Articles by Techcrunch from February 2011

What is your real name? That's my new favorite comment on TechCrunch, where many of its readers hide behind phony names and email addresses. Apparently it's not considered appropriate to challenge...

Y Combinator-incubated SwipeGood, a startup that allows you to donate to charity each time you buy, is using its Start Fund money to benefit others. In case you didn't catch this bit of news, DST's Y...

I was determined never to write another negative post about TED. Really. I feel like my views on the conference's smug-tendencies have been well-stated. And, as I said in this article in Fast Company,...

On January 7, 2010 I was ushered into a small private dinner with Secretary Hillary Clinton at the State Department along with the inventor of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google and a f...

"A good player goes where the puck is. A great player goes where the puck is going to be"" The Great OneGoogle made a few interesting announcements this week. First, Google Docs Viewer suppo...

Move over, Chronicles of Narnia, there's a new dreamworld of magic in town. That's right. Andrew Fischer, CEO of Colorado-based marketing company NURV, has recruited a stellar cast of Meme-lebrities, ...

Zynga made a small but fascinating change to its young-yet-ubiquitous game CityVille over the weekend. Players could previously buy "Wedding Chapels," which looked like small country churches but wit...

Editor's Note: This is a guest post by Mark Suster (@msuster), a 2x entrepreneur, now VC at GRP Partners. Read more about Suster at BothsidesofthetableThere's lots of discussion out there about a new...

Editor's Note: Jim Dalrymple has been writing about Apple for more than 15 years. You can follow him on Twitter @jdalrymple and on his Web site at The Loop.It's been almost a year since Apple release...

In this week's episode of Fly or Die, CrunchGear editor John Biggs and I do a special tablet edition where we take on the new Motorola Xoom and the Kno. (Watch the video above).The Xoom is the first ...

Every Gillmor Gang begins with a mysterious blend of serendipity and confusion. This episode is no exception, as Robert Scoble attempts to discuss the Motorola VaVaVoom or somesuch. The only problem w...

This guest post is written by Daniel A. Crane, who is Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School. He is an expert in antitrust law.Google's proposed acquisition of ITA Software, which ...

In mid February, at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt expressed pride in Google employee Wael Ghonim's brave struggle against the autocratic Mubarak regime...

Rebtel is offering us one hot little Motorola Atrix to give away this weekend to one lucky reader. How do you win? Well first you have to be very very nice to animals and the environment and then ...

Breakup Notifier creator Dan Lowenhertz should just give up on Crate (his actual job) and just make a whole network of these types of things. After having his wildly popular app Breakup Notifier bloc...

And we're back again with our now weekly update on the insanity surrounding Facebook's stock in the SecondMarket auctions. Last week, the stock saw the beginning of a rally back to $27 a share, good f...

All is right with the world, as genius (and Googler!) Thomas Steiner has made this beautiful Chrome extension that corrects Twitter's subject/object discrepancy on its "Who to Follow" feature. Grammar...

I love Kickstarter. It's maybe the best enabler site ever. In the short time it has been around, we've gotten everything from open source Facebook "killers" to iPod nano watches to RoboCop Statues. Bu...

This week, Affiliated Computer Services, Inc. (ACS) "  which was acquired by Xerox (NYSE: XRX) in February 2010 "  announced that it's building a new, electronic toll system on t...

Wait wha? According to this SEC form, daily deals site Groupon has raised another $16.2 million. There's no word on whether this is an add-on to its recent $950 million round or just a smaller min...

Kidlandia, the awesome site that lets you create your own personalized fantasy maps for your kids, has raised $2.5 million led by Alsop Louie Partners with GRP, Net Discovery, Ivan Sutherland and Jim ...

It's Oscar weekend so of course every social media service, smart phone app and "tech" blog is going to find some movie angle to remind you that they exist. And because I tend to write the more fluffy...

It has now been at least a year since I last used the optical drive on any of my computers. And now I'm really starting to believe I never will again. Which I love.Last October, I noted that I was rea...

How much should a startup spend on marketing? The answer, according to VC Fred Wilson, is zero. The best marketing for a startup when it is just getting off the ground are kick-ass products. Gr...

Bloomberg is launching a new daily hourly television show called Bloomberg West next week, we hear. It's on the air daily at 3 pm Pacific and then again at 8 pm. The show will focus on technology, inn...

Ask a VC was on hiatus for a few weeks, but your Friday investor-talk fix is back. Our guest this week is Tony Conrad, partner at True Ventures and founder of About.Me, which recently sold to AOL alon...

Apple just can't get a break. Consumer Reports is, well, reporting that in their testing scenarios the Verizon iPhone 4 has the same "death grip" attenuation issues as the AT&T/GSM model, which me...

It looks like recruiting service Pursuit has been gobbled up by Facebook, the latest in a string of acqui-hires, judging by the brief message on their homepage:"Update: we've found a new home at Faceb...

If you're like us, you may have a hard time remembering where you placed one of those remotes of yours that keeps secretively slipping away. You may have even given up after searching for it for hours...

Over the past couple of years, we've seen a blooming of new Q&A sites which are both social and informative. While Quora gets a lot of our attention here at TechCrunch because of the quality of t...

As we've written in the past, OneRiot recently switched its business model; shutting down its search portal and focusing exclusively on monetizing via its realtime advertising network. Today, the star...

It's that time again: time for a live discussion of a new piece of technology LIVE. Today we're talking about the Xoom for a full hour and I'm going to try to go through what I can and hopefully you c...

A few weeks ago, social commerce network Lockerz acquired photo sharing app Plixi as a way to boost photo sharing on its platform. It looks like the company has hit the ground running in terms of int...

Auto maker BMW recently established a New York-based venture capital firm dubbed BMW i Ventures that it seeded with $100 million to seek out partnerships that might facilitate BMW-i product adoption i...

According to a late Thursday SEC filing the New York City startup behind Flavorize.com, FlavorMetrics Corp., is seeking a $1 million investment to build a "Pandora for food." The company's web and m...

We have a bemused relationship with most folks from the PR industry here around TechCrunch, and with good reason (trust me on that one). Most of the time (but not always), we keep our peace when PR fl...

While this device may look like an old Fisher-Price Tape Player, what we have here is a bonafide music playback device designed for Google (probably as some sort of Tchotchke/giveaway) by Chord Electr...

My, how things change. A few years ago, anyone proposing that Facebook games would turn into a wildly profitable multi-billion dollar industry would probably be met with some pretty strange looks. Yet...

Last year, AuroraFeint launched the private beta of OpenFeint X (OFX), which offers indie developers the ability to create Zynga-like free-to-play games including microtransactions and virtual goods....

ContextIn, an Israeli company I first got to know when they launched their semantic technology platform at my Plugg conference back in 2009, has recently shifted focus to the buying side of the online...

Vocus, the publicly-listed provider of cloud-based marketing and PR software, has moved to acquire Facebook apps maker North Social, which enables businesses to create, manage and promote their busine...

Fresh off the heels of Box.net raising $48 million, cloud storage startup Scality is set to announce next week that they've raised $7 million in Series B funding.The round was led by IdInvest Partners...

For the past two years I've been holding onto the belief that Israeli entrepreneurs should devote particular focus on the opportunities available to products and services that cater to Small & Med...

If there was any doubt in peoples' minds that Apple intends to kill off the optical disc, it was put to rest today. This morning's unveiling of the OS X Lion Developer Preview came with the news that ...

Google search is powered by algorithms. Computers slice and dice data looking for signals that a web page is more or less interesting than other web pages for a given query. PageRank is a big part of ...

Offhand internationalization doesn't seem like it should be a problem for websites, or at least it should be a problem that should be easy to solve. Well not so much, at least according toWordchuck fo...

Social ads on Facebook are supposed to be cheap. In fact, they are one of the cheapest ads on the Web in terms of cost per thousand impressions. So imagine Facebook advertiser Joshua Niamehr's surpr...

Google made a substantial revision to its search algorithm today, the company says. And while no one in particular is being called out, it's clear that the big losers are content farms and related spa...

With regime change in Tunisia and Egypt, and Libya's uprising continuing apace, a growing number of commentators are hailing the influence of Facebook and Twitter in helping world-be-revolutionaries c...

Today in SXSW jockeying ... Introduction service Hashable, which has the pretty ambitious goal of ridding the world of business cards, is announcing its Android offering and a slew of features just i...

Single-use plastic grocery bags, and the various fees, taxes and bans proposed to curb pollution from their disposal, are causing controversy again this week. A newly surfaced study, still under peer...

Intel's new Thunderbolt interface, which made its debut this morning in an upgrade to Apple's MacBook Pro line, may be effectively an Apple exclusive for quite some time, according to Intel. At their ...

Editor's Note: The following guest post is by Matthew Prince, CEO of a CloudFlare, which came in as a close runner-up at the last TechCrunch Disrupt. We asked him to give us an update on the startup ...

Remember MySpace Music? It was supposed to put online music streaming on the the right track. But with all the layoffs, shrinking audience and turmoil at parent MySpace, MySpace Music is singing...

Earlier this week, CrunchGear's John Biggs sparked controversy (within TechCrunch ranks at least) with a post entitled "Alibaba And The Curse Of Chinese Manufacturing". In the post Biggs wrote (amongs...

Glam Media, one of the largest publishing and advertising networks on the Web, is revealing its third branded content channel today: health-focused Bliss. Bliss, which will be a content hub of health ...

It really is kind of amazing that Instagram has shot past two million users in just a few months with only an iPhone app. No Android app, no website, no real third-party support. But starting today, t...

Launching today is 140Fire.com, a Y Combinator-backed platform that allows advertisers, publishers, and media buyers to create interactive ad content and polls to overlay on streaming or pre-recorded ...

Last time we checked in with PayPal, it, along with MasterCard, Visa and others had blocked its services with regards to donations to WikiLeaks foundation.Today it is being reported that PayPal has ta...

Would you like to be a Product Lead for TechCrunch? How about a Sales Marketing Manager? Maybe an Executive Assistant? We have positions open and we are currently looking for qualified app...

I have the Motorola Xoom here in my hot little hands and I put it through its paces over the past few days and I'd love to demonstrate and explore the device with your questions in mind. What I'm plan...

Today, social fundraising platform Fundly announced that it had closed a $2 million seed funding round led by a group of Silicon Valley investors. Using AngelList, a marketplace that makes it easy for...

Earlier this month Google launched the web version of Android Market, which lets you purchase applications from your web browser and have them beamed directly to your phone or tablet (it's very slick)...

We expect perfection from companies in Silicon Valley. The general consensus is that Yahoo is one of the worst run tech companies in the world, never mind it's still profitable, cash-rich, and one of...

Though you're probably hearing about it for the first time now, Intel's been working on a new interconnection technology for the last few years. "Light Peak", as it was called up until it was rebrande...

Earlier this morning AOL President Media David Eun resigned, leaving us wondering who we at TechCrunch work for now (I mean besides you, dear readers). Now we know.In an email to all staff except us ...

When researching hotels for a vacation or business trip, a visit to TripAdvisor to check out reviews of a resort are a must. Pictures of rooms on hotel websites often misrepresent the exact size or lu...

David Eun, my boss's (Heather) boss since the acquisition, will shortly be leaving AOL. As President of AOL Media and Studios he oversaw the AOL homepage as well as all of the content brands and sites...

Some Internet wunderkinds don't bother to finish college. Tumblr founder David Karp dropped out of high school, and now runs one of the fastest growing publishing platforms on the Web. In our final ...

Storific, the French startup that lets customers place orders in restaurants, bars and hotels via an iPhone, has raised $200k in a seed round financed by Kima Ventures.The company offers a paid-for su...

It appears that LinkedIn has been blocked in China, after the professional social network became a platform for organizing anti-government protests. The report was first noted by Renmedia.According to...

Research firm eMarketer estimates that more than half of adult internet users in the US were logging on to Facebook at least once per month at the end of last year. In 2011, the company forecasts that...

Now that the news about the new MacBook Pros is out there, one thing that may disappoint someone just reading the spec sheet is battery life. Across the board, the Pro is now rated at 7 hours. While s...

Payvment, a startup that allows anyone to create and operate a retail storefront on Facebook, is unveiling the first virtual shopping mall on the social network. Comprised of all the stores that use ...

GOGII, maker of the social messaging app textPlus, is announcing a $15 million Series C round led by GRP Partners this morning. GRP will be joining existing investorsMatrix Partners andKleiner Perkins...

Cloud storage and collaboration startup Box.net has raised $48 million in new funding led by Meritech Capital Partners with Andreessen Horowitz, Emergence Capital Partners, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Sc...

Yahoo will soon kill off MyBlogLog, the service it acquired from the eponymous company behind it back in early 2007.Here's the message that was just emailed to all users (myself included):...

Two days ago, we first reported that Apple was likely to release a developer beta of OS X Lion "soon". Well, how's this for soon? This morning, alongside their new MacBook Pros, Apple has announce...

Happy Birthday, Steve! Just like the rumors stated, Apple refreshed the entire line of MacBook Pros today, which just so happened to be Steve Jobs' birthday. These new models aren't exactly revolution...

We're quite big fans of Airbnb, the "community marketplace for space" here at TechCrunch, and we're far from the only ones.This morning, the young company announced that it has hit a fairly big milest...

Syncapse, which bills itself as a social media technology company, has landed $25 million in financing from growth equity investor ABS Capital Partners, $20 million of which has already been closed. T...

Mediabistro.com, a division of online media and conferences company WebMediaBrands, this morning announced that it has acquired the assets of the Twittercism.com blog from founder Sha Bennett. As you ...

You could see this one coming from a couple of miles away: ChaCha, the questions and answers service provider, is suing smartphone maker HTC over trademark infringement. The lawsuit is obviously the r...

As you're undoubtedly aware by now, tomorrow (in just a few hours, really), Apple is expected to unveil their latest line of laptops. News has already started to trickle out about what's getting upgra...

On Monday, we've just shown you some leaked pictures, but we can now confirm the world's thinnest smartphone, NEC Casio Mobile's MEDIAS N-04C, is real. And provider NTT Docomo, Japan's biggest mobile ...

A freight brokerage is a service that brings together someone who wants to to transport goods (like oranges, or iPods) with the trucking company that wants to transport them. Open Mile, which is today...

Few tablets have met with such widespread anticipation as the recently-announced Xoom. It is the closest anyone has come to an iPad equivalent for the Android set. I was impressed with the speed, desi...

Disney has just acquired Togetherville, a social network for kids 10 years of age or younger, we've confirmed with the company. Terms of the acquisition are not being disclosed at the moment.Together...

We're now just over two weeks away from this year's SXSW event in Austin, Texas. And just as is the case every year, there will be several startups jockeying to be the one that is the breakout hit. Bu...

There's been a lot of speculation in recent months about where Twitter would put down a European base in its efforts to expand its operation. Certainly I've been bugging them in the last few weeks abo...

Google has been on a mission lately to outline some of the cooler, newer features coming to Chrome on their Chromium Blog. Today brings one of the biggest yet: Background Apps.This feature has existed...

Ever find yourself posting a ton of pictures to Twitter and Facebook and Dailybooth and so on and so forth, just to have them fall into the digital abyss? The people behind vvall, a stealthish mo...

A couple days ago, Readability was pissed off. In an open letter to Apple, they noted that the new subscription policy "smacks of greed". And they threatened to abandon Apple's platform in favor of th...

As medical records move online, doctors are increasingly bringing laptops into the exam room to take notes, write prescriptions and more. But laptops can be cumbersome, and the iPad has emerged as a p...

Meet the man who killed the television industry. In the mid Nineties, while he was looking at a Fry's ad, Anthony Wood invented the personal video recorder (PVR). From this epiphany, Wood founded Repl...

It isn't often that you hear about a startup that's remained in stealth through multiple multi-million funding rounds. But today, we're meeting a company called Transphorm that's done just that "...

Just Monday we were writing aboutBreakup Notifier, a Facebook app that raked in 100,000 users in less than 24 hours and as of 5 hours ago had a more than modest3,673,484 users in its database ... And ...

I'm not sure exactly how easy (or difficult) it is to come by stuff like this, but I for one thought it was pretty cool. Eli Feldblum and Mayer Reich, co-founders of RankAbove, emailed me a number of ...

The iPhone is great for gaming... in some ways. The App Store as a distribution model? Fantastic. The finely-tuned development platform? Amazing! The lack of even a single physical face button...

There's an age-old debate in Silicon Valley over whether or not you have to have started a company before to be a great VC. While many of the best VCs in Valley history weren't entrepreneurs, the bias...

StackOverflow co-founders Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood know their audience. The Q&A site popular with programmers is today launching its Careers 2.0 effort atcareers.stackoverflow.com, unveiling...

A Raleigh, North Carolina-based maker of thermoelectric coolers and generators, Phononic Devices, closed a $10 million series B investment from Venrock and Oak Investment Partners, the companies reve...

PCH International isn't your normal Chinese manufacturing company. They're located in Shenzhen, a sleepy fishing village in the 1970's that is now home to 9 million people. It's an Irish company, head...

Boom! One way or another, word of a March 2nd Apple event trickled out yesterday morning "  and sure enough, the invite just hit my inbox.Apple's straying from their generally coy approach w...

Chris O'Shea makes great stuff using a hacked Kinect. This latest experiment is a performance system called Little Magic Stories. It uses a Kinect sensor and a glass screen to create a "Pepper's Ghost...

Exclusive - Grey Area, a small Finnish smartphone games developer, has raised $2.5 million in Series A funding from Index Ventures, London Venture Partners and Initial Capital, TechCrunch has learned....

Search and online advertising juggernaut Google announced a couple of months ago that it would be providing some $5 million in grants to non-profit organizations devoted to innovating journalism. Arou...

Remember Archos? With all this talk of Droids v. iStuff, Archos' stable and handsome PMP/Tablet line has been cast by the wayside, relegated to a distant third place where it commiserates daily wi...

Do cell phones cause cancer? Some say yes. Some say no. Nobody knows. The frequencies and powers of the radiation used in them haven't been in use long enough for us to get decent long-terms studi...

Apple rumors are flying left and right, but the latest might just be the wildest of them all. This rumor states the upcoming MacBook Pro models will feature Intel's Light Peak high speed data connecti...

College textbook rental startup BookRenter has raised $40 million in funding from Adams Capital Management, Comerica Bank, Focus Ventures, Lighthouse Capital Partners, Norwest Venture Partners, and St...

Mobile social network MocoSpace is launching a $1 million HTML5 Mobile Game Developer Fund to accelerate the development of games played on smartphone browsers. MocoSpace develops a web-based social n...

Songtrust (founded in October, 2010) and Myspace Music this morning announced a partnership to bring Songtrust's music publishing management services to the social network's (vast) audience of DIY son...

SponsorPay, the European provider of advertisement-based payment systems, has raised further investment. This time the undisclosed funding comes from Nokia Growth Partners, the $350m fund with close t...

Digital sports media company Perform Group has acquired football site Goal.com for an undisclosed sum to stride into the direct-to-consumer market (via PaidContent).Perform will assume 100% ownership ...

It seems we only mention Google Calendar here on TechCrunch anymore when things inevitably go wrong - which means we get to cover the cloud-based calendaring service quite often, unfortunately.We've b...

Because it seems like it's Apple rumor day I'd thought I'd throw my (very small) hat in the ring. More than a year has passed since Final Cut Pro's last release and we've seen two reported Steve Jobs ...

Bandwidth.com, a supplier of VoIP network services to Skype, Pinger, and others, has acquired Dash Carrier Services, a provider of emergency calling telephony services (i.e. 911 calling). Terms of the...

AppSense, which specializes in what it calls 'user virtualization' solutions, has raised $70 million in its very first round of funding. Interestingly, the entire investment comes from one backer, Gol...

The iPad 2 nears! An iPad 3 is on the horizon! iPhone 5 is coming! Maybe an iPhone nano! New MacBook Pros! New iMacs! Maybe even an Apple television! Of all the Apple rumors out there right now, there...

In one more step towards the Groupon-ification of everyday life, ShopSavvy, the app that allows you to scan in a barcode, do a product lookup and find comprable deals on products nearby or online is a...

Companies like Exclusive Resorts and Quintess cater to the wealthy by giving them access to luxury home rentals at relatively reasonable prices. If you're traveling with a family or multiple couples, ...

As part of today's roll-out of Gingerbread updates to the Nexus One and Nexus S, Google also took an aggressive jab at Facebook: it has removed the ability of Facebook users to merge their "~...

Nexus One owners, the surprisingly long wait is (almost) over: today Google has begun pushing out the latest version of Android, codenamed Gingerbread, to Nexus One devices. The rollout will likely ta...

No, the FTC hasn't taken on Apple over its controversial 30% fee for subscription-based apps on the App Store. But, according to Cecilia Kang at the Washington Post, it is investigating whether the fe...

The Apple rumor economy has always been fascinating. More so than any other company, people obsess over little tidbits of information which may be true, may be half true, may be half false, or may be ...

If Chrome's best feature is its speed, it's second best feature has to be the Omnibox. I'm still not sure why every browser doesn't simply offer one box for both searching and typing in URLs. But the ...

Game developer Digital Chocolate has just announced a $12 million Series D funding round led by Intel Capital, with prior investors Sutter Hill Ventures and Bridgescale Partners participating in the r...

We’ve had a few weeks off for Ask a VC, but we’re back this week with Tony Conrad of True Ventures. Conrad is an interesting guy, because he’s a mix between an entrepreneur and a ven...

If you've ever opened the pixellated hell that is the Facebook iPhone app on the iPad, you'll realize that something must be done to improve our species ability to connect with friends and relations. ...

Here we go: speculation and alarums! AllThingsD has news of the latest Apple Media event and, although there is no time or location set, expect this event to be the unveiling of the iPad 2 or, if Grub...

Editor's Note: This is a guest post by Mark Suster, a 2x entrepreneur who has gone to the Dark Side of VC. He started his first company in 1999 and was headquartered in London, leaving in 2005 and sel...

Mobile payments company Square has made an interesting move today, which should put competitors Verifone and Intuit on notice. The startup is dropping the per transaction charge for any business using...

Back in the day, before the iPhone, before Android, before Webkit, before Skyfire, when we suffered through mobile web experiences using Pocket IE or worse yet maybe a preinstalled Motorola WAP 2.0 br...

It's a common criticism of popular Web services that don't yet make a lot of money: Where's the business model? That criticism has certainly been lobbed at Tumblr, the short-burst publishing plat...

The early successes of revolutionaries in Egypt seems to be touching off a number of other movements in the area, from Libya to Bahrain, and will likely spread further, as the fervor seems not to be d...

A fairly unnoticed story percolated through the interwebs this weekend about Alibaba's CEO and hundreds of employees being implicated in what amounts to a payola scandal. Alibaba is a site that allows...

New York City's Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg today announced the use of Quick Response or QR codes (which are something like a smartphone-readable barcode) on building permits, to provide New Yorkers wi...

We created subscriptions for publishing apps, not SaaS apps. " email attributed to Steve JobsThere's been so much confusion in the wake of A...

Oh, happy day! Angry Birds is now available for the PC. "But wait,"  you say. "There's no app store on Windows. How will I download it?"  Don't worry: Intel has you c...

The recent sale of sex.com, brokered by domain marketplace operator Sedo, has resulted in a Guinness World Record for "most expensive internet address domain name".Sex.com was sold for $13 millio...

Paydiant, a new Boston-based mobile payments startup, this morning announced that it closed a $7.6 million Series A round of funding led by North Bridge Venture Partners and General Catalyst Partners....

There a few platforms that aim to connect investors and startups on the web, including AngelList, but for the most part investment transactions and venture funding is done face-to-face, many times wit...

The rumor mill got one right. Amazon just launched the instant streaming service for Prime subs. The service opens up "5,000 movies and TV show at no additional cost" to those who pay for the Amazon P...

The next time you go out to dinner, look around. Depending on the restaurant, there will be anywhere from a few people with their heads buried in their phones, to a ton of people in that position. If ...

From the folks that brought you FlickSquare now comes 4SquareAnd7YearsAgo, a simple app that emails you with a reminder of where you've checked in on Foursquare from a year ago. All you need to to is ...

Previously video-hiring service HireHive, the founders behind Y Combinator-backed Hackruiter have taken the next logical step in being solving the problem of hiring good people, and have actually beco...

Earlier today there was quite a bit of commotion in the tech press over a Verizon ad that stated that Flash wouldn't be making its way to Android tablets until Spring 2011. Which has the potential to ...

In a perfect world, the fax machine would have taken the hint by now and made a graceful exit as it was supplanted by superior (and more environmentally friendly) technologies like email and e-signatu...

You read the headline "Android Market grows a staggering 861.5 per cent", and you think, "Wow, Android is really on a tear." But then you look at the fine print, and you realize that Android Market r...

Earlier today we received a tip to check out the blog Chrome OS Site for the details on the first official Chrome OS device. Obviously intrigued, I clicked through. There, I read about not a notebook ...

Last week, we got a Scion xB to drive. Our initial impression was that it looked "tastefully tuner"  and was very spacious inside. A quick glance over its tech and we quickly realized t...

Alibaba.com CEO David Wei and COO Elvis Lee have resigned this morning after an internal probe found that more than 2000 sellers on the e-commerce site were committing fraud, in some cases to the know...

On a dusty summer day in July 2009, I taught a young, impoverished refugee in Dadaab, Kenya, to earn money online.Paul Parach (pictured left, video below) had fled South Sudan at age seven and lived i...

In the never-ending debate between blogging and micro-blogging, Tumblr usually gets lumped in with Twitter and Facebook on the micro-blogging side. But Tumblr is actually somewhere in between the sta...

"Zuckerberg sometimes amused himself by conducting experiments. For instance, he concluded that by examining friend relationships and communications patterns he could determine with about 33 percent a...

Foursquare has just crossed 7,000,000 user IDs, which should mean that the location-based social network will be hitting 7 million registered users in the coming week. As we learned from the Foursquar...

Amazon has just released yet another new commercial for the Kindle, which again takes aim at its major competitor, the iPad. The commercial includes the fact that Amazon now has over 800,000 titles in...

Say goodbye to your address bar" maybe. Google is mulling over replacing the address bar found in its Chrome Web browser with something less intrusive (if that's the word to use). In one scenario...

Anyone with kids and a touchscreen device (Android, iPhone, iPad) knows one truth: kids love Angry Birds. My own 6-year-old is obsessed with the game and is constantly draining the batteries on my iP...

A month ago, we detailed a new location-based realtime chat service calledYobongo. At the time, co-founderCaleb Elston didn't want us to show shots of the app in action because it was still a work-in-...

Restaurant review company Zagat is best known for its print surveys that review and rank the best restaurants, bars and more in a particular city or region. But with the success of user-generated rev...

We've already been over (and over and over and over and over) Apple's new iOS subscription rules. And the initial backlash has seemingly cooled down as everyone has moved on to the next hot topic of t...

Threadless, one of the original crowdsourcing sites that pioneered the idea a decade ago and is now paying out more than $1 million a year in artist fees, is not just for T-shirts anymore. Today, th...

The Embedded Mobile House at the GSMA Mobile World Congress 2011? It sounded like science fiction to me or like one of those old IBM commercials hype-ing RFID for transportation logistics. It soun...

Using surveys for market research on Facebook and other social networks has become a popular way to gain consumer insight quickly and efficiently. Chicago-based Lab42 is an online market research star...

European streaming music startup Spotify is in the process of closing a very large financing, say multiple sources. DST, the venture firm that has backed Facebook, Groupon and Zynga, is said to be lea...

Right now Yahoo engineerJeremy Johnstone is my hero. Frustrated with with Flickr's lack of HTML5 support on the web, Johnstone -- whose position is currently "Technical Yahoo!" on the Yahoo For Good t...

Looks like Bill Gross' UberMedia has had its API access reinstated for at least two of its apps this Sunday afternoon, after a dramatic turn of events led to them being shut down on Friday. In their r...

With 45 million monthly active users on Facebook, CrowdStar is now the second largest social gaming network behind Zynga (which has 275 million monthly active users). Second in line in the social gami...

Last night at the dinner table we wrestled with the next generation in the form of our 17 year old. It all began when she asked to borrow my iPad for "a second." We had been discussing Lady Gaga's new...

Editor's note: This is a guest post written by TheIceBreak CEO Christina Brodbeck. Brodbeck is a UI designer, angel investor and entrepreneur based in San Francisco, CA.Women in tech. I hate to say it...

The Q&A land rush is on. Quora, of course, has been hyped to the moon, and not without reason. Fortune magazine recently profiled five more Q&A sites, and three new ones just launched: Cloudy,...

People always say things change fast in Silicon Valley. Here, and in other entrepreneurial communities around our country, ideas collide, companies form, money is injected, talent is allocated, and th...

Cultural relativity is an amazing thing. While American parents worry about their kids being on Facebook, Egyptian parents are naming their kids "Facebook," to commemorate the events surrounding the #...

Attention European startups based in or passing through London.I will be hosting regular "Office Hours" from now on so I can meet you and hear about your company.I'm initially trying an experiment by ...

On Friday afternoon, Paul J. Miller caused what passes for a kerfuffle inside the technology journalism meta-bubble.Miller, as you know, is "Senior Associate Editor" at our estranged sister site Engad...

In Francis Ford Coppola's 1972 film The Godfather, there's a scene between Tom Hagen (Robert Duvall) and Sonny Corleone (James Caan) that plays out like this:Tom: Your father wouldn't want to hear thi...

What was the best business decision VC Fred Wilson ever made? What was the worst? What part of his job does he dislike the most? The answers might surprise you. In the video above, Wils...

Publishers have been struggling for years. Now local newspapers, magazines and even the New York Times, that Grey Lady, are being treated like old ladies by Apple, stealing their pocketbooks while the...

The Gillmor Gang conflated two major stories this week into one: Apple's terms of service for app store approval, and Twitter's actions regarding UberMedia. The noise regarding Apple being hauled in f...

1996 was a great year in the life of the web. Netscape had launched two years earlier, Excite@home was going to wire all of our homes with unthinkably fast megabit connections, Webvan was going to del...

I sent my first e-mail message in 1995, to a member of my development team. That was the only person I knew who had an e-mail address in those days. I also did my first web search around that time. I ...

Last time we checked in with SecondMarket in late January, Facebook shares had declined from the auction's high point at $28.26 a share (a $70 billion + valuation) to $26.25 a share which means a...

Between the likes of picplz and Instagram, image-sharing sites are making plenty of headlines these days. And there's one obvious offshoot that seems ripe for similar services: video. Granted, Path o...

Want to come celebrate Sarah Lacy's new book with us in San Francisco? Here's your chance. We are giving away 10 free tickets to her launch party, all of which include a free signed copy of her cr...

It was back in July of last year that we first wrote about a service called Voyurl with the headline:It's Hard To Tell If Voyurl Or Their Ads Are Creepier. You see, at the time, the still-in-stealth s...

Both the BBC and the AFP are reporting thatMuammar Gaddafi's government in Libya has began to block user access to Facebook in the country's capital of Tripoli and are shutting down access to Internet...

The media world is in a tizzy over Apple's new subscription billing rules for iPad and iPhone apps. Basically, Apple will now take a 30 percent cut of all in-app subscription revenues and own all the...

I don't know how many times I've been visiting a city, looking for a place to work, and have just ended up in a Starbucks. I hate working in Starbucks. But I know they have WiFi, so I go there anyway....

Last week, Mike promised that, if Sarah Lacy's new book, Brilliant Crazy, Cocky, reached the number one slot in Amazon's Entrepreneurship category, we'd host a big launch party in San Francisco.At Tec...

This morning Twitter shut down UberMedia clients UberTwitter and Twitdroyd because of privacy violations for tweets more than 140 characters, monetization violations (concerning affiliate links) as we...

We've written a number of things about the contrast between native apps and web apps. The common consensus these days is that the two will eventually converge "  but that has been happening ...

I just got off the phone with UberMedia CEO and Idealab founder Bill Gross on the heels of Twitter's suspension of two of UberMedia's products, UberTwitter and Twidroyd, for violating Twitter's API ru...

TechCrunch Disrupt finalist Groupme has launched a cool new feature today, in advance of tomorrow's Foursquare hackday. People who link their Foursquare accounts to Groupme here can pull up an interfa...

Well this is interesting. According to this post, Twitter has suspended UberTwitter and Twidroyd for violating its policies.The action is even more fascinating considering that UberMedia, which opera...

It's as if Radiohead got the lion's share of Internet awareness, leaving the rest of the music industry completely clueless. Pretty much all anyone can talk about right now is Radiohead's The King of ...

We have given away an Apple iPad, Google Chrome Cr-48 Notebooks, a Dell Vostro V130 laptop, a Google Nexus S, and many other prizes over the last few months. We didn't want to disappoint this time aro...

White label daily deals platform and TC Disrupt finalist ChompOn is releasing some interesting data today comparing the value of shares, Tweets, likes and follows in the context of e-commerce. Using d...

The White House has just posted several photos from President Obama's dinner with a number of Silicon Valley's technology CEOs and leaders yesterday evening. As you can see from the photos, the star s...

The three Samwer brothers behind the highly successful European Founders Fund in Germany have sold their shares in Facebook, according to a report in the German press. Marc, Oliver and Alexander Samwe...

BeyondReality's Jeroen Mol has an interesting concept for his new Augmented Reality game slated to go live in the Android Market in the next month or so. His clever idea of using paper money notes as ...

eBay owns payments giant PayPal, and PayPal is deeply integrated within eBay's marketplace but both companies have operated fairly separately when it comes to APIs and developer relations. But interes...

Job hiring startup RoundPegg has raised $1.27 million in new funding led by Access Venture Partners with Croghan Investments participating. RoundPegg is a graduate of the TechStars class of 2010. Roun...

Few people are aware the San Francisco has had a tax provision in its municipal code since 2004 that requires companies to pay a payroll tax on gains from employee stock options. No one pays it, and S...