Hi there!
Here's the latest feed from TechCrunch.
Add feeds@feed2email.net to your contact list to make sure you receive all your emails
Make sure to visit feed2email.net to get more feeds sent to your inbox.
To find out which feeds you are subscribed to, or to get further help, just reply to this email.
"Apple Is Evil! Boycott The iPad! – Sent From My iPad"
Feb 01, 8:34AM
Here we go again. It has been a few weeks since we had a story about how Apple is evil, or how the relatively closed system the fuels the iPad and iPhone will be the downfall of society. We were due. And tonight we got such a story. Maybe. Or maybe not at all. It doesn't really matter. What's important is that Apple is closed! Closed, I tell you! The empire is going to collapse any moment now. Tonight, The New York Times is reporting that Apple is "further tightening its control of the App Store". How? Apparently, they rejected a Sony e-book reader app. Here's the key blurb:
Blekko Bans Content Farms Like Demand Media's eHow From Its Search Results
Feb 01, 7:57AM
Blekko, the perky little search engine startup that lets you customize your search results, is taking the fight against web spam to a new level. It already allows searchers to mark results as spam and keeps a spam clock that counts how many spam pages are on the web (743 million and counting). Now it is about to block content farms like Demand Media's eHow and Answerbag entirely. The top 20 sites its users have marked as a source of web spam will now be blocked (see full list below). Concerns are rising that spam is increasingly taking over search results. So much so that Google recently vowed to become more vigilant and downgrade content farms specifically in search rankings.
Deals Juggernaut Next Jump Hires a CFO, Looks To Add 100 Engineers In San Francisco
Feb 01, 7:10AM
Groupon gets all the attention, but another deal juggernaut that should be on your radar is New York City-based Next Jump. The company runs group discount shopping programs for 90,000 corporations and organizations, and powers MasterCard's loyalty rewards program. Investment bankers are sniffing around. The company is on a hiring spree. It just hired its first chief financial officer, ex-Googler Angus Kelsall, who used to run Google's international businesses in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. Another new addition to the executive team is Andrew Beranbom (he once ran Yahoo Shopping), who will take on the roles of chief social officer and VP of products. It acquired Y Combinator startup Flightcaster for its talent and plans to hire about 100 more engineers in San Francisco, mostly mobile. They will work under Sandeep Gupta, Next Jump's chief mobile engineer it nabbed from Yahoo last summer. 
Apple Reportedly Blocks Sony Reader App, May Foreshadow War With Amazon Kindle
Feb 01, 6:08AM
This evening the New York Times published an article titled Apple Moves to Tighten Control of App Store. An alternative title, should the report prove accurate, could be, Apple Underscores The Downsides Of Its Closed Platform. Really, things look like they are going to get nasty. According to the report, Apple blocked Sony's e-reader application from the iPhone and mandated that it would need to sell content via In-App purchases: The company has told some applications developers, including Sony, that they can no longer sell content, like e-books, within their apps, or let customers have access to purchases they have made outside the App Store. Apple rejected Sony's iPhone application, which would have let people buy and read e-books bought from the Sony Reader Store. Apple told Sony that from now on, all in-app purchases would have to go through Apple, said Steve Haber, president of Sony's digital reading division.
33Needs Brings Crowdsourced Funding To Social Startups
Feb 01, 4:48AM
The crowdsourced funding craze is picking up steam. Tonight we see the launch of 33needs, a site where socially-minded startups can raise initial seed funding from individual contributors on the Web. It is Kiva meets Kickstarter. Social startups post their "needs" in terms of how much money they are looking to raise, what problems they are going to solve and how they are going to do it, along with a video to help spread the word virally. People can invest $10, $100, $1,000 or more, and in return instead of getting shares in the company, they get a promised percentage of revenues for a specified period of time like 5 percent of revenues for three years.
Real Estate Community RentJuice Gets $6.2 Million From Tim Draper And Highland Capital
Feb 01, 4:05AM
RentJuice, an online community that allows real estate agents and brokers to view rental data in real time is announcing its Series B round of $6.2 million in funding today, led by Highland Capital and esteemed Draper Fisher Jurvetson founder Tim Draper. While not consumer facing, RentJuice is still useful to consumers as it can provide a broker with up to the minute data on whether a given property is available, thus preventing inaccuracies. It gives brokers "one-click syndication" or the ability to automatically post properties to consumer real estate sites like Craigslist, Trulia and Zillow. RentJuice also offers premium accounts where users can upgrade to features that automate administrative work like lead gen, advertising and paperwork.
Err, Call Me: Vumber Gives You Throw-Away Phone Numbers For Dating, Work
Feb 01, 3:33AM
By now you've probably heard of Google Voice, a service that lets you take one phone number and configure it to ring all of your phones — work, mobile, home, whatever — with plenty of settings to manage your inbound and outbound calls. But what if you wanted the opposite: a service that lets you spawn a multitude of phone numbers to be used and discarded at your leisure? That's where Vumber comes in. The service has actually been around for four years, but it was originally marketed exclusively toward people on dating sites. The use case is obvious: instead of handing out your real phone number to strangers, Vumber lets you spin up a new phone number, which you then redirect to your real phone. Then, when your date reveals that he hates animals and has lived in his mother's basement for a decade, you can simply deactivate the number. Around 30-40% of the service still caters to online dating, but Vumber can be used for other things.
Yammer Swings Back at Jive with a Survey and Salesforce with a Video (TCTV)
Feb 01, 2:33AM
The social enterprise wars are heating up. Last week, Jive's Tony Zingale came on to talk about a user survey that showed quantifiable value his customers were getting from Jive's software and answer why Yammer and Salesforce get the bulk of the industry press. I invited Salesforce's Marc Benioff and Yammer's David Sacks on the show if they wanted to rebut anything said. Sacks took me up on it, bringing his own user survey, a funny video aimed at today's Chatter launch, and some fighting words. All are below.
Google Dethrones Nokia As Top Seller Of Smartphones
Feb 01, 2:33AM
Android has passed yet another milestone in its race to the top: With 32.9 million handsets sold globally this last quarter, it has ousted longtime champion Nokia (with 31m) for the title of most popular smartphone OS maker in the world. It's a bit of an apples to oranges comparison, of course, since Nokia also makes its own handsets, but quibbling aside, the toppling of such an iconic mobile company is no small event. The numbers don't seem to include tablets, though it recently transpired that even the top-selling Android tablet sales were, to quote Samsung, "quite small." We won't see the Honeycomb effect until later in 2011. But it seems as though Android still has nowhere to go but up — that is, if you consider downmarket "up."
Instructure Launches To Root Blackboard Out Of Universities
Feb 01, 2:12AM
Mozy Founder Josh Coates launches Instructure today. He's hoping to disrupt the entrenched player in the University LMS space, Blackboard, and take a big part of its $377 million or so in revenue. In 2007 EMC acquired Mozy, an online backup solution, for $76 million. Coates stayed for another year, then left. Since then he's been helping Nepalese refugees integrate into American society, and he's a big WWII buff. He purchased and restored a M18 Hellcat Tank Destroyer. You can see the restoration process here (he keeps it in his garage). And here's a video of his wife blowing the crap out of the side of a gravel pit.
Review: Dell Streak 7
Feb 01, 1:09AM
Here we go again: another impressive 7-inch Android tablet with a Gorilla Glass screen, 4G networking, and a suave interface. But is this thing more of the same or something new. The tried-and-true 7-inch tablet is, by now, old hat. In fact, little about the Dell Streak 7 is new except the clear emphasis on media playback and T-Mobile's 4G wireless. On the aggregate, I'd say that this is a strong showing for Dell but does just enough to stand out from the current tablet crowd.
Former eHarmony Head Greg Waldorf Joins Accel As CEO-In-Residence
Feb 01, 12:34AM
Accel Partners is announcing today the addition of former eHarmony head CEO Greg Waldorf as CEO in residence. Waldof spent eleven years at eHarmony and five as CEO before leaving the company a couple of weeks ago and landing at Accel as of today. While at eHarmony, Waldorf oversaw an online dating business that raked in more than $1 billion in revenue. Under his helm the company expanded into over 15 countries worldwide. Waldorf has previously worked with Accel on the board of real estate startup Trulia.
Apple Makes Changes To Repair Policy Involving Liquid Sensors
Jan 31, 11:01PM
Apple has quietly made a change to its repair policy regarding the liquid contact indicators, or LCI. You may remember last years lawsuit surrounding the issue. Perhaps that had something to do with it. 
Bump Now Lets You Swap App Recommendations With A Tap
Jan 31, 10:57PM
You can tell a lot about a person from their mobile app library. Are they avid Doodle Jumpers, or do they prefer to challenge their wits with a few rounds of Civilization? Do they stretch their vocal chords to the beats of T-Pain or Glee's background choir? You get the idea. Given how much time people spend building out their app libraries, it doesn't come as much of a surprise that they love to share their collections with friends. In fact, Bump — an app that makes it easy to swap contact information, music, and other data between mobile devices — says that users have been asking for an easy way to share lists of their favorite apps for ages, and that it's the second most popular request overall (behind music sharing, which has already been implemented). Today, all of those users are getting their wish granted.
Google Teams Up With Twitter And SayNow To Bring Tweeting-By-Phone To Egypt
Jan 31, 10:39PM
It was only last week that Google acquired SayNow, a voice messaging startup, They're already putting them to good use. I mean really good use. As they've just announced on the Google Blog, the search giant has teamed up with the incoming SayNow team and Twitter to create a simple speak-to-tweet service for people currently engulfed in the turmoil in Egypt.
Egypt Shuts Down Noor, Its Last ISP
Jan 31, 10:07PM
We're hearing reports on Twitter that the coverage of Noor Group's DSL service, Egypt's last standing ISP which powers the Egyptian Stock Exchange as well as sites of major brands like Coca-Cola and Exxon Mobile, is being shut down, meaning there is a risk of Egypt losing all Internet coverage. According to Jacob Applebaum the shut down is occurring in stages and certain sites are still online, "noor.net shut all except NTG, the National Technology Group providing IT processing to the aviation, banking and financial sectors." The ISP's website itself is offline.
LetsLunch Launches and We've Got 100 Invites
Jan 31, 9:42PM
Earlier I wrote about an interesting new wave of companies trying to one-up LinkedIn, by using recommendation engines to help navigate your professional life. While LinkedIn made sense of your off-line social graph and how it intersects with friends' social graphs, these new companies are essentially trying to rank your social graph and let you use that information to get ahead. Earlier I wrote about Mixtent, which is trying to solve inefficiencies in the labor market. Another site launching tomorrow at the Founder Institute's Founder Showcase is LetsLunch. LetsLunch tackles another awkward and inefficient necessity of the business world: Networking. 
Facebook Has Been Refining Their Troll-Slaying Comment System For Months; Finally Ready To Roll?
Jan 31, 9:32PM
Back in October of last year, news started to trickle out that Facebook was completely revamping their commenting system plugin. The very thought had to send a chill down the spine of commenting startups like Disqus, Echo, and Livefyre. In a statement to us at the time, Facebook confirmed the upgrades, and vaguely said, "we'll have more to share in the coming weeks." Well, weeks turned to months — nothing. But that may be about to change. Facebook is on the verge of launching a full commenting system for third-party sites, CNET's Caroline McCarthy reports today. She cites multiple sources who claim the product should be ready to roll out in a matter of weeks. And apparently it could be implemented at launch on a number of high-profile sites (no, not us — unless AOL has us totally out of the loop on this one). 
Kickstarter: The aTrackt Improves Apple's Keyboard And Trackpad Ergonomics
Jan 31, 9:16PM
I wasn't convinced this particular project was worth its salt, but a little reflection convinced me. I don't use Apple's dainty little desk accessories — I always go back to a nice, meaty mechanical keyboard and high-performance mouse, because Apple's keyboards are like toys and the trackpad is no good for gaming. But hey, some people like 'em. The trouble is their naturally light and slippery nature, which causes them to slide about and become separated. I would have thought Apple would foresee this and install powerful magnets in that round bit of the casing, so they'd stick together, but they didn't, so it's left to the ever-inventive fans to justify their purchase with a home-brewed accessory. The aTrackt on Kickstarter really does solve the problem, and passes the only test it needs to, in my opinion: if I had the keyboard and trackpad, I wouldn't be caught dead without one of these as well.
Exposed: Apple's Terrible Sin in China (TCTV)
Jan 31, 9:04PM
Last I night I had the good fortune to see Mike Daisey's highly acclaimed show The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs at the Berkeley Repertory Theater. It's both an entertaining and acutely moving performance that anyone who owns an Apple product has a moral duty to see. Daisey is not only a brilliant monologist in the tradition of Michael Moore and Spalding Gray, but he's also a crusading journalist who has exposed the inhumane working conditions of the workers at the Foxconn factory in Shenzhen, China. Daisey went to Shenzhen and stood outside the monstrous Foxconn factory and interviewed its workers – some as young as 12 years old – about the inhumane working conditions there. This is what he found… Video ahead.
Video: Literally Eric Schmidt, Literally
Jan 31, 8:48PM
All great CEOs have presentation secrets. Apple CEO Steve Jobs says "boom!" a lot — and other superlatives. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer loves to repeat certain words three times — often while clapping his hands. But what about departing Google CEO Eric Schmidt? What's his secret? It's the use of the word "literally", literally.
4chan Founder Unleashes Canvas On The World
Jan 31, 8:44PM
Canvas launches today for 4,000 or so lucky souls. Seven year old 4chan, created by now-23 year old Christopher Poole, continues to delight and enrage the Internet. Major Internet memes were either created or spread on 4Chan, as were more denial of service attacks than we can count. Twelve million or so people a month visit the site, and at any given moment there are 60,000 - 70,000 people on 4chan. 4chan's success, says Poole, is based on three things. Real time collaboration as visitors riff back and forth about posted items, often pictures. A true shared experience as an item pops up on 4chan and then eventually falls off the board (there are no archives). And fluid identity - to add content on 4chan all you have to do is write something, upload a file and complete a captcha. There are no user accounts. But 4chan isn't Poole's ultimate goal. He's taken what works there, changed other things, and created something wholly new - Canvas.
Adult Movie Industry Follows RIAA's Footsteps, Sees Lawsuits As New Revenue Source
Jan 31, 8:33PM
It used to be that when you thought of BitTorrent-related lawsuits you'd think of the RIAA, or maybe the MPAA. It may be time to update that line of thinking. TorrentFreak notes that we're now approaching 100,000 copyright infringement lawsuits filed here in the US of A in the past 12 months alone. The thing is, it turns out that pornography studios are now where the RIAA was several years ago, suing everybody under the sun in order to scare people into no longer illegally downloading their content. This should be fun for everyone.
2RedBeans Is A JDate For Chinese-Americans
Jan 31, 8:02PM
The success of JDate, an online dating service aimed towards matching Jewish singles, has proven dating sites for niche religious or cultural groups can actually work. Today, 2RedBeans, a graduate of the Founder Institute, has launched a dating site exclusively focused on matching Chinese-Americans. The site has a slightly different twist from most dating sites—2RedBeans tries to match singles in accordance with Chinese cultural values. For example, the site's matchmaking algorithm places special emphasis on unique characteristics that are possibly relevant to the Chinese; such as date of immigration, and highest level of education. 
Facebook Launches 'Startup Days': Monthly Hacker Events For Platform Developers
Jan 31, 7:08PM
As part of the launch of Startup America, a national campaign to "celebrate, inspire, and accelerate high-growth entrepreneurship in the U.S."; Facebook has announced a new initiative called 'Startup Days.' Facebook will hold 12 monthly Startup Days in 2011 to "provide early-stage companies with engineering and design support on the Facebook Platform." These meetings, which will be held around the country, will provide entrepreneurs with resources to build social applications. Facebook has also announced it will continue its efforts to stay active in open source communities.
If at any time you'd like to stop receiving these messages, just send an email to feeds_feedburner_com_techcrunch+unsubscribe-hmdtechnology=gmail.com@mail.feed2email.net.
To stop all future emails from feed2email.net you can reply to this email with STOP in the subject line. Thanks
