Articles by Techcrunch from May 2011

Twitter has been completely emphatic about where developers should stake a claim, with Twitter Platform Lead Ryan Sarver warning the ecosystem to stay away from building "client apps that mimic or rep...

Pew Internet, a think tank that regularly publishes research reports about technology, has released a new study today showing the steady growth in using VoIP and phone services online. According to th...

This is guest post by Ian Hogarth, co-founder of Songkick, relates how 45 startups in London's East End got tired of being over-shadowed by the financial sector in London and created their own event t...

In this episode of Founder Stories with host Chris Dixon, Reddit Founder, Alexis Ohanian takes Dixon back to his college days at the University of Virginia where he and co-founder Steve Huffman bonded...

According to several sources Airbnb is in the process of closing a whopper of a funding round: $100 million or more at a $1 billion-plus valuation. The round is being lead by Andreessen Horowitz, and ...

If you're in the United States, you're probably tired of hearing about Spotify, the on-demand music service that lets you to listen to any of 13 million tracks as often as you'd like on both your PC a...

Ashton Kutcher started dabbling in tech startups a few years ago, but he is no longer a dabbler, as his his Disrupt interview with Charlie Rose last week made clear. Kutcher is an investor in a dozen...

IAC-owned Match.com has set its sights on Europe's largest dating site, Meetic.com. Match Match.com has put in a public tender offer to acquire all of the outstanding shares of Meetic for 15.00 per ou...

Seems like it's Sub-Saharan Month around here: first Sarah Lacy went to Nigeria, and now here I am in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia's capital and Africa's fourth-largest city. It feels like a boomtown. There ...

Seth Sternberg is the CEO and Co-founder of Meebo. He previously worked in M&A at IBM. I love talking to aspiring entrepreneurs" I do it once a week at minimum. I often get asked "w...

Ever since my first TechCrunch meetup in Berlin in 2008 and 2009 I've been keeping a watchful eye on this city as I travelled around Europe covering startups and explaining the scene to anyone who wou...

Continuing our series of interviews with companies in the "Silicon Roundabout" area of London (we're calling this The Roundabout Tapes), we interviewed Clearer Partners.Clearer is a specialised tech/m...

The other day we were in Las Vegas, in a hotel that like all of Vegas stank of cigarettes and losers, which by definition included us for being there. We sat at a sushi restaurant, or what started wit...

Currently I am not in Cancun. The reason I am not in Cancun is out of my control (an over three hour Virgin delay on the tarmac at JFK caused me to miss my connecting USAirways flight at SFO). I spen...

This past Thursday, Twitter rolled out a new small feature that garnered quite a bit of positive buzz. Essentially, they now allow you to see what other users see when they look at Twitter. In other w...

This guest post was written by Ethan Kurzweil. Kurzweil is a Vice President with Bessemer Venture Partners in Menlo Park, California. He works with Internet companies of all types, including Playdom, ...

Last week at Disrupt, Chris Dixon did a version of Founder Stories onstage with Quora founder Charlie Cheever. We learned that Quora is not looking to sell, but we also learned a lot more. For insta...

Earlier this week, I took part in Infinity Ventures Summit (IVS) Spring 2011 in Sapporo [this and many of the following links are in Japanese], a two-day, invitation-only event that takes place twice ...

Thanks to Kickstarter, the idea of crowd-funding a creative project is nothing new. Post- Cory Doctorow, the notion that an established author might convince his fans to pay upfront for a special edit...

Thanks to Kickstarter, the idea of crowd-funding a creative project is nothing new. Post- Cory Doctorow, the notion that an established author might convince his fans to pay upfront for a special edit...

Well known US VC house Greylock Partners is launching a brand new $160 million fund aimed at internet technology companies, with the fund being deployed between Europe and Israel. Greylock is best kno...

Generally speaking, the odds are stacked heavily against the average startup. The rate of failure among entrepreneurs and startups is startlingly high -- it comes with the territory. Otherwise, entrep...

As we heard last fall, Cliqset, a FriendFeed like social aggregation platform, was shut down by its founders, Darren Bounds and Charlie Cauthen. Cliqset, which launched in 2009, was a high-powered soc...

Chris Dixonwraps his Founder Stories interview withGilt Groupe'sCEO and Founder,Kevin Ryanby discussing the early sales strategy of Gilt - a strategy that was designed to build customer and brand loya...

Chris Dixonwraps his Founder Stories interview withGilt Groupe'sCEO and Founder,Kevin Ryanby discussing the early sales strategy of Gilt - a strategy that was designed to build customer and brand loya...

August Capital recently announced that Oren Jacob, CTO of Pixar has joined as their newest entrepreneur in residence. After a few weeks on the job, I got a chance to interview Oren and ask him how his...

After 30 startups launching on stage at Disrupt NYC, it all culminated in the final battle between six finalists: Getaround, BillGuard, Sonar, Do@, ccLoop, and InvoiceASAP. What made this final battl...

This week's Gillmor Gang comes at the end of travel "  to New York for TechCrunch Disrupt and Las Vegas for the Forrester Analyst Forum. Disrupt continues to gather a head of steam, with the...

em>Editor's note: Adeo Ressi, is the founder ofThe Founder Institute and TheFunded.com In this guest post he argues against ageism when it comes to to entrepreneurs. Ressi is 39.The recent articl...

There are many local, regional and global startup competitions that startups can compete in. I'm a big believer in the value of these startup competitions for two big reasons" they are a gre...

The people who have brought you It'sthisforthat have created another way to make your life just a little bit easier and funnier. MeetDryerBro, an app that uses an accelerometer to let you know when yo...

Facebook has no iPad app. It's ridiculous. Their iPhone app is the most downloaded app in the history of apps. And third-party iPad apps (many of which aim to trick users) constantly dominate the top ...

While Baitr didn't win the TC Disrupt Hackathon, it did win the minds and hearts of those in attendance who had a tendency towards black humor. Baitr, a Launchrock-type viral launch page that does not...

Facebook shares on SecondMarket spiked briefly in March to $34 - an $85 billion valuation. But they settled down to around $31.50 after that and have mostly stayed around that level since then. But so...

Facebook shares on private secondary markets like SecondMarket and SharesPost spiked briefly in March to $34 - an $85 billion valuation. But they settled down to around $31.50 after that and have most...

The latest Disrupt has wrapped, but given the volume of news it created and the rate at which posts were pushing each other off the front page, you could be forgiven for missing a few items or videos ...

For as long as I can remember, there has been one app that has constantly held the top paid app spot in Apple's App Store: Angry Birds. Sure, other apps surge to the top briefly. But Angry Birds alway...

Munchonme is a daily deals site for food. But wait, before you click away to a slideshow about hot coders, Munchonme has got some features that might just reroute you from relying on the big G and com...

Most options for wood used in decks, outdoor furniture and siding are rarely entirely earth friendly, since they are often treated with heavy metals or toxic chemicals, or logged from unsustainable fo...

This 6-inch screen displays black and white e-ink text and images at 800x600 pixels and can roll around a tube the circumference of a dime. If this isn't the future of print, I don't know what is.Desi...

When it comes to building a web startup, the devil's often in the details. And keeping track of those details "  be it how far users get in your signup process, or how often they're clicking...

<Quora co-founder Charlie Cheever not only doesn't want to sell his hot start-up but "" as he told me backstage earlier this week at Disrupt "" he even has an explicit non-goal...

With WWDC quickly approaching, the rumor mills are heating up with what we should expect at Apple's annual conference known for big announcements. We've learned a little bit more that speaks to what t...

Late last year, travel search engine Kayak filed for an IPO, aiming to raise $50 million. The company just released a new version of its S-1 today, with updated financials. The company will list its ...

Yesterday, PayPal filed a lawsuit against Google and two of its executives for stealing trade secrets. The lawsuit came on the same day that Google announced its mobile wallet plans involving Android...

Pixable, a startup that develops sleek social photo creation and categorization tools for Facebook and other photo sharing sites, has released an infographic today that includes a number of impressive...

Respected European venture capital associate Katy Turner is leaving Eden Ventures to join video advertising startup Videoplaza, working as their head of marketing out of London. The startup is current...

We know that Google has big ambitions for flight search, as the search giant dropped $700 million on travel search software developer ITA Software. Today, the company just announced a few new flight s...

Our obsession with our smartphones has grown into a full-blown addiction, according to a new survey in the iPass Global Mobile Workforce Report. According to iPass, one of every three mobile workers g...

I am still recovering from Disrupt NYC. It was our biggest event ever, and we'll be posting more videos and highlights throughout the next few days. But here are a couple of charts that give a snaps...

We've gotten a lot of requests for our Disrupt conference theme music. Some conference attendees and webcast viewers apparently can't get the music out of their heads and want to hear it some more. I...

Google made a couple bold statements about its upcoming Chromebook tablet, many of which have certainly excited consumers, particularly the promise of an end to security hassles. In the Chromebook lau...

As we've suspected for a long time, Apple is very close to launching an online music service which may go by the name iCloud. The basic idea is that it will mirror your iTunes collection online so th...

Streaming video player developer Roku has partnered with video advertising company YuMe to allow content owners to provide video advertising for media. DreamTV and Blastro Networks are among the first...

Best. first. quarter. evar. Some good news in today from the online advertising industry: The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) has announced that online advertising revenues hit $7.3 billion in th...

Google is making a bold play to enter mobile payments, and PayPal doesn't like it one bit. Shortly after Google announced its new mobile wallet for Android phones today, Paypal filed a lawsuit again...

The chief executive officers of two very different clean tech startups, Brammo and EcoMotors, discussed the relative merits and limitations of clean vehicle technology today, at TechCrunch Disrupt in ...

The chief executive officers of two very different clean tech startups, Brammo and EcoMotors, discussed the relative merits and limitations of clean vehicle technology, at TechCrunch Disrupt in New Yo...

It's probably not a good sign that I'm this excited about an email widget, but there you go.Google has just announced that it's rolling out a new feature over the next week called the People Widget&qu...

Twitter has just rolled out a nifty little feature. Now on anyone's profile, when click on the "Following" link, you'll be able to see exactly how they see Twitter. In other words, you can see the sam...

Tumblr founder David Karp and Instagram founder Kevin Systrom took the stage at TechCrunch Disrupt to talk about the hockey stick growth of their respective companies. Tumblr in particular is showing ...

Editor's Note: This is a guest post by (@msuster) Mark Suster, a 2x entrepreneur, now VC atGRP Partners. Read more about Suster atBothsidesofthetableThere is an old management adage that says, "H...

It was almost exactly a year ago that Diaspora started raising money on Kickstarter. A few weeks later, they had raised $200,000 from nearly 6,500 backers. Why so much excitement? Because Diaspora...

We're here at Google's NFC payments announcement, where the search giant has announced a new, important product called Google Wallet (see our comprehensive post on the announcement here). Google Walle...

Exclusively.In, a members-only niche flash sales site for fashion, jewelry and home decor from Indian artisans and designers, has raised $16 million in new funding led by Tiger Global Management, wit...

Today, during their Google Wallet/Offers unveiling at the NYC headquarters, Google touted the openness of their new system. Naturally, someone asked a question about what this meant for other, non-And...

Exclusive - Fotomoto, which offers a fairly innovative way for photographers, artists and content publishers to sell images and other products meant to print simply by adding a line of javascript cod...

We're here at Google's massive New York City HQ (they own an entire block) for what Google was calling a "partner event" but everyone knew was really an "NFC event". Sure enough, Stephanie Tilenius, G...

Earlier this week we gave you a little sneak peek at the new Livescribe Connect service but we also looked a bit more closely at the T-Mobile G-Slate, Big Fuchsia's wild 3D tablet. Erick was generally...

Ad network Reply has acquired online marketing network for small business owners MerchantCircle for $60 million in cash and stock. The transaction is expected to be completed in Q3 2011. Merchant Circ...

There are a lot of companies out there trying to leverage the social graph to make discovering new products, services, or tools -- whatever the case may be -- easier and more personalized. But, when i...

WePay, a Y Combinator backed startup that aims to take the hassle out of group paying, is unveiling a new ticketing feature that allows users to sell tickets online for events. As we've written in our...

Yesterday at TechCrunch Disrupt NYC, Marissa Mayer, Google's location boss, projected that Google Maps would be accessed more by mobile than PC by 2012, so it's no surprise that the search giant has e...

Exclusive - Zozi has landed $7 million in Series B financing from existing investors, TechCrunch has learned. The startup, which offers deals on unique local things to do, raised capital from LaunchCa...

There has been some interesting speculation regarding the relationship between hot (at least in Europe) music streaming service Spotify and gargantuan social platform Facebook. Now Forbes is reporting...

Mobile entertainment startup mSpot is launching a new feature for its cloud music service today" Radio Spotter. mSpot lets you upload your music to the cloud, after which it can be streamed ...

Stealthy startup Project Slice is launching to the public today and announcing a $9.4 million Series A funding round led by DCM and Lightspeed Venture Partners with Michael Birch, FLOODGATE, Eric Schm...

Earlier this week, Amazon offered the new album from superstar Lady Gaga, 'Born This Way', for a mere $0.99 in an effort to get people to discover its recently launched Cloud Drive / Player service. O...

Three days and 32 startup pitches later, the winner of TechCrunch Disrupt has been determined. Out of the 30 startups and two audience choice winners, we whittled the list down to six finalists, which...

Looking for a startup with a healthy dollop of hubris, a sense of humor, and a shroud of secrecy? Meet Amen, a company that claims to be offering "the best job in the world".At this point we don't...

Google is holding an event tomorrow in New York City. While everyone seems to be aware that it's a partner event to announce the NFC strategy for their Android phones, Google has refused to confirm it...

TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield finalist Getaround is already disrupting the current car sharing industry, only a day after its launch. As we wrote yesterday, GetAround is a car rental market place whe...

At the TC Disrupt startup battlefield finals, after Sonar CEO's product demo (Sonar is an app that introduces you to the people relevant around you) TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington asked founder B...

As some of you may have read, I was all set to step on a plane on Sunday to head to New York City for TechCrunch Disrupt. Then a giant volcano exploded.But being stranded in Iceland wasn't all bad. Fi...

We're live at, the very final Battlefield of TechCrunch Disrupt New York, where six finalists are duking it out for $50,000 and the coveted Disrupt Cup.We'll be maintaining our live notes below "...

4Chan and Canvas founder Christopher Poole (Moot) took the stage to talk to Erick Schoenfeld about creating vibrant online communities. Poole revealed that that the eight-year-old 4Chan is averaging 8...

4Chan and Canvas founder Christopher Poole (Moot) took the stage to talk to Erick Schoenfeld about creating vibrant online communities. Poole revealed that that the eight-year-old 4Chan is averaging 8...

Today at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York City, Google's Marissa Mayer sat down with our own Michael Arrington. She's an old pro dealing with Mike "  she's actually been to every event we've e...

Today we tried something new at TechCrunch Disrupt: a special, on-stage office hour with Y Combinator cofounder Paul Graham. The goal was to reproduce the sessions that Graham and other YC partners ho...

TechCrunch Disrupt winner and alum Qwiki took the stage today for an update on news from the startup. What makes Qwiki so compelling is its ability to generate media on the fly that combines text, aud...

Enamored of the shiny orange Brammo Enertia electric motorcyle adorning the stage during the latest presentations here at Disrupt NYC, Michael Arrington decided that it should be given away. Never min...

With today's announcement by Twitter CEO Dick Costolo of the Tweetdeck acquisition, the shape of the next layer of micro messaging begins to come into focus. What BetaWorks CEO and co-founder John Bor...

It's been exactly one year since mobile ad network AdMob was officially acquired by Google for $750 million, after intense scrutiny of the deal by the FTC. Over the past year, Google has been working ...

We've written previously about NearVerse's mobile app LoKast, a proximity based mobile social network. Today, the company is debuting a new version of its iOS app, which combines group messaging with ...

In four months simple Mac mail client Sparrow has been downloaded over 300K times, has raised $250K in funding from luminaries like Dave Morin and from Tweetie creator Loren Brichter."We're not adding...

In four months simple Mac mail client Sparrow has been downloaded over 300K times, has raised $250K in funding from luminaries like Dave Morin and from Tweetie creator Loren Brichter."We're not adding...

Square COO and angel investor Keith Rabois took the stage today with Michael Arrington at TechCrunch Disrupt to discuss the mobile payments product, his investment strategy and more. As you may know, ...

We are live in New York for the last day of TechCrunch Disrupt NYC. We have heard from amazing speakers, seen some unbelievable startups, and have given away many prizes. Since we know many of you wer...

Boom. After about a thousand blog posts, Twitter has officially announced that it has bought TweetDeck.BothCNNand Mike have reported that the total price of the sale was $40 million.Twitter emphasized...

At the "Disrupting Publishing from Tablets to Links" panel at TechCrunch Disrupt, 'The Daily' Publisher Greg Clayman revealed an interesting milestone about Rupert Murdoch's foray into tablet publishi...

Kickstarter started as a way for bands to fund projects without asking for money from Grandma. Now it's the go-to site for thousands self-funded projects and the company recently surpassed the facilit...

Speed and security are essential for the success of any website, so a free service that supercharges your site and pr Speed and security are essential for the success of any website, so a free service...

Today at our TechCrunch Disrupt conference in New York, Airbnb co-founder Brian Chesky had some news to share on stage when talking to our own Erick Schonfeld. Apparently, Airbnb will be launching a n...

Today at our TechCrunch Disrupt conference in New York, Uber CEO Travis Kalanick and Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky took the stage with our own Erick Schonfeld to talk about the disruption they're offering u...

Mobile ad network Millennial Media is making a purchase today"  mobile data startup Condaptive. Condaptive's technology focuses on audience formation and development through the innovative...

On the heels of its recent acquisition of DealADayOnline in Chicago, BuyWithMe today announced that it has acquired Groop Swoop, a social commerce company focused on San Francisco.BuyWithMe rivals Gro...

Today, at TechCrunch Disrupt, editor Erick Schonfeld took the stage to interview Alex Rampell, TrialPay; Stephanie Tilenius, VP of Google Commerce and Payments, and Lewis Gersh, Metamorphic Partners;...

Any seasoned investor knows that past performance is not indicative of future returns. That is as true with public stocks as it is with venture capital firms. But if someone were to ask you to rank th...

Hey, we'd love to hit 3 billion views today, too. It's the third day of TechCrunch Disrupt, and it just keeps getting better and better. Tune into the event live after the proverbial jump - you can ch...

YouTube is celebrating its sixth birthday this month, and the Google subsidiary is doing it partly by sharing some big numbers that underscore its overwhelming dominance in the online video streaming ...

YouTube is celebrating its sixth birthday this month, and the Google subsidiary is doing it partly by sharing some big numbers that underscore its overwhelming dominance in the online video streaming ...

Tech blog and research startup Giga Omni Media (GigaOm) has raised another $6 million in venture capital, on top of the $8.33 million previously raised. New investor Reed Elsevier Ventures led the rou...

Andreessen Horowitz-backed mobile gaming company TinyCo is launching a new $5 million investment fund, called the TinyFund, to help support mobile game developers.TinyCo, which just raised $18 million...

BuzzLogic says it is no longer an online monitoring company, and that it has pivoted to an "online media company that improves brand metrics and ROI through its media index and analytics platform". I'...

You may remember TechCrunch Disrupt winner Soluto, which helps bring an end to PC user frustration from printing problems, annoying add-ons, apps that crash, resource hogs, and those frustrating appli...

Well-known tech executive turned high-profile investor Peter Thiel, former PayPal CEO and an early backer of Facebook, this morning announced the appointment of the first 24 Thiel Fellows.These are re...

You know what's hipper than Hipster? Actually launching.OK, that's not quite what the three-person team behind new local Q&A site Gootip said but it's true that this tiny French startup launch...

Exclusive - In a conversation with TechCrunch writer Jason Kincaid after his panel on scaling fast-growing Internet businesses, Tumblr CEO David Karp talks not only about his lazy dog but also some ne...

Brightpearl, which provides a cloud-based integrated suite of applications for SMEs, has secured $5 million in Series A funding from Notion Capital and Eden Ventures. Both VC firms have previously bac...

Exclusive - Open Ocean, a recently established venture capital firm co-founded by the investors who closed the $1 billion sale of MySQL to Sun Microsystems, has just finalized its Fund Three with appr...

Today, at Disrupt NYC, CEO & Co-founder of Hunch Chris Dixon, Ron Conway of SV Angel, CEO of Betaworks John Borthwick, Managing Partner of High Line Ventures Shana Fisher , and former CEO of The H...

Thirty new startups have battled it out in front of a live audience and judges over two days at TechCrunch Disrupt: New York. Tomorrow at 3:30 EST six of those startups will show their stuff again in ...

Amazon is now offering the Kindle 3G, originally $190, for $164 with "offers." This new version integrates 3G wireless alongside Wi-Fi, something the new Nook pointedly does not have. This new version...

Today at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York, the winner of the audience award was CodeGuard. The idea can be summed up simply: "We are a time machine for your website," notes their founders.Essentially, t...

Of all the things written about the heavily funded Color, there is no denying that it's confusing to a lot of people, at least at first. Updates have helped this a bit, but the app relies so much on t...

Groups are all the rage right now. Facebook is focusing on them. Google is thought to be focusing on them. GroupMe, Beluga, etc. The fact that so many companies are focusing on them shows a common bel...

CatchFree is making its formal debut at Disrupt today with the unveiling of a social platform that allows people to discover and sharing the best free(mium) software and services online. The startup j...

Meporter is a location-based news app that enables you to write, photograph, and record video of your local news as it breaks, and then to share those stories with anyone who owns a mobile phone or h...

The pitch behind Madbrook Publishing's first product is pretty amazing. It seems like it should for sure be a joke. But it's not. It's Everything Butt Art.No, that's not a typo. The product is not &qu...

InvoiceASAP, which launched at TechCrunch Disrupt today, is a cloud-based invoice app that allows you to easily create and send professional invoices, estimates, sales orders and receipts. The app pro...

Carnegie Mellon student and a future Google intern Sohail Prasad built a working torrent streamer at this weekend's TC Hackaton and demoed it to us today after tweaking a few things. The product will ...

If you're looking to give Windows a facelift with some interesting UI tweaks, you may be interested in Lumier, a new startup that just presented at TechCrunch Disrupt. The company quietly raised a see...

Tracking the success and productivity for sales reps can be a challenge for any organization. Foretuit, which launches today at TechCrunch Disrupt, maps sales employees' business behavior and determin...

A little "I'll show you mine, if you show me yours"  seems to be going down between handset makers Samsung and Apple during their ongoing patent battle, only Apple has become that kid t...

TechCrunch's Michael Arrington recently wrote a post praising the fighting spirit of a little startup called Octopart. The New York City-based startup is a search engine for electronic parts that enab...

Launching in public beta today at Disrupt is ccLoop, a previously stealth startup founded by serial entrepreneur Michael Wolfe that aims to tackle one of the biggest problems with modern communication...

Round three from day one focused on "Disrupting Commerce." These are companies that hope to displace giants like Amazon, eBay, and so on. Not exactly easy prey, but these guys think they've got a uniq...

BlablabLab and 3D Systems (along with some help from Sonos) set up an amazing exhibit at Techcrunch Disrupt. Essentially, it's a 3D scanner/printer that grabs a 3D copy of your body and then prints it...

Launching today at the Disrupt conference, Thinkfuse is all about TPS status reports, more specifically making it easier to share and manage weekly status reports in order to assist organizations in a...

I'm a big fan of my Kindle DX. It's literally my favorite gadget. I love the form factor, the large screen, the relatively good battery life and the keyboard. Amazon could eliminate any of those items...

A couple of days ago, we got a tip pointing us to a YouTube page with a bit of interesting information. On Google's official account there was a placeholder page for a "Google Press Conference". We we...

In the collaborative consumption space with startups like AirBnb and TaskRabbit, Getaround is a car rental market place where you can rent a car by the day, hour or week through a smartphone app. Geta...

The second round of presentations from our Startup Battlefield is here for you to enjoy, in case you missed them yesterday. This round focused on "Disrupting Location, Location, Location." To be hones...

Today at TechCrunch Disrupt, Sequoia Capital partner Roelof Botha took the stage for an interview with Michael Arrington, where they discussed everything from startup valuations to Sequoia's biggest m...

Parents worry about their kids. It's what they do. Sometimes with reason, sometimes not. But now, thanks to MotherKnows, parents will be able to verify whether there is medical justification for their...

Healthcare is expensive, and it's increasingly suffering from overinflation. It seems that, while what we pay for consumer goods has tended to increase at a normal rate, healthcare costs have sky-rock...

According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, heart disease is the leading cause of death in the United States. As this is the case, there are many of us in the U.S. -- and across the g...

From kindergarten through college, today classrooms are more wired than ever before. Touchscreen devices and next generation projectors are becoming the norm, WiFi proliferates, and seemingly every ot...

Aside from being a partner at Kaulfield Perkins and Byers, Bing Gordon writes poetry. When our very own Mike Arrington asked him to write one up on the fly about 45 minutes before he went on stage. Th...

PCH International is one of those quirky, successful mid-size companies you've probably never heard of. For starters, PCH is a Chinese manufacturing company named after a California highway that has ...

Evernote, once described to me as "my remote brain", is releasing a new Google Chrome extension today to make clipping and saving webpages easier than ever. It's optimized to grab the body of any blog...

Nature, the folks who brought you the free life sciences learning community Scitable, are today announcing "Principles of Biology", a college level electronic textbook. Building upon the cross-platfor...

Harvest Power, a company that makes energy and fertilizer products from organic waste, added $6 million to its series B, $51.7 million round, with Rabobank's SAM Private Equity group, which focuses o...

Here at TechCrunch Disrupt Kevin Systrom has just announced a new milestone for photo service instagram, at 10 photos per second, up 6 photos per second a couple of months ago. "That growth we saw las...

Here at TechCrunch Disrupt Kevin Systrom has just announced a new milestone for photo service instagram, at 10 photos per second, up 6 photos per second a couple of months ago. "That growth we saw las...

Today at TechCrunch Disrupt, gaming industry vet and KPCB partner Bing Gordon took the stage with our own Michael Arrington for a special fireside chat that covered a broad range of topics, including ...

Lark, a silent waking system that wakes you silently and naturally, is announcing big news today. After launching at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco last Fall, the company is announcing the publi...

Today at Microsoft's Windows Phone VIP Reception, president of mobile communications Andy Lees and senior Windows Phone product manager Derek Snyder gave us a quick rundown of what to expect out of th...

What many people do not know about actor and angel investor Ashton Kutcher is that he's been interested in science and technology from a young age, starting out at the University of Iowa as a biomedic...

After pricing its IPO at $25 per share a few hours before the market opened, the Russian search giant's share price jumped by 40% immediately after the opening bell was rung.The price per share opened...

Today, TechCrunch editor Erick Schonfeld sats down with Moat's Mike Walrath, Facebook's ad chief Carolyn Everson, Medialets' Eric Litman and RadiumOne's Gurbaksh Chahal to address the disruptions in...

Today, TechCrunch editor Erick Schonfeld sat down with Moat's Mike Walrath, Facebook's ad chief Carolyn Everson, Medialets' Eric Litman and RadiumOne's Gurbaksh Chahal to address the disruptions in ...

Exclusive - Mobile communications startup fring, fresh off the heels of launching group video calls for smartphones, has raised a Series C round of financing from existing investors, TechCrunch has le...

The second day of TechCrunch Disrupt NYC just kicked off with a bang as Y Combinator cofounder Paul Graham sat down with world-renowned interviewer and journalist Charlie Rose. The topic of conversati...

Barnes & Noble just unveiled the latest and greatest Nook ereading device at a special NYC event. It's a simple device, really. In fact B&N stated that this revamped Nook is the easiest to use...

Brightcove is no longer just for videos. Starting today, it is launching an entire new product line for making mobile and web apps called Brightcove App Cloud. Developers will be able to use App Clo...

We're coming at you live from the Barnes & Noble superstore/cafe/public bathroom on Union Square where we hope to see an update to the Nook line. It's my understanding that we'll be seeing a new N...

Israeli startup Siano Mobile Silicon, a developer of mobile digital TV receiver chips, has just raised a $20 million in funding led by Jerusalem Venture Partners. This brings the startup's total fundi...

Yesterday, Mike broke the news on stage at Disrupt that SV Angel is doubling down with Yuri Milner once again to invest in all willing Y Combinator grads. Today, SV Angel is announcing another partner...

Opera Software makes some damn fine browsers, as tens of millions of people around the world can attest. Apple products like the iPhone 4 and the iPad, of course, come with a decent mobile version of ...

If you're not at TechCrunch Disrupt, you're missing out. I mean even MG flew in all the way from Iceland to finally get here. But incase you are stuck at ugh, work we've embedded the livestream above....

We're in the middle of a new industrial revolution. Over 2 bilion people are connected to the Internet - a third of the world's population and three billion have cell phones. Internet and mobile use ...

Yandex, one of the leading Internet companies in Russia, this morning announced the pricing of its initial public offering of a little under 52.2 million Class A ordinary shares at $25.00 per share. ...

Conversocial is a real-time social media management system which lets companies run marketing and customer support through Facebook Pages and Twitter. While competitors like coTweet, Hootsuite, Tweetd...

Word has been circulating for weeks now that Twitter was soon to be swooping up the popular third-party app. In early May, Mike Arrington reported that the deal was as good as done, but the two compan...

Jeff Jarvis is the creator of Entertainment Weekly, a San Francisco Examiner columnist, the Associate Publisher of The Daily News, and a consultant to new media companies -- in other words, a veteran ...

Symantec, the computer software security giant, has announced that it will be acquiring enterprise-class eDiscovery management platform maker, Clearwell Systems for $390 million. Symantec is probabl...

Our first batch of Startup Battlefield presentations is available for you to watch. Click on through for the "Disrupting Search and Discovery" range of companies and let them shock you with their bras...

The TechCrunch Disrupt Startup Alley audience choice winner today is Happy Toy Machine, which allows you to design and create plush toys online. The site allows adults and children to customize their ...

My Mom meticulously scans every credit card, cable or cell phone bill to ensure that no errors have been made or hidden fees have been issued. I, on the other hand, don't have the time or the patience...

Sticking to a budget can be a challenge no matter how big or small your income is. While Mint.com gives you access into where your money is going, it doesn't incentivize or motivate you to stick to a ...

Finding a new hair stylist in a city is a challenging and very important task. For me, I happen to be very particular about how I like my hair cut, styled and highlighted. While Yelp provides a databa...

Never get into a fight with people who have more expensive lawyers. Lodsys, the patent trolls trying to make people license a dubious feature based on in-app sales, received a letter from Apple's wolv...

Twitter just sent out a Tweet notifying users that starting today, the startup is "rolling out an email notification that lets you know if someone you follow retweets or favorites one of your Tweets."...

When Omar Hamoui left Google a few months after selling AdMob to the search giant for $750 million, he set up shop with mobile engineer Mike Rowehl as Churn Labs. Today at Disrupt NYC, we get to see...

It's no secret that e-commerce is growing like gangbusters. Last year alone, consumers spent a $142 billion on online retail spending. SneakPeeq, a startup launching today at TechCrunch Disrupt, aim...

"Ping me when you're in New York," you tell your friends, but then you forget to text and the next thing you know you're on an outbound flight at JFK and you haven't even seen anyone you went to ...

Using almost every publicly available profile, Facebook, Linked, Foursquare, Instagram, Eventbrite etc, mobile app Sonar, shows you who, how many, and why particular people are relevant to you in a ro...

Like a combination Tango, Skype and Facebook and Charoulette (or a Chatroulette for Facetime), Karizma is a location based video chat messenger that banks on the theory that people want to video chat ...

Google has made an acquisition today" Sparkbuy, a 'kayak for electronics.'Sparkbuy, which has raised $1 million in funding, is a high-powered product search engine and comparison shopping si...

Need to find an amazing Hatha Yoga classin the West Village? Want a press friendly restaurant in Soma. New app SpotOn takes into account existing data like Foursquare checkins, Facebook Likes and ...

There's little question that the iPad is one of the best media consumption devices ever. It's also been a hotbed for innovation around content recommendation, with apps like Flipboard giving you a vis...

Remember lonelygirl15? But of course you do (and if not, Wikipedia and YouTube search are your friends). Either way, it looks like some of the creators behind the interactive Web-based video serie...

There has been a flurry of photo sharing apps released over the last year, with notables including Instagram, Picplz, and Path. These apps tend to focus on the photos that have been shared by your fri...

Looking for something to do this weekend without having to sift through your newspaper or scour the web for a fun event? Weotta, a new startup launching today at TechCrunch Disrupt, is looking to ...

Ah, the power of choice. Browse through your Facebook News Feed or Twitter stream and you're going to be assaulted with an endless array of links, shared songs, videos, and products. Add a few more to...

A couple years ago, Steve Jobs drew a line in the sand between mobile apps and search. "On a mobile device," he declared, "search hasn't happened. Search is not where it's at. People aren't searchin...

TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington took the stage today to interview AOL CEO Tim Armstrong. It was actually at TechCrunch Disrupt New York last year where Armstrong first approached Arrington about b...

Social gaming company CrowdStar has had an impressive run of competing with giants like Zynga, EA and Disney with only $100,000 in funding. The company is the fifth largest social gaming app developer...

Social enterprise giant Jive is continuing its its shopping spree today, picking up OffiSync, an Israeli startup that adds a collaboration layer to Microsoft Office applications, we've confirmed. The ...

Mobile payments startup Square is announcing big numbers today" 500,000 Square card readers shipped, 1 million Square transactions in May, and the startup is now processing $3 million in mob...

It's no secret that disruptive mobile payments startup Square is growing fast. And today, CEO Jack Dorsey revealed a few more milestones for the company" 500,000 Square card readers shipped,...

Here at TechCrunch Disrupt Investor Chris Dixon interviewed Quora founder Charlie Cheever about the future of Quora and sundry other things namely how to avoiding becoming Yahoo answers.Said Cheever, ...

Here at TechCrunch Disrupt Investor Chris Dixon interviewed Quora founder Charlie Cheever about the future of Quora and sundry other things namely how to avoiding becoming Yahoo answers.Said Cheever, ...

Today at TechCrunch Disrupt, Path founder and CEO Dave Morin unveiled the latest version of the privacy-focused photo sharing app. And it brings with it one key, new feature that could change how you ...

When it comes to public interaction with the stock market, the ability to trade stocks online has completely changed the game. With abundant financial information on the Web, through a little research...

So this is interesting. At TechCrunch Disrupt, Path's co-founder Dave Morin sat down with our own Jason Kincaid to discuss Path's strategy and growth. During the conversation, Kincaid asked Morin abou...

Livescribe smartpens allow you to record and send the ink you draw or write on paper. They also record the surrounding audio so you can sync the audio with the drawings, something that's great for stu...

Ashton Kutcher fans who can't get enough of the star on Twitter are about to get some very good news. And the rest of you "  even if you aren't necessarily huge Ashton fans "  will...

Entrepreneurs are inherently individuals, so rolling their experiences up into trends isn't easy. That's made worse because 95% of the returns come from 5% of the companies. So what everyone does, doe...

Here's the awful thing about having Mike Arrington as an investor in your fund. You don't get to control over when you announce it. Arrington is on stage with Ron Conway and David Lee of SV Angels rig...

My boss, Michael Arrington, sat down with his boss (and my boss as well), Arianna Huffington for a brief chat at TechCrunch Disrupt, where Huffington revealed that she tried to 'merge' the Huffington ...

There are a lot of startups out there trying to make SMS messaging more affordable. I won't even name them all here. But, I'd argue there isn't a clear market leader as of yet, so with the right team,...

Local darling and Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley took the stage at TechCrunch Disrupt to talk to Mike Arrington about anything but acquisitions, partnerships, valuations or the rumors of a possible Gro...

Rent the Runway's slogan might as well be: Friends don't let friends wear H&M to the most important events in their lives. The company solves the perennial "closet full of clothes and yet nothing ...

Kobo launched as a Borders-based alternative to the Kindle hegemony, and while their e-reader was perfectly decent, I wouldn't say it was feature-competitive with Amazon's latest. They've announced to...

HP's upcoming tablet, the Touchpad and not the PalmPad in case you missed the memo, will be better than number one. You could call it number one plus. That's exactly what HP's European head recently s...

INQ, one of the first partners to add the Facebook layer to its Cloud Touch phone has announced today that it will be using the Foursquare location layer to visualize location content for its users.Th...

At TechCrunch Disrupt, Erick Schonfeld interview prolific investor Fred Wilson, an early investor in Twitter, Foursquare, and Zynga. When Schonfeld asked him about the Twitter ecosystem, and the compa...

To kick off TechCrunch Disrupt today in New York, Erick Schonfeld took the stage to interview investor Fred Wilson, of Union Square Ventures. For background, Wilson was early investor in Twitter, Zyng...

Tremor Media, one of the largest video ad networks on the web, is launching a new product today to give marketers more insight into how video ad campaigns are performing. The Tremor Video Hub is an a...

As we kickoff of our second annual TechCrunch Disrupt conference, we're clearly not the only ones who think there's a substantive ecosystem brewing here beneath all the hype and the froth; Lerer Ventu...

Lazy bloggers and other online content creators from around the world, rejoice, for Eightfold Logic (formerly Enquisite) is today debuting a cloud-based social writing tool dubbed InboundWriter that s...

While there's no replacement for actually being at TechCrunch Disrupt, we realize that not everyone can make it for one reason or another (like me, for example, due to massive volcanic activity). As s...

Global Telecom & Technology (GTT), a global carrier and network integrator, has acquired privately-held UK company PacketExchange in an effort to scale its business internationally. GTT will pay u...

It's that time of the half-year again! Time for TechCrunch Disrupt - or as it's officially titled this year: AOL-HuffingtonPost-TechCrunch Disrupt, Part III: Back In Training.For me, the highlight of ...

We are only a few hours away from kicking off the third TechCrunch Disrupt conference in New York and we are thrilled to announce the 29 startups that were chosen out of nearly 1,000 applicants to pit...

It's been over 3.5 years since Seedcamp was launched to help establish Europe as a great place for startups, and how things have changed since then. From where I'm standing, the European startup scene...

Gtrot, a service that leverages Facebook to help people make traveling decisions, is announcing a new round of funding from Lightbank. The company is declining to reveal the exact size of the round bu...

Google seems to be going out of their way not to promote Disco, the group messaging app built by Google's Slide team. When we first revealed the existence of the iPhone app and website (at disco.com) ...

Bleacher Report-- one of the few new entrants in the sports content category to get significant traction against the portal giants-- is continuing to build out its management team, announcing an impor...

TechCrunch Disrupt kicks off in about 3 hours. So naturally I'm sitting in a bar in Iceland.Why? Well, the entire story is kind of long and many parts are probably more appropriate for a Paul Carr...

On the heels of raising a whopping $50 million in venture capital, Eventbrite will announce today that former Netflix CFO Barry McCarthy has joined the company's board of directors. McCarthy was Netfl...

Tesco's wholly owned subsidiary Dunnhumby has acquired Boston based BzzAgent for around $60 million, we've confirmed. The companies will announce the acquisition today but is not disclosing the terms ...

Software AG, a provider of business process management solutions with revenues of 1.1 billion in 2010, has acquired Terracotta, which develops and markets software for application scalability, availab...

Australia's online retailing group CatchOfTheDay, which operates e-commerce site CatchOfTheDay.com.au and daily deal site Scoopon.com.au, has raised an undisclosed amount of funding (presumably around...

One of the winners at today's TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon is Docracy, an open source site where users can share and sign legal documents, similar to what GitHub provides for code. The site is the bra...

Q&A platform for video VYou is announcing today $3 million in Series A funding, lead by RRE Ventures and Highland Capital Partners and followed on by High Peaks Ventures, Broadway Video Ventures, ...

A 5:45 this morning, a man told another man to walk into traffic blindfolded. Using an iPhone app connected to their service, joysti.cc, Jarod Reyes moved Jon Gottfried trough light traffic in what am...

Three friends, including a 17-year-old high schooler, who met at New Work City, a co-working space, built Dispach.io to solve the problem of disperse information. The product, as it exists currently, ...

Here's why I'm glad I was wrong about RSS being dead. The latest evidence of that comes from Jesse Stay who reported a week or so ago that both Facebook and Twitter had discontinued RSS streams or som...

So you think you have what it takes to build a ground breaking app that will change the world? Do you have what it takes to accomplish that in just a little under 24 hours? Starting yesterday,...

Former DoubleClick CEO,Kevin Ryanledthe company through a period of explosive growth in the late '90's. He took the ad-targeting company from a handful of employees to more than 2,000 in just 4 years ...

Many companies and IT administrators are reluctant to move directly into the public cloud for file sharing and storage. Today, GroupLogic is unveiling a new product, mobilEcho, which attempts to give ...

In case you missed it, hackers were busy building new ideas and products at TechCrunch Disrupt's Hackathon in New York last night. Fueled by RedBull, coffee, and massive quantities of junk food, hacke...

A month or so ago, after a particularly irksome stay at the Luxor hotel in Las Vegas, I declared the era of toothless social media reps "over". How successful that declaration will prove to be, it's t...

It's been a whirlwind twenty-four hours: yesterday, hundreds of talented coders poured into New York City's Pier 94 for a marathon session of coding that ran through the night. At 9:30 AM this morning...

We're midway through the TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon (which, by the way, you should be watching live here), and the range of stuff that the hackers have managed to throw together in a mere 24 hours i...

In the early hours of Hackathon day two, bleary-eyed hax0rz roamed the conference hall, checking out each others' apps. TCTV caught up with a few who were still standing to see how they fared after t...

At the TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon today, local hackers Bill Magnuson and Jon Hyman presented an e-commerce plugin for flash sales site Gilt.com that is worth a look. Called Gilt-ii, the bookmarklet ...

Presentations for the TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon are in full swing (tune in for the live stream!), and we've already seen some very nifty nascent apps and services. One that just caught my eye is Ne...

Despite becoming embroiled in the UK's increasingly controversial row about injunctions which gag the press but not Twitter users, Twitter itself is going ahead with plans to open a new office in Lond...

We've spent much of the last week exploring Berlin, attending the Next11 conference and meeting a few local startups. The biggest problem from a video entertainment standpoint? We both agree that ...

Around 500 hackers participated from late last night to early today morning at the TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon in New York, building in teams and waking up or popping enough Redbull, to show off thei...

Jerry Lee Lewis would have been proud. Even as the clock ticked past midnight at Pier 94 in Hell's Kitchen, there was a whole lotta hackin' goin' on. Beginning around noon on Saturday, hackers filed i...

That was fast. Just like that Square passed $3 million in transactions processed, on a Saturday no less, according to a Tweet an hour ago by CEO Jack Dorsey. The mobile payments startup is seeing an...

Talent scouting at the 2011 Hackathon in Manhattan today, TCTV caught up with three alumni hax0rz and one n00b, who gave us a sneak peek of their apps and ideas. They included: a couple of dating sit...

The tables here at Pier 94 are full of enterprising hackers, swapping code and networking furiously. The Red Bull is flowing freely and snacks crunch underfoot — pigeons flit to and fro looking ...

Bitcoin. Oh, man, where to begin. Its Hype-O-Meter got cranked to 11 this week, and breathless histrionics are everywhere. Death and Taxes called this new currency "a seismic event"; Adam Cohen says i...

The Gillmor Gang "  Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, Dick Hardt, and Steve Gillmor "  got all LinkedIn in the wake of the startup's successful IPO. Amid the fear mongering about another...

Passionate biodiesel hobbyists have long relied on their local diner's supply of used cooking oil to power their cars, but a unit that automatically converts oil to fuel could help restaurants do it t...

I'll bet that got your attention. Finally, an app that wants to buy you a drink. Well, not exactly, but it's the next best thing. LoSo is a location-based social media app for the iPhone that re-laun...

Heading into TechCrunch Disrupt, New York, we pulled a couple excerpts from Chris Dixon's freshly shot Founder Stories interview with Gilt Groupe's CEO & Founder, Kevin Ryan.Ryan, who will be spea...

Ever wonder how super angel and man-about-town Chris Sacca spends his Friday nights? Well, right now you can find him at Turntable.fm, a stealthy, you-can-only-get-in-if-you-know-someone online D...

RadiumOne is emerging as a leader in a new breed of advertising networks, with enhanced targeting based on social data. The company is positioning itself to lock in data sources before competitors eve...

Google is on a mission to make the Web faster. One thing that slows down pageload times are fat image files. Even JPEG and PNG files can get pretty big. So Google is developing a new image format c...

If you've seen George Clooney and Jason Reitman's Up In The Air, you know that George Clooney's character in the film is the epitome of a savvy, frequent flier. His life's ambition is to accumulate m...

Firefox beta for Android has been updated today with the ability for users to turn on the "Do Not Track" privacy feature, making it one of the first mobile browsers to offer the privacy option. Mozill...

Twitter CTO Greg Pass has as of today stepped down from his post at Twitter according to people familiar with the matter.Prior to becoming Twitter CTO, Pass held the VP of engineering position at the...

Loopt a checkin app that seems to be pulling out all the stops, has now integrated with Groupon Now! in Chicago in order to provide users withlocationally relevant realtime deals around them, notifyin...

Chomp, an app search engine, has partnered with Verizon Wireless to offer an app search engine for the communications company's mobile app marketplace, V Cast. Chomp, which just launched an Android ap...

What appears to be a fire or explosion engulfed one of the buildings at the Foxconn Factory in Chengdu, China. Foxconn is reporting two casualties and 16 hurt and the damage does look severe and quite...

Paul Graham and Y Combinator just got the Wired treatment. Steven Levy writes a long and loving article which evokes what it's like to go through the program (or at least what it's like to be a fly o...

Have you ever visited a city, country or even store and found an original, unique product or item that you've never seen before? AHAlife is an e-commerce sites for hard-to-find and exclusive luxur...

We've been watching the British legal system turn itself into knots for the last couple of weeks, largely due to the ability of Twitter users to break just about any legal 'super injunction' a 'celebr...

I first met Charles Nourit at Le Web in 2007. Surrounded by 'boothe babes' in tight white T-shirts, he was handing out cards about something called Myid.is. Was this the standard French startup pitch ...

About a year ago, Stanford University students Dan Ha and Cameron Teitelman co-founded SSE Labs, a startup accelerator designed to assist aspiring entrepreneurs at the university develop their busines...

TheTechCrunch DisruptHackathonis taking place in NYC this weekend and is shaping up to be our biggest and best yet. We'll be hosting hundreds of hackers all weekend long.Come hang out with them. Signu...

LinkedIn's stock continues to perform well at the start of its second day of trading. After closing on the New York Stock Exchange at $94 per share yesterday afternoon (giving LinkedIn a $9 billion ma...

Shockingly enough, Apple isn't down with Amazon's claim that the term "app store"  is generic, and recently denied such a claim during the ongoing tiff between the two application provi...

If you haven't heard, Lady Gaga is taking over the internets with marketing and branding deals to spread the word on her new album, "Born This Way." The pop artist just launched a new deal with Z...

Zynga is racking up the Hollywood and entertainment partnerships. After launching a marketing deal with Lady Gaga for FarmVille, the social gaming giant is rolling out another deal, this time with Dre...

Editor's Note: This is a guest post by (@msuster) Mark Suster, a 2x entrepreneur, now VC atGRP Partners. Read more about Suster atBothsidesofthetableAre we headed for a long era of innovation in which...

Remember Modu, the Israeli phone maker who never quite found a market for its itty bitty cell phones? That's ok if you don't, because the semi-omniscient Google does. Back in 2008, Modu came up wi...

San Francisco-based SQLstream, which provides a standards-based stream computing platform that enables its clients to harness and monetize their real-time service and sensor data, has raised $6 millio...

Thanks to Jesse Thomas of interactive design agency JESS3, we now have an updated look at the structure of the geosocial universe as it exists in anno domini 2011. It wasn't so long ago that the Inter...

After fours years of tweaking and pivoting, WorldTV, which brings a TV channel-viewing experience to online video publishing, finally think it has the model right and is flicking the switch on an in-a...

Editor's note: Stan Stalnaker is the founding director of Hub Culture, a social network that revolves around a virtual currency called Ven. In this guest post, he extrapolates where virtual currencie...

Apple is furiously negotiating with the record labels to finalize deals which will allow it to stream music from the Internet to mobile devices (iPhones, iPads, iPods) and computers. It just came to...

So it turns out that almost nobody wants people to check out their purchases. And also that just adding a social element to a feature isn't enough to make it useful. The lessons of user adoption are s...

Today, LinkedIn officially started trading its shares on the New York Stock Exchange, Facebook may not be too far behind in its own public offering. Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg spoke briefly about t...

Health care is a mess in this country, especially the payments and insurance side of the equation. But as I mentioned in my last post on Brighter, a new group of startups are attacking the problem by...

It is no revelation that the healthcare payment system in America is broken. That includes dental plans, where an estimated 50 percent of the $110 billion Americans spend each year on dental bills is...

Google has rolled all of its finance tools into one product today, merging its mortgage, credit card and bank account comparison tools into Google Advisor. Google Advisor allows you to compare offer o...

As Chris Dixonrounds out hisinterview with Hashable founder, Michael Yavonditte, SXSW serves as a springboard to discuss the power of thinking small, when thinking about launching. Yavonditte relates...

After opening to $83 per share and a market cap of $7.8 million, LinkedIn closed at $93.86 per share, giving the company a valuation of $8.9 billion. Although the professional social network priced a...

NFC payments have already become somewhat of the norm over in Japan, but here in the States, near field communication technology hasn't quite taken off yet. However, that's not to say that U.S. Americ...

Toshiba "  the diversified tech company best known for its consumer electronics, lighting and HVAC systems "  is coming after the smart grid market in Europe and the U.S. with the...

Video search engine Vuclip has raised $8 million in Series C funding led by NEA and Jafco Ventures. This brings the company's total funding to nearly $20 million. Vuclip is an independent mobile video...

Streaming media is the future. You know this if you've used Netflix, Rdio, Grooveshark or any of the other popular music services. Apple is said to be getting into the game as well and a recently-rele...

Now that LinkedIn has stock is trading publicly,, you can buy and sell shares of the company on the New York Stock Exchange. But its shares have traded before privately among wealthy individuals and o...

The Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, held his first ever interactive Q&A session with Twitter followers today, and TechCrunch Europe was the only external party allowed in to witness the event. To ...

We recently broke the story of a small search software outlet named Masterobjects taking on Amazon.com in a notable patent infringement lawsuit, later also taking Google to court. Now it's apparently ...

Shortly after ringing the bell on the New York Stock Exchange, LinkedIn's CEO Jeff Weiner talked to Bloomberg Televisionabout the IPO and the company's future plans. You can watch the full video here....

Shortly after ringing the bell on the New York Stock Exchange, LinkedIn's CEO Jeff Weiner talked to Bloomberg Television about the IPO and the company's future plans. You can watch the full video here...

As we've written in the past, Google Ventures-backed LawPivot has applied the Q&A model to the legal space. LawPivot is essentially a "Quora for legal advice"  that allows technolog...

This week Erick and I received two invites to the Google Music Beta and I also discovered that Erick is a secret 90s classic rap fan who used to drink the brass monkey while whiling away the hours in ...

Five years ago, if you'd told a fellow book lover that eBooks were poised to surge in popularity and overtaketraditionalbooks,youprobablywould have been met with a scoff and a dismissal about reading ...

Saygent, a SaaS startup that helps companies figure out the sentiment behind customer voice responses, has raised $1 million in seed funding from 500 Startups,Innovation Endeavors, Juvo Capital, Kapor...

TechCrunch 50 company Jibe (formerly LocalBacon), has raised $6 million in Series A funding led by Draper Fisher Jurvetson and DFJ Gotham with existing investors, Polaris Venture Partners, Zelkova Ve...

Paper.li this morning announced new curation and management capabilities for its publishing platform, which basically allows individuals and publishers like HBO create personalized online newspapers b...

Ever wanted to be able to access every issue of Playboy magazine published since December 1953 on your iPad? Even if just for the articles?You're in luck: Playboy Enterprises, the media compan...

Ever wanted to be able to access every issue of Playboy magazine published since December 1953 on your iPad? Even if just for the articles?You're in luck: Playboy Enterprises, the media compan...

This is a big day for professional social network LinkedIn, which was founded in 2003. After filing its S-1 with the SEC in January, the company has begin trading its shares, under the symbol LNKD, on...

Jimdo, a service that lets anyone create a good-looking website without too much effort, is on a roll. The tool has now been used to build over 4 million websites, and 200,000 more Jimdo-powered sites...

When you hear a name like BlackBerry Partners Fund, your first thought probably isn't "Hey! They should invest in an iOS games publisher!"As it turns out, while the investment firm shares a name and m...

As easy as it is to forget that the iPad isn't just a little Angry-Birds-and-Netflix machine, it's always nice to see someone building something meant to teach kids a thing or two.Exhibit A: Motuto. L...

If this doesn't point to a coming refresh of Xbox 360 hardware I don't know what does. Starting May 22, Microsoft is offering a free XBox 360 (with 4GB of storage) to folks who pay $699 or more for a ...

Comcast Interactive Capital, the venture capital arm of the media giant, has partnered with Philadelphia based venture fund and startup accelerator Dreamit Ventures to provide seed funding, training, ...

Sophia, which operates a free online social teaching and learning platform, this morning announced that it has acquired Guaranteach, a Web-based service that provides tens of thousands of short-form t...

We talk a lot about the startups and companies that receive venture capital and angel funding, but what about the other subset of small businesses that are fundamental to the success of the economy, ...

Venture capital firm Khosla Ventures is raising $1 billion for its new fund, Khosla Ventures IV, an SEC filing reveals. From the looks of it, the new fund will be roughly the same size as the previous...

Plizy is an interesting new startup which wants to bring personalized video content to the iPad [iTunes link] the company has also announced a $1.2m angel funding round from undisclosed investors.Pliz...

Looking for a transistor or a relay? Or possibly an oscilloscope? More than likely you'll end up at Octopart, a vintage Y Combinator startup that launched in 2007. The company is a search engi...

The photo-sharing space continues to heat up, and continues to leave dominant player in the space Flickr in the dust innovation wise. If one thing's becoming clear, it's that it must be really painful...

With regard to their cloud music offering, it looks like Apple is now just about ready to rock and roll. It would seem that this is now coming together even faster than they anticipated. And that may ...

As if you're not scared enough of the Internet (and its potential to ravage your personal information), something comes along to make you even more paranoid. Just ask PlayStation users, or those that ...

When I first saw the ReadWriteWeb headline: Google Places Now Imports Your Foursquare Check-Ins, I was surprised. Wow, that's interesting, and could be huge, I thought. Then I wondered why neither Fou...

Earlier today, Gilt launched the latest addition to its group-buying sites with Gilt Taste" a very pricey online purveyor of produce, meats, fish, cheese, and other "artisinal" foods. While...

For someone so disdainful of the Internet, New York Times Executive EditorBill Keller sure fits the textbook definition of a troll. His anti-aggregation screed "All the Aggregation That's Fit to Aggre...

Forty-plus weeks traveling the emerging world has taught me many things. Chief among them is that most entrepreneurs outside Silicon Valley learn the wrong lessons looking in.A lot of that is the faul...

The backstory of last year's film Tron: Legacy picks up where the first film left off. Kevin Flynn teams up with Tron to create a new Grid, one meant for programs and users. But Flynn realizes that he...

Professional social network LinkedIn has priced its IPO at $45 per share, according to a release issued on the company's site. This is at the high end of the range, which was estimated at $42 to $45 p...

Exclusive - U.S.-based mobile games developer ngmoco was acquired by Japanese social games publisher DeNA in October 2010, but that doesn't mean it stopped looking at opportunities to grow through acq...

WaterSmart Software, a green tech startup that's frequently compared to the energy management startup OPower has closed a $900,000 round of seed financing led by Menlo Incubator and joined by Sand Hil...

Yahoo has just announced that it will be acquiring advertising platform 5to1. Terms of the deal, which we previously wrote about here, were not disclosed but we estimate the deal is around $30 millio...

Yahoo has just announced that it will be acquiring advertising platform 5to1 for $28 million.5to1 first launched at TechCrunch50 in September 2009, and raised around $13 million in various rounds of f...

src="https://tctechcrunch.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/7a097__angry-real-birds-1.jpeg?w=300" alt="" width="300" height="224" />BERLIN-- Yesterday at the Next 11 conference, I interviewed Rovio'...

Twitter has just announced that it will be drilling down on the third party app permissions, and will be taking away automatic OAuth access to Direct Messages for apps that need it. As of today Twitte...

Zynga is continuing its shopping spree today with the acquisition of social game developer DNA Games, marking its 14th acquisition in the past 12 months. It's important to note that this is an actual ...

The Next conference in Berlin is an international, English language conference covering of the latest in "digital", and serves as a useful platform for German startups to present themselves. One of t...

SkyGrid, a startup that offers a powerful business news aggregator, has upgraded its iPhone and iPad app with a number of new social and interactive features today. SkyGrid's app allows you to add fil...

Online ticket seller Eventbrite has raised another $50 million in a Series E financing round led by Tiger Global, according to a release issued by the company. This infusion comes only eight months af...

From the way that OEMs are rushing to get ahead in the slate race, you'd think that tablets were just about as ubiquitous as our beloved smartphones. But according to Nielsen, that is not the case, wh...

MongoLab, a cloud-based database provider created by San Francisco-based ObjectLabs, announced today that it has closed a $3 million series A funding round led by Foundry Group, Baseline Ventures, GRP...

TurningArt, a startup that aims bring a Netflix-like model to the art world, has secured $750,000 in seed funding led by NextView Ventures with participation from Niraj Shah, Steve Conine, Thomas Lehr...

Amazon is launching its fifth publishing imprint today" a mystery and thriller focused vertical called Thomas & Mercer. This joins Amazon's other imprints, including Amazon Encore, Amazo...

Cognitive Match has raised $6 million from new investor Antrak Capital and previous backer Dawn Capital. The round brings total funding raised by the company to over $10 million.The funding announceme...

Today, flash sales giant Gilt Groupe is launching its newest vertical" Gilt Taste, a marketplace for artisanal foods. By definition, artisanal foods are ingredients and foods that are hand-c...

ou may be tired of hearing about task managers, but Producteev is a task management service worth writing home about. Few people enjoy using complicated product, task or CRM managers, so Producteev ha...

Backed by an impressive list of investors, Zaarly, a web and mobile service that connects buyers and sellers in a localized market place, is launching to the public today. As we've written in the past...

E-commerce platform company Rearden Commerce has appointed former Nokia CFO Rick Simonson as its new chief financial officer and president of business operations. Simonson is known for serving as Noki...

Exclusive - Amsterdam-based startup Silk, which offers a platform that allows content creators to distribute their work on the Web in a more structured manner, has raised 320,000 (approximately $475,0...

Many have talked about the explosion of tech startups in the East of London, which has come to be known colloquially as "Silicon Roundabout". But who are they? We've been writing about the emergin...

If you've been reading TechCrunch regularly for the last week, you've learned the good, the bad and the utterly unique about Nigeria's tech and media scenes.But is Africa's largest market prime for fo...

Morgenthaler Ventures is one of those Valley firms who did incredibly well during the Valley's telecom/networking/enterprise software glory years. For all the dot com headlines in the late 1990s, ente...

TechCrunch Disrupt: San Francisco 2011 winner Qwiki has a hot iPad app (250,000 downloads in 11 days) and plenty of cash. But one thing they no longer have is cofounder Louis Monier. He's left the com...

Over the past couple of years covering Google, there's one seemingly simple question that comes up again and again, that Google just can't seem to answer. Why isn't Chrome a part of Android?Read t...

Following in Twitter (T.co) and Overstock's (O.co's) footsteps, Amazon has picked up the domains A.Co, Z.Co, K.Co and interestingly enough Cloud.co in adeal made with Colombia-based domain registry .C...

Yesterday, in a massively botched press launch, Bing released some new features that begin to really tap into the huge amount of social data exposed through its partnership with Facebook. The alliance...

One of many things that make Y Combinator special: They hold regular "office hours" with startups where entrepreneurs can get advice on any topic, from business strategy to design issues. What we talk...

When you plan a vacation, you likely have a destination in mind. Location plays a considerable role in our travel plans, but really what makes or breaks a good vacation is what you do when you get the...

Online retail spending reached $38 billion this quarter, up 12 percent from a $33.8 billion a year ago according to Comscore -- Due to an increase in the number of buyers (7%), transactions per buy (9...

Before there was Hashable, there was Tracked, Michael Yavonditte's attempt to build a better Yahoo Finance. It was little too complicated, and not social. "I felt like I was on the wrong side of his...

From Google I/O to Microsoft's acquisition of Skype, last week was a huge one for tech news.In this episode of OMG/JK, my colleague MG Siegler and I do an in-depth look at what happened at Google's an...

As I'm writing this the perky blue box on my iPhone has lit up with a "Groupon: 64% off Papa John's pizza" message, in the same format as I receive texts from friends -- This is why these things are s...

As I'm writing this the perky blue box on my iPhone has lit up with a "Groupon: 64% off Papa John's pizza" message, in the same format as I receive texts from friends -- This is why these things are s...

Two years ago, Tumblr founder David Karp shared some impressive numbers. In July 2009, Tumblr had 50 million visitors, 255 million pageviews, and 650,000 new posts per day. A year later, we noted that...

Square, the startup that put the sexy back into payments, has a major product announcement coming up next Monday, May 23. That happens to be the first day of TechCrunch Disrupt in New York as well. Wh...

Today at the Reuters Global Technology Summit, NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang threw out a prediction for the future of the tablet market that isn't too far removed from that of the smartphone market over t...

As a fan of Augmented Reality and its potential, I have, for some time, been thinking about how the technology will benefit from the larger screen real estate that tablets provide. There are plenty of...

It was only a few shorts weeks ago that we reviewed Onavo, the must-have iOS app that significantly shrinks data consumption. We were so impressed with the app's ability to save users money on their...

You're not a real celebrity until you have your own video game or, these days, your own section of FarmVille. Lady Gaga teamed up with Zynga to promote GagaVille, which is now live inside the game. ...

Loyalize, an audience participation company, has acquired game studio Savage Entertainment. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Savage has worked with numerous publishers, including Electr...

Netflix video streaming is now the single largest source of peak downstream Interent traffic i the U.S., according to a new report by Sandvine. The streaming video service now accounts for 29.7 perce...

Loyalize, an audience participation company, has acquired game studio Savage Entertainment. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Savage has worked with numerous publishers, including Electr...

Well, after several leaks, an SEC filing, and random speculation from random bloggers, Barnes & Noble just sent out an invite for a Special Announcement. Ready for more random speculation from a r...

Researchers at Germany's University of Ulm have made some unsettling discoveries about the security of the Android platform. According to an article from The Register, the research group located a vul...

Before companies can do anything about reducing their impact on the environment, they need to measure the damage they are doing. Energy management startup Hara helps them track their efforts to reduc...

BlackArrow, a provider of advertising solutions for 'New Television platforms', this morning announced a strategic investment by Time Warner Cable. Joan Gillman, president of media sales for TWC, has ...

Are sales of private company shares taking a breather? Demand for private company shares resulted in $115.4 million worth of transactions on SecondMarket during the first quarter of 2011, down fr...

Jive Software, the maker of an all-in-one social enterprise software, has launched a deeper integration with Facebook today with the release of the Jive Facebook Connector. The connector allows compan...

Jive Software, the maker of an all-in-one social enterprise software, has launched a deeper integration with Facebook today with the release of the Jive Facebook Connector. The connector allows compan...

Research firm Harris Interactive asked 2,124 American adults if they agree or disagree that some online companies, singling out such companies as Google or Facebook, control too much of our personal i...

Are sales of private company shares taking a breather? Demand for private company shares resulted in $115.4 million worth of transactions on SecondMarket during the first quarter of 2011, down fr...

Patent trolling is often a lucrative hobby for many companies that have fallen into hard times. Like the junkies they are, the trolls will spin all sorts of delightful stories exonerating themselves o...

Blip.tv started five years ago with a focus on helping budding video producers manage and distribute their shows across the Web. Slowly but surely, though, it's become a video destination in its own ...

Blip.tv started five years ago with a focus on helping budding video producers manage and distribute their shows across the Web. Slowly but surely, though, it's become a video destination in its own ...

It's been two years almost to the day when Israeli startup BeeTV raised $8 million in funding for a - really impressive - personal TV suggestion engine they'd been building. Fast forward to today, and...

9flats, the peer to peer apartment rentals site (or Airbnb-clone), has secured a "major investment round" led by Silicon Valley VC firm Redpoint Ventures. European-based eVenture Capital Partners also...

Wow. According to this filing, professional social network LinkedIn has just upped the pricing of its IPO from between $32 and $35 per share to $42 to $45 per share. This latest pricing, which marks a...

Vienna, Austria-based semantic web technology company uma has raised $1.1 million in funding from TheMerger.com and multiple private European investors.The company has also appointed new board members...

The socialization of the Web has brought about changes to how, when and where we communicate with each other over the Internet. The same goes for companies who now look for and hire new staff by using...

Publicis Groupe, the French advertising colossus, announced today that it will acquire Princeton-based interactive marketing agency Rosetta for $525 million in cash, plus later milestone payments. As ...

Reading the news in recent weeks, it's becoming increasingly clear that there are the early signs of a new war brewing in the mobile computing space. And it's a war that promises to be the most fascin...

For as long as I can remember, there has been one constant in tech news: Google News sucks at it.Now, that's not entirely fair since Google News doesn't actually provide any of their own content. Inst...

If you're like me Instagram has become a service you check the first thing you wake up in the morning, alongside Twitter and Facebook. My addiction has seriously gotten to the point where I anticipate...

Last week, just prior to day one of Google I/O, we noted that some updates in the Chrome OS code and forums indicated that a formal unveiling was likely very close. Sure enough, on day two of I/O, Goo...

Local Q&A startup Hipster has raised $1 million in seed funding from some prominent angel Valley investors including Mitch Kapor, Dave McClure/500 Startups, Lightbank, Google Ventures, Charles Riv...

For a group of developers on Facebook's platform, the clock is ticking.Last night and into today, Facebook has been sending out notices to developers they believe have apps in violation of their polic...

Ashton Kutcher will be on stage next week at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York. The actor, entrepreneur and investor will talk with Charlie Rose on Tuesday morning, and joins what is clearly our most imp...

In this episode of Founder Stories with host Chris Dixon, Hashable founder and CEO Michael Yavonditte delves into the conventional (lack of) wisdom, power plays and power players that helped shape pai...

In this episode of Founder Stories with host Chris Dixon, Hashable founder and CEO Michael Yavonditte delves into the conventional (lack of) wisdom, power plays and power players that helped shape pai...

Up until now, when Twitter has struck deals overseas with carriers, it has mainly been for SMS deals so that users can send/receive tweets for free and/or cheap. Today, Twitter has announced a new typ...

Chinese internet giant Tencent and U.S. travel bookings company Expedia have invested in Chinese travel site eLong, totaling $126 million. Tencent has acquired approximately 16% of the outstanding sha...

Former Foursquare Head of Operations and Facebooker Nathan Folkman will be joining photo-sharing startup Path as an engineer as of today, Path CEO Dave Morin tells me. Prior to Facebook and Foursquare...

Despite the fact that some specs have already been leaked, we got a chance to get hands-on with the latest Think product from Lenovo and thought it was only fair that you get the complete story, too. ...

Klout, a startup that measures influence on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook, has made a key hire today" a VP of Engineering. And the Kleiner Perkins-backed startup nabbed a seasoned analytic...

Tradeshift, the free invoicing platform and wider play to become the de facto social network for "B2B communications and processes", has raised a $7m round from Notion Capital.As we've previously repo...

California SB 242, proposed by Sen. Ellen Corbett, would force social networks like Facebook to allow parents access to their child's account(s) and, more importantly, force all privacy settings to th...

California SB 242, proposed by Sen. Ellen Corbett, would force social networks like Facebook to allow parents access to their child's account(s) and, more importantly, force all privacy settings to th...

In its last earnings report, AOL revealed that it poured $40 million into its hyperlocal news platform Patch in the quarter. It's no secret that AOL, Arianna Huffington and CEO Tim Armstrong have high...

For the third set of interviews from last week's excellent SFMusicTech event, I talk with David Hyman, the current CEO of MOG, the co-founder of Addicted to Noise and Gracenote and one of the smartest...

Datameer, a startup that offers a big data analytics solution built on Apache Hadoop, has raised $9.25 million led by Kleiner Perkins with participation from Redpoint Ventures. Kleiner partner Ellen ...

Expense reports are a pain. And, as if tabulating the amount you've spent on each trip wasn't enough (not to mention keeping track of all the receipts), many businesses have archaic systems that make ...

Through new official partnerships with Facebook, Twitter, and NY-based startups Foursquare and Tumblr, New York aims to become America's next, top digital city. New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg a...

As one professional network puts its IPO plans on hold, another is readying to go public on Thursday. Reuters reported this morning that Viadeo, the world's second-largest professional network, is put...

Tech industry insider and Mobile Review Editor Eldar Murtazin hit us with what could be the most shocking bit of leaked Nokia news since his infamous N8 hands-on last year. What happened? This mor...

Barnes & Noble just announced that Nook Color users have downloaded over 1 millon apps so far, including Angry Birds, Drawing Pad, and Pulse. Obviously 1 million apps in comparison to the numbers ...

It's no secret that eBay has been pushing a significant mobile strategy of late, and today the company is rolling out a new app in its mobile family" an eBay Motors iPhone app. eBay said it ...

Flash memory storage solutions provider SanDisk has acquired Pliant Technology, a developer of enterprise solid state drives, the company announced this morning.Under the terms of the agreement, SanDi...

Three years after founding bitly as a home-grown startup inside betaworks, John Borthwick is passing the reigns to a new CEO, Peter Stern. Borthwick will remain CEO of betaworks and concentrate on ne...

Mobile payments startup Billing Revolution has raised $6.6 million in Series B funding, led by DCM and SK Telecom Ventures. This latest funding round will be used to hire marketing, business developme...

Virtualization software giant VMware this morning announced that it has agreed to acquire Shavlik Technologies, a provider of cloud-based IT management solutions for small and medium businesses. Finan...

StackMob, a cloud-based system designed to ease the development and deployment of mobile applications, has raised $7.5 million led by Trinity Ventures with StackMob's existing investors, Harrison Met...

The first name that comes to mind when we talk about social games in Europe is probably Wooga. But the German-based social games publisher has a number of local competitors dispersed throughout the co...

First To File, a patent document management service, has raised $2 million in Series B funding led by Foundation Capital. This brings the startup's total funding to $4 million. First To File is a SaaS...

This is a guest post by Monty Munford, blogger at Monty's Outlook and freelance Mobile/social consultant is (also a Bollywood actor, next movie out April 2011). He tweets @montymunford. Eighteen entr...

Primedia, which helps people find apartments, houses for rent or new homes for sale through websites, mobile and print publications, this morning said it has entered into a definitive agreement to be ...

Satellite TV and video-on-demand company DISH Network this morning announced today that Joseph P. Clayton has been named the company's president and chief executive officer and has been appointed to i...

Ask.fm, a European Formspring competitor, has added video answers to its conversational Q&A service.Rather than answering questions in text, the browser-based feature lets anybody with a webcam re...

Cambridge, UK-based infrastructure software company Autonomy this morning announced that it is acquiring a number of assets of Iron Mountain's digital division - including the latter's archiving, e-di...

I have no idea if Lady Gaga, Jessica Alba or Cameron Diaz have good taste. But whoever is designing their fashion accessories is also selling pieces on Boticca.com. The London-based startup that launc...

At 35 thousand feet you can see the future of push notification more clearly. The in-flight WiFi won't sustain FaceTime or Skype video, but it handles IM just fine. GTalk is buried in the Gmail menus;...

Google has finally made good on their promise to deliver Chrome OS to the world this summer. Or they will, on June 15 when the first Chromebooks are available. Considering that I'm potentially the per...

"a friend in the US just told me that #DSK was arrested by the police in a NYC hotel one hour ago."It was the middle of the night in Paris when the news broke that Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the Chief of...

Facebook may have over 600 million users but there's still one problem: all the info is online! How on earth are you supposed to know if that cutie you just met is single or married without access to ...

Ever since he could remember, Ibrahim Boakye had a knack for understanding how things worked. There were things he could just do that no other kids-- let alone adults-- could understand. By the time h...

If you'd asked me a week ago what I thought about Honeycomb, the tablet version of Android, I would have said that it was in very bad shape and that it would be several months before it could even hol...

This weekend finds me in London, whirling around in the eye of the book launch storm and with very little opportunity to keep track of what's making news in the world of technology. Fortunately here i...

It's no secret that eBay has been heavily investing in a local commerce strategy. The central core of this is trying to capitalize on the $917 million online-to-offline buying market, which Forrester ...

The world is full of illusions. Magicians use a cascade of mirrors, smoke, and misdirection to trick their audiences into believing the unbelievable. In the process, they mystify them, capturing thei...

As of today certain aspects of theFlipboard experience have been blocked for Chinese users, at the very least access to Facebook and Twitter according to Flipboard CEO Mike McCue. While direct access ...

Earlier today, I wrote about our brush with machetes, the chaotic world of Nigerian filmmaking, and a company called Iroko Partners that's working on bringing order and YouTube distribution to the cha...

It was when they pulled out the machetes that I started to worry.I'd seen men with machetes in Africa before, but they were rusty, practical tools used for clearing away brush by the side of the highw...

In part III of Erick Schonfeld's interview with the man of many interests, Gary Vaynerchuk, Gary discusses his daily-deal wine venture, Cinderalla Wineand throws props to similar deal delivering sites...

In part III of Erick Schonfeld's interview with the man of many interests, Gary Vaynerchuk, Gary discusses his daily-deal wine venture, Cinderalla Wineand throws props to similar deal delivering sites...

This is a really weird time to be a writer. Agents are becoming publishers; publishers have moved to "the agency model"; and some self-published authors are making millions" all because e-bo...

The Gillmor Gang "  Craig Burton, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor "  survived the week of Google AeeEeeI/OUuu, Facebook slimeware, and the embalmerization of Microsoft...

Editor's note: Steven Carpenter is an entrepreneur that writes the TechCrunch Teardown series that looks at the business models of consumer Internet companies.My last TechCrunch Teardown outlined the ...

Editor's Note: This is a guest post written by Prasad Thammineni, the CEO and Co-Founder of OfficeDrop, a scanner software and digital filing system. You can follow him on Twitter @OfficeDrop_CEO.Comp...

Construction material manufacturing often produces hazardous byproducts that are either toxic or difficult to recycle, as are many of the materials themselves. Brooklyn based Planetary ONE is experime...

Ever wish you could just call your keys? Well the Ycombinator-backed Lockitron aims to replace physical keys entirely by letting you control your door lock with your phone. The Lockitron web app a...

Back in December of last year, we did an interview with ShoeDazzle CEO Brian Lee discussing whether his company was going to be the next Los Angeles-based web hit. That answer now appears to be a big ...

A company called PunchTab wants to test their new contest entry system, appropriately-named the PunchTab widget. To that end, they've offered us the ability to give away a black 16GB Apple iPad Two (w...

As everyone in the Bay Area will know, this Sunday is the annual Bay to Breakers run/boozefest. The 12k run normally goes from the bay (in the city) to the breakers (at the ocean), hence the name. But...

If you're like me, terms like "out of network" and "deductible" are cringe-inducing. Not just because they generally involve me forking over money for healthcare, but also because navigating the water...

Last week I wrote about Computer Village, where many of the gadget-hounds in Lagos go to get their gadgety fix. But what about new technology being developed in the country? The city's tech entrep...

Should music artists be like the authoritarian Steve Jobs? Is it their responsibility to know what their fans want better than they do? Evan Lowenstein, the successful singer-songwriter and th...

Small Demons, a stealth LA- based startup founded by former Yahoo Product VPs Valla Vakili and Tony Amidei has just raised $3 million in Series A funding, according to an SEC form filed today. While V...

In about a week, Disrupt NYC will begin. We will launch over two dozen new startups in our Startup Battlefield and bring together the smartest people in tech to discuss how the Internet is disrupting...

There are rumours of a new European seed fund being built out of London right now, billing itself as a sort of "500 Startups of Europe". Admittedly Hipster Ventures is a Seppuku-inducing name, but sta...

Last year, OpenFeint 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. U...

The first thing many of us do in the morning is check for earth shattering news, and Google has just made the quest to find relevant news a little bit easier by introducing a geolocation-enabled "New...

Last October I wrote about a small startup called Mailgun that was setting out on a bold mission: to provide developers a way toprogrammatically create and manage mailboxes and email messages using a ...

When it comes to app development for mobile devices, cross-platform implementation is the new hot thing. Developers have long struggled with fragmentation across operating systems, when they want to ...

This is your last chance to win a free ticket to this year's Disrupt in New York City! The conference is from May 23rd to May 25th, a little over a week away, and has an incredible lineup of guest spe...

Wine enthusiast, author, founder, blogger, investor and serial entrepreneur (did I leave anything out?) Gary Vaynerchuk dropped by our TechCrunch TV studio in New York City with a bottle of red to...

Netflix previously all but ignored Android, leaving users confused and annoyed by the lack of love. All that changed yesterday when the app dropped on the Nexus S and several HTC devices. But that's t...

A judge yesterday threw out most of the claims made in a lawsuit against Facebook, in which two California individuals, David Gould and Mike Robertson, accused the social networking giant of sharing t...

I'm broadcasting life from the Timecrafter's watch show in New York with Hugh Dougherty, the Mart & Highlights Editor for the National Association of Watch And Clock Collector's own watch blog, Wa...

OpenTable's co-founder Chuck Templeton is launching his latest venture today" OhSoWe. The site essentially aims to bring together neighborhoods. It's sort of like an online version of a bloc...

Based on a batch of documents released in the Skyhook/Google lawsuit, it seems that Google's Andy Rubin is not only the boss of Android, but the boss of just about everyone in the Android ecosystem. F...

Analytics ninja Sean Power lost his laptop in Brooklyn - it was stolen, although it may not have been stolen by the man who had it - and using Prey he was able to track it to a particular bar near Cit...

Exclusive - Earlier this week, Microsoft dropped a bombshell on pretty much the entire technology industry, acquiring VoIP juggernaut Skype for a baffling $8.5 billion in cash.One side-effect unreveal...

Wal-Mart this morning announced that it intends to acquire a minority stake in the holding company of Yihaodian, a massive B2C ecommerce company based in China. The transaction is expected to close wi...

Japan's biggest mobile carrier NTT Docomo today announced it will develop with Twitter a set of new mobile services for its domestic customer base of 58 million. Under the deal, Docomo plans to integr...

Online games publisher We R Interactive this morning announced that it has raised $5 million in second round funding from a slew of private investors, including Elio Leoni-Sceti, former CEO of EMI Mus...

It seems that the "Decorah Eagles" have officially become America's biggest reality-TV stars. For those who haven't yet heard, the Decorah Eagles are a family of Bald Eagles nesting in Decorah, Iowa. ...

At this point, I think it's pretty clear what Facebook's strategy for this whole Burson-Marsteller caught-with-their-pants-down situation is going to be: say as little as possible and move on. And it ...

Former Twitter recruiter Morgan Missen is joining Foursquare today as Head of Talent for Foursquare West.Missen (neMissentzis) was the first Technical Recruiter at Twitter responsible for all backend ...

When it comes to publishing apps on the iPad, there are two models: 1) social readers that bring all your realtime news feeds together like Flipboard; or 2) single-title apps from major publishers lik...

While the check-in started with social apps tied to location in the real world, it quickly spread to the virtual side of things, giving users the ability to check-in to watching tv/movies, listening t...

Amazon has always been frustratingly close-lipped about its hardware business, opting not to divulge sales numbers or upcoming hardware changes for more or less the entire life of the Kindle. And incr...

Whoa! Talk about a welcome surprise. After many long months in the works, Netflix has just pushed the first release of their Android application to the Android Market.Alas, there's a catch: it's only ...

Businesses today have the benefit of access to tons of data on their customers, what they're buying, what their social behavior looks like, and more. The problem, though, is how best to funnel the fi...

Docstoc, an online document sharing site that caters primarily to small businesses and professionals, is unveiling its first mobile app today with the launch of its iPad app today" Docstoc P...

Social and mobile incubator YouWeb, who has helped create OpenFeint, CrowdStar, iSwifter and Sibblingz, is announcing its latest venture" mobile 'edutainment' startup Pluto Plays Music. Plut...

When researchers Alasdair Allan and Pete Warden announced at the Where 2.0 Conference in Santa Clara a few weeks ago that iPhones and 3G iPads are storing records of where their users are and where th...

Boutique tech investment bank Pacific Crest Securities has purchased Pacific Epoch, a Shanghai-based investment research firm specializing in technology. This gives Pacific Crest fifty more bodies on ...

It's pretty rare for a story to be one part sad, one part fascinating, and twenty parts sleazy. Luckily, Facebook and Burson-Marsteller have just handed exactly that to us on a silver platter.As you'v...

Because Facebook is clearly concerned with user privacy, it's partnered up with crowdsourced reputation management service Web Of Trust today in order give its population of almost 700 million users p...

Both Google and Apple got an earful from Congress this week concerning a few different DUI checkpoint apps that were floating around in the App Store and Android Market. Senator Charles Schumer, who w...

Let's say you go to a store and check-in. Then what? Maybe there's a deal. Maybe. But for many location-based services, the check-in is the end of the equation. Shopkick is pretty much the opposit...

Networks and wireless sensors have been used for years "  by companies like Lighting Science Group, Arch Rock (acquired by Cisco) and D-Link "  in a variety of smart building, sma...

Twitter for Mac, which launched earlier this year with the rollout of Apple's Mac App Store, is getting its first major update today.Besides a design update, you can now see multiple timelines at once...

I'm a die-hard paper fan. I have a few shelves of books in almost every room of the house and I love taking a stack of magazines or newspapers on a plane - this is so ingrained in my psyche that I act...

Like many start-ups, Meebo has been on a recent hiring spree. In this episode of Founder Stories, CEO Seth Sternberg tells Chris Dixon, "for 12 weeks we had to hire a salesperson a week and if we...

Vente-Privee, the European flash sales giant, has announced a joint venture with American Express to bring the site to the U.S.Vente-Privee, which was founded in France in 2001, is one of the pioneers...

Talk about sinking to a new low. It seems that Comcast and perhaps other ISPs are blocking access to the notorious torrent site, ThePirateBay.org. The word comes from TorrentFreak who reached out to t...

Talk about sinking to a new low. It seems that Talk about sinking to a new low. It seems that Comcast and perhaps other ISPs are blocking access to the notorious torrent site, ThePirateBay.org. The wo...

Demandbase, a company that develops B2B marketing software, has raised $10 million in funding led by Sutter Hill Ventures with Sigma Partners, Altos Ventures, and Adobe Systems participating in the ro...

Search engine Blekko, ever eager to differentiate itself and make headlines with its countless product development advances, is announcing today that it will reduce its data retention period to 48 hou...

Score Media has acquired sports-focused mobile apps maker SportsTap, whose Android and iPhone apps compete with Score Media's multi-sport app ScoreMobile.Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed...

Facebook secretly hired a PR firm to plant negative stories about Google, says Dan Lyons in a jaw dropping story at the Daily Beast. For the past few days, a mystery has been unfolding in Silicon Vall...

Well, TechCrunch readers, we thought we owed you an explanation as to why the hell we got onto the UK version of the TV show The Apprentice last night, and here is it. Back in September last year I wa...

There are two things we love to do on Why Is This News. The first is to break news about things that are happening outside Silicon Valley. The second is to find excuses to promote our respective books...

When it comes to in-depth news about Facebook, there has been no better site than Inside Facebook. In fact, the flagship site of Inside Network became so successful alongside the meteoric rise of Face...

When you think about ecommerce, you think about Amazon. But how did a company that started with online books come to dominate an estimated one third of ecommerce in the U.S.? In the 72 slides ab...

Yahoo is likely to acquire advertising platform 5:1 for around $30 million, we've heard from multiple sources. The company first launched at TechCrunch50 in September 2009, and had raised around $13 m...

Here she is. Earlier today, Google unveiled the first notebooks running Chrome OS. Or as they're calling them, "Chromebooks". The first two companies partners producing them will be Samsung and Acer. ...

If you miss being able to blather on about Android versus iPhone or express your irrational hatred of a certain author, startup or device without having to attach your name to it (and don't want to g...

Today at Google I/O there was a fireside chat with a number of Chrome team members. Their goal was simply to answer questions "  both from the web and from the audience. Among those, there w...

New product giveaways have become something of a tradition at Google I/O. Last year attendees to the developer-focused conference walked home with two new Android phones (an Evo 4G and a Nexus One or ...

A New York research firm that turns massive amounts of data into streamlined information, CUBRC (pronounced "coo-brick") invested $1.2 million in seed finance, and established a strategic partnership...

Yelp's international sites have been growing like crazy, with non-U.S. traffic doubling in the past year. Today, it is adding a fifth non-English international site, Spain, to its roster. (The other...

Finally. Twitter has just unveiled a much needed revamp of its Twitter for mobile page, turning what was a pretty static looking page into a more dynamic HTML 5 web app with icons for @replies, messag...

If there was any question about Google's commitment to Chrome OS, you clearly haven't been following day two of Google I/O today. It's all Google is talking about. And in every way possible. But the b...

Check out the graph in my March post about MySpace's free fall in usage. After a long decline you'd expect a site like MySpace to plateau and find some sort of stable group of users. Instead, all the ...

Today during a press Q&A following the Chrome keynote at Google I/O, Google co-founder Sergey Brin joined the panel to take questions about the announcements. Naturally, the questions strayed a bi...

Today during the press Q&A after the Chrome OS/Chromebook keynote, Google co-founder Sergey Brin joined the panel to share his thoughts on the new products and Google in general. Since the end goa...

To me, the most interesting aspect of Google's Chromebook unveiling today may have been a sort of rallying cry that was more or less whispered. At first when Chrome head Sundar Pichai said it on stage...

One of the most important pieces in the Android ecosystem is Android Market " Google's application storefront that comes pre-installed on the vast majority of Android devices. Yes, there are...

Earlier this week, I spent a most enjoyable day at the SFMusicTech Summit, the Bay Area's top Internet music event put on by the digital impressario Brian Zisk. The highpoint for me of the summit was ...

Facebook has launched a new feature today for photo tagging that is sure to make brands and celebs happy. Now, you can tag photos with a brand, product, company or person's Facebook page, similar to t...

Just a few short moments after Google officially announced the Chromebook at its I/O event, the search giant also posted the Chromebook product page, offering up some some juicy details about what we ...

Sundar Pichai announced today at Google i/o that Google has partnered with Citrix and VMWare to provide apps for Chromebooks. Pichai emphasized that over 50% of companies today are running Windows HP,...

Google Product VP Sundar Pichai announced today at Google I/O that the Chromebooks functionality for consumers will be expanded for businesses. According to Pichai, more than 50% of IT companies today...

ChromeBooks, centralized, almost entirely cloud-based machines by Google, will be available for students and schools at $20/per month/per user, enabling full updates, central login controls, and a cen...

While it hasn't always been clear just how big of a bet Google was going to make on Chrome OS, after Google I/O today, it seems very clear that they're very serious. With the launch of Chromebooks, Go...

Vacation rentals giant HomeAway has made an acquisition today" social vacation rentals platform Second Porch. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Second Porch, which launched in 2009, help...

The Google Chromebook is here for reals now. Google first announced the nondescript CR-48 Chrome OS Notebook back in December of 2010 but the production version, now called Chromebook, was just announ...

"One of the reasons we've been angry is that we haven't been able to bring Angry Birds to the web,"  a Rovio developer noted on stage today at Google I/O. Well guess what? Thanks to the ...

Using WebGL complete with local storage, you will soon be able to play Angry Birds online or offline in your Chrome browser. The game plays at a full 60 frames per second - more than sufficient for th...

BillShrink, a service that wants to provide consumers with the best deals on their common purchases like a phone bill, credit card bill or TV service, is announcing the addition of four new features t...

BillShrink, a service that wants to provide consumers with the best deals on their common purchases like a phone bill, credit card bill or TV service, is announcing the addition of four new features t...

Chrome's user base "more than doubled" in the past year with browser uptake increasing from 70 million to 160 million thanks to Linux, Windows, and OS X versions of the browser finally reaching parity...

At Disrupt NYC, we're all about startups. We've culled two dozen of the hottest startups from over 500 applicants to launch at the event (which starts May 23, get tickets here). We are also bringing...

We're here at Google's I/O conference in San Francisco where we're about to get a huge dose of Chrome. We suspect this will be the launch of Chrome OS. Tune in to our live notes below for all the deta...

One of the most popular games in the history of computer gaming is making its way over to Facebook this summer, as Sid Meier attempts to transform his ultra-popular Civilization series into Civ World....

This is just crazy. The Xoom, which was supposed to be Google's pet Honeycomb tablet, came out three months ago and the microSD card slot still doesn't work. Oh, it's not a Android or Honeycomb thing....

Mobile payments are coming, and there are many paths being beaten to get them to our phones. Google-backed mobile payments startup Corduro launches this week with a combined mobile wallet/payments pr...

Expensify, the startup helps take the endless headaches out of expense reports, has added a innovative new feature today" total receipt automation.Expensify's platform allows you to pull in ...

E-learning software developer Trivantis has acquired Flypaper Studios, a startup that allows users to create flash-based web presentations without any programming experience. Financial terms of the de...

Gobble, an online marketplace for home-cooked food, has raised $1.2 million in funding from an all-star roster of investors including Reid Hoffman (via the Greylock DIscovery Fund), Felicis Ventures, ...

Gobble, an online marketplace for home-cooked food, has raised $1.2 million in funding from an all-star roster of investors including Reid Hoffman (via the Greylock DIscovery Fund), Felicis Ventures, ...

Remember a few months ago when you kind of cared about the Cisco Cius and then you realized it was just a little screen made for video meetings and wasn't really a consumer device? Well, prepare f...

Incubated within big data company Greenplum (acquired by EMC in 2010) and following 15 months of product development, Silicon Valley-based Alpine Data Labs launches its solution for "Big Data Predicti...

Boxee Box owners rejoice! It's new firmware time! Boxee previously committed to a three month update cycle, which meant the next firmware was coming out sometime this month. Boxee just so happened to ...

Do you like your wallet? Too bad. Pageonce, the one-stop shop for managing your financial accounts, wants to turn your smartphone into the wallet of the future. Though, the last time I checked, Ap...

Today sees the launch of the "first-of-its-kind" national gift network FreeMonee, founded by an impressive team of veterans from some of the largest companies in banking, retail and e-commerce, with e...

America's first pipeline-fed, retail hydrogen fueling station opened in Torrance, California, within Los Angeles county on Tuesday. The station will provide hydrogen for fuel cell and hybrid vehicles...

Tencent, a major provider of Internet and mobile services in China, this morning revealed earnings for the first quarter of 2011, reporting a better-than-expected 61 percent jump in net income. The co...

Hey, remember back in the old days when you could post a picture on Twitter and not have it ransacked by news organisations and picture agencies? Yeah, those days are gone. All these picture shari...

Yes, smartphone apps are still in vogue, and most mobile app stores continue to grow by leaps and bounds. Yet consumers spend more time engaging with the mobile Web on their smartphones than through a...

Exclusive: BranchOut, a professional social network for Facebook, has raised $18 million in Series B funding led by Redpoint Ventures with Accel Partners, Norwest Venture Partners, and Floodgate also ...

Add another stealth eCommerce startup attracting pre-launch funding from eager investors to your list. That is, of course, if you have one. Last month, we covered Decide, a Seattle-based company look...

Google is approaching a watershed moment in its internal platform wars. The time is nearly at hand when they will have to decide once and for all what Android is, what Chrome OS is, and where they are...

Like a Heroku for PHP, PHP Fog is launching to the public today in order to help PHP developers deploy and scale their applications in the cloud. Raising $1.8 million in a round lead by Madrona and fo...

Should founders innovate based upon customer feedback or is it better to develop from within and let consumer adapt. In this episode of Founder Storieswith host Chris Dixon, Meebo's Seth Sternberg dis...

Today at Google I/O in San Francisco, Google developers Amit Joshi and Alex Russell took the stage at a breakout session to announce an important milestone: a version of Chrome Frame that doesn't requ...

Google announced Android 3.1 earlier today at I/O. More surprising than the OS itself (which was expected, really) was that it was rolling out to Verizon Xooms today. Google failed to announce when it...

Today at Google's I/O conference in San Francisco, a group of executives sat down the with press to answer questions about the announcements made during the keynote earlier in the day. Much of the new...

As if Angry Birds hasn't pervaded our society enough, bands are now covering the Angry Birds theme on YouTube, just in case that tune isn't already on a never-ending loop in your head. The band Pompla...

Nuance, a company that develops imaging and voice recognition technologies, has announced the acquisition of print management and cost recovery software developer Equitrac. Nuance is shelling out $15...

Startup Sourcebits has raised $10 million in Series A funding from Sequoia Capital and IDG Ventures today. Sourcebits, which has operations in both India and Atlanta, creates apps for the iPhone, iPa...

Today at their I/O conference in San Francisco, Google had a range of things to announce, many of them about Android. By far the most interesting thing to me was the notion that Google is finally gett...

Uber is a black car service that you can schedule via a mobile app. It's slightly more expensive than taxis, but it is absolutely worth it, and I now rely on it to get around in San Francsico.The way ...

If you've been following the rise of Android, you've probably seen some of the controversy around how open (or not) Google's hugely successful mobile OS actually is. In October Android Chief Andy Rubi...

Y Combinator just gets bigger and bigger. They invest in batches, twice a year. The last batch had 44 startups, an all time high. But that record is about to be shattered - they're sending out offer l...

In the past, Zynga has landed a number of high-profile partnerships with musicians and entertainment companies, including Snoop Dogg, Dreamworks, Nickelodeon, The Green Hornet and others. But today, t...

In the past, Zynga has landed a number of high-profile partnerships with musicians and entertainment companies, including Snoop Dogg, Dreamworks, Nickelodeon, The Green Hornet and others. But today, t...

While online to offline buying is growing rapidly, so is e-commerce, according to comScore's latest data. The research company is reporting that online retail spending online retail spending reached $...

As anticipated, Google unveiled their music service today at their I/O conference, Music Beta. The emphasis is on the "beta" right now as Google clearly isn't launching the full service they had wante...

Juniper Networks today released a study concerned with potential threats to mobile technology, revealing a 400 percent increase in Android malware. The study also found that both enterprise and consum...

Google's mantra of launching products early and often didn't exactly work with Google TV. It hit the ground with a gimped feature set and limited hardware options. The analogy of Android simply hasn't...

In this post-PC world, tablets and phones are starting to be our main devices. But what if we want to do something special with like like adding keyboards, mice, and game controllers. Google is workin...

There's a new Android phone every two weeks now. That often spells bad news for slightly older phones as carriers and makers abandon their development. Not anymore.Google just rolled out the founding ...

While the news broke last night, Google officially announced its cloud music player 'Music Beta' this morning at Google i/o, rolling out to US users today. With Music Beta you can add up to 20k songs ...

While the news broke last night, Google officially announced its cloud music player 'Music Beta' this morning at Google i/o, rolling out to US users today. With Music Beta you can add up to 20k songs ...

Today at their Google I/O conference in San Francisco, Google had plenty to unveil for Android. One thing that consumers should really love is a new movie rentals option for Android devices. Notably, ...

The next major release of Android comes just in time for hot summer days. Ice Cream Sandwich, as it's called, is well, Google's "most ambitious" release yet. And look! A new logo!Google says they want...

In the wake of today's news that Microsoft is buying Skype for $8.5 billion, CEOs Steve Ballmer and Tony Bates just held a press conference to explain the deal and sell it to investors. The reaction ...

At Google i/o today a Google representative dropped some numbers about the success of Android today, introduced by a video of a 3D Android robot scaling a mountain of Android activations. There have b...

Android Honeycomb 3.1, Google's tablet OS, is getting a major update today and it will be available first for the Motorola Xoom from Verizon. The new OS version includes a more powerful task handler t...

Cell phone bills are expensive, and carrier contracts are binding. We need our cellphones, but that doesn't mean that we're not always looking for cheaper ways to make calls. Voice-over-IP services ha...

We're here at Google's I/O conference in San Francisco where the search giant will take the stage shortly for the day one keynote. What's coming? Hard to say for sure "  except Google Mu...

When Foursquare upgraded its mobile app last March at SXSW, it added some excellent new features which made the popular geo app even more compelling. Among these is a revamped leaderboard which shows...

Redwood City, California-based Sequent Software, formerly known as Sparq Mobile Solutions, has raised an undisclosed amount of capital in a Series A round of funding led by Opus Capital and SK Telecom...

NetSuite, one of the handful of companies to build a big company out of the early 2000s software-as-a-service funding frenzy, is now making a push into cloud based enterprise software, according to se...

Microsoft may have overpaid for Skype with its $8.5 billion all-cash offer, but it was bidding against a sure IPO. While $8.5 billion may look expensive now, it is a pre-emptive strike to take Skyoe ...

Microsoft's purchase of Skype for $8.5 billion in cash is a massive bet for the tech giant.Although it look like it may well have over-paid by $4.5 billion, and bid against companies who weren't seri...

Motorola Mobility this morning announced that it has acquired network operations management software maker SunUp Digital Systems. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.Founded in 1992 and bas...

We've frequently covered PayNearMe, an alternative payments product from the company formerly known as Kwedit, because its compelling services for the unbanked. e "unbanked" refers to consumers who do...

The deal is done. Microsoft is buying Skype for $8.5 billion in cash in its first sizeable acquisition since August 2008, when the Redmond software giant spent $486 million on Greenfield Online.In fac...

With Microsoft having confirmed its acquisition of Skype, sources tell TechCrunch Europe that Redmond outbid its closest rival, Google, by almost two-to-one. Meanwhile, Facebook is said to have never ...

The store downstairs from your apartment specialized in junk. Its owner was a small man, his face sagging and acne scarred, his front shirt pocket bulging with a pack of Marlboros and his hands always...

San Francisco-based social gaming outfit Funzio has raised $20 million in its first round of institutional funding, TechCrunch has learned. The Series A financing round was led by IDG Ventures and Chi...

There are tons of sites out there that help you build a website, but most of them are built for novices or, on the other end, developers. Many of them rely on template-systems: The user is given a cou...

The name Clearspring Technologies may not be terribly familiar to you, but chances are you've often clicked on or at least come across its AddThis buttons, which are plastered on publisher sites Web-w...

Just over a year ago, Salesforce acquired Jigsaw, which provides crowd-sourced data services in the cloud. The startup crowdsources information on professionals and companies and currently has a datab...

Unlike most, SendGrid, the TechStars-incubated email management and delivery system, loves dealing with overloaded inboxes. In fact, it loves email so much that it has delivered over 9 billion emails ...

Proformative, which operates an online resource and community website for corporate finance, accounting and treasury professionals, has raised $1.1 million in funding in a Series A round led by Bullpe...

We're just a few hours away from the kick off of Google I/O "  the search giant's huge annual conference for all things Google. Well, most things. The social stuff isn't being talked about. ...

There are dozens of reasons why Airbnb is awesome. Take its truly disruptive model, for instance. Or if that doesn't do it for you, how about the fact that you can use it to rent entire countries?...

Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) are not sexy. Most people have no idea they exist; those that do know that they make the web snappier by replicating content on multiple servers, typically in differen...

Flashback: Moscone Center, San Francisco. Google's Vic Gundotra is pacing the stage, rolling off one new awesome Android feature after another. There's Fro Yo, the new version of Android that does lap...

If you're a fan of reading long-form content online, you probably already know what Longreads is. If not, you should. It's the best way to find content between 1,500 and 30,000 words on the web. And t...

The deal buzzards are swirling around Skype, and Microsoft may end up with the prize. Om first reported the rumor, which is now getting major play by the WSJ. Microsoft is in final negotiations to b...

If you're a fan of reading long-form content online, you probably already know what Longreads is. If not, you should. It's the best way to find content between 1,500 and 30,000 words on the web. And t...

"It's probably something that Don Draper would come up with if Larry and Sergey were his clients."-- Steven Levy "Google's Sophie's Choice"By now you've probably seen or read about Google's warm and f...

As online video advertising continues to grow, and expands to mobile, brands are looking for ways to get more bang for their advertising buck, and viewers continue to yearn for and expect video advert...

Evernote rival Springpad is announcing support for Android Honeycomb tablets and is also debuting offline access via its popular chrome web app. Similar to Evernote, Springpad serves as a multi-platf...

The Gillmor Gang "  John Borthwick, Robert Scoble, John Taschek, and Steve Gillmor "  inaugurated a new kind of Gillmor Gang. To the undisclosed, it looks the same: silly chat, man...

Back in March location-based game SCVNGR launched a spinoff venture called LevelUp " a direct competitor to Groupon, Living Social, and other daily deal sites. LevelUp's key twist is that it...

When people talk about near-field communications (NFC) chips in phones, they usually bring up mobile payments. But NFC chips, which are already in some Android phones, can be used by other apps besid...

Google's annual I/O conference kicks off tomorrow and it will likely bring a range of big announcements. But one of the cooler things that will be on display at the event was actually pre-announced to...

One of the main limitations on touchscreen interfaces these days is that all you can do is poke at them. We do all kinds of things with our hands, but when it comes to screens, we just poke at them al...

In January of this year, DreamIt Ventures, a Philadelphia-based VC firm and startup accelerator, announced that it would be expanding to the Big Apple, creating a startup accelerator program based in ...

Google confirmed the existence of their movie service earlier today and has just released more details on which studios and movies will provide the 3,000 titles. YouTube has partnered up with NBC Univ...

Google confirmed the existence of its YouTube Movies service earlier today and has just released more details on which studios and movies will provide the 3,000 titles in its repertoire. YouTube has p...

Last Friday, we posted about the negotiations between Apple and voice recognition company Nuance. While these talks have been going on for months, sources told us that it wasn't yet entirely clear wha...

If you have been watching TechCrunch TV interviews lately, you may have noticed the videos are much sharper, crisper and much higher quality. The reason: we've gone HD. We are now using a new workfl...

Shoefitr allows you to find a shoe that is similar in size and shape to a pair of shoes you already own. For example, say you're into Nike Free Runs but they discontinued the model you like. You tell ...

YouTube chief Salar Kamangar has just written a post on the YouTube blog titled "Welcome to the future of video. Please stay a while" , in which he hints at some major announcements that will be comin...

Following in the footsteps of Facebook, Twitter, Digg and even Google, blogging platform Tumblr has released its 'Share On Tumblr' button, which allows publishers to add a button encouraging users to...

TNG Pharmaceuticals, developers of a vaccine to keep cattle free of blood-sucking horn flies, took top prize at the "Moot Corp." business competition this weekend.Formally renamed the Venture Labs In...

Zynga has made yet another 'acqhire' today. The company is announcing that Ricardo Quesada and Rolando Abarca, key contributors to the cocos2d for iPhone open source project, are joining the gaming gi...

Ze Frank thinks that the future of play is a "hot thing." That's why he founded Star.me, his soon-to-be fully public startup. And that's why he's shifted his focus from stand-up entertainment to ...

If smartphone app sales (namely iPhone app sales) have taught manufacturers anything it's that there's ready money to be made in the parting of the people from their pennies. For the past few years we...

If you've ever done an image search on Google, you've probably gotten back a page filled with the same or similar images as the top result. If that is what you are looking for, then that's great. If...

Exclusive - Ustream is today launching a new and improved Facebook application that it says will take live streaming within the hugely popular social networking site "to another level".The app, which ...

As we wrote last week, Yandex, one of the leading Internet companies in Russia, filed for a public offering on NASDAQ under the symbol "YNDX". Today, the company is announcing price range of the offer...

Row Sham Bow, a new game development studio founded by gaming industry veterans and focused on creating games for social networks and direct-to-consumer platforms, has raised $3 million in funding fro...

NASDAQ-listed Limelight Networks this morning announced the acquisition of AcceloWeb, a Tel Aviv-based provider of technology that helps speed the presentation of websites and applications. We wrote a...

Six years ago when Twitter was just a side project by a podcasting startup called Odeo, there was one member of the early team that wasn't American. In fact, he wasn't even based in the U.S., and for ...

NVIDIA this morning announced its acquisition of Icera, which provides baseband processors for 3G and 4G cellular phones and tablets.The acquisition, for $367 million in cash, has been approved by bot...

As we heard in the company's most recent earnings call, e-commerce giant Amazon is planning to open at least nine fulfillment centers to meet growing demand in sales across the globe. Today, the compa...

Luxury group buying service Gilt Groupe is joining the mega-round bandwagon today with a new $138 million funding, led by Softbank, which took nearly half the round. Goldman Sachs, New Enterprise Ass...

AVOS, the new company formed by YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, has acquired Tap11, a real-time business intelligence platform. The company's platform integrates social publishing and ana...

European music startup musiXmatch will be announcing today at the MusicTech Summit in San Francisco that it has closed a $3.7 million series A funding round for its digital lyrics platform. The round ...

eBay last month announced that it has agreed to buy GSI Commerce, a provider of ecommerce and interactive marketing services, for $29.25 a share, or total consideration of approximately $2.4 billion.U...

After disclosing its intention to list its IPO on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol LNKD, LinkedIn has released a new filing with the SEC that shows that it is pricing its IPO between $32.0...

Between PayPal, Square and NFC technologies, mobile payments are heating up. There's no doubt that your mobile phone will soon serve as your wallet. Today, startup Tabbedout, a platform that allows yo...

Local deals juggernaut Groupon and Live Nation have a formed a joint venture to develop a new online ticketing deals channel dubbed GrouponLive (not available yet). The site will serve as a local reso...

Consumer device chip maker Broadcom has acquired SC Square, a security software maker based in Tel Aviv, Israel, the company announced over the weekend.Broadcom will pay $41.9 million, net of cash, to...

Anybody who has had to sift through hundreds of resumes at a time or placed a job advert that's gone unfilled for months will know that the recruitment process isn't always as efficient as it could be...

Whoa, so Alven Capital has been a pretty busy bee this year - especially for a French fund. This is something like the 5th investment that the fund has announced since January, totalling over 8.5 mill...

There's no denying that startup accelerators are now officially in vogue. Whether that is a sign of a bubble (or even a Blubble) or not I will leave to you.However, today the movement is joined by the...

Finally there's a reason for young people to use LinkedIn! If you're having trouble keeping track of where your friends work in this current startupgasm, WhoWorks.Atwas made for you.Just download the ...

About a week and a half ago, I wrote a post defending Apple against the location FUD being spread. Due to some real, but minor issues (which have already been resolved) Apple was at the center of this...

Back in August of last year, with a small amount of media fanfare, I quit Twitter and every other social network.At the time, I was in the midst of making final edits to The Upgrade as well as writing...

Digging out from under a mountain of stuff this weekend, I'm hopelessly behind. Disclosure: I work at salesforce.com, doing amazing things I can't say anything about. Apparently, the tech press is ab...

This is just plain fantastic. The LeafSnap app for iPhone identifies any leaf you take a picture of, as long as it's in their library. Check out the video inside....

Earlier this week I issued a report about the positive changes that have recently taken place in the venture capital industry. These changes are profound and will have a lasting effect on both the ven...

Last week I wrote a post about my current investment policy at TechCrunch, and pointing out already disclosed financial conflicts of interest. Our primary duty to readers, as I've said many times, is ...

It's just about that time again. Google I/O is happening next week and just as in year's past, the company is expected to announce some big things on stage during their two keynotes on Tuesday and Wed...

Back in March, alongside the roll out of Amazon's new cloud-based music upload/player service, we noted one glaring problem: it didn't work on iOS devices. You might think this had to due with Flash o...

Everyone is rightly very excited about the upcoming mega-hackathon at Disrupt New York. At last count, the event will host around four hundred billion hackers, working on some eighty five trillion pro...

Since 2007, you've been able to sign in to your AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) account to chat with your AIM contacts directly from Gmail. You simply login with your AIM account in Gmail and your contact...

We've all lived the nightmare. A new developer shows up at work, and you try to be welcoming, but he1 can't seem to get up to speed; the questions he asks reveal basic ignorance; and his work, when it...

A few weeks ago we gave away a BlackBerry Playbook and, much to your disappointment, you didn't win. In order to right that wrong, we present The Return Of The Attack Of The 16GB BlackBerry Playbook, ...

Meebo, which connects users with their friends across social platforms, emerged from the ashes of an idea Seth Sternberg and his team had for "file sharing between friends that had IM in it."...

Search is about to change quite radically. For more than a decade, search has been stagnant: the core product has not changed much. Users have changed radically in that time frame. Even though the kin...

Hybrid cars have been around for a while, but one German grad student is taking the concept to the water. A new hybrid propulsion motorboat designed by Stefanie Behringer, would reduce drag thanks to ...

Around eighty entrepreneur hopefuls gathered at NASA AMES last week to pitch their ideas for breakthrough technological products, with the hopes of gaining the funding to make their dreams a reality. ...

This past November, the blogosphere was briefly set on fire when a comment Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak made in passing stated that Apple had acquired the voice recognition company Nuance. Wozniak q...

Notable developer Joe Hewitt has left Facebook to pursue independent projects.From his blog:"Today was my last day at Facebook. Normally when I leave a job I go out cursing the management and wishing ...

Notable mobile developer Joe Hewitt has left Facebook to pursue independent projects related to HTML 5 development.From his blog:"Today was my last day at Facebook. Normally when I leave a job I go ou...

Whoa there tipsters, slow down. We've just been bombarded with tips coming our way that Google has rolled out a new-look search results page. Scanning Twitter, it looks like there are in fact a lot of...

Who needs another social network? Maybe you, friend. Admittedly, the social networking space is packed with so many players, it makes the mind reel. Across the Web, it seems like a new social netw...

LAGOS, NIGERIA-- I'm in Lagos to speak at an event and decided to come a week early to check out the country's tech and entrepreneurship scene.Apparently Arrington thought I was kidding when I told hi...

The idea behind Grubwithus is an awesome yet simple one. You browse for a restaurant you'd like to go to in a certain city and buy a ticket for your meal at a set price. But the key is that others do ...

Brands may be pouring money back into online display advertising, but that doesn't mean that display advertising works or won't be replaced by something else in the next few years. Will it be social,...

Ze Frank wants to send us all back to kindergarten. Star.me, Ze's soon-to-be fully public startup, which raised $500,000 from star-struck investors including Gary Vaynerchuk and Ron Conway, is an atte...

comScore's mobile subscriber stats are in for the month and Android continues to top U.S. smartphone share over Apple and RIM. Additionally, during the three month average period ending March 2011, Sa...

Popular commenting platform Disqus, which recently raised $10 million from North Bridge Venture Partners and Union Square Ventures, is adding support for a feature that's both nifty and familiar: ment...

The U.S. solar industry is banding together to fend off an onslaught of global competition, and to lower the cost of manufacturing solar technology domestically. To make it happen, the newly formed U....

The story of tech is largely about adoption, and adoption often comes into focus in the wake of cultural events. Last Friday's wedding of Prince William to Katharine Middleton was the epitome of an ev...

Following our visit to Berkeley Bionics to talk with the team about their inspiring artificially intelligent, bionic devices, we were lucky enough to visit The Santa Clara Valley Medical Center (VMC) ...

Here is another chance for you to win a free ticket to this year's Disrupt in NYC. Early bird tickets are no longer available, so this ticket is valued at around $3,000. This is one giveaway you don't...

Netflix is leading the charge when it comes to streaming movies and TV shows over the Internet. It's no longer focussed on DVDs, even though it is about to ship its 3 billionth disc. As bandwidth t...

Comparison engine FindTheBest has announced a key hire today. Former Google and DoubleClick exec Rabin Yaghoubi will be joining the company as President. At FindTheBest, Rabin will lead Business Devel...

OpenID software creator Janrain is bringing its social login SDK to Android phones today.Janrain plug and play technology allows an app developer's visitors to sign-in to the app with their existing a...

Customer support startup Zendesk is partnering with knowledge base company MindTouch today to offer a social help solution for customer service agents. Now support agents using Zendesk's customer supp...

Tablets and electronic book readers are on a collision course. In this episode of Fly or Die , ChrunchGear editor John Biggs and I discuss the pros and cons of the new BlackBerry Playbook and the Colo...

Ah, robots. When they're not busy planning world domination, they apparently play Angry Birds just like the rest of us. OptoFidelity, a Finnish company that specializes in machine vision and optical m...

Exclusive: Location-based mobile advertising company JiWire has raised $20 million in new funding led by Trident Capital with Comcast Interactive Capital, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Panorama Capital, an...

Pittsburgh-based The Resumator, which aims to "take the hassle out of hiring", has secured $700,000 in funding led by Rincon Venture Partners, with Paige Craig, ff Venture Capital and Christopher Much...

UK-based security software maker Sophos has acquired Astaro, a privately-held provider of network security solutions.Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Astaro booked $56 million in billings las...

Peixe Urbano, Brazil’s largest daily deal site (Groupon is a close second), has closed a “significant growth capital” investment from General Atlantic and Tiger Growth Management, th...

I thought I had Google's PR and launch strategy all figured out a couple of months ago. There haven't been, and won't be, any big "this changes everything" announcements around social, I said. Because...

Self-publishing content company Helium has raised another 10 million in debt financing according to aSEC filing from earlier today. Listed on the the filing are President Mark Renalli, and board membe...

Earlier today, AOL's Head of AIM Products Jason Shellen sent an email to the entire company urging people not to share its contents with people outside of the company. Even though we're a part of AOL,...

"The online farmers will not be able to choose to grow cannabis or bananas, but undoubtedly there will be some strange decisions, some decisions I would not have made." -- Richard Morris, farmerBecaus...

There are a number of barebones/mass-market low-cost devices out there, many of them aimed at the huge developing world market, hoping to outfit people with basic PC functionality for as little cost a...

The buzzword of the year is "cloud," and it carries with it an implication that your data is somewhere magical and safe, and in a way, it is. But there's no getting around the fact that our appetite f...

After raising a whopping $90 million last year, Palantir Technologies appears to be raising another big round. According to an SEC filing, the company has just raised $50 million in new funding. This ...

Today during her keynote talk at Social Loco, Google VP of Location and Local Services Marissa Mayeroutlined some of the core goals driving Google's local and location strategies, and how social will ...

Content platform Demand Media reported its first quarter 2011 results today, reporting revenue of $79.5 million, an increase of 48% compared to $53.6 million in Q1 2010, beating analyst expectations o...

Universal password via browser extension Last Pass has announced on its company blog that it might have been the target of a hacking attempt on Tuesday, as it experienced an unidentifiable anomaly in ...

What's funny is that my headline reads like a pretty standard intriguing tech headline. Employees from a hot startup (Foursquare) create a new service (Subscribe To It) that has a monetization strateg...

Residents of Half Moon Bay California, there's no need to be worried. That large roar you hear is likely the collective cheers coming from GoPro's HQ. The Californian company just announced a new roun...

News Corp's IGN gaming and entertainment property has just acquired Hearst's gaming and entertainment property UGO, we've confirmed with the company. And yes, the move is step one towards News Corp. s...

Editor's note: This is a guest post by HubPages CEOPaul Edmondson. Prior to founding HubPages, Edmondson was part of the executive team at MongoMusic, which was acquired by Microsoft in 2000, and held...

Google has just released a new tool that visualizes search queries on its search engine from around the world. Called the Search Globe, the browser-based tool shows you where searches are coming from ...

Today at Social Loco, Google's Marissa Mayer gave a keynote presentation outlining some of Google's recent advances with its local products. She also unveiled two new features related to Local: a tabl...

Qwerly, which originally pitched itself as a "DNS for people", used to have profile pages along the lines of About.me. But no more. As of today the startup is pivoting (my apologies) and shutting prof...

Can a $35 piece of plastic offer a compelling and immersive 3D experience? Well, yes and no. The Hasbro My3D is a fun idea - it's basically a stereoscopic viewer that splits images on the iPhone o...

When we think of smartphones and geo-location the two main use cases that come to mind are mapping and check-ins. These are fine and dandy, but what if you could use smartphones to keep tabs of where ...

The online dating industry majors rely on a fundamentally broken model, which may be good for their short-term balance sheets and providing people with meaningless entertainment but, as matchmaking se...

Enterprise social networking platform Yammer, just debuted a brand new iPad app and today is rolling out a new version of its Adobe AIR-powered desktop app. Yammer, which launched as the "Twitter for ...

Local mobile advertising network xAD has hit an important milestone today" 2 billion ads served. After serving one billion ads in the first 18 months since launch, xAD doubled this in the pa...

As a teenager, my parents constantly hounded me about where I was going, and when I would return. I didn't have a cellphone, so communication was limited. Flash forward ten years and although many tee...

Editor's Note: This is a guest post by Mark Suster (@msuster), a 2x entrepreneur, now VC atGRP Partners. Read more about Suster atBothsidesofthetableI'm in Seattle this week. Seattle should be the en...

There's no doubt Android Market will at some point offer more applications for download and/or purchase than Apple's App Store, as the latter's growth has been slowing down of late, while the Android ...

Oh yes, France does indeed have a tech scene. And today, TechCrunch France is hosting the first edition of #TCFRecipes in Paris, an event that will cover all the ins and outs of what's happening in th...

Online career site operator CareerBuilder has acquired JobsCentral, one of Singapore's largest job portals with over 700,000 registered jobseekers and a growing presence in Malaysia.With the acquisiti...

There's a neat line in the Facebook movie, The Social Network, that says something like Harvard students don't seek a job, they create a job in reference to the fact that so many graduates go on start...

As we reported a month ago, mobile ad network JumpTap has raised a round of new funding. The company confirmed this today, announcing a $25 million financing round from AllianceBernstein, General Cata...

Google I/O, Google's developer (cough, nerd) conference, comes to San Francisco next Tuesday for two days of peace, love, panels, and coding. Each year, the conference plays host to its so-called "Sa...

When it comes to Chrome, Google has long been addicted to speed. And for many tasks on the web today, that speed is related to how fast your JavaScript engine is. Google has long held that their's is ...

It's not everyday that one has an encounter with a robot, let alone has the chance to wear one, and recently, I was lucky enough to have just that. Thanks to Berkeley Bionics, I got to take a peak int...

When Google Voice (previously GrandCentral) cofounder and CEO Craig Walker left Google last year, he didn't go far. In fact, he just went across the street to set up a desk at Google Ventures as an en...

Social media monitoring platforms are undoubtedly one of the more desirable acquisition targets for both technology, e-commerce and media companies. Salesforce picked up Radian6 a few weeks ago for $3...

If you haven't seen Google's new "Dear Sophie" video, I highly recommend you check it out. It's brilliant.And watch closely.At various points in the video, the Chrome browser in use reveals an unrelea...

"People used to sit at a desk to 'Internet'. Then they would get up and stop Internetting. Now they Internet wherever, whenever "  even when they don't think they are doing it."That's Masher...

Like Pinger, Talkatone lets you make phone calls using Wifi. Unlike Pinger, Talkatone uses Google Voice as a channel to let you make and receive phone calls to and from your phone contacts, for free. ...

Warning: if you are an obsessively clean person, you may want to skip this episode of TC Cribs.For those of you brave enough to tune in, here's a bit of an explanation.Over the last few months we've s...

Earlier today, Apple released the iOS update that resolves the location tracking issues that had the press in a tizzy over for the past couple of weeks. For those keeping score at home, it took Apple ...

It is May 4th aka Force Day. On this day we must celebrate the cultural phenomenon that is Star Wars. How better to do that than by picking one item from a huge list of Star Wars stuff and having it s...

Online marketing network for small business owners MerchantCircle is launching an iPhone app today that allows small businesses to manage and update their listings on the site and other social media p...

With hundreds of thousands of websites integrating with Facebook Likes and 250 million people engaging with Likes just a little after a year after the Like button made its first appearance at F8, the ...

TechCrunch Disrupt NYC starts May 23rd" less than a month away. And we are very excited to announce four more guests to our growing list of speakers who will be joining us at this year's Dis...

Intel has made an interesting advance in microprocessor technology after years of research, and it seems that 2011's processors will be the first to feature 3D transistors and tri-gate technology. By ...

Socialcam, the video sharing app that was created by Justin.tv, is quickly fleshing out its feature set. The app "  which is a lot like an 'Instagram for video', minus the effects filters &q...

About a month ago, I was one of the very first people to ride an Uber car in New York City a few hours after the company put a few test cars out on the streets. It was supposed to be a secret, but I ...

Mobile apps like Instagram and PicPlz made photo filters popular, and now every photo app needs to have filters and effects. But not every developer wants to spend the time and resources to come up w...

Mobile apps like Instagram and PicPlz made photo filters popular, and now every photo app needs to have filters and effects. But not every developer wants to spend the time and resources to come up w...

Exclusive: Digital Marketing company Datran Media has acquired Allvoices, a fast-growing citizen journalism platform. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed by the companies but we hear the ac...

Facebook is so large that it now accounts for about one out of every three ad impressions in the U.S., according to the latest statistics from comScore Ad Metrix. In the first quarter of 2011, comSco...

AOL CEO Tim Armstrong is betting on the devil. Project Devil, that is. Those are the ad units on AOL properties (including TechCrunch), and now on Hearst sites as well, that take up all the ad spots...

PowerReviews, a company that provides customer review technology for retailers and e-commerce sites, has raised $10 million in new funding led by Four Rivers Group, with Woodside Fund, Menlo Ventures ...

Chatroulette is plotting a comeback! The site that allows complete strangers to jump from one awkward random video chat to the next was all the rage among the Web's tastemakers in the first half of la...

Chinese social network Renren has priced its its initial public offering of shares at $14 per share, with a total offering size of $743.4 million. The price per share falls into the high range that th...

Warner Bros. Home Entertainment Group has acquired social movie discovery site Flixster. The acquisition also includes Rotten Tomatoes, a movie review site Flixster acquired from News Corp. last year....

Startup Scrible is launching its rich web annotation tool to the public today. Scrible is also announcing that it has received a $500,000 grant from the NationalScience Foundation (NSF).The service's ...

Topix, the largely under-the-radar platform for local news, information, and influence, has been aggregating local news and community discussions for nearly 7 years. Over this time, the platform has q...

Task management service TaskRabbitis announcing a raise of $5 million in Series B this morning, in addition to its already existing $1.8 million in Series A.The financing was lead by Shasta Ventures a...

SoundCloud, the audio platform, has unveiled SoundCloud Labs, a new site to house experimental projects and features both developed in-house and by third-party developers via its open API.The idea of ...

Our parent company AOL has just released its quarterly earnings for Q1 2011, and it's a mixed bag (again).Revenue came in at $551.4 million, which is better than most analysts had anticipated - the co...

Today, electric motorcycle makers Brammo revealed that the company will add new electronic transmission technology, and a redesigned motor, clutch and gear shift to its lineup, that will make its mot...

In the 1990s, peer-to-peer networks were a revelation. They allowed people to pool together tiny parts of their computers, and those pooled together parts could do far more together than the average c...

TransferWise, the peer-to-peer online currency exchange that aims to give banks a run for their money with its flat-fee exchange rate, has announced that it's seen $1m worth of transactions in three m...

I'm a huge fan of Viber's iPhone app, which lets me call, and since recently, send messages to many of my contacts, free of charge. Needless to say, it's imperative for Viber to go cross-platform as q...

This morning's upgrades to Apple's iMac line of computers brought a range of nice features. But most were just spec bumps. The big new addition is Thunderbolt. Following the initial roll-out to the Ma...

In 2005 Kyle MacDonald made a series of fourteen trades, beginning with a red paperclip and ending with a house. It took him less than a year. You all know the story. The Office did even an episode th...

If you ever wanted a glimpse of what the Spiderman "With great power comes great responsibility" quote looks like actualized, take a second to digest the above photo of President Obama,Secretary of St...

Spotify, the music service Americans don't get to enjoy, announced several very cool new features today. The European music service is rolling out new versions of its desktop and mobile apps today, wh...

AppDirect, a platform that allows businesses to find, buy and manage web-based applications, has announced that it has closed a $3.25 million round of seed funding to hire engineering talent and expan...

A couple months ago, we noted that a company called 955 Dreams was playing the iPad like jazz with their hot app, The History of Jazz. Now they're back again with another musically-themed iPad app. An...

Boingo Wireless, a nationwide WiFi provider, has just issued a release stating that it is pricing its IPO tomorrow morning at $13.50 per share, which falls into the expected range. The shares will beg...

TechCrunch Disrupt winner Qwiki launched its iPad app in the App Store a less than a week ago and after 11 days has hit the quarter of a million downloads milestone. This is notable for an iPad app, e...

On April 21st, Facebook celebrated the 1st birthday of its now ubiquitous "Like" button, and promptly shared the news that 10,000 sites are, like, using the plugin every day. The social networking be...

A few weeks ago, a video entered wide circulation in the tech press for two reasons: 1) it featured lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) Apple employees talking about their difficulties grow...

One upon a time, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer interrupted a speech at a developer's conference with a chant that would set the Internet ablaze. "Developers, developers, developers, developers" was quic...

If you have even the slightest hint of a creative streak, you may be interested in COLOURlovers,a startup whose products let you easily express yourself using shapes and colors, even if you aren't par...

Peer-to-peer education startup Skillshare, which just launched in April, raised a $550,000 angel round, according to an SEC filing. Investors in the New York City startup include Founder Collective, ...

We heard yesterday that Sunday night's announcement of Osama Bin Laden's death drew the highest sustained rate of tweets ever according to Twitter and Google has revealed an impressive stat showing th...

Google has eight major product groups. Advertising, Commerce & Local, Mobile (Android), Social, Chrome, YouTube and Search. Search is, of course, Google's first and most important product. But tha...

We heard yesterday that Sunday night's announcement of Osama Bin Laden's death drew the highest sustained rate of tweets ever according to Twitter and Google has revealed an impressive stat showing th...

Netflix is blowing the doors off its business, with $3 billion in annualized revenue and a $12 billion market cap driven by the transition to streaming online video. In terms of hours watched, stream...

Google Ad chief Susan Wojcicki has some advice for Web companies wondering if their products will be a success. Reminiscing about the early days of AdSense to Steven Levy at Wired's business conferen...

Way back at TechCrunch 50 2008 we saw the launch of GoPlanIt, a startup that looked to help you generate a travel itinerary in just a few clicks. The company was addressing a problem that everyone has...

Just in time for Mother's Day, co-founders Antoine Grant and Stuart Felkner are launching responsibly, a gift giving platform with a social good component. responsibly is basically a daily deals site ...

Xobni, the social email plugin that makes your inbox smarter, is going to make your Outlook email more productive today with the launch of a Gadget Store with apps from collaboration and productivity ...

We've covered Booshaka, a startup that takes Facebook search and adding a few bells and whistles to allow users to segment search by topic and provide trending topics around what people on Facebook ar...

By now, you may have run across a SoundCloud audio track somewhere out there in the wild, wooly Interwebs -- perhaps during one of your mad, late-night music searches. In which case, you're familiar ...

Late last year, we wrote about ProFounder, a startup that offers entrepreneurs ways to raise money for their startups and ideas. At launch, ProFounder allowed entrepreneurs to share a percentage of t...

Hey, remember those Italian guys who spent 2 years trying to get their startup funded in Italy and raised $101K in 19 days when they arrived in the States? There's a tendency on this side of the A...

Considering that the Web is changing and evolving every single day, the learning curve for newcomers -- and even old-hands alike -- can be steep. For those who are starting businesses and looking to ...

Electronic Arts (EA) has acquired Firemint, a privately held mobile development studio based in Melbourne, Australia. Firemint is the 60-people strong company behind games like Flight Control (see vid...

Some people like mice. Other people like trackpads. Apple likes both as long as they come with their credit cards.The updated iMacs offer both as options for no additional cost. During the build proce...

Super angel investor Chris Sacca doesn't like all the new competition pushing up valuations in angel deals and seed rounds these days. "It is a train and it is kind of running away," he says on a pan...

Long before Twitter launched a proper mobile website with enough bells and whistles to be actually worth using (December 2009) there was Slandr, a mobile website that allowed Twitter users, even those...

After the nuclear disaster in Japan at the Fukushima reactors, the general public is understandably skittish about nuclear energy once again. But not Bill Gates. Speaking today at a Wired business co...

Social networking is definitely no longer targeting just the young adult demographic - and Kima Ventures wants a piece of the larger social networking pie. Xavier Niel and Jrmie Berrebi's seed fund ha...

For the past six years or so, my main desktop machine has been a string of iMacs. As an all-in-one machine, they're both great to look at and simple to set up and use. But the power user side of me wa...

A new startup has launched hoping to disrupt the food services industry and democratize the experience of having a personal chef. Munchery aims to bring personal chefs to the masses, giving consumers ...

I don't often like to post "numbers" news since we're hardware guys, but this particular stat sticks out: Mike Lazaridis just reported that BlackBerry sold 150 million phones in the past 12 years and ...

I don't often like to post "numbers" news since we're hardware guys, but this particular stat sticks out: Mike Lazaridis just reported that BlackBerry sold 150 million phones in the past 12 years and ...

Amazon this morning announced that it is debuting a brand new private sales site, featuring fashion items straight from designers and boutique brands. The membership-only website, MyHabit.com, will of...

Quanta, a Chinese hardware manufacturer, is reporting that they have received an order from Amazon to build new Kindle tablets, potentially with fringe field switching display touchscreens that may or...

Groupon rival BuyWithMe has acquired a daily deal site in the former's home turf, Chicago, in order to expand its regional offering. With the acquisition of the group buying site, DealADayOnline (DADO...

Smell that? Yeah, it's the crisp smell of Sandy Bridge chips. The iMacs were starting to smell a bit stale with older Intel Core CPUs and low memory ATI graphic cards. Not anymore. Apple just roll...

The march towards the generic Android tablet has begun. Most of the first Honeycomb tablets are indistinguishable from each other save one or two tiny differences. The Xoom hit the market first and st...

I like to think of Gogobot as a Yelp for travel, or a TripAdvisor that puts users first. If you travel a lot and want to write about the things you did, or if you want good tips on travel, it's an exc...

When we first covered Stipple in September of last year, it seemed like a really cool idea: tag people in images no matter where they reside on the web "  not just on Flickr or Facebook. It ...

TrueCar, which helps people research new and used car prices and find local dealer savings, has acquired automotive social media company Honk.com, dubbed the 'Facebook for car buyers' in the news rele...

Friendfund, the group payments startup that lets friends club together to make a purchase, has announced an undisclosed round of funding from a group on Angel investors described as, well, friends. Th...

Recently, Paris-based Tigerlily seemed like it was slipping under the radar. It'd been a while since we'd heard anything from the company that we suggested Nestl take a look at when the brand came und...

The Financial Times yesterday reported on the upcoming IPO of Chinese social network Renren.com:The strong interest [in Renren's IPO] stems from the fact that there is no major social media or social ...

Getty Images has acquired competitor The Photolibrary Group, which provides access to over 10 million images, footage and music files. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.Founded in 1967 and h...

We wrote about Dapsem when they showed off their to-be-launched iPhone app at Techonomy3 in Tel Aviv a few weeks ago. I was impressed by the simplicity of the app, which simply allows you to give a ma...

Reading the headlines a month ago, you would have thought Apple's insane run in the stock market was over. "Apple Crunched in Nasdaq Rebalance," read the key Wall Street Journal headline. But the real...

Earlier tonight, Yahoo announced that they grabbed one from our side to be the new Editor in Chief of their Yahoo Media Network: Jai Singh. Singh had been the Executive Editor at Huffington Post (and ...

Hitmaker and Apptitude creator Noise Toys has raised $1.2 million in seed funding this week, to continue to focus on apps that bring together social sharing and game mechanics.Investors in the round i...

This morning, we noted that Google was getting ready to release an OS X version of the Chrome Canary build. Sure enough, just hours later, here it is.Canary is the pre-Dev build of Chrome meant for us...

Videolicious for the iPhone and iPad is a free app designed for those of us who aren't professional video editors but still want to have our important moments preserved in quality video. By walking pe...

Videolicious for the iPhone and iPad is a free app designed for those of us who aren't professional video editors but still want to have our important moments preserved in quality video. By walking pe...

Personalized radio service Pandora has reached a major milestone: last week it recorded its 10 billionth thumb (and it was a thumbs up).Avid fans of the popular service already know what that means &q...

A couple of years ago RockYou couldn't seem to send an email to partners without screwing up and cc'ing everyone. We pointed each screwup out, with catchy headlines. I knew that someday, somehow, we'd...

One of the main features of the latest version of the Kindle was its new "Pearl" E Ink screen. It offered better contrast, faster response, and so on. And since we've gotten so used to new stuff being...

With nearly 700 million users spending a good percentage of time on the service, its seems like everyone has their own Facebook features wishlist, or complaints list. I would personally like to click ...

Researchers at the University of Washington have found that, while useful, Kindles (specifically that larger Kindles DX) aren't all that popular with students - yet. Their issues, arguably, are UI pro...

Cobalt Technologies, a cleantech startup in Mountain View that develops and makes biobutanol, closed a $20 million series D funding round, the company revealed today. The investment arm of Parsons &#...

Twitter has acquired TweetDeck, we've heard from a source with knowledge of the deal, and the transaction will be announced in the next few days. The $40 million - $50 million purchase price includes ...

A little over a month after announcing the $326 million acquisition of social media monitoring company Radian6, Salesforce has closed the deal. The purchase of Radian6 is Salesforce's largest acquisit...

eBay has been acquiring companies left and right recently and today is announcing the acquisition of yet another startup (this time a nonprofit)" MissionFish. MissionFish has actually been p...

Twitter has just revised its preliminary measurements of 4,000 tweets per second from last night's announcement of Osama Bin Laden's death, tweeting out the new measurements below. At the event's peak...

Twitter has just revised its preliminary measurements of 4,000 tweets per second from last night's announcement of Osama Bin Laden's death, tweeting out the new measurements below. At the event's peak...

Users of Google Chrome are probably aware of the three channels you can use depending on how cutting edge you want to be (and how much you mind bugs): Dev, Beta, Stable. But ever since last year, ther...

Last week we broke the news that LikeALittle, an addictive college-focused site that lets students flirt with each other, had raised $1 million from Andreessen Horowitz and others earlier this year. T...

Peel, a startup that's looking to turn your iOS device into a super-powered universal remote (among other things), has some big news: it's just closed a $16.7 million Series B funding round led by Rav...

Mini's rolling out a slick new in-vehicle system and we recently got a hands-on demo. Mini Connected features much of what you'd expect for a modern infotainment system including a tight integration w...

It looks like Uber is on the move again. According to a Tweet from the private car service, the company is planning to expand to Boston, Chicago, Seattle, and D.C. Uber just advertised a number of job...

According to a report out today from Ernst & Young and Dow Jones VentureSource, American venture capitalists invested 54 percent more, by dollar amount, in cleantech companies for the first quarte...

Send the Trend, a recently launched e-commerce site that brings personalization to the world of fashion accessories, has raised $3 million in Series A funding led by Battery Ventures with a number of...

Last night, many of us learned about Osama Bin Laden's death on Twitter. And in fact, the first credible report from Keith Urbahn, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's chief of staff, was al...

Further evidence that advertising on social networks (a.k.a. Facebook) is a booming business. BIA/Kelsey reports today that social media advertising revenues will grow from $2.1 billion in 2010 to $8....

BlackBerry developer Research In Motion is definitely on a shopping spree. A week after announcing the acquisition of social calendering application Tungle.me, the company is buying smartphone softwar...

An app that probably should have appeared on the Playbook at launch, video chat, is coming to tablet owners tomorrow morning in an OTA update. In addition to front and back camera support, the chat ap...

The brand new BlackBerry Bold 9900/9930 is a 1.2GHz smartphone (RIM's "thinnest yet") that runs Blackberry OS 7 and includes NFC connectivity and a touchscreen interface....

Kaminario, a provider of SSD storage products, this morning announced that it has secured $15 million in Series C financing. Existing backers Sequoia and Pitango were joined this time by new investor ...

Brightcove was issued a broad patent for the "Distribution of content," which covers the basic features of a professional online video platform. Patent No. 7,925,973, which was applied for on August ...

Online local media and search company Local.com has acquired location-based shopping data aggegator Krillion for $3.5 million in cash. The company provides local shopping information on over 70,000 co...

DISH Network and EchoStar this morning announced that they've agreed to pay TiVo $500 million to settle all of their ongoing patent litigation with the digital video recorder company.Under the terms o...

Google Maps users have been busy as the news of the raid on Osama bin Laden's mansion was breaking. A pretty large compound listed on Google Maps in the city of Abbottbad, northern Pakistan has been p...

Yesterday Sohaib Athar (@ReallyVirtual on Twitter) was just a "an IT consultant taking a break from the rat-race by hiding in the mountains" - specifically Abbottabad in the Lahore, Pakistan.But today...

According to the Twitter-sphere, President Obama is about to announce the death of Osama Bin Laden, in an impromptu announcement broadcast on Whitehouse.gov this Sunday night at 10:45 EST.This news is...

According to the Twitter-sphere, President Obama is about to announce the death of Osama Bin Laden, in an impromptu announcement broadcast on Whitehouse.gov this Sunday night at 10:45 EST.This news is...

If the Twitterverse is to be believed, President Obama is about to announce the death of terrorist and 9-11 mastermind Osama Bin Laden, in an impromptu announcement broadcast onWhitehouse.govand TVthi...

As the initial hysteria (mostly justified) surrounding the Sony PSN breach subsides, more measured estimates of the damage are appearing, but more serious questions are becoming relevant. It's still t...

Many years ago, after graduating college, I came home before moving to NYC, wondering how I would scrounge together the money for the first month's rent and security deposit so my friends and I could ...

Yesterday, French site Consomac.fr did some digging into the latest developer preview build of OS X Lion and found something interesting. Buried in the code are references to a service named called "C...

Last weekend, our own Erick Schonfeld wrote an impressive in-flight diatribe against American Airlines; specifically their ineffectual social media representatives whom he described as little more tha...

The news from NBC/Universal/Comcast is that the cable giant has finally made deals with both ABC and Fox to carry selected shows on their on-demand service. This is big news for the iPad set, because ...

We're back for a new episode of OMG/JK (in HD!). This week the news has been all about private data " Google and Apple have been accused of tracking your every move (they aren't), and Sony h...

Inuit's GoPayment reader, which competes directly with Square, is about to become more attractive to small businesses today. The company has made the decision dropped the transaction fee ($0.15 per tr...

"Consumer Internet entrepreneurs are like pro basketball players," a venture capitalist told me recently while discussing the prospects for a thirty-something founder, "They peak at 25, by 30 they're ...

Ever heard of Dropship? It's an open-source project that "enables arbitrary, anonymous transfers of files between Dropbox accounts." Dropbox hopes you haven't; they tried to squelch it this week, ...

The Gillmor Gang "  Kevin Marks, Danny Sullivan, JP Rangaswami, John Taschek, and Steve Gillmor "  christened the new Gang studio with a surprise welcome to Kevin Marks. It turns o...

The talent wars that were common back in the late 90"s appear to have returned whether it's usingLOLCatsorcheeseburgersto recruit talent. While I love the creativity, when it comes down to making...

The business model of incentivized app downloads was recently dealt a death sentence by Apple.Apple said incentivized app downloads were driving inaccurate rankings in the App Store, almost certainly ...

I've been in Las Vegas for most of the month and so have been out of the loop on some of the major stories rocking the world of technology and media. Stories like the startling news that, having made ...

WARNING: mixed sports metaphors ahead.How many do-overs does a startup get before users give up on it for good? As far as I can remember, the answer is zero. I can't think of an example where a st...

Twitter recently upped its rates on Twitter Promoted Trends from $60K-$70K to between $100K-$120K which means the demand for the unique form of advertising is certainly there. But what are brands gett...

Last week President Obama spoke at Facebook, emphasizing during the townhall that theUS needs to be bullish on Science and Math education if we are to pull out of the recession, "We want to start maki...

This week, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency issued Energy Star ratings for large vat commercial fryers. These appliances are used by high-volume dining establishments "  like fast f...

Square founder and CEO Jack Dorsey just tweeted a photo of the company's internal dashboard, and, aside from looking very sexy, it's boasting some impressive numbers. Among them: Square has shipped 34...

If you've ever worked in retail or the food services industry, you're probably familiar with the Point of Sale (POS) system. It's the software/hardware combination that most people would probably call...

Well, the Royal Wedding is over. Wasn't that wonderful? If you weren't watching on TV, there were about a million ways to participate online. Millions watched on YouTube, Livestream and elsewhere....

"Online Services Division revenue grew 14% year-over-year primarily driven by increases in search revenue."That was Microsoft's statement about the Online Services Division in their earnings release y...

Vibrating sex toys have been around for over a century, starting out as crudesteam powered devices and now resembling something very cool that you might pick up at an Apple store. Sex toys have been t...

As we saw from retailer JC Penney's recent downfall in search rankings, using 'black hat' SEO tactics and gaming search is considered deceptive and 'tantamount to cheating' by Google. J.C. Penney said...

The speakers for Disrupt just keep on getting better and better. Today, we are extremely excited to announce four more guests who will join us at this year's Disrupt in New York City: Marissa Mayer, ...