Articles by Techcrunch from May 2012

For all its faults, Google Voice has gotten to be pretty solid with regard to how it routes calls from different groups of people, and today the search giant has gussied up the service even more. Acco...

Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin offered some early thoughts today on movie adaptation of Walter Isaacson's Steve Jobs, which he has signed on to write. Sorkin was speaking at the D10 conference, and it soun...

Mary Meeker's annual Internet Trends report is usually full of good stuff and this year is no exception. We already covered her comments about mobile monetization and the Facebook IPO, but one of the ...

It's midnight before your final exam and you need help. Do you know where your tutor is? InstaEDU, says a $1.1 million seed round from former Facebooker Chamath Palihapitiya's Social+Capital Part...

It's midnight before your final exam and you need help. Do you know where your tutor is? InstaEDU, says a $1.1 million seed round from former Facebooker Chamath Palihapitiya's fundThe Social+Capi...

Big data is not only hot in the startup world but also in the university. Stanford, with its intimate access to Silicon Valley is most readily associated with the study of big data. But UC Berkeley, t...

Google scored an important win over Microsoft a few weeks ago when it won a $35 million U.S. government contract to bring its cloud-based office solution to the Department of the Interior. Microsoft's...

It seems the much-rumored Google Nexus Tablet is nearing release. Citing Basemark benchmarking reports, the device is supposedly codenamed Grouper, running Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean) and employing a 7-i...

The women's liberation movement once taught ladies to cast off their bras in solidarity and empowerment; now a new startup, founded by two women, is inverting that formula to make sure that when you p...

ShareMyPlaylists was the first site to allow the sharing of Spotify playlists (launched 2009). It's now relaunched its music discovery Spotify app based its 91,000 hand-curated playlists. The site com...

Wrike is hoping to expand its audience today with the launch of a free version of its project management tool.Wrike says it already has 2,000 customers including Accenture, Stanford, and Ticketmaster,...

Mark Pincus took the stage today at D10, and of course because Facebook is all people can talk about after its IPO two weeks ago, he got asked and asked and asked again about Zynga's "attachment to Fa...

Grubwithus, the social dining network and 2011 Y Combinator grad, announced today that it has secured $5 million in new funding to snack on, led by GRP Partners with contribution from Lebanese entrepr...

We've heard a lot about how monetizing mobile content is difficult in the context of Facebook's IPO. A lot of the company's growth is coming from mobile, after all, but it's currently very hard to mak...

Pinterest rival Fancy, which thinks it has figured out social commerce (or at least, before Pinterest did), is announcing today that it has reached 1 million users as well as an average of $50,000 wor...

The fallout from Facebook's initial public offering earlier this month continues to play out in the media, but according to some of the most senior players in the financial space, any negative aspects...

Atlassian, the Australian company that makes popular software project management tools JIRA and Confluence, has opened a marketplace where customers can download and buy add-ons for the company's apps...

The whole area of making payments as a group of people, whether it be for joint gift purchases (weddings), or even simple things like housemates paying bills etc. has been an area several startups hav...

Parse, the Y Combinator-backed startup that powers the back-end for mobile apps like Band of the Day and Hipmunk, is rolling out support for mobile web apps too. The San Francisco startup has a new SD...

Media agencies want to ensure that their ads are only seen in the best light... But a lot of times, the networks they use to distribute those ads don't do a good job of distinguishing between good con...

It's been fascinating to watch the proliferation of photo apps before and since the rise of Instagram and its sale to Facebook. EyeEm has a beautiful app which makes tagging images to locations ridicu...

PowerInbox, the email platform that's been on a tear lately in terms of its releases, is rolling out yet another update today bringing a number of new features, including the addition of the most requ...

Everyone is focused on what hardware product Apple might launch next, but out of Italy comes news of a software development: the company has bought Redmatica, a small startup that specializes in digit...

Mary Meeker, famed Internet analyst-turned-Kleiner Perkins partner, has released her latest data dump. Here you go: ...

The Evo 4G LTE is one of the best phones to land on Sprint shelves in a while, but that's not to say it has no competition over at the Yellow carrier. The Galaxy Nexus has propped itself up as the And...

Another big advance for mobile payments startup BOKU: it has inked a deal with T-Mobile USA to provide carrier billing for the T-Mobile Mall, the digital storefront operated by the carrier.The deal is...

Betting big on the future monetization opportunities to be found in the "smart TV" ecosystem is boxPAY, a company which is now bringing the carrier billing option to TV apps and services. With boxPAY,...

I'm not a professional musician, but apparently it's a headache for artists to publicize their tourdates on the myriad number of websites and apps that cater to music lovers. Not only is there Faceboo...

Google+, with 100 million active users, still has a long way to go before being anywhere near social network rival Facebook's nearly one-billion subscribers. But it has been working hard to lever...

Sometimes you just gotta do your own thing. Such was the case with Boris Vaisman, who dropped out of Y Combinator's winter batch (where he was on kid-safe phone lockdown tool, Kyte). Says Vaisman, it ...

Simple.TV wants to help cord cutters record and have access to broadcast TV wherever they are, by connecting its device to an HD antenna and streaming those signals over the Internet. And it's launchi...

After a rough day yesterday, RIMM's stock opened down 10% today, trading at $10.05 at the opening bell. The stock price briefly recovered but it's on a steady downward trend as of this post's writing....

Much has been said about the Nokia Pureview 808 since its debut at MWC in February, but most recently the rumors have centered around delayed availability in the UK. The phone, and its 41-megapixel ca...

Roambi, one of the most popular names in an emerging set of business intelligence (BI) apps, has found an eager audience thanks to its enabling companies to transform their snooze-inducing Salesforce,...

One of the nice little surprises at Samsung's Galaxy S III unveiling in London was that the device would be preloaded with the fabled Android version of the Flipboard social magazine app. The news cam...

Do you ever find yourself wishing that the act of telling time was as simple, and tactile, as flipping a light switch in your home? If so, then the folks at Watchismo have got quite the surprise in st...

In the midst ofAmazon's recent moves to rapidly grow its content collection on Amazon Prime Instant Video, the company has also been brokering deals for another one of its video properties: European N...

If any household product deserves a spot in the Apple Store, it's the Nest Thermostat. Never mind the common denominator of long-time Apple employee, Tony Fadell, the Nest Thermostat exemplifies Apple...

If you've been keeping up at all, you should know that we're planning a tour of the Southeast during the second week of July. We're hitting all the hottest spots, including Savannah, Atlanta, Raleigh,...

If you've been keeping up at all, you should know that we're planning a tour of the Southeast during the second week of July. We're hitting all the hottest spots, including Savannah, Atlanta, Raleigh,...

SkySQL plans to be something of a thorn in Oracle's side. As you'll recall MySQL, which as a free database platform annoyed Oracle, was sold to Sun and then Oracle bought Sun. That was supposed to kee...

Every year, Cisco issues its Visual Networking Index (VNI) to forecast the amount of data traffic will be used worldwide. The latest VNI forecast shows a massive uptick in data usage, from the 369 Exa...

Inkling, the San Francisco-based startup that's known for making super slick interactive digital versions of college textbooks and other educational titles for the iPad, has debuted its first ever pla...

While some may still cringe at the word (and its overuse), gamification is reaching the tipping point. As Mayfield Fund Managing Director Tim Chang recently wrote in a must-read post, gamification is...

While some may still cringe at the word (and its overuse), gamification is reaching the tipping point. As Mayfield Fund Managing Director Tim Chang recently wrote in a must-read post, gamification is...

Yesterday, Gartner presented a picture of a $172-billion mobile payments industry that is still largely based around older technologies like SMS and web-based payments, with newer services like NFC ch...

TodayPayPalopened up a new front in its strategy to expand its role in mobile payments, a business PayPalprojectswill generate it $7 billion in revenue this year. The eBay-owned payments company today...

Nokia today announced it is losing another senior executive: Esko Aho, who had once been the prime minister of Finland and is currentlyEVP, corporate relations and responsibility and a member of Nokia...

We in the press haven't heard too much from Five Stars, the customer loyalty startup, since it launched out of the Winter 2011 class of Y Combinator last year. But now that seems the silence has been ...

smartDIGITAL, a startup that makes interactive ad displays, has raised $2.7 million in a Series A round of funding.smartDIGITAL displays are already available in Chicago and Miami, says co-founder and...

Since launching in mid-2011, doxo has been on a mission to make your life paperless. With its "digital filing cabinet" software, the Seattle-based startup aims to create a single place for users to ma...

Since launching in mid-2011, doxo has been on a mission to make your life paperless. With its "digital filing cabinet" software, the Seattle-based startup aims to create a single place for users to ma...

Some eye-opening stats out today from McAfee, the Intel-owned IT security company: a study of 28 million computers in 24 countries has found that 17 percent of all PCs do not have any form of security...

Sequoia Capital is indeed in the process of raising a total of some $1 billion for a series of several new venture funds, we've confirmed with sources close to the situation. The new raise is currentl...

Apple's product naming polices can be somewhat confusing and arbitrary: And today an audience member at D10 called Apple CEO Tim Cook out on the somewhat bizarre strategy, "How did you guys go from an...

At TechCrunch Disrupt NYC last May, the unanimous winner of the "Audience Choice" award was a young, Atlanta-based startup called CodeGuard. The startup caught the audience's attention based on a simp...

Apple CEO Tim Cook talked about the company's TV plans tonight at the D10 conference. His comments were all pretty vague, but if nothing else, he hinted strongly that Apple does in fact have plans for...

Asked onstage by Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher about what could be done about the lack of Facebook integration on iOS despite it's formidable 900 million uses, as well as other stalls in the Apple an...

In the first major public interview since replacing Steve Jobs as CEO, Tim Cook took the stage with Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher at the tenth annual All Things D conference to talk about the state o...

Another funding announcement that underscores what big business kids' and educational apps can be. Mindshapes, a UK-based developer of interactive learning apps, has picked up a $4 million round of fu...

Salesforce.com is acquiringBuddy Media, in the largest social marketing acquisition to date, according to sources close to the company are confirming.AllThingsD reported earlier todaythat Salesforce i...

Groupon just announced via its blog that it has acquired Breadcrumb, the creators of an affordable point of sale system and iPad app that targets local restaurants. While the terms of the deal have no...

Groupon just announced via its blog that it has acquired Breadcrumb, the creators of an affordable point of sale system and iPad app that targets local restaurants. While the terms of the deal have no...

Google, together with its partner Samsung, launched a new Chromebook and its first desktop Chromebox today. The most important change to the new Samsung Series 5 Chromebook is that it is significantly...

Facebook had another tough day today in the public markets, with shares now trading at around $28 after debuting less than two weeks ago at $42.05. Good timing, then, for a new slideshow report out to...

You're hitting deadline and you want to add that special something that will totally know your web app out of the park. Do you add rounded corners? A Tweet This button? No, motherlover, you add Clippy...

In this very unique edition of the "Keen On" web video series series typically hosted by Andrew Keen, we had the chance to turn the tables on the self-professed antichrist of Silicon Valley. Keen was ...

WordPress just hit an impressive milestone today: it has now filtered its 50 billionth piece of spam.Akismet, the homegrown comment filtering system from WordPress maker Automatticis the tool responsi...

WordPress just hit an impressive milestone today: it has now filtered its 50 billionth piece of spam.Akismet, the homegrown comment filtering system from WordPress maker Automatticis the tool responsi...

Canadian smartphone manufacturer RIM has briefly ceased trading of their stock today in order to issue a "business update" from CEO Thorsten Heins to their stockholders. Though the release takes the t...

Bitly launched a major update and redesign of its link shortening service today that, in the eyes of many of its users, de-emphasizes some of its core feature. Instead of being able to just copy and p...

Pain, pain, and more pain for Facebook's stock. Facebook sunk into the $20s for the first time today, declining about 9 percent as options trading started. The decline also came a day after a third wa...

Last we heard from Game Closure, the young startup had just turned down offers from Zynga and Facebook on its way to a $12 million raise from Greylock, Benchmark, General Catalyst, and more. Even in s...

Amazon just announced that its Instant Video service is now available on Microsoft's Xbox 360. With the Amazon Instant Video app for Xbox Live Gold subscribers, Xbox users can now access the roughly 1...

An Irish women's charity, Women's Aid, linked to some articles on the Irish Examiner (like this, this, and this) and thought that all was right with the world. Heck, that's how the Internet works, rig...

Evo. It's one of the few HTC/Sprint models to make a splash in the mobile ocean, and after a brief stay at U.S. customs, the latest iteration should do the same. The Evo 4G LTE is the most powerful Ev...

Sprint CEO Dan Hesse has been planning to kill off the carrier's aging iDEN network since 2010, but now Sprint has finally delivered a date for iDEN's demise. The carrier has just announced that they...

Mobile video sharing service Viddy has been busy adding new features to its iOS app, which will now provide more customization options for content that users upload. Along with the latest app update, ...

Although one could argue that Facetime and Skype are already nearly perfect telepresence systems, there's definitely some value in having a jolly little robot sit on your shoulder and transmit, in rea...

Mobile app downloads continued to decline in April and the cost to acquire loyal users picked up, reports mobile marketing firm Fiksu in its latest report out today. This downward trend was expected, ...

In the aftermath-analysis about what exactly happened in the Facebook IPO, and what it might mean for the future, here's one side-effect to the east of Nasdaq: Vkontake, the top social network in Russ...

Link shortener Bitly today launched a major redesign and number of new features that all add up to what the company itself calls "a new bitly." Among these new features are 'bitmarks,' bitly's name fo...

Now look: these are probably fake as all get-out, but bear with me. These handsomely watermarked photos are purported to represent a brand new iPhone design with a sort of two-tone brushed and chromed...

Social commerce startup Lockerz just announced that it has acquired online fashion community Chick Approved.Lockerz allows its members to earn "PTZ" by sharing content and other activity on the site, ...

Peer to peer (p2p) lending was always an idea with great potential. It is a simple concept. Match people who want to borrow money with people who want to invest money. Cut the banks out of the equatio...

The purchase of Face.com by Facebook is happening and is a done deal, say multiple TechCrunch sources.Those familiar with the matter have confirmed the price will be $100m, as per the media speculatio...

Rumblings of a new, Google-free iOS Maps app have been winging their way around the web for a few weeks now, and just in time to whet our appetites before WWDC, an early version of the revamped app ha...

Dell has sold various all-in-one computers for years. These systems were mostly insipid, humdrum computers not fit for anything other than being a family's portal to Facebook. Even with touchscreens, ...

JackThreads, the members-only shopping club bought by men's lifestyle brand Thrillist two years ago, just hit a major milestone this morning: 2 million members. At the time of the original acquisition...

Founded on the premise of making it easier for independent creators to interact with their customers, Stitch Labs launched to offer a cloud-based solution for small businesses that wish to manage CRM,...

Last December, file-sharing startup Kicksend went mobile, with an iPhone app designed to enable easy sharing of photos and videos that are captured from your mobile device. Now, six months later, the ...

Listen up, ladies! (And upwardly fashionable gents!) A new service has hit the web that you've likely been waiting for for a long time. Gone are the days of trotting over to a store sales associate an...

If you've been in the baby monitor racket as long as I have, you've seen it all: the good, the bad, and the unusable. Well here's a monitor that just might win my heart. It's called the BabyPing (ther...

Last month, San Francisco unveiled a new cloud-based open data site as part of its move to adopt cloud services and, in turn, to encourage open government, transparency and accountability by improving...

More developments in the world of mobile patents, and mobile advertising, as it happens: mobile marketing companyAugme Technologieshas purchased five patentscovering mobile VoIP and other technologies...

Australian travel search FlightFox has a new take on how to surface the best airline deals, and now it has a round of angel funding and entry into top startup incubator Y Combinator, to go along with ...

We first met the folks from Lamp Lighter at an NYC office hours session, and just as we expected, their iPad app Trivia Party is doing swimmingly in the App Store. After a week of availability, the ap...

Today, four-year-old Echo360 already has 1 million students using its blended learning solutions in over 6,000 classrooms and 500 institutions, owns 54 percent of its market, and is seeing annual reve...

Nintendo unveiled the tablet-centric Wii U at last year's E3. At the time the company was clear that it was a working name. A report earlier this year stated that Nintendo was exploring other options....

Ace Metrix, a startup promising brands and agencies a smarter, faster approach to testing their TV ads, has raised $8 million in new funding.CEO Peter Daboll, whose resume includes time as Chief of In...

According to a very short, very rumor-filled VG24/7 piece, Sony is looking at adding cloud-enabled gaming to the PlayStation line, presumably in the form of an Onlive or Gaikai partnership.Given that ...

10gen, the company behind the increasingly popular NoSQL database MongoDB today announced that it has secured a new $42 million financing round let by New Enterprise Associates. This round also includ...

One more Y Combinator startup from the March 2012 class has bagged a seed round of funding. PlanGrid, which has created a groundbreaking app for the construction industry, has raised $1.1 million from...

No, NFC still hasn't come to the iPhone -- or many other devices, for that matter. But this does not appear to be stopping the momentum in the world of mobile payments. Research out today from Gartner...

The Facebook IPO was supposed to be Silicon Valley's shining moment.It's the book-end for the decade of recovery that followed the first wave of consumer Internet companies. It was the debutante ball ...

Faster than you can say "Can I borrow your copy of 'How To Win Friends And Influence People,'" it's tech conference season again. There hasn't been a week during the month of May where I haven't atten...

Earlier this month, Y Combinator held its Work At A Startup Event, where many of its alumni took the stage not to pitch investors (as is the case at the incubator's enormous demo day), but instead en...

Id started raising 3 rounds. One fell apart and the others raised $1M & $1.3M in a few weeks each. The startup game is a marathon and while Im not yet qualified to give advice about crossing the f...

There goes another one -- RIM announced today that Chief Legal Officer Karima Bawa will soon be leaving the company. This is RIM's second major departure in as many weeks, with RIM sales head Patrick ...

Your Powerpoint pitchdeck is so boring. So. Freaking. Boring. Although tech bloggers aren't sent startup's actual pitchdecks as often as investors are (thankfully), we're still walked through them on ...

We're currently used to more drama-oriented stories coming out of Yahoo!, but that doesn't mean business hasn't entirely halted there. Yamli is a service which offers a smart Arabic keyboard that allo...

Face.com's CEO has shrugged offrumorsthat it is being acquired by Facebook for up to $100 million when we asked. But the addition of its facial recognition tech to Facebook's mobile apps could make su...

Every gadget that graces our shelves goes through plenty of tweaks and changes during its design phase, but it isn't too often that we get an actual glimpse of those scrapped iterations. It can be tre...

Every gadget that graces our shelves goes through plenty of tweaks and changes during its design phase, but it isn't too often that we get an actual glimpse of those scrapped iterations. It can be tre...

It may not be the end, but the prognosis doesn't look good. Social micro-payments platformFlattris taking an unkind hit in terms of its future growth opportunities on mobile, the company details on it...

Google just announced that its Google Apps for Business service has earned ISO 27001 certification. This certifies that Google is following the standard ISO information security management protocols a...

That's the big secret Wall Street is struggling with, that push is the monetization model of mobile. Who cares what the UI is, or what the advertising surface is. The moment a push hits your screen, i...

Cornell University made big news earlier in the year when it was announced the Ivy League school, located in upstate New York, would open a technology campus in New York City. Leading the charge for B...

If you're in the City of Brotherly Love, you're in a for a treat. Thanks to constant entreaties by one of your own, Anthony Coombs, we're going to hold a mini-meet up in Philly on June 19 at the Field...

If you're an older gamer, you will remember the holy trinity of Sierra RPGs - King's Quest, Space Quest, and Police Quest. All three of these games used something called "imagination" and "storytellin...

Diversification is the key to longevity. With that likely in mind, GameStop just announced wide-spread availability of Android tablets throughout its chain of retail stores. This comes after a 200 sto...

As the heat around the "Facebook Phone" story gets higher, our thoughts turn to the days a couple of years ago when it emerged Facebook had been thinking about developing an actual phone. Back then, i...

It's not clear if this is a one-off glitch, a signal of a bigger issue -- or a way of pumping up/sabotaging Klout scores for those who care. But it's not great news any way you spin it, if it's true:a...

EU Cookie legislation is now in force across Europe, but in a last minute change on Friday, the UK's information commissioner amended the way it will be implemented in the UK. It's now the case that s...

As tempting as it might seem, please do not upload a picture of a bunch of cash and then upload it to a social network. That's just dumb. But that's also what one 17-year-old Australian girl did only ...

It's not a given that a leader in search can successfully pivot into other areas like social media -- just ask Google -- but a new service launching in Russia today, from that country's search leader ...

Here we go again: Facebook is apparently trying for the third time to get its phone project off the ground -- snatching up iOS design and engineering talent left and right Nick Bilton is hearing.We're...

In the last of our series of posts featuring daily videos from Disrupt NY, Day 3's highlight was the final round of the Startup Battlefield presentations and the passing of the cup to the new winner U...

There are advantages and disadvantages of being one of the earlier companies in a very early market. While new companies get to watch, observe, and create their own insights based on product features ...

In less than three decades, the mobile phone has gone from being a status symbol to being a ubiquitous technology that facilitates almost every interaction in our daily lives. One month after the worl...

Continuing our trio of daily video highlights from Disrupt NY, Day 2 of the conference featured talks with Andreesen Horowitz's Jeff Jordan, Sequoia's Roelof Botha, and SV Angel's Ron Conway. We also...

Did you miss some of our NY Disrupt conference this week? Or want to watch it again? TechCrunch Disrupt and our Hackathon provided more than 30 hours of demos, interviews, panel discussions, and Bat...

If you feel there's been too much hype about "big data" recently, check this out: the Chief Technology Officer of the United States of America -- Todd Park -- wants developers and entrepreneurs to bui...

Some significant changes afoot at social and mobile games company Digital Chocolate: founder Trip Hawkins has stepped down as the CEO of the company. And we have also heard a report -- yet to be confi...

When I was a graduate student at theMIT Media Labfifteen years ago, my research group went on a retreat every year with Famous Computer Scientists fromXerox PARC. I greatly admired these people and th...

Every day there is a new headline about mobile payments focused on using a mobile phone to pay at retail locations. Paypal, Google and other industry giants are racing to provide new in-store mobile p...

If youre like me, youve had enough of the Facebook IPO story. For tech entrepreneurs struggling to build stuff, the cacophony of recent press is just more noise. Thats why when my friend Andrew Chen p...

As software patent litigation ramped up over the past few years, software patents have come under the microscope within the technical community. Many investors and technologists believe that software ...

The game is over. That game where they get to hire you for 40 years, pay you far less than you create, and then give you a gold watch, and then you get bored, you get depressed, and you die alone. It ...

The legend goes something like this: as a child, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey's father would relentlessly hound him to "Get better", so Jack eventually banned the phrase from being tweeted. Go ahead...

California-based watch maker Devon made a name for themselves a few years ago when they released the Tread 1. The modern looking electro-mechanical timepiece dazzled people with its tread-based system...

The Gillmor Gang Robert Scoble, Keith Teare, Kevin Marks, John Taschek, and Steve Gillmor explodes in opinions about Facebook IPO, Facebook privacy or lack of it, Facebook acquisition frenzy-to-be, ...

If you're building apps for phones or tablets, here's a must-see discussion for you. We were able to corral Greylock's John Lilly (who recently helped lead an investment in Instagram, right before it ...

The government of Syria uses made-in-California technology from BlueCoat Systems to censor the Internet and spy on its pro-democracy activists (who are regularly arrested and tortured, not to mention ...

The auction house Sotheby's is selling an official memo from Steve Jobs to Atari about improving the World Cup Football game. The pages - stamped and signed by Jobs himself - describe circuit diagrams...

Last month, the U.S. Department of Justiceaccused Apple and a number of other large U.S. publishers of conspiring to fix eBook prices and filed an antitrust lawsuit. While most of the publishers quick...

TinyTap is a new iPad application designed for kids which introduces a different angle on the "record-your-own-voice" storybooks craze, by offering a playable book or game you and your kids can custom...

Gillmor Gang - John Taschek, Robert Scoble, Keith Teare, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor. Recording live at 1pm PT. ...

MoPub, an ad serving startup for smartphone apps, is announcing a new way for its publishers to offer their inventory to advertisers a private marketplace limited to select publishers and advertisers...

There are plenty of ways to get your flight school kicks with your smartphone or tablet this missile shooting Griffin chopper comes to mind but few manage to ooze as much style (or cost as much mone...

The latest entrant into the couple-sharing mobile app space is SimplyUs, a Toronto-based startup that aims to make couples happier by adding a little organization into their lives.While other apps bui...

Facebook games just got a lot more viral. People don't want to install and give data permissions to games, they want to play them, so now Facebook is allowing games to be played directly from within n...

Facebook games just got a lot more viral. People don't want to install and give data permissions to games, they want to play them, so now Facebook is allowing games to be played directly from within n...

Disrupt isn't just a great launch platform for startups. Earlier this week at TechCrunch Disrupt New York, President Obama's senior technology advisor, Todd Park and U.S. CIO Steven VanRoekel announce...

PayPal is expanding its in-store payments technology to 15 new national retailers, following its initial brick-and-mortar rollout with Home Depot earlier this year. At a press conference held yesterda...

Not everyone loves Facebook enough to give it three, four, or five spots on their homescreen. So yesterday's launch of Facebook's third consumer iOS app, Facebook Camera, could actually end up reducin...

Sure, UberConference took home the Disrupt Cup and its accompanying $50,000 (giant) check. But it could be argued that Incident, makers of the gTar, had already won. The company's Kickstarter project ...

Exec, a mobile app that instantly gets people to do your errands, has raised $3.3 million, according to an SEC filing. The company's co-founder Justin Kan, who is also behind Justin.tv, Twitch.tv and ...

Belly, the Chicago-based loyalty platform which just closed its $10 million Series B from Andreessen Horowitzearlier this month, is today announcing a pretty significant milestone: its 1 millionth che...

In an apparent effort to help its users find more interesting apps in its cavernous digital stores, Apple today made an interesting tweak to its iOS and Mac app stores. Both now feature a "free app of...

TechCrunch is headed down south this summer and we're starting our trip in Savannah, Atlanta, Charlotte, and Raleigh-Durham. We already have some great spots lined up but we definitely need your help ...

To any member of the tech media, Techmeme is the first site you visit in the morning, and the last site you check before bed. It's a thermometer of today's news, with more context per headline than an...

Reporting and analytics firm Umbel wants to provide new metrics for measuring content online, to help publishers better monetize their content. And it's getting some validation from the Knight Foundat...

The European "Directive on Privacy and Electronic Communications" that regulates the ways websites can track users, is coming to sites which serve European users, which covers plenty out there. The Di...

Spring has sprung and like Persephone loosed from Hades' bonds, our iPad app is now available to all and sundry. This app is literally years in the making and we have been back and forth and up and do...

If SpaceX founder Elon Musk felt like winning the Super Bowl when the Dragon (perched atop a Falcon 9 rocket) finally launched on Tuesday, he must be absolutely over the moon now. At 9:56 AM Eastern t...

If SpaceX founder Elon Musk felt like winning the Super Bowl when the Dragon (perched atop a Falcon 9 rocket) finally launched on Tuesday, he must be absolutely over the moon now.At 9:56 AM Eastern th...

A big win for healthcare expense-tracking platformSimplee, fresh off its $6 million Series A from earlier this month: the company is nowannouncinga partnership with top HSA provider in the U.S. ACS (a...

SittingAround, the new service that allows parents to quickly and easily find and schedule a babysitter online, is now getting their sitters clients equipped with Square credit card readers. CEO Erica...

You no doubt are familiar with the Xetum brand, based out of California. If not, just have a look over at to the side of the page. In the past, we've reviewed their Tyndall model; today, we'll be taki...

It has been a week since the Facebook IPO, with a whole lot of drama in the aftermath about the glitch with Nasdaq (and the legal implications), and questions about how much traders have lostas a resu...

Today Benchmark Capital announced with Mayor Ed Lee our long-term commitment to the City of San Francisco, opening a new office on the top floor of the Warfield Theater, in the heart of the Tenderloin...

It looks like the webOS contingent at HP isn't done losing people. HP laid off 275 webOS employees back in February shortly after they announced their plans for the Open webOS project, and now their E...

Well, that's one way to get some attention for your product launch.Manpacks is announcing a new Startup Perks program, and to promote it, the company mailed boxes of free condoms to more than 100 star...

Launched in 2009, Yahoo's Connected TV was one of the first platforms to introduce an open app development kit (ADK) for Internet-capable TVs. Now it's making those apps even more powerful, by allowin...

BetterWorks, the employee perks startup led by Los Angeles entrepreneur and investor Paige Craig, has told its customers that it will be shutting down May 31.The company offered tools to help business...

Two big customer review platforms are teaming up: Bazaarvoice just announced that it has agreed to acquire PowerReviews.The agreement is for up to $31 million in cash, plus stock, bringing the total e...

Thanks to health-focused startup accelerators like San Francisco-based Rock Health and New York City-based BluePrint Health lacking intimate familiarity with HIPAA or med school experience is no longe...

Knowing how users react to Facebook's product changes is crucial to the site making the right moves, so today it's closed an acq-hire of part of design firm Bolt | Peters -- specifically its lead...

This is guest post by Julia Szopa , program director at the blackbox.vc incubator in Silicon Valley which specialises in moving European startups into the US. It is not uncommon for European entrepren...

"In the Studio" continues this week with an engineer who began programming at the end high school, double-majored in CS/EE in college, dropped out of Stanford's graduate CS program to become the secon...

Ok, maybe not a bouncy ball, but pretty damn close. M-Edge came out with a SuperShell for the iPad towards the end of last year, but the idea of a bouncing iPhone seems much more appealing. The case c...

Apple is continuing its "famous person uses Siri" commercials by bringing in famous person John Malkovich to add a soupon of Old World weltschmerz and philosophizing to what is, in short, a way to sch...

Facebook is dead serious about mobile. Today it begins rolling out Facebook Camera for iOS to English-speaking countries, a standalone photos app where you can shoot, filter, and share single or sets ...

In what should be a very welcome addition for Android developers, Google is adding subscription billing to its app store.That should give developers yet another to earn revenue on top of in-app purcha...

Amazon's Kindle Fire is one of the most popular Android-powered tablets, but it doesn't feature a GPS chip. Given how important location-based services have become, that's a bit of a drawback for many...

Dan Misener, in a fit of inspired data mining, scraped half of Kickstarter to find failed projects. He could not, it seems, find a single one. Why? Because Kickstarter hides them behind a non-searchab...

Crowdfunder, the Los Angeles-based startup creating an online platform for the "crowdfunding" of startups and small businesses, has launched the first public beta version of its site this week. The la...

One of the hot companies at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York this week was the real-time people-powered translation service Babelverse. Quite often, though, Google Translate-style machine translation is...

Huddle, the six-year-old company that makes cloud collaboration software for the enterprise, has closed on $24 million in new funding, bringing its total equity funding to $40 million.The new round, w...

There's a lot of talk these days about what you can do with "big data." Here's one of the more eye-catching uses: A startup called Recorded Future pulls data from around the Web to give customers a be...

Today, Israeli startup Superfly, which offers a secure tool that combines worldwide flight information with personal travel preferences to help people organize and maximize the value of their travel r...

Ad startup 140 Proof is opening up a partner platform for companies that want to take advantage of its social ad targeting.The company currently delivers ads to 50 social apps, including Echofon, Twee...

Box is releasing a number of new features today, with the broad theme of addressing "the needs of our largest enterprise customers in deploying this kind of technology," according to CEO Aaron Levie.T...

Autodesk is expanding its growing portfolio of iPad apps today with SketchBook Ink. The pen-and-ink app is built on a new graphical engine that's independent of resolution, allowing the created artwor...

Mobile advertising company Millennial Media, one of the biggest in the U.S., has released its quarterly ad impression report, and the results show that Apple continues to remain the single-biggest bra...

Thanks to health-focused startup accelerators like San Francisco-based Rock Health and New York City-based BluePrint Health lacking intimate familiarity with HIPAA or med school experience is no longe...

In March, VEVO launched a bold new redesign that provided TV-like viewing, with instantaneous and continuous playback. But the biggest addition to the platform, other than a beautiful new full-screen ...

Late last year, Yahoo filed for a trademark on the phrase Yahoo Axis. The filing raised more questions than answers at the time, but after six months Yahoo has finally spilled the proverbial beans -- ...

It's been a whirlwind couple of days here in New York, as our expert judges watched earnest startups pitch their hearts out onstage at the third annual TechCrunch Disrupt NY. Thirty startups presented...

Kony Solutions, the unfortunately named makers of a write once, run everywhere mobile app development platform today announced that it has closed a $15 million series C round of financing. The funding...

President Obama’s technology advisors are looking for some “kick ass” fellows to work on the White House’s new digital road map for open government. Announced on stage at Disru...

Confirming rumors from last week, HP just publicly announced a layoff plan that will result in a reduction of 8% of its workforce. Shortly after releasing the memo to Wall Street, HP CEO Meg Whitman s...

Within HP's quarterly results today, a bit of a development for Autonomy, the company's $10.2 billion enterprise software purchase from last year that was profitable when HP bought it but in the last ...

Internet music service Pandora just announced its financial results for the first quarter of its fiscal 2013. The company had a total revenue of $80.8 million, a 58% increase year-over-year. Out of th...

tape.tv has been around for a while - since July 2008 to be exact. It operates like a mix between an online version of MTV and Pandora. Just like the latter service, on Tape.tv users can skip, like or...

Hearst is best known as print publisher, but this year it has been making a big push into social media. Its latest effort is a Father's Day themed Facebook app for Redbook magazine.In order to use the...

Technology has helped to level the playing field across a wide range of industries, letting more individuals come to the table in fields such as publishing, entertainment and, of course, building web ...

When you're stuck for three days in a big warehouse with the same group of smart people talking about the future of tech innovation over and over and over again (+beer), you start getting really ...

Just a day after a gender discrimination suit was filed against one of Silicon Valley's most storied firms Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, an all-male panel of VCs at the TechCrunch Disrupt conf...

A mixed bag of news for HP today: it has posted Q2 sales that have just edged out analyst expectations, but it has alsoconfirmed27,000job cuts that should save it between $3 billion and $3.5 billion b...

This afternoon at TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2012, our own Josh Constine sat down with David Kirkpatrick, author of "The Facebook Effect," to discuss what they thought about the future of the newly IPO'ed ...

Bre Pettis of MakerBot stopped by our little show today and spent some time on the stage with John Biggs and other notables in the manufacturing space. But afterwards Pettis, co-founder and CEO of Mak...

Shaker won TechCrunch Disrupt SF last year with its 3-D virtual nightclub built on top of Facebook, and June 8th it will finally launch in North America with the help of the music industry's Live Nati...

This time last year, Brett Martin took the stage at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York to launch Sonar, a mobile app that connects you to friends and other people nearby, based on your existing social net...

Just over a week ago, the jury began deliberations on the ongoing patent infringement case between Google and Oracle. After waiting in the wings, with bated breath, the verdict is finally in, as Judge...

Last month, Marketo announced that it was acquiring social marketing startup Crowd Factory to add a social component to its marketing automation tools. Today the company is releasing its first product...

A number of cable, satellite, and IPTV providers have introduced TV Everywhere services that let viewers watch TV content online. But satellite TV provider DISH will be the first to introduce a standa...

iOS and Android aren't leaving much room for Firefox to burrow into mobile. "We knew there was going to be a transition from desktop being primary to mobile and tablet being primary" saidMozilla's for...

David Lawee, Googles VP of Corporate Development, sat down for an informative chat with MG Siegler at Disrupt NYC this morning, and it wasnt long before the conversation turned to Googles track record...

President Barack Obama is famous for his affinity for his BlackBerryand science fairs, but the tech love goes a lot further than that. Todd Park, the U.S. chief technology officer, today described the...

President Obama has a "high geek quotient" according to his senior technology advisor, Todd Park. Park and U.S. CIO Steven VanRoekel announced five major federal initiatives at TechCrunch Disrupt toda...

TechCrunch Disrupts Startup Alley is jam-packed with interesting startups and it's always frustrating that we can't get to film every single one. However, we do our best and you'll find that Techcrunc...

Google today launched version 2.0 of its search app for iPhone. Google completely overhauled the design of the app, which now looks and feels more like the app's iPad version the company launched last...

Online video advertising startup YuMe has picked up another $10 million in financing from WestSummit Capital, closing out a $22 million strategic round that was originally announced last November. The...

Earlier this morning, our own John Biggs was joined on stage by a handful of New York-based makers who have made a name for themselves by building physical things (or in one case, building something t...

Amazon is continuing to grow its collection of streaming video titles at Amazon Prime Instant Video, and is today announcing another new agreement with Paramount Pictures bringing "hundreds" of new mo...

As evidenced by the success of Chatroulette, people get a kick out of seeing each other (anonymously) on video. Taking that to heart, WhosHere - an app that has allowed countless people to meet and gr...

Beer may or may not be the first thing that comes to your mind when you think about TechCrunch Disrupt, but today, CrunchFund's MG Siegler took the stage at our New York conference to talk to Churchke...

Well, well, well. As if you couldn't get your fix of sling-shotting irascible fowl on every other mobile and social platform known to man, Rovio announced this morning that Angry Birds for Facebook (o...

There's all sorts of data that the government has, but very little of it is actually accessible by developers. But the U.S. Government is trying to change that: Wednesday at TechCrunch Disrupt, U.S. C...

Qwiki, the startup that won Disrupt in 2010, is announcing a new platform today for bloggers and other online publishers.The company's initial product basically assembled a multimedia "story" around W...

Mint.com iOS users now have the ability tocreate and (more importantly) edit budgets directly on their iPad/iPhone. Previously, editing functionality was only available at the main Mint website. Addit...

This morning at TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2012, partner at and co-founder of Founders Collective Chris Dixon(and co-founder of SiteAdvisor and Hunch, acquired by McAfee and eBay, respectively), sat down w...

Every time I think TC Disrupt's Startup Alley can't get any better, it does. TC Europe Editor Mike Butcher and I ventured into the chaos, accosted at every turn by startups from across the world. We e...

Online advertising company Rubicon Project just announced that it's getting into the mobile market by acquiring a startup called Mobsmith.The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed in the init...

shopkick, the location-based shopping app backed by Greylock and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, is having its biggest rollout yet Target says it's making the service available in its stores na...

Security and anti-spam firm McAfee today reported that it saw a massive uptick in mobile malware last quarter. Mobile malware has "exploded," the company said (PDF), "with a significant increase on An...

For the past two days, web companies and mobile apps have peppered our Startup Alley here at Disrupt NYC, but today we're doing something a little different. Those startups have cleared out for Disrup...

While we don't make a habit out of covering every iteration of the Google Doodle, today's version is especially awesome. The doodle is celebrating the birth date of Dr. Robert Moog, the inventor of th...

In its latest move to get top technical students to New York and started on new projects, the city's Cornell campus has named a top technologist to a new position. Greg Pass, the former CTO of Twitter...

TechCrunch has discovered and confirmed that software giant Oracle has bought social marketing platformVitruefor $300 million. [Update: A press release has confirmed the buy at an undisclosed price, t...

BodyMedia, one of the growing number of companies that offers wearable body sensors, just announced that it has raised a $12 million funding round led by Comcast Ventures. The company's products, incl...

Hundreds have entered. But only one will walk away with the coveted Disrupt Cup. Who will it be? Stick around to find out but in the meantime we've got a rockstar lineup on our final day, including a ...

Paddle8, Artsy, Zazzle, and Art.com are all part of a growing contingent of startups that are on a mission to democratize the purchase, discovery, and enjoyment of art by bringing it online.In August ...

SV Angel founding partner David Lee joined us backstage today for an informal discussion about a range of topics. Lee recently began writing on the new blogging platform Svbtle, sharing wisdom from hi...

MapMyFitness is a veteran of the online health and fitness space, with the first iteration of its website appearing back in the summer of 2005. Since then, the startup has developed a suite of fitness...

It has been a wild week so far at this year's TechCrunch Disrupt in New York City. Rainstorms and traffic jams couldn't stop nearly 2000 people from making it to our big weekend hackathon, and our las...

Rumors are flying that Airtime, the video startup founded by famed Napster alums Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker, has allegedly made its first acquisition -- before truly exiting stealth mode. The targe...

We've discovered that Airtime, the video startup founded by famed Napster alums Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker, has allegedly made its first acquisition -- before truly exiting stealth mode. The target...

If you're someone who thinks gamification is just a fad, you may want to look away now.To be clear, Bunchball isn't just jumping on the latest buzzword. The company was founded to deliver gamification...

Disrupt NYC day two has just wrapped up. During the conference today, Michael Arrington demanded to know from Ron Conway when he was going to run for Mayor of San Francisco (he kept saying he would "n...

As TechCrunch was the first to report, Ellen Pao, a partner with Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, has filed a lawsuit alleging that during her seven year career there she has been...

Shopping on the iPad is becoming one of the best ways do shop. You're sitting on your couch, comfy as a bug in a rug, swiping through dresses, and t-shirts, and shoes! Oh my! But there's one issue: yo...

Today brings another entrant into the social gambling space with RocketFrog, which is setting out to bring casino entertainment to Facebook with the launch of a free-to-play online casino that offers ...

On one end of the spectrum, networks like Twitter and Facebook have acted as catalysts to organizing events like the Arab Spring or the riots of London. On the other end of that spectrum, networks lik...

They say that all work and no play makes for some dull boys, and I think brothers Darren and Derek Dodge certainly seem to agree with that sentiment. The two of them have just launched a new iPhone ap...

In case you were wondering: Ron Conway says he will not be running for mayor of San Francisco.Apparently that was on Mike Arrington's mind when he interviewed Conway and SV Angel partner David Lee on-...

What good is a Foursquare check-in if it doesn't lead to a coupon or freebie? Why bother tweeting about a brand you like if they don't acknowledge your undying love and loyalty? With TechCrunch Disrup...

You're crazy with your friends, serious with your co-workers, and sweet with your parents. Now you can share those distinct personalities with their matching audiences thanks to Hmmm, a mobile app lau...

Startup Alley at TechCrunch Disrupt makes for a pretty grueling experience when so many companies are pitching every passer-by. But Jordan Crook and I went in feet first to check out some of the start...

Business software giant SAP announced today that it will acquire Ariba's cloud -based business commerce network for approximately $4.3 billion. SAP's subsidiary, SAP America, Inc., is offering $45 per...

Silicon Valley is full of unsung heroes: Mike Krieger, Arash Ferdowsi, interns, the TechCrunch sales team, Heather Harde and the countless engineers that keep the products we love from failing to be t...

For SaaS companies, whose customers are usually signed up on recurring monthly billing cycles, the art of retaining customers is just as important as winning them over in the first place. In fact, it'...

The winner of the Audience Choice Award during TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco, CardFlick launched with an application for building digital business cards on your mobile device and sharing them with ...

Most businesses need to be able keep in touch with their customers and provide customer service over the phone, but rolling out a call center can be expensive. Not just that, but most call center soft...

Software is eating another part of the world. (Or at least the next generation of software is eating the older 1970s-era kind.)Sunglass, which is coming out of beta today at TechCrunch Disrupt New Yor...

Email is broken. Social networks are not for private file distribution. Collaborative file sharing sites are missing pizzazz and key functions for the enterprise. This is the thought process behind Po...

Vinylmint is a Norfolk-based startup that aims to assist musicians in creating their music. It's essentially a recording studio in the cloud. You record uncompressed audio right into the computer, the...

A panel run by TechCrunch's Josh Constine with with Tim Armstrong, CEO of AOL and Melissa Brenner of the NBA was billed as being about how social advertising is working for those content brands. In th...

A panel run by TechCrunch's Josh Constine with with Tim Armstrong, CEO of AOL and Melissa Brenner of the NBA was billed as being about how social advertising is working for those content brands. In th...

Getable, the artist formerly known as Rentcycle, started out with a mission to bring the rental industry online, offering free, realtime reservations for consumers along with business management tools...

Earlier today, David Lee of SV Angel said that one of the hottest areas to watch in tech right now is the area of mobile commerce and companies that can close the loop between online and offline trans...

Remember address book-gate? Locationgate? I-don't-know-what-my-apps-are-doing-on-my-phone-gate? (Oh, that last one might not be a real thing.) Regardless, we're living in age where companies are pushi...

Geoloqi, the Portland, Ore.-based location platform, today announced that it is partnering with the popular mobile app development platform Appcelerator. Thanks to this partnership, Geoloqi is now ava...

Only 25% of U.S. local businesses have websites and just 10% show their prices online, but Centzy launches today to let you sort local business searches by price, open hours, and eventually quality --...

There was a time when I would watch shows like Extreme Couponing with a sense of morbid amusement there was clearly plenty of money to be saved by clipping bits of dead plant matter out of a newspape...

Over the last few months I've detected a disturbance in the Startup Force. While startups from Europe have often looked to the US as a natural market to scale up in, they've traditionally looked at th...

While customers love deals and coupon services about as much as they love money itself, merchants particularly small businesses tend to see things a bit differently. Often times they feel it's bad f...

Last month, I wrote about Y Combinator-backed Firebase and its ambitious vision to reinvent the infrastructure of real-time apps. Now the company is announcing that some big investors have signed on t...

When you live in New York City, there are certain expectations of what you should be able to accomplish easily. You can get almost anything delivered straight to your doorstep, whether it be food, gro...

One ideafloated when Ross Levinsohn took the reins as the interim CEO of Yahoo is that he might represent a kinder, gentler phase in the Internet company's contentious patent fight against Facebook. T...

Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins has been sued by Ellen Pao, one of its investment partners, for sexual harassment and gender discrimination that she has allegedly encountered durin...

Social mobile video startup Socialcam is rolling out a new website today, which is designed to create more engagement for users that might not have the mobile app installed. The company has also intro...

If you're like me and you live in San Francisco where cabs are few and far between, Uber has been a godsend. But the marketplace for on-demand transportation is about to get a lot more interesting. Th...

If you are so inclined, it's pretty easy to criticize Business Insider the all caps headlines, the slideshows, and content that has been "aggregated" from other sites. (And yes, BI has some mean thin...

At TechCrunch Disrupt New York this morning, Luis von Ahn, the founder of the ambitious free language learning and text translation site Duolingo, announced that the site will come out of private beta...

As people become increasingly comfortable using web platforms to swap homes, cars, and everything in between, some have said that collaborative consumption movement has the potential to be as profound...

TechCrunch founder Mike Arrington sat down withSequoia Capital partnerRoelof Bothain another fireside chat at TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2012 this morning.Prior to joining Sequoia Capital in 2003, Botha se...

Kleiner Perkins Caulfield and Byers, one of the most storied and well-respected venture capital firms in Silicon Valley, has been sued by Ellen Pao, an investment partner with the firm. ...

Kleiner Perkins Caulfield and Byers, one of the most storied and well-respected venture capital firms in Silicon Valley, has been sued by Ellen Pao, an investment partner with the firm. ...

Kleiner Perkins Caulfield and Byers, one of the most storied and well-respected venture capital firms in Silicon Valley, has been sued by Ellen Pao, an investment partner with the firm. ...

A Wiimote turned on its side makes for a perfectly serviceable controller when plowing through retro games from the Wii Shop Channel, and the Classic Controller isn't bad either, but I wouldn't call e...

Quikr, India's largest online and mobile classifieds portal, announced today that it has raised $32 million in series E financing, led by New York City-based private equity giant Warburg Pincus. The c...

At TechCrunch Disrupt on Tuesday, Y Combinator's Harjeet Taggar said that the incubator's next class will have at least 80 startups, up from 65 in the prior group. Even though Y Combinator is hosting ...

Betaworks' CEO John Borthwick took the stage at TechCrunch Disrupt with Crunchfund's MG Siegler this morning to discuss betaworks' investments and the state of the investment business in San Francisco...

YC alumReadyForZero, an online financial service that's trying to get people out of debt faster, is today expanding to mobile with the launch of its first mobile app. For now, the experience is design...

This morning at TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2012, TechCrunch editor Eric Eldon sat down for a fireside chat withJeff Jordan, General Partner atAndreessen Horowitz and former CEO of OpenTable, to discuss his...

Last week Mark Zuckerberg took his little Harvard project public in the largest tech IPO ever and quickly followed it up by marrying his Harvard sweetheart. However, the honeymoon was cut short as the...

Kickstarter is a great place to launch a product. Remember the Pebble smart watch, which saw over $1 million in funding in its first 28 hours on the site, and surpassing $3 million well over a month b...

As we reported would happen yesterday, Google has today announced that it has closed its acquisition of Motorola Mobility, buying the Illinois-based device maker for $40 per share in cash for a total ...

If you are in the business of needing to process shopping for your ecommerce startup then this is going to be of interest. If not, look away now.Today at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York the startup Pa...

Unless an app you have your eye happens to have a free demo version to muck about with, there's little one can do to try out an Android app on a device in advance. Sure, you could buy the app straight...

There hasn't been a whole lot of news coming out of the Google Zeitgeist event taking place in a posh hotel on the outskirts of London this week, but Google's making some other news in England: its CE...

Sonos has just gotten really deep (get it?) with their new Sonos Sub, a wireless subwoofer that connects to any Sonos system and adds just a bit more oomph to the musical proceedings. The sub costs $6...

Consumer video chat provider ooVoo, which has more than 46 million users worldwide, is rolling out new applications that will make its service even more attractive. And the service, which is popular a...

Welcome to Day Two, folks. If Day One wasn't enough for you, then you're in for a real treat. We have a special product announcement at 11:20, Design Office Hours and an incredible list of Day Two Bat...

Yotta, the Cambridge-based startup that offers cloud-based web performance monitoring and optimization services for small businesses, is today announcing that it has closed a $9 million series B finan...

Yottaa, the Boston-based startup that offers cloud-based web performance monitoring and optimization services for small businesses, is today announcing that it has closed a $9 million series B financi...

Zynga and American Express are back together again in a new deal that will give prepaid card carriers ways to earn extra Farm Cash.American Express, which has long been known for catering to high-end ...

The quick rise of smartphones over the last few years definitely changed the way we use our mobile phones, but one aspect that never changed much - and maybe even took a step backwards - is the humble...

DotLoop, a startup trying to bring real estate negotiations online, has raised a $7 million Series A from Trinity Ventures.The company says its software is already used by more than 200,000 real estat...

Back in October, GroSocial raised $450K in seed funding from the Kickstart Seed Fund, Monarch Ventures, Rock & Hammer Ventures and a handful of angel investors. The seed funding acted as early val...

Video conferencing startup Vidyo announced Tuesday that it has received a strategic investment from Juniper Networks as part of the network equipment vendor's Junos Innovation Fund. The funding comes ...

The team behind Salesforce.com's enterprise social networking app Chatter is making a big push for real-time communication with two new features Chatter Messenger and Chatter Screensharing.Chatter Pr...

Like Milo before it, Wishpond launched in late 2010 to build a local search engine that aggregates realtime inventory and product listings from brick and mortar retail stores -- from big chains to mom...

After weeks of speculation, online video distributor Machinima announced Monday that it has closed a $35 million funding round led by Google, which also included existing investors Redpoint Ventures a...

Our very first day of Disrupt NYC is over and the conference started off with a bang. We had memorable chats, dove into fashion for a bit, hung out with the Startup Alley companies and witnessed 15 st...

Babelverse won the opportunity to appear at TechCrunch Disrupt from the Startup Alley and with little notice ended up giving a slick pitch. Essentially this is a solution for universal speech translat...

Sprint's launch plans for the HTC EVO 4G LTE were ruined last week when shipments of their shiny new Android handset were held up by United States Customs, but we're hearing that they may been hitting...

"All people wear clothes!" declared one of Tagbrand's founders on stage at Disrupt today. That's true, but let's review.DailyBooth was (is still perhaps?) a phenomenon for a time as people became accu...

We spend more and more time on social networks, but sometimes it can feel like work. I mean, scrolling through your news feed isn't work work, but it's not quite as easy as vegging out on your couch a...

As we covered earlier today, the fashion vertical in tech has exploded, with myriad unique companies clamoring to take a bite out of Amazon's lunch, and a chunk out of the trillion dollar apparelindus...

GitHub, the source code hosting and collaboration service, has been growing like gangbusters. The site now has over 1.6 million registered developers, hosting over 2.8 million repositories on everythi...

It's a familiar story in the tech world: A company wants to build a consumer product, finds that the necessary tools aren't available, creates its own tools, then realizes it has created a broader pla...

Incident took the stage this afternoon at TechCrunch Disrupt NYC and debuted the gTar. It's safe to say that they are already a major contender for the Disrupt Cup.The startup wowed the crowd with the...

A double-whammy in the digital video space today: Avail-TVN, a video services provider that works with companies like NBC, Univision, and brands like Mattel, has announced that it has picked up $100 m...

We have all been there: you are in your car, you need to park, and you cannot, no matter how much you try, find a space. You see cars pulling away, but it's too far for you to get there before another...

What if you couldn't just share your Internet connection with the few WiFi devices tethered to your phone or hotspot, but with pretty much everybody around you? Open Garden, which is launching at Disr...

One of my least favorite moments of the day comes when my iPhone rings and the number isn't in my contact book. Is it an important call from an entrepreneur? A random PR person pitching me? Or just a ...

Imagine for a moment that you are sitting in your front yard in a lawn chair, sipping lemonade while attempting to read the latest news on your WiFi-only iPad. You're just out of range of your WiFi si...

How is data moved between systems? In the enterprise environment, point-to-point application interfaces are either handled with expensive and cumbersome utilities or, more likely, with custom code...a...

King.com, the European-casual-gaming-company-that-could, is cementing its ascendance on the Facebook platform by poaching one of the key producers responsible for EA's Sims Social and opening a new ga...

We all hate conference calls -- having to dial in, manually enter a room code and sometimes having to enter a passcode on top of that. Once you've actually logged in, there's a whole lot of talking on...

We all hate conference calls -- having to dial in, manually enter a room code and sometimes having to enter a passcode on top of that. Once you've actually logged in, there's a whole lot of talking on...

Well folks, while you may think all the action is on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt, the flip side of the coin is the enormous amount of buzz, energy and networking that happens in Startup Alley. Today t...

The gTar is disruption defined. It takes the guitar, an instrument with a steep learning curve, and adds a bit of digital wizardry in the form of an embedded iPhone to make learning dramatically easie...

Lord knows there is a lot of online video out there these days, but only a tiny proportion of it has been transcribed (less than 1% according to some estimates). Searching the mountains of video gener...

Following a jam-packed beta test and a jaw-dropping $4.2 million seed round, Ark people search is open for sign ups...at least for the next three days. Ark lets you sift through profiles on Facebook, ...

Earlier today we spoke to Fab.com CEO Jason Goldberg at TechCrunch Disrupt, on theanniversary of his company's pivot from gay social network to design focused flash sales site, and a week after its mi...

Everyone comes to Disrupt for the Battlefield. Of course, the panels are interesting, and few can resist a fireside chat between Fred Wilson and Michael Arrington, but the true gem of our massive conf...

The web is a vast, mostly useless, wasteland with bits of information held in random silos scattered about. Cyfeon Solutions' Answer Factory attempts to unite these locations in the spirit of increase...

On Friday May 18th, Apple filed a motion for a U.S. preliminary injunction against Samsung's Galaxy Tab 10.1. This follows a ruling by the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (Northern District o...

What if you couldn't just read an article on your favorite blog or news site, but also listen to it being read out aloud by the author or professional voice talent? That's what SpokenLayer, which is l...

Startup accelerators have been taking off in Canada of late, with FounderFuel and Year One Labs opening their doors in Montreal, Extreme Startups off and running in Toronto, and last year, Vancouver g...

TechCrunch contributor Andrew Keen took to the Disrupt stage with our own Alexia Tsotsis earlier this morning to do two things -- promote his new book Digital Vertigo, and tackle the problem of sharin...

Brad Garlinghouse, who just took over as CEO of YouSendIt and used to be a senior vice president at Yahoo several years ago, has a few ideas for the ailing web giant.The company's got a pile of cash i...

Brad Garlinghouse, who just took over as CEO of YouSendIt and used to be a senior vice president at Yahoo several years ago, has a few ideas for the ailing web giant.The company's got a pile of cash i...

Silicon Valley may be the undisputed capital of tech at the moment, but New York holds its own with a set of unique qualities that make it an essential part of the game -- and for some kinds of startu...

House Beautiful is hopping on the Pinterest bandwagon today courtesy of digital watermarking provider Digimarc, which has just introduced technology allowing consumers to pin magazine images from the ...

Today at TechCrunch Disrupt, CrunchFund's MG Siegler took the stage to interview Tumblr CEO David Karp. But not before disclosing that his fund was now an investor in the New York City-based blogging ...

In a fireside chat with MG Siegler at TechCrunch Disrupt Monday, Tumblr founder David Karp described how his company thinks differently about advertising than Facebook or Google, and how they hope to ...

Imgur has built a massive audience for the sometimes amusing, sometimes adorable images and memes that it hosts. Now it faces another challenge: Making money.With 2 billion monthly page views, adverti...

Fab.com CEO Jason Goldberg took the stage today at Disrupt, he laid out a grand vision for the site. He noted that it has been just under a year since the site launched, and it already has 4.5 million...

In very sad news, Mike Moritz, who has led top-tier venture firm Sequoia Capital through the very beginnings of the web until now, is stepping back because of an incurable disease. His firm has backed...

About.Me is set to get a bit more social. The AOL-owned property just released a public API and SDK into the wild in partnership with Reputation.com, Smarterer, Forkly, Kred and Showyou. While the onl...

"I've never seen angels being lazy" says Union Square Ventures founder and prolific blogger Fred Wilson, refuting Ben Horowitz's claim that angel investors make too much money for too little work. Wil...

Google got the chance to buy Twitter, but the search giant passed, says Michael Arrington. "Google hasnt beeninterested in buying Twitter since they committed themselves to Google+ saysFred Wilso...

In late 2010, the European Commission launched an investigation into allegations that Google was abusing its dominant position in the search engine market. Today, Joaqun Almunia, the vice president of...

After months of prepping, countless run-throughs and all nighters, it's time to get this party started. Welcome to TechCrunch Disrupt New York City 2012. I have a feeling this is going to be the best ...

Well, it's official. Or at least it's official if you believe in StatCounter's data. Google's Chrome web browser has overtaken Microsoft's Internet Explorer. For real this time. Maybe. The stat-counti...

Lately we've seen the rise of e-commerce and online retailer stertups disrupting the relationship between distributors and the consumer. Etsy comes to mind of course. Meanwhile, Made.com in the UK is ...

Google has reached the final regulatory hurdle to its $12.5 billion acquisition of Motorola Mobility, with China approving the transaction over the weekend, and today Motorola Mobility filed an 8-K fo...

Google has reached the final regulatory hurdle to its $12.5 billion acquisition of Motorola Mobility, with China approving the transaction over the weekend, and today Motorola Mobility filed an 8-K fo...

Google has reached the final regulatory hurdle to its $12.5 billion acquisition of Motorola Mobility, with China approving the transaction over the weekend, and today Motorola Mobility filed an 8-K fo...

Comcast announced Monday that it will make its newest set-top box available in Boston over the coming weeks, with a rollout planned across the entire country later this year. It's also introducing a m...

This morning AnchorFree, the makers of the popular virtual private network Hotspot Shield, is announcing that it has raised $52 million in series C financing from Goldman Sachs. All in all, this bring...

After months of prepping, countless run-throughs and all nighters, it's time to get this party started. Welcome to TechCrunch Disrupt New York City 2012. I have a feeling this is going to be the best ...

Xfire, which offers social networking tools for gamers, just announced that it has raised $3 million in new funding.The round was led by Singapore-based IDM Venture Capital. It's apparently targeted s...

This is kind of handy - and just in time for TechCrunch Disrupt. The team at Lemon Labs just launched a new app called "Hashtag App," which lets you follow Twitter hashtags on your iPhone or iPad. But...

Google always pitched Google Drive, which launchedin April after a considerable period of hype, as a replacement for Google Docs. What many users didn't realize, it seems, is that Google will indeed c...

Facebook shares dropped more than 13 percent to $33.14 -- below the company's final $38 price in the company's highly anticipated initial public offering last week. Today is an interesting test for Fa...

Facebook shares dropped more than 13 percent to $33.14 -- below the company's final $38 price in the company's highly anticipated initial public offering last week. Today is an interesting test for Fa...

After months of prepping, countless run-throughs and all nighters, it's time to get this party started. Welcome to TechCrunch Disrupt New York City 2012. I have a feeling this is going to be the best ...

Hulu announced a new slate of original and exclusive programming Monday morning, as the video site ventures further into creating its own content. For Hulu, it's a way to begin controlling its own des...

Until recently, mobile video ads have mostly been pretty boring. That's because, frankly, they're difficult to make and scale across all the different devices that brands, agencies and marketers want ...

With a wedding ring on his finger and his company public, is Mark Zuckerberg ready to make Facebook produce more profits, not just more social connections?Hisfanfare-less marriage to long-time girlfri...

Judging by many of the headlines on Friday, you might think that Facebooks IPO was a miserable failure. The Wall Street Journal declared, Facebooks IPO Sputters, and our very own TechCrunch declared t...

The speaker schedule for TechCrunch's Disrupt NYC conference has been set for a while now, but three brand new presenters were just added to the lineup: The winners announced earlier today at the fina...

Stanford has been a hotbed of startup activity for what seems like forever, and one reason for that is its Business Association of Stanford Entrepreneurial Students (BASES) program. The group, which h...

Paypal created a cost effective way to safely accept payments 10 years ago, but the web has changed dramatically and accepting payments has not. EnterStripe, a company that in my opinion is going to g...

This week we recorded live from the show floor at Disrupt NYC. We sat through 24 hours straight of hot-rod hacking at the Hackathon and now we're preparing for the main show and, most important, the b...

Disrupt NYC 2012 begins in approximately 12 hours (tickets here). But it's been two years since Soluto, the software that will make your computer simply run better, took home the Disrupt cup at the TC...

Apples planned phase-out of the UDID has introduced considerable angst in the app marketing community. The UDID provides a standard, widely supported method for attributing performance of advertising ...

Congratulations to Facebook for going public. Congratulations to the employees that are now millionaires. Congratulations to the founders who are now billionaires. Congratulations to the bankers, lawy...

After nearly 24 hours of fighting fatigue and crafting code, our Disrupt NY 2012 Hackathon is finally drawing to a close. Not a moment too soon -- I think some of our hackers are about ready to keel o...

A temporary solution to the drama that unfolded this morning when Twitter was blocked in Pakistan -- some believe over representations of the Prophet Mohammed and Twitter's refusal to block these imag...

Teaching kids - especially little girls - about electronics is a hard job. First, there's the electricity. Then there's the sense that soldering, wiring, and lining up LEDs is considerably less fun th...

A mere 24 hours ago, coders started hacking with hopes and dreams of building the next great app or program. Many participants stayed overnight, fueled on gumption and Red Bull. Others cut out early, ...

There have been a lot of complaints voiced over the last couple of years from people who wish entrepreneurs would address the world's "real problems" or do "something bigger" rather than create "me to...

A mere 24 hours ago, coders started hacking with hopes and dreams of building the next great app or program. Many participants stayed overnight, fueled on gumption and Red Bull. Others cut out early, ...

SpaceX and Elon Musk will not be held from the history books. Last night the company announced that engineers were currently replacing a faulty valve on engine #5, and if successful pending a data rev...

A life-size fire-breathing dragon. A fully robotic calliope band. A full-scale flight simulator built by teenagers. An entire herd of homemade R2-D2s. Electric cars, steampunk fashion, a robot petting...

With Disrupt NYC 2012 literally a day away (tickets here), it's hard not to think about the past success of our former Battlefield startups. I've taken a close look at quite a few over the past couple...

Mere 24 hours ago coders started hacking together programs with hopes and dreams of building the next great app or program. Many participants stayed overnight, fueled on gumption and Red Bull. Others ...

It's been a long, caffeine-fueled ride for the hundreds of hackers who have set up at our big Disrupt NY 2012 Hackathon, but the furious process of taking a wild idea and turning it into something rea...

Pictures of the Prophet Mohammad have always been a highly contentious issue -- they're not explicitly prohibited in the Qu'ran but many Sunni Muslims forbid the idea, while others do not seem to mind...

Another day, another example of a country making it harder for its citizens to use the web and some of its most effective channels of communication. There are reports coming in from Pakistan that it h...

Another day, another example of a country making it harder for its people to use the web and some of its most effective channels of communication? There are reports coming in from Pakistan that it has...

It's midnight. The city is alive with Saturday night fever, and Pier 94 is just as awake, and perhaps a bit more drunk. Tequila shots (and plenty of beers) are flowing, along with Red Bull, Mountain D...

It's been about eight hours since our big Disrupt Hackathon kicked off, and all of our intrepid hackers have been busy letting the code (and the caffeine) fly ever since. I managed to tear a few of th...

What a week. After eight years, Mark Zuckerberg takes Facebook public at a $104 billion valuation. His longtime girlfriend Priscilla Chan gets her medical degree from the UC San Francisco.And to top i...

There's a strong murmur in the room with random spurts of excitement. Hackers and coders have teamed up and mostly (hopefully) decided on a project. There are only 15 hours left. But night is approach...

Hackers aren't necessarily known for their fashion sense. Most of the time, a t-shirt and jeans is as far as it goes. But there are certain circumstances in which it's clear that hackers pay a little ...

Last time I took a look at the most over-hyped topics of the Future of TV, and I thought a great follow-up would be to look at the reverse case. After all, it's easy to sit there and critique, but wha...

It's been just over nine months since Google announced their intentions to acquire hardware manufacturer Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion, and now it seems that the final pieces of the deal have fa...

The anticipation is palpable. Hundreds of hackers have congregated outside Manhattan's Pier 94, planning, strategizing, and praying to baby Jesus that their fates will be similar to those of Group.me ...

The Gillmor Gang Robert Scoble, John Taschek, Gabe Rivera, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor play toe jam football in the shadow of the Facebook IPO. Try as we might, we can't shake the weight of Faceb...

Comcast's plans to do away with its 250 GB data cap and charge users based upon usage marks the end of an era for cable TV providers, and for the online video industry. No longer will users be able to...

My set ritual before going to bed each night is as follows -- turn out the lights, plug in my iPhone, take off my glasses and attempt vainly to nod off. Step two in that process can be a bit of a crap...

You may have seen it by nowGoogles concept video about its new Project Glass. These glasses will do what your smart phone will do only without having to hold anythingyou actually see your options at t...

UK tabloid newspaper The Daily Mail, has decided to raise the issue of Google's influence on the UK government, after uncovering the fact that Conservative party ministers have held meetings with Goog...

"Entering terminal count autosequence. 60 seconds to engine fire. #DragonLaunch," Tweeted Elon Musk as his space company was less than a minute away from it's historic flight. But the launch didn't ha...

When an email hits our inbox, we know not only who its from but their entire web imprint. LinkedIn can point out the profile of the woman you interviewed for a sales role last week and the gentleman y...

Weve all watched from the sidelines as companies have come out in a burst of glory, and then, two years later, spent their venture capital, lost their user base, and failed to monetize. This begs the ...

SpaceX, the private space exploration company founded by PalPal and Tesla Motors co-founder Elon Musk, is ready to boldly go where no private company has legitimately attempted to go before: The Inter...

Some of you are probably reading this post with ad blocker right now and to be honest, I don't blame you. Sure, there's the occasional amusing or genuinely useful ad, but not terribly often, so why n...

Facebook's IPO was obviously the single most discussed topic on Twitter today. The good folks over at social media data platform DataSift monitored what Twitter users were saying about the IPO through...

Just after the markets closed on its first day of public trading, Facebook amended its S-1 with a complete prospectus detailing how much stock each underwriter got to sell. Morgan Stanley, the lead-le...

Mark Zuckerberg's remote ringing of the opening bell and Facebook's initial stock trades were a bit anti-climactic in person at the NASDAQ Marketsite in New York City, as we've written -- NASDAQ is a ...

GameStop is hurting. Same store sales fell 5%-11% and revenue was down 17% to $2 billion. Profit fell to $72.5 million. Arguably, those are still huge numbers and presumably a new console refresh shou...

While, arguably, you’re not going to convince many kids to give up their Topps or Pokemon cards for these things, it’s nice to know they exist. They’re 3D Printer trading cards featu...

Facebook has just acquired mobile commerce startup Karma, which makes apps for gifting friends and family. The terms of the deal are undisclosed but 16 employees of the startup will be joining Faceboo...

The underwriters of Facebook's $16 billion debut on NASDAQ fought to the finish to keep the company's shares above last night's final price of $38 a share. Shares closed at $38.23 today. Sources tell ...

The underwriters of Facebook's $16 billion debut on NASDAQ fought to the finish to keep the company's shares above last night's final price of $38 a share. Shares closed at $38.23 today. Sources tell ...

Gillmor Gang - Gabe Rivera, John Taschek, Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gilmor. Recording live at 1pm PST. ...

In case there was any confusion after Facebook's eight years in business and its recent geographic expansions, it was cleared up today: Facebook's home and heart lies in Silicon Valley. TechCrunch TV ...

In case there was any confusion after Facebook's eight years in business and its recent geographic expansions, it was cleared up today: Facebook's home and heart lies in Silicon Valley. TechCrunch TV ...

Is The Avengers worth your money? Do the disc-blasting Nerf guns leave a welt? How do you pull a Pebble and reign in $3 million on Kickstarter? In this week's TC/Gadgets webcast, we answer all this an...

China's Internet juggernaut Tencent announced today that it would undergo a restructuring of its business units into six groups. Ren Yuxin was also named as the new chief operating officer and will he...

Microsoft, just like Apple, usually runs a major back-to-school promotion every summer that is meant to give students (and their parents) some extra incentives to buy a new computer. The company's jus...

Say you’re a misanthrope and you’re afraid of humans. What to do? Well, you could cower in the dark when people ring your doorbell or you could laugh derisively at their smug faces in the ...

The tale of Docracy's year-long journey is a fun one. When Matt Hall and his partner John Watkinson first went into the Hackathon last year, the only goal was to get a prototype working for an idea th...

The President's technology gurus, US CTO Todd Park and CIO Steven VanRoekel, will be looking for savvy innovators to work with at next week's TechCrunch Disrupt conference in New York (tickets here). ...

Facebook, which has now listed on NASDAQ, is set to make $16 billion if its share holds at the $38 price that it set yesterday -- more if it ends higher. Here's a coincidence: that's just north of the...

Facebook, which has now listed on NASDAQ, is set to make $16 billion if its share holds at the $38 price that it set yesterday -- more if it ends higher. Here's a coincidence: that's just north of the...

If only Facebook IPO day were a little less of a snoozefest than it is now. If only it had Zuckerberg impaling investors while riding a bull rampaging through a city. Or an elevator to space. Or Zucke...

Well, they warned us.Yesterday, Facebook PR was telling reporters that when the company went public this morning, there wouldn't be much to see at the Menlo Park headquarters. Nonetheless, I made the ...

Facebook's CEO Mark Zuckerberg received a hoodie from the NASDAQ and thanked his site's users in opening remarks recorded before he rang the NASDAQ opening bell this morning.In his short speech that j...

Facebook's CEO Mark Zuckerberg received a commemorative hoodie from the NASDAQ CEO Bob Greifeld and thanked his site's users in opening remarks recorded before he rang the NASDAQ opening bell this mor...

According to online analytics company comScore, Americans watched 37 billion online videos on sites like YouTube, Yahoo and Facebook in April. In total, 181 million U.S. Internet users watched an aver...

There are lots of different approaches to the amorphous market of 'e-learning' but only a handful ever feel much like fun. I think amongst the best of these are sites like MangaHigh which teaches Math...

How timely. After launching a year ago at Disrupt NYC 2011, Tracks is today releasing one of its biggest updates to date. The service is much like Color, but without the creepy factor as any and all m...

Why is there nothing but Facebook IPO news today, you (Facebook haters) may be asking? Well, outside of the obvious - people are obsessed, this is a historic event, it's the biggest tech IPO over, etc...

Zynga's share price plummeted 11.4% from $8.09 to $7.19 in the eight minutes after Facebook's IPO went live, and down 13.3% since yesterday. Investors may be worrying that a solid performance of Faceb...

Zynga's share price plummeted 11.4 percent from $8.09 to $7.19 in the eight minutes after Facebook's IPO went live, and down 13.3 percent since yesterday. Trading has been halted to stem further losse...

Zynga's share price plummeted 11.4 percent from $8.09 to $7.19 in the eight minutes after Facebook's IPO went live, and down 13.3 percent since yesterday. Trading has been halted to stem further losse...

Facebook shares opened at $42.05, a 10.5 percent increase from its final price last night at $38. This would value the company at $115 billion.While the price is going to fluctuate a lot today, there'...

Facebook shares opened at $42.05, a 10.5 percent increase from its final price last night at $38. Shares are actually currently almost flat at $39.16, which is 3.6 percent higher than $38 the price th...

Facebook's opening trade on NASDAQ has been delayed. We don't know why, but we're hearing mixed reports involving both unexpectedly high demand from retail investors and problems with canceling orders...

Trading has now begun on Facebook after a bit of a hiccup with NASDAQ, and while the numbers are nowhere near the heady heightsof $70-$100 that some people were murmuring earlier, the $42.05 opening f...

Today's Facebook IPO is a momentous, historical occasion. It's set to be the biggest tech IPO ever, and the third largest IPO in U.S. history, second only to Visa and General Motors. The company that ...

In this first installment of Gadget Of The Week I decided to try something a bit different. Rather than focus on some obscure cellphone or wonky laptop, I decided to take on one of the biggest questio...

Facebook shares are supposed to go live on the NASDAQ market in about 20 minutes. But what happens in the next crucial 15? We caught up with NASDAQ's Bruce Aust, who is the executive vice president an...

Another startup cashing in (figuratively speaking) on the FB IPO: StockTwits. Earlier this week, the social network for investors added Facebook to itsStockTwits Social Heatmap, a feature on the site ...

This is awesome. At 9:30 AM ET, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted what's bound to be a historical status update to his Facebook Timeline. The post simply reads: "Mark Zuckerberglisted a company onNA...

The Hackathon is one of the best parts of Disrupt. Granted, it's not quite as emotional as watching the Battlefield rounds play out, but there's something sort of inspiring about the idea that you may...

Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg didn't travel to New York's Times Square for the company's big day. He did it unconventionally like you'd expect a hacker would. He opened the bell remotely fr...

Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg didn't travel to New York's Times Square for the company's big day. He did it unconventionally like you'd expect a hacker would. He opened the bell remotely fr...

Editor's note:Some savvy Facebook engineers rigged the NASDAQ button to automatically post "Mark Zuckerberg has listed a company on NASDAQ - FB" to the CEO's Timeline as herung the bell to open the NA...

Social finance siteTradingView, which launched in September of last year, is rolling out a new feature just in time for the Facebook IPO (c'mon, you knew there would have to be at least one story abou...

As if anyone needed any more proof that the Samsung's Galaxy S III would sell like (slightly more expensive) hotcakes, a report from the Korea Economic Daily reveals that the long-awaited handset rack...

Facebook will be the largest tech IPO in history today as the company and its early shareholders raise $16 billion. There is also an allotment for them to sell up to $2.4 billion more in the next 30 d...

The Facebook IPO is expected to usher in a day of massive trading volumes on the markets, and some believe that might translate to a lift for some tech stocks. But one that could really use some help ...

You can watch livefrom the NASDAQ siteas Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg makes history this morning ringing the bell to open the day's trading on the NASDAQ from Facebook's headquarters just before his c...

I don't understand Klout. I've convinced myself that it's best that way. I just avoid it, really. Grading a person's social media influence on a scale of 100 seems like something popular girls would d...

Yeah, it's not $99 and it's refurbished but it's still a TouchPad. The tablet was once heralded as an iPad killer. Now, I'm not sure if it could even kill a Notion Ink Adam in a head-to-head sales bat...

Perhaps not the best timing for Facebook, but great timing for those looking for more profile on the whole issue of privacy and how it is approached by Facebook. The European activistseurope-v-faceboo...

Facebook knows what's best for you, sometimes before you do. That's the meaning of a new "Likers Gonna Like" inspirational mini-poster printed by the Facebook Toronto Office. If you don't approve of s...

With Facebook announcing its ballsy stock price of $38 yesterday and all eyes now on what will happen with the social network when it finally goes public today, a new trading platform in Hong Kong, 8 ...

With Facebook announcing its ballsy stock price of $38 yesterday and all eyes now on what will happen with the social network when it finally goes public today, a new trading platform in Hong Kong, 8 ...

Two years ago, WhiteyBoard founders Saachi Cywinski, Sherwin Kim and Jason Wilk set out to re-think those clunky, inflexible whiteboards found in classrooms and offices around the country. They develo...

Hundreds of Facebook employees congregated at 'Hacker Square' at the company's Menlo Park headquarters this evening ahead of the company's insanely-hyped initial public offering. Now, some of the firs...

Tomorrow Facebook will sell shares in one of the biggest tech IPOs in history. New investors will gobble up the stock to get a piece of the global phenomenon famously started in Mark Zuckerbergs dorm ...

If there's something on Facebook that won't stop pinging you with Notifications, tell it to shut up instantly with Facebook's new granular, in-line notification controls. Hover over an alert in the Fa...

If there's something on Facebook that won't stop pinging you with Notifications, tell it to shut up instantly with Facebook's new granular, in-line notification controls. Hover over an alert in the Fa...

Silicon Valley venture capital stalwart Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers is announcing this evening that it has closed on a $525 million round for its fifteenth venture fund, dubbed 'KPCB 15.' Th...

Facebook's $38 share price would make its deal to buy Instagram worth nearly $1.2 billion, up from the roughly $1 billion price the company announced in April. That's a nice little bump but the deal h...

On the whole, teacher compensation in the U.S. is embarrassing. To pick on marketers, some might see the fact that the average marketing manager makes twice the average salary of just about every type...

This is the age of thinking thermostats and, not to be outdone by a well-known circular model, hardware startup Ecobee has released the Smart Si. It is a smart thermostat with small color screen and a...

Pulse, the popular free mobile news reader for iPhone, iPad and Android, could soon get ads. Until now, Pulse, which launched its first app in May 2010, was ad free and the company focused more on use...

It's been about a month and a half since peer-to-peer bike rental service launched in San Francisco and New York. Since then, the New York-based startup has been busy trying to attract bike owners to ...

Although introduced in 2009, weve only seen glimpses of what Facebook Credits will become when it grows up, and Facebook is about to kick off the training wheels.So far, Facebook has done little to pr...

"People are sick of shitty customer service," said FastCustomer co-founder, Stephanie Hay. And she and her team aim to do something about it.Their first product, for the iPhone, Android, and other pla...

"People are sick of shitty customer service," said FastCustomer co-founder, Stephanie Hay. And she and her team aim to do something about it.Their first product, for the iPhone, Android, and other pla...

Angel investor and all-around web magnate Chris Sacca wrote a quick tweet early yesterday about how it'd be cool if there was a website where people could predict where Facebook's stock will end up at...

Twitter does a lot of things right, but it still hasn't solved the problem of turning its noise into signal. After joining Twitter, it can take a lot of following and unfollowing scores of accounts be...

Verizon CFO Fran Shammo ruffled a few feathers yesterday when he mentioned at an investor conference that every one of their customers would be on one of the carrier's new data share plans. In an effo...

The ongoing interest and use of cloud-based services has brought a generally good set of results to one of the leaders in the enterprise software-as-a-service business.Salesforce.com released Q1 earni...

Love'em or hate'em, despite the best efforts of Bump and others, traditional business cards aren't going away anytime soon. At least, though, some companies are trying to bridge the gap between paper ...

Facebook shares will start trading at $38 tomorrow, the company confirmed in a release, giving it a valuation of $104.12 billion.Facebook and its early shareholders will raise just over $16 billion in...

Last night, Time Inc. threw a pretty badass party in NYC to celebrate "Ten Startups To Watch." Among the ten were Fancy Hands, a site that offers up a personal assistant for every and any need you mig...

Freshdesk, the makers of cloud-based help desk software that allows companies to support their customers through email, phone, website, Facebook and Twitter, are on a mission to compete with the big b...

Tiny sidebar and news feed ads aren't going to cut it. If Facebook wants to live up to a $100 billion valuation it will need bold new revenue streams. An offsite ad network, big glossy news feed ads, ...

HP is reportedly going to be announcing massive layoffs next Wednesday. Conflicting reports state somewhere between 25K and 30K jobs, between 7% and 8% of HP's global workforce, could be eliminated in...

Everyme, the Y Combinator-backed mobile startup that helps users create groups for private sharing, is launching a whole bunch of new stuff today.For starters, it's releasing apps for both Android and...

"In the Studio" hosts a Silicon Valley technology veteran this week, someone who has been around tech since 1977, in venture since 1995, an early investor in Twitter, Yammer, and Millennial Media, a f...

Comcast announced today that it is doing away with its 250 GB data cap, and will be moving to test out new plans will charge customers based on usage, rather than cutting them off.Since 2008, Comcast ...

We first wrote about Balloonduck back in March. At the time, the social network was accepting invite requests prior to a full launch, so as to avoid empty room syndrome. But today is the big day: Ball...

Getaround was the big winner at TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2011. Since then, the startup has continued to lead and dominate the car sharing space. This year, Getaround will be back in New York to help us h...

Here's an iPhone app for those moments when you're wondering, "Okay, I've got some free time right now what should I do?"Weotta Go is actually the latest product from Weotta, a startup that launched ...

Charles Schumer and Bob Casey, the two U.S. Senators behind the Ex-PATRIOT act -- a proposal to go after early Facebook backer Eduardo Saverin and others like him that have renounced U.S. citizenship ...

Postmates, the urban logistics startup that launched its flagship business-to-business courier system back in December, just launched the public version of its first consumer-facing app, "Get It Now."...

Time Warner Cable is on a roll with this whole TV Everywhere thing. Just a day after adding Viacom stations to its live streaming iPad app, the cable provider has announced support for HBO Go on the X...

INTRO, the ambient location app whose claim-to-fame is howits angling to become the LinkedIn of the social/local people-stalking space, is now increasing its business-oriented focus. With theiOS apps ...

Speaking at Peter Thiel's class at Stanford last week, investor and entrepreneur Mark Andreessen called out retail as a "particularly promising" vertical for tech innovation.Were seeing and will conti...

Facebook created a $100 billion empire on top of a "hacker culture," a workplace ethos that encourages wild experimentation and collaborative fun. Now, AT&T is betting $3.8 million that one school...

Just about a month ago, Microsoft announced that it would end free access to its Bing Search API and start charging a minimum of $40 per month for the service. Today, the company is officially launchi...

T-Mobile CEO Philipp Humm noted during their last earning call that their prepaid users helped make up for the loss of 510,000 postpaid subscribers, and now it seems that they've got another bone to t...

Tiger Pistol, an Australian startup offering social media marketing tools that it describes as both "small business friendly" and "enterprise powerful", is coming out of its closed beta test today and...

The rush of interest around crowdfunding is spawning many variations on the theme, and one of the more original of them -- Crowdtilt, part of the most recent crop of Y-Combinator startups -- is today ...

Mozilla's Do Not Track feature, which allows users to tell websites that they would like to opt-out of being tracked by third parties, is starting to gain some traction among both users and publishers...

By now, we're pretty familiar with the term 4G LTE. But that in and of itself is somewhat surprising. It took 12 years for GSM wireless technology to reach one billion connections, and WCDMA took 11 y...

Eduardo Saverin may no longer be a U.S. citizen. But that's not stopping him from investing in American companies.In fact, he just closed a deal. He's backing Crowdmob, a startup that's blending app p...

Last year, YouTube announced the ability for its music partners to begin selling merchandise, digital downloads and event tickets through a new YouTube feature called the Merch Store. Today, the compa...

The lowly photo slideshow is not dead yet, or at least that's the hope of the team at Tel Aviv-based EasyHi, which is debuting its new product Slide.ly today, backed by $1 million in seed funding. The...

Video curation platform Shortform is launching a few new features that will make it easier for its video jockeys (VJs) to curate and share content with friends and followers. The hope is that by intro...

Facebook saysthat it generated half of its revenues outside of the U.S. and Canada in the first quarter of 2012, and some numbers out today underscore just how extensive its reach is in different mark...

Every few days something really amazing dumps over the transom here at TC HQ. Today it was YesterdayMe.com. Built by Vladimir V. Tuporshin and partner, Ilja Razinkov, the site essentially allows you t...

Carefully cultivating your Facebook presence can be tough enough when you only have your personal profile to deal with, but it's a completely different story when you've got a full-blown Page (or thre...

Facebook's IPO story is a lot about mobile, international growth and Asia.I am not Asian by birth but have been living there for a dozen years and researching key Asian markets since before Facebook w...

The Wall Street Journal made waves yesterday. Citing unnamed sources, the Journal reported Apple is ordering larger touchscreens for the next iPhone. Now, citing its own unnamed sources, Reuters somew...

Creating and publishing content-rich, interactive ebooks without programming skills or distribution power: that's the problem New York- and Seoul-based startupMoglueis trying to solve. TheTechCrunch D...

I've been on a journey through the past as Disrupt NYC (tickets here) draws closer, sifting through past Disrupt and TC50 startups with the hopes of getting a clear update on the accomplishments, the ...

Buffer, the little service for scheduling your social media updates, has some big news today: it's acquiring competitor ShareFeed, and is bringing its CEO Hiten Shah on board as a mentor and advisor. ...

At a J.P Morgan conference held in Boston on Wednesday, Netflix CFO David Wells said that the company was looking up and, more importantly, customers who cancelled the service because of the Qwikster ...

Another development in the ongoing story of how Eduardo Saverin has given up his U.S. citizenship to avoid paying $67 million in taxes related to Facebook's IPO: the U.S. government doesn't want him g...

In an effort to streamline its digital offerings, The Weather Channel has today announced that its popular iPhone app has undergone a major redesign. It started with the launch of the iPad app, and ju...

Heroku was a hit with Ruby developers because it was an easy-to-use development platform. Others have tried to do the same with other languages such as PHP Fog, dotCloud. Then last year AppHarbor, a '...

Rakuten, the Japanese e-commerce giant leading a $100 million investment in Pinterest, will be making two major contributions to the image-based social network as it gears up for its next stage of gro...

There's been a lot of armchair valuation punditryacross the Valley this week. As the Facebook IPO looms, our intricately entwined ecosystem of startups and investors seeks to benefit from the domino e...

There's a new product that just came out of Disney Labs -- a video portal for clips, movie trailers, and even a collection of curated YouTube videos, all designed to be watched online or on any of you...

Search engine ranking startup Positionly has secured $300,000 seed funding from Berlin-based led by seed VC Point Nine Capital and joined by Angels Mariusz Gralewski and Michal Skrzynski. ...

Palantir Technologies, the big data analysis company founded in 2004 by a team of ex-PayPal employees including Peter Thiel, has raised $56 million in new funding, according to a document filed today ...

Carrying on in the esteemed tradition of Facebook hackathons, there will be an all-nighter at the company's Menlo Park headquarters that culminates with CEO Mark Zuckerberg ringing in the NASDAQ bell ...

Carrying on in the esteemed tradition of Facebook hackathons, there will be an all-nighter at the company's Menlo Park headquarters that culminates with CEO Mark Zuckerberg ringing in the NASDAQ bell ...

Personal Capital, which launched last year, provides a suite of software aimed at helping people manage all their personal finances -- no matter where they are -- through one central suite of web and ...

American politics used to be fun: frequent political carnivals in the 19th century would mix parties, parades, and political speeches in an endless stream of local civic life. As a result, America had...

The Wall Street Journal reported this morning that Apple is currently ordering larger screens for the next iPhone. With the usual nonsense, the WSJ cited people familiar with the matter and stated the...

The folks over at Google just love their Google+ social network and more and more Google+ features have been creeping into Gmail lately as well. Today, Google is bringing even more of Google...

Is link shortener Bitly raising $20 million in new funding? The Verge says it is. In response to my email, a company spokesperson denied The Verge's story, but in vague enough terms that it could prob...

Customers of Time Warner Cable have some reason to rejoice today, as the cable company has gotten the go-ahead to add channels like MTV, VH1, and Comedy Central to its live streaming iPad app. The add...

It's hard to underestimate how important ranking in Apple's top 25 in the iTunes store is for mobile app developers. After all, the top 25 is what one of the most important app discovery mechanisms fo...

It's hard to underestimate how important ranking in Apple's top 25 in the iTunes store is for mobile app developers. After all, the top 25 is what one of the most important app discovery mechanisms fo...

No one ever called a limit on the number pivots a company can do, right? So here's the latest at a company we've been watching for a while now.RAVN, an event planning and sharing app that itself was t...

For some inexplicable reason, Nintendo and Toyota have teamed up to turn the Nintendo DS into a navigational remote control, thereby allowing drivers (although I hope passengers do most of the fiddlin...

Almost 115 million households in the U.S. currently own at least on TV set and 36 million own four or more. That's a huge market and as Apple, Google and Microsoft try wrestle more of this business aw...

Verizon Wireless has been working on bringing shared data plans to market for months now, but it turns out not everyone will enjoy making that transition. Verizon CFO Fran Shammo said at an investor c...

Independent online video company Funny Or Die is about to get a lot of help from a traditional TV company, as it's struck a strategic partnership with Turner Broadcasting to collaborate on multiplatfo...

One of the most memorable moments of TechCrunch Disrupt NYC last year was office hours with Paul Graham, who is the heart and co-founder of Y Combinator. We are doing it again this year. But because G...

One trend we've been tracking is the "Internet of Things" -- the idea that at some point, all devices will be intelligent and connected, allowing for things like whole home automation. The problem is ...

Today, Google is launching one of its most ambitious and interesting updates to its search engine in recent months. Starting in a few days, you will start to see large panels with additional factual i...

Disrupt alumni never cease to impress. TC50 finalist Perpetually and its web archiving technology have been acquired by Portland, Ore.- based Smarsh.Though the news hit the Web yesterday, we're told t...

Pearson, the educational publisher,today made a move to beef up its international professional IT testing business: it announced that it is buying Certiport, a developer, marketer and distributor of c...

Facebook's eight year history is famously speckled with a number of buyout offers from the likes of Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft. But each time, founder Mark Zuckerberg opted to keep his company indep...

Startup Prismatic claims to show you news related to "what you're actually interested in." Starting today, users can to reveal those interests to others with newly launched profiles.When I first heard...

Path co-founder and CEO Dave Morin is joining the board of the event ticketing startup Eventbrite, the company is announcing today. The news of the appointment follows what has been, so far, quite a b...

Back in in 1999, just as Ebay was coming into bloom, William Gibson wrote a piece on his experiences buying expensive watches online. He called the article My Obsession and it details his youth as a p...

Mobile payments and identity verification companyJumiois introducing its Netswipe Mobile SDK today, which allows developers to add credit card scanning functionality to their mobile applications. The ...

If you are looking for Piano or Rhodes-like feel for serious playing, Samson's Carbon 49 USB MIDI Controller may not be right for you.However, if you need a keyboard for some light playing or sample t...

The Galaxy S III is likely the most anticipated Android phone in existence. At least, today it is. Samsung is the king of Android hardware, the Galaxy S II is its most successful phone to date, and a ...

Is the Twitter platform about to get a second wind of dedicated apps?In the last few weeks, I've seen a handful products that are starting out by filtering out the most relevant news stories, videos a...

Contactually, the lightweight CRM solution for email users which launched into private beta at the beginning of this year, is today announcing its public debut with a number of new features in tow, as...

Mass Relevance, a startup that helps media companies and brands tap into this crazy Twitter thing, has raised $3.3 million in Series A funding.The round was led by Austin Ventures, with money from Bat...

This is a guest post by Roger Warner of Content and Motion. Here's classic example of how badly some companies are screwing up on social media. Back in February this year Coca-Cola Australia invited ...

Here's hoping that you already managed to get your hands on an HTC One X, because it may be a while before they appear on store shelves again. According to a release put out by HTC last night, U.S. Cu...

The iPhone might be coming to the world's largest mobile carrier, China Mobile. The world comes from Bloomberg quoting China Mobile's chairman. The report also details that the phone might not hit the...

When it comes to business social networking products, Convo, created by Scrybe Labs, probably doesn't have the name recognition (or the funding) of Yammer. But judging from the demonstration I saw rec...

With smartphone penetration now at 50 percent in the U.S., the world of apps is seeing a knock-on effect in their popularity: according to a new report from Nielsen, mobile consumers are downloading m...

With smartphone penetration now at 50 percent in the U.S., the world of apps is seeing a knock-on effect in their popularity: according to a new report from Nielsen, mobile consumers are downloading m...

We've been covering Gogobot since it first launched in early 2010. It took the social travel discovery and advice site a little while to find its niche, but since about the middle of 2011, it's been a...

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: The children are our future. You can learn a lot about the future by watching them, particularly by watching how they use technology and how they consume me...

Lately a trend has emerged: European VCs putting down more roots in Silicon Valley to take advantage of the current scene and act as a bridge for European companies trying to form local partnerships, ...

Wave Accounting, which makes 100 percent free accounting software for small and medium-sized businesses, has raised $12 million in a Series B round of financing from the Social+Capital Partnershi...

Fotopediais quickly building a reputation for producing beautiful travel-focused photo apps for iOS. Today, the company is launching its latest free app, which focuses on Morocco. The app is optimized...

Fresh on the heels of its $1 million Series A,Triptrotting, a startup that aims to connect travelers with hosts, is relaunching its website with a number of changes. In addition to improved design and...

Design shopping site Fab.com is debuting the next major release of its platform today, Fab 3.0, which is going live on the U.S.-based Fab.com first. The revamp focuses heavily on improved "social shop...

Facebook is revising hard and fast in the lead-up to Friday when it is expected to ring in the Nasdaq bell and go public. In short, every revision is continuing to gradually push up the value of the c...

The are almost too many tech events in the calendar these days to mark any particular one out as being worthy of note. I say almost because, on the global stage at least, TechCrunch Disrupt (Ok, Ok, b...

It's almost here. The big day. Can you feel the excitement? Yes, if all goes according to plan on Friday, Mark Zuckerberg will ring the Nasdaq bell in a hoodie, the big blue social network will go for...

Sign of a maturing marketing flattening out, a lack of compelling devices, or a contraction in the economy? Gartner today released figures that note that worldwide sales of mobile phones were actually...

With Square yet to reveal when or where it might offer its mobile payment service in Europe, and PayPal apparently still only talking with would-be partners, the door is wide open for more local playe...

In the white heat of the current tech market it's sometimes easy to forget that some companies, although taking their time, simply become viable businesses - instead of waiting for a call from Faceboo...

In the white heat of the current tech market it's sometimes easy to forget that some companies, although taking their time, simply become viable businesses - instead of waiting for a call from Faceboo...

Cloud-based telephony API startup Twilio has made significant inroads into VoIP and other carrier services like SMS by launching products that work on the web and in iOS apps, supporting 30,000 develo...

When I was younger, my parents liked to listen to the big soft rock stations in Los Angeles. Once in a while, the sappy love songs would be interrupted by an emotional song dedication from a boy/girlf...

Facebook has nearly a billion users today, so what could topple the blue giant? Government intervention, the shift to mobile, and a loss of "cool" all have the power to violently disrupt Facebook, or ...

Ask a VC is back this month (finally!) after a long hiatus. This week we have a freshly-minted VC, Nabeel Hyatt, of Spark Capital. Hyatt just joined Spark after 15 years of starting and building compa...

Today, the Banters social experiment has officially come to a close, as the startup's co-founder Lauren Leto said via blog post today that the team will be no longer actively working on the site begin...

Social magazine Flipboard may have to think up a new tagline for itself, as tonight the company is rolling out an update which greatly expands its focus beyond text-based content to also include audio...

Editor's Note:Sales Marketing Manager Leslie Hitchcock is a non-editorial TechCrunch employee. In addition to working at TechCrunch and being super fashionable, she reviews startups and tech products ...

Ever since Comcast unveiled the VOD service on the Xbox, it's come under criticism from those who believe the service violates the spirit of net neutrality, not to mention also violating some of the F...

Last week, Bing began the initial phase of rolling out a major redesign, in fact the "most significant" redesign in its three-year history. Today, the wait is over. This afternoon, Bing officially tur...

Over the past six months, the folks at Staircase 3 have been keeping tabs on the devices that have been downloading their OpenSignalMaps network monitoring app, and so far they've recorded downloads o...

One of the things I wish I had done in both of my companies (Excite.com and JotSpot) was to take a piece of advice that I now give most entrepreneurs I meet. That advice is: Right after you sign your ...

Lenovo rolled out its latest notebook today. It is, in a word, spectacular. The Chinese company proves time and time again that Apple isn't the only company capable of producing class-leading designs....

You've heard the stories, the rumors, and the speculation. Our recent string of TC Mini Meetups have been staggeringly successful, which is why we're bringing the fun to some of the most badass cities...

Winning TechCrunch Disrupt in 2011 was an unforgettable experience that will undoubtedly remain a highlight of my entrepreneurial career. After winning the prestigious Disrupt Cup and Audience Choice ...

As a culture, we are getting ever-more accustomed to using social networks as our primary hubs for all information, and that trend is leading to the rise of yet more services constructed like social n...

General Motors plans to stop advertising on Facebook, says The Wall Street Journalaccording to "people familiar with the matter." ButI spoke to a source close to Facebook that characterize GM's effort...

They say if you want to understand the future, you have to look at children. And if my 10-year-old cousin's chat history is any indication, we will soon be communicating in emoji, Egyptian hieroglyphi...

Ogmento is a gaming company dedicated to the creation of high-quality augmented reality games. Although AR games aren't that rare - the 3DS does a few quite well and there are a number available on mo...

If you've ever wanted to swing a magic wand around and make things happen (besides encouraging the cool kids to give you a swirly, that is), here's your chance. A new game on Kickstarter called Incant...

Imgur has a little piece of my heart. On long days (or really any day), as news picks up and I'm writing like a work horse or when news screeches to a halt and I'm bored out of my mind, Imgur is there...

Mozilla was late to the mobile revolution and is still playing catch-up with Firefox for mobile. It's starting to look as if Firefox for Android is slowly becoming a competitive player on Google's pla...

Authors no longer have to impress stodgy English majors to get their book a quality review: new research from the Harvard Business Review shows that the aggregate rating of Amazon reviewers are every ...

The Canadian startup incubator scene has taken off lately, and the one of the latest to appear was Toronto-based Extreme Startups. The accelerator, which was officially announced in January, has gone ...

When it comes to digital magazines, why should tablet owners have all the fun? That's the sentiment Adobe was espousing earlier today at an event held in New York where they officially pulled back the...

If anybody knows how to talk back to Facebook, it's Jim Steyer, the founder and CEO of Common Sense Media, America's largest and most powerful advocacy group for kids. Steyer is the author of the new ...

I must say that I have been a little bit disappointed recently in the many, many, many analysts who have been knocking the Facebook valuation with very limited insight into what is going on with their...

I must say that I have been a little bit disappointed recently in the many, many, many analysts who have been knocking the Facebook valuation with very limited insight into what is going on with their...

Last year, CollegeBudget launched with the goal of bringing a variation on the Groupon discount and group buying model to the campus. The goal being to help college students at colleges and universiti...

Online reputation and lending startup Lenddo has raised an $8 million Series A Round from institutional investors Accel Partners, Blumberg Capital, Omidyar Network, iNovia Capital, and Metamorphic Ven...

When Dish announced their new ad-skipping tech, response was fairly muted. Sure it was some cool technology - the experience is seamless in that you notice maybe the first second of a commercial and t...

Box has been grabbing headlines lately because it has been nailing a big market: enterprise customers who need to easily share and store big collections of documents online. But a quiet Silicon Valley...

Can early-stage tech startups be financed the way that Disney might fund a Pixar film?We're about to find out.New York's betaworks is crossing the Brooklyn Bridge to do a deal with design collective F...

I always hear that startups are competing for young talent, especially on the tech side but usually that means college students and recent grads. What about high schoolers?...

MoboTap's popular Dolphin Browser has racked up over 16 million downloads worldwide, but that hasn't stopped them from taking steps to expand internationally.The company announced earlier this morning...

Ask and ye shall receive: when I put a call out for cool hardware start-ups, little did I know that we'd be barraged by some amazing stuff. Case-in-point: the LayerNation El Tirador, a unique drinks m...

My first-ever Disrupt was a year ago, almost exactly. I had just started working for TechCrunch and Disrupt NYC 2011 was my initiation, of sorts. I had heard of Disrupt before but witnessing the Batt...

Google today launched version 19 of its Chrome browser for Windows, Mac, Linux and Chrome Frame to its mainstream stable release channel. Besides the usual bug fixes and performance improvements, the ...

Facebook has just closed a deal to hire about seven employees from Android photosharing app developerLightbox. The Lightbox Photos app automatically created personal photo blogs from a user's uploads....

Facebook has just closed a deal to hire the full team of seven employees from Android photosharing app developerLightbox, which should reduce worries that mobile will be its downfall. The Lightbox Pho...

Today Mayor Bloomberg rolled out the Made in New York Digital Map, an easy way to find New York City's tech startups and job opportunities. The interactive map keeps startups, investors, developers an...

This video by Tenable Security is pretty wild. It shows a visualization of an office network. Using different colors and lines users can pin-point problem areas based on traffic and data being sent an...

SaneBoxis definitely starting to get my attention. The company, which is focused on solving the very real problem of email overload, has just rolled out a minor, but clever, new feature: reminders tha...

Last month, Facebook drove 160 million visitors and 1.1 billion visits to third-party apps, an increase of 100 million visitors and 780 million visits from the month prior. Thanks to the size of its u...

Smule has been churning out scores of popular music-making iOS apps for years now, but they've been notoriously gun-shy about bringing those apps to other platforms. As of today though, that streak ha...

Two of the top venture capital firms have written a big check for Qualtrics, a 10-year-old company offering online data collection and analysis.The $70 million round is the first institutional investm...

Appia, an app marketplace and white-label app platform, is broadening its support for Android with the introduction of Pay Per Install App Advertising for Google Play (formerly known as the Android Ma...

Back in March this year Microsoft launched its first ever "direct" startup accelerator, based out of Tel Aviv, Israel. That meant it would, for the first time, be an accelerator owner/operator. Dubbed...

Web-based productivity suiteZohois launching a new app today which, again, puts it head-to-head against its biggest competitor, Google, while filling a much-needed hold in Zoho's business tools lineup...

Open data platformFactual.comis beefing up its Global Places offering today with three new APIs that will provide mobile developers with access to a ton of new data which can help them build better lo...

BBC Worldwide, the commercial arm of the BBC, today announced an extension of its relationship with social, online TV site Viki. On the heels of a strategic investment it made last year -- BBC Worldwi...

What's the best way to manage our conversations across all the websites and social networks we're visiting? William Mougayar, founder and CEO of Engagio, says that it's through a Gmail-style social in...

Taking the term home theater in a box to a new level, Ikea made waves a few weeks back when it announced plans to start selling a self-branded HDTV and home theater system with a starting price under ...

Social video network Twitvid has closed another acquisition today, followingits March deal which involved bringing the team from daily deals aggregator Frugalo on board. Today, the company is announci...

Founded in 2009 by Scott Sangster and incubated in healthtech accelerator Rock Health's inaugural batch, HealthInReach has been on a mission to combat the high cost of healthcare and put consumers bac...

New figures out today from Kantar Worldpanel ComTech -- a market research division of WPP -- show that Android is, overall, continuing to make large gains in the smartphone market, accounting for a ma...

Honestly.com, a startup that allowed professionals to submit anonymous reviews of their coworkers, has been pretty quiet for the past couple of years. Turns out that's because the company has been bus...

Simplee, a Mint-like platform for tracking healthcare expenses and then paying them online, is today announcing the close of its $6 million Series A round of funding. The round was led by The Social&p...

A new breed of social media sites led by visual rather than text-based interactions looks like it is now spawning a new breed of marketing service catering to the new format. The latest of these is a ...

Facebook has filed a new S-1, and it contains more details on the IPO.It will offer underwritersthe right to purchase up to an additional 50,612,302 shares of Class A common stock to cover over-allotm...

Facebook has filed a new S-1, and it contains more details on the IPO.It will offer underwritersthe right to purchase up to an additional 50,612,302 shares of Class A common stock to cover over-allotm...

Big mobile plans afoot for Baidu, the Google of China that leads in search and has launched a host of other services in the wake of that business. The company today unveiled the first smartphone to be...

BagThat, a new UK entrant to the daily-deals/e-commerce space, has picked up an investment of 2 million ($3.2 million) to develop its service, a mash-up of two well-known models for selling products o...

The biggest ecommerce opportunity today involves taking offline services and offering them for sale online (O2O commerce). The first generation of O2O commerce was driven by discounting, push-based en...

Everyone wants a piece of Facebook, so the company will likely allow underwriters to sell a "greenshoe" of up to 50.6 million additional shares, and definitely will increase its IPO share price range ...

By now nearly everyone knows that China has emerged as an increasingly massive and very lucrative market -- but because of major differences in culture, language, business practices, and the like, it ...

We're about to launch a new video series called Makers here at TechCrunch and we'd love to hear from any and all hardware based startups. I want to hear about robots, toys, and railguns. I want to hea...

Last month, mobile marketing company Velti reported that iOS had pulled slightly of Android in mobile ad impressions, after being tied at the end of last year. Now, apparently, iOS has taken widened t...

Instagram, Schminstagram. While flashy consumer deals keep getting all the headlines, it was actually cloud computing, enterprise and video that fueled the biggest deals of last quarter's $25.1 billio...

There's currently a heated battle being waged between three of the biggest on-demand music streaming services -- MOG, Spotify, and Rdio -- each of which is trying to capture our hearts and ears by off...

It looks like customer support via Facebook is about to get more useful, thanks to a new feature from startup Freshdesk.Freshdesk helps businesses manage their customer service through traditional cha...

On June 1, Founder Swap aims to take six different startups and get them to exchange founders, in an effort to get a fresh set of eyes on whatever they're working on and foster new ideas. The New York...

As all the major search engines continue to add social search features to their feature line-up, it can often look as if there isn't any space left for startups in this space. Wajam begs to differ. Th...

Remember last week when Foxconn president Terry Gou said that he was working hard at building the new Apple TV? The rumor was, as you might suspect, patently false. But just how false is the surprisin...

EyeTrackShop, a startup that develops eye-tracking technology for measuring ad effectiveness, has raised $3 million from Northzone.The company says its technology works through a regular webcam, allow...

For awhile now "gamification" has largely existed as a buzz word. It's felt just as ridiculous to write the word as it is to read it. However, as Tim Chang pointed out this weekend, although it's impo...

In its first-ever earnings report as a publicly traded company, mobile advertising network Millennial Media said its net loss for the first quarter widened to $4 millionon increased costs. Revenues we...

This shouldn't be the first time you've seen Skullcandy's Hesh headphones appear on TechCrunch, but I'll forgive you if it is. As a refresh, I reviewed the cans last week and found that it really came...

Remember Jitterbug, the big-buttoned phones for seniors that made using those confusing, new-fangled cellphone thingies so much easier to handle? Well it looks like someone has gone out and built the ...

Quora has raised $50 million at a $400 million valuationaccording to a reportby the Wall Street Journal and the founders themselves have confirmed. According to our own sources D'Angelo put $20 millio...

Svpply, the New York-based startup that replicates the feeling of window-shopping online, is nudging its well-heeled clientele to turn their "wants" into real purchases. The company, which was co-foun...

Groupon just published its second quarterly earnings report after going public in 2011. The Chicago-based company made $559.3 million in revenue during the first quarter of 2012, up 89% year-over year...

A lot of you have come to depend on TechCrunch for your startup funding news -- and hey, we're happy to be the first place you come when you're looking to see who's raising money. Which is why this ne...

The Le Web conference in Paris is an annual Techcrunch favourite, so be aware that there is just 24 hrs left to register for the startup competition for the new Le Web London event coming up. Selected...

The Le Web conference in Paris is an annual TechCrunch favourite, so be aware that there are just 24 hrs left to register for the startup competition for the new Le Web London event coming up. Selecte...

There's been a lot of buzz about how important mobile apps are for years now, and an increasing number of tech startups are launching with mobile-only strategies. But a new study indicates that the se...

Not content just to be your source of 140-character communications on the web, in its desktop app and on your mobile device, Twitter is now trying to creep into your email inbox. Twitter announced on ...

Thing have looked grim for upstart wireless service provider LightSquared ever since the FCC officially withdrew their conditional approval to build out the terrestrial part of their LTE network, and ...

There are about a million case vendors out there ready to hook up your iThing with the utmost in protection and style, but very few differentiate in a cool way. This Kickstarter project, however, has ...

Online human resources and social talent management solutionSilkRoadjust announced that it has raised a $35 million Series C financing round. The investors in this round include new investors Keating ...

He's not taking off the hoodie, and he's not going to NYC. TechCrunch has learned and confirmed that Facebook will IPO on Friday with CEO Mark Zuckerberg ringing the NASDAQ bell remotely from his comp...

Our action packed Disrupt conference is coming to Pier 94 in New York in less than a week. Get ready, because the agenda is chock full of leaders from the city's up-and-coming tech industry and, of co...

With Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference just weeks away, expect plenty of reports of new features to come crawling out of the woodwork. In fact, here's one from the Wall Street Journal -- they cla...

If you're sick of interrupting your news feed reading to open and load photos, you'll like a new Facebook mobile site, iOS, and Android app redesign rolling out today that makes photos three times lar...

Having in-flight access to WiFi is quickly becoming a standard feature on modern airliners, but (thankfully) in-flight  cell phone service for voice calls is still a rarity and even outlawed in a...

At the end of March, we covered Behance's major site redesign, at which point we learned that the startup was launching over 20K new projects every week, with 1 million projects created to date, and i...

Yext has been making waves of late, what with the spin-off of their original pay-per-call ad business which has been renamed Felix and the launch of their new business, PowerListings. But this is far ...

Watch out for falling prices! Verizon Wireless just cut the price of the RAZR Maxx to an attractive $199. That puts it on par with the iPhone 4S and Galaxy Nexus, making the 32GB iPhone 4S and BlackBe...

Buckle up everybody: Facebook's initial public offering, the most highly anticipated tech stock market debut since Google's 2004 IPO, is one step closer to actually happening.This morning Facebook fil...

The online stock photography service Shutterstock filed its plans for an initial public offering today. The company plans to list its stock on the New York Stock Exchange. The number of shares to be o...

Danielle Morrill's been thinking about this idea for at least three years. I know this because it was almost all she could talk for an hour straight at a dinner party several years ago.If you're an en...

If you're like me, the worst part about going to a baseball game -- other than watching your team lose -- is having to deal with lines at the concession stands. You inevitably end up missing at least ...

Doccaster wants to disrupt document-sharing, but it's attacking the space from a new angle: it's not just about storing files in the "cloud," it's about tying files to a location. The company islaunch...

Over the past few months, San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee has become a familiar face at local startup events whether it's at the Crunchie Awards, the opening of Dropbox's new office, or the NewMe Accelera...

When former Best Buy CEO Brian Dunn resigned after announcing a dramatic restructuring of the company's retail operations, it looked like a reaction to the company's recent financial woes. The timing ...

This morning, Nielsen is putting hard numbers to how consumers like to shop with their smartphones, backing up trends we already suspected to be the case. In particular, the new report examines how co...

If the rumors pan out, Apple's next MacBook Pro line will set the notebook world ablaze with a thinner chassis, USB 3.0 and a 15-inch high-resolution, so-called retina display. Of course it would pack...

It's been a year sinceE la Cartelaunched itscustomized tablet for restaurants, which brings menus, wine lists, nutritional info, play-while-you-wait games, and payment options tableside, and now the c...

Samsung confirmed well in advance of the Galaxy S III's official announcement that their new flagship Android handset would sport the company's new Exynos 4 Quad chipset, but it seems even clearer now...

As the software-as-a-service market continues to mature, there are companies emerging that are targeting specific sectors within the enterprise with solutions especially tailored and priced for them: ...

At a very fundamental level, the venture capital business is being reshaped. Speaking to a crowd at the Grind work space in New York last week, Fred Wilson addressed this ongoing shift, saying, "there...

According to the Kickstarter API blog, a bug caused 70,000 unlaunched projects to be publicly visible over the weekend, allowing folks to see goals, funding plans, and descriptions on projects that ha...

What does it mean when Facebook says it has 901 million monthly active users on its network? According to figures out from the International Telecommunication Union, it effectively signifies that Face...

Mobile carrier NTT Docomo today announced a move in its strategy to grow its content business outside of its traditional base of Japan: it issued a tender offer to acquire Buongiorno, a mobile content...

Zynga has done a small acquisition of Wild Needle, a female-focused casual games company that was backed by Playdom co-founder Rick Thompson.Wild Needle was raising funding back in late 2010 to build ...

With $450K behind it in funding, Israeli-based Qmerce is helping business large and small add social games to their communities, particularly on Facebook.The premise behind Qmerce's value proposition ...

Livebookings, the restaurant booking and marketing service that competes with services like OpenTable, is announcing today that it has picked up another $24 million (15 million) in funding to continue...

Livebookings, the restaurant booking and marketing service that competes with services like OpenTable, is announcing today that it has picked up another $24 million (15 million) in funding to continue...

Did you hear that 2012 is the year of the assistant?Its clear: Siri was only the beginning.Today, assistants can do my bidding for a bunch of transactional, task-oriented use cases, saving me a precio...

When I talk to my friends who are not currently at startups, or the Silicon Valley, the perception is that VCs and individual investors are throwing around investment dollars like drunken sailors. Out...

Very rarely do we see gaming startups launch on the rather limited platform of SMS. Mobile games are all about the graphics, the functionality, and the ability to leverage the very best of technology ...

This post is the third part of a three-part primer on convertible note seed financings.Part 1, entitled Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Convertible Note Seed Financings (But Were Afraid To As...

Some people just love Google+ and others just hate the company's efforts to create a social network and a social layer across all of its services. Google itself seems to be pretty happy with the ...

Some people just love Google+ and others just hate the company's efforts to create a social network and a social layer across all of its services. Google itself seems to be pretty happy with the ...

Yahoo has now officially confirmed the news we reported earlier: Ross Levinsohn is now interim Chief Executive Officer, replacing Scott Thompson, and Fred Amoroso is chairman of the board.Scott Thomps...

We're still confirming the news with Yahoo but AllThingsD's Kara Swisher is reporting that as of tomorrow, Scott Thompson will be leaving his role as CEO of Yahoo, and getting replaced, on an interim ...

These Fraunhofer microprojectors are still quite a ways off from being implemented into real phones, but the technology is certainly interesting. Based on an insect's compound eye, the projector is a ...

We're all now familiar with how adwords campaigns on Google work. You buy keywords commonly used in search terms, such as "plumber in X town", and send people to a response mechanism, usually a web si...

If you're thinking of a gift for mom, you probably can't go wrong with Nickelodeon's Gak or Floam, two toys made back in the 1990s. Gak is, as the name suggests, a sloppy sort of slime while floam is ...

What is 4G? Many an armchair philosopher over the past few weeks has pondered this concept and now, thanks to a minor tempest caused by upset customers, Apple has changed their iPad branding from "WiF...

It's no secret that many deals have been struck and key relationships formed at TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington's former house in Atherton. In case you aren't familiar, Arrington threw epic parti...

What Is a Conversion Discount? In the context of a seed financing, a convertible note is a loan that typically automatically converts into shares of preferred stock upon the closing of a Series A roun...

The reorganizing and downsizing at Yahoo -- and possibly the executive scandal at the very top of the pyramid -- are leading to a wave of talent departures at the company: the latest in that story is ...

One of the most frequent questions I get asked goes something like this: I have a really great idea, but (name of big company or university) has a patent on that. What do I do? With over 8,000,000 pat...

It wasn't so long ago that Peter Thiel began publicly pushing the somewhat controversial idea that higher education is in a bubble, or launching an initiative to help smart young people "stop out of s...

Wow,Pinterests porn sectionis fairly tame. I was just curious about the type of not-so-mommy-friendly content that might be popping up on whats nowthe third-most popular social networkafter Facebook a...

With a $100 billion IPO pending, its with confident defiance that Facebook has thumbed its nose at traditional web advertising models. On Facebook, despite their $5 billion 2012 forecasted ad revenue,...

This week, two of the major players in the credit card industry, Visa and MasterCard launched their online digital wallet services. Known as V.me (Visa's) and PayPass Wallet Services (MasterCard), bot...

Last December, Postmates launched with the plan to offer up a courier delivery service for local businesses throughout San Francisco. But then the team had a brilliant idea: What if it gave its courie...

This week Facebook did a virtually unprecedented thing. In the middle of its IPO roadshow it modified its S1 filing in reaction to questions it had been being asked by analysts. The modification I ref...

The minute you tell someone that images on your server disappear, everyone jumps to sexting.Evan Spiegel laughed and leaned back into his chair during his first sitdown interview since his iPhone app ...

The Gillmor Gang John Borthwick, Robert Scoble, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor turned off their minds, relaxed, and floated downstream on the push notification inbox of tomorrow. Borro...

If your response to virtual infrastructure installations is a derisive "Boring, Sidney, booring" then maybe AngelPad startup ElasticBox isn't for you. However, if you love cloud computing like Nancy l...

Last year, nearly half a million completed Dropbox's very first "Dropquest." This time, designer Jon Ying and engineer Rajeev Nayak say they "honestly don't know" how many people will participate, but...

As we approach the E3, the electronic gaming show in early June, I suspect that the value of "retina" high-resolution displays will soon become apparent. While the prospect of retina Macbooks is all b...

In the watch world the Meccanico dG watch is a bit of a legend. Originally debuted back in 2008, it helped bridge the gap between modern tech toys and high-end mechanical watches. The all-mechanical d...

One year ago I wrote an article called "Why The New Guy Can't Code," about how the industry-standard process for hiring software engineers is broken, shortsighted, and counterproductive. It remains my...

Warren Buffett is like my ten year old. When she gives me some BS story about something she needs to or something she is suggesting there's always a good reason for it. But whenever there's a good rea...

All those minutes reading your news feed in bed, messaging friends over lunch, and browsing photos on the bus really add up. Time spent on Facebook's mobile site and apps per month (441 minutes) has f...

If social media mattered in elections, Ron Paul would have a realistic shot at being the Republican nominee and Barack Obama would be on track to crush Mitt Romney in the biggest landslide in American...

The names, at least, sound like a match made in heaven BetaBait says it has acquired BetaNoodle.And actually, the products sound like a good fit, too. BetaBait connects startups with early users throu...

Thubmtack.com, a site that helps people find local service providers (from house cleaners to DJs to math tutors, to use the three examples on the company homepage), unveiled a big redesign earlier thi...

They have raised $11.45 million in both Angel and Series B funding since launch, acquired a company called Sensobi, and have been themselves acquired by none other than Skype (which was acquired by Mi...

Theyraised $11.45 million, acquired a company called Sensobi, and were themselvesacquired by Skypefor a price that was likely well north of $43 million.There may not be a wilder tale of a Disrupt succ...

I have been active in the field of gamification for the past couple of years, working with companies like Badgeville, HealthTap, Gigya, Basis and others on leveraging game mechanics for end user behav...

For Google Maps, winter is coming. Potentially.As you've undoubtedly seen by now, with the upcoming iOS 6 software, Apple intends to replace the Google Maps aspect of their default Maps application wi...

I have been active in the field of gamification for the past couple of years, working with companies like Badgeville, HealthTap, Gigya, Basis and others on leveraging game mechanics for end user behav...

As the capabilities of modern browsers expand and developing standards like Google's WebRCT initiative for real-time communications slowly find their way into most popular browsers, we'll likely see m...

The people behind college flirting network Likealittle have launched a new app in the App Store, Circle, an app that attempts to be more granular and thoughtfulabout the burgeoning ambient location sp...

You know how all Android developers complain about fragmentation? Yeah, this is what fragmentation looks like.Animoca, a Hong Kong mobile app developer that has seen more than 70 million downloads, sa...

Gillmor Gang - John Borthwick, Kevin Marks, John Taschek, Robert Scoble, and Steve Gillmor. Recording live today at 1pm PST. ...

A new app has just taken the App Store by storm a colorful, rainbowful storm. It's called Color Text Messages+ and the idea is relatively simple, but clearly appealing judging by the app's popul...

Online legal services company LegalZoom filed an S-1 form this morning declaring its intention to raise up to $120 million in an IPO.LegalZoom offers documents and subscription services to make it eas...

Google's map data has been baked into the iOS Maps app since the days of the first, thick, aluminum-backed iPhone, but that may no longer be the case once iOS 6 hits the streets. Unnamed sources told ...

GoGoFantasy is a patent-pending system for crowdfunding porn. Folks with fetishes, grandmas with groin urgings, and couples into copulating can create projects and request cash in return for filming c...

Just a day after it announced its well-received updates to its search result pages, here is some more good news for Bing: according to the latest data from Experian Hitwise, Bing-poweredsearches -- th...

Comedian Louis CK has just released a new comedy special, WORD: Live At Carnegie Hall as another download/streaming offering. The special costs $5 and follows on the heels of his previous special, Liv...

I've been spending some quality time with HTC's Titan II, and I would never call it a bad phone. But that's not the question good, bad, fast, slow, ugly, beautiful... they don't matter unless I feel ...

According to a new study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, the popularity of check-in apps continues to grow, though it still isn't quite mainstream yet. Pew's latest survey found that ...

Well that's some slick timing. Eduardo Saverin, known for co-founding Facebook with Mark Zuckerberg back in their college days at Harvard, has given up his United States citizenship. His name appeared...

Is this Zynga's next cash cow? It looks like Farmville 2.0 is already in beta testing under the name 'Big Harvest' in the Philippines, a tipster tells us. As you can see, the game is way more three-di...

Today Facebook will start sending the first of three billion notices to users about proposed changes to its privacy policy, which were made to comply with a Spring deadline for implementing recommenda...

Today Facebook will start sending the first of three billion notices to users about proposed changes to its privacy policy, which were made to comply with a Spring deadline for implementing recommenda...

Here in these parts, we may write a tad too much about our Silicon Valley gaming brethren like San Francisco's Zynga and Redwood Shores' Electronic Arts.But there's actually a company that's worth qui...

When party-planning service Punchbowl expanded into digital greeting cards last fall, it emphasized creating a beautiful experience, just as it did with its party invitations. But CEO Matt Douglas say...

Happy Friday! In less than one week, my colleagues and I (along with many, many others) will be flying to New York to gear up for one of the biggest conferences of the year, Disrupt NYC.We have reveal...

Tagstand, the YC-backed companyfocused on making NFC a more mainstream technology, is getting some action at a pretty big black-tie event in New York this weekend which will see its technology used to...

In an interview published by China Daily today, Terry Gou, chairman of Foxconn, confirms the massive manufacturing company is making preparations for an Apple television set called iTV. Gou also state...

Docphin, a medical news and research service which we once described as a "Bloomberg for doctors,"has been growing quickly since its beta launch in November. Since then, the startup was selected to pa...

Nielsen has been running some research into different demographics and their impact in the digital world, and their latest -- quite possibly as a hat-tip to Mother's Day this weekend -- is a look at U...

Here's a little something to file away for when your weekend gets dull -- the Australian devs at Halfbrick have brought their premier flying-around-and-dodging-things game to its new home away from iO...

It's always refreshing when a startup tackles a real-world problem instead of building another photo-sharing/local reviews/social calendar service. Case in point: TenderTree, a company that's trying t...

Alexia said this was coming a few weeks ago, so it shouldn't come as a huge surprise, but... Viddy announced this morning that it has closed a $30 million Series B funding round. The new financing com...

It was 15 years ago today that a computer - a conglomeration of transistors, memory, and storage media - could beat a world-class chess player. Called Deep Blue, the machine was part of a mission that...

The Olympus OM-D E-M5 is arguably the best micro four-thirds camera Olympus has to offer. We've had issues with past m4/3 iterations like the EP1 and EP3, like awful color reproduction and slow auto-...

This Nokia Lumia 850 is not real. It's just a concept. But I would be proud to carry that phone in my pocket if it was real.The concept comes by way of The Nokia Blog, a fan site that found the concep...

A color Kindle might be on the way. Industry watchdog publication, Digitimes, says Amazon will launch one in the second half of this year. The report goes on to state that the new models will forgo th...

There are still some big question marks over what Nokia plans to do in tablets -- a market where it is now the only major smartphone maker yet to make a device -- but at least Nokia is moving ahead wi...

There are still some big question marks over what Nokia plans to do in tablets -- a market where it is now possibly the only major smartphone maker yet to make a device -- but at least Nokia is moving...

Just as we get news of some consolidation in the local content market in the UK, some news of expansion, too: Qype, the Yelp of Europe (and Yelp's closest competitor in the region), today announced th...

The UK housing market has been on shaky legs for a while now -- with tight lending conditions, unemployment and general consumer confidence all playing their part in slowing things down -- and that is...

This year, Shereef Bishay came up with an ambitious engineering and educational challenge: Try to take 20 aspiring developers, at various levels of ability, teach them Ruby on Rails, and have them job...

Only 12% of your friends see your average status update, but Facebook is testing an option called "Highlight" that lets you pay a few dollars to have one of your posts appear to more friends. Highligh...

The tectonic plates in the app world have been shifting quite a bit lately, in ways that will significantly impact developers and users. One major upcoming shift is coming from our friends in Redmond-...

AngelPad, the startup accelerator program started two years ago by ex-Googler and tech investor Thomas Korte, held Demo Day for its Spring 2012 class in San Francisco this week. The event was a very b...

Three guys from Provo, Utah set out on a mission to make QR codes, those boring pixellated, black-and-white squares come alive -- in other words, to extend their functionality by turning them into rea...

A lot of people in Silicon Valley are pretty obsessed with organic this and that. One or two startups have looked at the whole connecting-fams-with-consumers-directly model, even. So it's odd that it'...

This is clever. A new Kickstarter project aims to disrupt the pill case market. True, it's not the sexiest industry in the world, but it's ripe for some disruption, since there just so happens to be a...

Some slightly conflicting stories zipping across the ether today involving Facebook, its $1 billion acquisition of Instagram and a rumored Federal Trade Commission investigation into the deal: The FT ...

KeKu is a VoIP telephony startup that has quietly build a global platform during its beta phase. Now, the company is ready to come out of beta. At its core, KeKu is pretty similar to services like Reb...

Twitter has just finalized a deal to acquire RestEngine, a developer of personalized email marketing services, which could help Twitter deliver email digests of great tweets you've missed. The acquisi...

Twitter has just finalized a deal tohire the team and buy the technology of RestEngine, a personalized email marketing service, which could help Twitter deliver email digests of great tweets you've mi...

In a world where Instagram is worth more than the New York Times, old media is no longer dying, it's dead. Instead, in its wake, we've got the Wild West: A chaotic morass of never-ending slideshows, p...

Miami-based streaming music startupSenzari, which aims to take on Pandora by targeting the markets Pandora misses (i.e., the rest of the world), has just closed an additional round of funding totaling...

Miami-based streaming music startupSenzari, which aims to take on Pandora by targeting the markets Pandora misses (i.e., the rest of the world), has just closed an additional round of funding totaling...

European newcomer Shavenu is now offering shaving blade subscriptions to scruffy Brits, Canadians, and Deutschlanders using the DollarShaveClub.com model that set the shaving world alight last month.F...

Today Facebook begins rolling out file sharing to all Groups, and while it's got many restrictions, it could be good enough to limit the long-term growth potential of cloud storage / file sharing serv...

Uber, the mobile car service that's becoming indispensable (I think I spend more money on Uber than on food), is continuing its geographic expansion by entering "super secret stealth test mode" in San...

Once upon a time a company pioneered simple photo sharing. By allowing consumers to easily take and share pictures, photography became a part of everyday life. Now, several generations removed, Polaro...

For just about a week now, GE and product development network Quirky have been running an interesting contest -- they've challenged people to come up with ways to improve everyday objects by making th...

UpNext, an angel funded New York start-up, makes beautiful maps. Using a number of clever views, the team has built a wildly unique way to navigate your city and, more important, see buildings, points...

"In the Studio" opens its doors this week to a technologist who grew up tinkering with old Macs, dropped out of college to begin a career in technology, founded a few companies, and wound up as the Ch...

Let's say you're Mark Zuckerberg. You've got more money than god. You're running a company that's about to IPO with a $100 billion valuation. Hell, you've already had a movie made about you, and you'r...

Mark Shuttleworth is the founder and former CEO of Canonical, the commercial company behind the Ubuntu Linux distribution. Today he holds the position "Lead Product Design", a role in which he shapes...

Stipple, the advertising startup that helps Web publishers monetize their images, just announced that it has raised $5 million in a Series A round of funding.The company already raised a $2 million se...

There are some of us who believe that having matching tastes in music is an essential for a relationship. Now two Spotify apps are setting out to prove it.The German founders of Fellody, Robin Simon a...

Bing today begins the rollout of a major redesign that separates search results into three panes: pure, algorithmic, text-only results in the center; context like maps, reviews, and actionable input f...

Bing today begins the rollout of a major redesign that separates search results into three panes: pure, algorithmic, text-only results in the center; context like maps, reviews, and actionable input f...

Shame on you, WriteThat.Name. After more than one personal recommendation, not to mention glowing reviews around the web, I finally got around to signing up for WriteThat.Name, a service which automat...

Shame on you, WriteThat.Name. After more than one personal recommendation, not to mention glowing reviews around the web, I finally got around to signing up for WriteThat.Name, a service which automat...

When two of the biggest names in venture capital (arguably still the biggest) both invest in a startup, you know it's probably time to take notice. So yes, take notice: A cross-device ad targeting sta...

When two of the biggest names in venture capital (arguably still the biggest) both invest in a startup, you know it's probably time to take notice. So yes, take notice: A cross-device ad targeting sta...

Looking to relive your childhood or turn your iPad into a hackneyed political pun? You'd best get over to Ari Krupnik's Kickstarter project. For $60 you get a red or blue case that simulates the actua...

Minted, the company that is best known for its online marketplace for stationery with prints by individual graphic designers, has launched a new vertical: Art prints.The art business on Minted is cura...

Assured Labor, a mobile-centric job networking startup that was founded at MIT four years ago, is breaking into another Latin American market. The company is launching in Brazil witha localized servic...

Squrl has released a new app that has optimized many of the features of its video discovery application for the iPad and made them available on the iPhone. It also hopes to increase engagement by allo...

Tell me if this sounds familiar -- you're sitting on a couch watching television, and the commercial breaks seem way longer than the snippets of the show you're actually trying to watch. As it turns o...

Isis, the carrier-led joint venture between AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon, is gaining steam and has today announced a new addition to its mobile wallet: American Express. The Isis Mobile Wallet will ...

You've seen the ads. What once was Carly in a pink dress, talking about her myTouch 4G that let her Facebook her face off and while making little "digs" at AT&T, has now become a biker chic badass...

No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. ...

Y Combinator-backed analytics startup Mixpanel can now add Andreessen Horowitz to an already-impressive list of investors.Mixpanel had already raised $1.75 million from Sequoia Capital, Square COO Kei...

Mobile ad and monetization platform Tapjoy is announcing a new $5 million fund - the "Tapjoy Asia Fund" - which aims to support development and marketing of free-to-play mobile games on both iOS and A...

When I think of product sampling, I remember the glorious days of wheeling around the grocery store with my mom and picking up every cheese and meat-laden toothpick in the building. My mom hated it. S...

The WhaleTail, not to be confused with the whale tail made popular by Midwest girls, attempts to make holding a tablet or notebook a bit easier. The $50 device suctions onto a flat surface and then pr...

When Google Drive launched at the end of April, a wave of partner apps launched too. Now Y Combinator-backed HelloFax, the startup behind one of those apps, says its Google Drive app has seen rapid up...

When Google Drive launched at the end of April, a wave of partner apps launched too. Now Y Combinator-backed HelloFax, the startup behind one of those apps, says its Google Drive app has seen rapid up...

It's easy to miss the launch of the latest movies. You get a week of marketing and by the time you've figured out if you want to see it or not, it's moved off the theatre and you're waiting for the DV...

Mobile and online payments and ID verification startupJumiohas received an additional Series B investment led by Citi Ventures,a unit of global financial services company Citi. The funding follows Jum...

KLIK, the real-time, facial recognition iPhone camera app from Face.com, has released its official 1.0 version today. (The previous version, which debuted in January, was a beta). The production versi...

Let's say you're a video publisher who wants all the world to have access to your content... But translating videos into multiple languages is time-consuming and expensive -- that is, unless you've go...

Let's say you're a video publisher who wants all the world to have access to your content... But translating videos into multiple languages is time-consuming and expensive -- that is, unless you've go...

In the riveting story of consumer electronics, the lowly point-and-shoot camera is about to be cut. Its days are numbered and cheap cameras are becoming increasingly less relevant as smartphones steal...

Yesterday Rovio announced that it had reached 1 billion downloads of games from its hugely popular Angry Birds franchise -- and with it, a little teaser of what might come next from the Finnish develo...

Potter fans will now be able to download all seven Harry Potter books from Amazon's Kindle Lending Library, a service offered free for Amazon Prime users. From the PR:The Kindle Owners Lending Library...

Yesterday, to much fanfare and resolute sentiment, HP announced a return to what made it a great company to begin with: poorly-named and generic computing devices tarted up to take on Dell. This year ...

Newfangled social and gaming apps are popular and all, but it turns out that some content dating back thousands of years can still hold its own in today's tech landscape. YouVersion, a Bible reading a...

Samsung has been teasing Galaxy Note users with the promise of Ice Cream Sandwich for months, but now it seems like the consumer electronics giant has finally come through for their phablet fans.Multi...

Coupa, the creator of spend optimization software for businesses, which brings something of a Mint.com-like view into where a company spends on operating resources, is today announcing the close of a ...

About six years ago, Google launched Apps for Your Domain, which, for the first time, wrapped its suite of emerging cloud products under one umbrella -- as a service for businesses and the enterprise....

Another bit of closure for Digg as the company continues to look for a buyer of its technology and its site: its engineering team is joining SocialCode, the social media advertising and analytics subs...

Another bit of closure for Digg as the company continues to look for a buyer of its technology and its site: its engineering team is joining SocialCode, the social media advertising and analytics subs...

T-Mobile USA's parent Deutsche Telekom today reported earnings for the quarter that ended March 31, with revenues and earnings in slight decline compared to a year ago: sales for the carrier came in a...

Anybeat, a social network that launched last year as a kind of "anti-Facebook" to meet people you don't already know, is getting bought by another company and is shutting down. The company posted a me...

Evernote, the company that makes software to help people take personal notes and archive information about their daily lives, today debuted a new standalone version of its service specifically for the...

Draw Something, the game that could do no wrong now seems like it can do little right, at least according to the blogosphere. There’sbeen a string of stories from virtually everyone saying that ...

Back in July of last year, we wrote about a New York City-based startup, called Consmr, which was attempting to build the Yelp, or Rotten Tomatoes of consumer goods. There's now more web research on c...

Maybe I'm thrifty or maybe I'm just too busy to go and try on a pair of jeans in store. Either way, I know I'm not the only one. In the US alone, the apparel and footwear market is a $300 billion busi...

When you run some of the biggest and best presses in town, it's hard to imagine them ever going silent. Brian Kibby of McGraw-Hill, well known textbook publisher, would be happy to shut them down tomo...

Lectures are often the least educational aspect of college; I know, I've taught college seniors and witnessed how little students learn during their four years in higher education. So, while it's nobl...

Whether it's revenue, users, funding, whatever -- nowadays in tech, it seems like the numbers just keep getting bigger. The latest example of this: New Enterprise Associates, the global venture capita...

Whether it's revenue, users, funding, whatever -- nowadays in tech, it seems like the numbers just keep getting bigger. The latest example of this: New Enterprise Associates, the global venture capita...

Sometimes you just need to clip some files to a document. In that thought Art. Lebedev Studios, makers of their infamous OLED keyboard first shown in 2006, created the Bulavkas flash drive, which can ...

EveryMove, an alum of TechStars' Seattle accelerator program building what they've dubbed a "mileage plan for health benefits, today announced that it has closed a $2.6 million round of series A finan...

More Facebook riches all around!The company granted about $796 million in restricted stock units to employees less than a week ago, according to an amended IPO filing.These are"employee refresher gran...

Most people probably don't stick around social music service SoundCloud's site to ogle its design, but apparently the team felt there was plenty of room for improvement. To that end SoundCloud, who no...

Facebook has just filed a sixth amendment to its S-1 filing to IPO in order to provide more transparency about how the shift of its user base from the web to mobile is causing it to show fewer ads per...

Facebook has just filed a sixth amendment to its S-1 filing to IPO in order to provide more transparency about how the shift of its user base from the web to mobile is causing it to show fewer ads per...

Facebook's platform may have come to life on the back of freemium apps, but now it's taking another page from Apple's playbook by offering paid apps. A beta program starting now will let developers ch...

Today, Facebook app discovery too heavily favors the loudest apps with the most users, so Facebook today announces it will soon launch the App Center, a single, personalized hub for discovering the hi...

Bottlenose is a web-based smart social media dashboard that, in many ways, directly competes with Hootsuite and Tweetdeck. Bottlenose, however, puts a stronger emphasis on filtering your stream, both ...

Just yesterday, I finally moved the Google+ iPhone app atrocity to the back screen of my iPhone, and then the company goes out and does this. It makes the darned thing all pretty with a fresh upd...

Samsung Electronics has acquired mobile entertainment startup mSpot, according to a release issued today. Financial terms were not disclosed, but previous reports point to an acquisition price of $8.8...

The last time TechCrunch heard from the internet-for-everyone proponents at FreedomPop, they revealed to us that they were working on an iPhone 4/4S case with a built-in WiMax radio that would give th...

People deal with the pain of online hotel search is different ways. For many, it means spending hours and hours of research spread across dozens of browsers tabs. In my case, I usually throw up your h...

Google today announced its latest update for Google Maps for Android with support forGoogle Offers. One interesting piece of this announcement that stood out was that Google Maps for Android users now...

We're thrilled to announce that two of President Obama's technology gurus, Todd Park, the US Chief Technology Officer, and Steven VanRoekel, its Chief Innovation Officer, will be joining us on stage a...

Simple (formerly known as BankSimple), the startup with $13.1 million in funding to build a better banking experience for customers, has today introduced its firstmobile application, surprisingly ahea...

So first things first: We're not being sold! Instead, we've just hired a bunch of brilliant writers and a new COO. Also, we've seen a resurgence of community support (with over a thousand people atten...

Google just launched an update for Google Maps for Android that brings three interesting new features to the app: integration with Google Offers, support for Google Business Photos and indoor walking ...

Chicago-based Base, a company that develops a cross-platform CRM product, has raised $6.8 million in Series B funding led by Index Ventures with Social+Capital Partnership, OCA Ventures and the I...

When we planned our mini meet-up series, we expected a few geeks in a bar somewhere drinking and swapping stories about C#. Nothing prepared us for the onslaught. At one point, 1,256 of us filled all ...

Last month, Klout launched its iPhone app. Today, it's announcing its first big mobile partnership, one that should make app pretty appealing to any air travelers in San Francisco.So Klout is launchin...

Ask a VC, the TCTV show where you ask the questions, is back after a long hiatus and we're kicking things off with two partners this week from Spark Capital and Andreessen Horowitz! If you've got ques...

Etsy, the popular online marketplace for all things handmade, just announced that it has raised $40 million in a new funding round led by Index Ventures with participation by Burda, Union Square Ventu...

RewardLoop, a startup offering a nifty new approach to customer reward programs, has raised $1 million in Series A funding.To get started with RewardLoop, businesses need to an install an adapter that...

When done well, iPad-enabled shopping experiences have been paying off for e-commerce sites. Take for example, Fab.com, which is forecasting the iPad to account for a quarter of its revenue in two yea...

Developing story: Ustream has sent out some details on the DDoS attack that is currently attacking its system -- which was reported on earlier by GigaOm, along with another DDoS attack on Bambuser.A U...

Dave McClure's 500 Startups crew is at it again, with another group of 27 companies joining its incubator program. The new group of startups in the 500 Startups Accelerator follows a lot of the same t...

Cloud storage service and device makerPogoplugis expanding beyond the consumer space today, to focus on the more potentially profitable business market. With a new offering dubbed "Pogoplug for Teams,...

Cloud storage service and device makerPogoplugis expanding beyond the consumer space today, to focus on the more potentially profitable business market. With a new offering dubbed "Pogoplug Team," the...

Looks like the final frame has been reached for Joost, the online video service originally started by Skype founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis and then eventually sold to the Adconion Media Gro...

Talk about covering your bases. In addition to outing the EVO 4G LTE's release date, Sprint (along with hardware partner Sierra Wireless) has pulled back the curtains on their new Tri-Fi mobile hotspo...

A little footnote -- no, actually, a big footnote -- to Rovio's news earlier this week that revenues had increased by more than tenfold in 2011: the games developer says that its Angry Birds games hav...

Good morning everybody! It's beginning to look a lot like NYC Disrupt time (seriously, Disrupt is a force of nature in more ways than one). For those of you wondering why we haven't been returning ema...

1000Memories, the startup that's helping consumers get their old-fashioned printed photos online, is bringing itsShoeBox mobile applicationto the Android platform today, while also rolling out a compl...

Facebook's role as a social network for close to one billion people can be a weighty responsibility, and today the company took one more step in the kind of social outreach activities that befit a com...

There are quite a few Pinterest clones out there, and to be quite honest with you, there's nothing wrong with a clone if it adds value in a fundamentally different way than the service it's cloning. T...

This post is co-written withDaniel Cunha, my partner atInitial Capital.In Part I, we outlined some of the challenges facing the Brazilian startup community as it sets-out to reap the massive opportuni...

Given that it's pretty hard to take a really bad photo with Instagram, it's only natural that some users would want to turn their images into physical objects to hang on their walls. There are a few c...

Pre-orders for Sprint's new EVO 4G LTE have been open for a few days now, but Sprint has finally gotten around to announcing when we'll actually be able to get our hands on one. Starting on May 18, yo...

Covering the tech scene in San Francisco, it sometimes seems like there's a hackathon every weekend. But the folks behind AngelHack are thinking a little bigger for their summer event.They're calling ...

What do you do when you're a consumer apps company with apps that never hit the big-time, but whose development forced you to solve the same problems over and over again? Well, if you're Border Stylo ...

Three months after launching the PS Vita is still a hard sale. There simply isn't a killer title yet. Uncharted: Golden Abyss is boring, the racing games fall flat, and the best game so far, Ninja Gai...

AOL reported first quarter earnings this morning, which saw it posting higher revenues than expected by analysts, with $529.4 million in revenue during the quarter, beating the $527 million consensus....

Adaptly, a startup that manages ad campaigns across multiple social networks, just announced that it has raised $10.5 million in a Series B round of funding. At the same time, it's launching a new pro...

Two big promotions are getting announced today at First Round Capital -- a sign of more growth, and more opportunities, at the early-stage VC firm: Phineas Barnes and Kent Goldman are now partners. Pr...

Two big pieces of news today forFirst Round Capital -- a sign of more growth, and more opportunities, at the early-stage VC firm: the company has closed on another fund, and it has created two new par...

ThingLink, which has a platform for tagging things inside images, has acquired Pixboom, an interactive image tagging service for the Swedish fashion industry. The terms of the deal were undisclosed bu...

Flipboard for Android has arrived! The app made a limited debut late last week with the Samsung Galaxy S III, but now it's here for everyone -- but not officially. You see, the app, is supposed to be ...

Last year, stealth startup OcuSpecraised $1.3 millionfrom Andressen Horowitz, Founders Fund, SOSventures International and a number of angel investors. Today, the company is announcing that is has rai...

Video search company Blinkx will be adding tens of thousands of clips from various feature films to its search engine, thanks to a deal with startup AnyClip. The agreement should bolster the amount of...

Another mobile payments service is hitting the market today, but unlike Square, Here from PayPal, or solutions from the likes of Isis, this one doesn't require a dongle on the handset -- or new techno...

Telefonica has been working hard to make sure it remains a relevant force in mobile as big companies like Apple and smaller app developers like Twilio all swoop in to eat the carriers' proverbial lunc...

In recent years a flurry of electrified two-wheeled motorcycles and scooters have emerged from companies like Zero, Brammo, Mission Motors, BRD and Evolve. While some are still in the prototype phase ...

PayPal and mobile operator Softbank are getting together to launch a joint venture in Japan that should extend the payment subsidiary's reach in Asia. It's a 50-50 effort for PayPal, which is owned by...

PayPal and mobile operator Softbank are getting together to launch a joint venture in Japan that should extend the payment subsidiary's reach in Asia. It's a 50-50 effort for PayPal, which is owned by...

Back in September, Jon Tirsen and Douwe Osinga, two ex-Googlers, unveiled their new mobile travel guide, Triposo, setting out to do for travel content what Google and PageRank did for search. The star...

AnyVivo, a startup that launched this spring out of Y Combinator's Winter 2012 program, has a pretty big mission: It wants to be the e-commerce hub for all living things. You might think that Amazon s...

Not many people think much good can come from New Jersey. Sure there's the Shore and Boardwalk Empire, but for the most part it's "bridge and tunnel" this and Snooki that. Well that's all supposed to ...

San Francisco-based mobile gaming startup Funziohad just come off making more than $5 million in sales per month when it sold toJapan's GREE for $210 million last week.Profits may be another story, an...

Here's a heart-warming tale of why you can't second-guess yourself. Robert Cezar Mateihad the chance to work for Instagram long-before it was acquired by Facebook for $1 billion, but followed his pass...

Arjun Sethi, who was the CEO of early social game developer LOLapps, has landed at Chamath Palihapitiya's venture fund The Social+Capital Partnership as an entrepreneur in residence. It's a soft ...

StumbleUpon co-founder Garrett Camp just announced that he's stepping down as CEO and becoming chairman of the company's board.The change is effective immediately, Camp says. He'll be leading a search...

When New York-based Sitesimon first emerged from Entrepreneur Roundtable's accelerator program last year, it was as a social browsing tool that aimed to automate the process of finding and discovering...

Facebook has a plan to squeeze more ad dollars out of ecommerce sites and anyone else selling products on the web. It's quietly testing a new version of its Offers coupons that can be redeemed at onli...

Email is typically static. Because of security concerns, virtually none of the standard web-based and desktop email clients let you run JavaScript code in an HTML email, for example. Microsoft's Hotma...

Location, location, location. Whether youre a real estate agent, a traveler, or building mobile applications, location matters a great deal. As far as phone sensors go, the GPS sensor appears to be on...

When Yahoo hired Scott Thompson as CEO back in January, many at the company were surely hoping that they'd finally found the game-changing leader they'd so sorely needed for years. Now just four month...

Virurl, a startup that helps advertisers promote their content virally, is launching its public beta test today. It's also announcing that it has raised $1.2 million in seed funding.Here's how the Vir...

NoshList, the new waitlisting application for restaurants out ofFirespotter Labs, themakers of the food photo-sharing appNosh(and, as you may recall, the awesome SoLoMo spoof appJotly), is announcing ...

Former TC'er Paul Carr's latest venture, called NSFWCorp, has launched into private beta. It's a weekly news magazine dubbed as the "the Economist as written by The Daily Show" and will be available f...

The marketing executive Ken Segall not only worked closely with Steve Jobs for years at both Apple and NeXT, but he was also the creative guy who came up with the iMac name. And he's just written a bo...

The marketing executive Ken Segall not only worked closely with Steve Jobs for years at both Apple and NeXT, but he was also the creative guy who came up with the iMac name. And he's just written a bo...

RealDirect.com was built around a compelling proposition for home sellers instead of paying the 6 percent broker fee, let RealDirect handle the listings and offer advice from agents, while only payin...

Ever since Facebook's $1 billion acquisition of Instagram, the search for the next "Instagram of [insert app category here]" has been on. One area many pundits have focused on in this context is video...

Conference calls aren't always the most interesting things to take part in, but they can be just as much a hassle to set up as they are to sit though. That's where a new app called GroupCall comes in ...

YouTube has announced the next class of creators to go through its YouTube Next program, this time focusing on vloggers. The video site originally announced the initiative about six weeks ago, and tod...

Verious, a new mobile component marketplace (and recent Disruptfinalist), is announcing an expansion of its service today, to also include components for Microsoft's Windows Phone platform as well as ...

Airtime looks to be finally ready for takeoff, as Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning's stealth video startup just put up a blog stating "We look forward to saying hello on June 5th. Sign up to be first in ...

Back in November, Ustream Co-founder and longtime CEO John Ham stepped down from the company he had helped found four and a half years earlier. His co-founder, Brad Hunstable, took the reins in his pl...

In my four-plus years covering tech, I don't think I've ever met another blogger who was happy with the search feature on their website. The options range from terrible to, uh, functional, but it's ne...

Today at the Finovate conference in San Francisco, a company callededo announced the introduction of what it describes as "geocommerce" offers, which, as the name implies, are offers and deals from me...

Zynga is taking yet another step away from its long line of casual sim "-Ville" games today with the launch of Bubble Safari. It's a arcade game where a monkey named "Bubbles" has to shoot down pieces...

Keeping up with the news is pretty much a full-time job these days. Thankfully, recommendation services like Zite and Flipboard have figured out some ways of keeping their users informed without overl...

Keeping up with the news is pretty much a full-time job these days. Thankfully, recommendation services like Zite and Flipboard have figured out some ways of keeping their users informed without overl...

Nest and Lowe's have teamed up to sell the Nest "learning thermostat" at 500 Lowe's stores throughout the country, a first for a major bit of high-tech geekery....

SessionM, a startup led by Quattro Wireless co-founder Lars Albright, just announced that it has raised $20 million in a Series B round of funding.The round was led by Charles River Ventures, with par...

We're back and ready to attack with another episode of our TechCrunch/Gadgets Weekly webcast. Matt, unfortunately, could not make any time for us as he was in the happiest place on Earth with his fami...

As a big watch nerd, I love sharing cool watches with you guys in hopes that my obsession, as unseemly as it is, will be passed from writer to reader like an STD. This time I was lucky enough to be ab...

Comcast and ESPN are making good on their promise to bring live sports to iPads and other devices, announcing today that Comcast subscribers can now log in to ESPN's WatchESPN mobile and web apps. And...

Israeli-based Viebix is announcing a Round A of $2M led by Canaan Partners, with participation by Longfellow Venture Partners. Viewbix makes it really easy and quick to create interactive videos. Thes...

Credictive, which just went into invite-only beta, wants to solve the problem of crediting who did what online. It's pitched as an "IMDB for creative content" where people who create videos or music o...

While Sprint customers wait with bated breath for their new LTE network to go live, the nation's third largest wireless carrier has just announced that their no-contract subsidiary Virgin Mobile will ...

Initial Capital was launched in 2011 as an investment firm targeting early stage startups in Israel and Brazil. The unlikely investment focus is the result of three friends two Israeli and one Brazil...

Windows Phone is way behind Android and iOS when it comes to apps -- only about 80,000 apps compared to 500,000-600,000 each at the other two -- too far behind to possibly ever catch up in actual numb...

Mobile payments processing platform Square has been used by a variety of individuals and businesses, from charities to taxis to food trucks to political campaigns. Next upart fairs and farmers' market...

It seems that Expensify is not done with its mission of making "expense reports that don't suck" quite yet. Today, the San Francisco-based startup launched new features that make the whole process eve...

If you watch one homemade Japanese RC car transformer video today, make it this one. This amazing little roadster switches from sports car to dancing robot in a few seconds and it can even walk while ...

Comics on the iPad. A match made in nerd heaven, right?Well, today it gets even better with the announcement that ComiXology and Marvel Entertainment have entered into a multi-year deal that sees the ...

And we're off: the TC New York Mini Meet-Up is on for tonight, May 8, from 6pm-10pm at Bar 13 on 13th St. and University Pl. It will be a Blastoise.Special thanks to our volunteers and good old Jordan...

The Kindle Fire from Amazon has stolen a march in the tablet world, with some estimating that it now makes up more than half of all Android tablets in use in the U.S. today. But the latest monthly fig...

Well, it's been quite a year already for the crowdfunding industry. With the JOBS Act becoming law, the tech industry (and the economy) are headed for some big changes, as the legalization of crowdfun...

Smartphone and tablets owners are clamoring for access to more Wi-Fi on the go, or so a new study from the Wi-Fi Alliance claims. Out of 1,000 US-based smartphone and tablet owners, 87% of them indica...

As device makers like RIM, Samsung and Nokia incorporate NFC technology into their mobile devices, Apple has been radio silent on what its plans will be in mobile commerce and payments. But a deal tha...

Education is changing, and startups like Coursera another, CodeAcademy, Treehouse, StraighterLine, Khan Academy, Lynda.com, and Udacity,(among others) are all carrying the torch for online education a...

Chicago-based Belly, a startup that is a fast-growing contender in the local business customer loyalty and rewards space, has raised $10 million in Series B funding from Andreessen Horowitz. The compa...

Lady Gaga has captured the imagination of the entertainment world with her team's successful social media engagement with the fans she calls her "Little Monsters", and many other artists and agents ar...

Another bit of consolidation in the mobile advertising space -- this time with an ad-tech twist: Amobee, the mobile ad company that itself was the subject of a takeover by Singtel only two months ago,...

Mojo Motors, a discount shopping site for used vehicles, has raised $3 million in series A financing, led by Atlas Venture, with participation from existing investors RPM Ventures, NextView Ventures, ...

We've been covering Viber since the very beginning, through the launch of an Android app and the addition of photo/location sharing capabilities, to the moment the company announced 50 million users, ...

For over a decade, if you were to say "home shopping," you were likely referring to the experience of viewing products on your TV set, and ordering over the phone. After launching in the '80s, it wasn...

Dozens of programmers gathered together this past weekend in downtown San Francisco to do two things: Celebrate Cinco de Mayo, and collectively pursue the "Ballmer Peak," an elusive state of inebriati...

The latest in what I like to call pro-point-and-shoots (I'd put the Canon G12 and the S95 in this category), the TG-1 from Olympus promises high-speed, f2.0 snapshots in a body that can take a lick an...

Elemental Technologies, which builds encoding software used by some of the largest video providers in the world, raised $13 million in a Series C round of funding led by Norwest Venture Partners, whic...

Imagery has always been important, but it would seem that our obsession with it is growing by the minute. Pinterest is so hot right now, and I honestly don't even need to talk about Instagram, or that...

When it comes to health and fitness, content farms rule the Internet. Try to search for something like "how to lose weight" and you'll get a long list of anonymously-written, poorly-sourced articles. ...

You Like me...you really Like me. Wait. Maybe you don't really Like me after all. According to our Facebook engagement metrics, only 1% of you actually react when we post. So, to keep the numbers up, ...

Twitpic was once the de facto standard for photo sharing on Twitter. Before Instagram and Twitter's own photo-sharing solution, the service worked a treat, allowing us to compress our photos and share...

EA's big shift toward treating games as services instead of packaged goods is going to mean restructuring this year. Chief executive John Riccitiello said in today's earnings call that there will be ...

The last time the Honeywell-Nest legal scuffle appeared on our radar, upstart Nest had just lawyered up (with Apple's former Chief Patent Counsel no less) and offered up their counterclaims to the ori...

No, Facebook news reader apps aren't declining becauseusers suddenly got fed up with auto-sharing. The user loss is likely due to "trending articles", a new way of surfacing recently read articles in ...

The Avengers can add another record to its tally it represents the most opening weekend tickets sold in Fandango history, and a new record for mobile ticket sales.Fandango didn't share the exact numb...

EchoEcho is one of the more useful location-based applications on the market today. Instead of focusing on check-ins and deals, the application simply makes it easy for you to find out where your frie...

If you're an event organizer selling tickets through Eventbrite, it's about to get easier to find sponsors, thanks to integration with a startup called SponsorHub.SponsorHub founder and CEO Robert Joh...

EA shares slipped 9.5 percent in after-hours trading to $13.70 as the company said it expected losses of 40 to 45 cents a share for the next quarter. It said it expects to make $4.1 billion for the ye...

EA shares slipped 9.5 percent in after-hours trading to $13.70 as the company said it expected losses of 40 to 45 cents a share for the next quarter. It said it expects to make $4.3 billion for the ye...

We're sitting in a conference at Sequoia Capital in Menlo Park watching Disrupt companies rehearse and it's reminding me, Disrupt NYC is almost here! (Also, I think I just stole somebody's food.)Other...

It's hard to find a live morning show or sports event coverage on TV these days that doesn't feature tweets or Facebook comments from viewers. For most programs, though, getting those messages on air ...

The jury in the long-running infringement case between Google and Oracle has ruled that certain pieces of Android APIs were too similar to code used in Oracle's Java programming tools. But the jury wa...

People are always complaining about the difficulty of getting found in the Apple App Store. A new startup called Alau.me (pronounced "allow me") is trying to tackle the problem through a app referral ...

San Francisco-basedBankOns, an early stage mobile startup, has been acquired by Capital One and will now be incorporated into Capital One's Digital Labs.This very young company was founded in summer 2...

Twitter just announced an update to its mobile site that is meant to bring it up to par with the new version of Twitter the company introduced in December. According to Twitter, the idea behind this u...

Plug in your iDevices people, because Apple just released an update. It's a minor one, to be sure, but brings about some rather helpful bug fixes. Most notably, you should no longer receive the "Unabl...

This morning, Google officially rolled out Google+Hangouts On Airto all users worldwide, following the feature's limited introduction back in September. At the time of its initial release, this l...

Unified, a company offering tools to help agencies and brands manage their social advertising campaigns, has lured someone from Google to run it sales team.Specifically, it's announcing the hiring of ...

Do you regularly use your cell phone to coordinate meetings, solve an unexpected problem, decide which restaurant to eat at, look up the score of a sporting event, check traffic, call help in an emerg...

While it seems like mobile gaming companies are getting acquired left and right this spring, there are still plenty that are staying independent and doing just fine.Storm8, which is totally bootstrapp...

We’re less than two weeks away from 24 hours of sheer hacking bliss. We’ve also released the final batch of tickets for the event, so if you’re planning on hacking, this is your fina...

Gumroad, the startup that lets individuals receive e-payments through a simple URL link, has received $7 million in new funding led by Silicon Valley venture capital stalwart Kleiner Perkins Caulfield...

The modern online newsroom is a 24/7 operation. It needs power tools to work efficiently, like modern carpenters need electric drills to build houses.The problem is that most content management system...

uTest, a company known for providing a variety of testing solutions for desktop, web and mobile, is launching a new solution designed to grade mobile apps' performance under real-world conditions, and...

In one of the most anticlimactic (and likely ineffective) marketing campaigns in history, RIM has today launched its "Wake Up. Be Bold." campaign in Australia. It began with a group of "protestors" di...

Nielsen today became the latest analyst house to call it for smartphones outnumbering more basic devices in the U.S. The company says that in March 2012 smartphones were in use by 50.4 percent of cons...

After a disastrous launchand a not-so stellar pivot, Color may finally have found its stride and a rather large core user base. Today,Color and Verizon Wireless have entered a three year deal to bring...

Exclusive: RichRelevance, a company that powers personalized shopping experience for online retailers, has raised $20 million in funding led by Crosslink Capital with Greylock Partners, Draper Fisher ...

Social loyalty platform PunchTab, which raised its $4.4 million Series A in November, is rolling out its new platform for agencies, allowing them to run customized incentives campaigns to promote cust...

There are plenty of travel sites out there, but have you ever noticed that almost all of them help you get where you're going and then leave you all alone in the dark once you actually arrive there? W...

Design-friendly online invitations and stationery startup Paperless Post has raised $6 million in funding from RRE Ventures, SV Angel, Tim Draper and others. This brings the startup's total funding to...

Design-friendly online invitations and stationery startup Paperless Post has raised $6 million in funding from RRE Ventures, SV Angel, Tim Draper and others. This brings the startup's total funding to...

Hot on the heels of its $70 million round, Evernoteismaking quick use of the new funds: today it announced that it has bought Penultimate, a digital handwriting app designed for the iPad. Financial te...

Well, this morning seems like it's going to be all about sequels. Not only do we have a shiny new Droid Incredible to wait for, AT&T has just pulled back the curtains on a new device in their Focu...

Online and mobile research company comScore just released its newly rebooted and retooled Mobile Metrix report this morning, which examines mobile media usage across both apps and mobile web browsing....

Online and mobile research company comScore just released its newly rebooted and retooled Mobile Metrix report this morning, which examines mobile media usage across both apps and mobile web browsing....

When we first took a look at the HTC One S, we felt that it was just another Android phone, despite the quality hardware. With today's introduction of the HTC Droid Incredible 4G LTE, the same sentime...

Groupon's CEO Andrew Mason today posted a letter to shareholders with some updated figures on how the company is doing, and a more specific outline of what Groupon plans to do to to move beyond daily ...

Startup Personal, which aims to give consumers control over their digital data, is debuting an iPhone app today, adding to the company's existing web and Android apps.Personal is a free web and mobile...

Credit card giant MasterCard is debuting a new study today, called the MasterCard Mobile Payments Readiness Index, which analyzed 34 countries and their readiness to use three types of mobile payments...

The iPad has, quite quickly, become the tablet of choice for enterprises, with some 97 percent of all tablet activations in Q1 of 2012 attributable to Apple's tablet, according to Good Technology. So ...

The iPad has, quite quickly, become the tablet of choice for enterprises, with some 97 percent of all tablet activations in Q1 of 2012 attributable to Apple's tablet, according to Good Technology. So ...

We all know what a wild success the Angry Birds franchise has been for Rovio, with the best-selling mobile games spawning cookbooks, toys and much more besides. Today the company revealed just what ki...

As you may have seen over the weekend, someone has discovered a security hole in FileVault, which arose with the OS X Lion security update, version 10.7.3, back in February: FileVault encryption passw...

Wonga.com, the successful but controversial payday loans provider, is extending its credit service to small businesses in the UK. The move is a smart one given the current economic climate. Banks have...

Way to blow your own horn, Google. Yesterday a newspaper in the UK, the Independent, ran a short item about how Google was about to reach an app milestone -- 15 billion apps downloaded! So we reached ...

Way to blow your own horn, Google. Yesterday a newspaper in the UK, the Independent, ran a short item about how Google was about to reach an app milestone -- 15 billion apps downloaded! So we reached ...

Oh the "where do I find hot startups?" problem VCs have been grappling with this for ages, resorting to such avenues as rampant gossiping, reading TechCrunch, informally tapping into early stage inve...

This is the second part in a two-part series on strategic investors in healthcare.Healthcare IT departments have focused much of their attention on the $19 billion portion of the stimulus bill that is...

AT&T has just announced a new security and home-automation system called Digital Life, which will be an IP-based platform that allows users to monitor and detect activity throughout their house re...

Photos, location, professional networking, or all your real-life friends... Instagram, Foursquare, LinkedIn and Facebook lead social networking today because they've found existing the types of networ...

Naming your company Thefuture.fm is kind of a bold move. Sure, it's fun at first, but if things go badly, you're setting yourself up for lots of bad puns ("No future for Thefuture.fm," etc.). Luckily,...

No self-respecting gadget lover can deny that MB&F's very high-end artistic wrist machines are overall cool. Most of us can't afford them, but items like this certain stir our ambitious sides. Rec...

The Internet is a lot like the American Dream. It's this huge opportunity for anyone who wants to make something of themselves a nearly ubiquitous platform to showcase skills and talents. Yet, it is ...

The Internet is a lot like the American Dream. It's this huge opportunity for anyone who wants to make something of themselves a nearly ubiquitous platform to showcase skills and talents. Yet, it is ...

As a resident of NYC, I find little use for the SF Climates iOS app that all of my San Francisco-based friends (read: social media whores) are boasting over today.But a lot of you do live there, so yo...

With all the press releases masquerading as news, Techmeme has felt more like Craiglist for articles in the past few months, or is it years. But recently we finally got some real news, when Google of ...

Despite fears that streaming access cannibalizes sales, classical music record label X5tells me when it launched an app within Spotify and saw streams of one album increase 412% in a month, that album...

After a long vacation, TechCrunch Cribs is back! But as TechCrunch alum Jason Kincaid left us with some pretty big shoes to fill, for our first installment we decided to start with a company that know...

More than a few people have been clamoring for Daniel Hooper's thoughtful iPad text editing concept to become a real thing since his video started making the rounds, and now all you mobile text editor...

Congratulations. Youre the CEO of a startup. Youre doing the hardest job in business. Youve raised money from venture capitalists and turned down better-paying jobs elsewhere. Youve mastered complicat...

SolarCity, the cleantech company backed by Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, filed for an IPO this past week. But there's hardly been a peep about it compared to most offerings.That's because under the ...

One of today's most challenging yet promising markets is the educational system. If you want to see startups hungry to disrupt an industry, look no further. Founders are trying to solve the problems p...

Money alone isn't enough to bring happiness . . . happiness [is] when you're actually truly ok with losing everything you have. - Tony Hsieh, Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purp...

It was less than a week ago that Tenthbit, the developers of the buzzy, new social-networking-app-for-couples (or other partners) Pair, picked up a $4.2 million seed round, money the founders said wou...

For years, companies have been known to flock more to SF's southern suburbs or to San Jose some 50 miles south, where space is often cheaper and the tax situation has historically been more lax. But s...

For anyone who enjoys (or has a knack for) planning, organizing a hackathon is not terribly difficult: its a matter of understanding your goals, assessing needs, and figuring out how to bridge the two...

An automated Facebook spam filter, not purposeful censorship, is to blame for startup enthusiast Robert Scoble and some other commenters getting blocked, according to a company spokesperson.Users atte...

As we put more of our private information online and entrust it to web services, privacy breaches become almost inevitable. One major problem with online privacy is that there is really noenforceablec...

Today was just another Saturday morning in blog land when Robert Scoble, the well-known tech startup enthusiast, went to post a comment on a Facebook post written by Carnegie Mellon student (and TechC...

Developing. Today was just another Saturday morning in blog land when Robert Scoble, the well-known tech startup enthusiast, went to post a comment on a Facebook post written by Carnegie Mellon studen...

Mark Zuckerbergs visit to China back in December 2011 created a storm of speculation on whether Facebook was preparing for a full scale entry into the most populous country in the world. Photos of Zuc...

Nathan Myhrvold, erstwhile Microsoft CTO and now patentpowerbroker extraordinare, has hit the news this weekend, but it's not for his latest licensing deal with a mobile phone maker, or for a lawsuit ...

This is a guest post by Maria Constantinescu, founder of Slickflickthe photo story app.Today, in 2012, there is a talent war like no other. The Valley is abuzz with a hiring frenzy. Startups can't com...

The Gillmor Gang Doc Searls, Robert Scoble, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor surfed the Social Holodeck for signs of intelligent life and overload. Meanwhile: @scobleizer and his Faceboo...

Jailbreak verb. 1 To get out of a restricted mode of operation. 2 To enable use of a product not intended by the manufacturer.Currently, the degree is the only meaningful unit of education to which em...

HTC won over some hearts a while back when it released its bootloader unlock tool for a good number of devices. It basically allows owners of Android phones to load custom ROMs onto their phones in ex...

ZocDoc, the professional booking platform for doctors, is rolling out to another market as of this week: Tampa, Florida - and incidentally, company CEOCyrus Massoumi also happens to be a Florida nativ...

Poor old Android is having a bad year. (Especially compared to last year.) Apple's iPhone is soaring in China, and apparently overtaking Android in the crucial American market. Oracle's lawsuit agains...

Previously we've covered Dropbox Automator, a sort of IFTTT for Dropbox. (IFTTT, if you haven't heard, automates tasks to trigger when a particular action has occurred, e.g. if a Facebook profile pict...

Launch Pad Ignition, the first tech incubator to make its home in the Big Easy, today officially unveiled the seven companies that participated in its second annual session. The accelerator's 12-week ...

Trying new APIs is tricky. You can spend hours setting things up, gaining permissions, and learning syntax before you even get to write one line of code. That's why CodeNow.com is cool. In short, it a...

With the influx of information flooding the web 90% of the web having been created in the last two years alone web businesses are looking for ways to understand and use big data to drive their busin...

In light of its impending multi-billion-dollar IPO, its user base of 900 million and its increasingly sprawling design and user experience, some people have come to believe that Facebook has gone craz...

A little under one month after its acquisition of Instagram, Facebook has acquired Highlight competitor and ambient location app Glancee.The company has already shut down the developers passive locati...

I don't want to become the publicity arm for every tech organization throwing contest or giveaway, but once in a while, something comes along that seems like a perfect fit for a big chunk of TechCrunc...

ChoicePass is bringing its corporate perk management platform to smartphones starting today, with the launch of its Android app.Co-founder Kyle Hui says his goal is to "make HR sexy again." Specifical...

This is important, so listen up. The people I'm about to describe are the most awesome of all the awesome people as they have volunteered to help out (free of charge) with our massive meet-up here in ...

Gillmor Gang - Doc Searls, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, Robert Scoble, and Steve Gillmor. Recording live at 1pm PT....

Gillmor Gang - Doc Searls, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, Robert Scoble, and Steve Gillmor. Live recording has concluded....

There's a huge difference between like and love. I like cheese, but I love Gruyere. I like beef, but I love filet mignon. I like phones, but I love my iPhone. You get the gist.Long story short, I real...

There's a huge difference between like and love. I like cheese, but I love Gruyere. I like beef, but I love filet mignon. I like phones, but I love my iPhone. You get the gist.Long story short, I real...

Facebook thinks mobile messaging should feel like you're having a face-to-face conversation, so today it updates its Messenger for iOS and Android apps with the ability to see if someone's read your m...

Sure, AT&T's One X will officially hit store shelves this Sunday, but you may be in for an early weekend treat if you've taken it upon yourself to pre-order the thing. According to a handful of re...

Portland, OR isn't just a place where young people go to retire and hang out at urban wineries. The city also plays host to a fair number of prominent startups, including companies like Urban Airship,...

How much should you pay for a used iPhone, TV, or bicycle? Spark Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, SV Angel and more think you need to know, so they've invested $1.5 million into Priceonomics, a Y Combina...

Earlier today, GlobalGrind broke the news that Adam "MCA" Yauch, a founding member of New York's pioneering hip-hop group the Beastie Boys, had died of cancer at the age of 47.While the loss of Yauch ...

Aliens are streaming our music! A crop circle bearing a striking resemblance to the Spotify logo has appeared in Wiltshire, England near Stonehenge. The Swedish startup denies having anything to do wi...

You've probably heard the complaint that MTV has forgotten its music video roots and spends too much time on reality television. Heck, you may have said something similar yourself. Well, for its third...

Sure, GPS helps us get from Point A to Point B, but what if you're just trying to find the Cinnabon? A new system from Fraunhofer allows for in-store (or in-mall) navigation and uses very simple senso...

Foursquare has tweakedits history pagethis morning, in order to give users a more functional, searchable version of their past check-ins. Although you could see your old check-ins before, they weren't...

If you've always wanted to try to build an Arduino project, this may be a great way to start. Matt Williamson built a tiny, Arduino-based motion sensor that will SMS you when something moves by your d...

We've been writing so many "please welcome star writer" posts lately that we're having to work hard to think of new versions of that headline. But that's the only painful part of this one, as we're ve...

Horace Dediu at Asymco has run the numbers and it's not looking good. Samsung and Apple now control an estimated 99% of vendor profits with HTC scraping in with 1%. BlackBerry and Nokia barely registe...

OK, this is cool. A new networking utility called Hachi is taking some of the best functionality offered by LinkedIn (searching by name, company, title, etc. and seeing how you're connected to other u...

Office Hours in New York was a huge success last week. We met the guys from Krossover, along with quite a few other really badass startups which we'll post about when the time comes. That said, I want...

When Apple launched iPhoto for iPhone, it quickly became clear that there was something odd going on with the maps in the application. Even though Apple never talked about this publicly, the data Appl...

TidePool, a startup that is trying to determine consumer personality from photos, has raised $1.5 million in a seed round led by Mike Hirshland of Resolute.VC and Michael Dearing of Harrison Metal Cap...

The HTC Titan II has already gone through the Fly or Die ringer, but the real determining factor for these phones is the level of competition surrounding them. In the case of the Titan II, the HTC/Mic...

Daily deal community for website owners Startups.com is shutting down. In an email sent out to its mailing list subscribers, founder Gonzo Arzuaga admits that the company just "couldn't make a go of i...

Nokia may be busy suing the likes of RIM, HTC, and Viewsonic over the infringement of a long list of wireless patents, but the Finnish company should watch their backs -- now they're the target of a c...

KinderTown, the startup behind the educational iOS app store for parents (and honestly, a personal fav) is expanding its focus today. According to feedback from its users, the number one complaint was...

Have you ever wanted to feel like a real Sith and/or blind your friends? Well buy yourself a massive WickedLaser's laser and the $99 "laser saber" attachment and get ready to buy a guide dog!This sabe...

A post on CNN Money found that during a quick assessment of 10 Verizon stores and reps in New York - arguably a small sample size - the representatives would pitch Verizon's Android's 4G phones over t...

Twilio, the upstart software maker of voice and other telephony APIs used by developers in web and mobile apps, is marking another chapter in its European expansion today: the company's voice API -- w...

Google has always been pretty cagey about the financials behind its Android mobile OS -- and data that has emerged over the last week could give us an indication why: it's been losing money from day o...

With social discovery all the rage with apps like Highlight, Banjo and Glancee attracting attention during this year's SXSW it's easy to forget there are players out there which have been doing this a...

As a high school student in 2003, Bri Holt found himself increasingly frustrated by the fact that there was no easy way for he and his classmates to view their grades online. So, being familiar with t...

What's the penalty for lying on a resume? It's an important question for new Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson, after his PR department offered up the laughable excuse that he made "an inadvertent error" on Y...

"You guys might want to cover this before he resigns tomorrow," one hardcore reader emailed in this evening. And yes indeed, newish Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson's "inadvertent error" about which degree he...

Sometimes people ask me why we're still here even though we're owned by poopy pants Aol , and I'm all like, "Huh what? Oh I'm sorry I'm drunk, who are you again?"Lolz.Okay so the real reason that I an...

BoomStartup, an incubator based in Salt Lake City, Utah, just announced the startups participating in its third annual session.The program runs from May to August.Participating companies get $20,000 i...

The Obama Administration's plan to spread the country's wealth around has made its way to struggling technology entrepreneurs. This past Tuesday, the Small Business Administration (SBA) began acceptin...

Do thoughts of Hadoop send you into a tizzy? Do petabytes of data make you wild? If so, then we have just the thing for you. Accel Partners, the firm that will be scoring a touchdown this month with F...

Even though Facebook's IPO roadshow video was a mostly touchy-feely affair with videos of friends have coffee and babies blowing out candles, there were some new stats tucked away in it.For the first ...

Video chat is still something quite a few people don't feel comfortable with. For U.S. teens, however, it is quickly becoming a pretty routine way of communicating with each other. According to a new ...

It was just over a month ago that social media management platform HootSuite picked up $20 million in a secondary investment round that valued the company at $200 million. Now we have heard from multi...

Researchers at Disney and Carnegie Mellon University have created an interesting new technology using Swept Frequency Capacitive Sensing that allows nearly any object to sense multiple points of conta...

Content companies have struggled to monetize on the Web, and there has been plenty of debate over the effectiveness of paywalls. What's more, tech startups really can't seem to rush fast enough into t...

During the conference call this afternoon for their first quarter earnings, LinkedIn executives boasted about the impressive mobile growth they're seeing. In the last week of March, the company says m...

During the conference call this afternoon for their first quarter earnings, LinkedIn executives boasted about the impressive mobile growth they're seeing. In the last week of March, the company says m...

Video platform Brightcove just released its first earnings report after going public in March. Brightcove posted a net loss of $4.3 million - that's down from $5.8 million last quarter. The company's ...

Anyone who's played competitive sports knows how important stats, analysis, and post-game film are. They're an excellent way to improve both personally and on a team level, yet it usually takes a dedi...

One of the most frustrating online experiences for me is trying to track down a web page or tweet that I saw a few days ago. If I'm lucky, I bookmarked the page or favorited the tweet, but most of the...

One of the most frustrating online experiences for me is trying to track down a web page or tweet that I saw a few days ago. If I'm lucky, I bookmarked the page or favorited the tweet, but most of the...

Facebook has just released the promotional video for its pre-IPO roadshow as well its prospectus for investors. It's split into five parts covering Facebook's mission, products and platform, advertisi...

Today any local U.S. business can start using Facebook's Offers product-- free-to-create coupons that businesses can share to the news feed, and that users can bring to brick-and-mortar stores for red...

Professional social network LinkedIn has just released Q1 earnings. Revenue for the first quarter was $188.5 million, an increase of 101% compared to $93.9 million in the first quarter of 2011. Net in...

Facebook's early investors and employees may sell up to $5.5 billion alongside the company's offering. Facebook said today that it is selling 180 million shares of stock at $28 to 35 a share. On top o...

LinkedIn has just acquired professional content sharing platform SlideShare for $119 million in cash and stock. We've pasted the release below. SlideShare is a sharing platform for business documents,...

Facebook just posted a fith amendment to its IPO filing, confirming the price range for its stock at IPO, how much it will raise, and noting the future threat of patent lawsuits from Yahoo over hardwa...

BeClose is a small but interesting start-up in Tysons Corner, Virginia. They make home monitoring systems for the elderly, allowing them to stay at home even when they may be fragile or lack motility....

Klout, the startup that measures influence on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Foursquare, Google+ and other social apps, has just released a new version of its API and released a number of ...

If we have reached the Death of the Spec, then what Samsung wanted to introduce us to today was nothing short of the birth of the human touch. In the presentation launching the Galaxy S III, the first...

"In the Studio" continues this week with an mechanical engineer who built and tested materials used in spacecraft, spent years on Sand Hill Road as a venture capitalist focused on semiconductors, soft...

Let's be honest: Whether or not you've recently hugged a tree, buying branded tap water in a plastic bottle for $1.50+ a pop seems ... well ... completely #$%^&-ing ridiculous -- unless of co...

The Discovery Channel is announcing that it has acquired online video company Revision3, as reported in AllThingsD.My boss Eric Eldon wrote on Monday night that a deal was in the works, with a price b...

We are hearing from bankers underwriting Facebook's initial public offering, that it will IPO at a $70 to $90B valuation, or $27-$35 a share. While that's still going to be a landmark valuation for a ...

We are hearing from bankers underwriting Facebook's initial public offering, that it will IPO at a $70 billion to $90 billion valuation, or $27-$35 a share. The reason for the valuation dropping below...

Online payment platform WePay just announced that it has raised $10 million in a new financing round. This round was led by Ignition Partners. Two of the company's existing investors, Highland Capital...

Samsung has just officially unveiled the long-awaited Galaxy S III at their event in London, and instead of boring you by telling you how momentous a moment this is for the company, I'm just going to ...

I use Uber all the time when I travel, and it's always sort of a bummer to come back home knowing it'll be weeks before I get to ride in another Uber towncar. Well, that's thankfully no longer the cas...

Google News already featured some integration with Google+ in the past, but today, Google is expanding this integration by bringing "relevant Google+ posts for a new social perspective" to i...

The makers of traffic appWazeare the latest company wanting to go beyond the phone and integrate more deeply with car hardware.It's a natural move if you use Waze, you use it when you're driving. How...

Smart shopping service Decide.com, which started off with a focus on consumer electronics before its recent addition of home appliances, is a unique player in the comparison shopping market. The servi...

Draw Something has been a hot topic of late. About a month ago, OMGPOP, the company behind the hit game, was acquired by Zynga as the web gaming company attempts the migration over to mobile. The $180...

42floors, the startup that launched in March out of Y Combinator's Winter 2012 class, is still only providing its commercial real estate search product in the San Francisco Bay Area. But today the co...

A new mobile shopping service called NetPlenish is announcing today that it has closed a round of $1.9 million in seed funding fromDave McClures 500 Startups, Gold Hill Capital, BHV Capital, TEEC Ange...

Betterment, the better investment app, launched at Disrupt in 2010 and went on to manage approximately $50 million in two years. The site is essentially an investment engine. Seamless automatic deposi...

Mobile devices, by some estimates, will become a replacement for your wallet in the future, with NFC, dongles and sophisticated apps helping you buy things and manage the rest of your financial life, ...

SecondMarket, which has served as a hub for transactions of pre-IPO Facebook stock for a few years, will have to find some new venture-backed companies to pique investor interest this year. While Face...

You've heard of GroundLink before. They offer ground transportation with up-front before-you-ride pricing throughout the U.S., and like Uber, you can book everything from your phone. The service basic...

I often hear people say they moved to San Francisco and Silicon Valley to be in the thick of things -- to open themselves up to the chance of meeting a new mentor at the local coffee shop, or being ab...

Fresh off a $35 million round of funding, mobile payments company Boku is announcing a direct carrier agreement with Sprint that will allow Sprint customers charge online purchases to their Sprint wir...

Fresh on the heels of its hot $2 million seed round from Kapor Capital, Menlo Ventures, 500 Startups, Howard Lindzon's Social Leverage fund, Eric Ries, Paul Buchheit, Jawed Karim, and others, YC-backe...

Not even a month after news of Fab.de's growth in Germany and Austria (revenue reaching 1.5M Euro per month), the company is today announcing its expansion across Europe. Starting now, Fab is availabl...

Vibrant Media is probably best-known for its in-text advertising, but it has been expanding its lineup of ad units. The latest edition is something it's calling Vibrant Lightbox Video.Vibrant already ...

Walmart's attempt at crowdsourcing product selection has come to a close. The company has announced the winners of itsGet on the Shelfcontest, which was launched out of@WalmartLabs,the digital technol...

The Swivl motion-tracking smartphone dock has always seems like a nifty piece of kit, but its $179 price tag doesn't exactly bring the device into "I can do something cool with this" impulse buy terri...

Fiverr, a global marketplace offering tasks and services for as little as $5, has raised $15 million in funding from Accel Partners and Bessemer Venture Partners. This brings the company's total fundi...

At RIM's keynote earlier this week, CEO Thorsten Heins unveiled a brand new camera app that will ship along with BlackBerry 10. It was quite impressive. It basically lets you snap a pic, select a subj...

eBay was one of the first e-commerce giants to launch an iPad app following the device's debut in 2010. As we've heard many times, mobile commerce is a huge growth area for eBay and the company is pla...

UK-based cloud accounting software company FreeAgent has acquired finance-tracking startup60mo. The U.S. startup's team will be incorporated into FreeAgents new American division. FreeAgent has also r...

Music streaming provider Deezer is one of the bigger (and older -- it's been around since 2006) services of its kind, with some 20 million registered users in 48 territories, and 15 million tracks in ...

It's official. To transition from a startup into a late-stage company that aims to be around for 100 years, Evernote today confirms it's raised a $70 million Series D round of funding at a $1 billion ...

Visage Mobile, an enterprise mobility management company, has raised $8 million Series C funding led by Motorola Solutions with Worldview Technology Partners and Qualcomm Ventures participating in the...

Enterprise cloud storage provider Nirvanix has raised $25 million in Series C funding round led by Khosla Ventures with previous investors Valhalla Partners, Intel Capital, Mission Ventures and Windwa...

Rdio has launched in the UK and France with a 7-day free trial of unlimited listening. Rdio hasn't officially announced this, but it's working. You can sign up for a free trial and stream. The cost is...

European startup conference The Next Web (and now competing blog, hello guys), which took place in Amsterdam last week, was covered in full by seven TNW bloggers who wrote over 30 posts about all majo...

A lot of adtech startups have focused their attention on ways to improve the process of measuring, buying and delivering online ads, but here's an example of a company getting some traction for a solu...

A lot of adtech startups have focused their attention on ways to improve the process of measuring, buying and delivering online ads, but here's an example of a company getting some traction for a solu...

Although it's a year this week since Passion Capital appeared on the tech scene in London, it feels like they have been around a lot longer. It was in July 2009 I sat on the sun-kissed roof of what be...

Although it's a year this week since Passion Capital appeared on the tech scene in London, it feels like they have been around a lot longer. It was in July 2009 I sat on the sun-kissed roof of what be...

In September 2010, I wrote a post that ignited an absolute shitstorm around these parts. "Shitstorm" in this case meaning a post with a thousand comments, the majority of which were spewed up by rabid...

The NewMe Accelerator, a startup incubation program founded last year aimed at under-represented minorities in the tech world (namely African Americans, Latinos, and women), held its second-ever Demo ...

You don't have to be an artist to make art, or a comedian to make lulz...at least not on The New Hive, where you can create one-off websites by drag-and-dropping any type of content. Upload some pics ...

Now that everyone and their mother can invest in startups, hundreds of crowdfunding portals are starting their engines. Wahooly happened to jump on the trend early, soft-launching back in September, b...

This first part of a two-part series on strategic investors in healthcare focuses on the expansion of the venture business beyond traditional venture and large strategic investors. In the second part,...

Why is everyone trying so hard to reinvent the hiring process? Maybe because referrals and recommendations (still the main way people get jobs) remain incredibly old-school. Sure, there are LinkedIn r...

Sometimes it seems like techies are just taking over the world, doesn't it? The latest cool example of this: Chris Cheng, the Google project manager who also happens to be an expert-level marksman, ju...

Blurb has had a good amount of success as a disruptive player in the "traditional" publishing space. The San Francisco-based company, which lets anyone write and publish a physical book at relatively ...

Over the course of the last few years, more and more "clickers" have found their way into college classrooms. These little devices allow teachers to request real-time feedback from their students thro...

I know we've been taking the piss out of Aol* all day, but someone in Aol PR must be drunk, because this bizarre"BREAKING: Board Has Presided over Improvement of AOL's Operating Results and Financial ...

It looks like always-pivoting Seesmic is wrapping up of its latest shift, from the CRM business to social posting apps.Back in March, the company laid off half its staff to pursue the new direction (w...

You know what doesn't rock? Missing a concert by your favorite band. Live Nation wants to make sure that doesn't happen to you, so today it's publicly launchingConcert Calendar, a Facebook app that pu...

Google's mission to organize the world's information changed the Web, and it remains true that, if you know what you're looking for, there isn't a more useful search tool. But if you don't, that's not...

Ad network engage:BDR has launched a new platform for real-time bidding that it's calling First Impression.Real-time bidding is already a big part of the online advertising landscape, but Vice Preside...

In its first ever earnings report as a publicly-traded company, Yelp said it earned $27.4 million in revenue, up 66 percent from the $16.5 million it made in the same time a year ago. However, the com...

Real estate listings site Zillow just reported strong Q1 earnings. The company reported record revenue of $22.8 million, up 103% over first quarter 2011. Net Income came in at $1.7 million, resulting ...

The European online restaurant reservation service LaFourchette announced that it has raised 8 million ($10.5 million) from Serena Capital and Partech at a valuation of more than 50 million ($65.8 mil...

Talenthouse, the talent crowdsourcing startup that aims to connect well-known artists with talented (but not so well known) collaborators, announced a new round of funding today. The company raised $4...

Just because the first day of BlackBerry World is over doesn't mean we mobile geeks have run out of BlackBerry-related tidbits to pick apart. Oh, far from it -- in fact, RIM CEO Thorsten Heins took th...

Russia was once known for its undying adoration for all things French back in the day, and a century and a half later you could argue that some of that spark is still hanging around. New Generation In...

It's a sign of the times. Crowdstar is through with making games for Facebook and they've just raised another $11.5 million to double-down on their move toward mobile gaming. The company's existing in...

Google today announced that it is bringing web fonts to Google Docs. Thanks to this update, you can now use 450 new fonts in your Google documents. These are the same 450 fonts Google already features...

Here comes money for media startups: former MediaNet CEO Alan McGlade and VC Michael Yang are announcing the launch of a new NYC-based firm called DEV (Digital Entertainment Ventures) whose early stag...

Your wedding day is supposed to be the biggest day of your life — but it's also the hardest. Planning a wedding can be one of the most stressful processes known to man, especially known to woman...

Tumblr, the immensely popular but profitless blogging platform, just turned on its first set of paid "sponsor products" (Tumblr doesn't like to call them "ads"). Even though the company resisted runni...

Another week, another IBM acquisition. Big Blue has announced the purchase of Tealeaf Technology, which provides customer experience analytics software that helps organizations access information abou...

To: [email protected]: AOL HRCC: AOL IT/Networking, AOL Legal, [email protected], [email protected]: ACTIONABLE OFFENSE: Pornography/Adult Content Viewing On Company PropertyMr. Bi...

Earlier this morning, San Francisco-based mobile app security provider Appthority announced that it has raised $6.25 million in a Series A financing round led by Venrock and US Venture Partners. Gunde...

While greedy advertisers claim they're skeptical about Facebook because it won't give them obtrusive ad units, investors seem quite confident in its business, considering they've publicly poured $915 ...

Amazon Studios, the offshoot of online retailer Amazon.com that aims to source scripts and test movies, has major news this morning. The company says that, in addition to its film development plans, i...

While Pair are popping champagne corks at their funding round today, they better not swig too much bubbly because tomorrow they may have to check out their rear-view mirrors. Co-founder Oleg Kostour s...

There are plenty of companies and startups that want to disrupt the food ordering space including Seamless, GrubHub and others. A new competitor is entering the space today. ChowNow is an online order...

As the Republican primaries wrap up and we head into the Obama vs. Romney stage of the presidential campaign, Stitcher has updated its talk radio app with an Election Center where anyone can track the...

One of Foursquare's earliest and best-known employees, Tristan Walker, Foursquare's Business Development VP, is leaving the company and is headed over toAndreessen Horowitz where he will take a positi...

We've all been there. You're listening to a song on your iPod (or iPhone or whatever) as you walk up to meet your friend and you want them to hear it, too. You pop your right earbud into their ear and...

Distance learners rejoice! Harvard University and MIT jointly announced their new non-profit edX online learning initiative in Cambridge earlier today, which aims to both enhance on-campus teaching an...

RIM is keeping the PlayBook party going. While speaking at a BlackBerry World breakfast with RIM CEO Thorsten Heins stated the company plans to launch an LTE-enabled PlayBook by the end of the year. H...

NY-based mobile web startup bMobilized, which bills itself as a competitor to the well-heeled new Google partner DudaMobile, has just closed its Series A round of funding to the tune of $1.5 million. ...

Vungle, a new company that wants to help mobile developers market their apps through video "trailers," has just raised an enormous $2 million seed round from the who's who of Silicon Valley. The round...

YC company Hyperink, a next-generation digital book publishing platform, is debuting a new service which helps bloggers create short books from their existing content.As we've reported in the past, Hy...

I keep hearing rumors about the ridiculous amounts of money that Weebly is making. But the San Francisco company, which provides a set of tools for small businesses and other organizations to easily c...

I live in New York City, and feel lucky for it. Every day I meet a waitress, bartender, receptionist, or Occupy Wall Street protestor who dreams of greatness. They aren't really waitresses or receptio...

The new iPad is nearly two months old and it's still not available for immediate shipping from Apple. However, the wait time just improved to less than a week. Apple.com now lists all the new iPad var...

As Nokia continues to try to turn itself around as a mobile phone business, it is also playing on the offense in the legal game: today it announced that it has filed fresh patent suits against HTC, RI...

As Nokia continues to try to turn itself around as a mobile phone business, it is also playing on the offense in the legal game: today it announced that it has filed fresh patent suits against HTC, RI...

If you were planning to swing by your local Target to buy a Kindle some time soon, you may want to add a little pep to your step. An inside source told The Verge that Amazon's line of Kindle e-reader...

A potentially big move forward for cloud-based telephony API startup Twilio -- and an intriguing development for Microsoft, given its would-be ownership of Skype: Twilio and Microsoft have formed a st...

You may not know this but Yahoo still operates a product called Yahoo Small Business, which provides SMBs and sites with web hosting, domain name registration, web site design templates, e-commerce so...

As NFC continues to see growing adoption, we are still noticing more mobile payment solutions that don't use the technology picking up traction -- and funding: one of the latest comes from Germany, wh...

Social enterprise company Jive is debuting a number of new features for its social network for businesses today. The company is also announcing its Try Jive, a free 30-day trial for customers. Jive is...

Today, The Weather Channel celebrates its 30th birthday. It will officially feel old at concerts and hot new night clubs. To mark the occasion, the company has revamped their website, weather.com, to ...

Avito.ru, the biggest online classified ads site in Russia, has secured a fresh $75 million round of funding from Accel Partners' London office. Founded in 2008, Avito has so far landed $101 million f...

DataSift, a data analysis company that provides developers and third parties with access to Twitter, Facebook and other social data sources, has raised $7.2 million in a follow-on Series A round from ...

Today, Spotify is releasing its long-awaited iPad app -- finally giving Apple tablet users, who also have a Spotify Premium (paid) subscription, a native route to accessing its 17-million song catalog...

Flattr, a social micro-payments platform which we've likened to a "Like button with cash" is to partner with the second biggest video site on the Web, Dailymotion. The distribution deal is targeted at...

Birst, a San Francisco-based startup that offers on-demand business intelligence and analytics solutions for companies big and small, has raised $26 million in series D financing, led by Sequoia Capit...

Make way for another VC firm in Europe: Today sees the launch of Connect Ventures, a new London based fund that will focus on seed and Series A stages in European tech companies. It's kicking off with...

While Google keeps cramming its search results pages full of tools and social content, today Bing confirmed with me the full roll out a redesigned search results page that completely clears the left s...

For a social network that's, for lack of a better term, monogamous, social network for couples Pair has just raised funding from so many high-profile investors I'm having trouble picking who to includ...

It looks like the team from Y Combinator-backed Stypi is heading to Salesforce, according to this blog post. It's unclear if this is an acq-hire or an actual acquisition. We've contacted Salesforce fo...

It looks like the team from Y Combinator-backed Stypi is heading to Salesforce, according to this blog post. UPDATE: We've confirmed that Salesforce has acquired Stypi. Financial terms of the acquisit...

The TechCrunch/Gadget Weekly is back with several new faces. Jordan and Chris join John and I for our first TC/G webcast in several months. In this week's episode we discuss our recent trip to RIM's W...

Google and its partner Onix Networking just won a $35 million contract to run the U.S. Department of the Interior's new cloud-based email and collaboration system. This wasn't always a sure bet for Go...

Japanese gaming giant GREE just acquired mid-core, mobile game developer Funzio for $210 million in what should boost its ability to build games for Western audiences. Funzio is behind Crime City, Mod...

Founded in 2008, San Francisco-based Castlight has been at the forefront of the movement to bring price transparency and comparison tools to healthcare, offering a B2B service that enables self-insure...

BrandYourself, a startup offering a cheap and easy approach to managing your Google results, has added a new feature to answer one of those burning questions: Who are the people Googling me?To be clea...

ID and fraud protection service AllClear ID, is launching a new feature today which aims to protect kids' Social Security Numbers (SSNs) from being stolen and used to secure things like mortgages, loa...

The fundamental misunderstanding of Facebook's mobile prospects is that it'strying to compete with iOS and Androidfor in-app payment revenue via HTML5. It's not. What Facebook really wants is the cont...

The fundamental misunderstanding of Facebook's mobile prospects is that it'strying to compete with iOS and Androidfor in-app payment revenue via HTML5. It's not. What Facebook really wants is the cont...

Foursquare is enhancing its feature set for businesses today, with the introduction of a new verification service for merchants. The company says that for a one-time, $10 fee, owners and managers will...

While the use case for these glasses can quickly become quite dubious, the YouGen.tv glasses by Vergence Lab are pretty cool. Not only do they instantly change from sunglasses to clear Buddy-Holly-sty...

It's too common a story: smart, low-income kid can't find their academic passion, so they drop out of school. But now you can rewrite this tragic tale with the help of Wishbone.org, a philanthropy web...

It's too common a story: smart, low-income kid can't find their academic passion, so they drop out of school. But now you can rewrite this tragic tale with the help of Wishbone.org, a philanthropy web...

It was 6.30 on Sunday morning, August 9th, 2007 when Ted Morgan, the Boston based CEO of a little location technology start-up called Skyhook Wireless, got a totally unexpected call from an absolute s...

Microsoft is trying to clean up the Windows Phone Marketplace and as part of this effort, the company just clarified some of its guidelines for developers who want to sell their apps in Microsoft's ap...

With the release of their BlackBerry 10 beta development tools and Dev Alpha devices earlier today, RIM has made it very clear that they want to build up as much developer love as possible before Blac...

One of the geeky, cute contraptions of the early Facebook days was a web-enabled beer keg at company headquarters. Whenever an employee swiped their RFID badge on it, a camera would snap a photo of th...

Remember that retro time-defying camera app that RIM unveiled alongside a few other BB10 features? You should — it happened this morning. Well, it would seem that the ability to search back thro...

Remember that retro time-defying camera app that RIM unveiled alongside a few other BB10 features? You should — it happened this morning. Well, it would seem that the ability to search back thro...

Sammy is now the big kahuna of cell phones. Today's Juniper Research and comScore reports indicated that Samsung kicked Apple from the top spot in regards to smartphones. IDC also released a report to...

A new startup launching today called eVr1sits at the intersection between the digital and physical worlds.In the words of co-founder Brandon Peele, eVr1 has tried to answer the question, "What does it...

Yahoo-owned Flickr is one of the largest content sources for Pinterest, with users posting Flickr images on the pinboard sharing site in droves. But in order to Pin a Flickr photo on Pinterest, you ha...

In 2009, Google brought its translation features to Gmail as a Gmail Labs experiment. Today, almost exactly two years after it first launched, this features is finally graduating from Gmail Labs. Star...

Every day companies are spending gobs of money to earn and keep your attention. Advertisers are collecting heaps of information about you in the hopes of presenting you with more targeted advertisemen...

Samsung doesn't break out actual unit sales figures for its mobile handset business, but among analyst houses, many are estimating that it is the brand to beat anyway. The latest comes from ComScore, ...

I recently wrote about news gamification app Scoople, and today, the company is releasing a new version with improved social interaction.When you use Scoople, you read news stories (usually aggregated...

Recently I tried to do a Google search for a wine to pair with swordfish, and it was pretty much a disaster (first world problems, I know, but still.) The problem is, web search results for certain to...

Recently I tried to do a Google search for a wine to pair with swordfish, and it was pretty much a disaster (first world problems, I know, but still.) The problem is, web search results for certain to...

This morning, Facebook announced a new feature which lets users post to their Facebook timeline that they've chosen to be an organ donor. The idea is that friends will choose to share the story of the...

One of the core features of Twitter's redesign last year was the addition of the Discover tab in the web and mobile interface. Today, the company is launching the first major update to this feature. T...

When John and I first chatted out the idea of an NYC-based TC meet-up, we expected around 500 attendees. Last week we hit the 700 mark, and today we've surpassed 1,000 RSVPs. Luckily, our fine sponsor...

CareZone has been busy discovering a few key markets since launching in February, chief executive Jonathan Schwartz tells me. And the results are good enough to warrant a big round of funding: nearly ...

The HTC Titan II is a symbol for an excellent partnership. I love HTC hardware and I love Windows Phone. It should be a match made in heaven, but unfortunately it's not. John and I sat down in the stu...

Social enterprise software maker Socialtext is today announcing having received strategic investment from Bedford Funding that will now see the service joining the Peoplefluent family of products. Bed...

Even though we still don't know when RIM will get around to launching it, CEO Thorsten Heins gave us a few brief glimpses at what BlackBerry 10 would be able to do during his keynote address at the Bl...

Electronic Freedom Fighters and knee-jerk reactionaries: prepare your big drums because here comes the cause of the week. We learned about Gatekeeper, Apple's app signing solution that ensures "rogue"...

Whether you have $10,000 or $10 million dollars, trying to find help to manage your investments can be a minefield. Enter SigFig. Launching in public beta mode today, SigFig is a web application that ...

EXCLUSIVE-Startup Newvem, which offers a SaaS based service for Amazon/AWS customers that aims to help businesses spend less money and gain more value from Amazons cloud infrastructure, has raised $4 ...

Get Satisfaction was built around the importance of community to businesses. Now, with the launch of a new product called Get Satisfaction Engage, it wants to make those communities embeddable anywher...

Y Combinator alum Crocodoc is debuting a new technology today that aims to bring an enterprise-grade HTML5 document embedding service for Microsoft Office and PDF files, to web-based products.Crocodoc...

TechCrunch Disrupt is all about shining the spotlight on exciting start-ups. But starting at this year's New York show, we're including hardware startup in the mix. After an initial call over the week...

Parents looking for a curated selection of music and videos that's a little more kid-friendly than YouTube have another option now, thanks to the launch of Jitterbug.tv. The new iPad app is the first ...

Etsy has become the go-to site for people looking for home-made crafts and vintage items from independent artisans -- and for artisans wanting to sell them, and it now counts some 39 million monthly u...

Etsy has become the go-to site for people looking for home-made crafts and vintage items from independent artisans -- and for artisans wanting to sell them, and it now counts some 39 million monthly u...

Etsy has become the go-to site for people looking for home-made crafts and vintage items from independent artisans -- and for artisans wanting to sell them, and it now counts some 39 million monthly u...

USB 3.0 is still slowly rolling out but Verbatim has charged forward with a line of flash drives. The new line of Store 'n' Go V3 USB 3.0 flash drives utilize the latest USB spec for speedy transfers....

EcoATM, a company that creates kiosks that automate the buy-back of used mobile phones and other used portable electronics directly from consumers, has raised $17 million in funding from Claremont Cre...

A camera is highly important in any smartphone.Even since before the iPhone, the ability to snap a picture on your cell phone and essentially leave your camera at home not only changed the digital cam...

Today is BlackBerry Jam, RIM's developer conference or WWDC equivalent. It's RIM's moment to redefine, rejuvenate, and re-establish itself in the world. Whether or not the company can pull it off, how...

As it stands, most of BlackBerry 10 is still shrouded in mystery. Not even the Dev Alpha devices that will be made available to developers offer a glimpse of RIM's new software -- they're running a mo...

RIM has caught plenty of flack these past few months, thanks to (among other things) a multi-day global outage, disappointing PlayBook sales, and a dramatic management shake-up. Beyond all of this, th...

JP Selects, an online marketplace for selling sustainable and ethical brands has acquired LovingEco, a flash sales site for eco-friendly fashion and natural beauty products. Financial terms of the dea...

JP Selects, an online marketplace for selling sustainable and ethical brands has acquired LovingEco, a flash sales site for eco-friendly fashion and natural beauty products for $1 million.LovingEco, w...

Mobile Roadie, which allows anyone develop and create sleek, rich media iPhone and Android apps, is launching a native iPad app creation platform and self-service mobile website product.Mobile Roadie ...

Pindrop Security, a startup that aims to prevent and protect against phone-based fraud, has raised $1 million in funding from Andreessen Horowitz, GRA Venture Fund, New World Ventures, Sigma Partners,...

Loopc.am has lately become a little bit of a craze amongst some iPhone users I know. Frankly, at first it seemed like something of a gimmick. Recording and sharing short gif-based videoclips called lo...

uberVU already offers a dashboard for monitoring social media conversations about your company, but CEO Mark Pascarella and founder/Chief Product Officer Vladimir Oane says it's time to help brands fi...

The education market -- as Apple and others have noticed -- represents a huge mobile opportunity, and today sees the launch of an app that plays on that potential, with added gamification and social t...

Local advertising startup,and recent Google Offers partner,Signpostis announcing its Series A funding round this morning to the tune of $3.75 million, led by Spark Capital. Other angels also participa...

Facebook has been credited with helping to power the 'Arab Spring' movement of democracy, and in further 'we plan to save the world' news, it is now unveiling a new feature: tell the world you're an o...

In mobile world, bigger is not always better. That can be the case for specs, and it can also be the case for market share: and a report out today from Juniper Research highlights a case in point for ...

Broadcast TV, set top boxes, IPTVs, DVRs and PVRs are going the way of the Dodo, and today's connected TVs have to be able to take advantage of the same smart processors and dynamic OS tech that power...

Chicago-based startup GrubHub, a service that lets you order food for delivery or take out from local restaurants online or by mobile phone, is debuting a new tablet technology for restaurants called...

Two closely watched cases in the music industry are about to go to trial involving a motley crew of characters: Eminem's producers, Rob Zombie, Rick James (his estate at least) and Steve Jobs.Apple is...

Dozens of startups have launched in the past few years claiming to fix the broken recruiting and hiring process. One of them, Readyforce, has already signed up some well-known startups with a relative...

Pinterest is starting to fill up its own Pinboard... with money people. Sarah Tavel, a former VP at Bessemer Venture Partners (the same BVP that led a Series A round in Pinterest in 2011), has now joi...

Bigger isn't necessarily better but in the case of Jawbone's Jambox, it might actually work out. Typically known for their Bluetooth headsets and the ill-fated-but-not-quite-dead UP band, Jawbone has ...

Seven years in, Revision3and its stable of web stars have more than survived the tough early days of building a video content business on the web. The San Francisco company is now bringing in a respec...

It's the problem every manager or CEO faces: how do you stay aware of what everyone is doing? Thinkfuse, which debuted at last year's TechCrunch Disrupt in New York, is out of beta with a product that...

Edmodo is one of the startups whose name pops up a lot when you talk about "edtech." Founded in 2007, the company is almost old school, yet, in spite of the influx of new education-focused startups, E...

Has The Washington Post acquired Digg, as reported in The Next Web? Sort of.We're hearing from multiple sources that the Post has hired the Digg team, but is not acquiring the site or the technology. ...

So this is pretty fun. A University of California at Berkeley freshman named Derek Low uploaded a video to YouTube today of what he's calling the "BRAD", or the Berkeley Ridiculously Automated Dorm. A...

There aren't too many people who love email these days, but few of us can actually live without it. Thankfully, there are a number of startups that are trying to make email more manageable. One of the...

Y Combinator might be best known for software plays like Dropbox and Airbnb. But it's also harbored a few hardware companies, notably the one that blew out Kickstarter funding records with Pebble Watc...

If you love watching TV shows on Hulu but don't have a cable subscription, things could get a bit more complicated in the near future. According to the New York Post, Hulu could soon start requiring i...

If you love watching TV shows on Hulu but don't have a cable subscription, things could get a bit more complicated in the near future. According to the New York Post, Hulu could soon start requiring i...

The British Phonographic Industry (BPI) finally got its will today. According to a ruling by Britain's High Court, UK Internet providers must now block access to Swedish file-sharing site The Pirate B...

ifeelgoods has a brilliant idea -- letting you earn Facebook Credits for ecommerce purchases or following a brand on Twitter -- but now it has to convince big companies and shopping sites to adopt its...

For game developers who thought about applying for the $100,000 Build Fund from rewards network Kiip but didn't get around to it yet good news! The deadline has been extended from today until May 30....

Socialcam is hustling to be the "Instagram for video" app of choice, battling neck-and-neck for the top spot in the iTunes app store with its main rival, Viddy. It turns out that Socialcam now has a n...

Socialcam is hustling to be the "Instagram for video" app of choice, battling neck-and-neck for the top spot in the iTunes app store with its main rival, Viddy. It turns out that Socialcam now has a n...

SalesVu, the maker of a mobile payments service designed for business customers, is launching a major update with SalesVu 2.0, live now in the iTunes App Store. The company is somewhat similar to Squa...

Google is announcing some new search advertising features designed to help advertisers drive more app downloads, and to track those downloads.The first feature, an Ad Extension, seems aimed at compani...

According to Akamai's latest State of the Internet report, the average Internet connection speed around the world was 2.3 Mbps by the end of 2011. That's down about 14% from the previous quarter. In t...

Microsoft really wants to make sure it can compete against Amazon and Apple in the e-books space -- and it's putting its money where its mouth is. In addition to the $300 million Microsoft is investin...

Getting a new laptop or buying a new license for an operating system is often cheaper in the U.S. than in most other countries. Europeans, for example, are used to paying a hefty premium for Apple pro...

CustomMade , an online marketplace that connects shoppers with artisans to make customized goods, has raised $4 million in funding co-led by Google Ventures and Schooner Capital. Existing investors La...

Brit Morin, the Martha Stewart of tech, is today announcing a $1.25 million seed round for her technology and content company Brit. The list of investors is actually pretty sympatico with "the next ge...

Brit Morin, the Martha Stewart of tech, is today announcing a $1.25 million seed round for her technology and content company Brit. The list of investors is actually pretty sympatico with "the next ge...

Want a zombie on your underwear? Good, because soon, you will have that opportunity. Today, there comes more proof that mobile gaming is the entertainment franchise opp of the future as EA-owned PopCa...

With the rise of startups building on top of the collaborative consumption model - that is, where users are buying from and selling directly to other users - there's a growing need for some sort of sy...

Rovio to Houston. The Mighty Eagle as landed. Big time.Rovio just took to Twitter to announce that its latest Angry Birds installment, Angry Birds Space, was downloaded 50 million times in 35 days. As...

The mobile industry will reel in more than $1.5 trillion in revenues in 2012, with 28 percent of that, $400 billion, attributable to mobile data, according to new research out from analyst Chetan Shar...

Liftopia, the startup offering consumers discounts on ski tickets and other snow-related activities, is today launching a new e-commerce platform for the ticket sellers themselves called "Cloud Store ...

A bit of silly for your Monday morning: this is a flying, RC-controlled robotic dragon that actually breathes fire and sounds like a monstrous squeal demon as it takes off. The Dragon took a year to b...

Reuters is reporting that Nokia is exploring selling the Vertu phone line to holding company Permira for $264.26 million, freeing itself from the difficult process of selling phones no one wants to pe...

Sure, Windows Phone is still but a baby alongside Android and iOS, but the platform shows promise. Woz likes it. And the fact that it's backed by hardware partners like Samsung and Nokia says good thi...

Pepsi is launching a big rebranding campaign today, and the company says social media is going to play a crucial role. Specifically, PepsiCo Global Head of Digital Shiv Singh tells me that the biggest...

Barnes & Noble has found a new, major partner in its fight to get an edge over Amazon and Apple in the heating up market for e-books and the devices being used to consume them: it is teaming up wi...

The UK may have just entered a double-dip recession but that doesn't seem to have trickled down to how consumers are spending money on take-out food -- and the companies that are building businesses a...

Greylock Partners has been long focused on two distinct areas when it comes to venture investmentsconsumer and enterprise. The last consumer partner hire the firm made was former CEO of Mozilla, John ...

On the desktop, Opera's browser is only a minor player compared to Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome and Safari, but as a mobile browser, Opera competes head-to-head with Apple and Google. Worldwide,...

With a $4M investment, McCann Worldgroup has bought a 15% stake in Israeli incubator 'thetime'.This move isn't a particularly surprising considering 'thetime' was founded by Ilan Shiloah, who for the ...

Zillow, according to one report, may be closing in on a deal to buy rental marketing software maker RentJuice for $45 million, but in the meantime the online property portal is focusing on the rental ...

Wrapp, a social gifting service backed by Greylock Partners and Atomico, is crossing the pond with the U.S. launch of its mobile gift card and retail app. Wrapp, which was available previously only in...

When I became an entrepreneur at the age of twenty-three, I began in earnest, as do all entrepreneurs, chasing a dream. My dream was clear. I would build a consumer technology company that reached ten...

With all the chatter about Billion dollar valuations -- like Instagram, Evernote, Splunk -- combined with recent S1 filings and IPOs, the topic of tech company valuation is coming to the forefront of...

Apple still doesn't own iPad.com, apple.co.uk or many other domains that contain its name or names of its products, but it is now the proud owner of applecom.com and appleprinters.com -- two domains t...

Summer is on its way, and self-improvement is on everyone's minds -- so it seems like each day I hear about a new must-have app focused on fitness, health, nutrition, or the "quantified self" in gener...

Weathermob, a mobile, social network for sharing weather reports around the globe, has raised $360,000 in new funding from a number of angel investors including Christopher Austin, Tim Albright, Drew ...