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 ⌀ |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Fring, An Early Mover In Mobile Messaging And Video Apps, Sells For $50M To Genband To Build Out WhatsApps For Carriers | Ingrid Lunden | 2,013 | 9 | 12 | , an early startup that focused on creating group messaging and video calling apps for mobile phones, competing against the likes of Skype and WhatsApp, is calling it a day as an independent entity: it has been to , a provider of services like IP gateways and billing and other services to mobile, fixed and cable car... |
Tow Choice Wants To Take The Hassle Out Of Calling For Roadside Assistance | Chris Velazco | 2,013 | 9 | 13 | Once, on a brisk autumn night months and months ago, I went for a run around a park and promptly lost my car keys in the dark. The next hour was spent Googling local tow services and hoping that my phone’s battery wouldn’t die. The hour after that was spent sitting at a picnic table under an ancient oak tree trying to ... |
Microsoft’s Now-Deleted Anti-iPhone Commercial Is The Funniest Thing From Redmond Since Windows RT | Alex Wilhelm | 2,013 | 9 | 13 | It’s Friday, kids, so calm down and have a laugh. Do this: Stop caring about Apple and Microsoft and Google and the phone in your pocket and the platform of your dreams and all that. Instead, giggle at the in which Microsoft takes on Apple in a way that I honestly did not see coming. Microsoft knew that the clip woul... |
Harbingers Of Apps To Come, Here Are Four Google Glass For Fashion Hacks We Saw At Disrupt | Eliza Brooke | 2,013 | 9 | 13 | With an abnormally high population of Google Glass owners in one convention center and open to participants at the TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon, it should come as no surprise that a number of hacks combined the two. Between the use of Glass at fashion weeks past and present and magazines’ inclusion of the technology ... |
Ask A VC: Early Twitter Investor And Spark Capital Partner Bijan Sabet On Founder Personality, Investment Syndicates And More | Leena Rao | 2,013 | 9 | 13 | In this week’s episode of Ask A VC, Spark Capital founder and general partner Bijan Sabet joined us in the studio to talk about investment syndicates and much more. Sabet was one of the early backers of Twitter (which just for a public offering yesterday) in 2008 and served on the company’s board from 2008 to 2011.... |
Woot’s Founding Team Returns As Mediocre Laboratories To Experiment With E-Commerce | Ryan Lawler | 2,013 | 9 | 13 | A little more than a year after Woot founder Matt Rutledge he sold to Amazon, he’s bringing the team back together to hack e-commerce once again. The new company, called “a mediocre corporation,” is being designed to build up and test out new ways of selling products to customers online. Mediocre brings together a nu... |
Ark Launches Rapportive-Meets-Mailbox Email App In Pivot To Marketing Intelligence | Josh Constine | 2,013 | 9 | 13 | Need to do some homework on who you’re emailing? You could search their name on Google, Facebook, or LinkedIn, but on mobile that’s a lot of taps, and it’s hard to know if you’ve got the right John Smith. So has just launched a that pulls in all the social profiles of the people you’re emailing so you can quickly do... |
null | Stephanie Yang | 2,013 | 9 | 12 | null |
The Government Wants To Define Who Qualifies As A Journalist | Gregory Ferenstein | 2,013 | 9 | 13 | Journalists and netizens have mixed feelings about a long-sought federal media shield law that is headed to a vote in the Senate. would protect designated journalists from revealing their sources against a subpoena. are thrilled about the law, which was derailed in 2009 after WikiLeaks ignited a global debate about... |
Gillmor Gang Live 09.13.13 (TCTV) | Steve Gillmor | 2,013 | 9 | 13 | – Keith Teare, John Taschek, Dan Farber, Roberts Scoble, and Steve Gillmor. |
With Automatic Photo Import, Days Gets One Step Closer To Having Users Share Everything | Jordan Crook | 2,013 | 9 | 13 | with a very difficult mission: to change the way you think about photo-sharing. While some think that pictures of your feet or coffee are too mundane for photo-sharing to Instagram or Facebook, Days asked you to share as many photos as possible, mundane or otherwise. To help usher in this type of behavior, Days didn’t... |
Mailbox’s Gentry Underwood Would Rather Move Slow And Get It Right | Jordan Crook | 2,013 | 9 | 13 | In an interview backstage at TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2013, said that the company is actively working on an Android version of the app, and mentioned that ephemerality may be involved in forthcoming “whiz-bang” features down the line. doesn’t have the same “move fast” mentality as some other companies, most notably F... |
Intel Has Acquired Natural Language Processing Startup Indisys, Price “North” Of $26M, To Build Its AI Muscle | Ingrid Lunden | 2,013 | 9 | 13 | has quietly made another international acquisition in its push into artificial intelligence technology: it has bought , a Spanish startup focused on natural language recognition. The terms of the deal have not been disclosed, but it is reportedly “north” of €20 million ($26 million). It comes just two months after ne... |
Seenth.is App Helps Music Fans Wrangle Their Favorite Artists’ Multiple Social Media Feeds | Catherine Shu | 2,013 | 9 | 13 | lets music fans hone their obsession by making it easy for them to track the most interesting social media updates from their favorite performers. The (an Android version will be released later this year) aggregates and filters content from sources including , , and accounts of musicians and fans and presents i... |
CrunchWeek: The New iPhones, Twitter Preps For An IPO, And Tech Execs Talk NSA | Colleen Taylor | 2,013 | 9 | 14 | This time, I was joined by and TechCrunch’s Europe-based Editor At Large to discuss the and the debuted by Apple, Twitter making its first concrete step toward an initial public offering by , and all that at the Disrupt conference. |
Silicon Valley Luminaries Got Grilled On The NSA At Disrupt, Here’s How They Responded | Billy Gallagher | 2,013 | 9 | 14 | On Monday, TechCrunch founder the CEOs, VCs, and other Silicon Valley leaders who he was interviewing at TechCrunch Disrupt about the NSA scandal. “I’m scared of our government and I’m disgusted by what little Silicon Valley has done to fight it,” Arrington wrote. He continued: “I’ve brought this up in every one of... |
Expedia And Zillow Founder Rich Barton Wants To Fund ‘Power To The People’ Startups | Colleen Taylor | 2,013 | 9 | 14 | So when we ran into Barton backstage at this week’s Disrupt conference (where he was judging the startup Battlefield), we asked him to stop by the TechCrunch TV setup and talk about his investment strategies and what kinds of founders and startups are catching his eye. Barton says that the common thread in his inves... |
Naval Ravikant On How AngelList Syndicates Can Shake Up The World Of Venture Capital ‘Scouts’ | Colleen Taylor | 2,013 | 9 | 14 | So when AngelList co-founder and CEO came offstage from his this week, I asked him to talk a bit more about the latest developments at AngelList and how the Syndicate feature is coming along now that it’s funded . You can check out the whole chat in the video embedded above. One interesting point he made is that... |
Gillmor Gang: Inch by Inch | Steve Gillmor | 2,013 | 9 | 14 | The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Dan Farber, John Taschek, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor — added up the Apple announcements, the Twitter IPO, and why Chromecast’s Cloud-to-Device model will stick. No consensus on this last point, but since AirPlay does a little of both strategies, we’ll know soon enough. The biomet... |
First-Time Chilean Entrepreneur Raises $16M To Disrupt Latin America’s Insurance Market | Contributor | 2,013 | 9 | 14 | Sebastian Valin, founder and CEO of ComparaOnline Think about that pure, unbridled feeling when you knew you wanted to be an entrepreneur. Now think about the most unsexy business you could possibly start. Did you think of an insurance product and financial services aggregator? Did that get you excited? It got one 29... |
Twitter Co-Founder Evan Williams Lays Out His Plan For The Future Of Media | Gregory Ferenstein | 2,013 | 9 | 14 | Twitter Co-Founder Evan Williams has an ambitious new plan: to shift our daily reading habits away from consuming incremental news bites and towards engaging with enlightened ideas curated by an intelligent algorithm. Ordinarily, such a goal would seem utopian, were it not for the fact that Williams is among a handful ... |
He’s Electric — Will A Revolutionary Black Box Turn Dale Vince Into Europe’s Elon Musk? | Mike Butcher | 2,013 | 9 | 14 | Dale Vince sits in a spartan office in the corner of , one of the UK’s few green energy electricity networks, and taps away on an Apple Mac at his standing desk. The office is bare, other than a normal desk, a couple of chairs and a Union Jack flag hung on the wall. But the Union Jack is not sporting its normal Red Wh... |
Hackathons And How To Find A Parking Spot In Rio De Janeiro With Team Rua Aberta | Contributor | 2,013 | 9 | 22 | I’m sitting in an office on the 13th floor of Mayor Eduardo Paes’s headquarters in Rio de Janeiro. I’ve come to speak with Pedro Paulo, the Staff Secretary who presided over Rio’s first city-sponsored hackathon, an overnight Red Bull and hot-dog infused tech fest that opened up a cache of city data to 75 Rio citizens... |
Wait, When Did Software Become So Boring? | Jon Evans | 2,013 | 9 | 14 | Maybe I’m just jaded and cranky. But as I wandered through Startup Alley at this week, and even as I watched many of the Battlefield contestants, I found myself fighting eye-glazing ennui. Apps and services that help you connect and collaborate with others. Tools that help you build or use apps and services that help... |
VivaKi Partners With SparkReel To Help Marketers Manage Crowdsourced Videos | Anthony Ha | 2,013 | 9 | 22 | As the amount of user-generated video continues to grow, a startup called aims to help companies harness those videos for their own promotional efforts. Now the startup should get a big boost thanks to a new partnership with , the digital innovation arm of advertising giant Publicis. VivaKi is making the deal throug... |
Why Startups Fail: A Postmortem For Flud, The Social Newsreader | Rip Empson | 2,013 | 9 | 22 | In late July, , the social news reader for iOS, Android and Windows Phone, was headed to the deadpool. Startup failure is an all-too familiar, even cliche, story in Silicon Valley. But when San Diegoan co-founders Bobby Ghoshal and Matthew Ausonio officially shuttered the Flud app and website in August, after three ye... |
The “Zizz” Is An Intelligent Sleep Mask That Helps You Get Better Zzz’s | Sarah Perez | 2,013 | 9 | 14 | At TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2013 this past week, a Warsaw-based startup called was showing off an intelligent sleeping mask that uses sensors to monitor the wearers’ sleep cycles, including REM and non-REM sleep, in order to determine if you’re getting quality Zzz’s at night. The mask uses small electrodes pressed to yo... |
Netflix Scores Its First Emmy With House Of Cards Directing Win | Catherine Shu | 2,013 | 9 | 22 | Netflix has after director David Fincher won the award for Best Director of a Drama Series, beating out directors from Boardwalk Empire, Breaking Bad, Downton Abbey and Homeland. Its Emmy win marks an important milestone for Netflix as it moves beyond rerunning TV shows and films on its streaming video platform to ... |
Poshmark, The Mobile Marketplace For Women To Sell And Swap Clothes, Crosses 1M Items Sold So Far This Year | Colleen Taylor | 2,013 | 9 | 22 | App downloads are key metrics for all mobile-focused startups, but not many early-stage companies in the space can cite revenue-generating figures alongside their user growth. But , the mobile marketplace out of their own closets, says that over the past year it’s enjoyed a strong showing at both levels. In an inter... |
The Ambient Economy | John Biggs | 2,013 | 9 | 22 | Access to information is addictive. The moment we have more of it – and more of it available at opportune times – the more we crave. I learned this first-hand when I began wearing a smartwatch in earnest. While I’ve long rejected the idea that a smartwatch is a valuable addition to the infonaut’s arsenal, I now reali... |
Vonkil’s Batthead Is A Rechargeable, Remote Controlled AA Battery | Chris Velazco | 2,013 | 9 | 22 |
I spent my formative years using up AA batteries , and I can’t count the number of times my parents said they wished they could zap my trusty Game Boy dead. While there’s nothing they can do to salvage my childhood now, the folks at Vonkil Technologies have worked up something that should help a new generation ... |
The NSA Review Panel Is An Even Bigger Joke Than We Previously Thought | Alex Wilhelm | 2,013 | 9 | 22 | Today that President Barack Obama’s promised NSA review panel is channeling the entity that it is supposed to inspect, hiding behind layers of government bureaucracy and obfuscating its work. The AP states that the review panel is lodged in offices provided by the Director of National Intelligence (DNI). Even more, t... |
What Games Are: The Perplexing OUYA Reflex | Tadhg Kelly | 2,013 | 9 | 22 | Since first surfaced, I’ve always been a big advocate. Why? Some of my reasons are to do with finally seeing digital-native distribution come to the TV, which is long overdue. Others are to do with watching how the world of apps has transformed the pricing structure of games, resulting in more games for more players.... |
Dattch, A Pinterest-Inspired Dating App For Gay Women, Closes $160K To Fuel Its UK Beta | Natasha Lomas | 2,013 | 9 | 22 | London-based startup is a dating app with a difference. I don’t mean the fact that it’s exclusively for lesbians, bisexual and/or bi-curious women — though that certainly makes it stand out from the ranks of straight dating apps. What really sets it apart is its mostly female team who set out to design a dating app s... |
Hackers Bypass Apple’s Touch ID With Lifted Fingerprint | Frederic Lardinois | 2,013 | 9 | 22 | Fingerprint scanners have always been vulnerable to hackers who are willing to go the extra mile to bypass them. Over the years, we’ve seen everything from people using , and more sophisticated techniques to bypass these biometric scanners. It’s not really a surprise then, that Apple’s on the new iPhone 5s is vuln... |
Into the Gloss, An Editorial Beauty Site, Raises $2M To Build Its Team | Eliza Brooke | 2,013 | 9 | 22 | The editorial beauty website has raised $2 million in venture capital funding led by Forerunner and Lerer Ventures, along with several angel investors. Since it was founded in September of 2010, the site has been making waves in the style space for its insider access-type interviews with editors, designers, writers, ... |
Betabrand’s New Think Tank Mashes Up Kickstarter-Style Fundraising With Cult Clothing Manufacturing | Leena Rao | 2,013 | 9 | 22 | San Francisco-based cult clothing retailer is debuting a new way for customers to engage in developing new products — an online think tank. The online-only clothing retailer, which launched in August 2010 and has and others, already allows its customers and fans to participate in the creation and promotion of its p... |
BBM’s Android And iOS Launch Weekend Going About As Badly As Possible | Darrell Etherington | 2,013 | 9 | 22 | BlackBerry trumpeted its intention to deliver the long-awaited Android and iOS versions of its BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) service this weekend, and so fans around the world eagerly awaited the mobile software’s debut. But debut the apps didn’t, at least not as intended and not for the vast majority of expectant fans. A... |
Apple TV 6.0 Update Pulled After Users Report Bricking, Other Issues | Frederic Lardinois | 2,013 | 9 | 22 | On Friday, Apple launched its 6.0 software update for its set-top box, but soon after, some users reported that the update bricked their devices while others were a bit luckier and just lost their connection to the Internet or had to restore their machines. Some users are also reporting extremely and many seem to h... |
Mobile Apps, Card Interfaces, And Our Opposable Thumbs | Semil Shah | 2,013 | 9 | 22 | TechCrunch This is a post about “cards” as an interface in mobile apps. I am not a designer. I am also unable to mention every single app that uses cards — feel free to mention others in the comments. Additionally, I don’t know which apps should be credited with popularizing cards, or when that happened. For this pos... |
Hands On With The Brooklyn-Made Makerbot Digitizer | John Biggs | 2,013 | 9 | 22 | The looked too good to be true. It was a solid, compact 3D scanner that could replicate a solid object without much fuss and had a level of detail unparalleled in the home scanning market. Now it’s clear that this is much more than a compelling idea. I saw the Makerbot in action yesterday and spoke with Makerbot ... |
Introducing Apple’s New “Kids” App Store | Sarah Perez | 2,013 | 9 | 22 | Apple has finally take steps to better cater to the children who have adopted its devices, and especially family favorite the iPad, with the launch of a Kids App Store. Arriving this week alongside the launch of iOS 7, the Kids App Store store is not a separate mobile application, to be clear, but is rather a new secti... |
Apple? They Make The Cheap Plastic Phones, Right? | Josh Constine | 2,013 | 9 | 22 | Apple could learn a lot from the fall of Burberry. The once-exclusive fashion brand became associated with trashy youth by greedily licensing out its signature tan chequered pattern for use on baseball caps and other cheap clothes. Suddenly, the rich clientele it had catered to for a century wanted nothing to do with B... |
You Win, Republicans. My GIF Reaction To Their GIF OpED | Gregory Ferenstein | 2,013 | 9 | 22 | GIFs are the hot new thing. News organization BuzzFeed.com, which has staked its future on dozens of GIF and listicle posts a day, . Attention-starved politicians want in on the action. So last week, Republicans published out a GIF-filled against Democratic opposition to an oil pipeline. It was an instant success; t... |
BlackBerry Cancels Its 2Q2014 Earnings Call | Catherine Shu | 2,013 | 9 | 25 | its second-quarter earnings call, which was scheduled to take place along with the release of its financial results on Friday. The company said the cancellation was because of it signed earlier this week. Fairfax agreed to pay $4.7 billion for the beleaguered phone maker. Further details about its second-quarter res... |
null | Jordan Crook | 2,013 | 9 | 22 | null |
Amazon Faces High-Stakes Challenge In Scaling Mayday On-Demand Support | Josh Constine | 2,013 | 9 | 25 | What happens when it’s easier to call tech support than to Google your problem? Amazon might discover the costly answer to that question depending on how much the owners of its new use its Mayday on-demand video customer support feature. And whether they behave themselves. is available at the tap of a button in the ... |
Elop Conspiracy? Not So Much | Alex Wilhelm | 2,013 | 9 | 25 | If you read the news yesterday, you might have run into a few articles discussing the exit of former Nokia CEO Stephen Elop, the terms of his exit, the , and how he was a mole in the Finnish company determined to bring it down in flames. Well, maybe not that last bit, but people did write it. There is in the market ... |
SecondMarket Launches A Bitcoin Investment Trust For Accredited Investors | Kim-Mai Cutler | 2,013 | 9 | 25 | As Bitcoin, the math-based currency that enthusiasts say could revolutionize online transactions, becomes more mainstream, its supporters have been looking for ways to make it more accessible to investors. Today SecondMarket, a platform where privately-held or growth-stage companies can raise capital, says it is . It’... |
Nest Labs To Open Up Its Learning Thermostat To Developers | Matt Burns | 2,013 | 9 | 25 | The Nest Learning Thermostat is about to get a little smarter (and perhaps ). Speaking at CEDIA Expo 2013, Tony Fadell, the company’s co-founder and CEO, that’s aimed at developers looking to integrate the Learning Thermostat within their ecosystem. Want one app to control your smart lighting, fan, security system ... |
Apple Uses Bluetooth LE To Enable Apple TV ‘Touch To Set Up’ Via iOS 7 Devices | Matthew Panzarino | 2,013 | 9 | 25 | Apple is leveraging the Bluetooth LE technology that it has been building into every iPhone since the iPhone 4S to enable automatic setup of an Apple TV 3G. Just touch a device running iOS 7 to a newer Apple set-top box to have it automatically set up Wi-Fi networks, region settings and Apple Store accounts. This essen... |
In Search Of The Perfect Polo: Hands-On With Vastrm’s Home Try-On Service | Chris Velazco | 2,013 | 9 | 25 | Y Combinator alum has been pretty busy lately. In addition to locking up another $1 million in seed funding from A16z, SV Angels, Ignition Partners, and Will Smith (to name a few), the startup redesigned its website slightly modified its sense of purpose. The team has always been about giving its customers the perfec... |
This Week On The TechCrunch Droidcast: Amazon Outs New Kindle Fires While Samsung Goes For The Gold | Chris Velazco | 2,013 | 9 | 25 | What would a Wednesday afternoon be without the TechCrunch Droidcast? Don’t answer that. Sadly, I couldn’t be around to take part in this glorious meeting of the minds (I was checking out startups , in case you were curious) but our very own Matt Burns and Anthony Ha stepped up this time around and the results were… ... |
Both Apple And EA Deny Money Exchanged To Keep Plants Vs. Zombies 2 Off Android | Matthew Panzarino | 2,013 | 9 | 25 | Apple and EA are both categorically denying a report that surfaced late yesterday that money exchanged hands to keep Popcap hit Plants Vs. Zombies 2 an exclusive to iOS. Reached for comment on the matter, both EA and Apple told us that “it’s simply not true.” The report, from , had quoted EA Labels head Frank Gibeau a... |
Target Launches Its First Subscription-Based E-Commerce Service, Focus For Now Is Baby-Care Items | Sarah Perez | 2,013 | 9 | 25 | As Amazon’s online business continues to cut into traditional retailers’ revenues, Target today makes a move to fight back. The Minneapolis-headquartered retailer has just launched a pilot program for subscription-based commerce called . Initially, the service is focused on new parents, with various products related t... |
Google Starts Supporting Google+ Hashtags In Search Queries | Frederic Lardinois | 2,013 | 9 | 25 | Google+ started in May, and today the company announced that Google Search will now allow you to search for Google+ posts by using these hashtags. Given that there’s a little bit of Google+ in , it’s no surprise that these Google+ hashtags are now finding their way into other Google products. This new search feature... |
Automattic Acquires File-Sharing Service Cloudup To Build A Faster Media Library And Enable Co-Editing | Eliza Brooke | 2,013 | 9 | 25 | , the parent company of WordPress.com, has acquired , which launched in beta in June. The acquisition will help Automattic improve two features of WordPress.com in particular: the media library used for uploading visual content and post editing to give multiple users the ability to edit at one time. Cloudup is an of... |
Apple Launches iOS 7 Tech Talks For Developers In SF, NYC, Tokyo, Shanghai, Berlin And London | Matthew Panzarino | 2,013 | 9 | 25 | Apple has just announced a series of Tech Talks for developers building apps for iOS 7. This is a relatively common occurrence as Apple likes to get evangelists out to talk to developers and help them on a more personal basis than just WWDC. The talks are important because Apple extremely quickly this year, leaving m... |
Instacart, Growing Rapidly In Chicago, Adds Recipes To Its Grocery Delivery Service | Alex Wilhelm | 2,013 | 9 | 25 | Today , a grocery delivery service, added an initial set of recipes to its service, helping customers purchase groups of items that combine into finished dishes. For the non-chef among us (hello, my name is Alex), this is a boon. The news is small for the day: Instacart has curated a list of recipes that its users can... |
Gmail For Android Updated With Card-Style Layout | Sarah Perez | 2,013 | 9 | 25 | Google’s is being updated today with a new design which will bring Google’s now preferred “card style” user interface to the Conversation View within the app. This layout, which Google popularized through its Google Now search application, has become the new go-to design paradigm at Google, arriving across other Goog... |
Google+ May Finally Matter Thanks To YouTube Comments | Josh Constine | 2,013 | 9 | 25 | You didn’t really need a Google+ account until now. You might have one whether you wanted it or not. But requires a presence on Google+. And there’s no real alternative to YouTube for video. Google+ may have mattered before in theory, but now it matters in practice. Google+ is really a designed to help Google perso... |
Instagram Gets A Mild iOS 7 Redesign With Edge-To-Edge Images | Matthew Panzarino | 2,013 | 9 | 25 | Instagram has been updated for Apple’s iOS 7 today that puts photos front and center. The app has not been re-written or torn down for the logic of iOS 7 so much as trimmed and tucked to fit with the aesthetic. Instagram’s previous designs had already been winnowed a bit to make them feel more in line with the Androi... |
Valve To Launch A Prototype Steam Box And Multiple Steam Machines In 2014 | Romain Dillet | 2,013 | 9 | 25 | Following the announcement of , Valve just unveiled the long-anticipated Steam Box — sort of. Instead of releasing a Valve-branded Steam Box, the company will actually work with multiple manufacturers to release a series of for your living room. Yet, Valve also presented a specific prototype, a Steam machine designe... |
Wealthfront Launches Wealthfront.org To Give Web-Based Investment Tools To Non-Profits | Colleen Taylor | 2,013 | 9 | 25 | Automated investment services company has made its name as an alternative to traditional financial advisory services for individuals, especially “Generation Y” techies just starting to pull their nest eggs together. Today, the company is looking to expand its user base in a different direction with the launch of , ... |
Social Events Platform DoubleDutch Raises $10 Million Series C Led By Bessemer | Sarah Perez | 2,013 | 9 | 25 | Rapidly growing mobile events application platform raised $10 million in Series C funding TechCrunch learned, in an oversubscribed round led in large part by of Bessemer Venture Partners, who will now join the company’s board. Previous investors from DoubleDutch’s A and B rounds, Floodgate Fund, Bullpen Capital and... |
A Year Of Spam: The Twoo Experience | Billy Gallagher | 2,013 | 8 | 3 | , “the fastest growing place to meet new people,” has been spamming people . Users have been complaining that they get unsolicited emails from the app, that the app messages all of their contacts without their understanding, and that it’s unclear how to delete their accounts. I covered Twoo’s questionable growth techn... |
IBT Media Buys Newsweek From IAC | Anthony Ha | 2,013 | 8 | 3 | I guess today is the day for announcing : just that it has reached an agreement to acquire Newsweek from . Back in 2010, with IAC-owned website The Daily Beast. (The magazine subsequently .) However, earlier this year, that buying Newsweek was a mistake, one he would correct by . “We are thrilled to welcome... |
CrunchWeek: MotoX Says Hello, Ridesharing Regulation Wars, More Google Surveillance Suspicions | Colleen Taylor | 2,013 | 8 | 3 | This time around, Rao, and I discussed the much-anticipated , the brand new smartphone from Google that happens to be assembled , the new ride-sharing rules as part of the between regulators, old fashioned taxis, and the Uber/Lyft/Sidecar startup contingent, and the latest instances that show how increasing... |
Obama Administration Vetoes Ban On Certain iPhones And iPads | Anthony Ha | 2,013 | 8 | 3 | President Obama’s administration has vetoed to ban the import and sale of a number of Apple products, including models of the iPhone 4 and iPad 2. The ITC announced the ban in June after finding that those devices had violated a patent held by Samsung. In a letter to the ITC (embedded below), US Trade Representative ... |
The New York Times Company Sells The Boston Globe (And Related Properties) For $70M | Anthony Ha | 2,013 | 8 | 3 | The New York Times is the Boston Globe and the rest of its New England Media Group to John Henry, the billionaire who’s principal owner of the Boston Red Sox, for $70 million in cash. The news has prompted some rather depressing comments about the Globe’s relative worth. For example, Ken Doctor at the Nieman Journali... |
Gillmor Gang: What’s Up Doc | Steve Gillmor | 2,013 | 8 | 3 | The Gillmor Gang — Bret Taylor, Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor — gather in real time to try out Bret’s new startup, Quip. The last time we saw Bret, he was selling Friendfeed to Facebook and becoming CTO. Now, he’s back (sporting Marc Benioff as one of his investors) at the intersection of... |
The Business Of Fear | Jon Evans | 2,013 | 8 | 3 | I spent much of this week at the information security conference, after attending the head of the NSA’s ; and I am pleased to report, O my readers, that here in Las Vegas I have finally achieved enlightenment. That being: the fundamental problem with the National Security Agency, which it shares with most “security”... |
FlightCar Offers Users Up To $400 To Rent Their Cars Out For A Whole Month | Ryan Lawler | 2,013 | 8 | 4 | Got a car you don’t ever really drive? Wanna not pay for parking or worry about shuffling it around on the street every couple of days? Have an interest in actually making some money from that car that you’re not actually using while it’s sitting around on the street? Well, car rental startup might be able to help y... |
Fly Or Die: Rithm | Jordan Crook | 2,013 | 8 | 4 | has been cultivating a community of recommendations for quite a while now, but only recently has the company taken its userbase’s disposition towards music recommendations and turned it into a brand new app: . Rithm pulls from many of the messaging and social apps we love today, like Snapchat, Vine, and basic messa... |
Lync, Azure, Office 365 And The Shifting Center Of Microsoft’s Gravity | Alex Wilhelm | 2,013 | 8 | 4 | You might have missed it, but Lync, Microsoft’s enterprise-focused communications suite brought its parent company $1 billion in revenue during its 2013 fiscal year. That a milestone of that sort could all but slip through the news coverage of Microsoft’s is almost interesting. The reason for the mild coverage of Lyn... |
What Happens At Def Con Stays With Us All | Jon Evans | 2,013 | 8 | 4 | There’s nothing like attendance at the annual and security/hacker conferences to hike your paranoia into the red zone and keep it there forever. You come away with the sense that nothing, anywhere, ever, is safe–and that’s just from talks given by people willing to publicize their work. Compared to the secret legio... |
TV Expert: Time Warner Cable-CBS Blackout To Result In ‘Best Of All Possible Worlds’ For Cable Subscribers | Ryan Lawler | 2,013 | 8 | 4 | Subscribers to Time Warner Cable might not be able to watch CBS shows over the next few weeks, as a result of the between a network and a pay TV operator. But at least one expert believes that the blackout, while disruptive in the short term, is actually good news for those who pay TV viewers, whether they’re Time Wa... |
null | Matthew Panzarino | 2,013 | 9 | 25 | null |
Taking A Roundtrip With Facebook | Contributor | 2,013 | 8 | 4 | It’s finally happened. Some fourteen and a half months after its IPO, Facebook shares closed on Friday above its for the first time since the date of its IPO. Investors who bought shares in Facebook’s IPO and held until now are a whopping 5 cents in the money, with Friday’s $38.05 closing price. The challenges of the... |
Who Will Disrupt Real Estate? | Frederic Lardinois | 2,013 | 8 | 4 | I don’t even want to imagine what looking for a house was like . Over the last few years, Zillow, Trulia, Redfin and others have done a lot to make more information available to those who want to buy and sell their homes. Today, I can easily get an alert on my phone when a house comes on the market. Indeed, I’ll proba... |
LearnXinYminutes Is The Occasional Coder’s Best Friend | Greg Kumparak | 2,013 | 8 | 4 | If you’ve never written a line of code, let me let you in on a not-so-secret secret: once you’re pretty good at one programming language, picking up others becomes a lot easier. That’s not to say that mastering one language makes you a master in all of them. Hardly. Each language has its own style quirks, syntactic r... |
What Games Are: The Win Imperative | Tadhg Kelly | 2,013 | 8 | 4 | Many readers will be familiar with the idea that games and reward go together like two peas in a pod. Click a button, hear a satisfying ding. Kill the monster, get a magic sword. Make the longest word, earn a badge. These ideas have been with us for a long time and even seep over into the real world in the form of exer... |
From Fail Whale To Uncaged Bird, Twitter’s IPO Drumbeat Will Get Louder | Semil Shah | 2,013 | 8 | 4 | TechCrunch Do you hear that faint drumbeat? In the background, barely noticeable, amid the frenzy around Facebook’s stock price resurgence, or the noise of your Twitter stream, there is a slow, steady drumbeat afoot looking out to 2014 and the public offering for the microblogging platform. In the rocky year since Fa... |
Can An Algorithm Be Empathetic? UK Startup EI Technologies Is Building Software That’s Sensitive To Tone Of Voice | Natasha Lomas | 2,013 | 8 | 4 | Often it’s not what you say, it’s how you say it that matters. Especially if you’re being sarcastic to a customer services operator. Such nuance is obviously lost on automated speech systems, more’s the pity (and, indeed, on some human ears) but don’t give up hope of being able to mock your future robot butler with a s... |
After Skeuomorphism | John Biggs | 2,013 | 8 | 4 | When I was working on my review of Logic Pro X something struck me – where were the sliders? Historically, pro audio software has tried hard to mimic analog – and digital – workstations used by audio engineers. Those boards made you press buttons, twiddle knobs, and plug in patch cords. Logic X hid those. They were the... |
Review: Exo, A Cricket-Based Protein Bar That Won’t Destroy Your Productivity | Gregory Ferenstein | 2,013 | 8 | 4 | My sweet tooth is the enemy of productivity: sugary snacks are a one way ticket to and squishy love handles. As TechCrunch’s resident healthnut, I regularly get pitched by food startups claiming to solve the workplace snacking problem, but their “healthy” alternatives invariably raise my blood sugar like a Snickers b... |
With Findery, Caterina Fake Wants To Create A Lasting Community Around Stories | Leena Rao | 2,013 | 8 | 4 | When Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield founded Flickr in 2004, creating a community around photos was a huge challenge. “There were very few people on internet to begin with, and within that group, there was a small group of people who engaged in social networks,” explains Fake. With Fake’s newest startup, she ha... |
Hell No Moto X | Darrell Etherington | 2,013 | 8 | 4 | Motorola last week, and our own Chris Velazco found the phone impressive enough. But the more I think about it, the less impressed I am by Motorola’s big brand relaunch under the Google banner. The Moto X never really excited me to begin with, and it’s likely not meant to, with a slew of options squarely aimed at sho... |
Snapzoom and Shuttr Allow Smartphones To Take Clear High-Resolution Macro and Long-Distance Shots | Catherine Shu | 2,013 | 8 | 5 | Last week I , the tiny Bluetooth remote control for smartphones that lets users take better self-portraits and group shots. But can be used for more than just selfies. Other accessory developers have been experimenting with Shuttr to see how far it can extend a smartphone camera’s capabilities. For example, when Shu... |
Unroll.me, A Startup That Battles Junk Mail And Manages Subscriptions, Says It Has 100K+ Subscribers | Anthony Ha | 2,013 | 8 | 5 | We’ve written about , a service that helps users manage their junk email and subscriptions, before — most recently when it was . Now the company is sharing some stats about its growth. For one thing, it says it has more than 100,000 subscribers. It also says that more than 106 million emails have been diverted from i... |
UrbanSpoon To Focus On Quality Restaurant Reviews After Selling Rezbook To OpenTable | Stephanie Yang | 2,013 | 8 | 5 | After stepping out of a heated battle over the restaurant reservation space, Urbanspoon is taking a new approach to its review services — editorial content. Yelp had last month, which suggests it will replace industry default OpenTable with an in-house, mobile-focused competitor. When it last Wednesday, OpenTable g... |
While We’re Trying To Follow His Game Of Checkers, Jeff Bezos Is Playing Chess | MG Siegler | 2,013 | 8 | 5 | A few years ago, I just didn’t get it. I couldn’t for the life of me understand how a company like Amazon could operate, let alone flourish. I spent the majority of my time following Apple, a company which in many ways was the antithesis of Amazon. Apple was all about huge margins, big profit. Amazon seemed to avoid pr... |
Bezos In 2012: People Won’t Pay For News On The Web, Print Will Be Dead In 20 Years | Gregory Ferenstein | 2,013 | 8 | 5 | Before Jeff Bezos the Washington Post for $250 million, he had some choice words for the ailing print news industry. with the German paper, , the newly-minted media mogul said at the time that no one would bother paying for news online and print would be dead in 20 years (translation from our awesome writer, Frede... |
What Did Bezos Actually Buy? | Alex Wilhelm | 2,013 | 8 | 5 | Jeff Bezos, not Amazon, is to purchase the venerable Washington Post. But it’s not only the paper that Bezos is picking up for his quarter billion. As part of the purchase, the Amazon founder will also become owner of a host of smaller local papers, the Washington Post website, and a printing outfit by the name of Co... |
Ashton Kutcher And Josh Gad On The Making Of JOBS | Jordan Crook | 2,013 | 8 | 5 | On August 16, Steve Jobs biopic “ will hit theaters nationwide. The movie follows the story of a young Jobs deciding to start Apple, building the world’s first personal computer out of his garage, and going on to lose the company he built only to be asked to take the helm once again, years later. Ashton Kutcher, who t... |
Meet Tastemade, The YouTube Network For Food Lovers | Ryan Lawler | 2,013 | 8 | 5 | As YouTube networks go, there are some that are designed to attract talent from all over the spectrum, and then there are those which focus on specific verticals. With that in mind, Santa Monica, Calif.-based has become the leading next-generation video network for foodies in just 12 months. We visited Tastemade as... |
Mobile Weather App Minutely Lets You “Correct” The Weather, Visualize Storms In 3D | Sarah Perez | 2,013 | 8 | 5 | Mobile weather applications may be becoming , but few can also make claims as to advancing the technology behind the display of the weather on users’ smartphones, as well. But that’s the case with , a newly launched mobile weather application for iPhone and Android which not only offers the usual assortment of weathe... |
Jeff Bezos To Acquire The Washington Post For $250M | Anthony Ha | 2,013 | 8 | 5 | Yes, you read that right. The Washington Post Company just that it has reached an agreement to sell its newspaper publishing business to Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos for $250 million. “I, along with Katharine Weymouth and our board of directors, decided to sell only after years of familiar newspaper-industry cha... |
Fail Week: When The U.S. Government Knocked On Tim Draper’s Door About That $6 Million | Colleen Taylor | 2,013 | 8 | 5 | That silence about failure is something that . People who are working through struggles in building a business should know that they’re not the only ones who have had dark days. So we asked some of the most prominent people in the tech industry to talk about a time in their careers that was marked by epic failure a... |
DEA Reportedly Hiding NSA Data Used To Prosecute U.S. Citizens | Alex Wilhelm | 2,013 | 8 | 5 | The Snowden effect continued to roll today, with fresh revelations detailing how the pervasive surveillance of the National Security Agency (NSA) is in fact linked to domestic criminal prosecution. The idea, and the defense, that NSA activity only impacts non-United States citizens and terrorists, is now utterly specio... |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.