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The New "Handmade" (Part Three)
Jun 02, 1:00AM
Consumer interest in 3D printing is booming, thanks to increasingly affordable printers, crazy stories about 3D-printed candy, human ears and handguns, all of which are impressive technological leaps. But 3D printing is fueling artists' creativity, too, whether those artists are formally trained experts or self-taught newcomers, finding their way around by watching YouTube tutorials.CrunchWeek: Elon Musk Dominates Tech, Waze Sale Talks Falter (Again), Jury's Out On Arrested Development
Jun 01, 10:00PM
Thanks to the Memorial Day holiday, it was a shorter week than normal for many of us (at least those of us in the United States) -- so here's to the weekend, and to a new 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.Crowdstar Picks Up An Extra $12M To Fuel Its Move Onto Tablets, Mobile
Jun 01, 9:20PM
Crowdstar, the social and mobile gaming company that has built several fashion-focused titles, just picked up another $12 million from existing investors to bring two products to market later this year. As you might expect, both are mobile and Crowdstar CEO Jeffrey Tseng says the company now has a renewed focus on tablets. Competing companies like Finland’s Supercell have made tablet gaming their bread and butter, with higher engagement and player spending fueling revenue growth. We picked up the new funding through an SEC filing, but Tseng later confirmed it. “So it’s the same internal investors, but I can’t talk much about the products,” Tseng said. He said that one will be fashion-focused like Top Girl and Social Girl while the other one will be different. An early player on the Facebook platform, Crowdstar had to migrate onto iOS and Android like the rest of the industry. Zynga is making a similar transition, but as the legacy leader on Facebook, it’s had a tougher time involving job cuts and studio closures. While it was never anywhere near the size of Zynga, Crowdstar has stayed small through the transition with 70 people overall. Back in 2011, when it was crossing over to iOS, the company’s previous CEO Peter Relan said Crowdstar would have a three-prong strategy involving mobile platforms, Facebook and international reach. But since then, they’ve shifted their entire focus to mobile. “We’ve completely switched to mobile and the focus will be on tablets,” Tseng said. The new round brings Crowdstar’s overall funding to date to more than $46.5 million. It comes as marketing spending has risen on mobile platforms, bringing the cost of launching a new game into the millions of dollars. “Platform are getting to the point where the fidelity and expectations have to be higher,” Tseng said.As Anti-Government Protests Erupt In Istanbul, Facebook And Twitter Appear Suddenly Throttled
Jun 01, 9:19PM
A massive anti-government protest in Istanbul, prompted after days of unrest were sparked by plans to redevelop one of the last remaining central public parks, appears to have lead to a throttling of social media both in the city and across Turkey. TechCrunch has independently verified via a number of sources that both Facebook and Twitter have been almost impossible to access from inside Istanbul, and other parts or Turkey. There are also anecdotal reports of authorities switching off access in a localised manner around Taksim Square where thousands of people are demonstrating.Mozilla Readies Major Firefox Redesign As It Ponders What The Browser Of The Future Should Look Like
Jun 01, 8:00PM
"Maybe we shouldn't even call it a browser anymore," Mozilla's VP of Firefox engineering Jonathan Nightingale told me a few days ago. "'Browser' is really an antiquated word. People don't really browse all that much anymore." Instead, he argues, we now mostly use our browsers to access sophisticated web apps, web-based productivity tools and social networks. For browser developers, this means they have to start to rethink what their browsers should look like now that usage patterns have changed and that the majority of users have become pretty experienced Internet (and browser) users.How Samsung Got Big
Jun 01, 7:00PM
The cellphones were stacked up high in the Gumi factory yard and more were coming out every minute. Phones, TVs, fax machines, and other gear shattered as it hit the concrete and Samsung CEO Kun-hee Lee and his board cracked the screens and cases with heavy hammers. Then they lit a bonfire and threw everything in.Austin Turns Out For A Hot Night Of Fun, Drinking And Pitching
Jun 01, 6:30PM
Last Thursday, on a balmy night in Central Texas, over 900 people attended TechCrunch's first event in the Lone Star State. Just like every other TechCrunch meetup, the crowd was an eclectic mix of tech nerds, entrepreneurs, business types, and venture capitalists. It was an epic night that ended with a pitch-off for the ages. Halfway through the night 30 companies took the stage and pitched to three Austin-area VCs and TC East Coast Editor John Biggs and myself. Never before have we featured such raw talent in a pitch-off. Austin, and Texas in general, has some amazing young companies.The Quantitative VC
Jun 01, 5:55PM
It's no longer sufficient in venture capital for firms to wait for companies, people and trends to come to Sand Hill Road. Seeing a startup on Demo Day at Y Combinator used to be the pipeline for scouting an early deal. But these days, YC companies are raising from angels before demo days. This is a sign of the times in the venture world. To start competing for deals, VCs have to be prospecting people, companies and trends well before events like Demo Day. And how are VCs trying to do this? Through complex data mining and pattern recognition. In the past two years, Sand Hill Road has seen a number of changes, including the explosion of angel and seed-stage investors, the agency model that Andreessen Horowitz is building, and rise of the operator VC. The latest trend is the role of the data scientist within a firm, and how a firm's data is being used to help VCs scout better deals and entrepreneurs and eventually create better returns for their LPs.Gillmor Gang: Wake Up Call
Jun 01, 5:00PM
The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Keith Teare, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — recorded early on a Thursday morning, flush with Apple CEO Tim Cook's read-between-the-lines performance at D11. Cook took some 80 minutes to say very little, or so say the pundits and Wall Street spinners. But the Gang found plenty to decrypt, including thoughts on Apple TV, wearable computing, value versus volume, and just about everything Steve Jobs used to do minus the famous reality distortion field.Policing Hate Speech Is Harder Than Nipples
Jun 01, 3:37PM
No automated system can identify what will offend people. What some humans find disgusting, others find controversial, and others still find funny. Computers just don't understand. That caused trouble for Facebook this week when women's activism groups got advertisers to boycott after the social network failed to suspend accounts accused of publishing hate speech.After Your Job Is Gone
Jun 01, 1:00PM
Do you have a job? Do you like having a job? Then I have some bad news for you. The Guardian is worried "today's technologies are going to remove people from economic activity completely." Techonomy says "America's real worker crisis is not immigration, it is jobs." Om Malik asks: "People talk about robot-helpers and an army of drones, but...what is going to happen to millions of people who will be replaced by those drones and robots?"Coub's Gif-Like Looping Musical Videos Start To Pick Up Real Traction
Jun 01, 9:54AM
While other file formats have faded, the lowly Gif has stubbornly stayed alive for more than 25 years through sites like Tumblr. Other apps like Vine and Cinemagram have also popped up to support the short-looping video. Coub is doing the same and it’s starting to pick up some real traction. Over the last few months, the site, which lets people take YouTube or Vimeo videos, clip them to 10 seconds and loop them with music, has started attracting upwards of 1 million visitors a day from virtually nothing at the beginning of the year. Almost all of this traffic is from Russia, where the company has its Moscow headquarters. The name is a play on Cobb, Leonardo DiCaprio’s character in the Christopher Nolan’s movie Inception. (They had to add the ‘U’ because Cobb was already taken as a domain name.) The two brothers behind the site, Anton and Igor Gladkoborodov, have a long history of building and selling media projects in Moscow. One of their last projects, Lookatme.ru, became more hipster hub for Russia, while another project catalogued public lectures in the city. After selling Lookatme.ru, they started to brainstorm about other possible projects. They bootstrapped Coub and launched it last year, although it only started to pick up momentum in January. Now they’re seeing 5.5 million uniques per month. Unlike Vine or Cinemagram, Coub is web-first and it’s mainly designed for people to manipulate existing videos, not create new ones from their phones. The Gladkoborodovs say many of the existing Gif-making sites aren’t that intuitive to use and the file formats can take longer to load and have poorer image resolution than their looping videos, or Coubs. Russians are using Coub to mock celebrities and politicians, like the one below making fun of famed director Nikita Mikhalkov or the one below that of Vladimir Putin. There are signs that Russia is heading in a more politically oppressive direction after Putin’s re-election last year. Earlier this year, two of the founders of Russia’s top social network VKontakte, Vyacheslav Mirilashvili and Lev Leviev, abruptly and mysteriously sold a 48 percent stake in the company to UCP, an investment fund run by a financier with close ties to Putin. Some are worried this will mean more limits for online political criticism. But looping videos and Gifs meanwhile are pretty harmless, and funny, at the least. The two brothers, who moved toOculus VR Co-Founder Andrew Scott Reisse Killed At 33, The Victim Of A Hit-And-Run
Jun 01, 7:11AM
Our community has lost a brilliant mind. Andrew Scott Reisse, a founding member and lead engineer on the Oculus Rift VR headset project, was struck and killed by a vehicle in Santa Ana, California as its driver fled from the police.Facebook Advertises That You Can Turn Off Home "If You Need Some Alone Time"
Jun 01, 6:34AM
Desperate to make its homescreen replacement Home seem less invasive, Facebook is advertising that you can temporarily deactivate it and use your HTC First or other Android phone as normal. The fact that Home replaces your widgets and app folders has been a core complaint. Facebook vows to fix that, but until then it's reminding people they can leave Home for stock Android or their old launcher.Google Won't Approve Glass Apps That Recognize People's Faces… For Now
Jun 01, 5:11AM
The potential creep factor of Google Glass is something that the search giant has to mitigate as best it can if it wants that kooky head-worn display to become a mass-market sensation (and even that may not be enough), but a recent announcement highlights the search giant’s commitment to, well, do no evil. Google confirmed on its official Glass G+ page earlier this evening that it won’t allow developers to create applications for the head-worn display that are capable of recognizing the faces of people the wearer encounters. It’s no surprise that Google has been keen to downplay the idea of first-party face recognition features — Google Glass director Steve Lee gave the New York Times a near identical statement earlier this month — but now the company has made it clear that developers are subject to that same code of conduct. That’s not to say that Google is throwing out the possibility of face-recognizing Glass apps in the future — the company just has to lock down a firm set of privacy protocols before letting developers run wild. As you’d expect, there’s no timetable in place yet so it’s still unclear when Glass will be able to chime in our ears with a long-forgotten acquaintance’s name. It may be a big win for privacy advocates, but the news doesn’t bode all that well for some of the early-stage startups that are angling to turn Glass into an ever-present recognition device. Consider the case of Lambda Labs — earlier this week the San Francisco team talked up its forthcoming facial and object recognition API that would allow developers to create applications with commands like “remember that face.” At the time, Lambda co-founder Stephen Balaban sought refuge in the fact that the Glass API didn’t explicitly bar the creation of face-recognition apps, a shelter that no longer exists. To quote the updated Glass developer policies: Don’t use the camera or microphone to cross-reference and immediately present personal information identifying anyone other than the user, including use cases such as facial recognition and voice print. Applications that do this will not be approved at this time. For now, though, Google seems all right with the prospect of using Glass to recognize individual, people so long as their faces aren’t the things being kept track of. Back in March, news broke of a partially Google-funded project from Duke University that saw researchers createBig Impact On A Small Budget: Ben's Friends Wants To Build A Web & Mobile Support Network For Every Rare Disease
Jun 01, 3:02AM
There's a lot of exciting and head-turning technology out there today, and it's changing our world in a multitude of ways, some more obvious than others -- and at a fairly astounding rate. But many of these services, while making our lives more convenient or connected, aren't necessarily helping people or having an impact at a more fundamental level. There are, of course, many exceptions, and Ben's Friends is one of them -- another example that for-profit, social enterprises can have a big impact even without venture capital, or big budgets.Science- And Tech-Focused 'STEAM Carnival' Hits Its Kickstarter Goal
Jun 01, 2:08AM
Looks like Kickstarter can add "reimagined" carnivals with "robots, fire, and lasers" to the list of things that its users have crowdfunded. Earlier today, an event called the STEAM Carnival, put together by a company called Two Bit Circus, reached its $100,000 Kickstarter goal. The initials are a twist on STEM, which stands for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math -- the A adds "art" to the equation.GitHub Announces Octokit, The Official Way To Build Using The GitHub API
May 31, 11:35PM
GitHub today announced Octokit , a new lineup of GitHub-maintained client libraries for the GitHub API. Octokit comes in two flavors. It offers a kit for developing Ruby apps and another for Objective-C. The Ruby version is what the site describes as a simple wrapper for the GitHub API. The Objective-C version uses the Cocoa and Cocoa Touch framework "for interacting with the GitHub API, built using AFNetworking, Mantle and ReactiveCocoa."Stilly Is A One-Button GIF Maker For iPhone That's Even Easier Than Vine
May 31, 10:17PM
Like GIFs? Tumblr? Got an iPhone? $2.00? OK, good, then you'll probably like this new app called Stilly which is either the most ridiculous thing ever or the most fun you're going to have all weekend. The app, in a nutshell, turns anything you capture with your iPhone's camera into a jiggling, wiggly, color-flashing GIF. Well, you know, kind of!Ask A VC: Freestyle's Dave Samuel On The Secrets To A Great Co-Founder Partnership And More
May 31, 9:45PM
In this week's Ask A VC episode, Freestyle Capital's Dave Samuel joined us in the studio to discuss his investment philosophies and more. Samuel also talked about how and why his co-founder relationship with Josh Felser has been so successful. The duo co-founded Spinner (acquired by AOL for $320 million), and Grouper (acquired by Sony for $65 million). In 2011, Fesler and Samuel formally launched Freestyle Capital, which makes investments in early-stage startups.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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