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What Games Are: The Shady Side Of Games
Apr 13, 9:00PM
A lot of recent moves in the gaming space to ban, investigate or curtail certain aspects of its output can seem egregious. However seen in the light of how shady game makers tend to behave, and the need to keep their sleazy tactics at bay, such moves are often understandable. Still, there are costs to games as a medium that this sort of thing keeps happening.CrunchWeek: Bitcoin Mania, Foursquare Gets A Cash Infusion, And VCs Rally Around Google Glass
Apr 13, 6:30PM
The weekend is finally here, and so is another episode of CrunchWeek, the TechCrunch TV show where a few of us writers sit down for some real talk about the stories that dominated the tech world over the past seven days.Warby Parker Opens Retail Store In NYC, With Boston Up Next, Beats Google & Amazon To The Offline Punch
Apr 13, 5:29PM
Hip online eyewear startup Warby Parker has, over the last two years, been partnering with boutiques to open "stores-within-stores," or small Warby Parker showrooms, where customers could try on their eyeglasses in 3-D. These showrooms popped up in L.A., Nashville, San Francisco and many others. Today Warby Parker officially announced its first, flagship retail store in SoHo in New York City.Gillmor Gang: Speculation, Music, Death
Apr 13, 5:00PM
The Gillmor Gang — Kevin Marks, John Taschek, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor — spared no expense to bring you the finest in up-to-date tech commentary. In other words, we tore into Twitter Music, ignored Facebook Home, dissected the internals of AirPlay, and cashed our Bitcoin checks. Our attention is a zero sum game, and whether it’s West Wing or Twitter pointers into the musicsphere, how we make our streaming choices will determine who the big winners are. What we’re really waiting for is the tipping point when the streamer artists crossover and recapture the idea that the creators are the real coin of the realm. @stevegillmor, @kteare, @kevinmarks, @jtaschek Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmorRevel Body Is A Crowdfunded Personal Massager
Apr 13, 4:30PM
Do you suffer from "sore elbows, wrists and hands from having to hold small and awkward shapes?" Have you found that "products are confusing to impossible to control?" Do you know what a phthalates is and are you embarrassed by the packaging of your favorite personal massager products? Has Revel Body got a product for you.Through The Looking Glass: Hiring Sales People
Apr 13, 3:00PM
Editor's note: Ben Horowitz is co-founder and partner of Andreessen Horowitz. Perhaps the most common mistake that I see a technical founder make when building her sales organization is that she applies strategies to the sales-hiring process that work when building the engineering team. This may sound shocking, but sales people are different from engineers, and treating them like engineers does not work well at all.Hailo, SideCar, And The New York Taxi And Limousine Commission To Discuss The Future Of Transportation At Disrupt NY 2013
Apr 13, 2:02PM
In the coming weeks, the New York Taxi and Limousine Commission is expected to enter into its first trial of taxi e-hail apps. That'll allow startups like Hailo that help users find nearby cabs through their mobile phones, without having to hail them from the street. At the same time, competition is coming from services like SideCar, which enables passengers to find rides from community drivers.Beyond The Bitcoin Bubble
Apr 13, 1:00PM
A few months ago, while visiting a hacker friend's magnificent new San Francisco loft, he gestured to a little alcove stuffed with server racks and said: "And over there are the Bitcoin mines." I smiled and nodded, thinking, Oh, right, Bitcoin. Is that still a thing? Andy, if you're reading this, I apologize. Is it ever, and how. Over the last few weeks the hype around everyone's favorite distributed cryptographic currency has gone insane. It's a Ponzi scheme; no, it's the first instance of the third era of currency; no, it will spiral up and down forever; no, it's the new venture-capital frontier; no, it's an existential threat to the modern state. No, possibly, conceivably, maybe, and no. But: I realized this week that Bitcoin actually is a really big deal -- in a way that's been almost entirely obscured by all the hype.Facebook's Latest Home Commercial Is Just The Right Amount Of Weird
Apr 13, 12:55PM
During the Facebook Home launch, Zuck premiered their first Home commercial. It was... pretty bad. A guy behind me whispered "Is this real life?", faces were palmed, and the room was pretty quiet as the lights came back up. They aimed for weird-funny, but ended up with mostly just weird. Their second attempt is much, much better, if only because it has a goat that screams in Zuck's face.T-Mobile Crows About First Day iPhone 5 Sales, But The Carrier's Future Is Still Unclear
Apr 13, 6:59AM
T-Mobile finally began selling the iPhone 5 earlier today, and it seems as though all that pent-up consumer tension has resulted in some promising sales for the carrier. "Today has been gangbusters for T-Mobile," CMO Mike Sievert noted to AllThingsD earlier today. Naturally, Sievert wouldn't discuss just how many iPhones were moved during the course of the day, but he did point out that customers had lined up at "nearly all" of the carrier's retail outlets.Here's How To Get Facebook Home Running On Nearly Any Android Device
Apr 13, 6:29AM
In case you happened to miss the furor earlier today (or yesterday, depending on your timezone), Facebook officially pushed its Facebook Home launcher into the Google Play Store for owners of a select few devices to muck around with. Early impressions seem to run the gamut, but unless you had the right hardware you were plumb out of luck if you wanted to take Home for a spin. Well, let me rephrase that: you were plumb out of luck.Excerpts From Laurene Powell Jobs' First Interview Since The Death Of Steve Jobs
Apr 13, 5:17AM
In the first interview since her husband’s death, Laurene Powell Jobs dedicated her sizable platform to advancing immigration reform, while remaining notably tight-lipped about the private life of the late Steve Jobs. We’ve included highlights (with context) from her interview with Rock Center host Brian Williams. On Steve Jobs: “Pretty Cool” Legacy BRIAN WILLIAMS: It’s another way of saying we’re left with a world of really cool stuff. I always wanted to know what it was like to be a Kennedy and drive to Kennedy Airport; and what it’s like to be you at a light and watch 10 people cross, and the only thing they have in common are white ear buds. What’s that like? LAURENE POWELL JOBS: It’s pretty cool. BRIAN WILLIAMS: (LAUGHS) It’s pretty cool. I mean, that changed our world. LAURENE POWELL JOBS: Yeah. To do what you wanna do, to leave a mark– in a way that you think is important and lasting, that’s a life well lived. On Immigration Reform Powell Jobs has been a vocal advocate of immigration reform, partnering with director Davis Guggenheim (Waiting For Superman, An Inconvenient Truth) on a documentary highlighting the struggles of talented, patriotic American youth who have been denied entrance into the military and college because they are undocumented immigrants. To add public pressure for Congress to pass a bill that provides a pathway to citizenship for children of immigrants who came to America illegally, the film (trailer below) is accompanied by a grassroots campaign and website. BRIAN WILLIAMS: Climb into the minds of our viewers watching you guys on Friday night. So help us process this. How are we supposed to feel about their parents, who did do something bad? This is ill-gotten gains, because the first entry into this country was wrong. How are we supposed to feel about the bureaucracy we would now have to have just to hand Social Security numbers to our Marine, our civil engineer? LAURENE JOBS POWELL: Yes. It’s understandable that people are conflicted about this. And, yes, the parents broke the law. And so I think that’s why Congress is trying to find a way to make amends. So have them pay a penalty, have them pay back taxes. Have them wait for two decades in order to have the chance to have citizenship. I mean, there are penalties that can be brought out. But then you have someoneEntrepreneurial Excellence: Can 10,000 Hours Of Practice Make Perfect?
Apr 13, 4:00AM
Editor's note: Jon Auerbach is a partner at Charles River Ventures, a 42-year-old early stage venture firm based in Menlo Park and Cambridge, Ma, where he focuses on mobile technologies. Research over the past two decades has identified a strong link between hours of practice and expertise in sports, chess and the performing arts. In the early 1990s, Anders Ericsson, a psychologist at Florida State University, spent months tracking violinists at the Music Academy in Berlin. He found that the top violinists had practiced on average 10,000 hours during the course of their lives. The weakest violinists had averaged only 4,000 hours.Schmap Takes A Deeper Dive Into Twitter Audience Data With Demographics Pro
Apr 13, 12:31AM
Schmap already helped advertisers and other companies understand their Twitter followers through its Know Your Followers product, but today it launched a new, upgraded service called Demographics Pro — CEO Paul Hallett described the concept as "Nielsen for Twitter." Nielsen does its own social media analysis, and it announced a partnership with Twitter last fall, but that was focused on measuring the social media impact of TV shows. Demographics Pro is much broader than that, giving customers a detailed demographic breakdown of the people following a given account or commenting on a given hashtag.Code In Twitter Music's Placeholder Page Shows Web Interface, Track Purchasing, Charts And Service Integrations
Apr 12, 10:03PM
Since we have nothing much to go on other than a static landing page for Twitter #music, some folks didfurther inspection within the CSS on the login page, and certain features and integrations became apparent. We’ve reached out to Twitter to confirm what we’ve seen, and we’ll update our story once we hear back. Until then, here’s what can be taken from the styling code itself, picked up on by desginer Youssef Sarhan: - Both web interface and separate downloadable app - Pull in Tracks from iTunes, Spotify, Soundcloud and Rdio - YouTube and Vevo integration - We Are Hunted’s charts feature - Turn playing tracks on/off - Track purchasing - Tweet a track .iconmusic-spotify-connect-btn{background-position:-4431px -0px;height:32px;width:179px} .iconmusic-player-source-rdio{background-position:-2801px -0px;height:19px;width:30px} .iconmusic-player-source-itunes{background-position:-2751px -0px;height:19px;width:30px} .iconmusic-player-source-soundcloud{background-position:- 2851px -0px;height:14px;width:92px} .iconmusic-player-source-vevo{background-position:-2963px -0px;height:9px;width:53px} .youtube-vid player{position:absolute;padding:10px;height:200px} While this is in no way a finalized “feature set” for the Twitter #Music app, it is more information than we had before and confirmation of what we’ve seen others testing out on Twitter, which are basically embedded music players in Twitter Cards. And of course, since this is a Twitter-owned page, so the code speaks for itself. Here’s a look at what the player will look like, again referenced in the CSS for the page: Here’s that on/off switch for playing tracks: These are some random graphical elements that point to what services will be included as well: In addition to all of this, it looks like Twitter will be bringing in bios of musicians, perhaps from their Twitter profiles. All of this integration makes complete sense and perhaps the selling of music will be controlled by the artist themselves. If you’re listening to a track that someone shared from Spotify and want to purchase it immediately, it doesn’t matter which service Twitter hooks into, there’s a good chance that you’re going to follow through with your purchase. This could mean big bucks for Twitter as it marches towards going public, perhaps as early as next year. This all gives us more of a sense of what the #Music service itself might look like, even though we have no screenshots to prove it. Much in the way that Twitter set up “hashtag pages” for brands such as NASCAR, Twitter is taking all of the data that it’s currently collecting and just showing it off in a different, more consumable way. If #Music becomes a full-featured service that artists can use to sellThis Week On The TechCrunch Gadgets Podcast: Facebook Phone (Again) And Bitcoin
Apr 12, 10:00PM
This week on the TechCrunch Gadgets Podcast we talk about the launch of Facebook Fone and my own horrible attempts at becoming a bitcoin billionaire.Designer Nicholas Felton Leaves Facebook After Pioneering Timeline Overhaul
Apr 12, 9:53PM
Nicholas Felton, who came to fame through many super-detailed infographics and reports about his life as quantified through data, is leaving Facebook almost two years after being acq-hired to work on projects like Timeline. His early work, which compiled data on things like all the songs he had listened to or everywhere he had been in a single year into a “Feltron Annual Report,” became the basis for Timeline. In a sense, all the profiles of Facebook’s roughly 1 billion users are all like living, breathing annual “Feltron” reports. He posted on his page today: On April 19, 2011 I walked into the Palo Alto Facebook office and began contributing to the timeline project. Two years, many late nights and a few launch celebrations later I will be moving on. The opportunity to help mold a service of such importance to so many people has been a high point in my professional career. I’m extremely proud of the projects I worked on, grateful to the teams that built them and confident in the products to come. Facebook acq-hired Felton's startup Daytum in April of 2011 and Felton and his co-founder Ryan Case moved from New York to Palo Alto. When Facebook’s vice president of product Chris Cox unveiled Timeline, he said he was inspired by seeing Felton’s annual reports: “14 pages. One year. One book. It was hard to call it anything other than what it really was — art.” He went on, "We had one reaction: we have to try to hire this guy." There’s no word on what Felton be working on next yet.Where In The World Are The 1.2M Raspberry Pi Microcomputers? Mostly In The West - But Pi Founders Want More Spread This Year
Apr 12, 9:48PM
One to 1.2 million Raspberry Pi microcomputers have shipped since the device's launch just over a year ago but where in the world are they located? While it's impossible to say exactly where each Pi has ended up, the vast majority sold to-date have shipped to developed nations -- including the U.S. and the U.K. But the Pi Foundation wants to get more developing nations buying into Pi.Ask A VC: Javelin Venture Partners' Noah Doyle On The Next Innovations In Mapping And More
Apr 12, 9:45PM
In this week's Ask A VC show, Javelin Venture Partners' Managing Director Noah Doyle sat down to talk with us about why he started a venture firm, where the next innovations in mapping are coming from and more. Doyle has extensive experience in the online mapping world—he directed the enterprise product line for Google's geospatial products, including Google Earth and Google Maps. Prior to Google, Noah managed the Marketing Strategy and Corporate Development functions at Keyhole, a company that created the first Web-hosted digital earth model and was acquired by Google in 2004. Doyle explains to us that some of the new technologies he's excited about include layering social data across maps.Y Combinator Grad ReelSurfer Gets A Makeover, Now Lets You Clip & Share Any ESPN Or New York Times Video
Apr 12, 9:22PM
Y Combinator grad ReelSurfer is an instant video editor, born out of its founders frustration of trying to find clips, quotes and scenes from their favorite movies on YouTube and other video sites. The process is probably familiar to you: Search for clip, don't find it; if you do find it, it's part of a larger clip, so you have to download, convert and clip the video yourself.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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