Business

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 Today, one in four Americans suffer from a diagnosable mental illness, yet only one-third of those with symptoms are treated. Among the reasons why: The poor distribution of mental health professionals, the stigma that comes with mental health issues and, sadly, the high cost of care. In 2009, Mark Goldenson launched Breakthrough at TechCrunch50 to address this problem, offering an easy and private way for anyone and everyone to connect with mental health professionals via email or a HIPAA-compliant video platform on the Web. Today, Breakthrough enables users to search for providers based on price, specialty or disorder, while giving psychiatrists and psychologists a management suite through which they can keep track of appointments and payments. Breakthrough recently took several big steps forward in its...

Google’s tools for tracking the upcoming U.S. election later this year mostly focus on the presidential election. It’s no secret that Google – thanks to its various advertising services – also makes a good amount of money from the various political campaigns that compete in smaller contests, including the 435 races for seats in the House of Representatives this year. This year, thanks to the recent redistricting of many congressional districts, quite a few of these races are very different from just two years ago and many districts now include new media markets that can make reaching voters hard. Today, Google launched a new tool that allows political campaigns to simply select their district and ensure that their ads are shown only within their district. This tool, says Google, allows campaigns to “quickly and easily target their search, display, mobile and video ads solely within that particular district’s border.” Google says it “built a sizeable team” that’s helping candidates w...

Biggs is the East Coast Editor of TechCrunch. Biggs has written for the New York Times, InSync, USA Weekend, Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, Money and a number of other outlets on technology and wristwatches. He is the former editor-in-chief of Gizmodo.com and lives in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. You can Tweet him here and G+ him here. Email him directly at... ? Learn More Producers of digital goods have a few problems. The first is finding good clients (preferably not these clients) and the second is building a popular portfolio of work. But without the former, you can’t create the latter and vice versa. That’s where fol.io comes in. A Manhattan-based company, fol.io aims to make it easier to sell digital assets. Founded by Cillian Kieran and Simon Keane, the site is designed to make it easier for web creators to grab handsome, usable graphics for their projects. Rather than futzing with Photoshop all day, they can grab a “share this” button for a dollar or a funny little graphic for $...

Q&A site Answers today announced that it has acquired ResellerRatings, a site that calls itself “the web’s leading independent resource for helping shoppers find the best online retailers.” ResellerRatings currently features about 1 million reviews of just under 40,000 online stores. The site gets about 2 million monthly visitors who add around 1,000 new merchant ratings to the site every day. Answers CEO David Karandish says that his company acquired the service to solidify its “leadership in the fast-growing Q&A space and to help consumers find answers to whatever they are searching for online.” The two parties did not disclose the financial details of today’s transaction. Both Answers and ResellerRatings are basically Internet dinosaurs. Both companies were founded all the way back in 1998 and both have been through numerous changes since. ResellerRating’s CEO Scott Wainner actually founded his first site, SysOpt.com, when he was just 15. He then sold that site and Reselle...

We’ve seen an increasing number of fashion startups lately and the newest one is Hello La Mode, a New York-based startup that just launched its marketplace for luxury fashion resale last week. The company just announced that it has raised a $500,000 seed round from three undisclosed angel investors. That’s not quite on the same level as some other fashion-focused companies like JustFab, which raised $76 million this week, but Hello La Mode has an interesting business model that sets it apart from other fashion startups. Until now, Hello La Mode co-founder Eric Gagnaire tells us, people were often hesitant to buy secondhand apparel online because of potential issues with quality and conformity. His company, however, makes sure that every item that is put up for sale goes through a “manual check by fashion experts.” The company plans to use this funding round to build its mobile and tablet apps, as well as to hire more of experts to scale its operations. Hello La Mode currently operate...

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...

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Colleen Taylor is based in San Francisco where she is a reporter for TechCrunch TV. Previously she worked for GigaOM, where she reported on startups and Silicon Valley. Earlier, Colleen reported for Mergermarket, an online newswire and subsidiary of the Financial Times focused on M&A. Before that, she was a contributing editor for Electronic News, the semiconductor industry trade newsletter. Colleen... ? Learn More Instagram became a billion dollar company with a service that existed entirely within the realm of mobile apps. But it’s looking like the social photo-sharing juggernaut may be about to unveil its own bridge to the web, too. Web designer Cole Reinke says he recently was logged into Instagram on the web (the site currently allows you to do things like edit your profile, change your password, and manage applications) when he hovered over his user name and saw an option that is not typically there: “View Profile.” Here is a screenshot Reinke posted to his blog (click to e...

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 VidCaster was founded in 2010 to make creating video sites easier than ever, and has signed up a number of customers who use it to deliver free, or ad-supported videos online. Now it’s adding the ability for its clients to charge for access to their library of content, with the launch of VidCaster Paywall. Other online video platforms like Brightcove or Ooyala only provide a video player to their clients, which requires them to build out their own sites, which videos can then be published into. VidCaster, by contrast, provides a full-service solution, enabling users to quickly create a fully customizable site for their content, without having to go through the work of hiring an outside design firm or whatever. It’s also cheap, relative to other solutions out ther...