3ones
The Simplest Stable Structure
July 12, 2009
TechCrunch
Browsing through the hilarious pages of FailBlog.org during rare moments of downtime has become something of a tradition here at TechCrunch. The site painstakingly chronicles some of the funniest (and bizarre) screwups from around the web and rea...
Its been more than a month since Google Finance shed its beta label, and finally today it is rolling out some design tweaks it has been testing out for the past few months.
In the screen shot above you can see most of the changes. There is now...
The gap between Facebook and MySpace is growing wider in the U.S. In May, Facebook finally caught up to MySpace in unique U.S. visitors and surpassed its rival social network by a smidgeon. Last month, Facebook left MySpace in the dust, according...
Just to follow up on our story from Friday, FriendFeed has now implemented the feature that will allow you to disable comments on individual threads.
This move is in response to ours and others concerns that while FriendFeeds real-time commenting ...
Twitter seems to be the hottest thing in tech recently — if you look at TechCrunch, it averages at least 3 posts a week about Twitter. But the bigger question is, who is really using Twitter? Many of you might think that, as with most of the late...
Readers are always asking us for more TMZ-style posts, so heres one for you. The New York Post did yet another review of Ben Mezrichs upcoming Facebook narrative, The Accidental Billionaires. That itself is not that interesting, but the Photoshopp...
MG Siegler and I ran into Pandora CTO Tom Conrad on Saturday evening at dinner gathering in San Francisco. He was still glowing from all the good news at his once troubled startup: a reasonable settlement around online streaming royalty rates qui...
Panasonic approached us a few weeks ago offering a Toughbook CF-30 to test in any way we saw fit. Rather than a lot of fancy lab tested, we decided to run over the laptop with a Toyota RAV4.
The laptop, surprisingly, survived almost unscathed.
T...
Perhaps youve noticed that apps arent exactly flying off the virtual shelves in BlackBerrys App World store, like they are in Apples App Store. The store is hard to navigate and theres confusion about several of the apps, are the main complaints w...
Well heres a hot little rumor. Netflix stock has surged today on news that it may be acquired by Amazon.
The stock is currently up over 7% in trading today, at an 11-week high. Sources seem pretty thin, based seemingly on stock analysis from place...
There's a fantastic report coming out of Morgan Stanley that analyzes the way teens consume media in this day and age. The source was a 15-year-old boy; he interns at the company. The results will the music industry, make Hollywood very happy inde...
Vindicia, a Redwood City, California-based provider of on-demand payment management software has raised $7.5 in Series D funding. New investor ONSET Ventures led the round and was joined by existing investors Bertelsmann Digital Media Investments,...
Microsoft is definitely relishing its Bing moment, communicating gains in market share every chance it gets to build a story of steady progression against both Google and Yahoo. Today, Microsoft self-reported an 8 percent increase in unique visi...
Heres the latest invention from the Gmail labs team: a verified accounts key to help distinguish spam from a legit email. Last year, Gmail started filtering spam from fake eBay and PayPal emails, requiring actual verification from the source that...
TweetFeel is a new web service by marketing research startup Conversition Strategies that combines real-time search for Twitter with sentiment detection algorithms.
The idea is for people to use TweetFeel to run search queries for products, celeb...
Russian investment group Digital Sky Technologies has placed a tender offer to purchase up to $100 million of common stock from current and former Facebook employees, weve confirmed from a source close to the deal. Employees who would like to acce...
Venture capital keeps getting squeezed as an asset class. The second quarter of 2009 saw the lowest level of capital going into VC funds since the first quarter of 2003, according to the National Venture Capital Association (NCVA). During the se...
International publishers demand new intellectual property rights protection to safeguard the future of journalism.
Thats the title of a press release distributed late last week by the European Publishers Councel (EPC), which you can find here. Pr...
MySpace has teamed up with Fox International Channels (FIC) in an agreement under which the latter will take over management of local advertising, marketing, and promotion across a number of territories outside the United States.
According to new ...
The following post was written by a well known executive at one of the largest sites on the Internet. The author has requested to remain anonymous - not for dramatic effect, but because of the backlash he would receive from the SEO industry and po...
Unless youre the nostalgic type (I know I am), this wont interest you much. Rollip is a basic web service that allows you to upload pictures and turn them into Polaroid-quality photos. Once youve selected your desired effect, you can upload a pic ...
The web has been abuzz the past few weeks with chatter about Microsofts announcement today at its Worldwide Partner Conference in New Orleans about the new version of Microsofts Office 2010. Theres even a mini-movie about its debut. Facing potent...
This morning is the kickoff of TWS2009, an event organized by Israeli financial newspaper Globes, and leading Israeli startup blog, the.co.ils with its founder Yaron Orenstein. TechCrunch, in its continued support of Israeli startups, is proud to ...
TeachStreet, a Yelp-like service for real world classes (cooking, dog obedience, music lessons, ballroom dance, foreign language, golf, yoga, etc.), is launching a marketplace feature for teachers to be able to coordinate payments from students. ...
Thanks again to all of you who came out to our Real Time Stream CrunchUp and August Capital Summer Party. We broke 600 attendees to the Real Time Stream CrunchUp, double our initial expectations, and we hosted lots more of you at the August Capi...
After being scarce for the first couple of weeks following the new iPhone 3.0 software rolling out, apps with Push Notifications are now rolling out at a healthy clip. And thats great, because the feature is really useful. To a point.
The issue Im...
Aaron Levie is the CEO and co-founder of Box.net, founded in 2005 with the goal of helping people and businesses easily access and share information from anywhere. Box.net is now used by millions of individuals, small businesses, and Fortune 500 ...
Indie music discovery service OurStage decided to fill me in on how well theyre doing as a startup in the difficult online music business, and I was quite amazed to see how much theyve progressed over the years. On a financial level, the company h...
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 25, 2009
TechCrunch
A lot of us here at TechCrunch quite like Bing, Microsofts new search, sorry, discovery engine. For a number of queries it seems to provide better results than Google. But that doesnt mean the public will start using it. And this video by College ...
Just like every other major Website, Google was inundated with people looking for news about Michael Jackson yesterday. Above is a chart showing the volume of search queries for the deceased pop star. Searches peaked right around 3 PM PDT, as pe...
A few years ago, Max Levchin—of PayPal and Slide fame— told me there were two kinds of entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley: Those who work tirelessly and are great at execution, and those who are visionary and truly create new ideas—and sometimes new ...
For the last few weeks it hasnt been unusual to see ATT among Twitters trending topics — following its disappointing performance at WWDC and the activation issues with the iPhone last week, the carrier hasnt exactly been garnering positive reactio...
One of the hottest areas of search right now is real time search, which attempts to find results based on what is happening right now. Twitters search engine fast becoming one of the key ways to navigate the service and discover what people are ...
When youve just gotten laid off, the last thing you want to hear is that you cant cash your last check because of one final payroll screwup. But thats apparently exactly whats going on over at MySpace, which laid off over 30% of its staff (or aro...
Flickr, Yahoos photo property, is one of the largest picture sharing services in the world. However, if you were to ask a group of random people how you spell its domain, a high percentage would likely tell you F-L-I-C-K-E-R. Thats not surprising,...
Weve all heard it before, whether you work in a Fortune500 company or waited tables at a restaurant. Theres always an uptight guy or girl whos defensive, paranoid, over-stressed and nitpicky. And someone maybe youre too polite but someone says, T...
The second batch of 150 tickets to attend our 4th annual summer outing on July 10 at August Capital are available now, courtesy of Eventbrite. Theyll go fast so grab them now.
We are also selling tickets for our Real Time Stream CrunchUp earlier...
Glam Media, a distributed media network comprised of both its own properties and a publisher network of hundreds of lifestyle websites and blogs, is looking to build an advertising network powered by Twitter.
We know this because a number of thir...
An exercise for the reader:
First, we present Fracture. You tap the iPhone to "crack" the screen and then the apps all explode, triggering the rest of the apps to explode in rapid succession. Next, we find SkyFart. You press a little man and he f...
I'm not a svelte man anymore, I'll admit. Two kids - I ate them both - and lots of beer have force my metabolism to run, cowering, resulting in size changes that would swallow the average man. This product is what I need.
The BodyTrace is a wire...
Michael Jacksons unfortunate passing is a sad event on many levels, and a moment to reflect upon the mans rich life and career as well as a time to pass support - silent or loud - on to his family, friends and everyone who needs it now that the Ki...
Apple is nearly tripling its stake in UK-based Imagination Technologies, boosting its interest to 9.5 percent with the purchase of 2.2 million new shares at £1.4275 ($2.35 million) each - the mid market close price on 25 June - and another 11.52 m...
Our posts earlier this week about the alarming amount of click fraud at Facebook left more than a few unanswered questions. The problem is real and was confirmed by Facebook. But what wasnt clear is exactly how or why it was happening. Now, after ...
Okay, this situation continues to get weirder and weirder.
An application featuring pornography first appeared in the App Store yesterday. Today, that app was removed, which everyone presumed was a move by Apple. But the developers said that the r...
Twitter has a history of killing off features in order to stay up. And it looks like it had to do that again today, in the wake the avalanche of tweets that are flowing in following Michael Jacksons death. Gone are Search and Trending Topics from ...
Today, we got the latest version of the live-streaming app Qik, a version that will work on the iPhone 3GS. No, we didnt get it through the App Store, because Apple or AT&T or both still wont allow for applications that stream live video from ...
Foursquare, the location-based social networking service, is about to activate Push Notifications in the new version of its iPhone app, due shortly. Ive been beta testing it out for the past week, and Im happy to report that it works brilliantly. ...
Brand loyalty is a powerful thing, especially when it comes to technology. Consider the battle brewing now between Google and Microsofts new search engine, Bing. Even if Bing proves to be just as good as Google, it might not matter because of t...
June 2, 2009
TechCrunch
At last weeks hush, hush meeting of newspaper execs on how to monetize content and save a dying industry, the American Press Institute presented a white paper that offers a step by step plan of how newspapers should move forward with paid content...
Weve been working hard behind the scenes on the CrunchPad since our last update in April, and have just about nailed down the final design for the device. Were showing the conceptual drawings here today. In another few weeks well have the first w...
Bro's a no no for CoCo? In case you missed the Twitter Tracker bit on Conan last night, here it is again in all its glory. It's a must-watch no matter what you think of Twitter.
Google is taking a step towards taking all the messy, unstructured information on the Web and putting it into neat little, labeled boxes. Literally, that is what Google Squared does. First announced at last months Searchology event, Google Squar...
Theres no question that Hulu has firmly established itself as one of the dominant video sites on the web. But its incredible growth seems to be dropping off, and quickly. Between January and February of this year, the site saw a 42% increase in ...
Today at the Startup 2009 conference in New York City, Business Insiders Henry Blodget interviewed Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes on stage. Hughes recently moved to the city and has been going around to various colleges on the east coast talking...
One large component of the RSS Is Dead idea is that services like Twitter offer a faster and more curated way to share content. But the problem is that to do this on Twitter, it involves sharing a link to the content and not the content itself. Tw...
Twitters not the only social platform to have a celebrity fetish. Google is bringing out its inner obsession with celeb users by launching iGoogle Showcase, which allows you to see and share the homepages of your favorite celebs. The current site...
There she goes again. The Justice Departments antitrust chief Christine Varney is convinced that tech companies are doing wrong and her underlings are going after them aggressively. She has already given Google notice that she is keeping an eye...
Back in the olden days I used to read Joey Devilla's blog all the time. He was - and is - known as Accordion Guy and he produced consistently cool content. Well, I just stumbled on him again and found that he's doing great, philosophical posts on ...
Most men hate to shop. It takes way too much time, we are out of our element, and we end up getting really dorky clothes because we feel like not buying something is an admission of failure. Online shopping is better, but most of us would rathe...
In the past weve written about eBays Skype conundrum, or the trouble the former has had to successfully integrate the latters communication capabilities into the e-commerce giants web services. In the recent press release announcing that eBay plan...
Theres lots of speculation on what the soon-to-be independent AOL should do to drive user and revenue growth, and stay relevant in a world dominated by Google, Microsoft and Facebook. New CEO Tim Armstrong says hes taking some time to take input i...
The TV guide doesnt know who you are, what your favorite movie genre is, what youve watched in the past, what your mood is, and so on. Because of that, it is incapable of providing you with any recommendations about what to watch on your TV, or wh...
my6sense is announcing it has raised $2 million in Series A financing from private investors. The company is pioneering digital intuition, artificial intelligence designed to assist everyday users separate the signal from the noise. This is a problem that has grown in magnitudes of severity since the introduction of blogs and RSS into our lives, and compounded even further by the recent rise in popularity of streams (thank you Facebook Twitter).
In my initial review I tested my6senses technology which they...
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Shopping for fashion on the web can be an overwhelming experience. Not only can you find an unlimited amount of clothing on the e-commerce sites of retailers like Nordstroms and Saks.com, but there are also plethora of web-based sites that offer...
RingRevenue, a pay-per-call platform designed for affiliate networks, has closed a $3.5 million funding round led by GRP Partners, Rincon Venture Partners, and Great Pacific Capital. The company is looking to tap into the huge volume of sales tha...
Intuit, the company that makes personal and small business software, has launched a new capability called “Federated Applications” that allows SaaS developers to write their applications using any programming language and cloud platform and conne...
About 45 minutes ago I tried logging into Mahalo to stake a few claims for myself in the sites revamped directory, which pays users for creating and maintaining their entries. This has proven far more difficult than it should be. In fact, it seem...
Save the date and let the frenzy begin. Our 4th annual summer meet-up at August Capital will be Friday, July 10 this year.
We cant thank David Hornik and his partners at August Capital enough for having us back, yet again. Each year the party get...
Jason Calacanis wants to inject what he calls the Skeeball economy into Mahalo, his highly tuned site for creating and searching topic pages. (Disclosure: Calacanis is our partner in putting on the TechCrunch50 conference). Since launching Maha...
For years, Microsoft has tried to shrug off its reputation as a monopolistic tyrant. Today comes news that seems to undermine those efforts pretty badly.
The Next Web reports that users of Internet Explorer 6 are being forced to use Bing as their...