3ones
The Simplest Stable Structure
February 23, 2010
Xconomy San Diego
Luke Timmerman wrote:
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San Diego-based Amylin Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: AMLN), along with its partner Takeda Pharmaceuticals, said late Monday that their experimental combination of metreleptin and pramlintide is being primed for final-stage Phase III clinical development for obesity. The decision was made after Amylin and Takeda reviewed data from a full 52 weeks of follow up from patients, which showed the drug consistently helped patients lose weight. Separately, Amylin said...
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Bruce V. Bigelow wrote:
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ProActa, which is developing an anti-cancer drug transplanted from New Zealand, has raised $1.1 million in debt and securities, according to a recent regulatory filing. The biotech, which has raised at least $43 million in venture funding since 2004, announced earlier this month that it was starting a second mid-stage clinical trial of a drug for Acute Myeloid Leukemia. ProActas investors include Alta Partners, Clarus Ventures, Delphi Ventures, ...
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San Diegos Qualcomm Ventures is showing its confidence in Visage Mobiles back-from-the-dead strategy by leading a new investment round in the San Francisco-based company.
Tim Weingarten, who stepped in as Visage CEO in 2008, tells me the company has secured $4.5 million in its second round venture funding since 2008, when the company sold most of its assets to Convergys on terms that were not disclosed. Visage Mobile basically restarted its ...
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January 21, 2010
Compete Blog
Compete and Fox Audience Network Partner
First of its kind Audience Profiles now available through Compete
On Monday, Compete and the FOX Audience Network (FAN) debuted a comprehensive audience insight service. Publishers and advertisers now have the ability to dissect their website’s audience composition and use these insights to develop highly targeted marketing strategies to reach their [...]
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August 11, 2009
TechCrunch
The Onion strikes again, announcing Google Opt Out today, a product that lets people opt out of Googles information gathering activities by having their home destroyed and moving to a covered villiage complex at an undisclosed location. As always,...
Weve already written a half dozen times or so about how the Mac version of Googles Chrome browser continues to surge towards being fully usable on a daily basis. And today brings another update on that front.
The latest builds of Chromium for Mac ...
This is going to end well, and no one will be upset about this. Also, everything I said in that last sentence is probably wrong.
When Debian developer Joey Hess started tinkering with webOS, he noticed that it was sending something to Palm once...
Mint, the popular personal finance site that won 2007s TechCrunch40 conference, has closed a new $14 million Series C funding round. Silicon Alley Insider discovered the round in an SEC filing this morning, and weve just gotten off the phone with...
Apples App Store policies have been under fire for months now. It looks like tensions are starting to thaw following a couple of emails from Apple Senior VP Phil Schiller to some vocal bloggers. But it seemed a bit odd that it was Schiller doing t...
Do you guys remember my belt buckle? It's cool, right? What could be cooler than a QR code belt buckle? How about a silver brooch that displays a topographical map? I know, right?!
At almost 300 euros the Earth Brooch imposes a pretty hefty premi...
Socialcast, the realtime collaboration software platform, today announced the release of its official developer API after weeks of beta-testing. Essentially, Socialcast lets employees in companies communicate via activity streams, create groups, a...
If it wasnt bad enough that Facebook bought FriendFeed on Monday and turned on real-time search to better compete against Twitter in the Stream Wars, and is playing around with a lite version that resembles Twitter even more, now Twitter really h...
iGoogle, a personalized homepage that competes with My Yahoo, My MSN, My AOL, Netvibes and others, will release 19 new in-house and third party iGoogle widgets today that add new social and sharing features to users of the service. An overview of ...
As Erick pointed out yesterday, IPO registrations are up. But even if all of these companies go out, does this mean VCs are out of the no liquidity woods? Hardly.
Sure everyone brings up LinkedIn and Facebook as the potentially huge homerun IPOs i...
So, apparently, Apple's Phil Schiller is starting to talk about Apple's missteps. After months of silence, one of Apple's top executives (and possibly the most public-facing one next to Jobs) has started to reach out to the tech community to help ...
Microsoft and Nokia announced a broad ranging alliance this morning which will bring Microsoft Office and other productivity software to a Nokia phones. The agreement marks the first time Microsoft will make Office for non windows mobile phones,...
Boxee, the media center software startup, has won a lot of fans with its open approach to streaming content. And as a result it has won some more money, to the tune of a $6 million second round, led by Bostons General Catalyst Partners. The new mo...
Go ahead and clean up the coffee you just spit all over your keyboard. We'll wait. Back? OK. A judge and Texas as ruled that Microsoft Word's XML systems violate patents by Toronoto-based i4i Inc. Word uses XML in reading and writing XML, DOCX, an...
I suspect the femtocell has missed its chance, wrote Charles Arthur in the Guardian recently. Not so fast. It seems the existing shareholders of femtocell manufacturer Ubiquisys beg to differ, because theyve just pumped a further $11m into the com...
So, weve already explained why the newly revealed Facebook Lite at the very least wasnt conceived to be a Twitter-killer, but it does look interesting. The service, which is currently being tested in India (and sadly, not in the U.S. despite the m...
So, the web pretty much exploded tonight over the appearance of something called Facebook Lite, a new service thats apparently being beta tested by Facebook. But users who received the message that they were invited to test it out, were frustrated...
GigLocator, a live music aggregator, launches today in open beta. It promises to offer a large collection of gig listings worldwide, sourced from major ticket providers and a number of independents too. It enables users of keep track of their favourite artists and venues while offering a discovery mechanism to help you find more gigs you might like.
It has a smart search engine which knows if youre looking for artists, venues and so on. Enter multiple Last.fm, Pandora or iLike usernames and the site will k...
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LinkedIn tonight celebrated their 45 millionth user sign up, according to LinkedIns Marketing Project Manager Florina Xhabijas Twitter message.
According to comScore, LinkedIn had 16 million worldwide monthly unique visitors and 331 million page ...
It looks like Facebook has tonight turned on a feature called Facebook Lite for some users to test out. Were getting bombarded by tips about it, and some of us are seeing it as well. Unfortunately, it appears that it may not be fully ready for p...
By now, most businesses and self-employed individuals know that they can use social media services like Twitter and Facebook to help themselves grow their customer base and (hopefully) make some money. But for most people, actually using these se...
Weve known for a while that Googles Knol is no Wikipedia killer, but now the knowledge-sharing site is being reduced to a sad Craigslist wannabe. The original idea behind Knol was that people could collaboratively write definitive articles about...
As weve seen before, DVD Jon loves messing with Apple. And now hell get his chance in a major way. Jon Lech Johansen (better known as DVD Jon), the co-founder of doubleTwist, a company attempting to circumvent the iTunes/iPod ecosystem, has posted...
Another small sign that the worst of the recession may be behind us: IPO registrations are clawing their way back from the shadow of the valley of death (also known as the first quarter if 2009, when there were zero IPOs registered with the SEC)....
A few weeks ago, we wrote about Steven Frank, a well-known Mac developer who was giving up his iPhone over his disgust with the ways Apple is managing the App Store. (This was right before Mike also gave up his iPhone). Well, Frank is already cons...
The tough thing about being a startup is that no one is willing to share their numbers with you.
With that in mind, wed like to announce the 2009 TechCrunch Web App Survey.
Its an (optionally) anonymous survey where we can all share a bit of data ...
August 7, 2009
TechCrunch
New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg had planned to take the entire day tomorrow to use Twitter to send out mundane updates about his life. Unfortunately, the Hudson River accident today has forced him to reschedule his Twitter plans, so he can, ...
As anyone who has read my critically acclaimed, Pulitzer-Prize-winning book will know, I have not always been the paragon of honesty I am today.
Truth be told, in the past I have been guilty of prevarication on an Olympian scale in almost all aspe...
It has now been over a month since we first wrote about GPush, an iPhone app that uses Apples Push Notification system to alert you when you have new Gmail messages. Like so many other apps, it was starting to look like Apple simply may not accept...
This is completely a rumor, but an awesome one. Citing a pretty reliable source, Boy Genius Report is saying that the next version of iTunes will add a bunch of new, highly requested features. Specificially, BGRs source says iTunes 9 features Blu-ray support, a new way to organize iPhone apps within iTunes, as well some kind of integration with Twitter, Facebook and possibly Last.fm.
Each of those features have been talked about for some time now on the web. But as BGR notes, the talk of Blu-ray does line i...
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Ever since the new Firefox 3.5 beta came out about a month ago, Ive been using it as my main browser. Generally I am very happy with it. Pages load a lot faster than they did before, the plus-sign feature in tabs which launches a new one is a god...
As one of the most popular applications on Apples popular iPhone platform, a lot of users are eagerly awaiting the next version of the app. And that wait is almost over.
The app is pretty much done - were just working on translating it into a bunc...
While Google CEO Eric Schmidt was on Apples board of directors, the two companies had an agreement not to hire away each others workers, a former Google employee with knowledge of such matters has told us. We have since confirmed this with other e...
Scribd, the so-called YouTube for documents thats recently also become an Ebook store, has been seeing a major drop in traffic over the last two months. Since June, the site has lost over 48% of its global traffic, falling from a peak of 58.3 mil...
Predictify, a prediction market that launched back in 2007, is closing its doors. The service allowed users to vote on potential outcomes for current news stories (it likened itself to a fantasy sports for everything else). Users could have thei...
This guest post on the struggles of online music services to reach profitability is written by Michael Robertson, the founder of music sites MP3.com and MP3Tunes, as well as a number of non-music related startups like Gizmo and Dealpedia. As one o...
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...
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 29, 2009
TechCrunch
We on the web are a simple folk — especially us males. We need but two things to keep us happy: Explosions and boobs. And thank God someone has finally cut through all the BS, and given us exactly what we want in one brilliant site called yes, Ex...
Over the last few days weve seen a lot of attention centered on the new iPhone application from Spotify, the so-called iTunes Killer subscription service that lets you plays songs on demand from a library of millions of tracks. We still dont kno...
Mozillas Firefox browser is about to hit a major milestone: 1 billion total downloads. As you can see on this Twitter account set up to monitor the download numbers, it just crossed the 999,000,000 threshold earlier today. Judging by the rate at w...
NewsGator Online, one of the first online RSS readers I used back in the day, is being tossed in the deadpool by its parent company in a move that signals its newfound focus on desktop applications and social computing tools for businesses.
Users...
You know those idiotic commenters on Digg? Sure you do. You know, FIRST, LOLZ, URGAY, etc. Yeah, those guys. Well Digg took a step today that could possibly make them at least 10,000 times more annoying: Email alerts.
Now, lets be clear: This does...
Online travel services group Expedia has reported its results for Q2 2009, and the financials arent looking spectacular, but not as bad as expected.
Although the number of booking transactions handled by the company actually saw a small uptick, gr...
The conventional wisdom out there on Web video advertising is that most advertisers dont want to risk being associated with user-generated videos (i.e., the vast bulk of videos on YouTube). It is only the professionally-produced stuff on portion...
Lolligift solves a pressing problem in most offices. You know how when Maurice in accounting or Lydia on the dev team breaks a hip or has a birthday? And how Sarah in HR goes around collecting cash for a present for them? And how you know you have...
At first glance, Redux has a very appropriate name: It looks like its just another version of the aggregation and conversation service FriendFeed. But a new feature is fairly awesome. TV allows you to easily share video clips, just as you would sh...
Weve all seen the ads and screenshots that pop-up when you hover over keywords on blogs. For the most part, theyre annoying. But what if those pop-ups had actual useful information in them? Thats the idea behind Panels Network.
A key feature of th...
Google Voice has been making a lot of headlines lately, but not for the reasons youd hope. The service is already running into frustrating opposition from Apple and possibly ATT (depending on who you believe). Today, its getting opposition of a d...
The creator of iCombat wrote an analysis of his experience making and giving away a free "lite" version of his app alongside his paid, full version. The result? It makes economic sense to create a lite version early on and update it often to goose...
My Name is E appeared earlier this year with a product which sounded familiar to most. It enables you to collect all your social and contact accounts - on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and any other network - in one spot. However, the twist was that...
Dutch startup Nimbuzz , which bills itself as the mobile Skype today releases an IM application for Android phones which ties together multiple messaging tools (Skype, MSM, Yahoo, ICQ, Google Talk, etc.) via a single interface. The Nimbuzz trump c...
When Jimmy Wales co earlier this year quietly added Wikianswers to the host of products launched under the Wikia umbrella, we werent the only ones who were skeptical about its potential to make waves. Did the Internet really need yet another QA s...
Getting sound out of an iPhone and online quickly has been pretty easy for a while, and there are a number of startups playing in the space. Trottr works from any phone and is a simple call-in or upload system. The Tweetmic iPhone app has been gat...
Like everyone else Ive watched the print media world fall apart over the last few years. The poster child for that industry is the New York Times, of course, and their many missteps in recent memory have been well chronicled. In early 2008 Marc An...
In June we wrote about AOLs evolving Toyota strategy to evolve into an online media powerhouse just as the print media world is falling apart. New CEO Tim Armstrong hasnt been pinned down on how hard hes betting on this strategy in recent public a...
Whether its a sign of economic recovery or just investment bankers getting ready to take off the month of August, theres been a lot acquisition activity lately. In the last week alone, IBM purchased SPSS for $1.2 billion, Amazon bought Zappos fo...
Twitter is now seeing dozens of tweets a minute from users reporting that their Twitter updates are being posted as automatic updates to their Facebook profile, apparently without their consent. The change seems to have happened very recently, an...
Is Apple losing the plot? I ask this because, having just read this bollocks (Apple wants to make jailbreaking illegal because it supposedly threatens our nation's cellphone tower infrastructure, and thereby threatens our national security), I've ...
The Guitar Hero/Rock Band phenomenon is showing no signs of waning, with countless sequels still on the way (including one focused solely on music by The Beatles) and money continuing to pour into the coffers of their respective game publishers. ...
“You know the beautiful thing: June 29, 2009, is the two- year anniversary of the first shipment of the iPhone,” Elevation Partners (which owns a huge portion of Palm) co-founder Roger McNamee told Bloomberg in March. “Not one of those people will...
July 27, 2009
TechCrunch
This is, without a doubt, the best comment ever on TechCrunch. Left by J on MGs latest iPhone rant about the Google Voice debacle. Beautiful.
AT&T: You want answers?
TechCrunch: We think we’re entitled to them.
AT&T: You want answers?!
Tec...
Well, we never thought it would happen because of its intense rivalry with Google, but Facebook is almost ready to launch an official app for Android phones. Hints are already popping up here and there, but Ive been able to confirm it. The app...
Hosting provider SoftLayer was partially taken down this morning from a DDOS attack, and several well known websites, including TechMeme and TwitPic, went down with it.
The problem at SoftLayer was resolved, but some users of OpenDNS, a DNS servic...
You almost have to admire AT&Ts consistency. They are consistently finding new ways to fuck up almost daily now.
The latest issue involves the story we covered yesterday about apps using the Google Voice service getting pulled from Apples App ...
Google is finally figuring out that short links are just easier to deal with, especially on a mobile phone. No, it is not rolling out its own URL shortening service just yet (bit.ly, stand down). But today it is introducing what it calls smart ...
If youve got a company and you want a big acquisition in a year or two, you may want to consider hiring Alfred Lin, currently the COO/CFO of just-acquired Zappos. Every company hes worked for has been acquired, and the smallest deal was $265 milli...
We've been screaming and whining about the iPhone App Store for nigh on a year now and we seem to have avoiding talking about one of the most obvious sources for information about the Store: Steve himself.
Harry "Long Tail" McCracken remembers wh...
Years ago, London ruled one-fourth of the world's population. Now? Training its civil servants how to tweet “issues of relevance or upcoming events.”
The UK's Cabinet Office original story titlehas published a 20-page “how-to” of sorts, the go...
The much anticipated Microsoft/Yahoo search alliance is in the final stages of negotiation says a source close to Yahoo, and may be signed at any time. The two companies have been negotiating the terms of the transaction for weeks, and our source ...
Issuu, the Danish startup battling the likes of Docstoc and Scribd in the professional document publication and sharing space, is today introducing a REST-based API that enables its users to automatically upload and manage publications, bookmarks,...
iPhonAsia has some information on China's exciting WiFi-crippled iPhone. The device will cost less than the smuggled, grey-market iPhones currently available in China and will include special apps for the Chinese consumer.
Considering Apple and C...
Ive now been given an extended demo of the Spotify iPhone app which is currently awaiting Apples approval.
Unfortunately the guy who showed it to me managed to prize the iPhone with the app on it from my cold sweaty palms, so I wasnt allowed to t...
Hello, my name is Christopher Hawker. I am a professional inventor, specializing in innovative consumer products. My company is called Trident Design, LLC. I have developed many products in numerous industries and have over 20 products on the mark...
There are 1.2 million predictions made on Twitter everyday. Those are numbers that the prediction startup Blubet pulled 2 weeks ago from the service. Thats roughly 5% to 6% of the overall tweets being sent out on any given day, according to their ...
The following message is brought to you by TechCrunch50 co-host Jason Calacanis.
In order to build excitement for the TechCrunch50 conference, and in a blatant attempt to take over the Twitter trending topics list for the next six weeks, weve con...
In what looks to be shaping up to be another healthy week for MA activity, Sprint Nextel is putting more of its focus on the prepaid cell phone service market with a $483 million deal to buy out Virgin Mobile USA.
The acquisition, which was annou...
Mike Hudack, the founder of Blip.tv, just landed a major set of deals to expand the distribution of his Web video network. The biggest deal is with YouTube, which for the first time will allow Blip.tv to place its own ads in the YouTube player o...
IBM is buying analytics software and solutions provider SPSS in an all cash transaction at a price of $50/share, resulting in a total cash consideration in the merger of approximately $1.2 billion. The acquisition is subject to SPSS shareholder approval, applicableregulatory clearances and other closing conditions. The acquisition is expected to close later in the second half of 2009.
Big Blue said the acquisition of the privately-held Chicago company was expected to strengthen its information-agenda initia...
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Ben Darnell, a key member of the Google Reader team, has left Mountain View to jump into startup life. Darnell bailed Google for FriendFeed, which was founded by ex-Googlers and notably in part by Kevin Fox, who used to work with him on the Google...
The Linux Foundation, the non-profit that supports the growth of the Linux kernel, is today announcing an affinity Visa Platinum credit card for people who want to contribute to advancing the OS through the organizations initiatives. Reading the p...
MySpace has been taking quite a bit of heat lately for its stalling growth and waves of layoffs, but there are at least a few areas where the site has continued to do well, like MySpace Music, which still sees strong traffic. Now weve come across...
Twitter is great for a lot of things, but I think my favorite use of it is public smack-talking. Just read what Lance Armstrong has to say about his Tour de France-winning teammate, Alberto Contador. And in the tech world, we have some good smack ...
Earlier today we learned that Apple had begun to pull all Google Voice-enabled applications from the App Store, citing the fact that they duplicate features that come with the iPhone. Now comes even worse news: weve learned that Apple has blocked...
If Zappos was a forced sale, would someone please come force me a raise?
Zappos just filed its S4 with the Securities & Exchange Commission, which details the history of the merger talks with Amazon. Theres a lot of boring boilerplate here, b...
July 24, 2009
TechCrunch
I dont know about you, but I give this ridiculously misguided experiment three weeks.
Three weeks until - at best - Arrington comes to his senses and realises that theres a reason why Ive been fired from every job Ive had, most recently as a colu...
In an e-mail to its user base and with a short notice on its main website, FreeYourID has announced that it will be shutting down its service after nearly two years and a half in business. After August 15, the web service will be discontinued wit...
In light of the FTC’s recent scrutiny of Social Media practices and the activity that connects brands to influencers and ultimately consumers, we will soon see guidelines and corresponding penalties to serve as governance for future engagement.
I...
Sifting through public status updates posted on Twitter and Facebook can be quite useful for instantly tapping into peoples thoughts on any given topic and links to more information about it.
But sometimes its even more useful to search only the status updates published by your friends and family, like when youre looking for something specific to your social circle or only want to get an overview of thoughts or recommendations from those people you know and trust. Enter Status Search, which aims to fill th...
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This is a guest post by Israeli blogger Orli Yakuel, who has apparently spent a significant amount of time testing every single way of accessing Twitter. In this post she shares her experiences with nine of her favorite web interfaces for the Twi...
A couple of weeks ago IAC Chairman and CEO Barry Diller was telling the elite crowd at the Allen Co. Sun Valley conference that he was pessimistic about Twitter’s prospects for making money. A couple of weeks later and hes singing the same tune, this time to the elite crowd at the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference in Pasadena.
In an interview with Andy Serwer, Diller admitted that he didnt really understand the service and doesnt use it himself. He said it was for people who want emote real time informati...
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TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington recently visited Charlie Rose for a chat about the latest news and events in technology. Michael gave his take on the Google vs. Microsoft rivalry, saying that each tech giant is going after the others core businesses. Michael also touched upon the latest news around the CrunchPad and Apples much hyped and potentially similar product, the large form iPod Touch, which is reported to hit the market in early 2010.
Of course, Rose unsurprisingly delved into the whole Twitt...
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Another data point that profitable businesses can be built on the back of the iPhone/iPod Touch app store: Social Gaming Networks F.A.S.T. dogfight game, which launched in early June and lets users try to shoot down other human players, pulled in ...
For many people, the web has fallen prey to information overload — from RSS readers to Email to social networks, weve all got vast amounts of data coming in at any given time, oftentimes to entirely different places. Many services have sprung up ...
July 21, 2009
TechCrunch
The Zappos deal is widely viewed as a win-win-win. Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh gets to stay in charge with deeper pockets to keep building the company for the long term. Amazon expands its ecommerce dominance by snapping up the one company online shoppe...
Facebook has fast become one of the leading photo sharing sites on the web, and now video, on the web. The social network already lets you upload photos via MMS or through Facebook apps on the iPhone, Blackberry and other mobile devices. Today, ...
Skype is great, but its also kind of a pain in the ass if youre talking to someone that has a crappy microphone. And Skype realizes that, so it put its engineers to work on a super-secret project: A headset that anyone could use, anywhere.
And tod...
News has just broken that Amazon.com has purchased hot ecommerce up-and-comer Zappos for 10 million Amazon shares or $880 million. (The Amazon release said it was $807 million, but that was based on a trailing 45-day estimate of its share price. Closing price today bumps the deal up to $880 million.) Zappos employees also will get $40 million in cash and restricted stock. And Zappos management will remain in place.
This is a great exit for Zapoos investors, including Sequoia Capital and Venture Frogs, who...
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Microsofts newest version of its operating system, Windows 7, is finally in the release-to-manufacturing (RTM) stage, so the OS will soon be preloaded on new computers. Though not officially released yet, Windows 7 is expected to be a hit. For instance, after just eight hours on Amazon UK, Windows 7 pre-orders outpaced the total number of pre-orders for Vista over a period of 17 weeks.
According to Microsoft, Windows 7, which offers seven different versions of the OS, has undergone significant testing, q...
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Google Maps is an incredibly useful tool for searching for pretty much anything in a specific geographic area, but I used to find it annoying that I would have to conduct multiple, separate searches in Google Maps for various items along a route ...
You gotta hand it to the Bing guys, they just dont stop coming up with kooky ideas to drive interest in their little search engine (or whatever you want to call it) that could. The latest is a new contest starting tomorrow on Twitter that will see...
After years of uncertainty and talk of shutting down, Internet streaming radio finally got the break it needed a few weeks ago. SoundExchange, the group responsible for setting the listening rates being charged to the Internet radio services, agre...
Weve confirmed from multiple sources that San Francisco/Seattle based music service iLike, which has been profitable since 2008, is raising new capital in an unusual transaction designed to push out Ticketmaster, an investor since 2006.
The compan...
This is a video featuring Kevin Spacey. He's a man who gets paid millions of dollars to pretend to be other men, for entertainment. And here he is on the “Late Show With David Letterman” trying to explain Twitter, the pulse of the planet, to Mr. L...
The end game for many social investing sites is to create their own investment management products that link members brokerage accounts to the trading data generated by the top portfolios on each site. Today, Covestor is the first major social i...
So the story goes that a 25-year-old man at Foxconn - where iPhones are born - was to send 16 iPhone prototypes to Apple from the Chinese factory, but one was lost somewhere. The Foxconn security department then proceeded to illegally search the man’s apartment ...
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Yahoo has acquired e-mail startup Xoopit for a reported $20 million according to multiple reports. The deal, which was first reported to be in the final stages of closing earlier this morning by the Wall Street Journal, is expected to be announced...
If you watched in agony as the very-cool MoGo Talk Bluetooth iPhone headset was announced and given away here on CrunchGear while your BlackBerry sat idly on your desk, take heart. The BlackBerry Curve and BlackBerry Javelin versions are coming ...
Is the worst behind us? The broad worldwide recession hit the venture capital and startup communities hard last year. Memories of the NASDAQ meltdown and venture capital “nuclear winter” earlier this decade sent everyone into a tizzy as they fear...
MySpace may not be the hottest thing in social networking any longer, with visitor numbers and page views decreasing at an alarming rate, but apparently its free music streaming service MySpace Music is still something of a hit.
According to Niel...
As a writer covering the tech industry, there are a couple of websites and services that I would classify as downright essential for my job, including some VoIP/IM communication tools and my e-mail application of choice (Gmail).
Apart from those, ...
Despite being virtually unknown in the US, and still somewhat hemmed in by its core German speaking market, XING, the LinkedIn competitor, refuses to lie down. And like a scene from the Rocky movie, its going into training to become better, quicke...
For the last few months Facebook has been regularly posting promotional videos to its Career site, introducing prospective applicants to all the neat things that go on behind the scenes. Today theyve uploaded one thats particularly interesting, d...
Twitter has turned into a fantastic way for businesses to connect with fans, so its no surprise that weve recently seen a number of local establishments begin to actively promote their Twitter accounts to customers. Its a win/win situation: custo...
Opensource wiki developer Mindtouch today has launched several new features in its opensource, wiki-like collaboration platform for enterprises. This includes the ability to add video to MindTouch wikis, package applications built in MindTouch fo...
Two weeks ago the venerable UK newspaper The Guardian, facing budget cuts, fired new media columnist and author Paul Carr. Their loss is our gain - he now works for TechCrunch.
Most recently Carr wrote a weekly column for The Guardian called Not S...
As Twitter becomes a valuable marketing tools for companies, there has been a proliferation of sites and startups that help manage a brands presence on the microblogging site. Buddy Media, a startup that develops of applications for social networks, including Facebook and MySpace, is throwing its hat in the ring by launching a Twitter Management System for brand advertisers to manage marketing efforts and analytics on Twitter.
Buddy Medias Twitter Management System will let marketers measure and identify...
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Do-it-yourself social network Ning has added another $15 million to its coffers from LightSpeed Venture Partners, the company has confirmed to us. This brings the total capital raised to $119 million. Its other investirs include Allen Co., Leg...
Here’s something to mull over while you get ready for bed. The Street is reporting that Apple will launch the highly anticipated (and rumored) tablet with Verizon. Now, we’ve heard rumors that Verizon could be getting a CDMA variant of the iPhone ...
Video ads are the great hope of brand marketers on the Web. They are easy to understand (its just like on TV, kinda) and easy to create. Thats why pre-roll video ads will never die. Brand marketers love em.
As the rates for pre-roll video ads o...
During its quarterly earnings call today, Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer focused a lot of attention on what the company is now calling its pocket products. That is, the iPhone, the iPod touch and the iPod. Youll notice that Apple has taken to separat...
“You know the beautiful thing: June 29, 2009, is the two- year anniversary of the first shipment of the iPhone,” Elevation Partners (which owns a huge portion of Palm) co-founder Roger McNamee told Bloomberg in March. “Not one of those people will...
We have an update on the AIM push problem we wrote about this morning. The problem only affects jailbroken iPhones 2 and 3G running the homebrew app Pushfix. If you are in this sad number please restore to the original firmware or risk seeing your...
So I just bought House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street, by William D. Cohen, from the just-launched Barnes and Noble e-book store. Long story short, it works pretty well, but there sure as heck isn't a hint of polis...
Picurio, a Y Combinator startup from its Spring 09 session that makes photo sharing between large groups incredibly easy, has taken the beta label off. While there are an innumerable amount of photo sharing sites and applications out there, Picur...