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Cooliris Gets $9.6 Million From Kleiner Perkins And Others, Releases New Version Of LiveShare Group Photo Sharing App
Feb 14, 9:58AM
Multimedia browser plugin Cooliris, which lets you view photo and video content on the web in a more visually appealing manner (screencap above), has snagged $9.6 million in Series C financing from its investors, including Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Deutsche Telekom's T-Venture, DAG Ventures and The Westly Group. The company plans on using the new financing to further strategic partnerships and product. Cooliris is also releasing a new version of its LiveShare group photo sharing app conjunction with the funding announcement. LiveShare 1.2 allows users to discover and share content with their Facebook friends through the creation of shared group photo streams. A location-based photo sharing app entering the same space as Instagram and PicsPlz, you can find LiveShare 1.2 on the iPhone, Android and Windows Phone 7.
App Filters What Pages You've "Liked" On Facebook: Why Isn't This A Facebook Feature?
Feb 14, 7:57AM
The meaning of a Facebook Like has been getting more and more vague ever since Facebook changed the wording from "Become a fan" to "Like" on Facebook Fan Pages. What's even more frustrating than this is that there's no simple way, aside from visiting the "Activities," "Interests" and "Other Pages" part of your Facebook profile, to figure out what Pages you have liked in the past. In essence: It's complicated.
Snapdragon Bites Back: Qualcomm Announces A Quad-Core 2.5Ghz Chipset For Mobile Devices
Feb 14, 7:01AM
I've been writing about the mobile industry for a few years now, and there's one thing that still blows my mind each and every day: the rate at which these companies are able to make new feel old. Everytime something comes along and rocks our world, someone else in the industry responds with "Oh yeah? Well our new thing is twice as fast! And twice as efficient! Oh, and ours is completely powered by the laughter of unicorns! Beat that!" And then someone does. Just 3 weeks ago, NVIDIA announced the Tegra 3, a 1.5 GHz, Quad-Core chipset for smart phones and tablets. Madness, right? Texas Instruments responded with their own quad-core chipset — except theirs clocked in at 2 Ghz. Now it's Qualcomm's turn. Their rebuttal? 4 cores, each running at a theoretical maximum of 2.5 GHz. Punch it, Chewie! 
Spanish Design Student Creates Sleek New Spotify Gadget
Feb 14, 5:50AM
Leave it to those ambitious, young grad students to show us the objects of our desire that we didn't even realize we desired. Thanks to Jordi Parra, an Interaction Design student at the Umeå Institute of Design in Sweden, we now have a futuristic new music player that lets you listen to Spotify from the comfort of your living room. (Only if your living room is in Europe, however, as Spotify is not yet available in the U.S.) At first glance, the player -- which Parra made as part of his final design project in collaboration with Spotify -- looks like a digital lovechild of Jonathan Ive and the brilliant Swedes at Ikea. Perhaps the coolest feature of the product's design is its inclusion of 192 LED nodes, which display volume levels, battery life, and Internet connectivity on the device's face. Not too shabby for a degree project!
Steve Jobs On The Apple Campus Is Like A Double Rainbow
Feb 14, 3:21AM
On Friday the WSJ published an article entitled "Apple's Jobs Calls Shots From Home" which depicted the Apple CEO as still having a generous hand in the day to day going ons of the company despite being on medical leave. Jobs involvement comes as no surprise, as Jobs himself said in the statement announcing his absence, "I will continue as CEO and be involved in major strategic decisions for the company." 
Inside the DNA of the Facebook Mafia
Feb 14, 2:54AM
A lot of things about Facebook have been impressive, even by the Silicon Valley standards. Almost no other Valley company has reached so many people around the world so quickly. Few Valley companies have been considered important forces in causes as disparate as planning a party or a political uprising. Rarely has a kid in his early 20s held onto the CEO reins this long. And of course, no other Valley company has been made into a star-studded, over the top Oscar-nominated film. So it shouldn't be surprising that the Facebook mafia-- made up of high profile alumni responsible for building companies like Quora, Cloudera, Jumo, Asana and Path-- has also emerged so early and become so distinct, well before Facebook has come close to a major liquidity event. Like most of the things that make Facebook unique, part of this is due to Facebook itself, and part is due to the time in which the company was formed.
The Power Of Voice: A Conversation With The Head Of Google's Speech Technology
Feb 13, 9:55PM
For all the whiz-bang graphics and nifty apps appearing on smart phones these days, there are still few things that feel more futuristic than pulling out your phone, uttering the words, "find directions to the Exploratorium", and having Google immediately do your bidding. The technology is becoming widely available via apps on the iPhone and deep integration into Android, and this is really only the beginning. Earlier this month I had the chance to sit down with Mike Cohen, the man who leads all of Google's speech technology efforts, to get a look behind the curtain at why Google has invested so much into voice, and where things are going from here. A Look Back Before we discuss where we stand now, it's worth looking at Cohen's past, which also serves as a good history lesson on speech technology. Cohen has been at Google since 2004, but he's been straddling the intersection of voice and technology for decades, getting his start at the Stanford Research Institute in the early 1980s.
Instagram Finally Gets A Better Website — For The Grammys. A Sign Of What's To Come?
Feb 13, 9:36PM
When it comes to Instagram, there are generally two complaints: 1) there's no Android app yet. 2) the web experience is severely lacking. Today they've finally taken a stab at the latter. Well, sort of. The Instagram team has put together a what they're calling a "microsite" as a subdomain of their main website. Why? Because some of the team is at the Grammys right now and they're working alongside MTV to cover the event in the filtered, square images that are Instagram's hallmark at the moment.
Say Goodbye To The Long Tail Of Product Resellers, At Least On The Internet
Feb 13, 8:42PM
Editor's note: This post was written by Alex Rampell, the CEO of TrialPay. Rampell is a regular contributor to TechCrunch – see his previous guest posts here. Say goodbye to the long tail of product resellers, at least on the internet. The 1980s and 1990s witnessed the slow death of the "mom and pop" general store, replaced by superstores like Walmart that sold everything from butter to guns. Regardless of one's position on this trend, it makes classic economic sense: by buying in bulk, Walmart commands better prices with suppliers, and then passes on lower prices to consumers. 
You Want A Better Search Engine? Sortfix Suggests Better Search Terms
Feb 13, 7:31PM
It's interesting that TechCrunch's Michael Arrington kicked off a debate today about the current problems with search. Because it's clear that while few players feel able to take on the might of Google, there remain a few startups out there trying to attack the problem from different angles. One of them is Israeli startup SortFix, who I met on a recent trip to Tel Aviv in Israel (more on that soon). Previously, SortFix tried concentrating its search functionality directly through its website and through its iPad app. But now SortFix has created a FireFox extension for Google which makes use of SortFix's algorithms to generate suggested words to improve your search. It's still in beta but you can try it here. 
Nokia Keeps Pumping Meego And Symbian – But What App Developer Will Now Bother?
Feb 13, 6:58PM
Nokia CEO Stephen Elop has been on stage tonight at a Mobile World Congress press conference talking about Nokia's future relationship with Microsoft. Various blogs have been live blogging (here's a post from Engadget). But sitting back and listening to Elop's explanation about how Symbian devices will still be shipped and a Meego device, due to ship this year, will be used for experimentation and "disruption", one has to ask the simple question: Where are the apps? While the first MeeGo product will ship this year with a Qt framework, Qt is unlikely to go onto Nokia's Windows Phone, thus killing off all those developers who studied Qt. "If we encourage a fork in Windows Phone's development platform, we could create a situation where we confuse developers and consumers," said Elop tonight in Barcelona. Bang goes that talent base, then. 
We're Live In Barcelona For Mobile World Congress 2011!
Feb 13, 6:22PM
We've made it. 16 hours, 7,000 miles, and 1 exploded MacBook Pro power adapter later, we've made it. We've trekked halfway around the world to Barcelona to bring you the latest and greatest from the biggest mobile show in Europe: Mobile World Congress. While the conference officially starts on February 14th, a few folks always like to get the party started a bit early. Samsung, Sony Ericcson, and Nokia all have press conferences scheduled at 6 PM CET (That's 9 AM Pacific for all the folks back home) on the 13th — and unless any more of our gear decides to spontaneously combust, we'll have live blogs of both Samsung and Sony Ericcson's announcements going down as they happen. We're expecting a pretty good show this year. Stay tuned in for all the news!
Close or View
Feb 13, 6:08PM
Push notifications are the new prime time, water-front property, Boardwalk and Park Place of phase 2 realtime. The domino effect of this alert mechanism will transform the iPad and therefore the downlevel iPhone and Web clients in turn. Soon we will be able to write filters directly to that middle layer buffer where state is stored, with business rules that let some things through to compliant apps and push data from weaker clients to second class citizenship. This in turn will provide powerful incentives to clean up wayward apps, as iPad economics propel such power features for an additional price or more targeted information about user interests.
The End Of History, Part II
Feb 13, 4:00PM
The world is quaking. Egypt and Tunisia are overthrown; Gabon, Jordan, Sudan, Syria and Yemen are rocking. Some say this is thanks to Twitter and Facebook. Others, notably Malcolm Gladwell and Evgeny Morozov, say that social media are politically irrelevant and/or dangerous. China has censored "Egypt", Syria has legalized Facebook, and the president of Sudan has declared he will use social media to crush his enemies. You couldn't make this stuff up. What's going on? Who to believe? Fear not. I can explain. Everyone is right, and what's going on is nothing more than the end of international politics and history as we know them. Welcome to our brave new world, and about time, too. The old one sure was miserable while it lasted.
Al Jazeera's Social Revolution (In Realtime)
Feb 13, 3:54PM
While you can debate about the exact role of social media, specifically Twitter and Facebook, in Egypt's revolution, there is no question about its role as a new global media channel. Where once people tuned into CNN to watch governments collapse, this time around they tuned into Al Jazeera on the Web (at least in English speaking countries lie the U.S. where Al Jazeera English is not widely carried on cable systems). Thanks to Chartbeat, we now have a realtime snapshot of what activity looked like on Al Jazeera's English website on Friday when Egypt's president Hosni Mubarak resigned. Everyone wanted to watch and they flooded to Al Jazeera's English website. Concurrent realtime visits spiked from about 50,000 right before noon ET to 135,371 when the snapshot above was taken. The number of people simultaneously on Al Jazeera's website kept going as high as 200,000—that was at any given second, and translated into millions of people watching on the Web.
Why Engineers Are Better Off Joining Startups
Feb 13, 3:50PM
It is truly a great time to be an engineer building new things. Gadgets from sci-fi movies of 10 years ago are creeping up on us in the real world and mobile devices and social networking have made the internet go truly mainstream. We are on the cusp of seeing even more world changing ideas becoming a reality when everyone is walking around with powerful computers connected with over 20MBps of bandwidth to millions of people. To top it all off, there is another technology boom happening right now. Anyone who has lived in Silicon Valley through a few business cycles can feel it just by watching the traffic on 101, or reading about "bubbles" in the tech press. In the previous tech booms, a steady stream of top-notch technical graduates from other countries helped fill the recruiting needs of startups flush with VC money. But that is no longer the case. When I talk to recent top graduates from the IITs, my own alma-mater, I can clearly see the trend—very few of the rest of the world's best recent graduates are planning to build their careers in the US over the next decade. In addition, we have multiple successful large companies, most notably Google and Facebook, which have hired huge numbers of engineers and plan to grow their hiring rates even more.
KindleLendingClub Forced By Amazon To Rebrand; Now BookLending.com
Feb 13, 3:30PM
In early January, Amazon rolled out a feature that allows Kindle users to lend books to another Kindle user a for 14 day period. KindleLendingClub spawned from this feature as a way to connect people for lending their e-books. The service quickly accumulated more than 12,000 people lending and borrowing on the platform. Users can post books that they want to lend in a public forum and can also request to borrow books. And you can search for borrowers and lenders by title on the platform. Unfortunately, KindleLendingClub just received a call from Amazon, requesting that the startup change its name and domain. After all, Amazon owns the trademark for 'Kindle' and is within its rights to ask the startup to change its name. And Amazon has enforced this in the past.
Search Still Sucks
Feb 13, 7:53AM
A decade ago I tried Google for the first time. Like everyone said, it was magic - the result I wanted was right there at the top. For someone who'd been using AltaVista for years before that it was a very pleasant experience. Anyone who was on the Internet before Google came along knows exactly what I'm talking about. Google just felt right. It got the job done. It's been a creeping feeling, growing over the years, but it sort of feels like pre-Google again. Search is a really bad overall experience. Travel searches, for example, are a joke, and startups like Gogobot are popping up to try to fix that. When I'm trying to figure out the best hotel for me when I travel I bail on Google entirely and head to Tripadvisor (shudder), and Gogobot. Same for gadget product reviews. GDGT, Amazon and occasionally Consumer Reports seem to have the best collections of data, so I just go there directly and bypass Google. In fact, I use Google mostly for navigation, not discovery these days. Meaning I know the document I'm trying to find and figure out the best search query to locate it. But pure discovery? It's a shit show of layer upon layer of SEO madness vying for my click.
Google Explains, Apologizes For, CR-48 Spam
Feb 13, 7:04AM
Early this morning people who have received a Google CR-48 notebook, and people who've requested one, got hit with 100 or more emails from a newly created Google Group. Google sent out an email this evening apologizing for the emails and explaining what happened. Google was planning on launching the group next week for all users who have been selected to be in the program. But someone discovered it early and posted to it. 
The Guardian's David Leigh Talks About Julian Assange and Wikileaks
Feb 13, 1:57AM
"Freedom of speech is being denied [to] Luke Harding while Wikileaks and Julian are getting in to bed with these dictators; these enemies of freedom of speech..." - David Leigh
The Guardian's Wikileaks Book Is This Generation's "All The President's Men"
Feb 13, 1:56AM
Two weeks ago, I reviewed the New York Times' book: 'Open Secrets: WikiLeaks, War and American Diplomacy'. It's a remarkable work of journalism, combining the paper's collected reporting on Wikileaks, with editor Bill Keller's personal account of working with Assange. For my money, Keller's account was the stand-out highlight of the book - a behind the scenes journalism thriller, punctuated by details from the leaked documents themselves. In fact, as I read through the bulk of the book, I found myself wishing that Keller's style had continued throughout. Even in edited, compiled form, the revelations from "Cablegate" and the Iraq war logs are a lot to digest and it would have been wonderful to have Keller as narrator to walk the reader through them all. That didn't affect my review, though: it was too much to expect the Times to publish that kind of comprehensive narrative so quickly. You can imagine, then, how delighted I was to receive a copy of the Guardian's new crash-published Wikileaks book and discover that it was all the things I wanted from the Times' book. And more.
Lissn Strips Down To Its Skivvies: Three Anonymous People Chat While Others Listen
Feb 12, 9:54PM
When Lissn launched on stage at TechCrunch50 in September 2009, we described it as sort of a "broader Twitter meets a simpler Google Wave". Well, like the latter, the idea behind Lissn never really caught on. By March of last year, the service decided to pivot a bit to be based more around individuals rather than specific conversations. But that didn't really work either. So now, with version 3, they've decided to strip away basically everything. Founder Myke Armstrong says that they started removing features after hearing author Eric Ries talk about creating a "minimum viable product". He determined that Lissn, at its core, was simply about conversations, not the people having them or the topics they're about. So here we have the new Lissn, which is sort of like a Chatroulette for conversations now.
Why Starting Justin.tv Was A Really Bad Idea, But I'm Glad We Did It Anyway
Feb 12, 9:07PM
Right now I'm neck deep in product launch mode, putting the finishing touches on our new mobile video application—Socialcam. Of course, I've been here before . . . Years ago when we launched the Justin.tv show we had no idea what we were doing. This much was obvious to anyone who watched. Outsiders attribute far more strategic thought to the venture than we gave it. Some think that we planned all along to start a live platform, and that the Justin.tv show itself was a way of promoting that platform. While this ended up happening, none of it had crossed our minds at the time. Emmett Shear and I had been working on Kiko, the first Javascript web calendaring application in the Microsoft Outlook style. We prototyped the application in our final year at Yale, went on to raise money from Y Combinator, then continued working on it for over a year. Then Google Calendar was released—boom—absorbing most of our nascent user base and capturing most of the early adopter mindshare. But to be perfectly honest, Kiko would have failed regardless. We were too easily distracted and hadn't really thought through the strategic implications of owning a standalone calendaring property (hint: no one wants a calendar without email). A short time later we were burned out and spending most of our time playing Xbox with the Reddit guys in Davis Square—hardly a startup success story.
Gillmor Gang 2.12.11 (TCTV)
Feb 12, 6:00PM
On the Gillmor Gang, I recalled that moment when Gabe Rivera suggested I log into Twitter. Then came the year where I posted nothing, followed by the gaming of Track, the FailWhale, and a lot of noise about how social media and the enterprise didn't have a thing in common. Of course, they were wrong, and Marc Benioff proved us right. Chatter.com was announced at the Super Bowl, and now millions are slowly moving down the runway toward takeoff. Chatter rolled out @mentions and Likes this Sunday, and we heard the same old noises about applying social signals to business processes. Fellow Gangster John Taschek and I have been experimenting with @mentions for some time now on Twitter. Together with direct messages, the two signals have provided a key tool for communicating what we want publicly, and what we want to keep private. Email can kiss its lack of the @sign goodbye. And along with it, the malignant hierarchical constraints that choke serendipity and calcify progress. 
(Founder Stories) Fred Wilson Explains Why He Wouldn't Invest In Groupon Or Pandora
Feb 12, 5:30PM
Few VCs have a hotter hand right now than Fred Wilson. His firm, Union Square Ventures, is an investor in Twitter, Zynga, Foursquare, Tumblr, Etsy, Clickable, and more . In this episode of Founder Stories, he talks to host Chris Dixon about Union Square's investment thesis has changed from going after all web apps to companies that are "building a large networks of engaged users." (Watch the video above). It has to be be both a large network and engaged users. By that requirement, he says he wouldn't invest in Pandora (which just filed for an IPO yesterday, although this was taped a couple weeks ago) because Pandora listeners just sit back. The users aren't doing anything in Pandora," he says, "even though Pandora is a great company." Similarly, he wouldn't invest in Groupon. Not because he thinks it's a bad business, it's just not his area of focus. "Groupon is an ad network," he says, "we wouldn't invest in that." Within ecommerce, he feels that marketplaces (like Etsy) do fall under his definition, but things like Diapers.com or Zappos would not. Wilson also mentions some companies that got away which he wishes he had invested in: AirBnB and Bump, which he lost to Sequoia. 
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