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It's just about 2013 and I gotta say, I'm a little bored. At least, the blogger in me is. As an investor things are just peachy. All this panic about overpriced consumer startups has led to a nice softening of the market (periodic reports of Blubbles are great for that). And other sectors, like business to business, is still under capitalized v. the consumer sector. But as a consumer and observer of tech, things feel very 2002ish to me. There's been a lot of belt tightening, for example, as many startups are trying to make their seed rounds stretch just a little bit longer. But it's more than that. I just don't see the tons of crazy new ideas that I did a few years ago. Things that are genuinely new and interesting. Yeah, yeah, mobile. I get it. Everything's mobile these days. LET'S GO MO-BILE! But really that's just an IQ test. When you see bold new startups with nothing but a desktop strategy, you know they just don't get it and you move on. But really a lot of the mobile stuff out there is just radioactive decay from the iPhone launching in 2007. 2007! Old news! Ancient platforms! Yeah, the iPhone and Android are great. But seriously, look at the top headline grabbers in tech news in 2012. Apple. Google. Facebook. Microsoft. Christ. It might as well still be 2007. I don't want to read any more stories about how Facebook cloned something they couldn't buy. Or that Twitter banned something that they tried to buy but Facebook got there first. Or the press regurgitating how Google+ is somehow not flailing. Or about the number of Android v. iPhone devices. Or Samsung's patent mishaps. Or how Yahoo is winding down things in Asia. I certainly don’t want to, for example, spend another minute debating Hunter Walk on the nuances of social graphs or whether we should be given a way to efficiently remove friends from Facebook. For two other examples look at the post directly below this one, and (in a few minutes) the one directly above. Snoozers! I want something completely new and different to happen, and lots of it. Stuff that makes us change the way we think about a market, or the world. Something that inspires a new generation of crazy startups doing crazy things. I don't want to be completely negative on the
Samsung and Docomo, Japan's largest mobile communication company, are joining forces to develop Tizen, an open source OS that supporters hope will cut into the 90% marketshare held by Google and Apple. The smartphones may be on the market by next year, reports the Yomiuri Shimbun. DoCoMo is the only firm among Japan's three top mobile operators that does not sell iPhones, which has caused it to lose a substantial amount of subscribers over the last four years.
Biegert & Funk has made a name for itself thanks to its iconic clock design that tells time the way we tend to convey it to one another in conversation – with written words in five-minute increments, spelling out “half past twelve” or “a quarter to five.” After creating a number of wall and desk clocks with this design, the firm made a lot of people’s wishes come true and revealed the QLOCKTWO W, a wearable version of the design that fits on the wrist. One has been sitting on mine for the past couple of weeks, and in that time it has managed to make a strong impression on both myself and my friends and family. With only a 10 x 11 grid of letters making up 110 characters in total (that’s less than a tweet), the QLOCKTWO W can display any time, and even though it only spells out five-minute increments, if you’re more exact, four dots at the bottom of the watch’s face indicate the specific minute, and you can cycle through to a view of the seconds ticking by with a couple presses of the QLOCKTWO’s single button. It also displays the calendar date (and if you’re unaware of the month and year, you likely have more problems than a watch can fix), and is available in English, French and German versions. The QLOCKTWO W comes in three different finishes – polished, brushed, or black stainless steel. The face of each measures 35 x 35mm, which with a square-faced watch wears roughly similar to a 40mm standard round watch. For me, since I prefer smaller faced watches, it’s a perfect size. The square design and the non-tapering wide 24mm leather strap make it appear more substantial than you might expect, however, and it definitely attracts a lot of curiosity from onlookers. Biegert & Funk have done a phenomenal job with the overall look of the case and strap, which isn’t surprising given their history as a design firm. The QLOCKTWO W’s most impressive feature is its display, however. When you activate the display, words light up to reflect the current time. Unlike other watches that use a push-button LED illumination trick to show the time, I found the lighting on the QLOCKTWO to be incredibly even. The letters on the face are relatively small, but they show up clear and very easy to read thanks to the well-engineered backlighting. The
After 15 years, Yahoo completed its exit from South Korea today, reports Yonhap News Agency. This move also marks the first Asian market that Yahoo is leaving.
Pakistan lifted, then very quickly reinstated its ban on YouTube after a few hours when efforts by the government to filter out blasphemous material provided unsuccessful. Prime Minister Raja Pervez Ashraf had ordered the video sharing site blocked in September after YouTube refused to remove the low-budget anti-Islamic film "Innocence of Muslims." Access was restored for a few hours on Saturday, but Ashraf issued orders to reinstate the ban after seeing that blasphemous content was still accessible.
Chinese telecommunications manufacturing giant Huawei is once again in hot water over allegedly playing loose with trade sanctions. One of Huawei Technologies key Iranian partners reportedly offered to sell embargoed HP computer equipment to Iran's largest mobile-phone operator in late 2010, according to documents unearthed by Reuters.
Advertising is something that we’ve all grown accustomed to in today’s society. For companies that provide free services, it’s an important part of keeping those services free for everyone to use. But are ads even working on us anymore? That’s up for debate and discussion, and those are decisions everyone can make for themselves. One of the biggest companies ever facing the conundrum of introducing advertising is Facebook. The social network is inherently made up of people, and in turn, their content. There’s private content, personal content and public content. Facebook is trying to monetize as much of it as it can to keep its shareholders happy, the service free, and its users from leaving for another option, of which there are none to speak of at the moment. No matter where the advertising is placed, it’ll either rub people the wrong way, or will be ignored completely. Here’s what Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO, has been quoted as saying regarding ads: Advertising works most effectively when it’s in line with what people are already trying to do. And people are trying to communicate in a certain way on Facebook – they share information with their friends, they learn about what their friends are doing – so there’s really a whole new opportunity for a new type of advertising model within that. Is that “new” advertising the future or is it more of the same? Remember those flashing animated banner ads on websites in the early 2000′s? They were annoying and people didn’t really click on them. Just ask Myspace. Sure, they got some clicks, but only because advertisers became sneaky enough to turn them into “games” and interactive modules using Flash. They still sucked, though. Where Myspace failed, Facebook has a real opportunity to capitalize on the fact that ads are just not so good for the user’s experience. How, you ask? By offering an option to turn them off, something that has worked for services like Amazon’s Kindle, Pandora and Spotify recently. Yes, they are different, because they are offering up entertaining content. However, that Facebook content is entertainment, especially since a lot of people spend a lot of their free, and busy, time on it. On mobile devices, there is way less real estate for unwanted content. Good thing that Facebook stopped working on them for a while. Making Something You’re Proud Of Zuckerberg has also made this
We had a bit of a false alarm today, when TechCrunch's Kim-Mai Cutler spotted a bankruptcy sign on the door of the i/o Ventures building in San Francisco's Mission District. We guessed that the sign was referring to the cafe that shares the building i/o, but we weren't sure. So in case you were wondering: Ashwin Navin, a partner at the startup incubator, confirmed it's the cafe that went bankrupt, and the incubator is unaffected. By our count, this is actually the second time in the incubator's history that the neighboring cafe has gone out of business.
Depending on who you ask, Google+ is either a thriving social network and the most important backbone of Google's social efforts, or a deserted wasteland where a small clique of fans keeps the lights on. I tend to think it's doing quite alright for Google, but I also know that I would use it far more if I could use a desktop client (and maybe one that combines Twitter, Facebook and Google+) to read and post updates. Google, however, has steadfastly refused to launch a full read/write API for Google+.
Executing the cost-reduction plan CEO Mark Pincus announced in November, Zynga has shut down, pulled from the app stores, or stopped accepting new players to 11 games, with some turning off today. The gaming giant will reallocate resources to more successful titles as well as creating new ones. Along with layoffs, the shutdowns are part of the hard road to recovery for Zynga.
January: We started the year at CES where it was clear that Samsung is the new Apple. Late January brought the Crunchies, our annual awards fest where we gave Dropbox the nod for start-up of the year. We were also treated with the hip hop of Booby Hammer, son of the noted VC, Mr. MC Hammer. Seriously.
Discoverability, collapsing social game models, failing gamification and weak levels of excitement for new gaming platforms have all conspired to make 2012 a complicated year for games. For some this means that the business is all about selling shovels rather than prospecting for gold, but maybe it's more about identifying the causes that players believe in.
I'm just wrapping up a week-long road trip, in which a travel companion and I visited some friends in Southern California. We only booked one night's stay ahead of time, and decisions around where to sleep, eat, and visit were mostly spontaneous. Here are the apps and tools that we used, and what we think could be done better.
Back in 2008, Jonathan Nelson was working as an ER nurse and tinkering on code at home in his spare time. As someone who wasn't a full-time engineer, he had a hankering to get out of the house and rub elbows with other techies. So he organized a casual meetup at a local bar, inviting other programmers toying with the idea of getting into the startup world to trade stories and talk shop over a beer or two. He called the group exactly what it was: Hackers/Founders.
It's CrunchWeek time, wherein a few of us writers turn on the TechCrunch TV cameras and shoot the breeze about some of the past week's most interesting stories. This week, we decided to reflect on some of the year's biggest stories in tech.
Hackulous, the company behind the popular (and controversial) app Installous which let people easily download pirated apps on jailbroken iOS devices, has shut down. In what iDownloadBlog's Sebastien Page has called "a small victory against app piracy," the Installous app is also no longer available for use.
Editor's note: Derek Andersen is the founder of Startup Grind, a 35-city event series hosted in 15-countries that educates, inspires, and connects entrepreneurs. He also founded Commonred (acquired by Income.com) and is ex-Electronic Arts. There are virtually no companies in Silicon Valley that exit north of $100MM or create a billion dollar business, that don't raise Venture Capital funding. Charles and Kai Huang, the founders of Red Octane are the exception having done both. They went on to sell more than 30MM units of Guitar Hero becoming one of the top videogame franchises of all time. Recently I sat down with Charles at Startup Grind and heard this fascinating story. In 1999 Charles and his brother Kai founded Red Octane. Launching six months before Netflix, the goal was to be the Netflix of videogames. But six months after they launched the dot com bubble burst and so did their business. As funding completely dried up, the capital intensive rental business became unfundable. Of that time Charles said, "It looked like the whole valley was just going to die and go away. So that's when we scrambled and looked at video game hardware, and eventually videogame software. That was the beginning of what was many lives of Red Octane." Startup Survival. 2 Weeks Of Cash. They were gamers and were playing a lot of Playstation 1 games, especially the pirated stuff out of Japan. Dance Dance Revolution was just making it's way to the States so they stated selling dance pads. "We realized the dance pads that we were buying and reselling were garbage, because they were breaking down and we thought we could make better dance pads than this," Charles said. "I literally packed my bags, went to China, visited a few of these factories that made dance pads, figured out how they made them and took a bunch of suggestions that users had given us and incorporated them into new designs and so we started coming out with our own dance pads and believe it or not, that kept the company afloat (from 2001 to 2003)." Everything was sold online due to lack of cash. "We had to start that way because we couldn’t afford to sell to stores due to cash flow. The way it works is you sell to Gamestop and they don’t pay you for 60 to 90 days. We didn’t have the money to do that, so we had to sell everything
Same-day shipping became the big retailer craze this holiday season. Why? As the New York Times points out, retailers are living in fear of Amazon.com and trying to match what the online retailer offers. The fear factor -- Wal-Mart once had a trance on retail. Now it's Amazon.com. But it's not just retail that has begun to show deeper anxiety about Amazon. Its' the enterprise giants, too, that pay far more attention to the moves Amazon makes. Commerce came first, now Amazon is prepping to have the same impact on big data and the software markets.
In the few years I've been in Silicon Valley, if someone asked me to sum up -- in one word -- what defined and dominated consumer technology applications during that time, I'd have no choice but to answer: "Photos." Now, it's easy for others to sit back and roll their eyes at the thought of it. "Why not solve big problems?," an aggravated chorus might wail. Looking back over this time period, the big events touching on digital pictures gained outsized attention: The launch of iPhone 4, with its incredible camera; the meteoric rise and acquisition of Instagram; the technical achievement unlocked by Lytro; the influence of the Pinterest design on nearly every e-commerce site; our narcissistic addiction to Timehop or delight in depositing checks through our bank's mobile app; today's fascination with exploding pictures, courtesy of Snapchat; and on the horizon, one of the most anticipated interface advancements: Google Glass.
Editor's note: Ross Rubin is principal analyst at Reticle Research and blogs at Techspressive. Each column looks at crowdfunded products that have either met or missed their funding goals. The period leading up to the New Year is often a time of self-reflection. Resolutions often relate to people wanting to create a better version of themselves or at least a thinner version of themselves. Many also want to be more giving. Following through on these challenges often helps if you have support.
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I'm Bored. What's Next?
Dec 31, 6:34AM
It's just about 2013 and I gotta say, I'm a little bored. At least, the blogger in me is. As an investor things are just peachy. All this panic about overpriced consumer startups has led to a nice softening of the market (periodic reports of Blubbles are great for that). And other sectors, like business to business, is still under capitalized v. the consumer sector. But as a consumer and observer of tech, things feel very 2002ish to me. There's been a lot of belt tightening, for example, as many startups are trying to make their seed rounds stretch just a little bit longer. But it's more than that. I just don't see the tons of crazy new ideas that I did a few years ago. Things that are genuinely new and interesting. Yeah, yeah, mobile. I get it. Everything's mobile these days. LET'S GO MO-BILE! But really that's just an IQ test. When you see bold new startups with nothing but a desktop strategy, you know they just don't get it and you move on. But really a lot of the mobile stuff out there is just radioactive decay from the iPhone launching in 2007. 2007! Old news! Ancient platforms! Yeah, the iPhone and Android are great. But seriously, look at the top headline grabbers in tech news in 2012. Apple. Google. Facebook. Microsoft. Christ. It might as well still be 2007. I don't want to read any more stories about how Facebook cloned something they couldn't buy. Or that Twitter banned something that they tried to buy but Facebook got there first. Or the press regurgitating how Google+ is somehow not flailing. Or about the number of Android v. iPhone devices. Or Samsung's patent mishaps. Or how Yahoo is winding down things in Asia. I certainly don’t want to, for example, spend another minute debating Hunter Walk on the nuances of social graphs or whether we should be given a way to efficiently remove friends from Facebook. For two other examples look at the post directly below this one, and (in a few minutes) the one directly above. Snoozers! I want something completely new and different to happen, and lots of it. Stuff that makes us change the way we think about a market, or the world. Something that inspires a new generation of crazy startups doing crazy things. I don't want to be completely negative on theSamsung And DoCoMo Reportedly Team Up To Offer Tizen Smartphones In 2013
Dec 31, 5:33AM
Samsung and Docomo, Japan's largest mobile communication company, are joining forces to develop Tizen, an open source OS that supporters hope will cut into the 90% marketshare held by Google and Apple. The smartphones may be on the market by next year, reports the Yomiuri Shimbun. DoCoMo is the only firm among Japan's three top mobile operators that does not sell iPhones, which has caused it to lose a substantial amount of subscribers over the last four years.The QLOCKTWO W By Biegert & Funk Is A Timepiece For Literate Lovers Of Good Design
Dec 31, 5:00AM
Biegert & Funk has made a name for itself thanks to its iconic clock design that tells time the way we tend to convey it to one another in conversation – with written words in five-minute increments, spelling out “half past twelve” or “a quarter to five.” After creating a number of wall and desk clocks with this design, the firm made a lot of people’s wishes come true and revealed the QLOCKTWO W, a wearable version of the design that fits on the wrist. One has been sitting on mine for the past couple of weeks, and in that time it has managed to make a strong impression on both myself and my friends and family. With only a 10 x 11 grid of letters making up 110 characters in total (that’s less than a tweet), the QLOCKTWO W can display any time, and even though it only spells out five-minute increments, if you’re more exact, four dots at the bottom of the watch’s face indicate the specific minute, and you can cycle through to a view of the seconds ticking by with a couple presses of the QLOCKTWO’s single button. It also displays the calendar date (and if you’re unaware of the month and year, you likely have more problems than a watch can fix), and is available in English, French and German versions. The QLOCKTWO W comes in three different finishes – polished, brushed, or black stainless steel. The face of each measures 35 x 35mm, which with a square-faced watch wears roughly similar to a 40mm standard round watch. For me, since I prefer smaller faced watches, it’s a perfect size. The square design and the non-tapering wide 24mm leather strap make it appear more substantial than you might expect, however, and it definitely attracts a lot of curiosity from onlookers. Biegert & Funk have done a phenomenal job with the overall look of the case and strap, which isn’t surprising given their history as a design firm. The QLOCKTWO W’s most impressive feature is its display, however. When you activate the display, words light up to reflect the current time. Unlike other watches that use a push-button LED illumination trick to show the time, I found the lighting on the QLOCKTWO to be incredibly even. The letters on the face are relatively small, but they show up clear and very easy to read thanks to the well-engineered backlighting. TheYahoo Bids Farewell to South Korea, Completes Exit
Dec 31, 3:42AM
After 15 years, Yahoo completed its exit from South Korea today, reports Yonhap News Agency. This move also marks the first Asian market that Yahoo is leaving.Pakistan's YouTube Ban Is Lifted And Then Reinstated As Observers Worry About Internet Freedom
Dec 31, 2:54AM
Pakistan lifted, then very quickly reinstated its ban on YouTube after a few hours when efforts by the government to filter out blasphemous material provided unsuccessful. Prime Minister Raja Pervez Ashraf had ordered the video sharing site blocked in September after YouTube refused to remove the low-budget anti-Islamic film "Innocence of Muslims." Access was restored for a few hours on Saturday, but Ashraf issued orders to reinstate the ban after seeing that blasphemous content was still accessible.Chinese Telecom Giant Huawei Accused Of Offering Embargoed HP Equipment To Iranian Companies
Dec 31, 2:22AM
Chinese telecommunications manufacturing giant Huawei is once again in hot water over allegedly playing loose with trade sanctions. One of Huawei Technologies key Iranian partners reportedly offered to sell embargoed HP computer equipment to Iran's largest mobile-phone operator in late 2010, according to documents unearthed by Reuters.With A Flick Of The Wrist, Facebook Could Destroy Current Advertising Models
Dec 31, 2:00AM
Advertising is something that we’ve all grown accustomed to in today’s society. For companies that provide free services, it’s an important part of keeping those services free for everyone to use. But are ads even working on us anymore? That’s up for debate and discussion, and those are decisions everyone can make for themselves. One of the biggest companies ever facing the conundrum of introducing advertising is Facebook. The social network is inherently made up of people, and in turn, their content. There’s private content, personal content and public content. Facebook is trying to monetize as much of it as it can to keep its shareholders happy, the service free, and its users from leaving for another option, of which there are none to speak of at the moment. No matter where the advertising is placed, it’ll either rub people the wrong way, or will be ignored completely. Here’s what Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO, has been quoted as saying regarding ads: Advertising works most effectively when it’s in line with what people are already trying to do. And people are trying to communicate in a certain way on Facebook – they share information with their friends, they learn about what their friends are doing – so there’s really a whole new opportunity for a new type of advertising model within that. Is that “new” advertising the future or is it more of the same? Remember those flashing animated banner ads on websites in the early 2000′s? They were annoying and people didn’t really click on them. Just ask Myspace. Sure, they got some clicks, but only because advertisers became sneaky enough to turn them into “games” and interactive modules using Flash. They still sucked, though. Where Myspace failed, Facebook has a real opportunity to capitalize on the fact that ads are just not so good for the user’s experience. How, you ask? By offering an option to turn them off, something that has worked for services like Amazon’s Kindle, Pandora and Spotify recently. Yes, they are different, because they are offering up entertaining content. However, that Facebook content is entertainment, especially since a lot of people spend a lot of their free, and busy, time on it. On mobile devices, there is way less real estate for unwanted content. Good thing that Facebook stopped working on them for a while. Making Something You’re Proud Of Zuckerberg has also made thisDon't Be Alarmed By The Bankruptcy Sign Outside I/O Ventures
Dec 31, 1:00AM
We had a bit of a false alarm today, when TechCrunch's Kim-Mai Cutler spotted a bankruptcy sign on the door of the i/o Ventures building in San Francisco's Mission District. We guessed that the sign was referring to the cafe that shares the building i/o, but we weren't sure. So in case you were wondering: Ashwin Navin, a partner at the startup incubator, confirmed it's the cafe that went bankrupt, and the incubator is unaffected. By our count, this is actually the second time in the incubator's history that the neighboring cafe has gone out of business.Will Google+ Ever Get A Full Read/Write API?
Dec 31, 12:00AM
Depending on who you ask, Google+ is either a thriving social network and the most important backbone of Google's social efforts, or a deserted wasteland where a small clique of fans keeps the lights on. I tend to think it's doing quite alright for Google, but I also know that I would use it far more if I could use a desktop client (and maybe one that combines Twitter, Facebook and Google+) to read and post updates. Google, however, has steadfastly refused to launch a full read/write API for Google+.Game Over: Zynga Shuts Down PetVille And 10 Other Titles To Cut Costs
Dec 30, 11:57PM
Executing the cost-reduction plan CEO Mark Pincus announced in November, Zynga has shut down, pulled from the app stores, or stopped accepting new players to 11 games, with some turning off today. The gaming giant will reallocate resources to more successful titles as well as creating new ones. Along with layoffs, the shutdowns are part of the hard road to recovery for Zynga.2012: TechCrunch Year In Review
Dec 30, 11:40PM
January: We started the year at CES where it was clear that Samsung is the new Apple. Late January brought the Crunchies, our annual awards fest where we gave Dropbox the nod for start-up of the year. We were also treated with the hip hop of Booby Hammer, son of the noted VC, Mr. MC Hammer. Seriously.The Games Industry Is Driven By Marketing Stories
Dec 30, 11:00PM
Discoverability, collapsing social game models, failing gamification and weak levels of excitement for new gaming platforms have all conspired to make 2012 a complicated year for games. For some this means that the business is all about selling shovels rather than prospecting for gold, but maybe it's more about identifying the causes that players believe in.Road Tripping In The Digital Age
Dec 30, 10:00PM
I'm just wrapping up a week-long road trip, in which a travel companion and I visited some friends in Southern California. We only booked one night's stay ahead of time, and decisions around where to sleep, eat, and visit were mostly spontaneous. Here are the apps and tools that we used, and what we think could be done better.How Hackers/Founders Grew From Beer-Filled Bar Meetups To Full-On Startup Incubator [TCTV]
Dec 30, 9:00PM
Back in 2008, Jonathan Nelson was working as an ER nurse and tinkering on code at home in his spare time. As someone who wasn't a full-time engineer, he had a hankering to get out of the house and rub elbows with other techies. So he organized a casual meetup at a local bar, inviting other programmers toying with the idea of getting into the startup world to trade stories and talk shop over a beer or two. He called the group exactly what it was: Hackers/Founders.CrunchWeek: The Year-End Wrap Up
Dec 30, 8:00PM
It's CrunchWeek time, wherein a few of us writers turn on the TechCrunch TV cameras and shoot the breeze about some of the past week's most interesting stories. This week, we decided to reflect on some of the year's biggest stories in tech.
Hackulous Shuts Down, Taking Its iOS Piracy App Installous With It
Dec 30, 7:58PM
Hackulous, the company behind the popular (and controversial) app Installous which let people easily download pirated apps on jailbroken iOS devices, has shut down. In what iDownloadBlog's Sebastien Page has called "a small victory against app piracy," the Installous app is also no longer available for use.How The Huang Brothers Bootstrapped Guitar Hero To A Billion Dollar Business
Dec 30, 7:45PM
Editor's note: Derek Andersen is the founder of Startup Grind, a 35-city event series hosted in 15-countries that educates, inspires, and connects entrepreneurs. He also founded Commonred (acquired by Income.com) and is ex-Electronic Arts. There are virtually no companies in Silicon Valley that exit north of $100MM or create a billion dollar business, that don't raise Venture Capital funding. Charles and Kai Huang, the founders of Red Octane are the exception having done both. They went on to sell more than 30MM units of Guitar Hero becoming one of the top videogame franchises of all time. Recently I sat down with Charles at Startup Grind and heard this fascinating story. In 1999 Charles and his brother Kai founded Red Octane. Launching six months before Netflix, the goal was to be the Netflix of videogames. But six months after they launched the dot com bubble burst and so did their business. As funding completely dried up, the capital intensive rental business became unfundable. Of that time Charles said, "It looked like the whole valley was just going to die and go away. So that's when we scrambled and looked at video game hardware, and eventually videogame software. That was the beginning of what was many lives of Red Octane." Startup Survival. 2 Weeks Of Cash. They were gamers and were playing a lot of Playstation 1 games, especially the pirated stuff out of Japan. Dance Dance Revolution was just making it's way to the States so they stated selling dance pads. "We realized the dance pads that we were buying and reselling were garbage, because they were breaking down and we thought we could make better dance pads than this," Charles said. "I literally packed my bags, went to China, visited a few of these factories that made dance pads, figured out how they made them and took a bunch of suggestions that users had given us and incorporated them into new designs and so we started coming out with our own dance pads and believe it or not, that kept the company afloat (from 2001 to 2003)." Everything was sold online due to lack of cash. "We had to start that way because we couldn’t afford to sell to stores due to cash flow. The way it works is you sell to Gamestop and they don’t pay you for 60 to 90 days. We didn’t have the money to do that, so we had to sell everythingAmazon Is Not A Commerce Company
Dec 30, 7:00PM
Same-day shipping became the big retailer craze this holiday season. Why? As the New York Times points out, retailers are living in fear of Amazon.com and trying to match what the online retailer offers. The fear factor -- Wal-Mart once had a trance on retail. Now it's Amazon.com. But it's not just retail that has begun to show deeper anxiety about Amazon. Its' the enterprise giants, too, that pay far more attention to the moves Amazon makes. Commerce came first, now Amazon is prepping to have the same impact on big data and the software markets.Iterations: It's Early Innings For Digital Pictures
Dec 30, 6:00PM
In the few years I've been in Silicon Valley, if someone asked me to sum up -- in one word -- what defined and dominated consumer technology applications during that time, I'd have no choice but to answer: "Photos." Now, it's easy for others to sit back and roll their eyes at the thought of it. "Why not solve big problems?," an aggravated chorus might wail. Looking back over this time period, the big events touching on digital pictures gained outsized attention: The launch of iPhone 4, with its incredible camera; the meteoric rise and acquisition of Instagram; the technical achievement unlocked by Lytro; the influence of the Pinterest design on nearly every e-commerce site; our narcissistic addiction to Timehop or delight in depositing checks through our bank's mobile app; today's fascination with exploding pictures, courtesy of Snapchat; and on the horizon, one of the most anticipated interface advancements: Google Glass.Backed Or Whacked: Ignoring The Little People
Dec 30, 4:00PM
Editor's note: Ross Rubin is principal analyst at Reticle Research and blogs at Techspressive. Each column looks at crowdfunded products that have either met or missed their funding goals. The period leading up to the New Year is often a time of self-reflection. Resolutions often relate to people wanting to create a better version of themselves or at least a thinner version of themselves. Many also want to be more giving. Following through on these challenges often helps if you have support.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.
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[Note: This is a weekly series. If your company is doing something amazing to help a charitable cause or doing some good in your community, please reach out.] Sometimes, the right people are in the right place at the right time. For DonorsChoose.org, all of this came true. In 2003, Oprah Winfrey mentioned the non-profit on her show, calling it a “revolutionary charity”, and her viewers donated $250k to benefit projects in classrooms around the world. Yes, DonorsChoose.org is all about helping people help teachers, who of course help teach our students. Being a teacher isn’t the easiest job in the world, and for many reasons, it’s difficult to perform all of the tasks that you want to do to teach our youth in the right way. I spoke to DonorsChoose founder, Charles Best, about where the idea came from, what they’ve accomplished thus far, and what we can expect in the future. How did you come up with the idea for DonorsChoose? In 2000, as a New York City public school teacher, I spent a lot of time in the teacher's lunchroom, talking with fellow teachers about the books they wanted their students to read, the art projects they wanted their classroom to do, and the field trips they wanted their students to take. They didn't have the funding to do these things, so I founded DonorsChoose.org out of my classroom. In 2007, DonorsChose.org expanded to serve every public school teacher in the U.S. How do you explain DonorsChoose to people, to grab their attention? With DonorsChoose.org, anyone can give as little as $1 and get the same level of choice, transparency, and feedback that is traditionally reserved for someone who gives millions. We call that citizen philanthropy. Can you provide us with some real stories and stats on what you’ve accomplished thus far? We strongly believe in transparency – that people should be able to see exactly how every dollar is spent. The impact page of our website provide information at the national and state levels about what types of projects are being funded, how many students have been impacted, dollars raised, projects funded and more. Check out the progress we’ve made in helping schools impacted by Hurricane Sandy. What have you done differently that helped your program get off of the ground? We believe teachers know best what their students really need, and we’ve dedicated a lot
TigerLogic, a company with a market cap of about $56 million that provides data management and app development solutions for enterprises, said it agreed to acquire Portland mobile developer Storycode for up to $7.25 million in cash and stock today. The Irvine-based company says it will integrate Storycode’s technology into its social visualization platform called Postano. Yes, “social visualization” platform is a little vague, but basically Postano lets brands embed widgets with content froms social networks on their sites. They also offer an internal dashboard that lets clients monitor what people are saying about them on Twitter or Facebook, and they can also help with creating custom Facebook tabs and apps. Storycode has a mobile app publishing platform that media companies like Thomson Reuters, USA Today, NBC and CBS use to create iPhone and iPad apps. The mobile publishing platform will plug right into TigerLogic’s Postano product. According to an SEC filing, each share of Storycode’s stock will be converted into $6.75 million worth of TigerLogic’s stock. On top of that, a single share of preferred stock in Storycode will get converted into the right to receive $250,000. TigerLogic is also giving Storycode $100,000 in bridge financing and is taking on up to $150,000 in the company’s liabilities. Storycode actually has been through one previous acquisition. It was previously called FreeRange Communications after it spun out of Handmark in 2011. The company changed its name to Storycode last May after acquiring a Portland-based mobile agency.
A lawsuit filed yesterday by Theodore F. Schroeder claims that Pinterest investor Brian S. Cohen stole the idea for the social sharing service. The suit, which was 
After the communication breakdown over surge pricing last New Year’s Eve, Uber is taking precautions to make sure users are aware of fare increases next week. Surge pricing has become more common now among Uber users but when fares increase dramatically, it catches consumers off guard. So to prevent any surprises. Uber customers will be alerted to the surge pricing multiple which they have to confirm and accept before making any request for a ride. Uber says that when there are extreme spikes in demand on the evening, customers will also have to take Uber's "Surge Sobriety Test." And Uber's Fare Estimator will give all customers the ability to estimate their fare prior to any ride request. Uber warns in a blog post: It's going to be a crazy night and Ubers are going to be pricey, so here are a few pointers to keep in mind. The fare estimate feature will only be available for the iPhone app, unfortunately. And all riders will need to accept the fare multiplier before finalizing a booking. uber says the average surge multiple will be about 2 times normal prices, during the worst times (12:30 AM until 2:45 AM), but prices during extreme spikes could cost you $100 before time and mileage charge. Uber adds that the most expensive times to take an Uber are 8:30pm – 9:45pm and 12:30am – 2:45am. The best times to take an Uber on NYE are before 7pm, 10pm – 12:10am and 3am on. The company’s CEO and founder Travis Kalanick will also be holding a live chat for any one who has questions about surge pricing on New Year’s Eve. Uber clearly learned its lesson from last year, when users were caught off guard by steep prices caused by surge pricing. For example, one user was charged $75 for a two minute car ride. With the sobriety test, and fare estimator, the company is giving users all the information they need to decide if a pricey car ride is worth the splurge. The sobriety test is particularly interesting, and I wonder if this will become more widely used in the app. Ride-sharing app SideCar also warned users today of its surge pricing that will take place on New Year’s Eve.
While most of us were enjoying the holidays with our families all over the world, someone who is related to the CEO of Facebook posted a photo of her family to friends, and then some journalist person downloaded it and tweeted it. There's a real difference between something being private and something being personal. And that, as the aforementioned incident highlights, is a notion that a lot of people — including Randi Zuckerberg — have forgotten, online and off. What I mean by this is that just because you post something online, doesn't mean it's meant for public consumption. Yes, this all sounds very conflated, and yes, Facebook privacy controls are about as easy to understand as left-handed scissors for a right-handed person. However, somewhere in this slow news big news cycle, publications started to tell the story that said Facebook CEO’s sister clearly didn’t understand Facebook’s privacy controls. This is simply not true, because the photo wasn’t private, it was personal. Allow me to explain the difference. Private As A Peacock Private: confined to or intended only for the persons immediately concerned; confidential: a private meeting If something is “private” in your mind, it’s probably not a good idea to share it on the Internet…anywhere. I don’t care what types of controls a social network gives you. There’s no such thing as full-on “privacy” on the Internet. Do you know what is private? A good-old-fashioned photo in a scrapbook, passed around one by one at the dinner table during the holidays. If you see someone try to pull out their phone to snap a photo for Instagram purposes, you can say “HEY! That’s private.” This can’t be done on the Internet. Once something is out there, it can be screen-shotted, captured and re-shared just as easily as it was uploaded in the first place. As we learned with Snapchat and Poke, those sexy private photos and videos aren’t really “private” either. I’m not even going to get into the difference between public and private, because I feel like that’s fairly obvious. Privacy is a lost art in humanity these days. We’re so used to sharing every darn thing that happens to us, myself included, that we have lost a sense of self, therefore leaving ourselves open to the shit show that ensued during the boringest news week of the century. No matter what Randi Zuckerberg said after the fact, people
It's been days, possibly even weeks, since we've covered a wedding-focused startup. Let's change that, shall we? 
Buzzfeed has found a 
Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, which is nice and all -- but for businesses, flattery doesn't exactly pay the bills. However, when said flattery comes along with massive amounts of new attention from millions of potential new users, a high-profile copycat could actually help more than it hurts. Such may well be the case with ephemeral photo sharing app 
California's experiment in fully online voter registration appears to have been a success. "Online registration contributed significantly to an increase in 2012 youth registrants and modestly to overall increases in general registration rates," claims a University of California, Davis, study of the 2012 election, which finds that online voting boosted youth registration an entire percent (10.1 percent to 11.1 percent) in its short one-month existence prior to the election [PDF].
"Other than the vague threat of an Orwellian dystopia, as a society we don't really know why surveillance is bad," writes Washington University Law Professor, Neil Richards [PDF]. Today, the United State Senate reauthorized a controversial Obama-supported surveillance law, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 Amendments Act of 2008 (FISA), which permits intelligence agencies to monitor international communications, sometimes without a warrant and little court oversight. Civil libertarians are up in arms, but in the face of deadly terrorist threats, does government monitoring actually harm people? Richards' attempts to argue that brazen government spying does, indeed, have real-world harms, including mass self-censorship and blackmail, and supplies moderately compelling evidence for those naturally scared of the government.
Lately, it seems that many mobile apps, upon first launch, are stepping users through multi-screen "walkthroughs" where all the features of the app are demonstrated, painstakingly, one-by-one. Worse still, are those overlays of help screens that appear at start up, with the scrawled handwriting, circles and arrows best left on whiteboards - not in user education material.
I've backed an embarrassing number of Kickstarter projects, almost all of them in the hardware/gadget categories, and I've been disappointed more than I've been delighted. The Slim wallet by Supr however bucks the trend, delivering a front-pocket wallet that finally and truly deserves the honor of actually being carried in that place.
Sure, it's not unlike the New York Post to be 
A botched software update to networking gear caused one of GitHub's all-time worst outages last weekend, the second major disruption that customers of the the popular social coding platform have suffered through in the past several weeks.
Samsung is keeping its fans entertained during the lull between Christmas and New Years with a several announcements and teasers: a 
Fab announced today that 56% of its Christmas day U.S. revenue was from sales through its mobile apps, a new single day record for the design-focused e-commerce platform. Forty percent of its European revenue on that day was also via mobile, another milestone for the company.
Japan's top smartphone messaging app, Line, which reaches about a third of that country's mobile phone users, just 
If you owned a swanky apartment or house, would you really want to rent it out to strangers? Well, startup 
Netflix has confirmed to 
One of the stranger things I came across while in Tokyo last month was a digital artist who built a human camera that requires touch from another person to snap photos. It is artist Eric Siu’s bit of rebellion against an increasingly technology-dependent world that distances people from real-life interactions. This effect is especially pronounced where Siu lives in Japan, as the Internet has allowed "Hikikomori" and "Otaku" sub-cultures to thrive. In “Hikikomori” culture, teens actually shut themselves in from interaction with the outside world. As social networking, e-mail and other forms of digital communication replace or squeeze out time for face-to-face meetings, Siu wanted to create a piece of technology that required the opposite — real human touch. The Touchy Camera, which he built using off-the-shelf parts for a few hundred dollars, is a wearable camera that requires another person to touch the wearer in order for it to work. Otherwise, the wearer is blind because the camera’s shutter doesn’t open without contact from someone else (see the GIF I made below). If you touch him for 10 seconds or longer, that camera snaps a photo that’s viewable from an LCD screen on the back of the his head. We walked around with it one morning in the Roppongi Hills area in Tokyo. And to make an understatement, the effect on bystanders was a bit magical. Some people would run away if they saw us come close, while others started asking questions. When some of them touched him and the shutters in front of his eyes opened, they gasped and smiled. The camera works when human touch completes a simple circuit. Siu hands you something that looks like a lightbulb to hold in one hand, and when you touch him with the other, it completes a basic low-voltage circuit. Siu only has one version of the Touchy camera, although people have asked him before about buying one as a toy. Since releasing it earlier this year, he’s performed all around mainland China and Asia and actually has gotten a bit of interest in it as a product. He says he would be open to making others if there was demand. He and his partner, another character named Margaret Toucha, just made a holiday video (above) filled with boxers, pole dancers and some meandering around downtown Tokyo.
A week after the Newtown massacre, The Journal News published an interactive Google Map with the names and addresses of gun permit owners in select New York cities. The bold move has escalated into a transparency arms race, after a Connecticut lawyer posted the phone number and addresses of the Journal's staff, including a Google Maps satellite Image of the Publisher's home. "I don't know whether the Journal's publisher Janet Hasson is a permit holder herself, but here's how to find her to ask," read Christopher Fountain's blog post. The double irony here is that open data was heralded as a tool of enlightened civic dialog, and has been co-opted for fierce partisanship, bordering on public endangerment.
As you talk to Aaron Levie, the co-founder of fast growing cloud storage company Box, it's hard not to notice his incredible energy when he talks about enterprise storage possibilities. Six years in, Levie is still as passionate about what he is trying to build as he was back in 
Most TV commercials are poorly targeted and show things you'd never buy. But not for long. 
With the closing of 
In what is becoming somewhat of a holiday tradition for Google, the company just 
It started with 
After months of selling a 
Beloved phone camera app Instagram sure had 
Yoics is a startup with a cloud service that connects and networks devices to the cloud. It sounds simple enough but realistically the complexity in connecting devices individually into a network of shared features shows how primitive the general cloud is in its present form. Yoics, which this week received $1 million in a CrunchFund lead investment, is a service that provides accesss directly at the core TCP service level to provide a “service level virtual private network.” It provides access for developers to their devices and apps, but also the ability to 'virtualize' various elements of the products so unique access can be provided. The Yoics API allows networked devices to be connected to or shared like any web service, while maintaining privacy and security for users. Yoics abstracts the physical device itself to make distinct features available such as a the camera on a laptop or a smartphone. For Yoics, the cloud serves as a hub that it uses to layer services. Yoics automates the manual work it would normally take to manage devices. The virtualization aspect to this is key here. Most remote management services access the entire device, not discreet features. Yoics explains the complexity this way: In a world where everything is connected to the Internet, it is actually hard to network various devices to one another. This is especially true for the various silos of LAN and mobile devices from various makers. To make a device on a LAN remotely accessible requires the network router to be configured to open a port and for the remote user to know the (static) IP address and port number to access it. This type of complex configuration is typically beyond the skill set of most consumers and also creates a security vulnerability that can be exploited by a variety of threats. Yoics hits on a huge problem. The gap between device manufacturers is enormous. Each smartphone maker has different ways they configure their devices. Further, the cloud in its current form is not meant to accommodate networking between devices and their respective features. And it’s why the definition of that space between the cloud and everything else represents one of the biggest opportunities for the new year and well beyond. Here’s why. Everything is getting connected. Cars, houses, and any device imaginable will soon have the ability to connect with one another. But those devices have to connect via the cloud, each with
Twitter is reaching out to TV producers and showrunners to find out ways that it can further integrate with the TV experience. That could mean Twitter-based voting, in the case of some competitive reality shows. It could also mean introducing interactive elements in scripted shows that viewers could use to unlock new content or web experiences.
Google has been used for many ends, but in the hands of researcher Viridiana Rios, the search engine has become a tool to fight Mexican drug cartels and help the government organize to prevent violence. Rios is a researcher at Harvard University who recently published a paper about a tool she created to track publicly available cartel data and how it can inform Mexican security officials' work.
The patents war between Samsung Electronics and Ericsson rolls on. The Korean electronics company has announced that it 
