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Beats Targets The Business Traveler With Executive Edition Headphones, We Listen In
Sep 17, 4:00AM
Since launching its first product in 2008, Beats has gone from an obscure niche headphone brand to a multi-million dollar business with plenty of star power (Dr. Dre, Lady Gaga, Justin Bieber, etc.) catapulting the brand into the mainstream spawning several celebrity and musician endorsed rival brands. Now it's going after an older crowd with the Executive over-the-ear headphones, which I've been testing for the last few days. Originally partnered with Monster, the company has since detached itself from the audio manufacturer, had the majority of the company acquired (51 percent) by HTC, acquired music service MOG, and then regained 25 percent of HTC's shares back this past July. It's also had its brand name attached to HP laptops and HTC smartphones.Shazam Makes Its Big TV Push, Says App Can Now Tag Any Show On Any Channel
Sep 17, 4:00AM
When you use Shazam, you're probably identifying a song on the car radio, in a coffee shop, or anywhere else. Recently, however, the company has been expanding into the world of TV, thanks to partnerships with shows like American Idol, and also with brands, including nearly half of the advertisers during the Super Bowl. Shazam just announced that it's expanding its TV efforts beyond individual partnerships. Chief Revenue Officer Doug Garland says the company has created a comprehensive experience for TV, allowing users to tag any show on any channel. This functionality is actually live in the current version of the app — Shazam just waited a little while to announce it. (Unable to resist the pun, Garland says, "We were getting it ready for prime time.")Why The Hell Did I Save This? Annotary Adds Context To Your Bookmarks By Letting You Highlight Them
Sep 17, 2:15AM
Bookmarking things is one of those quiet, thoughtless interactions with content that probably peppers your days without you even being aware of it. Did you just discover an awesome recipe for tabbouleh? Cmd (or Ctrl) + D that thing. Does some newly-found bit of literary criticism seem tailor-made for your English Lit class? You know what to do. New York-based startup Annotary takes this momentary interaction and expands on it just a bit -- in addition to saving the page you've landed on, it allows you to save snippets of outstanding text to go with it.Hardware Alley At Disrupt — From Tele-Presence Robots To Golf Swing Sensors
Sep 17, 1:41AM
The great thing about Hardware Alley at TechCrunch Disrupt is - apart from the fact that it seems to grow bigger at event event - is the sheer variety of companies exhibiting. There's pretty much anything you can imagine, and only two feet can separate a robotics company from a mobile gadget. But it's the opportunity investors look for I guess. Here's a list of the companies featured in this break-neck video.CloudFlare CEO Matthew Prince On Beating Disrupt Battlefield Nerves And Avoiding Site Meltdowns
Sep 17, 1:00AM
CloudFlare launched almost exactly two years ago at the first TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco. It was an incredible experience for us, and we owe a significant amount of our success to the stage Disrupt provided us. Since then, we've rolled out 23 data centers (one per month since launch), added more than half a million customers' websites, and powered nearly half a trillion page views through the CloudFlare network. It's been quite a two years.UK Conservative Party Minister Grant Shapps Is A Master Spammer
Sep 17, 12:02AM
BoingBoing just pointed out a nice piece about Grant Shapps, UK Conservative Party Co-Chair and Member of Parliament for Welwyn Hatfield. The Conservative Party has fallen under scrutiny for being too cozy with Google and their practices this year but this seems to offset that considerably. Shapps runs HowToCorp, one of those ubiquitous link farm services that promises to create heady amounts of Google juice for folks who are trying to squat on a topic like, say, "golf."Why It Doesn't Matter That Apple's iPhone 5 Doesn't Have Global LTE, Or NFC For That Matter
Sep 17, 12:00AM
With all the new features in the iPhone 5, there have been a couple of standout omissions. Reuters, WSJ and others on Friday published articles about how last week's iPhone 5 launch has put Europe in the slow lane and created winners and losers. Their reason: the device will not support LTE on the 2.6GHz and 800MHz bands, frequencies being most commonly used in Europe for 4G. Similarly, Apple's decision not to include a "wave and pay" NFC chip has imparted a damning verdict on a technology that many consider the lynchpin of how point-of-sale mobile payments will work. NFC still stands for "Not For Commerce"! quipped the Guardian. In the follow up to that, there have been some attempts at explanations, both from outside speculators and Apple itself, about why LTE has been configured as it has been; and why NFC is absent. Some interesting points (guesses) being made -- among them, it's a longer-odds game to court carriers at other LTE frequencies (see this GigaOm post); there are problems with implementing an NFC antenna in a metal case (step up, NYT).Your New, Social Calendar: UpTo Now Lets You Discover And Follow Events, From Sports To TV
Sep 16, 11:30PM
In March we wrote about the launch of UpTo, an iPhone app that attempts to build an event-based social network around your calendar, using the iPhone calendar API. Whether you use Google Calendars, Outlook or Yahoo, UpTo goes for agnostic and works with whatever calendar you already have synced with your phone to eliminate friction that stands in the way of sharing or adding events while you're on the go. The app also includes group sharing functionality so that you can add friends from Facebook, exiting contacts, put them into groups, share events from your calendar to UpTo's feed with a couple of clicks or direct to your social networks. Users can also chat with friends in realtime, along with adding events to GCal, for example, straight from the app. In its attempt to become a GroupMe or Plancast for your calendar, today, UpTo is adding another big piece to the puzzle with a "Discover" section that makes it simple for users to find and follow Event Streams.Hardware Alley At TechCrunch Disrupt — From Coffee To Cortexes
Sep 16, 11:17PM
With the rise of cheap and affordable manufacturing facilities, combined with new sources of financing such as crowd-funding, hardware startups are hot once again. And there is no better evidence of this than a quick dash through the Hardware Alley at TechCrunch Disrupt last week in San Francisco. We started with a new kind of connected coffee maker and ended with a startup that lets you look at your thoughts. Enjoy.Mayer To Yahoo!: You Can Have Any Cellphone You Want, As Long As It's Not Blackberry
Sep 16, 11:11PM
Excuse the belated chortle here but it bears noting that Marissa Mayer, CEO of Yahoo!, seems to have pushed the old maxim of a "new broom sweeps clean" all the way into the darkest recesses of Yahoo. To wit, consider the note the BI found from Mayer to her staff. We have a very exciting update to share with you today - we are announcing Yahoo! Smart Phones, Smart Fun! As of today, Yahoo is moving off of blackberries as our corporate phones and on to smartphones in 22 countries. A few weeks ago, we said that we would look into smartphone penetration rates globally and take those rates into account when deciding on corporate phones. Ideally, we'd like our employees to have devices similar to our users, so we can think and work as the majority of our users do.
Nice Phone, Apple, But What's The Deal With The $29 Lightning To 30-Pin Adapter?
Sep 16, 11:00PM
Chances are you have a few iPhone or iPod chargers and cables in your house right now and maybe even a speaker dock or alarm clock that lets you plug in your iPhone. In one fell swoop, Apple made these obsolete when it launched its new Lightning connector on Wednesday. In typical Apple fashion, the company didn't just replace its old proprietary connector it introduced in 2003 with a standards-compliant one. Instead, it went with its own design. The Lightning connector is significantly smaller than the old 30-pin connector, but the one feature that Apple really seemed to feel the need to stress is that it's "reversible" (because plugging in the old connector was always so hard). If you made any investment in iPod/iOS hardware ecosystem in the last 10 years, chances are you will need to buy a few of Apple's overpriced $29 adapters (or $39 with a cable) so you can keep using your devices.Investors Are Salivating Over Zuckerberg's Plans For Search. Here's Why
Sep 16, 10:18PM
Facebook's share price has rocketed up from 19.46 to 22.00 since Mark Zuckerberg talked at TechCrunch Disrupt Tuesday, and numerous sources in the investment community tell us it was his declaration that Facebook will tackle search that excited them most. Rather than incremental increases in revenue that better ad units could bring, the prospect of the social network taking on a whole new business offers an upside worth betting on. But what would Facebook search look like? Not a straight-up, standalone search engine say experts and a Facebook employee. But that doesn't mean Facebook's double-down on search won't threaten the mighty Google.The Need For Speed
Sep 16, 9:50PM
This week's iPhone announcement and last week's release of the new Kindle Fire, Windows 8/Nokia Phone, and Droid RAZR by Google/Motorola offer the latest evidence that, over the past few years, the U.S. has regained global leadership in key areas of communications technology. These high-powered devices, and the demands they place on our broadband networks, underscore a critical challenge. To ensure the U.S. is at the forefront of the next wave of Internet innovation, we need to drive continued improvements in our wired and wireless broadband infrastructure – super-fast, high- capacity, and ubiquitous broadband networks.Startup Alley At Disrupt — Impact Pavilion Shows Off Health, Energy And Transport
Sep 16, 9:17PM
Not only were there country pavilions at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco last week, but also themed ones like Hardware Alley and the Impact Pavilion. Here, you could peruse startups in the themes of health, energy and transport, a few of which were put together by the Greenstart accelerator programme and Solar Mosaic. We caught up with the guys to hear what they had on display. Here are the companies we talked to in this segment:Path CEO Dave Morin On Building A "Personal" Social Network For Mobile Devices
Sep 16, 9:00PM
At the time that Path was first introduced as a new social network for mobile devices, there were already many options for connecting with friends, family, and coworkers. So why build another? Path CEO and co-founder Dave Morin told me in an interview backstage at TechCrunch Disrupt that he and his cofounders were looking for ways to connect users closest to one another -- and building for mobile was the best way to do that.Gina Bianchini's Mightybell Evolves Into A Collaborative Online Space For Creative Projects
Sep 16, 8:00PM
When Ning co-founder and former CEO Gina Bianchini launched Mightybell a year ago, a startup aimed at helping you accomplish things in small, incremental steps and show others how to do the same, it essentially allowed you to create step-by-step private guides for anything. But the startup is shifting its focus slightly away from the private, step-by-step product into a more collaborative, open public platform for people to share their ideas in groups. Now Mightybell is focused on offering sleek, design-focused collaborative online spaces for creative projects. The step-by-step product is still available, but is located here under the product name "Steps."Iterations: My Disrupt Takeaways In Three Words: Enterprise, Celebrity, And Khosla
Sep 16, 7:00PM
As a long-time contributor to TechCrunch, I again had the privilege of hanging out backstage and seeing the TechCrunch team put on what was, in my mind, the best Disrupt conference I've been to. In addition to having a really good time, the content generated both on stage, during the battlefield, and backstage with TCTV was astounding, a great place to reconnect with friends, and a special setting to monitor the pulse of Silicon Valley in this moment in time. In that spirit, as I've done for the past conferences, I wanted to reflect on the key themes I observed during Disrupt. As a disclaimer, please note this isn't an objective summary of the three days, but rather reflections seen through my own lens. I'm also not going to discuss the excellent Battlefield companies, as they were well-covered this week and the quality of pitches in the finals were very good. A few days after the event, these three themes continue to ring in my mind.TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2012 Day 3 Video Highlights (TCTV)
Sep 16, 6:00PM
In the last of our three part series of video highlights from Disrupt SF, we focus on Wednesday when YourMechanic won the Startup Battlefield competition. Earlier in the day, Uber CEO Travis Kalanick explained how he goes up against regulators trying to block his disruptive business model. Yammer CEO David Sacks was asked whether his company was ever in serious acquisition talks with Salesforce or Twitter before it was sold to Microsoft for $1.2 billion. And Vinod Khosla of Khosla Ventures explained why he doesn't like to refer to himself as a venture capitalist, preferring to be called a mentor instead.The Rise Of The TechnoLatinas: A Full-Fledged Startup Movement Emerges In South America
Sep 16, 5:00PM
The South American entrepreneurial community is no longer a small band of companies vying for attention. Instead, it is a full-fledged movement with an ecosystem that is creating new connections for the economies of Argentina, Brazil, Chile and the rest of the world. These entrepreneurs represent a movement now. They are the "TecnoLatinas" and their growing strength became readily apparent this past week at Disrupt San Francisco 2012.Make Sure Your Company Is Ready For IPO Prime Time
Sep 16, 4:00PM
Editor's note: Spencer Rascoff is CEO and a director of Zillow Inc. He previously co-founded Hotwire.com, which was sold to Expedia in 2003. Before his consumer Web career, Spencer was a private-equity investor at TPG Capital, and an investment banker at Goldman Sachs, Bear Stearns, and Allen & Company. Following the closely watched Facebook IPO, there has been increased scrutiny around the IPO process and a lot of discussion about whether certain companies are ready for public markets. It's been a little more than a year since Zillow went public, and I'm regularly asked about our performance relative to other technology companies that have gone public in the past couple of years. Ultimately, I believe the markets recognize and reward companies that execute well. But the road leading to an IPO is a complex one, and every chief executive and board must ask, "Should we go public, and, if so, should we go public now?"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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