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Though Snapchat has been picked on, picked apart, and blown up in the media, the technical aspects of the service are still somewhat mysterious to the average user. A new research report from a company called Decipher Forensics is looking to shed a little light on how the service “deletes” photos you send through Snapchat.

According to Decipher, Snapchat photos are renamed with a .jpgnomedia extension to hide that photo from your phone, under /data/data/com.snapchat.android. The computer forensics company claims that they can retrieve these photos both before and after they’ve expired within the app.

The only catch is that you need to use their $9,000 forensic software, and you’re in luck! They’re only charging $300 to $600 to do so.

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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.

BDC says that the goal is to get the Canadian startups with the most potential into a high-growth market as effectively as possible and says this is a natural extension of its work with Canadian-based accelerators and incubators, including GrowLab, Extreme Startups, Hyperdrive and Founder Fuel. BDC’s Montreal VP Senia Rapisarda explained that, while startups participating in the CTA program will get access to its convertible note options for financial support, this is more about providing an experience for startups that they might not otherwise have.

“We understand that we can bring companies up to a certain level [with our Canada-based accelerators],” she said. “But then, the U.S. clearly being the first port of entry in terms of customers, it really made a lot of sense to pair up with the CTAs in New York, San Francisco, Boston and Philadelphia who were so close to customers that at that point a company could be seriously accelerated.”

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Editor’s Note: Semil Shah is a contributor to TechCrunch. You can follow him on Twitter at @semil.

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 that began in India but registered as a U.S. 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 zones, ScaleArc offers a more distributed approach, especially in an age when certain sites (such as gaming portals) cannot afford even the slightest cloud outage.

In this short video, Singh and I discuss a range of topics that would be of interest to technical founders, especially those living outside the U.S. First, Singh incorporated in Delaware but founded his company in India. Technical talent is cheaper in India, and this allows his team to have more iterative cycles, whereas in the Valley, his runway would have been cut from 2.5 years to maybe a year. Singh then started shuttling back and forth between India and the Valley, and found that as long as he could give potential customers the right to try before they bought, the customers didn’t care where the company was located or headquartered. This is a trend I’m seeing on the enterprise technology and SaaS space, where foreign companies are now coming to the Valley and actually disrupting what the Valley considers to be upstarts.

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Bitcoins are nominally worth $113 as of this very moment. That means very little in the real world. As Forbes writer Kasmir Hill notes, it’s pretty difficult to go up to the McDonald’s cashier and offer an invisible cryptocurrency that resides entirely on the Internet in exchange for a Big Mac. She’s survived a week using nothing but Bitcoins and, although she’s still alive, her experience wasn’t friction-free.

That’s changing. While I find most announcements that so-and-so website is now accepting Bitcoins to be little more than PR stunts, the fact that Gyft, a gift card site, is now accepting BTC is important. In essence, it allows Bitcoin users to turn their value into store credit and, more importantly, this credit can be spent at places you actually want to spend it.

As I wrote before, Bitcoin has a last mile problem. Human beings need food, shelter, and entertainment (read: sex) and excepting a few very rare instances, none of these things can be purchased with Bitcoin. Right now, for example, I can order Papa John’s (shudder) through Foodler and pay with Bitcoin, but I can’t go into Papa John’s and get the deed done. I could get some entertaining substances with Bitcoin, but that’s about it.

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Though Foursquare is now busy trying to take on Yelp, one of its more rewarding, but personal use cases (now that the fervor around badges and mayorships has died down), is its ability to add insight and data around your check-ins. Often after registering your location, the app rewards you with a little encouragement or commentary via a pop-up message. Today, the service is making these little moments shareable with a new button which lets you edit and post that message to Facebook, Twitter, and more.

For example, you might learn that you hadn’t been at some airport since last December, or it’s your third day in a row at a favorite location. In Foursquare’s blog post about the feature, it gives the example of a user who wants to brag about hitting the gym 3 days in a row. (Though let’s get real, we’ll probably see more people posting about their ongoing bar streaks, don’t you think?)

gymsharing

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Dish.fm, the recently relaunched restaurant recommendation app which focuses on the best menu items, as opposed to overall venue reviews, is today rolling out an update which expands the service into more of a dish search engine than local utility. The company had previously allowed you to see the best dishes nearby and compare dishes inside a restaurant, but now the app also helps you find the best dish (e.g., steak, tiramisu, pizza, etc.) anywhere – whether that’s 10 minutes away, in your city, or even elsewhere in the world.

When the startup had originally launched, it had gone the “Foodspotting” route, which had it relying on crowdsourced photos and reviews. Following the app’s overhaul, which debuted this past December, the new focus has been on building on top of established content from sources like Yelp, Foursquare and Instagram. In order to determine the best dishes around, Dish.fm analyzes public reviews and tips found across the web, extracts those, and counts each positive review as a “like” within its application.

With today’s update, that functionality has been expanded, now allowing users to search for favorite foods, drinks or desserts anywhere they want, using a slider at the bottom of the app’s homescreen which can be set to anything from 0.1 miles to 15 miles to search closer to home. Or, if you’re planning a trip, for instance, a new search interface lets you search for both dishes or restaurants by name in another city, and display these on map or within Dish.fm’s now cleaner, visual interface featuring photos of the items in question.

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BlueStacks, the startup known for bringing Android apps to PCs and Macs, has been growing like a weed. Last week, the company announced that it had passed the 10 million user milestone, nearly half of which were added in the first quarter of this year. Today, hot on the heels of the news that OUYA has landed $15 million from Kleiner Perkins to bring its affordable, $99 Android-friendly gaming console to the masses, BlueStacks is firing back with some news of its own.

Looking to tap into a huge new audience, BlueStacks is today bringing those 750K-plus Android apps not just to PCs and Macs, but to TVs as well with its own gaming console and subscription service. The new package, called “GamePop” includes a custom console and game controller for free, as part of its $6.99/month service. Well, actually, the console is free through the end of May, at which point BlueStacks will slap on a price tag.

The price of the console has yet to be determined, but the company tells me that GamePop has an “estimated value of approximately $100,” so one can probably expect the pricing to fall in that range — or five times that, depending on how saucy BlueStacks is feeling. Of course, $100 is the “estimated” value, and gamers can get their hands on the whole package for $84 (for a year of the service) now, so take that for what it’s worth. After May, it will probably be more like $184 for a year of the service.

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Since the launch of personalized magazines this March, social magazine maker Flipboard has added 6 million new users to its platform, bringing its total number of users to 56 million – and that’s before the feature even arrived on Android, which now comprises roughly half of Flipboard’s user base. Today, that changes as the personalized magazine option arrives on Android phones and tablets, alongside the launch of a new web-based magazine editor designed with the needs of curators and publishers in mind.

Android users have a couple of unique options, including the ability to “flip” items from other native applications such as YouTube, the browser, or their own photo gallery, into Flipboard. The updated app is also now making use of Facebook Single Sign-On for registration, the company notes.

In addition, while previously a mobile-first and generally mobile-only company, the launch of the online magazine management tool shows that Flipboard is carefully considering how it should proceed when it comes to the web. The company has previously acknowledged that there are challenges with Flipboard’s magazine sharing features – that is, when someone tweets or posts a link to a Flipboard magazine on the web, it can be inconvenient for those who click that link from their non-mobile device.

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After reading about WeatherSignal, a new project from London startup OpenSignal which makes use of the latest sensors in smartphones such as the Samsung Galaxy S4 to crowdsource weather information, I was reminded that I recently caught wind of Shaka, an Estonian startup that has built a wind meter accessory for iOS.

Due to start shipping next month, the battery-free Shaka Wind Meter plugs into an iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad’s headphone socket, and combined with the existing onboard sensors of Apple’s hardware and the startup’s own app/service, measures, records and displays wind-specific weather data such as current and average wind speed, maximum wind gust, ambient temperature, and wind direction — all mapped to a location via GPS.

The device’s inspiration and intended use-case was to enable people who take part in wind-related sports, such as windsurfers and kitesurfers, to find good wind conditions. “Forecasts are often inaccurate and the coverage with stationary and connected stations is not good enough,” says Shaka co-founder Raigo Raamat. “We wanted to simplify the process of sharing good wind conditions inside the community.”

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Today, gaming console and software company OUYA announced that they have closed a $15 million round led by Kleiner Perkins, and with participation from the Mayfield Fund, NVIDIA, Shasta Ventures and Ocean Partners. This marks one of the largest institutional investments to go to a project that had its humble beginnings on Kickstarter.

OUYA is a company that launched back in 2012 on Kickstarter under the guiding hands of Julie Uhrman, a video game industry veteran who believes that gaming should be affordable and enjoyable for everyone. She and the team developed a $99 Android gaming console, which hooks into the TV and comes with automatic access to free-to-try games. It launched on the crowdfunding site to much fanfare, scoring $8.6 million in funding, which ends up being around 9x more than OUYA asked.

Along with the $15 million round, which brings OUYA’s total amount of funding to $23.5 million, the company will also be bringing KPCB General Partner Bing Gordon on to the board of directors. Gordon brings with him years of experience from Electronic Arts.

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