Business

Editor’s note:  John Greathouse is a general partner at Rincon Venture Partners and has held a number of senior executive positions with successful startups during the past fifteen years, including Computer Motion, Citrix Online and CallWave which collectively created in excess of $350M in shareholder value. You can follow him @johngreathouse. You can also check his blog for emerging entrepreneurs here. Successful Olympic athletes share a number of common qualities with entrepreneurs; including boundless energy, uncompromising tenacity and a willingness to innovate. Such innovations include new training routines, inventive diets and novel, gameplay tactics. Entrepreneurs are well served to pay particular attention to two of the most innovative Olympic athletes: Dick Fosbury and David Berkoff, the former of which I discuss in the following 2-minute video. Dick Fosbury began experimenting with unconventional methods of high jumping as a high school sophomore. Rejecting the straddling a...

Ingrid is a reporter for TechCrunch, joining February 2012, based out of London. She comes from paidContent.org, where she was a staff writer, and has in the past also written freelance regularly for other publications such as the Financial Times. Ingrid covers mobile, digital media, advertising and the spaces where these intersect. When it comes to work, she feels most... ? Learn More News Corporation has just reported its quarterly earnings. For Q4 it had revenues of $8.4 billion with earnings per share of $0.32, both down compared to the year before (Q4 2011 the company reported revenues of $9 billion with EPS of $0.35). The company also reported a net loss of $1.6 billion for the quarter, compared to a net income of $683 million in the same quarter a year ago. The company said the figure included a $2.8 billion restructuring charge for its publishing division, which News Corp. is planning to separate from its entertainment division. That includes publications like the Wall Street...

Google just announced yet another batch of services it plans to discontinue in the near future. Most of these are relatively obscure products that probably didn’t have a large amount of traction. In this round, Google is shutting down three products, as well as a number of company blogs that had become redundant or just weren’t updated very frequently. The products include Google Apps for Teams, Google Listen and Google Video For Business. This round of shutdowns comes just a few weeks after Google also closed relatively popular services like iGoogle and Google Video. Google launched Google Apps for teams in 2008 and the tool allowed businesses and schools to use non-email services like Google Docs without having to sign up for a Google email address. This service, Google said today, was not as useful for people as [it] originally anticipated” and starting September 4, Google Apps for Teams accounts will be turned into personal Google Accounts. Google Listen started as a Google Labs ...

Jordan Crook studied English Literature at New York University before entering the tech space. Prior to joining TechCrunch, Crook dabbled in mobile marketing and mobile apps as well as doing device reviews for MobileMarketer and MobileBurn. Crook is fascinated with alternative energy production and greentech. She is now a writer for CrunchGear. ? Learn More Samsung has just reported its Q2 2012 earnings, and it would seem that the Korean electronics giant is still the king of mobile, with an operating profit of $5.9 billion for the period, up 79 percent year over year. Of course, the Galaxy S III and the Galaxy Note have plenty to do with that, considering the fact that Samsung predicted it would sell 10 million Galaxy S III units by July. And that’s just what it did. The company reported $41.5 billion in revenues, which is up about $1.5 billion from last quarter, and up 21 percent year over year. Samsung is killing it in the TV department, though the company does report that demand ...

GoodData has raised $25 million to continue developing its cloud-based business intelligence technology. The funding brings GoodData’s total funding to $55 million. Founder and CEO Roman Stanek said the investment came from existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst Partners and Fidelity Growth Partners. Windcrest Partners is also contributing to the round. GoodData offers a cloud-based data analytics service that competes with solutions from companies such as IBM, SAP and Oracle. Its business model is pretty clever. Its markets to the vast ecosystem of SaaS providers that integrate the technology into their own platforms. Those providers can then offer their own customers access to dashboards, advanced reporting and other features. The difference is in the apps that the SaaS providers offer from GoodData. Stanek cites as an example how budgets are shifting to digital marketing. Marketers, though, still do not have enough analytics. GoodData provides insights into that ...

Ingrid is a reporter for TechCrunch, joining February 2012, based out of London. She comes from paidContent.org, where she was a staff writer, and has in the past also written freelance regularly for other publications such as the Financial Times. Ingrid covers mobile, digital media, advertising and the spaces where these intersect. When it comes to work, she feels most... ? Learn More Apple often gets a lot of love in Europe, but in the last quarter that wasn’t enough to help it against the tide of economic woe hitting the region. In today’s Q3 earnings call, CEO Tim Cook described sales in the region as “essentially flat to slightly positive” — and, not unlike the wider macro-economy, “that really hampered our total results.” Specifically, he noted that France, Greece and Italy were “particularly poor”, and Germany saw “only single digital positive growth.” Interestingly, the UK seemed immune to this situation and posted a “solid” 13 percent growth rate. Overall, though, the perfor...

Google has a new cloud partner program that shows the company’s drive to go after old IT. In a blog post today, Google provided some details about it with a link to a list of the technology and service providers that are part of the program. It’s a short list but here’s what they are offering. Service providers deliver consulting services for the various Google Platform Cloud products. This would include the new Google Compute Engine, Google App Engine, Google Cloud Storage, Google Big Query and its prediction and translation APIs. Technology partners provide integrations with Google Platform Cloud or use one of its services as a foundation for their products. Google is hinting that it will use its partner program to pursue customers who want to migrate off legacy solutions. According to the Google blog post: For example, Orangescape Technologies, one of our partners, integrated Google App Engine as part of their platform to help United Biscuits, a leading manufacturer of biscuits an...

News Corp, Home of Fox News and one of the world’s most powerful media entities, has announced its long-awaited plans to disrupt education. Former New York City education chancellor and CEO of Amplify, News Corp’s new k-12 education division, will attack education reform through technology, with three specific strategies: assessment via mobile tools, curriculum design, and the online distribution of resources via AT&T-powered tablets. “The strategy of Amplify is to fundamentally change the way we think about delivering education in the K-12 space,” says Klein, who will be revealing more information about on the ambitious project at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco, September 8-12. While details are still scant, we did find one video in the Amplify website that gives a hint at what the vision is: a tablet that gives students a fully-customized learning experience, from the moment they arrive in class, complete with a proprietary developed curriculum that has a heavy emphasis on int...

Cerilli grew up in Rhode Island and he was always a hustler.  He isn't a coder, he's a salesman, and Cerilli perfected his technique by selling flowers, lemonade and T-shirts to the Brown University community with his friend, Irving Fain. Fain says they'd walk away some weekends with thousands of dollars in their pockets. "If you can sell roses to people on a hot day during college graduation, you can sell anything," says Fain. "Wiley can sell effortlessly. He is the type of person who walks into a store to sell someone, and within minutes they're trying to sell him, asking to be his customer. Cerilli learned a lot from his father, who died of cancer when Cerilli was 16. A real estate developer, Cerilli's father constructed multiple large buildings in Providence, one of which had no windows. He hired an artist from RISD to paint beautiful bay windows on it that could be seen from the highway. "I wanted to be like that and paint windows on my ...