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August 4, 2009
TechCrunch
This afternoon Facebooks Open Stream API, which launched in late April, will be getting a few new additions that make the API significantly more robust and easier for developers to integrate.
One feature that will be familiar to Twitter and Frien...
At our Real-Time Stream CrunchUp event last month, one of the most interesting things that was demoed was PubSubHubbub, a new protocol made by a few Googlers in their spare time to improve the speed at which Atom and RSS items travel around the we...
Most of the public Internet companies have reported their second quarter earnings by now. In a research note sent out to clients today, J.P. Morgan provides a few takeaways from the quarter. We already know that the recession continues in overa...
Apple has just pushed out the newest update to its OS X Leopard (10.5) operating system, with 10.5.8. This could potentially be the last Leopard update we see before Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6) is released to the public sometime in the next couple of...
What is it with all the toolbar copycat craziness lately. First, there was Digg going after StumbleUpon with the Diggbar. Then StumbleUpon, which already had a toolbar, introduced a new toolbar/URL shortening service called Su.pr.
Now, micro-...
In 2007, Radiohead sent a shock-wave around the music industry when it released its album In Rainbows online, letting the purchaser set the price they wanted to pay for it. Some hailed it as the future of music distribution, others thought it woul...
Last month at The Europas - TechCrunch Europe’s version of the Crunchies - a lot of impressive start-ups were honored. But one was clearly cleaning up: Spotify, the sexy online music app that has music lovers in Europe swooning.
Each time the comp...
Google just released a new beta version of its Chrome browser for Windows PCs. The company claims that it is 30 percent faster than the current stable version of the browser (based on V8 and SunSpider benchmarks).
What may be more significant...
Twitter is being sued again, and this time it isnt some angry baseball manager who doesnt like people impersonating him on the service. This time it is a little more serious. Twitter is being sued for patent infringement by TechRadium, a Texas-...
In another fascinating move by the App Store acceptance team (Motto: Lunch is tasty! Is that a butterfly? We like cake.) the Ninjawords pocket dictionary, a $2 app, has been given an 17+ rating after being censored by Apple. This ensures that titt...
For several months now, Ustream has had an iPhone app that allows you to view video from the service. But view is the keyword there. You could only watch it, you could not record and send your own video back from the iPhone. But starting today, yo...
Global mobile advertising network operator mKhoj shall henceforth be known under the name InMobi, which is infinitely easier to pronounce in the Western world. The company felt the rebranding was necessary given that it will be shifting more of it...
Online advertising marketplace TRAFFIQ today announced it has closed a $10 million Series B round of venture funding from Grotech Ventures, Greenhill SAVP and Court Square Ventures.
The New York-based company, which operates a management platform...
Washington DC based LaunchBox Digital, an early stage investment firm and incubator founded in 2007 by John McKinley, Sean Green, and Julius Genachowski (now the new head of the FCC and divested from LaunchBox), just wrapped up its second annual ...
Google and On2 Technologies jointly announced today that they have entered into a definitive agreement under which Google will acquire On2, a developer of video compression technology. The acquisition is expected to close later this year. On2 mark...
Google Radio, the Internet search and advertising giants online radio ad buying service, has been sold to online ad and media management software firm WideOrbit for an undisclosed sum. The acquisition was first reported by PaidContent back in July...
New Y Combinator funded startup Listia launched this morning, and I already love it. Its a really smart way to give stuff away for free.
We tend to give away a lot of the random stuff people send us at TechCrunch. Some of it is trivial - stickers,...
Close to half of Europeans use the internet every day but one third have never used the web, according to a new report (PDF) published by the European Commission. The study, which took a deep dive into the digital landscape in Europe over the last...
Ever since Netflixs awesome vacation policy was revealed to the public (basically, there is no policy, its take the time you think you need), the companys work policies have been of interest to people. A new 128-page presentation called Reference Guide on our Freedom & Responsibility Culture was recently sent around the company, and then put on SlideShare, where the blog Hacking Netflix found it.
The presentation, which you can see for yourself below, is as interesting as any 128-page document can be. If you...
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Google is clearly enamored with the netbook space. We already know that its serving as an entry point for the new Chrome OS, but Google isnt just going to sit around and wait for that, its starting to optimize its experience for netbooks already.
...
This is just kind of odd. Look at the picture below. See the picture of some guy in place of the X button? Yeah, thats this guy.
Apparently, one of Googles Chrome UI designers, Glen Murphy, has inserted his face into the latest nightly build of Ch...
When it comes to flight information, or to be more accurate, flight statuses, push notification can be a godsend. Case-in-point, Worldmate Gold (iTunes link), one of the first iPhone travel apps to utilize the new OS 3.0s push notification capabil...
Its a match made in real-time heaven. StockTwits, a popular site that lets you track real-time discussions about stock information on Twitter, is now featuring a live feed of real-time news provided compliments of SkyGrid, the powerful real-time...
Tonight Aneesh Chopra, US Chief Technology Officer and Associate Director For Technology, spoke at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View during his first trip to Silicon Valley since he took office in an event that is being put on by the Ce...
Slowly but surely, Google Maps is filling up with more and more places. If you do a search in a major city, you are likely to find landmarks, museums, famous stores and restaurants labeled right on the map even if you did not specifically search...
As we first reported the existence of a few days ago, Googles Theme Gallery for Chrome has gone live. On the page, you can find 29 official themes that range from subtle (greyscale) to hideously ugly (legal pad).
Installing them couldnt be simple...
July 7, 2009
TechCrunch
Google is starting to respond to questions about the just announced Chrome operating system. In a short FAQ today they talked about cost and initial partners.
First of all, the software will be free, which was an easy assumption to make since it...
Su.pr, StumbleUpons URL shortening service, has come out of closed beta. StumbleUpon, which was recently freed from eBay’s clutches, tossed its hat in the URL shortening ring earlier this year. We first heard about Su.pr in March when StumbleUpon...
With so much being said about Googles new Chrome OS being a direct attack on Microsoft, naturally some of the gaze is now going to shift towards what it means for Apple, which makes the second most popular OS in the world. Heres what it means — Fo...
Dongles. In-line adapters. Proprietary headset ports. If it's an audio port on a mobile handset and it's not 3.5mm, it's junk. As we declared back in May, we're done with all of it.
Now HTC, sire of the T-Mobile G1, myTouch, and countless othe...
If you are wondering how Facebook plans to compete with MySpace as a platform for celebrities to connect with fans look no further than the just-launched Facebook Fan Box. It is a Facebook widget bands and celebrities like Lance Armstrong can pl...
23andMe isnt making too many headlines in tech circles any more, but theres little doubt in my mind that it, or at least companies like it, will become incredibly important over the next decade or so. Affordable genetic testing will likely revolu...
On the very same day that a certain search and Internet advertising giant based in Mountain View, California has made public its plans to soon bring to market an open-source operating system that it hopes will give Microsoft a run for its money wh...
Facebook has updated its publisher tool to allow users to create events directly through the Publisher. After clicking on the Events icon, you can enter information about what the event is and where and when you want to meet.
You can invite frien...
For the past few weeks, TechCrunchIT editor Steve Gillmor and I have been pulling together speakesr and demos for our Real-Time Stream CrunchUp this Friday. What started as a roundtable and a few demos, quickly grew into a full-fledged mini-conf...
SPRXmobile, the startup behind Layar, the mobile augmented reality browser for Android, is moving fast. Barely three weeks after launching its application too much fanfare (see my video interview with the companys co-founder Raimo van der Klein fo...
Skyfire, the makers of the “game-changing” Skyfire mobile browser, has tapped Jeffrey Glueck to join the company as CEO. Formerly Chief Marketing Officer at Travelocity, Glueck helped grow sales for the travel site from $3.5 billion to $10.6 bil...
Its hard to type a blog post when one hand is being used to pat myself on the back.
Last year I wrote a post about the just launched Chrome browser titled Meet Chrome, Google’s Windows Killer. From that article:
Chrome is nothing less than a full ...
Wow. So you know all those whispers about a Google desktop operating system that never seem to go away? You thought they might with the launch of Android, Googles mobile OS. But they persisted. And for good reason, because its real.
In the second ...
As we reported earlier today, media search engine Technorati has succumbed to the Twitter infatuation and is launching Twittorati, a site that shows what Technoratis top 100 bloggers are tweeting about. Our earlier story indicates that the site i...
More bad news for large newspapers. According to the latest stats from the Inland Press Association, larger newspapers with higher circulations are suffering more than their smaller siblings. Newspaper veteran Alan Mutter reports that the bigger ...
Maybe you heard that a new Facebook iPhone application is almost complete. Maybe youve also heard that probably the best feature is that it will allow you to upload video right from your iPhone 3GS to the social network. Well you dont actually hav...
Last summer Facebook announced two new programs designed to help surface some of the best applications on Facebook Platform. The first, called Verified Apps, was to help users find applications they could trust — in other words, apps that always ...
It isnt the sexiest startup in Silicon Valley, but San Francisco based OpenDNS just closed one of the most competitive venture capital deals in recent history. Top tier firms Sequoia Capital and Greylock Partners came out the winners. The company ...
July 1, 2009
TechCrunch
After months of dismal unemployment numbers, this mornings continued growth in the unemployment rate from 9.4% in May to 9.5% for the month of June reinforces the fact that the U.S. is still very much in the midst of recession. Additionally, the ...
July 1, 2009 - the day the music wars started in earnest. Last night the guys from Dovecote Records, a small music label based in New York, were hanging out at their local bar. Employees from file sharing startup LimeWire showed up to have a party...
You may have noticed that Twitter has started hyperlinking hashtags. Those are words preceded by a # which denote what the Tweet is about and makes it easier to search for Tweets about specific topics and events. For instance, try searching for ...
Ever since its redesign a few months ago, FriendFeed has been one of the standard-bearers of the real-time web. Thats because while a lot of sites claim to be real-time, FriendFeed is one of the few that actually updates continuously as data comes...
Last fall Google launched a revamped version of its Blog Search, converting the sites frontpage into a automated news portal similar to sites like Techmeme. It has its fair share of issues (for one, its subject to the same problems of automated g...
Yesterday, we wrote about what Facebook was planning for the next major release of its iPhone app, version 3.0. The big update will contain 15 new features, probably none bigger than the addition of event management to the app, finally. But there ...
An internal AT&T memo that was leaked today is full of very impressive number regarding the iPhone 3GS — numbers that once again show why AT&Ts exclusive contract with Apple to sell the iPhone in the U.S. is so important.
The iPhone 3GSs l...
A little over two hours ago, a Google employee posted a note in this Google Groups thread indicating that Google App Engine was seeing elevated Datastore latency and error-rates, as well as elevated serving error-rates. He noted that the problem b...
What is the best way to sift through a stream of information? The list view seems to be the most popular because it is information-dense and easy to scan, but it can be overwhelming. More visually appealing ways to manage data are needed. Twin...
Ever since OS. 3.0, the latest operating system for the iPhone, launched on June 17, prices among the top 100 apps in the iTunes App Store have been fluctuating wildly as developers push out apps taking advantage of all the new features in the OS...
Its one thing when Internet companies like Facebook adopt OpenID, its another when a giant retailer like Sears Holdings Corporation embraces it. Sears has just announced that it will enable over 1 million monthly MySears and MyKmart visitors to us...
comScore has aggregated some data based on its World Metrix audience measurement service and put together a study on social networking worldwide. Surprisingly, it appears that the Russians are more engaged with social networking than the rest of t...
Really curious to find out how this is done exactly, but someone somewhere has managed to change a real trending topic on Twitter - #MrsSlocombe - into something childish, as you can tell from the screenshot above. Strangely enough, when you do a...
From the rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic file: The new MySpace exec team has promised changes (we havelaid the groundwork for an exciting new chapter of innovation for MySpace). And theyre delivering. A couple of hours ago they changed ...
Twitter has long had an official Facebook application that allows users to update their Facebook status with tweets. Its quite useful for those of us who dont want to have to spend all day updating multiple services with the same messages. The ap...
While not every tweak to YouTubes system deserves a post, this one is pretty significant, though very straightforward as well. First, the 1GB file limit for YouTube videos has been doubled to 2GB; this is a boon to many users who have been upload...
Our Real Time Stream Crunchup is only a week and half away (get tickets here). Weve been working hard to pull together the best startups, investors, engineers, and marketers developing products and platforms which take advantage of real-time dat...
Its Twitter day at Microsoft, apparently. Not only did the software giant announce that it would start adding tweets to its Bing search results, the company actually started officially using Twitter today.
To be clear, Microsoft had a rather large...
June 8, 2009
TechCrunch
Despite the avalanche of mobile apps that let people access local information, the mobile browser is still the king when it comes to finding out whats going on in your city or neighborhood. People across the board are using their mobile phones t...
A hot area of development right now is in the field of desktop Twitter clients. Some like Tweetie, are Twitter-only, while others like Seesmic Desktop, handle a few different services with a focus on Twitter. The area is apparently so hot that Goo...
Udorse, a New York-based startup currently in stealth, has raised a $500,000 round of seed funding from Founders Fund. Founders Funds Peter Thiel will be serving on the companys board of directors.
At this point we know very little about the star...
Trust me, theres nothing quite like opening up a letter addressed to you and finding a check inside for $1,334,261.05. I know because that happened to me this morning.
The check is from Pure Digital Technologies, the company that Cisco recently ...
What are you doing this Friday night? Going to a bar with friends? Going to a movie? Wrong.
If youre a real web addict youll be sitting at your computer waiting for the clock to strike 12:01 AM Eastern Time. Thats when Facebooks new vanity URLs ar...
By now you either are addicted to Spymaster, or absolutely cant stand it. The viral Twitter-based game in which you do spy-like things such as assassinate your followers is a great time-waster. But its also drawn some criticism as being spammy. Th...
For the past several months, everyone has been bitching about the lack of availability of Chrome on the Mac. So Google did something about it, and formally released a developer build to the public, making sure to note that it wasnt really ready fo...
When Apple announced the iPhone 3G S yesterday, some folks were shocked — or disappointed, even — that the new one was a spitting image of the last one. Width, height, depth - besides being 2 whole grams heavier, the physical specs were a perfec...
Any self-respecting Website these days has its own URL shortening service for easy syndication of links across Twitter, Facebook and other status streams. There are services such as bit.ly and TinyURL. Digg has its controversial Diggbar (which ...
Over the last year or so, having online chat integrated into a website has quickly moved from nifty to the norm. The feature first caught on with Facebook, and has since made its way to a variety of other sites, including MySpace and Orkut. But ...
Google has gathered tech press at the Clift hotel for a press event around Google Apps. At the ridiculous time of 9:30 in the morning. Meaning (1) I had to get up at 7 to get ready and battle traffic, and (2) Im therefore not in a very good mood. ...
Googles small but growing enterprise app business is now going for Microsofts jugular. At a press conference today (see Mikes real-time notes), Google announced a new plug-in that will sync Googles enterprise versions of Gmail, contacts, and cal...
Internet audience measurement company comScore has released a preliminary study of the performance of Microsofts new search engine, Bing, during the first week of its public launch.
The study confirms earlier reports that Bing had a very good sta...
Weve been eagerly awaiting the public beta launch of Fotonauts encyclopedia for photos, Fotopedia. TechCrunch Editor Erick Schonfeld reviewed the preview of Fotopedia that was released a few weeks ago. A startup that debuted at TechCrunch50 last ...
By 2013, annual global IP traffic will reach two-thirds of a zettabyte, according to a new forecast of IP traffic issued by Cisco today. What is a zettabyte? It is a trillion gigabytes, dummy. (I had to look that up too). And that number repr...
Cc:Betty, a free service that helps organize group email threads, today has secured $1.5 million in seed led by Venrock with investors Seraph Group and Hillsven participating. The company was incubated in Venrocks offices and officially launched ...
Dublin-based InishTech debuts today as a new startup relaunching Microsoft Software Licensing and Protection (SLP) Services, a business unit Redmond booted back in October 2007 following its acquisition of the company Secured Dimensions in January...
With all of the collaboration going on between Qik and Nokia over the past few months, it seemed like it wouldnt be too long before Nokia went ahead and put the live mobile video broadcasting service onto handsets right out of the box. Sure, enou...
Web analytics firm Compete has released its data for the month of May, and as Justin Smith over at InsideFacebook has already pointed out, US traffic to Facebook.com has increased by nearly 8% to 82.9 million unique visitors last month, with Faceb...
Weve been hearing for some time (starting with an ex-Youtube employee) that the number of video streams per day reported by Comscore, Nielsen and other metrics services way under-report on Youtubes total video streams.
Its hard to compare apples ...
I still love the story of Writely, a product we wrote about way back in 2005 when TechCrunch was just a little tike.
The company got a lot of attention as one of the first Ajax-powered online Word products. An acquisition by Google came just a f...
When Songkick was born in 2007, it had an interesting goal: To perfect concert recommendation. Plenty of services do music recommendation, but the idea of recommending concerts you might like based on things like music youre interested in and you ...
Microsoft was kind enough to send us a few boxes of Bing stickers (we requested them). We dont have enough surface area on our laptops, walls, floors, dogs, etc. to use them all, so if you want a couple, theyre all yours. Just send us a self addr...
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Its just so darn true. The competence slide with the guy scratching his head is my favorite. Im pretty sure its a clown thats presenting to them.
Thanks for the tip Kelly.
Cru...
As the phones in our pockets become our second computers, it will become increasingly important to sync data between the two. Not just emails, but contacts, calendars, photos, music, apps, browser bookmarks, files, and more. Nearly every Web pho...
Over the last few months weve been following a lawsuit between well known Internet marketing guru Jeremy Schoemaker and a Google employee named Keyen Farrell. The story so far: Schoemaker is suing Farrell for using his trademark Shoemoney in the ...
Today at Apples WWDC event in San Francisco, Apple had a bunch of Cinema Display monitors mounted together on a wall showing what looked to be some sort of pulsating canvas. But a closer look revealed that it was actually a huge collection of ico...
I spoke today with Scott Kveton, a former developer with deadpooled open-ID startup Vidoop, about the startup, Urban Airship, he and 3 other fellow ex-Vidoopers launched today to assist iPhone developers with push notifications and iPhone storeki...
After attending a great Tokyo 2.0 event last night (more to come about that later), the GeeksOnAPlane group is now at Startonomics Tokyo, where well be hearing about a broad range of topics pertaining to Japanese tech throughout the day.
Join us b...
Were visits to the doctor ever a pleasant experience as a kid? Of course not! Even regular checkups were a hassle and a nightmare, but those lollipops and model airplanes were totally worth it in the end. But my experiences differed greatly from t...