3ones
The Simplest Stable Structure
August 6, 2009
TechCrunch
Anyone who has ever used Googles automated translation service knows that its not exactly perfect — generally youll wind up with words that are close approximations of what you started with, but Google inevitably decides to change the meaning of a...
The Microsoft PR team tweeted out the first image to Twitpic of the Microsoft Retail Store opening in Scottsdale and Mission Viejo. The stores are slated to open sometime in the fall, with more locations opening after. In July, Microsofts master p...
As we noted early this morning, Twitter is still having some major issues getting its service stabilized following the DDoS attacks. Co-founder Biz Stone has posted a new update on the situation on Twitters blog today. Apparently, the attacks are ...
Assetize, the startup known for selling Facebook vanity URLs, has launched a new service targeted at Twitter users with unused, unwanted accounts. The same concept from Facebook vanity URLs carries over to the Twittersphere. Assetize will let you park Twitter accounts, like domain names, for future use and in the meantime put ads on the account while you sit back and make money. To park your Twitter account, simply register with Assetize for an invite, then put in all of your account information, give keywo...
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Everybody's making noise about the upcoming Apple tablet, and who can blame them? It'll certainly be an interesting device, but the thing is that nobody really knows what it's going to be. Flat, to be sure, and tablet-shaped in all likelihood, but...
Twitter was down for a little while yesterday (its still a little iffy), and it was the closest the United States of America has ever come to collapsing.
P.S. I know the song is played out; thats why I picked it!
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because its time for you to find a new Job2.0
When Amazon paid $928 million for Zappos in July, it got a little something extra in the box: the Clothes.com domain. It turns out that Zappos bought the domain last year from Idealab for $4.9 million (Bill Gross strikes again).
The detail is t...
Weve done more digging on the Spotify cap table story from yesterday, and have confirmed with one source that the company did close on at least part of the new round of financing the Financial Times reported they were negotiating earlier this week...
Silicon Valleys electric car company, Tesla Motors, says that it hit profitability in July. The private company reports that it made approximately $1 million of earnings on revenues of $20 million, and that it shipped 109 Roadsters, its $109,000...
If you’re craving city life or a university setting, Ann Arbor, Michigan is the place to be. Ann Arbor is the seventh largest city in the state of Michigan, with a population of 114,386, of which more than 30% are college or university students. ...
I had never heard of Spacelocker before, have you? Apparently, its a social network where you can go to meet friends and connect to online stuff but not to upload and store photos, videos, or music. So essentially its like Facebook or MySpace but ...
Going over the 10 startups that were profiled by guest author Don Dodge yesterday on the occasion of their TechStars 2009 graduation, Next Big Sound to me seemed one of the more interesting ones and I wanted to take a closer look at it. Basically,...
Hot European music startup Spotify is back in the news today. On August 4 we broke the news that the big music labels have secretly been shareholders in the company since 2008, and that they paid roughly the same price for their preferred stock as venture capital investors Northzone Ventures and Creandum paid last year.
Now, though, Swedish news site ComputerSweden is reporting that those music labels actually got their stock for free. Sony BMG, Universal Music, Warner Music, EMI and Merlinbought at the tim...
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Twitter, Facebook and LiveJournal spent yesterday battling a DDOS attack that started around 6 am California time. Twitter and LiveJournal went down hard, Facebook stayed mostly online but was clearly under strain. CNET reports that a single indi...
With Twitter down this morning and reports of failure all over the social Web, I figured FriendFeed would be up, if denuded by the Twitter outage. Well, sorta. In fact, FriendFeed searches are down. How the hell does a denial of service attack pla...
Since the early days of the Facebook Platform, Causes has been one of the most popular apps. Its also big on MySpace, and the company behind it recently announced that they had raised some $10,000,000 for various causes in two years. It makes sens...
Earlier today I had a debate about the Realtime Web with author Andrew Keen on a Blogtalk Radio podcast hosted by Supernovas Howard Greenstein. (It is embedded below if you have an extra hour to spare).
Andrew thinks that real time streams such a...
As an online entity, Google is constantly evolving and improving its products. Some updates are silly, but some are far more serious and meant for good. Its update today to Google Earth to expand its Darfur coverage, is the latter.
Using data from...
July 18, 2009
TechCrunch
When I wrote my BusinessWeek column on Zygna a while back, every venture capitalist in the Valley told me that Playdom was the company’s biggest competitor.
After all, it competes game-to-game, with similar mob-style and poker games, and was said ...
As the web matures, its also getting more complex. Yet much of it is still fundamentally based on things like HTML which are 30 years old. A new startup, FasterWeb, aims to bring these old technologies up to speed — as it were — making the web fas...
The Twitter document leak fiasco started with a simple story that personal accounts of Twitter employees were hacked. Twitter CEO Evan Williams commented on that story, saying that Twitter itself was mostly unaffected. No personal accounts were ...
Saving money is tough work, even when youre working towards something you really want, like a new car or a vacation. First, theres the business of actually finding someone to write you a paycheck each month, and then you have to look at that pile of cash sitting in your bank account, just begging to be spent on the latest DVD, book, or gadget that suits your fancy. And theres always the predictable but expensive costs like rent and insurance that keep eating away at those savings, not to mention the issue...
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Now even mainstream journalists are picking up the no handshake banner and running with it. Neil Swidey, writing for the Boston Globe, says Last month, swine flu officially became a pandemic. Public health officials have said so-called “social dis...
When Om Malik of GigaOM said he was breaking up with his iPhone 5 months ago because of the failures of AT&T, I must admit, I thought he was overreacting. I was wrong.
Since I switched to AT&T from Verizon just over 2 years ago to get the ...
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 28, 2009
TechCrunch
Pleo is back, thanks to electronics and entertainment leader Senario, and we want to give you one.
The $349 artificial dinosaur hit the news this April when Ugobe, its creator, filed for bankruptcy. However, it is thankfully still available from ...
URL shortener and analytics service Bit.ly has been working on a new set of products, being referred to as Bit.ly Now internally, which will define the next stage of the companys growth. The company confirmed these plans to us today. The services...
At the beginning of last year, Yahoo made a fairly large acquisition with the purchase of online video distribution and advertising platform provider Maven Networks. Under the terms of the agreement, which we reported as a rumor the same day the p...
Last week, Michael Jacksons death caused sites to fail left and right. Today, its a very different problem. The hosting service Rackspace has been completely down for the past 30 minutes or so. Dont believe us, just listen to Justin Timberlake or ...
They may be mysterious and perhaps even a bit shady, but secondary equity markets, which allow employees to sell off their shares to other buyers, are quickly heating up. Because of the rarity of IPOs and acquisitions in the startup world these d...
Digg founder Kevin Rose, Founders Fund partner Sean Parker and leading Israeli angel investor Yossi Vardi will return to our third-annual TechCrunch50 conference Panel of Experts September 14 - 15 in San Francisco. Our experts judge the fifty star...
Weve been a bit baffled by the system Apple has in place when it comes to ratings for applications in the App Store. Is it allowing apps with nudity? Not allowing them? Allowing them with a 17+ rating? Weve talked to some developers willing to bre...
LinkedIn has bolstered its position as Americas leading business social network by the month lately, with Germany-based Xing as the only company regarding itself a worthy competitor in the last few years. But now those days seem to be over - in th...
Facebook has just named former Genentech Chief Financial Officer David Ebersman as its new CFO. The news comes three months after Facebook ousted Gideon Yu from the position, citing at the time its desire to find someone with public company exper...
Steve Jobs is officially back at work, according to Apple PR. Even though he had a
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A lot of people know that hunger is a major problem in Africa, but few people ever think about it, let alone do anything about it. One Twitter account claims to be trying to spread the message with the use of very straight-forward tweets pretendin...
Over the weekend, YouTube launched a new channel dubbed Reporters Center, which it hopes will prove to be a good way to educate existing and aspiring citizen journalists on how to report news in the digital age. The new resource will feature a hos...
There has been no shortage of talk about the apparent demise of Userplane, the text, voice and video chat software provider that was acquired by AOL in August 2006 for around $40 million (the exact price was never disclosed).
Venturebeat ran a st...
If you were reading a major paper this weekend, you'd notice a striking ad. There's the Palm Pre resting against an apple core with the words:
The Palm Pre does things the iPhone can't. Run multiple applications at the same time with real-time up...
Not only does Google want to organize all the worlds information, it also wants to make all that information available to everyone in the world. For the majority of the worlds population, that means making it available on a cell phone, and not a...
As Twitter becomes the default conversation spot on the Web, were going to start to see tools which combine site-specific conversations with Twitter. One example is Tweetboard, which creates a Twitter-powered forum for any site. Once a site add...
The pictures of the Sony Walkman in this BBC Magazine article made me feel strangely nostalgic - the actual text of the article made me laugh out loud. The Magazine invited 13-year-old Scott Campbell to trade his iPod for a Walkman for a week, and...
Supposedly, the The Pirate Bay guys were found guilty in their recent trial in Sweden, and, supposedly, they got sentenced to a year in prison and had to pay $4.5 million in damages.
But back in the parallel universe which happens to be the real...
Digitalsmiths, the video distribution and analysis platform that powers TheWB.com, TMZ, and a number of other popular sites, is rolling out a new product suite today dubbed VideoSense 2.0. The new suite includes a number of features that will mak...
Earlier this week, New York Times reporter David Rodhe escaped from a Taliban prison. He had been a Taliban hostage for the last seven months, but the general public had absolutely no clue. In a joint effort by The New York Times and Wikipedia, th...