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Highlight Needs To Let You Switch Off 'Friend Of Friend' Notifications Before SXSW
Mar 04, 6:44AM
Ambient location app Highlight is a big deal. Eldon likes it, Scoble likes it, MG and Mike like it and Grindr fan Charlie Cheever likes it. More importantly, I like it. Before you call me out for being slightly narcissistic with the above statement (which wouldn't make me at all unique in my field), here's why the fact that I like it is important; In case you haven't noticed, I am a female, which means I am an indicative use case for an app that forces you to constantly broadcast your location.App.net Wants To Help Mobile Apps Stand Out At SXSW
Mar 04, 2:00AM
Here's one of the great things about South by Southwest: Everyone wants to launch a cool new product there. Here's one of the worst things about South by Southwest: Everyone wants to launch a cool new product there. That's why Dalton Caldwell, CEO of App.net, is holding a special App Showcase at Beauty Bar on the afternoon of March 10.>From Zynga To Flipboard: Why All Eyes Are On China For The Next Mobile Boom
Mar 04, 1:00AM
If you spend any time speaking with Western mobile companies, one topic that's likely to pop up is their "China strategy." Due to a mix of mobile penetration, sheer population, and popularity of the mobile web, Western mobile companies recognize there's a lot of money to be made overseas. The idea is not without merit: China is the world's largest mobile market with almost one billion users, 69 percent of which access the Internet through their phones on a regular basis.One Year Later: How Google Panda Changed Our Business
Mar 04, 12:10AM
February 24, 2011 was a day that will live in infamy for the team here at Viewpoints. That was the day of the Google Panda update. Up until that point we had enjoyed four years of consistent traffic growth to Viewpoints.com. We managed to double traffic each year and had just reached 2.7 million unique users. We had heard that Google was planning to update its algorithm to penalize content and link farms and were excited about the bump we might get as a result. Turns out we were in for a bit of a surprise.PinClout Gets A Cease-And-Desist From Klout, Will Change Name
Mar 03, 11:31PM
"Klout for Pinterest" may be a catchy company description, but taking it too literally may lead to legal trouble. Startup PinClout launched about a week ago, and its name seemed to make the company's mission clear — to measure influence on fast-growing Pinterest. And there's been positive interest, with some tech press coverage and what co-founder Chris Fay said is an average of 2,000 to 3,000 unique visitors every day. However, the company just received a letter from Klout's attorney asking it to "immediately cease and desist from all use of or plans to use the PINCLOUT mark and the www.pinclout.com domain name."Google Drive And The Cloud Wars
Mar 03, 10:08PM
For the past six years, any startup touching the cloud storage space has lived in anticipation and fear of Google's entry into the market. G(od) Drive's arrival was meant to instantly commoditize existing offerings, kill all future opportunity for new players, and leave a charred ecosystem in its wake as it battled Microsoft and Apple for control of our online lives and content. This was seen as all but a forgone conclusion among investors, press, analysts, and even competing startups since 2006 and beyond. And even beyond that. But the Google Drive never came. Why?On The Shoulders Of Giants: Y Combinator Demo Day Brings The Future To Computer History Museum
Mar 03, 9:15PM
Every year, Y Combinator Demo Day, where the latest batch of incubated startups make their pitch to investors, seems to get a little bigger. Now, for the first time since the event began in 2005, it's moving to a new home — the Computer History Museum. At the last Demo Day, in August (they're held twice a year), you could already sense that the gathering was outgrowing YC headquarters in Mountain View. Organizers pushed out the walls to accommodate a larger audience, and in order to speed through the 63 presenters (an increase of nearly 50 percent), each company was limited to a few minutes of speaking, meaning they had to give rapid-fire pitches instead of full demos. There was even a tiny stage erected for the demos.Foursquare And Glancee Are Cool, But Here's Why I'm So Excited About Using Highlight At SXSW
Mar 03, 7:50PM
The crowds and hype of South By Southwest make the massive Austin tech and media conference the perfect place for launching, well, any sort of app that needs crowds and hype to break out of tech circles and into the mainstream. So what can we expect to blow up next week, like Twitter, Foursquare, GroupMe and Beluga have in past years? Highlight is what I'm placing my bets on -- and not for what it is today, but for what it could become. That is, the long-sought replacement for business cards.Valve Rumored To Be Working On Steam-Based Console
Mar 03, 7:43PM
Valve, creators of (among other things) the Half-Life franchise and Steam, the gold standard for digital game distribution, are said to be getting into the hardware game. If The Verge's tip is to be believed, the company is working with partners to establish a base PC gaming standard to sell as a packaged deal, a sort of set-top box PC that would run Steam or other download services and run most PC games. If true, it would be a major step for Valve, which has always been a software company. They haven't ruled out moving into hardware, but their expertise is in software, so they're more likely to be collaborating with an established gaming PC brand like Alienware. In fact, Alienware's compact X51 system is said to have been designed with a spec like this "Steam Box" in mind.Pair Programming Considered Harmful?
Mar 03, 6:11PM
"We have trained, hired, and rewarded people to be cowboys. But it's pit crews that we need," said Atul Gawande -- a surgeon and Harvard professor who writes for The New Yorker in his copious spare time -- in a recent TED talk. He was talking about doctors, but what tech profession might fit that description as well? Yes, that's right. You there, huddled over the IDEs on your MacBook Pros. Step forward, software developers. Coding has always been seen as lone-ranger work; witness the opening scene in The Social Network. Despite managers' dreams of programmers as fungible units, it's nearly universally accepted that a great developer is ten times as productive as a mediocre one, and/or that a small team of the software equivalent of the Special Forces can code rings around an army of hundreds of grunts. The flip side is that one cowboy coder's bad decisions can cripple you; maybe immediately, or maybe next year, when you suddenly discover that your organization has quietly racked up so much technical debt that it has become the software equivalent of Greece. There are various ways to try to mitigate this risk. One of the more extreme calls for all development to be performed by pairs of programmers: two coders at one keyboard, at all times, with almost no exceptions. The idea (to oversimplify a bit) is that a second mind will sanity-check every bad idea and support every good one, so you--counterintuitively--wind up with higher per-programmer productivity. Legendary development shops like San Francisco's Pivotal Labs and Toronto's Xtreme Labs(1) have adopted a 100 percent pair programming mindset, with considerable success. Great! Problem solved, right? ...Not so fast.UX Expert, 23, Almost Refused Entry To Ireland To Hire People. Name's Flanagan.
Mar 03, 6:10PM
As tech becomes the world's hottest subject and one of its few growth sectors, the international borders are straining as talent moves around the globe in search of the best startups and projects. European countries are increasingly alive to this, and we've seen huge efforts made by tech celebrities to lobby the White House over the Startup Visa concept. But it seems the news that the tech industry is now a big deal had not reached a certain immigration official at Dublin Airport today. An unnamed officer today turned away one of the world's top UX guys from entering Ireland because they didn't believe his "story". The "story" turned out to be told by one Brian Flanagan - a name normally recognised as being Irish in extraction, but more to the point, Flanagan is currently working with one Joi Ito on a project. The problem was that the official simply did not buy the idea that UX is a "real job" and promptly sent him off to a waiting room where he was due to be deported back to the U.S. from where he'd traveled. Despite telling officials he was in Ireland to HIRE people, he was told bluntly: "You couldn't be hiring people, you're - like - 23!"Gillmor Gang: Living on Rented Time
Mar 03, 6:00PM
The Gillmor Gang — John Borthwick, Doc Searls, Robert Scoble, John Taschek, and Steve Gillmor — go through an entire show (almost) without mentioning Apple's big event next week. Instead, we discuss Netflix' new 26 hour movie model, why news silos can be good for you, the relationship between the Republican primary process and the secret source of innovation, and Cluetrain vs. the carriers. Doc's theory that Verizon killed fiber to get into the mobile market certainly does raise some eyebrows, but @scobleizer is happy just sucking down data because he's living in the future. Me — I've been living in 1919 and Downton Abbey, waiting for Mad Men to return. So it goes in the Land of Licensing, where the only thing we own is the electric bill.Co-Founder Of Manteresting, Pinterest For Men, On What It Means To Be A Clone [TCTV]
Mar 03, 5:35PM
We've found Pinterest clones galore since the social pinboard site first launched, but it would seem that the fad is going in a new direction. Recently I stumbled upon Manteresting.com, a Pinterest for men, and couldn't help but seek out the founders for a quick little interview. In it, co-founder Brandon and I discuss what it means to be a clone, how Manteresting plans on differentiating itself, and whether or not the user experience is heightened by drawling a line between the two genders. (Unfortunately, co-founder Jesse Michelsen wasn't able to speak with us.)
I'm A Startup — Why Am I Being Inundated With Cloud Providers?
Mar 03, 5:15PM
Over the past few weeks, when I've visited several startup incubators from Stanford's Start X, to Los Angeles' Start Engine, to the NewMe Accelerator, I have noticed many cloud computing companies hoping to get these startups to choose them. Some of the cloud computing companies are throwing tons of goodies at these startup incubators or accelerators. Rackspace, where I work, sponsors startups at Techstars, Founder's Den, and other places where startups congregate. Why?Koubachi Wi-Fi Plant Sensor Takes The Guesswork Out Of Container Gardening
Mar 03, 3:02PM
Houseplants can be hard to care for, even when watered regularly on a sunny windowsill. A new device from Swiss startup Koubachi takes the guesswork out of plant care through real-time monitoring and notifications when the plant needs attention.What A Love Doctor Taught Me About Fundraising
Mar 03, 3:00PM
Oprah Winfrey recently interviewed Anthony Robbins, who talked about "how we're defined by the stories we tell ourselves". Last month, I met two investors; one of them asked how come I'd never raised capital. I answered with the "story" I'd told for 6 years to the point I believed it: "No one really wants to invest in a producer of video content based in Montreal."Apple Inc., Made In America
Mar 03, 2:01AM
There are two sayings on the back of every Apple product: Designed By Apple in California and Assembled in China. These statements attempt to say that even though the products might be assembled in a different country, Apple is an American company -- a fact Apple proclaimed loudly today with a new web page titled Creating jobs through innovation. Apple has been under fire lately regarding its overseas manufacturing partners. Apple hired the Fair Labor Association to conduct voluntary audits of the final assembly partners, including Foxconn's massive Asian facilities. But consumers and activists alike aren't buying it. It's a smokescreen, they say. Foxconn will just hide the children and give everyone a new pillow prior to inspector's arrival. This has rightly put Apple on the defensive.PlanGrid Builds A New Market For The iPad: The Construction Industry
Mar 03, 1:25AM
Mark this up as one more crucial chapter in the much-thumbed book called "The Consumerization of IT": a new app has launched from a Y Combinator-backed startup that offers builders the ability to store, manage and view blueprints on and iPad tablet. The unique selling point for PlanGrid, as the app is called, is that it promises to present building blueprints in a far more efficient way than they have been presented before. But on a more general level, PlanGrid is a sign of how the iOS platform is maturing and attracting a new wave of developers who target specific enterprise verticals with solutions tailored to their business needs.Playdom Says Marvel Superheroes Are Super Viral (Among Men)
Mar 03, 12:57AM
Social game-maker Playdom officially launched Marvel: Avengers Alliance on Thursday, and executive producer Chia Chin Lee says the title is already disproving some of the common assumptions about social games. The big assumption: that men don't like to share their activity in social games the way that women do. That could be a problem for Avengers Alliance, since a game about superheroes would probably skew male. But during the beta test period, when the game was played by tens of thousands of users, it actually saw 45 percent more viral installs compared to most Playdom titles, and in fact men were four to six times more likely to send in-game messages.Necessary Evil? Random House Triples Prices Of Library E-Books
Mar 03, 12:52AM
Random House, the world's largest publisher of the kinds of books you and I read, has made some adjustments to the way it sells e-books to libraries. Notably, they have tripled the price of many titles. Librarians across the country are expressing their discontent. The changes were telegraphed by an announcement a month ago that suggested prices would be going up soon, and most expected significant increases — but across the board popular genres and titles have gone up as much as 300%. Nothing is offered below $25, and some common titles are going for above $100. As Kathy Petlewski, a librarian in Plymouth, puts it: "The first thing that popped into my mind was that Random House must really hate libraries."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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