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Feb 03, 9:13AM
[tc_ooyala code="Y1YjZmMzqrDqFLX3J2SsqbZOqcVZeKWm"] We covered the launch of
Summly an application that summarises text
last year, but I recently caught up with Nick D'Aloisio, the16 year year-old programmer who came up with the application for a video interview.
Feb 03, 9:00AM
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Here are some recent posts on TechCrunch Gadgets: The Peek Bites The Dust Steve Jobs Impersonator With Angel Wings And Halo Used To Hawk A Worthless Android Tab The $199 PlayBook Returns For A Limited Time
Feb 03, 7:59AM
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Halfway to living up to its moniker with over 250 startups,
500 Startups held a series of demo days this week and last, where a group of 33 scrappy startups presented their wares to investors in both New York and San Francisco. As we are wont to do with these things, we visited the 500 Startups offices in Mountain View and interviewed the seven that we thought were the most interesting, from both an investor and consumer standpoint. The startups chosen spanned all sorts of market territory, from a novel take on media-based eCommerce to an SaaS for farmers, but what they all had in common was a unique approach to the problem they were trying to solve as well as inkling of that other indeterminate thing that makes a startup great.
Feb 03, 3:25AM
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Facebook is testing a new photo viewer layout that mounts engagement buttons and comments to the right rather than beneath images. See, Facebook doesn't want you to just view comments, it wants you to start a conversation. Apparently the company doesn't care about being accused of copying Google+, since the viewer's layout is very similar to that of
its competitor.
Feb 03, 2:39AM
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The Occupy movement, or rallying cry, or whatever you want to call it, is by its nature decentralized. By refusing to come together under one banner other than the word "Occupy," they've both diluted their message and allowed it to spread more quickly. You don't need an Occupy license to occupy a bank's lobby in Kansas City, but at the same time there's a natural question of whether one occupation is related to another. Political considerations aside, the point is that Occupy might benefit from a recognizable face. On this front, some faction of the movement has decided to do a little branding, but in keeping with the democratic, bottom-up nature of the organization (or rather
disorganization), they've opted to
run a contest and let the "official" logo be selected by popular vote. It's a great application of web technology to an interesting problem, and will probably prove to be a memorable case study in an increasingly common phenomenon: the necessity of branding an emergent movement or pattern on the internet.
Feb 03, 1:57AM
Yammer grew like crazy last year. How crazy? Product VP Jim Patterson just tweeted out the Yammer 2011 Year in Review infographic below with the comment: "Pretty much everything tripled." Paid seats went from 300,000 to 800,000, total users went from 1.6 million to 4 million (2.5X growth), and employees went from 80 to 250. Also, all told, 200,000 companies are using Yammer, including 85 percent of the Fortune 500 (and TechCrunch).
Feb 03, 1:44AM
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The tale of Google Wallet's life thus far is a bit of a weird one, but here's the gist: Google launched it back in September, initially as an exclusive feature on Sprint's Nexus S. We
reviewed it here. Then came Google/Samsung's new flagship Android phone, the Galaxy Nexus — and, for one reason or another, none of the Galaxy Nexuses on any of the US carriers supported Wallet. Android fans roared, and everyone involved pointed fingers everywhere else until everyone just kind of forgot about it. Flash forward to day: without much fanfare, AT&T Galaxy Nexus owners are reporting that Google Wallet now appears to support their devices.
Feb 03, 1:32AM
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In case you happened to be the victim of a day-long coma yesterday,
it was a very exciting day for Mark Zuckerberg, Silicon Valley, and that quaint little social network we've all come to know, love, and be terrified of. Facebook filed its S-1 on Thursday with the crystal clear intent to go public on a market near you very soon, and will be raising $5 billion ahead of its IPO at an expected valuation of between $75 and $100 billion. In fact, there was so much excitement and noise around Facebook's IPO yesterday that the volume of visitors looking to check out Facebook's filing
succeeded in crashing the SEC's website. Hitwise tells us that SEC.gov apparently saw a 15 percent increase in total visits, compared to the day before and a 42 percent compared to previous Thursday. And guess who was the number two source of traffic for the site? That's right, TechCrunch.com -- less than 3 percent behind the top source, Google.com. Thanks to you, readers, we gave the SEC all the traffic they could handle. And apparently more.
Feb 03, 12:47AM
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Alan Lomax single-handedly (and some would say, heavy-handedly) saved the folk music from oblivion. Son of John Lomax, Alan travelled across the US and around the world recording folk musicians in their natural habitat. Some of his most notable songs - work songs, cowboy songs, and ballads - formed the bedrock of the folk movement and the succeeding rise of the singer-songwriter in the 1960s and 70s. Everyone from Bob Dylan to Nickelback owe him a debt of gratitude.
Feb 02, 11:02PM
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If you're anything like me (and hopefully for your sake, you're not), then you tend to do things --scheduling, booking, and so on -- at the last minute. For we Last Minute Scramblers, some highly usable services have popped up that not only allow us to book at the last minute, but receive deals while doing so. You may be familiar with
HotelTonight, an app for Android and iOS that takes last-minute deals (discounts up to 70 percent) offered by hotels on their unsold rooms -- and serves them to you via your smartphone. Well, another San Francisco-based startup thinks that there's more to this whole last minute booking thing. Yes, from 500 Startups' summer batch comes a new app, called
WillCall, which wants to be the HotelTonight for ... live events.
Feb 02, 10:04PM
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Say what you will about The Huffington Post and AOL, their merger has given HuffPo the resources to conquer the online news aggregation business. Today
HuffPo dropped some big stats about the year since its acquisition, most importantly a 47% growth of monthly unique visitors to 36.2 million. Next it's aiming to take down CNN and the cable news industry with
The Huffington Post Streaming Network, which will stream content live on the web for 12 hours a day.
Feb 02, 10:02PM
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The big promise of location-based mobile apps is that they can help you find something great in real life without you meaning to look for it. But that hasn't usually been my experience. Instead, whether because of the friction of having to check in, the lack of adoption by friends outside of tech, or whatever else, I simply forget to use them. That has changed with
Highlight, a new passive location app for iOS that shows you when Facebook users with friends and interests in common are nearby. Since it launched last week, I've gotten in touch with an old friend/source who's now at a big new company, discovered a couple previous acquaintances who happen to live or work near me, and got the heads up about a fellow blogger creeping behind me at work. My experience is more or less on track with what founder Paul Davison is hearing from other users so far.
Feb 02, 9:33PM
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You may remember the
Peek, a device that showed up
back in 2008 (so long ago, now!) offering nothing but email. That's right, nothing but email in an age when smartphones were already becoming popular, and the iPhone was changing the way people thought about interacting with their data. In a way, it was genius: limiting the service and the device made it easy to explain and simple to use. It does email, period. An interesting tack, and one that kept them rolling for a few years, but alas, Peek is finally going to take the big sleep.
Feb 02, 8:34PM
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Parenting is already an extremely hard job, let alone the myriad issues tired parents find in trying to track down the best local babysitter and daycare services, schools, and more. Meanwhile, the brain-melting technology that we see employed every day focuses mainly on photo sharing, friend finding, and money managing, but parents are often left holding the short end of the stick. This is according to Dr. Carol Peebles, a co-founder of
WeSprout, a graduate of the first batch of startups from healthtech-focused accelerator,
Rock Health.
Feb 02, 8:34PM
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A video detailing the new features of Windows Phone 8 Apollo — originally intended for Microsoft's smartphone partners — has leaked into the hands of PocketNow editors. Yay! In my opinion, Windows Phone Mango is a solid platform that's quicker and smoother than anything I've seen on Android. Still, when looking at devices from Microsoft, Apple, and Google side-by-side, the Windows Phone always seems to lose in the spec department. That said, WinPho boss Joe Belfiore has plenty in store for us come Q4 2012 (the rumored release date of Apollo).
Feb 02, 8:29PM
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Android malware has been an issue over the past year. Granted, most of the numbers we see out of security software companies are inflated — including malicious apps from third-party sources and ignoring small download figures — but that's not to say that we can just brush that dirt off our shoulders. Google knows this, and has for a while. Despite the fact that downloads of malicious apps are down 40 percent between the first and second half of 2011, seeing that
14,000,
30,000, or even
260,000 devices have been affected by this or that malicious app requires action. That said, Google is adding a new security layer to the Android Market: codenamed Bouncer.
Feb 02, 8:24PM
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comScore just
released its monthly mobile numbers, which charts smartphone usage from U.S. consumers for the three month period ending in December 2011. For the period, 234 million Americans age 13 and older used mobile devices, which is in line with the
previous period's usage. With respect to smartphone usage, 97.9 million (up from 91.4 million people in the previous period) people in the U.S. used smartphones during the three months ending in December, representing 40 percent of all mobile subscribers. Google Android continued to be the most popular smartphone platform with 47.3 percent market share, up 2.5 percentage points from September. Apple took the second position, growing 2.2 percentage points to grab 29.6 percent of the smartphone market. RIM ranked third with 16 percent share, followed by Microsoft (4.7 percent) and Symbian (1.4 percent).
Feb 02, 8:20PM
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Back in November, there was a run on
PlayBooks when the price was briefly reduced to $199. For a tablet that started out with a premium price, the deal proved enticing to many buyers. And again at the beginning of January, with a slightly odd promotion pricing
all models at $299. Well, they're at it again: until the 11th,
the PlayBook is priced to move: $199 for the 16GB version, $249 for 32GB, and $299 for 64GB. Unfortunately, the device won't be shipping with the 2.0 version of the PlayBook software that
we played with at CES. They
will be rolling out the update soon, though.
Feb 02, 8:00PM
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"In the Studio" at TechCrunch TV continues today with a guest who was once a Senior Scientist at Apple and CEO of Mozilla Corporation before eventually making the trek up Sand Hill Road, where today he's a partner at a leading venture capital firm. John Lilly, an investor with Greylock Partners, has kept himself busy. Having invested already in properties like Tumblr, Dropbox, and a series of others through his firm's early-stage "Discovery Fund," one of the new areas Lilly is investigating today is world of personal health data and systems. The sheer number of new companies and devices on the market offering consumer-level health solutions is simply staggering. We have an explosion in "computing devices" (phones and sensors), new hardware (like Fitbit), new software services (like Cake Health), and social systems and platforms that attempt to weave these all together to form some type of personalized representation of our current state of health and where we'd aspire to be. (Note: There are simply way to many companies in the health space to mention them all here. You can find more comprehensive lists on Quora and by poking around the website of Rock Health, an incubator designed to help launch health-focused startups.)
Feb 02, 7:49PM
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For those not from Silicon Valley or Wall Street, there's only 1 thing you really need know about
Facebook's plan to become a publicly traded company: Your Facebook won't be suddenly overrun with ads. Facebook bluntly warns greedy investors "Our culture emphasizes rapid innovation and prioritizes user engagement over short-term financial results", and CEO Mark Zuckerberg proclaims, "Simply put: we don't build services to make money; we make money to build better services." This is a huge win for the user base, which depends on Facebook as a communication utility.
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