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"The US Is A Country Of Explorers" Says Elon Musk As He Plans For A Texas-Based Spaceport
Mar 09, 9:06PM
Wired's Chris Anderson interviewed Mega-Entrepreneur Elon Musk about hs many projects, which include SpaceX AND Tesla Motors. Throughout their fairly technical and detailed conversation, Elon when into detail about the rigors of launching rockets and dealing with bad press about cars.Elon Musk Says His Only Regret In NYT Controversy Was Not Rebutting The Rebuttal
Mar 09, 8:56PM
During this afternoon's keynote interview at South by Southwest Interactive, Tesla CEO and founder Elon Musk briefly addressed his recent back-and-forth with The New York Times about a negative article by writer John Broder, which Musk said was "false." Asked if he would do anything differently, Musk said there was just one thing — he would have posted "the rebuttal to the rebuttal." Broder's article recounted a test drive of Tesla's Model S in which the battery was depleted in the final part of the drive, meaning that it had to get towed. Musk in turn wrote a long post in which he accused Broder of improperly charging the vehicle, taking a long detour, and otherwise setting up the test drive to fail.Elon Musk's SpaceX Is Testing Technology To Make Rockets Reusable
Mar 09, 8:47PM
Elon Musk's SpaceX is getting closer to having technology which could dramatically lower the cost of space travel. In a keynote speech at SXSW Interactive, Musk demonstrated tech that could be used to make rockets reusable. During the interview, Musk showed off a couple of videos demonstrating how the technology works.With 26.5M Daily Users, Denmark's Kiloo Pioneers New Ways of Producing Mobile Games
Mar 09, 8:33PM
One of the sleeper hits on the charts over the last year has been a tiny game out of Denmark called Subway Surfers. It’s a runner game like Imangi’s Temple Run that has a character named Jake riding train tracks and dodging trains. That single title has helped Kiloo and Sybo, the studio it co-produced the game with, reach 26.5 million daily active users. For comparison, that’s more daily users than Zynga had on mobile platforms last quarter. Subway Surfers was also the sixth most actively used game on U.S. iPhones in December, according to app tracking company Onavo. It has some off-the-charts retention numbers with 91 percent of players returning after day 1 and 60 percent returning after 30 days. How did they do it? Kiloo’s chief creative officer Simon Moller credits a co-production model where they split development of the game with outside studios. Kiloo handles the free-to-play part with the user interface, monetization, marketing, user retention and community. Their developer partners focus on the concept and art. Moller, who co-owns the 50-person company with his brother, says Kiloo’s model isn’t about publishing. He insists it’s different. “This model is good for people who come out of the traditional gaming world. They know how to do gameplay and graphics, but they’re really confused about free-to-play,” he said. “Maybe they know it’s the way the industry is moving, but they don’t realize it requires a whole different skill set and mentality.” What’s happened over the last year on mobile platforms is that early companies like Pocket Gems and then big publicly-traded companies like Zynga have started a publishing arms race. With their reach, they promise indie studios distribution and customers. While indie hits do break out from time to time, the market overall is just getting a lot more expensive and competitive. Last month, Distimo said that only 2 percent of the top 250 publishers in the iPhone App Store were "newcomers," versus just 3 percent in the Android store, Google Play. Publishing is also a way for the bigger gaming companies to de-risk their portfolio and counter the hits-driven nature of the business by relying on outside studios for original IP. The publishing model, which was necessary in a world where games were packaged goods sold on store shelves for $60 or more, is controversial on mobile platforms where anyone can just submit an app to the store.EA Apologizes For SimCity Disaster, Says It Was "Dumb" And Offers Free Game To Players
Mar 09, 8:15PM
Electronic Arts’ SimCity was easily the most anticipated game of the season, but its launch was an unmitigated disaster because the DRM solution Electronic Arts and Maxis dreamt up means users have to always be online if they want to play. Sadly, EA’s servers weren’t up to the task and most players were either unable to connect or got kicked out of the game after a while. Today, Lucy Bradshaw, EA’s general manager for its Maxis label, issued an apology. EA is also offering players who were affected by these issues a free game from its catalog. Bradshaw says that not having enough server capacity was ‘dumb.’ EA has now increased its server capacity by 120 percent. In an age where spinning up a few Amazon EC2 or Windows Azure instances takes minutes, it’s surprising that EA wasn’t able to scale its platform quicker, but at least, Bradshaw also says, the number of “disrupted experiences has dropped by roughly 80 percent.” “The good news is that SimCity is a solid hit in all major markets,” she writes. ” The consensus among critics and players is that this is fundamentally a great game. But this SimCity is made to be played online, and if you can't get a stable connection, you're NOT having a good experience. So we're not going to rest until we've fixed the remaining server issues.” Starting March 18, all SimCity players who have activated their game will receive an email that will tell them how to get their free game. It’s not clear if this only applies to players who bought the game before the apology was issued, or if new players – who are still facing issues today – will also be able to redeem this offer. Can't Afford To Stay At The Driskill? Here's What $60 A Night Gets You At The Firehouse Hostel
Mar 09, 8:00PM
Every year, the tens of thousands of SXSW attendees who descend upon Austin cause a huge crunch on accommodations. If you're lucky, you might be able to book a hotel months in advance. If not, you can maybe find an affordable Airbnb a few miles away. This year, a few lucky attendees were able to score digs in a great location right downtown, as a place called the Firehouse Hostel.If It Gets Them, Google May Open .Search, .App, .Blog And .Cloud gTLDs To The Public
Mar 09, 7:00PM
If Google is awarded the right to manage the domain registrations for .search, .app, .blog and .cloud, there is now a good chance that it won't just use them for its own services and will open them up for non-Google properties, too. Last year, when ICANN opened up the first phase of the registration process for new generic top-level domain names, Google accounted for about 100 of the over 1,900 applications ICANN received. Among those were some that referenced Google brands and products like .google, .chrome, .android and .gmail, but Google and many of the other applicants, however, also applied for the right to manage top-level domains with very generic terms like .blog, .show, .earth, .book and .car.Forget Google Glass, Google Debuts 'Talking Shoe' Concept At SXSWi, Wants More Social, Motivational Everyday Objects
Mar 09, 6:59PM
Meet Google's "talking shoe," which aims to translate movement data in witty messages to users and their friends. The concept apparel, showcased at the search giant's swanky SXSW Interactive headquarters, is part of a new arts project - "Art, Copy, Code" - which aims to breathe a social, life-like experience into everyday objects. "If standing still was a sport, you'd be world champion," the trash-talking shoe projects on a monitor hanging over a rainbow-colored obstacle course after it senses I've been standing still.How To Make A Million Dollars With A Hot Dog Cart
Mar 09, 4:00PM
Editor's note: James Altucher is an investor, programmer, author and entrepreneur. He has started and sold several companies, run a VC fund, and is an active investor in many private companies. My wife, Claudia was upset with me. She said, "I didn't shower! I haven't left the house. I'm having coffee in the afternoon. I feel like I'm turning into you!" And quite frankly, she looked sort of disgusting while she was saying this to me at 3 in the afternoon.Zaarly Shutters Its Reverse Craigslist Marketplace, Goes All In On Virtual Storefronts As Co-Founder Exits
Mar 09, 3:00PM
After winning LA Startup Weekend, Zaarly almost immediately raised $1 million from a long list of notable investors (even "Steve jOBS"), and then raised $14 million more before the end of the year in a round led by Kleiner, while adding Meg Whitman to its board. Fast forward to today and you'll no longer find Zaarly's marketplace on the Web. And, with the next update to its mobile app, co-founder Bo Fishback tells us, its "request anything" model will disappear from the Zaarly experience completely.Bring On The Platform Wars!
Mar 09, 2:00PM
Writing software used to be so simple. A giant pain in the ass, mind you, but simple. You were a Microsoft developer, with binders full of Visual Studio CDs; you were a Java developer; you used the LAMP stack; or you worked with something proprietary from IBM or SAP or the like. Nowadays, though, while the tools and technologies we use have improved enormously...imagine, God forbid, that you're building some sort of web service. Should you use Ruby on Rails? Node.js? Python and Django? PHP and Drupal? .NET? Any of the panoply of Java servers? Something new and cool like Go or Scala? And how/where will you host your code? Amazon? Heroku? App Engine? Joyent? EngineYard? Force.com? How about your app? You'll have an app, right? On which platforms? Native code? Hybrid HTML5? Cross-compiled with Xamarin? And then there's your database... The mind gibbers and reels with analysis paralysis.Payments Startups Take The Data, Design And Development Route To Reengineer The Credit-Card Business
Mar 09, 10:00AM
Editor's note: Steve Patterson is a writer who has covered Boston and San Francisco Bay Area startups for 20 years. Braintree Payments, Square and fellow disruptors are applying web and mobile technologies to overhaul the economic model of the payment industry. In the next chapter of the Internet's disintermediation of large markets, payments are shifting to be efficient and pervasive over-the-top mobile services.Go NoSQL Style – The Geeky Gangnam Version
Mar 09, 6:38AM
This could have been an absolute flop, a parody of itself. But this remix of the Gangnam style video to explain the NoSQL database is actually not so bad. It's really goofy and amateurish. But that's what makes it so awesome.
How Stripe, Weebly And Cue Make Programming Challenges That Are Good For Recruiting
Mar 09, 5:00AM
Editor's note: Robby Walker is co-founder and CTO of Cue. His previous company, Zenter, sold to Google in 2007. Programming challenges are a fantastic way to connect great people with great jobs, particularly great jobs at startups. Startups like Weebly and Cue have spent weeks of valuable engineering time building programming challenges. And tens of thousands of engineers spend their personal time playing them.Did PayPal Just Clone Stripe's API Documentation?
Mar 09, 2:45AM
Is imitation the sincerest form of flattery? As we reported this morning, PayPal just launched a number of new APIs and a brand new developer portal today. This also included the release of new REST APIs. One thing that many noticed—competitor Stripe's REST API documentation looks remarkably similar.Netflix Stops Issuing API Keys To New Developers, Effectively Ending Its Developer Program
Mar 09, 2:09AM
Netflix just used the quiet Friday afternoon to announce that it is effectively ending its public developer program. Netflix will stop issuing API keys immediately and will not accept new API affiliates. The company will no longer offer a test environment for developer and its developer portal is already set to be read-only. Netflix’s OData catalog, which was never updated all that regularly in the first place, will be retired a month from now on April 8. The only good news for developers here is that applications that are currently actively calling the API will remain active, so services like instantwatcher.com, Goodfilms and CanIStream.itm which all either use data from Netflix or offer integration with the service, will likely remain online for the time being. Netflix did not say for how long it plans to support its current public API. The company says these ‘changes,’ as the company calls them, “are designed to allow us to focus our API efforts on supporting the products and features used most by our members.” Its API program, Netflix argues, has “shifted over the past few years” and is now more about supporting all of the devices that are used by its 33 million members to stream shows and movies. Here is a list of all the changes the company announced today: We will no longer issue new public API developer keys. All existing keys that are actively calling the API will remain active. We will no longer accept new API affiliates. There will be no impact to existing and active affiliates. We will no longer offer test environments. The test tools have been unavailable for a while and we won't bring them back. We will set the forums in the developer portal to read-only. We encourage developers to continue their conversations at StackOverflow with the tag "netflixapi". The existing forum posts will remain on the site for now in the form of an archive. We will retire the OData catalog, effective on April 8, 2013.Flush With $80M, Desire2Learn Buys 'Anti-Sharepoint For Students' Platform Wiggio, Its 2nd Acquisition In 2 Months
Mar 09, 1:20AM
The EdTech space is growing fast -- from every angle -- talent is starting to cross over from consumer-facing companies, schools are looking to go digital, national policy is changing and student debt is out of control. While there's a lot of early-stage capital flowing into the market, the follow-on money is much more scarce. To support the growth of the ecosystem and encourage young startups and entrepreneurs to keep building, they need the security of exit opportunities. The space needs the more mature education technology companies to become those targets. Desire2Learn, the online learning platform based out of Waterloo, Ontario in Canada that raised $80 million in September 2012, looks to be stepping up to the M&A plate. Today, we've learned, and confirmed, that the company is making its second acquisition in as many months with Wiggio, the collaboration platform for students.Bang With Friends Launches Site To Help You Have Sex With Strangers At SXSW
Mar 09, 1:15AM
It seems like hooking up at SXSW was never very hard, but it just got easier. If you're in Austin this week and looking for that special someone to have anonymous sex with, look no further: Bang With Friends has extended its hookup app to make it available for the unwashed hordes of social media experts looking for a little love over the weekend.In First 24 Hours Of 3.0 Launch, Path Made More Money Than Ever And Sent More Than 1M Messages
Mar 08, 11:42PM
Earlier this week, Path launched the 3.0 version of its privacy-focused and mobile-centric social networking app. It was an update that was important for two key reasons: It debuted private messaging, and rolled out Path’s first real revenue-generating feature with a shop for premium emoji-like “stickers.” TechCrunch TV interview talked to Path founder and CEO Dave Morin today at the South By Southwest Interactive conference in Austin, Texas. You can watch that in the video embedded above, to see us discuss 3.0, whether messaging could interfere with Path’s Facebook relationship, Path’s new hire, CFO Kim Jabal, and more. But there were some key off-camera comments as well, in which Path founder and CEO Dave Morin told me some interesting details about how 3.0 has made a bigger impact on the company than even the team had expected. In fact, Morin said, in the first 24 hours after the 3.0 launch, Path made more money than it had in its entire lifetime as a company, total (starting with its 2.0 version, Path has collected affiliate revenue from media sales generated in the app.) And messaging has proved extremely popular, with more than 1 million messages sent by users within the first 24 hours of 3.0′s debut. I’m told he’s now announcing those figures publicly in an ongoing on-stage SXSW interview following our chat. It’s good news from the social networking app, which is universally lauded as beautifully designed and thoughtful, but has been criticized for possibly not quite making a big enough dent outside of the early adopter crowd. This is an example of Path being more forthcoming with numbers that might prove those naysayers wrong — similar to how the company recently announced that its user base numbers 6 million people — and could be an indication of more confidence from the company.Inside Google Street View: From Larry Page's Car To The Depths Of The Grand Canyon
Mar 08, 10:46PM
“Teleportation is the transfer of matter from one point to another without traversing the physical space between them, similar to the concept apport, an earlier word used in the context of spiritualism.” The concept of moving throughout the world freely without actually having to “physically” travel is the Holy Grail for many. Being able to explore a physical space that is thousands of miles away without having to deal with the rigors of travel seems like something out of a science fiction novel. With Street View, Google has brought us as close as we could possibly get to teleportation – without the actual physical matter transference, of course. The project started as research at Stanford and then hopped into Google co-founder and CEO Larry Page’s car. Snapping photos of every nook and cranny of the planet so that people could travel the world from the comfort of their own homes or mobile devices is the hallmark of Google’s approach to the world around it and the evolution of technology. I spent the day with the founding members of the Street View team to learn about how it went from a gimmick in someone’s mind to a utility that we use without thinking, and in some cases, wouldn’t want to live without. Starting out as a camera strapped to Page’s car, Street View technology has been added to vans, cars, tripods, backpacks, bikes and even a snow mobile. It has become the eyes of all of Google’s vision for how we view the world after launching on May 25, 2007. While the product has had its fair share of controversy, Google has forged ahead. Going somewhere before you actually get there It was a Frankenstein-looking car. Before I spoke with Luc Vincent, engineering director, and Daniel Filip, engineering manager, at Google Maps, I had done quite a bit of research into the history of the Google Maps product as a whole. What I didn’t know is how “pie in the sky” the concept of Street View actually was, which is an easy misconception to have once a technology has become so ubiquitous. Vincent told me a bit about the first concept of Street View, which was hatched at Google based on some experiments being done at Stanford, led by Marc Levoy. Levoy and one of his students had come up with a way to shoot video and paste it together intoIf 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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