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Hipmunk Takes Simple Flight Search And Makes It Even Easier On The iPhone
Feb 22, 9:27AM
Hipmunk is one of those things that sells itself. You look at it side-by-side with the alternative ways to search for airline travel and it's a joke. And that's exactly why it's so awesome that they've been able to translate that experience over to the iPhone — and perhaps make it even a little easier. If you've used Hipmunk on the web, you'll know the drill: You enter a "From", you enter a "To", you enter the "Dates". And then, if applicable, you change the "Fare Type" and "People", and you're set. Hipmunk does the rest for you, combing over the listings they have to find you the best flights sorted by "Agony", "Cost", "Depart", or "Length". It really couldn't be an easier.
I Will Check My Phone At Dinner And You Will Deal With It
Feb 22, 5:21AM
The next time you go out to dinner, look around. Depending on the restaurant, there will be anywhere from a few people with their heads buried in their phones, to a ton of people in that position. If you don't see any, keep watching, you will. This topic of discussion came up this past weekend when I took a trip outside of the Bay Area bubble to go visit my parents. My mother has the stance that I can only assume most mothers do: you shouldn't check your phone at the dinner table. So naturally, to comply with her request, every few minutes I would check my phone under the table.
4SquareAnd7YearsAgo Knows Where You Checked-In Last Year
Feb 22, 3:37AM
From the folks that brought you FlickSquare now comes 4SquareAnd7YearsAgo, a simple app that emails you with a reminder of where you've checked in on Foursquare from a year ago. All you need to to is sign into the app on FourSquare and the app will email you with last year's checkins. That simple. And if you didn't check-in on any given day the email skips. Launched at FourSquare hackfest by Jonathan Wegener, Benny Wong and Matt Raoul the app has caught the attention of Foursquare founders as well as bloggers and industry notables. Says Wong, "You know that mode in Mariokart where you can race against yourself as a ghost? Yeah, it's kinda like that." Indeed, plugging into the app and receiving the email is a delightful lesson in nostalgia, "Oh, I went there!" Don't know how long it will endure, but for now it's cool.
Engineers Recruit Engineers With Hackruiter
Feb 22, 2:07AM
Previously video-hiring service HireHive, the founders behind Y Combinator-backed Hackruiter have taken the next logical step in being solving the problem of hiring good people, and have actually become recruiters themselves. While we've chronicled the Silicon Valley talent crunch in a number of ways, we've never covered a startup actually attempting to disrupt the process of engineering recruiting. Until now. Says founder Nicholas Bergson-Shilcock, "A lot of people approach hiring as a purely technical problem. We think there's a lot of value in approaching it from a human standpoint as technical people." 
Adobe: Flash Coming To Android Tablets "Within A Few Weeks"
Feb 22, 1:52AM
Earlier today there was quite a bit of commotion in the tech press over a Verizon ad that stated that Flash wouldn't be making its way to Android tablets until Spring 2011. Which has the potential to be pretty far off (as late as June), especially given that the Motorola Xoom — the first tablet to run Android Honeycomb — will be coming out in a few days. Now Adobe has issued a blog post clarifying just how long we'll have to wait: they say it will be available "within a few weeks of Android 3 (Honeycomb) devices becoming available, the first of which is expected to be the Motorola Xoom". Which sounds like it should be around mid-March, though Adobe has still left itself some wiggle room. At least it's a lot better than June.
YC-Funded HelloFax: Sign And Send Faxes From Your Browser, Without The Hassle
Feb 22, 1:25AM
In a perfect world, the fax machine would have taken the hint by now and made a graceful exit as it was supplanted by superior (and more environmentally friendly) technologies like email and e-signatures. Alas, faxes are still around, and some businesses insist on using them on a daily basis. Fortunately companies like eFax have sprung up to serve as stand-ins for fax machines, and now there's a new Y Combinator-funded startup that's looking to make life even easier. Meet HelloFax. Now, online fax services aren't anything new. eFax and MyFax (which was just acquired by the former) both offer robust services to deal with faxes without having to actually own a machine. At least, that's the promise. But HelloFax founders Joseph Walla and Neal O'Mara say that these services make it a pain to actually fill out forms and sign documents, which leads people to print them out, sign them, and then scan them into their computers to send them back (which sort of defeats the point). HelloFax wants to fix this.
Despite 861.5 Percent Growth, Android Market Revenues Remain Puny
Feb 21, 11:29PM
You read the headline "Android Market grows a staggering 861.5 per cent", and you think, "Wow, Android is really on a tear." But then you look at the fine print, and you realize that Android Market revenues are still barely registering, and that the only reason they grew so much in 2010 was because in 2009 they were nearly non-existent. According to a chart making the rounds from UK-based research firm IHS, Android Market revenues in 2010 came in at an estimated $102 million, up from $11 million the year before. And how did that compare to revenues from Apple's App Store? Apple App Store revenues came in at an estimated $1.7 billion in 2010, almost 20 times bigger than Android. And Apple App Store revenue grew at a not-too-shabby 131.9 percent rate. More importantly, Apple accounts for 83 percent of the total estimated app store revenues. 
Is The First Official Chrome OS Device A Monitor Or All-In-One PC? Nope.
Feb 21, 9:17PM
Earlier today we received a tip to check out the blog Chrome OS Site for the details on the first official Chrome OS device. Obviously intrigued, I clicked through. There, I read about not a notebook or netbook running the OS, but rather a monitor! Specifically, the report has Acer supposedly unveiling this "monitor", or perhaps all-in-one PC, called the DX241H, as the first actual Chrome OS device. Several other reports along these lines followed. Weird, right? Well yes. Because from what we're hearing, that's just not true at all. 
Video: CrunchGear Reviews The Wannabe-Techy Scion XB
Feb 21, 8:59PM
Last week, we got a Scion xB to drive. Our initial impression was that it looked "tastefully tuner" and was very spacious inside. A quick glance over its tech and we quickly realized that Scion probably added the gear as an afterthought. A lot of the gear doesn't work together; instead they're all separate, like what you would get from installing different aftermarket parts. Scion says that's the whole image it brings the younger generation, but we think it could be done better. There's a lot to like about the xB. Slamming the door barks a thud indicative of a solid build. As much as you'd want to think it's a cheap piece-of-junk, it really isn't. At no point did the quality feel super-budget. Which is a good thing, because this car isn't super-budget.
Alibaba.com CEO And COO Out Because Of Vendor Fraud
Feb 21, 8:58PM
Alibaba.com CEO David Wei and COO Elvis Lee have resigned this morning after an internal probe found that more than 2000 sellers on the e-commerce site were committing fraud, in some cases to the knowledge of Alibaba staff. The Hanzhou, China-based Alibaba told the WSJ that more than 100 sales staff (out of 5,000) were allowing fraudulent suppliers to fake the business registration papers needed to set up shop on the site. In some cases buyers never received items already paid for.
Guest Post: How Online Work Can Save America
Feb 21, 8:19PM
On a dusty summer day in July 2009, I taught a young, impoverished refugee in Dadaab, Kenya, to earn money online. Paul Parach (pictured left, video below) had fled South Sudan at age seven and lived in the camp for fifteen years, suffering persistent shortages of everything from water to firewood while he struggled to learn English. In a small computer center, donated by the Danish Refugee Council and hooked up to a satellite dish, I showed Paul and 15 other refugees to use Google to search for phone numbers and paste them into a web form for a Silicon Valley client. Several months earlier, I had founded a non-profit called Samasource to connect people living in poverty to sources of work, via the Internet. In two years, we've employed over 900 people in Asia, Africa, and Haiti to do small tasks, or "microwork," for companies including Ask.com and Intuit. 
(Founder Stories) Why David Karp Started Tumblr: Blogs Don't Work For Most People
Feb 21, 7:03PM
In the never-ending debate between blogging and micro-blogging, Tumblr usually gets lumped in with Twitter and Facebook on the micro-blogging side. But Tumblr is actually somewhere in between the status bursts of Twitter and Facebook and the long-form publishing of Wordpress-style blogs. If anything, it is more accurately described as micro-blogging than Twitter or Facebook because you actually produce short blog posts filled with images, links, and videos. But the key to Tumblr's incredible growth—it's adding a quarter billion pageviews a week—is how easy it makes it to post something and reblog what your friends are posting. Tumblr CEO David Karp recently sat down with Chris Dixon for a Founder Stories interview in which explains how he started Tumblr four years ago as a reaction to other blogging tools out there. "All blogs took the same form," he notes. "I wanted something much more free-form, much less verbose." People wanted to express themselves and blog, but he felt that the standard blogging platforms available at the time—Wordpress, Blogger, TypePad—were too complicated. "These tools I just don't think worked for most people. It's a commitment, you need to sit down for an hour and hammer out a post."
Breakup Notifier Emails You When People You're Stalking On Facebook Change Their Relationships
Feb 21, 7:02PM
"Zuckerberg sometimes amused himself by conducting experiments. For instance, he concluded that by examining friend relationships and communications patterns he could determine with about 33 percent accuracy who a user was going to be in a relationship with a week from now. To deduce this he studied who was looking which profiles, who your friends were friends with, and who was newly single, among other indicators." -- David Kirkpatrick's The Facebook EffectDan Loewenherz was sitting up one night with fiance and his mom, trying to conjure up a guy to set up with his fiance's sister. They finally came up with the perfect guy, enthusiastically checked the guy's Facebook profile and to much disappointment, saw that he was in a relationship. I know this has happened to you: You meet a great guy or girl, immediately run to Facebook or Google to Internet stalk them and find out that they're spoken for. Boo.
Foursquare Closing In On 7 Million Users
Feb 21, 6:48PM
Foursquare has just crossed 7,000,000 user IDs, which should mean that the location-based social network will be hitting 7 million registered users in the coming week. As we learned from the Foursquare, user ID numbers don't quite match up to the network's actual number of user accounts, but in the past have been correlated as a sign that the network is fast approaching the milestone. If Foursquare does in fact hit 7 million users in the next week or so, it would show that the startup is continuing to see steady growth, despite recent competition from Facebook's location product Places. At the end of January, Foursquare announced 6 million users, and it took the location based social network a month and a half to add another million users from 5 million in early December. It should take a little over a month for Foursquare to hit 7 million users. 
New Amazon Kindle Commercial: "The Book Lives On"
Feb 21, 6:21PM
Amazon has just released yet another new commercial for the Kindle, which again takes aim at its major competitor, the iPad. The commercial includes the fact that Amazon now has over 800,000 titles in the Kindle book store, and like past commercials, highlights the difficulty many iPad users face when reading on the tablet in direct sunlight. The Kindle, on the other hand, is perfectly visible in direct sunlight. The commercial even includes a tagline, "easy to read in bright sunlight" and throws in a mention of its long battery life. One thing that is noticeable in the commercial is that all of the actors appear to be in their twenties and thirties, which shows that Amazon is clearly trying to target a younger demographic in the spot. And the tagline "The Book Lives On," appears to be a new one. 
Will You Miss The Browser Address Bar If Google Kills It?
Feb 21, 6:13PM
Say goodbye to your address bar… maybe. Google is mulling over replacing the address bar found in its Chrome Web browser with something less intrusive (if that's the word to use). In one scenario, the address bar would only become visible when, say, the mouse pointer is hovered over a certain area of the screen. At all other times the address bar would vanish from the interface. The (possible) changes come soon after the release of the latest Internet Explorer 9 beta (technically it's a release candidate at this point). Mozilla may hate the browser, but the interface is the most "radical" of the bunch. For starters the tab bar and the address bar are on the same Y axis, which Microsoft says helps sites "shine." (You always get the feeling that Microsoft tries too hard when it comes to verbiage.) Obviously what Internet Explorer does is irrelevant to the Mac and Linux users in the audience, be it serves as an example of where modern browser design may be going.
The Best Birthday Cake Ever (Angry Birds Edition)
Feb 21, 5:27PM
Anyone with kids and a touchscreen device (Android, iPhone, iPad) knows one truth: kids love Angry Birds. My own 6-year-old is obsessed with the game and is constantly draining the batteries on my iPad and iPhone to play the game. So I can totally relate to the inspired genius of Electric Pig's Mike Cooper, who made his son an Angry Birds birthday cake and documented it in the YouTube video above. The cake includes a slingshot, of course, and edible birds that can be flung at the columns and green edible pigs. Yes, you can play with this cake and eat it too. What more could a kid want?
Yobongo Will Be In The Running For The Addictive App At This Year's SXSW
Feb 21, 5:00PM
A month ago, we detailed a new location-based realtime chat service called Yobongo. At the time, co-founder Caleb Elston didn't want us to show shots of the app in action because it was still a work-in-progress. But now he's finally comfortable enough with everything that he's asking beta testers to do just that. And he should be, as the app both looks great and needs to be ready to go for the upcoming SXSW festival in Austin, Texas. Elston realizes that SXSW is a big opportunity for the app. And assuming all goes well with App Store acceptance, they'll be ready. And having used the app for a few weeks now myself, I think it's safe to say that it will definitely be in the running for one of those addictive apps that could catch on at the conference.
Zagat.com Relaunches With More Free Content Including Maps, Lists, Third-Party Reviews
Feb 21, 4:15PM
Restaurant review company Zagat is best known for its print surveys that review and rank the best restaurants, bars and more in a particular city or region. But with the success of user-generated review site Yelp, Zagat has steadily been upgrading its online offerings, striking partnerships with Foursquare and Foodspotting and releasing mobile apps. For the most part, the company's content has been behind a paywall, with in-depth reviews and features available exclusively to paying members. But today, Zagat is adding more free content to the site, including lists, third-party reviews and more. Zagat is now allowing users to surface reviews in an easier way with enhanced search capabilities. New interactive maps allow diners to search by clicking on any neighborhood, drawing an area on a map, or indicating a popular landmark. Zagat has also compiled hundreds of lists of restaurants based on editor picks, and other topics, which users can access for free. 
Apple Smacks Readability In The Face With Subscription Rules; All SaaS In Trouble
Feb 21, 4:03PM
We've already been over (and over and over and over and over) Apple's new iOS subscription rules. And the initial backlash has seemingly cooled down as everyone has moved on to the next hot topic of the hour. But it's pretty clear that this issue is going to keep surfacing, because it really does screw a lot of developers. And sure enough, it's already back today. Readability, a service which takes text on the web and strips out ads and other distractions to make posts more readable, had been planning to bring an app to the iOS platform. In fact, they worked with Instapaper creator Marco Arment to build it. It seems like it would have been a pretty popular app. Except it was rejected on the grounds that it circumvents Apples in-app subscriptions today.
Threadless Is Now Crowdsourcing For Causes
Feb 21, 3:56PM
Threadless, one of the original crowdsourcing sites that pioneered the idea a decade ago and is now paying out more than $1 million a year in artist fees, is not just for T-shirts anymore. Today, the company is introducing a crowdsourcing platform called Threadless Atrium, which is initially targeted at causes and cause-based marketing campaigns. "Threadless Atrium will allow other organization to use community-based design to further their mission and causes," says CEO Tom Ryan. The first two examples of organizations using Atrium can be found on Threadless Causes. The DNA (Demi and Ashton) Foundation is using Threadless to solicit T-shirt designs to raise awareness about child sex slavery, and the Oceanic Preservation Society is crowdsourcing the artwork for its upcoming documentary Singing Planet about mass extinction. On the product side, Threadless is also working with fashion designer Steven Alan to come up with patterns for a future line of clothing which will also go towards helping DNA.
Video: Connected Medical Devices At The GSMA Embedded Mobile House
Feb 21, 2:33PM
The Embedded Mobile House at the GSMA Mobile World Congress 2011? It sounded like science fiction to me or like one of those old IBM commercials hype-ing RFID for transportation logistics. It sounded painful...just where exactly was it embedded? Seriously, I figured it would be a "flying cars/kitchen of tomorrow" type thing where all the devices in the house were controlled by a central computer with a fabulously attractive voice telling me my soufflé was finished. Nope. It was way more boring than that. But boring is not to say without value. In fact sometimes the things that work well are not flashy nor eye-catching. They are instead the kind of things you don't notice at all (or at least don't notice until they stop working). I think that was what I took away from the Embedded Mobile House. I took away that when this kind of concept reaches the masses—the concept of small simple tools and devices "embedded" with the ability to communicate their status—it would be a transparent experience.
Lab42′s Surveys Offer Market Research Via Social Networks
Feb 21, 1:00PM
Using surveys for market research on Facebook and other social networks has become a popular way to gain consumer insight quickly and efficiently. Chicago-based Lab42 is an online market research startup that uses social networks, such as Facebook and MySpace, to obtain samples for online surveys. Similar to market research companies like Peanut Labs, Lab42 targets users on games and other applications within Facebook, and allows users to take market research surveys in exchange for earning virtual currency. While there are a number of companies who conduct these surveys, Lab42 is hoping to differentiate itself by offering a cost-effective way for market research firms and ad agencies to survey consumers.
DST About To Lead Huge Spotify Funding
Feb 21, 5:33AM
European streaming music startup Spotify is in the process of closing a very large financing, say multiple sources. DST, the venture firm that has backed Facebook, Groupon and Zynga, is said to be leading the deal, which values Spotify at around $1 billion. The size of the round will be $100 million or more, say our sources. The company has raised at least €82.3 million to date, including a relatively small round of financing a year ago from Founders Fund. This new round, though, is at a much higher valuation. The Founders Fund round was rumored to be at a similar valuation as the previous round, a 2009 financing that valued the company at around €200 million.
Yahoo Engineer Complains About Lack Of Innovation At Yahoo
Feb 21, 5:26AM
Right now Yahoo engineer Jeremy Johnstone is my hero. Frustrated with with Flickr's lack of HTML5 support on the web, Johnstone -- whose position is currently "Technical Yahoo!" on the Yahoo For Good team -- has decided to take his employer to task, where else? In his Flickr stream. Earlier today Johnstone posted the above image, with the following barb. "No Flickr, you have it wrong. I don't need to install anything. I just need to use a different site to host my video which properly supports modern web technologies."
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