VENTURE CAPITAL POST

San Francisco, US-based mobile app performance startup Crittercism took home $30 million in a funding round led by Scale Venture Partners for its expansion and enterprise initiatives.

Jim Cicconi of AT&T said the call of Netflix CEO Reed Hastings for free internet internet connection was an "arrogant proposition" that would require everyone else except Netflix to pay, Reuters reported.

Palo Alto, US-based late-stage investment firm Technology Crossover Ventures (TCV) raised $2.23 billion for its eighth growth equity fund from European and Asian private and public pension funds, financial institutions and other investors.

Engineers of California, US-based on-demand Internet streaming service Netflix hacked a Fitbit activity tracking device and activated a feature that auto-pauses the video when the watcher falls asleep and allows him to resume watching when he wakes up.

Seattle, Washington-based filmmaker Freddie Wong broke Indiegogo's record for web series crowdfunding when he gathered $900,907 in total contributions on Saturday night for his Internet-based show Video Game High School (VGHS).

Seattle, US-based e-commerce and digital media giant Amazon will rename its London-based streaming video service LoveFilm as Prime Instant Video in Germany and the UK starting February 26.

Google Ventures general partner Rich Miner will join the board of directors of San Francisco, US-based mobile app performance management (mAPM) firm Crittercism to replace Wesley Chan, who left Google Ventures to establish his own company.

New York, US-based startup Docurated nabbed $3.75 million in its first major funding round led by Rogers Venture Partners to help companies index and search for their files on local servers and cloud storage services.

Tech and Internet giant Google released a new software development kit (SDK) that allows developers to build their own apps for the Chromecast streaming media dongle.

Mike Liberatore, the former head of Paypal's enterprise and North American financials, left the company to become the new Chief Financial Officer (CFO) of San Francisco, US-based payments startup Clinkle.

Marlyand, US-based education startup Tales2Go bagged $750,000 in a seed funding round led by NewSchoolds Venture Fund and Maryland Venture Fund to improve students' listening fluency through a "Netflix-like" audiobook app.

Billionaire John Malone is building a cable empire once more as the firms he is backing have announced or are cooking up acquisitions amounting to more than $80 billion, Bloomberg reported.

Amazon will be releasing "Betas," a tech comedy show about app entrepreneurs in the Bay Area as it ramps up its original online programming to compete with Netflix and Hulu.

Former Netflix executive Ariel Tseitlin joins Scale Venture Partners as its newest venture partner.

Denmark's Waoo!, Sweden's Com Hem and the UK's Virgin Media are the latest additions to the Netflix galaxy of streaming partners.