title
stringlengths
2
283
author
stringlengths
4
41
year
int64
2.01k
2.02k
month
int64
1
12
day
int64
1
31
content
stringlengths
1
111k
Oculus Execs Believe Controllers Are The Missing Link In Virtual Reality
Josh Constine
2,014
9
20
When you put a child in virtual reality, they instinctively raise their hands hoping to see them, says Oculus CTO John Carmack. Yet Oculus doesn’t have its own gloves or handheld controllers, amongst the VR community that Oculus would reveal a controller today at its . Carmack concluded “The missing link in VR is co...
Return Of The M&A
Andreas Penna
2,014
9
20
2014 has seen an unprecedented number of M&A transactions globally, especially within the tech sector. Global tech M&A was up 55 percent over last year, soaring to its highest level since 2000. Technology-related transactions this year alone have generated over $100 billion. Now, we’ve all heard of the large-scale, h...
The “Oculus Platform” Marketplace For Virtual Reality App Launches This Fall
Josh Constine
2,014
9
20
Oculus announced the “Oculus Platform” store for developers to distribute their virtual reality apps and experiences today at the Oculus Connect conference. Starting this fall on the made by Oculus, this revamp of the Oculus Share marketplace will let users browse the Oculus Platform within virtual reality and downlo...
The Investments In A Wearables Future
Matt Witheiler
2,014
9
20
  People may debate when the wearable first came into being or what industries will be most impacted by the technology, but there is no debating that startup activity in the wearable space has accelerated. If   is one sure sign of anything, it’s that. Between consumer interest and investor attention, the wearable categ...
Oculus Reveals Its New “Crescent Bay” Prototype With 360-Degree Head Tracking And Headphones
Josh Constine
2,014
9
20
Oculus gave the world the first look at its today at the  ( ), and I got the very first hands-on demo. Crescent Bay has a faster frame rate, 360-degree head tracking, and integrated headphones, plus it’s lighter. Oculus also announced coming to the Samsung VR, which brings VR to a large audience through mobile apps...
Gillmor Gang: Slight of Hand
Steve Gillmor
2,014
9
20
The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Dan Farber, John Taschek, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor. The new big iPhone and its younger less bigger brother hit the streets, along with the iOS refresh that will link the shipping devices to a late October iPad update and next year’s iWatch. From the redwood forests to the upper...
Air Food One Delivers Airline Food Right To Your Door
Sarah Buhr
2,014
9
20
Have we reached peak delivery service? Just in case you had a craving for airline food for some reason, there’s now a company in Germany that will bring it to you. is a subscription food delivery service that has teamed up with grocery company and to bring leftover airline food right to the door of anyone living ...
London’s Tech Boom Is More Than Just Hype, The Hard Numbers Say So
Mike Butcher
2,014
9
20
While may not yet rival last week’s London Fashion Week for glamour, there is real substance to the capital’s tech boom. This is why, for the first time, TechCrunch is bringing its Silicon Valley conference, . A number of things are driving it. London has long acted as a “bridge” both to US tech companies entering E...
Apple Cauterizing HealthKit At Launch Shows How High The Stakes Are 
Natasha Lomas
2,014
9
20
Last week, in the fevered cauldron of  / ,  and  it was easy to miss the glitch in Apple’s oh-so-choreographed release matrix: a bug in its new  develop tool. Apple  to developers at its WWDC event in June, along with a Health app which acts as a repository for viewing all the health and fitness data collated via H...
Watch The Oculus Connect Keynotes Here
Greg Kumparak
2,014
9
20
Oculus, the virtual reality headset company that Facebook acquired , is holding its very first conference today. With conferences come keynotes — and with keynotes comes the potential for big announcements. No one’s quite certain what Oculus will announce, though . Whatever they say up on stage, you can catch ...
The Demons Of On-Demand
Sarah Perez
2,014
9
20
Are today’s on-demand and local services really about catering to the lazy rich, as , or are they about a new way to book services from local providers by satisfying demand more efficiently through the use of geolocation and advanced software that can map out where customers are, what they need and when? I’d argue it’...
Going Digital: A New Frontier For Finance
Pierre Brais
2,014
9
20
  Financial services are no longer the enigma they once were. Gaining ever-increasing accessibility, these services are on the brink of exploding. While obtaining greater access to financial services comes in part because our world is becoming more digital, it is also a result of new, innovative and disruptive influenc...
Let’s Fix The Internet
Jon Evans
2,014
9
20
I hate to be the one to tell you this, but: we, the people of the Internet, have collectively run up a colossal amount of . Much of our online infrastructure consists of band-aid and/or legacy Rube Goldberg solutions hacked together with ; and the only way to pay back technical debt is to fix it. The good news is, we...
null
Catherine Shu
2,014
9
2
null
Klarna Announces U.S. Team As It Plans For 2015 Launch In The U.S.
Jonathan Shieber
2,014
9
18
The payments market in the U.S. couldn’t be be more competitive, and now yet another player is entering the mix. Stockholm-based is set to announce its U.S. team ahead of expansion plans into North America, which will begin in earnest at the beginning of 2015. Klarna, a European giant, which has raised $282.1 million ...
Facebook Won’t Budge On Letting Drag Queens Keep Their Names
Sarah Buhr
2,014
9
18
Facebook will not be changing its for the drag queen community. San Francisco drag queens met with representatives from the company yesterday afternoon to talk through a recent mass deletion of their personal profile pages. Facebook started deleting accounts of hundreds of members of the drag community last week afte...
One Lap With Circa’s Matt Galligan
Rob Coneybeer
2,014
9
18
In the first installment of , Matt Galligan joined me at Thunderhill Raceway to talk about his mobile news application, . I first met Matt in Boulder, Colo., in early 2010 shortly after he started , an infrastructure provider for location-aware applications. A few years later, he sold SimpleGeo and founded Circa. ...
Patient Capital Drives Change In Education
Matthew Pittinsky
2,014
9
18
In 2001, Arthur Levine, then president of Columbia University Teacher’s College, predicted that one day faculty members would become free agents, increasingly independent of their colleges and universities. “It is only a matter of time before we see the equivalent of an academic William Morris Agency,” Levine, now pres...
Hours For iOS 8 Lets You Track Your Time With A Widget
Kyle Russell
2,014
9
18
Those who have to keep track of how they spend their time working during the day can’t do much better on iOS than , Apple Design Award winner  ‘s latest app. We when it launched back in July, and now the Tapity team has released an update for iOS 8 that helps you keep on top of your tasks with even less hassle. For ...
Winter Is (Probably) Coming (Soon)
Alex Wilhelm
2,014
9
18
a bubble. Or something close to one. And the good times are going to slow down. Probably soon. That’s the gist of a that venture capitalist Bill Gurley gave. His words matter because they cut to the simple fact that too many companies are burning too much money. Making money is better than losing money, but losing m...
The Best Of Times …
Danny Crichton
2,014
9
18
Or so Dickens might have written if he had lived in San Francisco. The bubble is back in the news again , the well-known Benchmark venture capitalist, who warned that some startups have increased their burn rates so much, that they are reaching perilous levels of risk. So quick is capital flowing through startups that...
SAP To Acquire Expense Software-Maker Concur For $129 Per Share
Anthony Ha
2,014
9
18
Enterprise software company SAP just that it has agreed to acquire Concur Technologies, maker of expense and travel management tools that are used by 23,000 businesses (including TechCrunch and its parent company AOL). The deal is for $129 per share, which is 20 percent higher than Concur’s closing price on Sept. 17 ...
Snapchat Scores Nike’s Director Of Digital To Win Sports Partnerships
Josh Constine
2,014
9
18
Snapchat could be the new way to experience sporting events from afar. At the very least, sports and athletics brands are jumping up and down trying to reach the young, active demographic Snapchat has captured. That’s why the ephemeral app’s latest hire has so much potential. Snapchat just poached Eric Toda, Nike’s glo...
Home Depot Hack Exposed Up To 56 Million Credit Cards
Greg Kumparak
2,014
9
18
Almost immediately after word broke that Home Depot had been hacked, were noting that the breach was likely even worse than that had preceded it. Sure enough, Home Depot has just confirmed the scale of the breach. All in all, as many as 56 million payment cards were potentially exposed. For comparison (though compa...
Sharethrough Acquires UK’s VAN As A Springboard For International Growth
Anthony Ha
2,014
9
18
Advertising company announced today that it’s moving into Europe with the acquisition of a London-based company called . The financial terms of the deal are not being disclosed. Sharethrough’s head of communications Thomas Channick told me via email that the VAN team will form “our core” in Europe, although the comp...
Twitter Overhauls Its UI On iPhone, Stops Hiding Your Bio
Greg Kumparak
2,014
9
18
If you’ve ever thought that Twitter’s interface for displaying profiles on phones was a bit wonky, don’t worry. You’re not alone. Even Twitter agrees. Twitter has just rolled out a new profile interface for iOS users that they’ve been quietly testing for the past few months. The biggest change? They no longer inexplica...
Join Us In Hardware Alley At Disrupt London, Won’t You?
John Biggs
2,014
9
18
Disrupt London is fast approaching and I’d love to see you in our amazing Hardware Alley. This even, which runs during the last day of Disrupt, features all of my favorite startups – the hardware ones – in glorious technicolor. What is ? It’s a celebration of hardware startups (and other cool gear makers) that feature...
Oracle Stock Drops 2.5% On News That Larry Ellison Has Relinquished His CEO Title
Alex Wilhelm
2,014
9
18
Today after the bell, Oracle that its long-time premier Larry Ellison is no longer its CEO. Former HP CEO Mark Hurd will take over the job in partnership with Safra Catz. Catz will manage finance and manufacturing, while Hurd will handle sales. Ellison will take on the titles of Executive Chairman of the Board and CT...
Incubated: MuckerLab’s Hands-On Approach To Accelerating Startup Growth
Ryan Lawler
2,014
9
18
was founded three years ago as one of the first incubators to launch in Los Angeles. With a shared workspace for a relatively small cohort of startups that participate, the accelerator takes a hands-on approach to helping companies that go through its program find product-market fit. At the time he first started wor...
PayPal Here Arrives On Android Tablets
Sarah Perez
2,014
9
18
PayPal Here, the company’s dongle-based mobile payments solution, is now available for Android tablets, the company announced this afternoon — a move that will address a large and growing swath of the tablet market. According to , PayPal , 62 percent of tablets sold last year run Android. The PayPal Here application ...
iOS 8 Adoption Off To A Slower Start Than iOS 7, Say Multiple Usage Trackers
Darrell Etherington
2,014
9
18
The iOS 8 installation spike is high, but lower than it was for iOS 7 last year, according to numbers from a variety of mobile OS usage monitoring platforms. , , and all show adoption numbers that, while high, fall short of the rocketing pick-up rate we saw when Apple launched its major visual overhaul of iOS jus...
I Drove Toyota’s Car Of The Future And It Was Boring
Kyle Russell
2,014
9
18
While Tesla is getting everyone excited about the idea of sexy electric cars in every driveway, Toyota has been working on a different technological roadmap: The carmaker that made the hybrid category with the Prius thinks that the next generation of cars will be fueled by hydrogen, and it’s going to beat everyone to m...
Airbnb CFO Andrew Swain Has Left The Company
Sarah Perez
2,014
9
18
Airbnb CFO has left the company — or so his email auto-responder states, sources told TechCrunch. We quickly tested the claim for ourselves and, sure enough, it’s true.  According to tech industry sources, Swain was asked to leave the company. Though he clearly accomplished a lot during his time with Airbnb, there wa...
How To Survive And Thrive In A Funding Round
Tomer Tagrin
2,014
9
27
  When my co-founder Omri Cohen and I started Yotpo, a reviews and marketing solution for e-commerce, raising funding was new to me, like it is for most first-time founders. Three rounds and $13 million in funding later, I’ve learned a lot about the process. First of all, funding can be really painful. When someone tel...
Enterprise App Marketplaces Respond To Pain Points In Corporate IT
Jim Franklin
2,014
9
27
  Enterprise application marketplaces have grown significantly in number and stature in recent years. This trend has emerged as a response to developers in corporate IT departments who are stifled by lengthy procurement processes, locked into long contracts and highly restricted when it comes to deploying exciting prod...
Apple’s iPhone 6 Has Finally Convinced Me To Ditch My Compact Camera
Darrell Etherington
2,014
9
18
It was bound to happen sooner or later: A smartphone would convince me that I no longer needed to carry around a powerful compact camera, despite a general interest in taking photos that straddles both my professional and personal lives. The  and the even more photo-friendly  are that tipping point. While on paper th...
The Open VC
Bo Peabody
2,014
9
27
After spending 20 years building companies, first as an entrepreneur and then as a venture capitalist, there’s one thing I’ve learned about the industry:  venture capital firms understand much more about the startups they invest in than startups understand about the venture capital firms they partner with. That informa...
Tinder And Evolutionary Psychology
Liraz Margalit
2,014
9
27
Mobile dating application Tinder  has been due to its , which many consider so that it could only be used to facilitate .  However, the app’s popularity continues to grow at an extraordinary rate: it is currently available in 24 languages and boasts more than 10 million active daily users. It was also awarded ’s...
Gillmor Gang: Five Card Stud
Steve Gillmor
2,014
9
27
The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Doc Searls, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor. The Gang handicaps some new startups from Ray Ozzie and the Anybody But Facebook crowd. Talko may be an enterprise play in consumers’ clothing, but Ello gets plenty of press and no clear reason for investing in a ...
Shoutout Aims To Be The Simplest Way To Share Photos With Friends
Anthony Ha
2,014
9
27
is a new iOS app offering what co-founder and CEO Philip Golbraikh calls “visual texting.” The idea, basically, is to create an environment where people don’t worry about the quality of their photos and instead treat them as “a visual representation of your message” — this is what I’m doing, here’s something cool I sa...
The Internet’s Missing Link
Stefan Thomas
2,014
9
27
When the web was originally designed, its creators aspired to include a way to transfer value. According to the , error code 402 was “reserved for future use” and was labeled “Payment Required.” Just as we needed a way to freely share information, we needed a way to freely exchange value. Implementing a standardized p...
Don’t Dismiss Developers
Ethan Kurzweil
2,014
9
27
  Danny Crichton recently asked TechCrunch readers if . It’s a debate that surfaces frequently in technology circles, with camps emerging on each side. On one hand, we find the “middleware analogists” — those who equate “selling to developers” to “peddling middleware,” which is code for “uninteresting.” On the other s...
We Have Entered The Golden Age Of Hardware Hacking
Jon Evans
2,014
9
27
Hardware is the new hotness. This has been true for some years now: but today, the acorns planted by Arduino, TechShop, Kickstarter, , etc., are finally beginning to sprout into oaks. The best thing about this year’s Disrupt SF conference was that its Startup Alley boasted far fewer sugar-water apps…and many more ni...
Kano Ships Its First 18,000 Learn-To-Code Computer Kits, Fueled By $1.5M Kickstarter
Natasha Lomas
2,014
9
27
, a startup that plays in the learn to code space by adding a step-by-step hand-holding layer atop the  single-board microcomputer to make hacking around with code and learning about computational thinking child’s play, has shipped all the hardware kits in its first batch of crowdfunded orders and pre-orders. That’s a...
Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe Donates $31M To Build VR Lab At His Alma Mater University Of Maryland
Josh Constine
2,014
9
11
Brendan Iribe dropped out of University Of Maryland his freshman year to launch a startup before going on to form Oculus. But now inspired by Mark Zuckerberg’s philanthropy and made rich by Zuck’s company buying Oculus for $2 billion, Iribe is donating $31 million to build the  Iribe Center for Computer Science and In...
TechCrunch TV’s New Series Interviews Startups in a Race Car
Felicia Shivakumar
2,014
9
11
Meeting with VCs can be stressful and we took that to the extreme with our new show. One Lap with Rob Coneybeer takes willing entrepreneurs onto the racetrack and out of their comfort zones. “I really like going fast. When you’re going fast with other people in other cars around you, racing requires you to think abou...
null
Alex Wilhelm
2,014
9
18
null
With ArtCling, You Can Commission Art That Sticks To Your Walls
Anthony Ha
2,014
9
11
Earlier this year, I wrote about , a startup that . Now the company is launching a new site called , which takes a different approach to actually getting that art up on your walls. ArtCorgi co-founders Malcolm (CEO) and Simone (COO) Collins (yes, they’re a couple — ) created ArtCling in partnership with , a compan...
On-Demand Home Services Startup Handybook Hires Amazon Exec Jeff Pedersen To Be Its CFO
Ryan Lawler
2,014
9
11
Customers are becoming increasingly comfortable with the idea of booking services on the web and on their phones, so companies like are taking off. It’s for that reason that the on-demand home services startup has decided to hire former Amazon exec Jeff Pedersen as its new CFO. It probably seems early for a startup l...
The MOOC Revolution That Wasn’t
Dan Friedman
2,014
9
11
Three years ago this week, Sebastian Thrun recorded his Stanford class on Artificial Intelligence, released it online to a staggering 180,000 students, and started a “ .” Soon after, ,  and others promised free access to valuable content, supposedly delivering a disruptive solution that would solve massive student de...
Kevin Rose’s New App Tiiny Lets You Share Little Photos That Disappear In 24 Hours
Josh Constine
2,014
9
11
Digg, Milk, and Revision3 founder Kevin Rose recently left Google Ventures to start a new mobile development house called North, and now we have some details on the , which will launch soon. The basic idea is that Tiiny lets you share thumbnail-sized photos and animated GIFs to a grid of pics on your friends’ phones, ...
6SensorLabs Gets $4M To Help People With Food Allergies Test Their Meals
Ryan Lawler
2,014
9
11
There are 15 million people in the U.S. with food allergies, and until recently they haven’t had a good, reliable, and affordable way to test meals to ensure they don’t eat something they shouldn’t. That results in more than 200,000 hospital visits a year related to food allergies or food sensitivity. A startup called ...
Big Data Analytics Vs. The Gut Check
Contributor
2,014
9
11
  Data is more varied and fast-moving than ever, and analyzing it effectively now requires highly sophisticated software and machinery. But where does big data analytics leave the good-old-fashioned hunch? What if the data tells a business manager to “jump” but her intuition says “stay”? It might sound surprising comin...
Facebook Will Now Ask People Why They Hid An Ad, Banish Offensive Ones
Josh Constine
2,014
9
11
Facebook needs to know if you just thought an ad was annoying, or if it was actually inappropriate and no one should see it, so it’s now they see on the service. Ads marked as offensive or inappropriate will be pulled from Facebook’s site and apps, while the individual user will simply see fewer ads like those they m...
Dropbox Calls For Support Of The Senate’s NSA Reform Bill
Alex Wilhelm
2,014
9
11
This morning, Dropbox released detailing government requests for its user data, and information about certain user accounts. The company for the passage of the Senate’s version of the USA FREEDOM Act. In the first half of 2014, Dropbox received “268 requests for user information from law enforcement agencies and 0-...
Google Acquires Opinion Poll Service Polar For Google+
Frederic Lardinois
2,014
9
11
Google today announced that it has , the highly graphical opinion poll service, for an undisclosed sum. Polar’s service includes both a mobile app that allows users to create and participate in polls, as well as services for web publishers (we’ve occasionally run Polar polls here on TechCrunch, for example). The com...
Samsung Attacks Apple’s Keynote With “It Doesn’t Take A Genius” Ads
John Biggs
2,014
9
11
[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vA8xPyBAs_o&list=PLMKk4lSYoM-yi1RcmxhgbkFxIAa577K4A] has released a series of videos lampooning this week’s announcement, a move that is at once familiar and not unexpected. There are six of them in total, including one on screen size, in a series called “It Doesn’t Take A Ge...
Sued As A Young Startup? Don’t Surrender
David Soofian
2,014
9
11
Patent trolls are on the offensive, using weak patents to go after young tech startups with the hopes of securing licensing deals. These trolls bank on the assumption that these young companies will pay without putting up a fight in order to avoid the high cost of a long drawn out litigation. However, two recent change...
Confide Updates Its App To Make Sending Text-Based Ephemeral Messages Faster
Ryan Lawler
2,014
9
11
Earlier this year, launched the first version of its app to enable enterprise users to send and receive text-based messages that disappear when you’re done reading them. Today it’s hoping to improve the experience with a big update to the app that makes it a lot faster and easier to use. Confide is like a lot of othe...
Corporate America, Your Future Engineers Aren’t Attending Career Fairs Anymore
Vivek Ravisankar
2,014
9
11
  Like the , hieroglyphics and video stores, college career fairs may soon be a relic of the past — particularly when it comes to recruiting software engineers. Undergraduate enrollment in computer science programs , growing by double digits year-over-year. Pair that with the fact that employer demand for computer scie...
Voice Marketing Company Ifbyphone Raises $30M More, Acquires Competitor Mongoose Metrics
Anthony Ha
2,014
9
11
, a maker of voice marketing software, is announcing that it has raised $30 million in additional funding. It’s also revealing one of the main uses for that money — the acquisition of competitor . This doubles Ifbyphone’s funding from $30 million to $60 million. The round comes from new investor NewSpring Capital, as ...
Mozilla Launches Experimental Tool For Cross-Browser Debugging
Frederic Lardinois
2,014
9
11
When you are building Web apps — and especially when you are debugging them — all the subtle differences between the different browsers start coming into play. Testing on every single browser is a hassle and there are no good tools available that help you easily automate these tests, partly because the different browse...
Code.org Launches Code Studio, A Toolset And Curriculum For Teaching Kids Programming
Kyle Russell
2,014
9
11
Since its creation, ‘s mission has been to get coding into curriculums for students as schools nationwide. Today, the nonprofit group is launching , a combined set of tools and curriculum to get students in kindergarten through high school interested in the underlying concepts behind coding through guided lesson plan...
Navigating The Reality Of Cloud, Mobile And SaaS
Guy Turner
2,014
9
11
The websites of most VCs have a stated investment thesis in SaaS, cloud, mobile, social or some combination of each. Are these really investment theses? Still? No, they’re realities, and this is worrisome. While SaaS, cloud, mobile and social have been drivers of big success for many funds and entrepreneurs over the pa...
iPhone 6 And 6 Plus Arrive In China On October 17
Kyle Russell
2,014
9
29
the official launch date for the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus in China. On October 10, customers will be able to pre-order the devices from Apple’s site. On October 14, they’ll be able to put earlier orders in at Apple’s retail locations, and devices will become available for pickup on October 17. The iPhone 6 and 6 Plus will ...
Festival Travel Site Festicket Raises $2.7M Series A
Steve O'Hear
2,014
9
11
, the UK startup that offers a travel booking and discovery site for festival goers, has closed a $2.7 million Series A round. The new funding, which adds to a $680,000 seed round in March 2013, is being led by European VCs, Wellington Partners and PROfounders Capital. Previous investors, Windcrest Partners, Playfair...
Hem, Fab’s Pivot Into Home Furnishings, Goes Live In 40 Markets
Ingrid Lunden
2,014
9
29
Three months after , the New York-based design/fashion marketplace,  and its intention to pivot its European business to focus solely on original home furnishings, the company is putting its eggs into a new basket — or basket , as the case may be. Today it is launching  , selling Scandinavian-style tables, shelves ...
Native Ad Company Sharethrough Raises $10M From British Sky Broadcasting And Others
Anthony Ha
2,014
9
29
Earlier this month,  announced its European expansion, and it jumpstarted those efforts by . Now it looks like Sharethrough will also be getting help from one of the region’s big media companies — British Sky Broadcasting. Specifically, Sharethrough is announcing a $5 million strategic investment from BSkyB. Existing...
Microsoft Will Start To Explain The Future Of Windows Tomorrow Morning
Alex Wilhelm
2,014
9
29
Gird thyself, a new Windows approaches. Tomorrow morning in San Francisco, Microsoft will show off some part of its next operating system in a long-awaited event whose . The market is expectant, and the technology and business media will have its eyes trained on what Redmond has on offer. In the past few days, odd rum...
PotatoStock Actually Happened
John Biggs
2,014
9
29
[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9g-lrjDbY1g&feature=youtu.be] It couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy. Zack “Danger” Brown, he of the potato salad Kickstarter, held the first annual PotatoStock in Columbus, Ohio where he and thousands of potato lovers enjoyed beer, music, companionship, and salad. I met , ju...
Jeremy Allaire Opens His Long-Awaited Bitcoin Product Circle Up To The Public
Kim-Mai Cutler
2,014
9
29
When you have one of the most experienced CEOs in the industry, who led Macromedia and oversaw the development of Adobe Flash in the 2000s and then changed online video again by taking Brightcove public, people pay attention. So when Jeremy Allaire said he was entering the Bitcoin space, top-tier venture firms took not...
No, People Are Not Leaving Facebook In Droves For Ello
Sarah Buhr
2,014
9
29
is not the second-coming of Facebook and Facebook users are not leaving the social network giant in droves. How do I know this? Those with a shiny new Ello profile are posting about it on Facebook. Despite the promise of an ad free network and the chance to name yourself whatever you want, people don’t up and leave a n...
iCloud Is Down For Some
Matt Burns
2,014
9
29
It seems Apple’s iCloud woes are not over. The service is down for some users including myself. It’s unreachable from iCloud.com and files and emails are failing to sync. Apple’s reports iCloud and the rest of Apple’s online service as operating normally when iCloud is very clearly not accessible for some. This comes...
Apple Just Patched The Shellshock Bug In OS X
Greg Kumparak
2,014
9
29
Last week, a big, nasty, freakishly widespread bug now dubbed “ ” was discovered hiding in many UNIX-based systems, including OS X. While Apple was quick to proclaim that weren’t susceptible to the bug and that only users who’d tinkered with “advanced settings” needed to act, that doesn’t mean they want to leave the ...
HP Plunges Downmarket With A $99 Windows Tablet, $199 Windows Notebook
Matt Burns
2,014
9
29
The race to the bottom is back. Reminiscent of the netbook war of yesteryear, HP just with a $99 tablet along with introducing a $199 Windows notebook. Expect to see these colorful devices at a department superstore near you. HP hasn’t revealed the specs powering these Windows 8 machines. That’s by design and as we’v...
Fly Or Die: Apple iPhone 6
Jordan Crook
2,014
9
29
We’re back with a new episode of and armed with the latest iPhone. Will John and I, longtime Apple users, give the iPhone 6 the green light? Before we get to that, let’s take a look at the new features: The new has a noticeably larger 4.7-inch, 1334 x 750 ppi with 1400:1 contrast, making it one of Apple’s most b...
Burn!
Alex Wilhelm
2,014
9
29
We’ve reached Peak Talk About The Bubble. (I in .) And that’s a damn fine thing, since much of the current discussion about burn rates, losses, growth, venture, and the business cycle would have been quite useful a year ago, before a number of companies got even more out to sea. It seems that he Gospel of Growth has...
Scientists “Train” Water To Move On Its Own
John Biggs
2,014
9
29
[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P5uKRqJIeSs] In what could be a useful trick for moving chemicals from one point to another, scientists at the University of Southern Denmark and Institute of Chemical Technology in Prague, Czech Republic have created a method to “move” liquids through an alcohol base. While tha...
Snapchat Spam Might Make You Feel Fat, But At Least It’s Not Snapchat’s Fault
Jordan Crook
2,014
9
29
If you’re receiving messages from your friends on Snapchat that tell you how to lose weight, don’t freak out. It appears that many accounts have been hijacked, though Snapchat denies the spammers accessed accounts through its own system. According , users’ accounts have been hijacked and used to send to other accoun...
Free Consumer Credit Monitoring Company Credit Karma Raises $75M, Now Valued At Over $1 Billion
Sarah Perez
2,014
9
29
A consumer-facing credit monitoring startup, , is now worth more than a billion dollars following a new round of funding. The company this morning it has raised an additional $75 million in growth funding from Google Capital, Tiger Global Management, and Susquehanna Growth Equity. The new round comes 8 months after ...
Adobe Brings Photoshop For Chromebooks To Its Education Customers
Frederic Lardinois
2,014
9
29
For the longest time, pundits said that Google’s initiative wouldn’t amount to much because Chrome OS couldn’t run complex applications like . Those pundits will have to find another example now, because , Photoshop will run on Chrome OS and on Chrome for Windows (if you are an Adobe education customer). This new s...
BlackBerry Is Gonna Get Weird With Smartphone Design At Least Once A Year
Darrell Etherington
2,014
9
29
BlackBerry could be about to become the most interesting company in the smartphone business: The Canadian telecommunications firm will deliver a minimum of one “unconventional device” per year, according to a new , following the launch of the square-screened Passport last week. The Passport is definitely an outlier ga...
For Those About To Rock The Jamstik, We Salute You
John Biggs
2,014
9
29
MIDI instruments. After messing with the I’ve been looking for the perfect portable MIDI device that allows me to meld my inability to play keyboards with my sub-par guitar skills. Perhaps I’ve finally found my perfect match. We first met the and I’ve been waiting to get my hands on a unit since. The team is fin...
Mophie’s Samsung Galaxy S5 Juice Pack Gives You Ample Smartphone Life
Darrell Etherington
2,014
9
29
Mophie has a new Juice Pack out, . The case packs a huge 3,000 mAh battery within its glossy shell, which is slightly larger than the 2,850 mAh unit within the Galaxy S5 itself. True, you could carry around a spare battery for the GS5 and pop the back whenever you want more power, but the Mophie’s extra juice is just ...
iOS App Store’s “Trending Searches” Section Shows Evidence Of Gaming
Sarah Perez
2,014
9
29
A new feature in Apple’s App Store for iOS 8 is a search section which displays – an area meant to highlight the popular apps of the moment. However, from an analysis of the apps which have been appearing on this page since its public debut, it seems some app publishers have already figured out how to game the system...
Cozy Makes Its Rental Management Service Free
Kyle Russell
2,014
9
16
, a service that makes the rental process easier for landlords and tenants, has made its current feature set available to all clients for free. In , Cozy CEO Gino Zahnd says that making these features free will bring in a wider audience for products set for launch in Q4 2014. Cozy lets landlords and renters handle pay...
Microsoft Shakes Up Its Board, Boosts Its Dividend 11%
Alex Wilhelm
2,014
9
16
Microsoft has two coming board departures, two board additions, and a boost to its dividend. Leaving the board are Dave Marquardt and Dina Dublon. Marquardt is best known for his work in venture capital, and Dublon for her work at JPMorgan Chase. Taking their places are the appointed Teri List-Stoll from Kraft and Ch...
SwiftKey’s Predictive Keyboard App Is A Free Download On iOS
Natasha Lomas
2,014
9
16
Rejoice, long-time iOS users, for you can finally throw off the — cursing its erratic autocorrect habits for (hopefully) the last time — as you download a third party keyboard adventure of your choice. Yes, at long, last, Apple is opening the floodgates to , with its   upgrade — due to start rolling out sometime t...
Apple’s iPhone 6 And 6 Plus Cases Offer Comfort And Light Protection With Few Concessions
Darrell Etherington
2,014
9
16
Apple launched both its new iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus today, and along with the new smartphones it also debuted for each. The follow the simple precedent Apple set out when it created the iPhone 5s leather cases: simple, solid color designs that are thin and have no moving parts, yet offer a degree of additional prot...
Amazon Has Turned On Carrier Billing For Apps, In Germany With Bango And O2
Ingrid Lunden
2,014
9
16
, the e-commerce giant that recently added   to its growing mobile empire, is now turning on another element to bring more users and usage into its mobile business. It will now enable carrier billing, so that when people buy paid apps and make in-app purchases through Amazon’s appstore, they can charge that directly to...
iOS 8 Review: Refinements And Relaxed Limitations Add Up For A Better Experience
Darrell Etherington
2,014
9
16
tomorrow, and while it isn’t as overtly dramatic a change as iOS 7 was last year, it’s still a big update with lots of new features and tweaks. Using it on the new iPhone 6 hardware revealed lots to love in the new mobile OS from Apple, some easing of restrictions that could lead to big advantages for third-party apps...
iPhone 6 Plus Review: The First Truly Well-Designed Big Smartphone
Darrell Etherington
2,014
9
16
not one, but two premium smartphones today, and the iPhone 6 Plus is the one many probably were skeptical even existed just a few short months ago. With a screen size measuring 5.5-inches across the diagonal, it’s well into the territory labeled “phablet” on the ancient sea charts of mariners who’ve braved the Android...
Codenamed “Moments”, Facebook Has Built An App For Super-Private Sharing
Josh Constine
2,014
9
16
Facebook has failed repeatedly to get us to use complicated lists and privacy settings to share intimate moments with just our closest friends and family. It’s clumsy and confusing doing that with the same composer for blasting News Feed updates to everyone. But now Facebook is polishing off a new app codenamed “Moment...
Zero To One: How Blake Masters Went From Being Peter Thiel’s Student To Co-Author
Billy Gallagher
2,014
9
16
In the spring of 2012, Peter Thiel taught a class called CS 183: Startup, at Stanford. One of the students in Thiel’s class, Blake Masters, posted detailed notes on his personal blog that became an instant hit in the tech community. Now, Masters and Thiel have transformed those class notes into a book: “Zero to One: No...
NASA Partners With Boeing And SpaceX To Send Astronauts Up In Space Taxis
Sarah Buhr
2,014
9
16
NASA has to build space taxis to shuttle astronauts to the International Space Station. This deal will end NASA’s reliance on expensive Russian crew transport by 2017. The cost was a whopping $71 million per seat. However, the rising tensions in Ukraine may have also been a factor in the push for U.S. contracts. It’s ...
iPhone 6 Review: Meet The New Best Smartphone
Darrell Etherington
2,014
9
16
new iPhones debuting today, including the iPhone 6. The iPhone 6 is the heir apparent to the flagship line of Apple smartphones, as it comes in at the same price point as the iPhone 5s, but Apple has done something new this year by introducing a premium priced iPhone 6 Plus. The iPhone 6 is still plenty premium, howev...
Our Four Favorite Startups From The StartX Summer 2014 Demo Day
Kyle Russell
2,014
9
16
, the Stanford-funded and affiliated incubator, just held the first demo day at its new Palo Alto-based office space. In an hour, 12 startups pitched their wares to investors and the press, showing products and services that range from a dating service for Chinese ex-pats to zoom lenses for next-gen smartphones. In no ...
null
Kyle Russell
2,014
9
29
null
The FCC Received 3.7 Million Net Neutrality Comments
Alex Wilhelm
2,014
9
16
And lo, the final tally: As of Monday night, the FCC had received a total of “approximately” 3.7 million comments on its notice of proposed rule-making concerning and the open Internet. That’s quite a haul. When the tally crossed the 1 million mark, it . After breaking the 1.1 million mark in its first comment perio...
Researchers Create A Kindle eBook That Can Hack Your Amazon Account
John Biggs
2,014
9
16
A fairly nasty flaw – the ability to run a script in the title text of an eBook – could compromise the security of your Amazon account. The flaw, which reappeared recently after being patched in October, allows hackers to embed programs right into an eBook file that run when the book is examined via Amazon’s Kindle too...