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CrunchWeek: Facebook's Weird Home Commercial; Our Experiences With Google Glass, And Fibermania
Apr 20, 10:00PM
The weekend is 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. This week, Ryan Lawler, Greg Kumparak and I talked about Facebook Home's weird new commercial featuring a screaming goat, our experiences with Google Glass (which was released to developers this week) and the expansion of Google Fiber to Austin, TX and Provo, UT.Newly Discovered Android Malware Was Downloaded Millions Of Times
Apr 20, 9:33PM
Security firm Lookout has detailed a clever new bit of Android Malware lurking in the Google Play store. The good news: unless you're downloading questionable Russian clone apps, you're probably not affected. The bad news: that hasn't kept it from being downloaded a few million times.Gillmor Gang: Kaleidoscope Eyes
Apr 20, 8:25PM
The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, John Taschek, and Steve Gillmor — pictured themselves in a boat on a river, as the first wave of Google Glass hit the network, aka Scoble's forehead. @scobleizer promises to never take off this thing, and even the hyperbole doesn't refute the central notion. The whole world is not only watching but feeding the realtime stream. Social meets mainstream.CBS Twitter Accounts Hacked, Tweeting Suspicious Links
Apr 20, 8:07PM
At least 3 CBS-affiliated news accounts have been hacked, apparently by a rabid conspiracy theorist who wants the world to believe that President Obama is aiding Al-Qaeda. Accounts for @60minutes @48hours, and @CBSDenver have all been hacked, some tweeting suspicious links (don’t click on them). Screenshots below. CBS is apparently working with Twitter to get the situation under control.Watch A Drone Visit College Football To Give Coaches Better Perspective
Apr 20, 6:28PM
University of Tennessee coach Butch Jones wanted to get an eagle-eye view of his players but apparently didn’t have the resources to spend it on the kinds of expensive, cable-suspended Skycam equipment used by broadcasters. Instead, he sent up a drone, in what appears to be the first – or one of the first — uses of unmanned aerial vehicles in college football. A Vine (above) showing the coaches warming up the drone for practice immediately started making the rounds on sports blogs. According to Outside magazine, military drone technology was quickly adopted by the entertainment industry, and is becoming more pervasive for aerial footage. “Even at upwards of $5,000 per day, a drone runs a fraction of the cost of a helicopter rental,” explains Joe Spring. A number of policymakers are proposing moratoriums on low-surveillance drones, until privacy laws can catch up to the quickly evolving technology. But flying cameras are completely legit for sports. Interestingly, Coach Jones credits the experiment to a Google-style mass-innovation approach to management: “It’s a number of guys. It’s our support staff, it’s [Sports Technology Coordinator] Joe Harrington. It’s everyone just always trying to make the program better each and every day. That’s the culture that we’re building here. It doesn’t matter if it’s our secretaries, our equipment staff, our training staff, or our cooks. How can we make Tennessee football better each and every day?”Vine, The App That Eats Your Precious Memories
Apr 20, 5:27PM
No app has ever broken my heart quite like Vine, Twitter's six-second animation maker. You capture a scene, then pocket your phone while you think of a witty way to describe. But when you open it a few minutes later or the app randomly crashes, it's gone. That moment, that memory, deleted. I still love Vine, but I'll never forgive it for the visions it stole from me.Cognitive Overhead, Or Why Your Product Isn't As Simple As You Think
Apr 20, 4:43PM
Editor's Note: David Lieb is co-founder and CEO of Bump, creators of the popular app that lets people share contact information, photos, and other content by bumping their phones together. Bump has been downloaded more than 130 million times. It's been hard to ignore the massive shift in the last decade toward simple products. The minimalist design aesthetic...Gillmor Gang Live 04.20.13
Apr 20, 4:07PM
Gillmor Gang - Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, John Taschek, and Steve Gillmor. Recording for today has concluded. Check Techcrunch soon for replay.Behavioral Finance Explains Bubbles
Apr 20, 3:00PM
Editor's note: Adam Nash is the chief operating officer of Wealthfront. He was formerly executive-in-residence with Greylock Partners and VP of product management at LinkedIn. Given the incredible volatility we've seen lately in the Bitcoin and gold markets, there has been a resurgence of discussion about bubbles. This topic is always top of mind in Silicon Valley, especially given that the two favorite local topics of conversation are technology companies and housing.OK Glass, RIP Privacy: The Democratization Of Surveillance
Apr 20, 1:00PM
How's this for synchronicity: Google Glass started shipping on the same week that CISPA passed the House, 3DRobotics unveiled their new site, and 4chan and Reddit pored over surveillance photos trying to crowdsource the identity of the Boston bombers. Cameras on phones. Cameras on drones. Cameras on glasses. Cameras atop stores, in ATMs, on the street, on lapels, up high in the sky. Modern cars log detailed data their manufacturers can access if they so desire. Oh, and "if you carry a phone, your location is being recorded every minute of every day." In 1999, Sun CEO Scott McNealy said: "You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it." Sadly, that sounds more prophetic every week.Simplee Combines Mint.com And PayPal To Bring Medical Bill Payment, Management To Your Smartphone
Apr 20, 6:10AM
The mobile health market is growing like a weed these days. According to mHealthWatch and eHealth Initiative, there are 31,000 health and medical-related apps on the market today. In fact, over the last year, the number of health apps jumped 120 percent, and hundreds of apps now hit stores every month. Yet, in spite of this exponential growth, the mobile health space is still in its "Wild West" phase. In other words, it's a work in progress.How To Build A Political Social Network That Actually Works
Apr 20, 4:00AM
Editor's note: Lucas Dailey is a UX designer and chief innovation officer at political social network MyMaryland.net. My political social network startup died last year, and I eulogized it in a public post-mortem here on TechCrunch. The experience (and the article) led to a job taking over the product reins at nonprofit MyMaryland.net. Here are some tips for charting your own course for political social networks.Little Eye Labs Does Mobile App Crash Testing (Before The Day Of The Big Launch)
Apr 20, 1:25AM
There are a plethora of options for mobile app crash testing, like Crashlytics, Crittercism and Bugsense. But what about before the day of the big launch? A startup out of India’s GSF Accelerator called Little Eye Labs is looking to handle crash testing before developers go into post-production. They just launched an app and crash testing service within the last few weeks. “We want to catch the bugs before the app reaches the app store,” said co-founder Kumar Rangarajan. The company has built a way for developers to monitor an app’s performance on a single or a handful of devices for how it consumes memory, power and wireless data during a test-run. Basically you either plug the phone into your computer and watch how it performs, or you can disconnect it, and observe how the app performs for a 30-minute run on these metrics through their software. Other competing products like Crashlytics instead look at crash reporting for when a developer’s app is already released, out in the wild and being used on perhaps thousands or millions of devices simultaneously. Little Eye records what’s happening live on the screen as it monitors other less visible stats like data and memory usage. Once the test run is over, it shows charts and a side-by-side video recording that can tell developers what happened while an app was running. “When doing app testing, you need a lot of context around what a user was doing at certain points,” he said. “You can actually deploy this in your lab, run multiple apps on a series of devices. Our main value proposition is that context; it’s the whole video aspect of it.” Rangarajan said the closest comparable service out there is Android’s Dalvik Debug Monitor Server, which comes as a tool for developers using the platform. “It’s very rudimentary, but what we do is more visual, advanced and easy-to-use,” Rangarajan said. Rangarajan and his co-founders previously worked on developer tools at Rational Software, which is a company that IBM acquired for $2.1 billion back in 2003. They have a freemium model, naturally. A full annual subscription is about $500 per developer, and the monthly costs are roughly $50 per developer.Y Combinator's Paul Graham Takes His First Ever Board Seat With Healthcare Crowdfunding Non-Profit Watsi
Apr 20, 12:38AM
Y Combinator founder Paul Graham is a father figure to countless startups he’s helped accelerate, but had never taken a board of directors seat until now. Today he announced he’s accepted board seat with Watsi, a site that lets people donate money to pay the medical bills of needy people. Watsi came out of this season’s Winter 2013 Y Combinator class and is the first non-profit it’s ever backed. More specifically, Watsi hosts profiles of people in dire need of medical care, but who can’t afford it. Donors can browse the profiles and donate as little as $5 to help someone get well. 100% of donations go to the sick, and Watsi funds its operations and even pays credit card processing fees on donations out of its own pocket. We named Watsi one of the top seven startups from the last YC Demo Day. Today, Graham tweeted: For the first time I agreed to be on a board of directors: @watsi's.— Paul Graham (@paulg) April 19, 2013 [Update: Watsi tells me "We're thrilled to have PG as our first board member. He's been an incredible advisor and supporter to us from the beginning and we look forward to growing Watsi with his continued guidance." So this is not only Graham's first board seat, but Watsi's too.] We’ve reached out to Graham for comment about why he accepted the position. But he had already been showing the startup some love. After discovering the startup on Hacker News and meeting the team he invited them to be the first ever YC-backed non-profit. When the company launched, Graham wrote a blog post exclaiming “After about 30 seconds of looking at the site, I realized I was looking at one of the more revolutionary things I’d seen the Internet used for. Technology can now put a face on need. The people who need help around the world are individuals, not news photos, and when you see them as individuals it’s hard to ignore them.” He concluded, “I’ve never been so excited about anything we’ve funded.” Then after the Boston Marathon bombings he tweeted: When terrible things happen to people I can't help, I go to watsi.org and help people I can.— Paul Graham (@paulg) April 15, 2013 Beyond a few advising investing roles with companies like 280 North, he’s known to devote himself fully to Y Combinator. He could help Watsi navigate the balancing actFacebook Forces You To Smile When You're Unhappy (Update: Smile Turned Upside Down)
Apr 20, 12:02AM
"Success Theater" means only sharing an idealized version of yourself where you're always happy. Now a bug in Facebook's new mood sharing feature is taking that concept way too literally. Select that you're "Unhappy" and Facebook adds a smiley face to your post instead of a frown emoticon.True Ventures Confirms Investment In Second Life Founder Philip Rosedale's New Startup High Fidelity
Apr 19, 11:05PM
Earlier this month, we wrote that High Fidelity, the virtual world startup led by Second Life founder Philip Rosedale, had raised $2.4 million of a $3.4 million round, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. However, we didn't know who had actually made the investment — until today. Tony Conrad of True Ventures just announced that his firm led High Fidelity's Series A, and that Google Ventures and various angel investors also participated. The High Fidelity website now mentions Mitch Kapor and Linden Lab (the company behind Second Life) as investors too.iPad Still Dominates Tablet Ads With iPad Mini Gaining, Velti Finds
Apr 19, 9:55PM
Mobile advertising firm Velti has released its monthly report on advertising impressions across its network. The iPad is far and away the leader when it comes to the tablet market, and is gradually chipping away share from the iPhone in terms of overall dominance among mobile ads. The iPad mini remains a much smaller factor, but is growing steadily, and on the Android side it’s pretty much all about the Kindle Fire. Velti’s data found that the iPad accounted for 91.6 percent of all tablet ad impression during the month of March, and only lost share to the iPad mini, which gained a full percentage point to come in at 6.2 percent during the month, firmly in second place. The Kindle Fire was the next strongest device, with a comparatively small piece of the pie at 1.6 percent. The Kindle Fire still dominates the Android tablet segment, however, with only the Galaxy Tab line of devices anywhere close. Amazon’s and Samsung’s tablets made up 73.4 percent and 26.2 percent of all Android tablet share, respectively. Among phones, the iPhone still leads the pack, with the iPhone 4 still leading all handsets with 13.3 percent of the impression share. iPhones accounted for eight of the top 10 devices, with the Samsung Galaxy S II and S III coming in at 8th and 10th place, respectively. Samsung is running away with the Android market in terms of ads served according to Velti’s figures, with 68.2 percent of all Android impressions. That’s no surprise given the company’s clear continued dominance in terms of hardware sales. In March, most mobile app usage took place during weekends, with a much greater deviation between Friday/Saturday/Sunday and the rest of the week than Velti had seen previously, which perhaps indicates that more people were settling down to do serious work during the month. Finally, Velti also saw click-through-rates continue to grow on Android and shrink on iOS. This means that despite having a much smaller share of overall ad impressions, the ones that are viewed on Android are more likely to convert into some kind of customers action. That may be due to the more relaxed rules about what types of advertising and campaigns can appear within Android apps vs. those on iOS. Still, iOS was better in terms of eCPM, but the gap narrowed between it and Android, meaning iOS users resulted in just a little less revenue on average than didAsk A VC: Google Ventures' Karim Faris On Why Enterprise Security Is Red Hot And More
Apr 19, 9:45PM
Google Ventures' general partner Karim Faris joined us in the studio this week for Ask A VC, where we put VCs in the hot seat. Faris, who focuses on the enterprise and e-commerce investments for the firm, talked specifically about the opportunity in the enterprise security space, and why we are seeing a growing number of startups succeed in the market. We're looking at a year of a number of breakout security companies, explains Faris, and maybe even a few IPOs in enterprise security. We also tackled reader questions about where mobile is headed in the enterprise.Announcing Disrupt NY's Startup Alley And Hardware Alley Companies
Apr 19, 9:30PM
Startup Alley is the loud and boisterous marketplace of Disrupt. Young companies, huddled around cocktail tables demoing their wares, are vying for attention and a spot on the Disrupt stage. And we're very pleased with the large group of startups exhibiting at Disrupt NY later this month. We have startups covering nearly every category including separate pavilions for Brazilian, Israeli and Italian companies.'Airbnb For Bikes' Startup Spinlister Returns From The Deadpool, Now With New Management
Apr 19, 9:30PM
If you're a big fan of bikes and Airbnb-type sharing economy startups like me, you might have been disappointed to learn that Liquid (née Spinlister), the peer-to-peer bike rental startup, was shut down a few months ago. The service, which launched in New York City last Spring, had just opened up to the general public a few months before being put on hiatus.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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