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Paper Or Plastic?
Mar 10, 2:57AM
I have a confession to make: despite having reviewed a few e-readers, and having written dozens of articles about them, I've never really used one. I mean, I've used them enough to know a good one from a bad one, to understand the features, and to do a proper evaluation — but I've never made one part of my life, the way one makes a mobile phone or laptop part of one's life. In that way I haven't really used an e-reader. Until just recently. As a book lover, I view e-readers as interlopers; as a practical person, I acknowledge them as inevitable. But in both cases, I have come to view them as a deeply unsatisfying reading experience. They fall short of paper in meaningful ways, and objecting to them should not be considered technophobic. The future of e-books is bright, but as far as I'm concerned, right now we're still in the dark age — though that isn't to say the stone age.Army Warns Of Danger Of Geotagging
Mar 10, 2:03AM
While for an ordinary civilian the automatic geotagging of your photos or check-ins might be convenient, in the military it can be a lethal mistake. In 2007, geotagged photos of a new fleet of helicopters allowed enemy forces to mortar the base and destroy several of them; it could just as easily have been a field hospital or barracks. The Army has therefore published an article calling attention to this fact, though its casual tone suggests that they aren't ready to take serious action on the issue. A warning is all it is, and perhaps also an acknowledgement that sometimes it's better to bend with the breeze than fight it.Eyeing An IPO, Kayak 2011 Revenue Up 32 Percent To $225M; Net Income Up 21 Percent
Mar 10, 12:41AM
Travel search giant Kayak just posted new revenue numbers for the fourth quarter and full year 2011 in a new S-1 filing with the SEC. As we heard last September, Kayak put its IPO plans on hold until market conditions improve. Now that the markets are more stabilized, it should be interesting to see when Kayak makes the push to become a public company. For the year Kayak generated $224.5 million of revenues, up 32 percent from 2010. Net income for the year was $9.7 million, up 21 percent from 2010's net income of $8 million For the fourth quarter, Kayak saw a 27 percent increase in quarterly revenue, posting $53.9 million in Q4 2011 sales. In contrast, revenue grew 28 percent in the third quarter.Cater2.me May Be Feeding Your Favorite Startup
Mar 10, 12:39AM
Startup Cater2.me is trying to answer one of the rarely-discussed challenges facing any company that wants to keep a large workforce happy — feeding them meals that aren't boring. Cater2.me was founded in late 2010 and has already attracted some positive press attention. Now, its client list includes some startups worth bragging about, such as Yelp, Eventbrite, Tagged, Square, Dropbox, Twilio, Causes, Posterous, and Heyzap. The company is serving 40,000 lunches a month (including many to non-startups, of course.)Mobcaster Crowdfunds Its First TV Season
Mar 09, 11:20PM
It's famously difficult to get a TV show on the air — much less one that still matches your initial vision. That's why startup Mobcaster has launched a new platform where creators can ask fans directly for the financial support needed to produce their shows. The startup just had its first funding success story — The Weatherman, an Australian-produced comedy about, yes, a weatherman, which just raised the funding for its first season. The production company set a goal of $72,500, and it raised $73,975. (As the team notes at the beginning of the pilot episode, traditional television episodes cost hundreds of thousands of dollars or more, so that's a tiny budget for a full season.)PayPal's New Digital Wallet Will Offer Personalized Deals, Flexible Payments, And More
Mar 09, 11:00PM
We've been hearing recently about PayPal's in-store payments platform for large retailers (which will soon be rolled out to small businesses as well). But we haven't seen PayPal do much in the past few months with its plans for its digital wallet on the consumer side. We know PayPal has a major vision for how payments will be made in the future, but today, the company is giving us a glimpse of exactly what new features will be added to the platform in the coming year. As PayPal's director of communications Anuj Nayar tells us in an interview, "PayPal is changing, and this is the first major revamp of the core PayPal product. We're known as an online payments brand but this is all part of PayPal becoming an actual wallet."Gundotra: Google+ Won't Let 3rd-Party Apps Post Because "Your Stream Could Easily Be Overwhelmed"
Mar 09, 10:39PM
Today at his SXSW fireside chat, head of Google+ Vic Gundotra said "I am 100% to blame" for the social network lacking an API seven months after launch. The reason? "Your stream could easily be overwhelmed" if Google allowed third-party apps to post content on users' behalf. "I'm going to release that API when I'm confident we're not going to screw over developers." Additionally, Gundotra criticized Facebook's inclusion of ads on photo albums and said that only a "very small number of people have turned off social search".A Better Live Wiki: HackPad Could Be Your SXSW Backchannel
Mar 09, 9:47PM
There are lots of apps for finding the right people and parties at South By Southwest this year, but what about, you know, actually going to panels and sharing your thoughts about them? Well, there's Twitter for short-form public sharing, and messaging apps like GroupMe for group chats. But HackPad has a more serious idea: actually taking notes about the panels and keynotes you go to, with other people who care. It sounds dangerously productive for the fun-oriented event. And it is -- this is one of the better live group word-processing products I've seen in a while.Nokia Lumia 900 Won't Hit AT&T Shelves Until April 22
Mar 09, 9:46PM
We'd heard a while back that the long-awaited Windows Phone-powered Lumia 900 would show up on AT&T's shelves on March 18. However, around the time that this rumored launch date leaked, the Lumia 900 had yet to go through its testing in the technical acceptance process. Turns out, that may be the reason BGR is now reporting that the Lumia 900 launch has been delayed to April 22.Marvel Touts New Deal: Buy A Comic Book, Get The Digital Version Free
Mar 09, 9:27PM
Pop quiz, hotshot: it's Wednesday, and that means a new shipment of comic books is sitting pretty at your local dead tree retailer. Do you schlep down to the store to buy a physical copy, or will you reach for your smartphone/tablet and buy it from the comfort of your own home? Well, if you want the best bang for your buck, you should probably get dressed and prepare to brave the outside world. Starting in June, any Marvel comic that costs $3.99 or higher (when did comic books get so pricey?) will come with a code that lets the purchaser download a digital copy of that same comic via the Marvel Comics app for iOS or Android.Stride, A CRM System Salespeople Will Hate (But Freelancers Will Love), Launches Into Beta
Mar 09, 8:40PM
Stride, a new CRM system designed to meet the needs of freelancers and small business owners, is launching into private beta today. The product, which was born out of an actual need for a more simplified CRM system, is focused on efficiency, not a complex feature set. It's not for adding contracts, managing cases, or allocating tasks to a team of salespeople. Instead, Stride is about deal-tracking and high-level metrics only. "For salespeople, this app is going to make them cringe," says Stride co-founder Andrew Dumont.Apple Goes Big In Texas With $304 Million Austin Campus
Mar 09, 8:10PM
Most of the news around Austin this week is centered around SXSW, naturally, but Texas Governor (and erstwhile presidential candidate) Rick Perry broke some news today that's unrelated, but still Austin-relevant. Apple, it seems, which has been slowly growing its presence in the state's tech oasis, chose SXSW weekend as an auspicious time to announce a major new campus in Austin.Clouds & APIs: Mayor Lee Unveils The San Francisco Open Data Cloud
Mar 09, 7:56PM
With 30,000 tech jobs already in town and more (hopefully) on the way, San Francisco has been making a big push to make its city as friendly as possible to entrepreneurs. In January, we saw Mayor Ed Lee, Ron Conway, and former TechCrunch CEO Heather Harde launched sfCITI, a committee which focuses on hiring -- both placing and training competent programmers and just generally bringing smart people into San Francisco's workforce. Last month, the city complemented its hiring committee by announcing a new initiative again aimed at making the city more relevant to its chief industry, called the 2012 Innovation Portfolio, which helps founders, as Eric wrote at the time, do everything from "completing the paperwork for creating a company, to giving developers new access to city data, to actually testing out tech products at City Hall itself."How Green Dot Will Use Loopt To Go After Mobile Payments
Mar 09, 7:29PM
Imagine you're walking by your local cafe, and you get a notification on your phone that you'll get a free bagel if you buy a cup of coffee. You walk inside, and make the purchase with your credit card — no need to take out your phone again. The bagel rings up as "free," and you get a notification from your bank confirming you've received the discount. All of this payments and loyalty interchange can happen over the cloud. A lot of companies are trying to get their arms around mobile payments. Many of them, trying to make your phone itself act as the credit card. Google with Wallet, Square, PayPal, American Express, everybody who's experimenting with NFC.How To Win At SXSW: Give Away Experiences, Not Grub and Booze
Mar 09, 7:17PM
The fundamental mistake companies make when marketing at SXSW is giving away things I can easily buy on my own. Open bars and taco giveaways only attract freeloaders. If brands want influencers to take notice, they have to provide unique experiences. >From my last three SXSWs, I couldn't tell you who provided the ice cream sandwiches or Lone Star beers. But Zynga's warehouse concert with TV On The Radio, Tagged's limo rides, and Diggnation's fire-eating magician -- those I remember.StartupBus To SXSW Day Three: Las Cruces To San Antonio [TCTV]
Mar 09, 7:02PM
StartupBus, the hackathon-on-wheels in which busloads of entrepreneurs make the journey down to the South By Southwest conference with the goal of teaming up to create viable web apps by the time they arrive in Austin, rolled into its third day yesterday. in this video you can see how the buspreneurs' apps have gone from concept to code with demos from customizable breakfast cereal app Cerealize and motion detection video technology startup Kinect.ly.Resumes Are Bullshit. HireArt Is Better.
Mar 09, 6:43PM
HireArt, a newly launched Y Combinator-backed company, is working to solve a major problem that all employers face today: resumes are bullshit. Job candidates often like to fluff up their experience, and sometimes they even outright lie about their abilities. Other times, potentially great employees are overlooked because they have unorthodox backgrounds that don't match up with what an employer thinks they need in terms of experience. Sometimes these kinds of things are realized during the in-person interview. Unfortunately for many employers, they often don't discover how much a particular candidate may have oversold themselves until they've been hired and can't perform to expectations. With its new applicant screening system, HireArt thinks it may have a solution: have the employees actually do the work first.Microsoft Envisions A Future With Super-Fast Touchscreens
Mar 09, 6:38PM
As solid as modern touchscreens are, there's very often an subtly apparent sense of disconnect when you try to use one. According to Paul Dietz of Microsoft's Applied Sciences Group, it all comes down to latency — he notes average touchscreens have a latency of a 100ms, which yields a noticeable bit of lag between a user touching a screen and the screen displaying a reaction to it. Sure, it's totally usable, but it never really feels like you're fully in control. If you drag an app across the iPad's screen, for example, the icon will dance around your finger a bit as the display tries its best to keep up. That's not good enough for Dietz and his team, as they have whipped up a demo of how things ought to be — unlike the 100ms delay of a regular touchscreen, the demo knocks that delay between touch and tracking down to 1ms flat.Fred Wilson, Ron Conway, Dennis Crowley, Keith Rabois And Roelof Botha Are All Ready To Disrupt
Mar 09, 5:38PM
Who's coming to Disrupt NYC this year, you may ask? Well, we aren't going to reveal all of the fun surprises we have in store quite yet, but we are excited to announce a couple key speakers who will be joining us this year. This year's lineup kicks off with a strong set of Silicon Valley greats and New York tech titans. Roelof Botha is a partner at Sequoia Capital and is in the business of finding the most disruptive startups out there. As many know, Ron Conway puts the "super" in super angel. Dennis Crowley, the co-founder of Foursquare will also be joining us, along with Square's Keith Rabois and top investor Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures. These five compelling speakers are just a quick preview of all of the guests who will be there. As they stroll through Startup Alley, which companies will catch their eye this year? Stay tuned for more announcements of our guest speakers, ticket giveaways and a few surprises each week as we get closer to the event.TechCrunch Cribs Visits Llustre — A Better Gilt For Home Decor?
Mar 09, 5:05PM
I must admit I didn't immediately get Llustre. It looked like another ecommerce play, super-focused on curation and editorial - where was the potential for scale? I looked again. They'd raised £750,000 (just over $1 million) from a host of experienced angel investors, entrepreneurs and venture capitalists. There must be more to it than meets the eye? Perhaps it was the latest in a new trend of culture-led startups coming out of London right now in the fields of art, design and music? Clutching a camera, I went along to their new offices in Clerkenwell to find out. The location is significant. London's Clerkenwell has long been home to a cluster of designers, artist and artisan communities and is well located between the creative/design companies of the West End and the tech startups of the East.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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