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.
Mar 28, 12:34PM
Every few months
Google embraces another CE company. It began with HTC and G1, giving that manufacturer resources and manpower enough to produce a powerful entrant in the smartphone race. It continued with Motorola for the
Droid and has cycled through to
Samsung for a brief period. This bear hug essentially gives the manufacturer access to Google's engineers and pre-release code and leaves everyone else out in the street, waiting for a software update. Now Google has set its sights on LG and, if rumor is correct, it means a Nexus S tablet is on its way from LG running a pitch perfect version of Honeycomb. It also means that anyone with a 2.x Android Tablet, the Gal Tabs included, will be severely disappointed. Think of this action by Google as akin to training one athlete in a race to an Olympic level and then pitting her against amateurs. The amateurs could still win, but it's going to be tough.
Mar 28, 12:33PM
Apple this morning
announced that it will hold its annual
Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) June 6 through June 10 at San Francisco's
Moscone West. The company promises to "unveil the future of iOS and Mac OS", demo a bunch of applications and host more than 100 technical sessions (presented by Apple engineers).
Mar 28, 12:21PM
Following in the
footsteps of rival
Visa,
American Express this morning
announced a digital payment and commerce platform dubbed
Serve, enabling U.S. consumers to make purchases and person-to-person payments online, via mobile phones and at AmEx's network of millions of merchants. Serve integrates a variety of payment options into a single account that can be funded from a bank account, debit, credit or charge card, or by receiving money from another Serve account. The platform is available immediately to anyone in the U.S. and is expected to launch into other international markets over the coming year.
Mar 28, 10:34AM
>From the why-didn't-anyone-think-of-this-before department: meet
Heartsy, which is basically a
Groupon for
Etsy, i.e. a daily deals site for handmade items sold on Etsy stores. The concept should be overly familiar to you: registered users get sent exclusive deals on handmade items sold on Etsy by email. Acquired coupons, or vouchers as Heartsy refers to them, can be redeemed at the Etsy store that sponsored the deal (
example).
Mar 28, 9:50AM
Brendan Eich, creator of the JavaScript scripting language and chief technology officer at
Mozilla, has joined the advisory board of Amsterdam, The Netherlands-based
Ajax.org. We recently
wrote about Ajax.org's introduction of
Cloud9 IDE, a commercial, cloud-based development platform for JavaScript that incorporates HTML5, and supporting Python, Ruby and PHP. Eich is known for his work on Netscape, where he started work in April 1995 and invented JavaScript. He then helped found Mozilla.org in early 1998, serving as chief architect, and later helped spin out the
Mozilla Foundation.
Mar 28, 8:47AM
This morning in London, the UK's answer to
Startup America launches, titled - guess what? -
Startup Britain. That similarity aside, the initiative has been put together by a number of existing UK entrepreneurs and is not being backed by any government money, unlike the Obama initiative. Instead, we have here a ground-up entrepreneur-led initiative which is seeing over 60 leading brands offer services to up-and-coming startups in the UK. This is not specifically about tech startups - but it may well appeal to that sector. The campaign is being launched by Prime Minister David Cameron, who is known to be very pro-enterprise. The UK has 270,000 businesses that start up every year but many fail due to a lack of support. So in effect the Startup Britain initiative is doing a few things much more differently. It's offering a package of discounts and free trial on business services like insurance, broadband, advertising, office space and more. The claim is that this amounts to over £1,500 in value for every startup company in Britain. Startup Britain is a portal site to a package of these services.
Mar 28, 2:27AM
"One of the deep mysteries to me is our logo, the symbol of lust and knowledge, bitten into, all crossed with the colors of the rainbow in the wrong order. You couldn't dream of a more appropriate logo: lust, knowledge, hope, and anarchy."
-- Jean Louis Gassée on the naming of Apple
Why is Color named "Color"? "A tribute to Apple's color logo from the Apple II. This computer changed my life when I was seven (also a reference to another company name I've used.) My dad bought one from ComputerCraft run by Billy Ladin in Houston. He was one of the first computer resellers back in 1977. In an odd twist, I meet him in an elevator 15 years later and worked for him. He introduced me to the Web. 
Mar 28, 1:51AM
We're back with a new episode of OMG/JK, and it's a good one. This last week has been full of controversy — from the launch of Color, the photo-swapping app that raised $41 million pre-launch, to reports that Google is not planning to open-source the tablet version of Android any time soon. And, as you'd expect, MG and I have some differing opinions about what that means for Android's status as "Open". This week also brings the launch Amazon's Appstore, which will face off with Google's official Android Market. Here are some posts relevant to this episode's discussion:
Mar 28, 1:00AM
Glam Media, one of the largest publishing and advertising networks on the Web, is continuing to expand its international presence with the launch of Glam Media South Korea. The women-focused vertical will represent the sixth international country subsidiary for Glam, adding to platforms in Canada, Germany, Japan, France and the UK. Similar to Glam's womens entertainment, style and fashion channel Glam.com, Glam.kr will feature original stories, photos and videos, as well as curated content across a range of lifestyle categories including beauty, entertainment, fashion, health and wellness, and more. Ellie Park, formerly the editor-in-chief of Elle Magazine's online site in South Korea, will serve as editor in chief of Glam.kr. 
Mar 27, 8:36PM
Everyone loves loyalty points. But it's often a pain to get them because different companies all have their own programs that require you to remember numbers. Topguest's goal is to unify that experience by letting you earn points simply by checking-in on social networks like Foursquare and Facebook. And now they're adding a new layer to the mix: Instagram photos. Yes, beginning today when the integration goes fully live, you'll be able to earn reward points at venues around the world simply by taking a picture and sharing it on Instagram. This may mean hotel points, air miles, or other benefits at the over 10,000 places Topguest currently works with. All you have to do is link up Topguest to your Instagram account (via their new API) and make sure your picture is geotagged at the venue.
Mar 27, 6:49PM
Much has been made of the iPad's role as a laptop replacement, but for me that war is over. The phone is increasingly a remote controller for the larger screen — I use its Personal Hotspot tethering to broker FaceTime calls on the move, and push notification as pointers into Twitter and the Web document store. Chatter provides a corporate firewalled collaboration space, and I spend the rest of my time discovering workarounds for current limitations that require my Mac Book Pro. They are as vanishingly few as times I can't get through to Scoble or weekends where I can get my column in on time.
Mar 27, 6:30PM
As a law student, Lauren Leto and her friends started Texts From Last Night, a site where they could anonymously posts real text messages about their exploits going out at night. It turns out a lot of people could relate, and when they opened up the site to anyone to contribute, it became a Web sensation. Today, the site attracts 4 million people a month, 5,000 to 15,000 submissions a day, and the 99-cent iPhone app has been downloaded a million times. It also spurred a book deal for Leto. Not bad for a bootstrapped startup site that only took $20,000 in capital to get off the ground. In the Founder Stories video above, Leto tells host Chris Dixon how Texts From Last Night got started and how she quit law school to move to New York City from Detroit. She ended up in Brooklyn at the Makery, a co-working space with other startups, which she talks about as well. In the second video below, Leto gets into her latest startup, Bnter, which is a way to capture text messages and publish them publicly.
Mar 27, 4:34PM
When I first wrote about Swoopo back in 2008 I found it abhorrent. It was, in short, a form of gambling masquerading as an auction site. You paid for bids - the more bids you bought the better the chance that you'd be able to pay a reduced price for a certain item. The real money came from the suckers who ran up the price. All those previous bids, at $1, were junked in the process. They called it entertainment shopping. Now, however, I call it dead.
Mar 27, 4:00PM
On Thursday, I used Yobongo all day, which helped me find a new lunch spot, run into an old friend, and meet a Yobongo co-founder. That afternoon, I thought it would be a good time to write about the new group and mobile messaging wars for TechCrunch. A few hours later, Color Labs launched, to put it mildly. And, as I was editing this post on Friday night, Disco appeared, the new group messaging client from Google. Along with SxSW and the NCAA basketball tournament, this is surely March Madness. What does this explosion in mobile social apps mean. We're witnessing an entirely new class of companies that are being built primarily for the mobile phone and tablet experience, not PCs or laptops. These companies are using basic social activities and leveraging smartphone capabilities to provide consumers with cooler features in exchange for the chance to construct more intimate networks. Just within the last year, larger forces like Facebook and Foursquare have released new mobile features to allow users to combine check-ins with location-based picture-sharing. Perhaps messaging, broadly defined, is converging toward more context-specific communications that leverage and combine bits of information our mobile devices already are aware of.
Mar 27, 3:15PM
Editor's Note: This is a guest post by Mark Suster (@msuster), a 2x entrepreneur, now VC at GRP Partners. Read more about Suster at Bothsidesofthetable Blogs. We all read them to get a sense of what is going on in the world, peeling back layers of the old world in which media was too scripted. By definition, if you are reading this you read blogs. But should you actually write one if you're a startup, an industry figure (lawyer, banker) or VC? Absolutely. This is a post to help you figure out why you should write and what you should talk about. So read on ...
Mar 27, 1:15PM
In his recent article on TechCrunch, "Engineering vs. Liberal Arts: Who's Right—Bill or Steve?," Vivek Wadhwa sparked a national debate about education that raises important questions for us all. If you haven't read the article yet, Wadhwa, a professor at Berkeley and Duke University, surveyed 652 chief executive officers and heads of product engineering at 502 U.S. technology companies and found that only 37% held engineering or computer technology degrees, and just 2% held mathematics degrees. The rest had a wide range of degrees, from business to the humanities. Yet in industry and education circles, STEM – teaching science, technology, engineering, and mathematics – has gained cult-like status as the primary solution to our national innovation challenges. But while investment in STEM is critical, it alone neglects the development of the types of skills that actually lead to discovery, creativity, and innovation.
Mar 27, 5:52AM
"Every now and then when your life gets complicated and the weasels start closing in, the only cure is to load up on heinous chemicals and then drive like a bastard to Las Vegas..." - Hunter S. Thompson
31,000 feet on Delta flight 133 from New York to San Francisco, sandwiched between a rotund bald man and a skinny French kid in a checked shirt. I feel like the cheesy filling in an unsettlingly turbulent quiche. Still, sub-prime conditions or no, I have a column to write: I pop open my laptop and fire up a clean browser window. As a technology columnist, my craft can be distilled as follows: identify the week's hot-button topic, Google what other commentators are saying about it, pick a side, argue the opposite, get paid, don't read the comments. Piece of cake, right? And this week, the first two of those steps has been made particularly easy. For the past few days, my fellow tech writers have been working themselves into a bubbling froth about the Valley's latest app du jour: Color.
Mar 27, 1:59AM
Many people (including myself) were a bit disappointed that Apple didn't devote any time during the iPad 2 unveiling to talking about iOS 5, the next major revamp of the software. But there may be a very good reason for that: it's not coming anytime soon. In fact, the plan right now is to wait to launch iOS 5 until the fall, we've heard from two solid sources. If our sources are right, this would break the pattern of Apple unveiling the latest iOS iteration in the early spring, leading up to a summer launch alongside new iPhone hardware. The spring timetable usually reserved for an iOS roadmap event is why some were hoping Apple may just rope the details into the iPad 2 event. When that didn't happen, rumors quickly spread that there may be another event in April to talk iOS 5 (and MobileMe). But it's looking like that will not be the case this year. 
Mar 27, 1:01AM
This week's Gillmor Gang started off with a bunch of no-shows from Mike Arrington and Robert Scoble. Don't know what happened to Mike, but @scobleizer was sandbagged by a rehearsal request for Ted X, whatever that is. So we hunkered down with Danny Sullivan, Kevin Marks, and John Taschek for a rousing trouncing of the vanishing television windowing system, as performed by NetFlix, Showtime, and various Mad Men. Showtime is mad because Netflix is closing in on its 20 million subscribers. Mad Men are mad because AMC can't close a deal for a fifth season without promising a sixth. Android is mad because it can't get no respect from anyone but @kevinmarks, and I'm mad about the iPad 2. As in nuts. Ce n'est pas un app. 
Mar 27, 12:44AM
Google is still hard at work on their social strategy. You know it, I know it, we all know it. What it will actually be, remains to be seen. But there are clues related to it that have started to appear. The first was the redesign of the toolbar. While Google claimed it doesn't directly point to the social strategy (even though it looks exactly like the verified +1 leaks we've seen), it is a first step. The second was the revamping of profile pages. Also nothing particularly social about it, but again, related to the overall strategy. And now we're seeing something else: a unification of profiles across Google properties. And a big push for all of them to be public.
Mar 26, 11:15PM
Open. Open. Open. Open. Open. Open. Open. Closed. I've never liked Google's use of the word "open" to describe the Android operating system. On one hand, the "openness" has led to situations where carriers can more easily screw consumers. On the other hand, their system is really only "open" when it's convenient to be. Wanna include Google's services on your Android device? Sure, sign this partnership agreement. Wanna check in code for Android? Do you work at Google? No. Well then you'll have to wait. Open. But still, every chance they get, we hear from Google how open Android is, as if it's the perfect answer to every question. How are you going to compete with Apple? Open. How are you going to keep the carriers in check? Open. How are you going to make money from Android? Open. Why is the Android experience sub-par? Open.
Mar 26, 4:05PM
After having been a tech executive for many years, I needed to take a break, and I wanted to give back to society. Duke University engineering dean Kristina Johnson gave me a great spiel about how the school's Masters of Engineering Management program churns out great engineers, and how engineers solve the world's problems. She said that I could make a big impact by teaching engineering students about the real world and encouraging them to become entrepreneurs. I felt so excited that I joined the university without even asking for a proper salary. That was in 2005. I was shocked—and upset—when the majority of my students became investment bankers or management consultants after they graduated. Hardly any became engineers. Why would they, when they had huge student loans, and Goldman Sachs was offering them twice as much as engineering companies did? So when the investment banks tanked in 2008, I cheered because engineering had become sexy again for engineering grads (read my BusinessWeek column). But thanks to the hundred-billion-dollar taxpayer bailouts, investment banks recovered and went back to their old, greedy ways. And they began offering even more money to engineering grads (and themselves).
Mar 26, 3:27PM
Let me start with two questions. Why is it that such a successful company as Facebook feels like it needs to change and reinvent its interface constantly? And why are we so complacent with these changes that, quite literally, disrupt our online social lives? We have seen how social media is changing the world around us, yet we don't have a say in its progress. Undeniably, Facebook is already part of all of our lives, even for non-users. Below, I highlight 5 critical problems that Facebook needs to fix immediately:
Mar 26, 1:30PM
Editor's note: Guest writer Amanda Hesser is a cookbook author, co-founder of cooking community site Food52, and a food columnist for the New York Times. The entity with the greatest influence on what Americans cook is not Costco or Trader Joe's. It's not the Food Network or The New York Times. It's Google. Every month about a billion of its searches are for recipes. The dishes that its search engine turns up, particularly those on the first page of results, have a huge impact on what Americans cook. Which is why, with a recent change in its recipe search, Google has, in effect, taken sides in the food war. Unfortunately, it's taken the wrong one. In late February, when Google announced that it was adding a new kind of search, specifically for recipes, it seemed like good news for a site like ours -– at last Google was shining its searchlight on content we deeply care about. But then came the bad news: once you get your new recipe results, you can refine the results in just 3 ways: by ingredient, by cooking time and by calories. While Google was just trying to improve its algorithm, thereby making the path to recipes easier and more efficient, it inadvertently stepped into the middle of the battle between the quick-and-easy faction and the cooking-matters group.
Mar 26, 1:27PM
Nintendo has long defined the rules of childhood. In Nintendo's world, logic and whimsy are intermixed and there is always a bigger boss and another castle. We learned from Nintendo that you can always turn your enemy's weapons against them and that evolution is a fact. We learned that the best stories are played out in your head and even when you don't have a lot of friends you at least always have Mario. Nintendo also defined video gameplay. Their NES console, while seemingly underpowered, sat under millions of Christmas trees and at millions of birthday party tables for almost a decade. Their audience grew up, new members joined, and the SNES, Nintendo 64, GameCube, and Wii pushed the envelope ever so slightly with each generation. The Game Boy grew up too, morphing into the GBA, the DS, and now something else entirely. The Nintendo 3DS isn't hard to love. It's a cute little handheld aimed at an interesting demographic. Because children under 7 shouldn't use the 3D feature, it seems Nintendo has made this for tweens and, more important, early adopters in the 18-36 market.
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
Posted in:
Much has been made of the iPad's role as a laptop replacement, but for me that war is over. The phone is increasingly a remote controller for the larger screen — I use its Personal Hotspot tethering to broker FaceTime calls on the move, and push notification as pointers into Twitter and the Web document store. Chatter provides a corporate firewalled collaboration space, and I spend the rest of my time discovering workarounds for current limitations that require my Mac Book Pro. They are as vanishingly few as times I can't get through to Scoble or weekends where I can get my column in on time.
