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Blekko Launches ROCKZi, a Social News Site to Complement Its Search Engine
Jul 15, 3:00AM
Even though Digg was once known as the next big thing in social news site, it was torn down and sold in small pieces. Yet, part of the concept still lives on. The search engine Blekko just launched ROCKZi, a visually compelling way to consume and interact with the fresh content that users care about the most. After selecting the category that you want to read (Geekery, The BiZ, Glitterati…), you are presented with articles in a grid view reminiscent of Flipboard on the iPad. You can upvote the article with the "This RockZ" button and leave a comment. Users can submit new articles and share them on Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest. On top of that, you accumulate karma points with every action.
Dear Free Press, Stop The Facebook Gossip Profiteering
Jul 15, 2:00AM
The otherwise laudable Free Press book publisher has joined the ranks of media outlets that profiteer from cheap, gossipy, Facebook criticism. The Boy Kings is an autobiographical account from a Facebook customer service employee of the mildly frat boy behavior of Facebook's male engineers, disguised as a tell-all investigative forewarning of the social network's plans for the future. The Grand Canyon-size gap between author Katherine Losse's apocalyptic claims and the actual examples are extraordinary. In one anecdote, Losse's friend and fellow engineer, "Thrax," crashed on the floor asleep after working unusually hard. When Thrax's colleagues praised his work, this was Losse's explanation: "It was as if, in the process of building out his technology, he had reached the technologist's desired state in which he no longer had a human body...This, maybe, was Facebook's primal scene, the moment when technology consumed the body, reality, and what was left of the physical realm."MobiTV Pulls Its IPO: Unfavorable Market Conditions, Or Unfavorable Business Model?
Jul 15, 1:00AM
At the end of August, mobile TV and video platform MobiTV filed its S-1 and announced its plans for a $75 million initial public offering. Founded in 1999, the company had been one of the early movers in the movement to bring live and on-demand TV to mobile devices, which led to partnerships with NBC, ESPN, Disney, CBS, and a bunch of other sizable media companies. The company closed over $100 million in outside investment in their time, had partnered with the big four carriers, and revenue was on the rise, so it seemed like a company on the road to a successful IPO, right? Wrong.Ad Targeting Is Hard
Jul 15, 12:00AM
Microsoft recently announced that it's taking a huge $6.2 Billion writedown over the failed aQuantive acquisition. This news, and the scrutiny of Facebook's business model following their IPO drama, show that, in online advertising, it's all about the targeting.How Authoritarianism Will Lead To The Rise Of The Data Smuggler
Jul 14, 11:05PM
David McCrory has developed the concept of data gravity. It dictates that data has its own mass. When data gets stored it becomes harder to move. The more data stored, the greater the mass. The increasing efforts to control data provides a more dystopian vision about the future of transporting data. How does the data smuggler hide data of such weight when moving it from place to place?Social Network At The Pool Releases TechCrunch "Pool" In Advance of Monday's Launch
Jul 14, 9:57PM
Happy weekend, readers! Unless your boss is making you work this weekend, you've got two days of freedom ahead of you. If you want to spend that time making new friends or meeting people with similar interests, a new startup called At The Pool can help. The social network sends users a different match, based on their location, history, interests and intent (their pols) every day in an email. Users are encouraged to connect on- and offline. The site officially launches Monday—it's had beta launches already—with a "Silicon Beach Pool" aimed at the LA Tech scene. However, the At The Pool team has launched a "TechCrunch Pool" for readers that is live now.Review: The Telikin PC For Older Folks
Jul 14, 9:02PM
I've been putting off writing about the Telikin because, arguably, any PC is suitable the older audience that the Telikin is aimed. I set my Dad up with a Linux machine and then a Mac Mini and he's been surfing Drudge and listening to Polka like a champ for almost a decade now. Why spend $699 when you can feasibly hook Grandma up with a PC for $400 or so at Best Buy? Well the Telikin is an entirely different sort of PC. Built as an all-in-one device, the machine includes an 18- or 20-inch screen, large-print keyboard, and a normal wired mouse. It runs an unnamed version of Linux and is completely locked down, dumping you into a kiosk-like experience that you can't leave. The machine is, in actuality, a MSI MSI Wind Top AE1920 with some special software installed and you essentially pay a $60 premium for Telikin's software.Path's Consistency Of Tone
Jul 14, 8:52PM
Admittedly, I have a negative bias towards overhyped startups. If a company gets a lot of attention before they do anything significant, I'm less likely to try their product and when I do, less likely to have a positive feeling about it. I realize this is a weakness I need to overcome, but it's the way my mind works. There are few better examples over the past few years of overhyped startups than Path. Two years ago the company, after much uber-super-duper-stealth-mode speculation, launched a sub-par photo-sharing product that offered little utility over the other products in the space. Then, Path turned down a rumored $100m acquisition, again, before they'd released anything worth buying (except the team).DIY Wireless Typing Glove Is The Future Of Michael Jackson Impersonation/Data Entry
Jul 14, 7:19PM
As we were wandering through the Atlanta meet-up last week we stumbled upon a charming young man wearing a glove studded with circuit boards and embroidered with what looked like silver thread. Upon closer inspection, it turned out that it was a wild homegrown glove made by a pair of former design students.RIM Ordered To Pay Out $147 Million Over Mformation Patent Scuffle
Jul 14, 6:00PM
And RIM's rough ride continues. Within the past few weeks, the Canadian company has had to announce all sorts of bad news, and now RIM has been dealt an expensive defeat in court to add that list. Bloomberg reported late yesterday that RIM must now shell out nearly $150 million in order to settle a patent suit with a New Jersey-based mobile device management company called Mformation.Facebook's Latest Acqui-Hire: Spool, The "Instapaper On Steroids"
Jul 14, 5:59PM
Facebook has acquired the team behind Spool, the mobile content-caching startup that launched in September 2011 at TechCrunch Disrupt. We're working on getting more details, but this looks like a pure talent acquisition -- it doesn't appear that any of the technology Spool built will be integrated into Facebook, and the company has already shut down its service.Gillmor Gang: Tablet Stakes
Jul 14, 5:00PM
The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Keith Teare, John Taschek, and Steve Gillmor — played Minority Report The Home Version as Google entered the Tablet Wars. The Nexus 7 or some such is actually a phenomenal device, and brings the Goog back from the Slow Death of Fragmentation and a step ahead of Microsoft SquareFace. Now we've got two push notification platforms that will actually get built out, as long as Google keeps the Nexus refreshed on the latest Android build. Whether the Gang members are right about the timing remains to be deciphered from the conversation, but it's clear sailing for a unification of the metadata if not the actual notification streams.Iconoclasm
Jul 14, 3:00PM
What can be said about the save icon? It is a diskette. It is often blue. And of course, as others have pointed out, many (soon to be most) people using computers today have never touched one and never will. Yet you could say the same for a the "home" icon (millions will never own a house), the "phone" icon (used a model 500 lately?), the lasso, the magnifying glass, the dodge and burn tools. "Games," represented by a checkerboard! Copy and paste, for god's sake?Metastasized Software And Life 3.0
Jul 14, 1:00PM
"Center for Digital Archaeology," said the banner above one of the startups at the Funders and Founders Life 3.0 demo show, and for a moment I got excited, thinking of Vernor Vinge's software archaeologists. It wasn't quite that. Instead, Codifi was a "solution for turning cultural heritage datasets and rich media into web- and mobile-ready interactive experiences." Which is cool, and worthwhile, but more a niche market than a world-shaker. As were a lot of the startups there. TennisRound: "find a tennis partner." DreamBoard: an app for dream tracking and analysis Plus, of course, the usual panoply of social marketplaces, socialsourced services, gamified giving, "Instagram for Products," etc etc yadda yadda. I apologize for being jaded. But Michael Church's scathing essay "Don't waste your time in crappy startup jobs"--go read it--was still ringing in my ears, and I couldn't help but wonder how many of these startups were founded more for the sake of founding a startup than because the founders had an idea that wouldn't let them go.What Exactly Is GitHub Anyway?
Jul 14, 9:00AM
Andreessen Horowitz announced a whopping $100 million investment in GitHub this week. You can read commentary and speculation all over the web about what GitHub will do with the money, whether this was a good investment for Andreessen Horowitz and whether taking such a large investment is a good thing for GitHub. But what the heck is GitHub and why are developers so excited about it? You may have heard that GitHub is a code sharing and publishing service, or that it's a social networking site for programmers. Both statements are true, but neither explain exactly why GitHub is special.How To Create A Minimum Viable Product
Jul 14, 6:00AM
There's been a lot of talk on the concept of minimum viable product lately, but not much has been written on how to actually implement one. Having gone through the process of developing one of the earliest social software mashups (GROU.PS) in PHP six years ago, and LoveBucks, a node.js Javascript app that is the Facebook "Like" Button for online content monetization (both alone), I want to describe to you a little bit what has really changed in web application development in recent years and the beauty of minimum viable product.Thumbs Up: Digg Wasn't A Failure, It Was A Beginning
Jul 14, 3:25AM
"Don't let him climb a wall. We haven't finalized his life insurance plan." That was one of the first directions I was given at Digg when I started in early 2008. "Him" was Kevin Rose, the founder of the widely popular social news site, and I was on my third day. It was widely known that Kevin was an avid rock climber, though he had recently been extending this skill to common household surfaces...walls, doorframes, stairways. We were heading together to Miami, for his keynote at Future of Web Apps, and he had offhandedly mentioned that he was going to scale the 3-story inner wall of the conference hall.Your National AngelHack Winners: Appetas, GiveGo, And ShareBrowse
Jul 14, 1:27AM
This summer's AngelHack was a little more ambitious than your average hackathon. Instead of holding one event in one location over one weekend, it held hackathons in four different cities (Seattle, Silicon Valley, Boston, and New York), then allowed the winning teams to refine their products for three weeks before coming to Palo Alto and competing in the final event last night. I was one of the judges, along with Right Side Capital's David Lambert, AngelPad's Thomas Korte, Istanta Capital's Matt Oguz, Google Ventures' Wesley Chan, and Facebook's Austen Haugen. (Oh, and TechCrunch's Josh Constine was the event "host", which meant that he introduced each presenter and cracked jokes while they took the stage.) The judging felt a little odd, because the presentations and products were much more polished than what I've seen at other hackathons. At the same time, they weren't full-fledged companies yet, either.mPowa Replaces Hand Photo Allegedly Swiped From Square With Photo Of A Totally Different Hand
Jul 14, 12:16AM
It looks like a titanic legal struggle has been avoided. Mobile payments startup mPowa has responded to a cease-and-desist letter from Square by taking down a photo on its home page that Square said was swiped from its site. You can read more the dispute in yesterday's post, but basically, Square's lawyers said it was "clear and obvious" that mPowa had copied Square's image. mPowa CEO Don Wagner, on the other hand, told us that Square was just trying to "divert" the company's focus. At the time, he wouldn't say how mPowa would respond, but we heard that the company was probably just going to take the photo down.Nodejitsu Takes On Heroku, Microsoft Azure With Node.js Platform Cloud
Jul 13, 11:45PM
Nodejitsu announced a long awaited public beta for its Node.js platform cloud service this week, that runs on Amazon Web Services, Joyent or Rackspace. The company also offers suites of tools for deploying, monitoring and managing Node.js applications in both public and private cloud environments.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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