SparkLabs, the startup accelerator that wants to inject South Korea's startup ecosystem with Silicon Valley expertise, announced its second intake today. Its latest class is an international lineup of companies that represent a variety of sectors and are at widely different stages of funding, from bootstrapped financing to those that have closed a Series A round.

This week on TechCrunch TV's Ask A VC show, we have Mayfield Fund Managing Director Navin Chaddha in the studio. As you may remember, you can submit questions for our guests either in the comments or here and we’ll ask them during the show.

It’s still practically a newborn but Indian mobile messaging app Hike is already channelling almost a billion messages a month between its 5m registered users. Those numbers sound insignificant when you stack them up against the big beasts of the messaging space – WhatsApp claims 200m+ monthly active users, and 600bn messages – but Hike’s growth is impressive when you consider it's 4 months old.

I’ve spent the last two weeks wandering around London, Paris, and Istanbul (not Constantinople.) As an experiment, I left my trusty MacBook Pro behind and brought only the $199 Chromebook on which I type this. And to my considerable surprise it has served admirably. So admirably, in fact, that I believe ChromeOS is only one or two iterations away from being the right choice for many-if not most--homes.

Amit Singhal, Google’s senior VP of search, today announced that Google’s Knowledge Graph will start exposing a number of statistics as graphs on the search results pages today. Google is also adding Polish, Turkish, Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese to its lineup of supported Knowledge Graph languages. With regard to the statistics, Singhal said the system will also try to predict what your next question will be and add related statistics to the graphs. Say you want to know more about how many people live in India, Google may also show you stats for China. Singhal also recapped ...

Singapore’s largest telecoms provider, SingTel, plans to set aside $1.6 billion (S$2 billion) over the next three years for startup acquisitions. Like those it has made in recent years, these are expected to be in the digital media space. All of these can be tracked back to the major restructuring of SingTel’s business arms last year, where it divided itself into three pillars called Consumer, ICT and Digital Life. The first two focus on consumer and enterprise segments, respectively, but the Digital Life arm is most representative of the change. The division was set up as ...

Parents of preschoolers can finally let go of “iPad guilt” – the term that refers to that terrible feeling you get when you use the iPad as babysitter. Today, a company called Kidaptive is launching one of the most comprehensive feedback systems for parents to date, allowing them to get a hand of their child’s learning and development by simply handing over the iPad and letting their child play. It’s a shame that despite the wide variety of educational apps out there, too many parents still treat the iPad as a toy, letting kids rot their minds with time-wasting ...

500 Startups today is announcing the next 28 companies to take part in its Accelerator program, unleashing a largely international class of startups who have come to Mountain View to accelerate their startup progress. There are 28 companies in this Accelerator class, and as usual there's a bunch of diversity there.

Cisco today announced the results of its study into consumer’s thoughts about connected and driverless cars. While a large part of the study focused on the role of technology in the car shopping experience (unsurprisingly, nobody likes car dealerships), the study also looked into drivers’ attitudes about driverless cars. Surprisingly, 57% of all of the respondents said that they would trust driverless cars to drive them around, but there are some clear differences between different markets. Acceptance for driverless cars seems to be especially strong in emerging markets. In Brazil, for example, 95% of respondents said they would trust ...

BlackBerry has just announced the BlackBerry Q5 smartphone, the latest BB10 handset to come out of the Waterloo-based firm. Like the Q10, the Q5 has a QWERTY keyboard and comes in a host of colors, including red, black, white and pink. "I know it's going to be a big hit," said Thorsten Heins, as he made the announcement.

With India’s annual GDP growth of about 5 to 6 percent per year, a new wave of affluent consumers is coming. While there have been e-commerce successes like Flipkart, a handful of local startups are targeting the upper-end of the market. Squarekey is a startup that brings high-end fashion brands to India for the same prices as ones that a consumer would pay in the West. “Retail is stagnating the Western world,” said founder Avantika Daing. “The growth story is now in markets in India. We’re really addressing a big unmet consumer need. Our core base will include ...

It’s a rare fall rainy day in Palo Alto and SAP Executive Board Member Dr. Vishal Sikka is as sick as a dog. It’s less than a week until SAP Sapphire in Madrid and the community around him are like a worrying family. I had told them that it is okay. I could make the trip another time. But they were insistent I make the trip. Fast forward to May. It has been several months since that cold rainy week in Palo Alto. We’re on the eve of the next Sapphire conference in Orlando this week. Last ...

A few days ago I landed in England and, expecting little, slipped an old UK SIM card into my phone. I’d bought it when living in London five years ago, and hadn’t used it in over a year. But to my amazement it was still active -- as was the money I’d added to its pay-as-you-go account sixteen months earlier...and then I received a friendly text message informing me that my data costs were now L1 per 100MB. Another SMS popped up when I emerged from the Channel Tunnel in France a few days later, informing me ...

Matrix Partners just announced the close of Matrix X, the venture firm's tenth early-stage technology-focused fund. As Fortune's Dan Primack reported in a scoop in April, the firm raised $450 million for this fund.

BDC Venture Capital, the leading major investment firm for accelerators in Canada, announced today that it would add its financial and expert support to ongoing Canadian Technology Accelerator programs being run in the U.S. by the Canadian government. The programs, spread across various major tech hubs including Boston, Philadelphia, New York and San Francisco, give Canadian startups the U.S. face time they need to make connections and product sales.

This is the penultimate episode of "In The Studio." The show, which features developers and entrepreneurs working on enterprise technology, will be ending. This week's guest is Varun Singh, CEO and founder of ScaleArc, a young startup which began in India but registered as a US-company with designs to expand to this country once it got off the ground in Mumbai. ScaleArc operates in the space of database infrastructure and sits between apps and database services, what Singh calls as SQL/NoSQL hybrid. Whereas Amazon Web Services would require integration and does not allow for multiple masters across multiple ...

Once again, news from a supplier is fueling rumors about Apple's future product roster. This time it's manufacturer Pegatron's announcement that it will increase its number of workers in China by up to 40 percent in the second half of this year. The hiring blitz at the company, which produces iOS devices, has led to new round of speculation that a cheaper iPhone is in the works.

Editor's note: Marco Rubio is a United States Senator from Florida. Follow him on Twitter @marcorubio. Today, the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science & Transportation will examine the role of immigrants in America's innovation economy. More specifically, the committee will look at how our broken immigration system is holding back American innovation and job creation, and how the immigration reform proposal before the Senate can promote a thriving U.S. technology sector that benefits American workers.

The food delivery wars continue to heat up: today foodpanda, the Rocket Internet-incubated startup that offers a one-stop service to order food from a selection of restaurants and take-out joints to be brought to your door and now working with some 15,000 restaurants globally, is today announcing that it has picked up over $20 million in funding, with participation from Rocket regular AB Kinnevik, Russia's Phenomen Ventures as well as Rocket Internet themselves. This is not only foodpanda's first reported round of investment, but it also looks like it might be Phenomen's first public investment in ...

A new front has opened in the smartphone war, and for the first time in many years, Apple is both outnumbered and outgunned. I'm not talking about the phones themselves. iOS is still better than Android, although the gap has narrowed. The next iPhone will doubtless be the best phone in the world when it's released, as ever. It won't be as customizable - no Swype, no Facebook Home - but those remain relatively minor inferiorities. The new battlefront is different. The new battlefront is the cloud: Google Maps vs. Apple Maps, Siri vs. Google voice search, iCloud vs ...

Recently we've seen a lot of news articles about the potential for chat apps to take over the role of SMS. Analysts Informa recently came out with the research that suggested that 2012 was the tipping point, with nearly 19 billion messages sent over chat apps daily globally, versus 17.6 billion SMS messages. In 2014 some 21 billion SMS messages are predicated as against 50 billion app-based messages. Now, while the the user numbers of chat apps are significantly lower right now when set against chat apps (3.5 billion SMS users in 2012, against 586.3 million ...

LinkedIn has acquired one million users in Singapore, or 20 percent of its 5 million population, since the service's launch there in 2011, the professional networking site announced today. This milestone means that about 70 percent of Singapore's labor force and students now have accounts on the Web site, according to the company.

Credit where it's definitely due: this post was inspired by a Twitter conversation with Box CEO Aaron Levie. Don't look now, but something remarkable is happening. Instagram had twelve employees when it was purchased for $700 million; all of its actual computing power was outsourced to Amazon Web Services. Mighty ARM has only 2300 employees, but there are more than 35 billion ARM-based chips out there. They do no manufacturing; instead they license their designs to companies like Apple, who in turn contract with companies like TSMC for the actual fabrication. Nest Labs and Ubiquiti are both 200-employee ...

Rebtel, a VoIP provider sometimes thought of as Sweden's (smaller) answer to Skype, today is releasing a new SDK that will let iOS and Android app developers embed Rebtel-based voice calls by way of an API directly into their apps, free of charge. This represents a new line of business for Index Ventures/Benchmark-backed Rebtel, which has up to now built a business on its own retail, consumer cheap-calls VoIP offering, now at 22 million monthly active users and profitable.