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Netflix has announced that it will begin operating in The Netherlands later this year, further expanding its European footprint. The Netherlands, Netflix’s seventh European country, is a relatively small market for the streaming video service, but in keeping with Netflix’s more cautious approach to moving into new countries after its aggressive international expansion last year lost money.

After breaking into several international markets, including the UK, Ireland, Norway, Denmark, Sweden and Finland, in 2012, Netflix said in January that it would dramatically decrease the rate of its overseas expansion in 2013. During the past six months, Netflix has not launched in any new countries.

In its first-quarter earnings report this April, Netflix said that it expects a profit of up to $149 million from its U.S. streaming business in the second quarter, but losses of up to $81 million from its international streaming in 40 countries. The company’s U.S. business is also given a boost by its DVD-by-mail segment, which will contribute additional profits of up to $112 million.

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Video services provider Ooyala is setting up an R&D operations in Singapore, and is hiring researchers and data scientists for the facility.

The company provides video technology to media companies and telcos, enabling them to stream their content online such as the Australian Open, or helping ESPN embed videos in tweets.It claims to have a collective viewership of about 200 million across 130 countries each month.

Ooyala has had a small staff of four in Singapore since last year, but the new facility will bump up its presence here to about 20 when it’s operational in 2014, said CEO, Jay Fulcher. The center here will focus on researching localized products for Asia, as the company expands outside of the US. Ooyala will keep its core engineering team in Mountain View, where most of its 300 staff are. It also maintains offices in Sydney, Tokyo, LA, New York and London, with teams of about ten in each of them.

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Teambox has added high-definition video conferencing, adding to a list of providers that are adding video to their collaboration platforms.

The Teambox offering is of particular note, as it fully integrates video conferencing and screen sharing directly into the collaboration platform through Zoom, a video-conferencing service. The service allows for video conferencing of up to 25 people across desktops, tablets and mobile devices. It supports iCal, Outlook and Google Calendar.

Teambox has earned recognition for its capability to integrate third-party apps for an inline experience. It’s in some sense a framework for aggregating apps such as Box and Evernote.

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For pretty much as long as anyone can remember, a relationship triangle, or a “love triangle” if you will, has taken shape between companies and the PR firms that represent them and the press that covers them — existing in some sort of recursive loop. Yet, while that triangle should have come to represent a symbiosis and a valuable communication network, somewhere along the way the triangle broke down. (Defying the laws of Geometry, even.) In reality, today this relationship is more like the Bermuda Triangle.

While the matter of who is responsible for the disconnect is subject to debate, the PR industry (for right or wrong) usually takes most of the blame. While the causes are numerous, in the end, most of the problems inherent to the startup-PR relationship are a matter of transparency (or lack therof) and the inability for either side to find the best (and most mutually beneficial) match on the other.

AirPR launched into private beta last year with $1 million in seed funding from 500 Startups, Mohr Davidow Ventures, WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg and others to help solve this problem by creating a marketplace in which startups can find PR representation that’s right for them, and vice versa. Pitched as a kind of “Match.com for PR,” at launch AirPR focused primarily on matching top, pre-screened PR talent in the U.S. with technology startups looking for (and able to pay for) representation.

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Months after Hurricane Sandy left New York scrambling for power, the city is unveiling 25 solar powered charging stations in parks and public spaces throughout the five boroughs, starting today.

The pilot project between AT&T and the city of New York is officially called AT&T Street Charge. (DUMBO firm Pensa handled design, and Goal Zero provided the solar technology, AT&T handled the cash.) The stations will move to new locations at the beginning of July, rotating throughout the city until September. After that, we’ll see what becomes of them.

Most are a little out of the way for those who don’t go to Fort Greene Park, the Brooklyn Bridge Park, or Riverside Park on the reg, but solar powered, public, and free is a pretty great thing. Definitely better than those public charging stations that also charge you money.

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It happened to me. Yes, I once uploaded a pic of my friend to Facebook from my phone, forgot to change the setting from “Public” to “Friends” and had the friend get told that day by a random person: “Hey I just saw a picture of you on Alexia from TechCrunch’s wall!” So now I’m circumspect.

Apparently this social media disaster was happening to more people, because Facebook just fixed it — at least on iOS. Android has apparently had the new feature for over a week.

Now iPhone users too are able to easily edit Facebook’s photo privacy settings — by selecting the drop-down arrow on the status update and selecting “Edit Privacy.” Though you still can’t edit the update text or any comments themselves from your iPhone, this is pretty useful. The last time I messed up on a photo privacy setting, I had to access Facebook’s Mobile Web page on a foreign connection to fix it. Not pretty.

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More and more jobs deal in the virtual realm, and are done by people sitting down at desks at computers. Desk work can be made interesting in its own ways, but it’s always fun to visit a company that’s actually making physical stuff.

So for this episode of TechCrunch Cribs, we jetted over to New York City to check out the headquarters of Quirky, a startup founded back in 2009 with the aim of “making invention accessible.” Quirky is a company that crowdsources ideas for unique physical products — gadgets, kitchenware, furniture, and the like — and manufactures them at large-scale production so that they can be actually sold in stores.

This process entails lots of prototyping, so Quirky’s downtown Manhattan office is full of fun stuff like 3D printers that help them bring invention ideas to life. It all made for a really fun tour, led by Quirky’s co-founder and head of people and culture Nikki Kaufman, and you can see it all in the video embedded above.

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As it promised it would, Google is fighting the government’s gag order on releasing how many users are monitored by the National Security Agency. Unlike Facebook and Microsoft, Google and Twitter publicly rejected a government deal to disclose the total number of spying warrants for user data, which would include (but not detail) the number of requests coming from the controversial Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA).

“Lumping national security requests together with criminal requests—as some companies have been permitted to do—would be a backward step for our users,” explained a public statement following the petition.

Unfortunately, as both I and the Washington Post have suggested, even if Google is successful, the most pressing concerns would remain a mystery. Google’s transparency report discloses the number of court orders and users affected, but not what data was given up. Can the government read emails, monitor Gchats and Google Voice phone calls, as leaker Edward Snowden has claimed?

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Android home gaming consoles are nearly arriving for the consumer market, but one at least needs a little more time in the oven to bake. It’s the GameStick, the super portable USB-stick style device that plugs into an open HDMI port on your TV to turn it into an Android-powered gaming machine, and its release schedule is being pushed back another month until August, with a retail launch to follow after that, because of a need to gather more feedback related to the GameStick UI so that it can be refined prior to wide release.

GameStick wanted to nail the user experience strikes me as a familiar refrain; another company, Leap Motion, which also achieved lots of support from the community for a novel idea, said something very similar when it delayed its own product recently. In both cases, the apprehension about getting things right the first time around is understandable, since these are products that have few if any antecedents with demonstrated success in the wider consumer market.

The GameStick delay, though another one on top of its first ship date slip, isn’t yet one that should really raise any eyebrows – projects typically underestimate how long it will take to go to market on Kickstarter. The Ouya was also delayed from its original planned launch by three weeks, owing to “demand” on the retail side. BlueStacks’ GamePop hasn’t been delayed as of yet, but it’s targeting a more open-ended end of year launch, and that gives it some flexibility to make sure the experience is just right before putting too fine a point on things.

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Tired of your friends texting on their phones while they should be getting schnockered? This clever hack is called the Offline Glass and it’s designed to ensure that you and your friends don’t sit at the bar checking Wikipedia for who starred in The Greatest American Hero and whether Tabitha will totally come out tonight oh my god she won’t she and Christian just broke up oh god she’s with Raul and Paula and maybe she’ll come in an hour! In fact, you can’t hold your phone because of the unique shape of the glass’ bottom.

The glass has a notch cut out of it so it will only stand if it’s situated on top of a phone (an iPhone works best) and you can only use your phone if you’re also holding your beer. Knowing the average drunk person I suspect a) this will destroy hundreds of iPhones a night and b) this will result in lots of spilled beer, but by gosh if it isn’t a clever idea.

The glass is being used in the Salve Jorge Bar in Sao Paolo and was created by the Fischer & Friends ad agency in Brazil. You can’t buy one but, with the right tools, you could probably make a few. I’d like to see someone 3D print a few of these for house parties.

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