3ones
The Simplest Stable Structure
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...
May 30, 2009
TechCrunch
At this past weeks Google I/O event in San Francisco, Google brought a contraption it calls the Holodeck, for event-goers to experience. Basically, its a near-360 degree way to view Google Street View in fast motion, high definition video. Danny S...
Music service Last.fm shuts its doors for the afternoon, claiming datacenter temperature issues beyond our control required them to go offline. The outage began around 12:30 pm PST, so were at two hours and counting. Updates are on their Twitter ...
One thing I love about Facebook spokesperson Randi Zuckerberg - she says exactly what she thinks, and she isnt afraid to use the power of Facebook to back up her opinions.
Mean bar bouncers can lose their Facebook pages (this was later retracted...
When Fotonauts debuted at last years TechCrunch50, I called it a gorgeous photopedia because it promised to turn your photo albums into collaborative Web pages about different topics and subjects. Fotonauts is a desktop photo client which helps y...
Facebook will soon be allowing all users to claim a vanity URL pointing to their regular profile page, weve heard from a reliable source. The announcement should come sometime later this week. Afterwards, at a certain date and time, the landrush ...
Yes, Twitter is down. Yes, again. Yes, theyre looking into it. Yes, this is another Twitter post. But, I come baring gifts. Spymaster, the somewhat controversial and addictive Twitter-based game obviously doesnt work nearly as well when Twitter is...
Were less than a week away from the launch of the supposed next iPhone killer, the Palm Pre. The iPhone has miraculously survived a few of these attempts on its life before it somehow weathered the BlackBerry Storm, and before that, the G1 was go...
Life is not easy for search engine startups. FIrst, its hard to create something that doesnt fall flat against Google. Too much hype (Google Killer!), whether the company drives it or not, inevitably leads to disappointment.
Cuil is walking dead...
Bad news for Portland-based Open-ID startup Vidoop (as well as Vidoop partners like AOL, MySpace and Flock): its apparently out of business. Earlier this month the company announced layoffs, but based on an email string that was forwarded to us, t...
May 7, 2009
TechCrunch
In celebration of Mothers Day, Facebook now lets you list and connect to your family members in the Basic Information part of your profile. Starting later today and through this weekend, you will see a new Family Members section within the Inform...
We all know about Twitters downtime today. It was a scheduled maintenance service that was supposed to last for about an hour. Sure enough, after about an hour, Twitter came back but only partially. Over the past hour since its been back, its bee...
Twitter just went down. Dont worry, it was planned. It should only be offline for about an hour today but theres another downtime planned for Monday as well. Im sitting here not quite sure what do with myself, as Im sure many of you are. So Ill go...
April proved to be a dismal month for technology sector jobs and overall employment, but there may be a light at the end of the tunnel. Granted, this morning brought sobering news of the U.S. unemployment rate hitting its highest mark since 1983:...
Its sort of funny when Facebooks Randi Zuckerberg takes her frustration out on a club bouncer by saying it would be a huge bummer if their facebook pages accidentally went down. But its also terrible messaging for the fast growing company. Randi ...
DocuSign, an e-signature service, closed $5 million in Series D funding from Frazier Technology Ventures, Ignition Partners, Sigma Partners, and West River Capital LLC. The funding follows a Series C investment of $12.4 million in 2007 from the...
Federated Media has been our advertising partner since December 2005. The first checks they sent us allowed TechCrunch to become something more than a guy sitting in a spare bedroom talking about startups to a small audience. Revenue from Federate...
I find it frightening that the first alien contact we might make could be a tweet.
Truer words have never been spoken by a YouTube commenter.
NASA astronaut Mark Polansky, who will be commanding the next mission to the International Space Station...
During the past several months, a war has been brewing between Twitter apps for the iPhone. But its been largely two-sided. You were either in the Twitterfon camp or the Tweetie camp. And if you were using any other app, it was only because you di...
Are you looking for the best beer bars in the world, good places to make out in San Francisco, or where to go on the Big Island in Hawaii? A travel recommendation site called nextstop mixes social recommendations with search and adds a reputatio...
Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, Start.
There are few codes more sacred to old school gamers than the Konami code - a cheat code that originated on the original NES and has since made its way into many other games. More rece...
Weve covered SeeqPod quite a bit here on TechCrunch. The San Francisco startup has been hard at work to develop a way to intelligently index media files on the Web to make them searchable online, and introduced an API which many other startups an...
Its no surprise that Google has its fair share of Trekkies, and theyre as excited about the new Star Trek film as anyone. So excited, in fact, that the Google Calendar team has put together a new Stardate calendar that will tell you exactly toda...
There are now 231.5 million Websites according to Netcraft. But last year the number of new sites added to the Web slowed down to 29.9 million, from 48.7 million in 2007. Royal Pingdom went through Netcrafts server surveys to come up with the c...
Forget Ashton Kutcher and Oprah Winfrey, theres a genuine queen on Twitter these days: Rania Al Abdullah, Queen of Jordan, joined the tweeting masses yesterday and she really has a feel for the micro-medium too!
And yes, its the real deal since it...
Theres a new trend that starting to sweep the web: Real-time. Everyone wants access to information as it happens instantaneously. FriendFeed recently went real-time and now Facebook is starting to embrace it. But those are just two services what ...
TicketLeap, the Philadelphia-based provider of Internet ticketing services for event organizers, recently launched a product that turns any Internet-enabled computer with a browser into a functional box-office ticketing system. The new product, du...
The last video interview I did at the Next09 conference in Hamburg that I wanted to feature here on TechCrunch is the conversation I had with mr. Captain Web 2.0 himself, open web advocate Chris Messina. Besides his involvements with Citizen Agenc...
OLX, the Craigslist for the rest of the world, has raised $5 million in Series C funding from General Catalyst Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners, Founders Fund and DN Capital, bringing the total funding raised to $28.5 million. OLX raised $13.5...
I’m getting shit for this post no matter what. By insinuating business magazines are better off than papers when I currently write a column for BusinessWeek people will call me biased. (As Arrington would say, “consider that your disclosure.”) Lik...
Facebooks battle with Twitter just got more interesting. Two months after its homepage redesign, Facebooks iPhone application has caught up to the web version, and now features real-time updates.
This is actually a much bigger deal than it soun...
January 6, 2009
Google Federated Login API | Google Groups
Google now supports federated login; your users can now log into your website or application using their Google account. The goal of federated login is improve the online login experience for everyone by (1) minimizing the number of different names and passwords people need for the sites they visit, and (2) letting developers deploy web sites without setting up a login system. Google's login authentication uses the OpenID 2.0 protocol, which has open source implementations available for a number of different development platforms used by Google Data API developers. (Currently enables for regular Google accounts only.)