A First Look At Younity, The App That Lets You Access All Your Files All The Time

I went on a vacation to Iceland earlier this year, and took a ton of photos – it’s a beautiful country, and the light there is really unique. But to date, I haven’t showed them off to anyone. That’s because my Iceland photos are on my home computer’s hard drive, and I’ve been too busy (or lazy) to upload them all to the web. So when friends and family ask, “How was Iceland?” my response is, “Amazing. Someday I’ll get around to uploading those damn pictures.”

But a new app called Younity could make situations like that a thing of the past. Younity, which is in the current class of Los Angeles-based startup accelerator MuckerLab, purportedly creates a “personal cloud” for the files shared on all of your various devices to let you access them anytime, anywhere.

I met Younity co-founder Erik Caso while we were in L.A. visiting MuckerLab earlier this month, and his pitch was quite interesting – from the looks of it, I’d be able to access those Iceland photos that are on my home computer from my phone in a snap (that is, if I had an iPhone.) Essentially, it makes the experience of the cloud come to you, rather than the other way around.

It’s still the early days for the Younity app, but it looks promising, and it’ll be exciting to see how it develops in the months ahead. Check out our brief interview with Caso and introduction to Younity in the video above.

CrunchWeek: Google Chromecast, Apple’s No-Growth Q3, And Earnings Madness

Welcome to a brand new episode of CrunchWeek, the show that brings a few of us writers together in front of the TechCrunch TV cameras to dish on some of the more interesting stories from the past seven days.

In this week’s episode, Greg Kumparak, Ryan Lawler and I talked about Apple’s no-growth Q3 (and recent DevCenter hack), Facebook’s mobile growth and financials from its earnings reports, and Google’s new $35 streaming device, Chromecast.

Tune in above for more!

Surf Air, The Air Travel Startup That’s Bridging The Tech Hubs Of L.A. And S.F.

There are a lot of factors that come into play when working to build a successful tech startup, and historically, a big one has been location – hence the continued focus on Silicon Valley as a major industry hub.

Now, location will probably always be important when it comes to building a tech business, but a startup out of Los Angeles called Surf Air has made it much easier for people on the California coast to travel between the state’s tech hubs in San Francisco, L.A., and most recently Santa Barbara, through a uniquely tech-savvy service that bridges the big gap between super expensive private air travel and hassle-filled commercial air travel.

The company has taken on a healthy $7 million in venture capital funding and is eyeing some big expansion efforts going forward, so while visiting L.A. earlier this month, we at TechCrunch TV made it a point to talk to Surf Air CEO Wade Eyerly at MuckerLab, the Santa Monica accelerator where Surf Air got its start. Watch the video embedded above to hear more about Surf Air’s business model, its growth thus far, and plans for the future.