3ones
The Simplest Stable Structure
July 2, 2009 (yesterday)
TechCrunch
Analyst firm Next Up Research has published an extensive report on Linden Lab, the San Francisco company behind virtual world Second Life. The research is based on aggregate data and is available on SharesPost, a site set up to trade shares of pri...
Google received some unfortunate news today, with the U.S. Department of Justice formally announcing the investigation of the $125 million settlement Google made with the Author’s Guild to pay authors a nominal fee for copyrighted works it has sc...
Since the debut of the App Store last summer, my iPhone has become an indispensable part of my workout routine. The phone makes it easy to track your workout progress both in the gym and outdoors, where applications like RunKeeper allow you to us...
When I first signed up for GrandCentral a few years ago, I lived in a different city. As such, I had a different area code. And that was fine until I moved and Google, which bought GrandCentral in 2007 and subsequently put it on lockdown, prohibit...
ReadWriteWeb
This is one post/chapter in a serialized book called Startup 101. For the introduction and table of contents, please click here.
First-time entrepreneurs are usually also first-time CEOs. When you look at your first business card that says CEO, d...
Under waves of ever-increasing competition from Mozilla, Safari, and Google, Microsoft has released a series of edgy, PSA-style online videos to promote Internet Explorer 8.
Featuring onetime Lois and Clark actor Dean Cain (who has apparently bec...
According to a report today from the BBC, Iranians are able to text message one another for the first time since the day before the presidential elections.
SMS service, which political dissidents had used to spread messages and organize protests,...
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...
Google Mobile Blog
One of our top goals on the mobile search team is to bring you the comprehensiveness of Google's web search while optimizing the search experience for your mobile device and in your language. Here is an update on our progress.After launching new ...
June 30, 2009
TechCrunch
This guest post is written by Mary Hodder, the founder Dabble. Prior to Dabble, Hodder consulted for a number of startups, did research at Technorati and wrote her masters thesis at Berkeley focusing on live web search looking at blog data.
Real...
Bet you didnt see this one coming. Back in 2007 we wrote about a service called Dial Directions which lets you call a special phone number and verbally ask for directions, which are immediately sent to you via SMS. Today comes news that the comp...
It looks like Apple has already started sending out the beta version and SDK for the next iteration of the iPhone OS, 3.1, to developers.
The iPhone 3.0 software was released just about two weeks ago, ahead of the iPhone 3GS launch. By most accoun...
SkyGrid, the nifty, free financial news aggregator, is now publishing a stream of news on Twitter, letting users follow breaking business news headlines via the microblogging network.
The news aggregator, which only features stories about publi...
June 29, 2009
TechCrunch
Twitter has just quietly rolled out a set of changes to its user interface on the Following and Followers sections of its website. These changes will clearly make it easier to manage who you follow as well as take actions, such as @replying someon...
How do you advertise on a Web-based instant messaging service without interrupting conversations and annoying the hell out of users? Meebo CEO Seth Sternberg thinks he has the answer: There is a moment of boredom while they are waiting for a res...
Since its inception, one of the biggest problems with Digg has been that users often submit the same content over and over again. This makes it harder for cool content to become popular because some users digg one submitted story, while some digg ...
Over the last six months Google has been ramping up Friend Connect, its social online identity platform thats a direct rival of Facebook Connect (both products opened up to the public last December). Since then Google and third party developers h...
FriendFeed now lets you individualize your account with six new designer themes. When you select a theme, your FriendFeed account will always include your theme, and other people looking at your profile page will see it in whatever theme they hav...
As many of you know, a lot of the sites that use Rackspace as their hosting provider were down for about an hour yesterday. Thats because Rackspace went down. Apparently, it was a power outage at a data center that caused it, an incident report th...
Earlier this month, Flickr started flirting with Twitter integration by allowing users to link their Flickr accounts to their Twitter accounts. The experiment was only for email uploads, which simultaneously created a Tweet with a short http://f...
Around this time last year we saw a stream of high ranking employees leaving Yahoo as the web portal reached new lows following the fumbled Microsoft deal. Now, were beginning to see a similar trend from MySpace, the once-shining social network t...
I still think “Enterprise 2.0” is a meh business trend with a horrible name. It’s not that social media/collaboration tools don’t have a role in business, and I agree there are some situations where consumer tools aren’t the right fit. A great exa...
Back in 2007 I did a column on TeeBeeDee, a social network aimed at baby boomers. Id spent some time looking at the space, and thought TBD was the best designed site, avoiding Eons age restrictions and fascination with death and building something...
Mozilla today released Firefox 3.5 into the wild. Not surprisingly, its flying off the virtual shelves. And unlike when Mozilla released Firefox 3.0 last year, its servers are staying up and reliable, so the rate of downloads is pretty incredible...
High Gear Media, the publisher of automotive media sites, has secured $5.5 million in Series B funding led by DAG Ventures with Accel Partners and Greylock Partners participating. The company raised $6.5 million in Series A funding in November 20...
If information is power, the first step to gaining power is to get the right data. The Obama administration is a big proponent of opening up government data and making it digitally available. Today at the Personal Democracy Forum in New York Ci...
Intel Capital has led a Series B funding round in Sense Networks, a NY-based developer of nifty machine-learning technology that allows for digital indexing and ranking of real world locations based on movement data. According to Venturebeat, whi...
A couple weeks ago, we wrote a post detailing why there needs to be some sort of iPhone app recommendation system. Just like iTunes has its Genius feature for music and movies, with over 50,000 apps now in the App Store, there needs to be a way to...
MojoPages, a local listings search engine, has raised $5 million in Series A funding led by Austin Ventures. MojoPagess search technology powers local business listing search engines for local newspapers, and TV and radio stations.
Originally a stand alone search engine for business listings, the company found that it could not compete with bigger players like Citysearch and Yelp. So Jon Gardner, CEO of MojoPages, decided to overhaul the sites business model and offer white label, branded local search eng...
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If youre like me, you always try to avoid storing or backing up files, even those that are important to you. Its too boring, time-consuming and cumbersome to remember doing it regularly.
This is where a new service called quanp (short for quantum ...
With a webcam built into or sold together with nearly every computer that goes over the counter nowadays youd expect direct video-based communication to have massively taken off by now, but the reality is that its far from being as ubiquitous as s...
Yoono, an extension built to enhance both the Firefox and IE browser experience that comes in pretty handy when you go on the Internet mainly to interact socially with your peers and friends, has just released version 6.1 of its add-on, and revamp...
Disclosure: I have not bought an iPhone 3GS — I’m still unsure if I will. Apple gave me a review unit to play with for 60 days.
Ive had the new iPhone 3GS for a little over a week now. Using it day-to-day over the course of that time, I have a pre...
Swedish software firm Global Gaming Factory X this morning announced it has agreed to buy file-sharing service The Pirate Bay for 60 million Swedish crowns (which currently converts to approx. $7.7 million). In addition, GGF has entered into an ag...
EurekaFest is a yearly event held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that showcases the prototype inventions of high school students from around the country. The inventions consist of various gadgets and devices aimed at helping solve re...
Mochi Media, the fast growing Flash game advertising network and payments platform that we covered last week, is in the midst of an internal battle over the fate of the company.
The company is mulling over an acquisition offer that would give inv...
Sense of Fashion is an Israeli startup that aims to be a marketplace for both Indie fashion designers to sell their designs and for consumers to be able to access clothes made by aspiring designers. The site also serves a social purpose—it lets any user create a fashion homepage of sorts where you can add photos of what you wear your favorite clothes and designs. Designers can create storefronts on this platform as well.
The site has ambitions to be more than just a marketplace for new and interesting fas...
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If you own an iPhone, chances are you have at least one Twitter client on it. And while everyday seems to bring new ones into the App Store, at the end of the day, Tweetie always seems to be the one that I go back to. TwitterFon, Twitterriffic and...
Tomorrow, YouTube is going to release a very important addition to its suite of advertising products, and it has the potential to have a huge impact for politicians, brands, and charities alike. The funny thing is, you probably thought it was alr...
CollegeHumor has outdone itself again. Just a few days after unveiling Bing, the better way to Google, the site has released Web Site Story, a five minute musical tribute to some of the webs most popular websites.
Im not going to ruin any of the ...
Last month we wrote about OffiSync, a powerful plugin that directly ties Microsoft Office to Google Docs, allowing you to save your desktop files to the cloud automatically. Since launch the plugin has fared quite well, with over 50,000 downloads...
Google Mobile Blog
As is well known, our mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. We aim to do this through technology, and in Africa, that means developing tools for the mobile phone. Africa has the world’s highe...
June 28, 2009
TechCrunch
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...
June 25, 2009
TechCrunch
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 24, 2009
TechCrunch
In terms of well-known celebrities, few are bigger than Michael Jackson. Love him or hate him, pretty much everyone on the planet knows him. And that caused big problems for a lot of huge websites today with the news of his passing.
It was probabl...
Ever since I’ve been in Silicon Valley, Ive heard mass anxiety about the state of higher education, particularly when it comes to training the next generation of tech thinkers, innovators and worker bees. But for all those speeches and pledges to ...
In the last six months or so, the real-time web has really started to take hold. Services like Facebook, FriendFeed, and YouTube are finding ways to update their services on the fly with impressive results. But aside from Twitter, there havent b...
Heyzap, the Y Combinator startup that offers an easily-embedded widget containing thousands of Flash games, is launching a major new product today that introduces the company to an entirely new source of revenue. Dubbed HeyZap Payments, the platf...
Yuck! Today, Im told, is National Handshake Day. Its also National Handshake Day National Chocolate Pudding Day, apparently. And, err, its National Watermelon Seed Spitting Week.
But back the the handshaking thing. Its disgusting and we need to p...
If there was any question about the significance of the iPhone 3GSs impressive video functionality, heres your answer: YouTube reports that in the six days since the iPhone 3GS was released last week, the number of mobile uploads has increased by...
The drama in iPhone porn world continues. Yesterday, Hottest Girls, the first app with nudity was accepted into the App Store. But early this morning it was made unavailable, and everyone presumed Apple was behind it. But apparently, the app has n...
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
This morning Google Voice was featured in a segment on the Today Show, during which NBC News correspondent Janet Shamlian outlined her experiences with the service over ...
The adoption cycle for Twitter is a bit strange. It goes something like this: Ever-increasing waves of hype, links, and attention bring in the newbies to Twitter.com where they get their first taste of Twitterdom. Some portion of those set up a...
Glubble, social network for families, is launching several new features to improve photo sharing within its social network for families. Formerly a Firefox plug-in that let parents control what websites kids could visit online, Glubble evolved in...
GROU.PS, a do-it-yourself social network focused on moderated online collaboration, has raised $1 million in an extended Series A round of funding from Golden Horn Ventures. The company previously raised $1.1 million in Series A funding from Gold...
The tech blogosphere was abuzz yesterday with the news that Apple seemingly started accepting applications that contain nudity into the App Store. Now, it appears someone over at Cupertino as ultimately decided to reject the first such app to get...
With all the chatter about Yahoos impending roll-out of a completely overhauled brand - see Techmeme for more - this particular tip that landed in our inbox last night definitely caught our attention.
TechCrunch reader Bradley Scott Shoemaker che...
Opera, the Norwegian software company behind mobile browser Opera Mini, has released its latest State of the Mobile Web report, providing some interesting data points for a detailed look at the evolution of Web browsing on mobile phones.
Looking a...
AdMob has released its metrics report for May 2009 (PDF download link), and looked closely at the actual distribution of users of the iPhone apps in their network this time. The main take-away? There may be tens of thousands of applications availa...
A group of Movable Type specialists - some of them former Six Apart employees - wanted to speed up the development of an open source version of the popular publishing platform and decided to group together in a quest to build an independent, commu...
Stock music and sounds effects marketplace AudioMicro has overhauled its web service to make it easier for users to discover and license stock audio material.
In addition, the startup is announcing a partnership with online presentation software maker SlideRocket, which basically means its library of stock music and royalty-free sound effects will now be included in the SlideRocket marketplace.
The revamp of the site consists of both a cleaner design and more functionality. One of those new features is the...
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Mochi Media continues to quietly build out monetization and reporting tools for Flash game developers. In May we reported on the big growth in their ad network - over 100 million people a month now play games that include their ads. You can find t...
Some of you may be growing tired of hearing about companies described as the Kayak of _____ but if the analogy fits, we might as well abuse it. So without further ado, I give you DoNanza, the Kayak of online freelance project search. With 70,000 p...
Google has just debuted the latest entry to its fleet of Labs products, introducing the search giant to the travel space. Dubbed City Tours, the new site can build itineraries for brief trips to locations around the globe in a matter of seconds. ...
In the online reservation space, you probably know about OpenTable. The restaurant reservation services IPO in a time of drought for IPOs, made big headlines. Now imagine OpenTable for just about everything besides restaurants. Thats BookFresh.
Wh...
Just as we were speculating a couple nights ago, Apple has apparently decided that with the new parental controls now built into the iPhone 3.0 SDK, nudity is now okay in iPhone apps. The first such app, Hottest Girls, has actually been around for...
Finance sites like Yahoo Finance and Google Finance havent changed much in the past ten years. The fonts are different. Maybe theres some more real-time quotes and fancier, interactive charts. But at their core they all follow pretty much the ...
Another day, another weird Twitter story. Tonight the news broke that NBA superstar Shaquille ONeal was being traded to the Cleveland Cavaliers. Huge news, but whats humorous is that apparently Shaq found out he was traded on Twitter.
Look at Shaq...
With ad pricing from ad networks changing constantly, publishers not only have to keep a pulse on revenue from impressions, but also on which ad network is delivering the best value. In fact, publishers can benefit greatly from diversification in...
You might not think that we here at TechCrunch have a lot in common with the band Blink 182. But actually, we do. We both now have our own branded TweetDeck applications. You can find ours here.
TechCrunch TweetDeck users will get all the features...
When Facebooks Vanity URL landrush kicked off nearly two weeks ago, over 500,000 people registered their new names in a matter of 15 minutes. Over the following weekend, nearly 6 million users staked their claims. The most desirable names, li...
Another public official of South Carolina shames himself: Governor Mark Sanford is extremely sad that he got caught cheating on his wife. The video is here, the transcript is here. Bottom line, he says Ive been unfaithful to my wife. Read all abou...
TechCrunch Editor Sarah Lacys book Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good came out in paperback edition earlier this month. We posted some of the new Twitter history that she included in a new chapter included in this edition a few weeks ago.
You ca...