Business

Ryan has spent more than five years covering business, technology, and telecom-related subjects for a variety of publications based in New York and San Francisco. Ryan currently works as a writer for TechCrunch. ? Learn More Mobile video. Hot space, right? Viddy just raised $30 million, Socialcam just sold for $60 million. But most of the big mobile video apps seem to be more focused on video consumption and building their user base than actually, you know, letting people shoot video. TapIn.tv wants to change that, with a new app that will let users instantly create and share live and on-demand video streams from their mobile phones. Mobile video streaming is nothing really new — not even live mobile video streaming. As soon as the iPhone had a camera, there were apps out there that were hacking it to let users stream from their phones. But those apps generally required users to sign in if they wanted to share video, name the channel or stream that they’re shooting, and provide a des...

Billy Gallagher is a writer for TechCrunch. He is also the president and editor in chief of The Stanford Daily. Billy previously worked at The Stanford Daily for two volumes as a managing editor of news. He has also worked in sports and staff development at The Daily. In March of 2012 the Friends of The Stanford Daily awarded him... ? Learn More SparkLabs, a new startup accelerator, launched today in hopes of developing South Korea’s next wave of entrepreneurs. Serial entrepreneurs Hanjoo Lee, James Kim and Bernard Moon, who have all known each other since college, co-founded the accelerator. Moon said they are all Korean or Korean American and want to be a part of the changing entrepreneurial landscape in the country. Moon says they see more young entrepreneurs looking outside South Korea and wanting to be global companies, not just working to be acquired by a regional company. They want to build a network to advise these companies on launching outside of Korea to the U.S., Japan, C...

Rip Empson is a writer and rabble-rouser at TechCrunch. He covers startups, music, social, mobile, health, and education. You can reach him at rip[at]techcrunch[dot]com ? Learn More Open English, as its name might suggest, is an online learning platform that helps non-English speakers learn the language and speak fluently. After developing the foundation for Open English in his home country of Venezuela in 2006, Andres Moreno took his idea north to Florida, where he launched the program commercially in 2008. Since then, Open English has flourished. Today, the startup employs 1,000 people (40 of whom are in Miami), has offices across Central and South America, and serves 80,000 students in over 20 countries. Just as many American investors have started to turn their attention to Brazil, so too has Open English. Moreno sees big opportunity in Brazil, which is quickly becoming a global marketplace and is seeing demand for English-speaking talent rise dramatically. To expand its footprin...

Ryan has spent more than five years covering business, technology, and telecom-related subjects for a variety of publications based in New York and San Francisco. Ryan currently works as a writer for TechCrunch. ? Learn More If you’re anything like me, you’re already kind of fat and lazy and likely to just get fatter and lazier with time. You blame an intense work schedule, high cost of gym memberships, and lack of time for your gluttonous, slovenly existence. You secretly hate the squishy blob of flesh that you’ve become, but you say you have neither the time, energy, or money to do anything about it. And, well, you might be the target demographic for fitness provider Wello, which uses video chat to allow anyone to get personalized training sessions online. Wello has launched a marketplace that connects personal trainers with potential clients, using two-way video chat to enable anyone to get training sessions at their convenience. All users need is a laptop, web connection, and web...

Researchers are developing a sense of touch, at least, a sense of touch for robotic machinery. A group of 13 researchers are working on an international project to develop an artificial finger with a sense of touch. The finger would be directly connected to the nervous system, the researchers said. It would contain sensors on its surface in the same numbers as our fingers do. The sensors translate pressure and mechanical movement into an electronic code. This would then decoded by the wearers brain, once they were trained to interpret the signals. "Compared to the hand prostheses which are currently on the market, an integrated sense of touch would be a major improvement. It would be a truly modern and biometric device which would give the patient the feeling as if it belonged to his own body," says Dr. Lucia Beccai from the Centre for Micro-Robotics at the Italian Institute for Technology. The finger would be important for people who have lost fingers or hands. The prototy...