Hi there!
Here's the latest feed from TechCrunch.
Add feeds@feed2email.net to your contact list to make sure you receive all your emails
Make sure to visit feed2email.net to get more feeds sent to your inbox.
To find out which feeds you are subscribed to, or to get further help, just reply to this email.
Facebook Makes The First Big Dent On FISA, Releases Data On All Requests It Has Received From The U.S. Government
Jun 15, 1:32AM
As the PRISM scandal shows no signs of dying down in the public consciousness, Facebook just released the fullest account to date of the requests it has received from United States law enforcement and governmental authorities for the data surrounding its users. To borrow a phrase from local news sizzle reels, the numbers may surprise you. In a report issued today on Facebook’s company blog, general counsel Ted Ullyot wrote: “For the six months ending December 31, 2012, the total number of user-data requests Facebook received from any and all government entities in the U.S. (including local, state, and federal, and including criminal and national security-related requests) – was between 9,000 and 10,000. These requests run the gamut – from things like a local sheriff trying to find a missing child, to a federal marshal tracking a fugitive, to a police department investigating an assault, to a national security official investigating a terrorist threat. The total number of Facebook user accounts for which data was requested pursuant to the entirety of those 9-10 thousand requests was between 18,000 and 19,000 accounts. With more than 1.1 billion monthly active users worldwide, this means that a tiny fraction of one percent of our user accounts were the subject of any kind of U.S. state, local, or federal U.S. government request (including criminal and national security-related requests) in the past six months. We hope this helps put into perspective the numbers involved, and lays to rest some of the hyperbolic and false assertions in some recent press accounts about the frequency and scope of the data requests that we receive.” More information can be found here, and we’re updating the story as it develops. But at first blush, those numbers may not seem as scary as the initial reports on governmental surveillance of web activity would imply. Though the government under FISA does have the right to request as much information as it would like in the name of national security, it seems that those requests have affected a relatively tiny fraction of Facebook users. For a bit of background: Facebook this week joined several other technology giants including Microsoft and Google in publicly asking the government to change the restrictions prohibiting them from being fully transparent about the extent of their cooperation in the U.S. government’s surveillance activities. Thus far, requests that Facebook has received from the National Security Agency (NSA) haveElastic Path Raises $8M For Commerce Everywhere API Platform
Jun 14, 11:06PM
Elastic Path has raised an $8 million debt round to fuel the development of its "commerce everywhere," API -- a hypermedia platform that abstracts backend complexity for the front-end developer and business person. Wellington Financial out of Toronto provided the financing. Elastic Path has traditionally served as an e-commerce company. But over the past few years, it has focused on building an API platform that extends the capability for businesses to take commerce beyond a website. Vice President of Marketing Matt Dione said the company will use the funding to invest in its API platform.Google Quietly Kills Quick View For Wikipedia Results In Mobile Search
Jun 14, 10:15PM
In April, Google announced a couple of new features that were meant to speed up mobile browsing. Among them was "Quick view," an experimental feature that added a badge to Wikipedia results on Google's mobile search results pages that, when you clicked it, loaded the Wikipedia result in around 100 milliseconds. Now, however, it looks like these Quick view badges were indeed just experimental and have quietly disappeared from Google's mobile search results pages.Ask A VC: Canaan Partners' Maha Ibrahim On Why There Aren't More Women VCs
Jun 14, 9:45PM
In this week's Ask A VC epsiode, we had Canaan Partners' Maha Ibrahim in the studio to chat about her perspective on social gaming and more. Ibrahim, who has worked at Canaan since 2000, invests in cloud, social gaming and digital media companies for the firm. We raised an interesting question to Ibrahim: Why aren't there more female VCs in the industry? According to a recent report, of the 25 most active VC firms in 2011, only 8 percent of their investment professionals were women. Many of these firms don't have female investment professionals at all.Jack Dorsey, Mayors Bloomberg And Lee Will Co-Host Digital Summit On Sept 30th
Jun 14, 9:39PM
Square CEO Jack Dorsey and the Mayors of New York City and San Francisco announced today that they will be collaborating on a digital technology summit, to be hosted on September 30th in the Big Apple. At a press conference at Square this afternoon, San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee gave a few details about the upcoming summit, which will bring together industry stakeholders for a big-think meeting of how to solve social issues.Facebook Will Launch A News Reader At June 20th Press Event
Jun 14, 8:54PM
The upcoming death of Google Reader, mentions of RSS in Facebook's code, and the addition of hashtags signal Facebook will likely launch a news reader at the June 20th press event it's just sent out mysterious invites to. A news reader app and web product could take advantage of Facebook's treasure trove of aggregate data on what people share to surface popular and personally recommended articles.Finally, Someone Likens Parenting To Marketing
Jun 14, 8:39PM
You know what's worse than waiting all day for an app (an app!) to get back to you? The fact that an article called "Father's Day: What's your ROI?" exists. Finally, someone likens parenting to marketing. Tech newsmedia brethren, have you given up? I know, I know, some of our guest posts are also atrocious, and our world does have bigger fish to fry, but weren't Fridays supposed to be the days that you did journalism, VentureBeat?Teenage Musician Uses The Crowdfunded Loog Guitar To Crowdfund Her Album
Jun 14, 8:31PM
When we last left off with the Loog Guitar by Rafael Atijas it had blown past its funding goals on Kickstarter in early 2011 and shipped with much fanfare making it one of the first successful Kickstarter projects on our radar. In the interim it's become a mini-phenomenon and, most important, people have started using the three-stringed instruments to record albums.Groove Playlist Generation App Tops 85,000 Downloads In One Day After Going Free
Jun 14, 8:19PM
Groove is a Canadian-made mobile app that's tearing up the charts, reaching a top 1o spot in over 30 countries, and climbing to number 1 in the Canadian app store over other music apps including Rdio and Songza. The app is part of Montreal-based FounderFuel's latest cohort, and in move that's becoming a trend for Founder Fuel companies, it has just gone free, and racked up 85,000 downloads in just 24 hours.¿Cómo Ha Crecido Path? By Buying Ads In Spanish
Jun 14, 7:43PM
The mystery of Path’s mysterious growth deepens. The app, which has been around for nearly three years, miraculously jumped up the charts from between 500th and 600th place to the teens on the free list about two months ago. That raised questions about how the app was able to do that so spontaneously. Was it that Path finally suddenly acquired the network effects and organic growth that it had worked for years to trigger? Or was it something else? Valleywag speculated that it was spamming tactics plus spending on advertising, citing a graph from app and mobile ad tracking service Onavo Insights. The chart showed that an uptick in advertising spending that coincided with Path’s gradual rise up the overall charts. In fact, a source familiar with the spending habits of various top-tier mobile developers tells me that Path was the third highest spender on iOS app install ads on Facebook in the month of April behind the usual suspects like the top-grossing gaming companies. It then tapered its marketing spend down in May, and it also suffered slightly on the charts after Facebook shut down the app’s “Find Friends” ability. Path’s Facebook ad spending was also done in a clever way, with much of that spend being devoted to Spanish-language ads instead of English ones. We have an example unit at the top of the story, which appeared in the Facebook mobile feed and which Path put money behind earlier this spring. Not only that, if you dive into Onavo’s data, you’ll see that the highest correlating apps for Path usage in the U.S. are Mi Banco Mobile and El Nuevo Dia. Morin has talked about this publicly before, telling The Wall Street Journal that the company saw a spike in adoption in countries like Venezuela, Mexico and Puerto Rico. Path, for its part, is issuing its clearest statement today on its spending habits. It says it spends nowhere near what Valleywag claimed, which is more than $10 million in marketing over the last two months. “We would like to set the record straight once and for all — Path’s recent growth has been primarily organic and viral,” said the company’s vice president of marketing Nate Johnson. “While we do run Facebook ads in growing markets around the world, that spend averages in the low 10′s of thousands of dollars a month at best. Recent claims that Path has spentHeyzap Says Its Mobile Ad Network Has Grown To 800 Games (And Makes Up The Majority Of Its Revenue)
Jun 14, 7:38PM
Back in March, I wrote about how Heyzap was introducing advertising to its mobile gaming platform. Now co-founder Jude Gomila says the company has become a significant player in mobile advertising. Specifically, Gomila sent along the chart showing the growth in publishers running Heyzap ads and the corresponding growth in ad impressions over the past six months. You can't tell exactly where things stand now, because there's no Y-axis to the chart. However, Gomila did note that Heyzap ads are now running in 800 games (it was 350 in March), and that number is also growing quickly. He also said that the publishers advertising with Heyzap include big names like Zynga and DeNA,.This Week On The TC Gadgets Podcast: E3, The Death Of Symbian, And WWDC
Jun 14, 7:00PM
It was a big week in gadgets, and thus, a big TC Gadgets podcast it shall be. This week, we discuss developments at E3, including Xbox One and PS4 pricing, the death of Nokia's Symbian OS, and of course, WWDC. Will you buy a PS4 or an Xbox One? Does despair fill you from nose to navel when you remember the good old days of Symbian? Is the new iOS 7 design repelling, attractive, or some bizarre combination of the two? John Biggs, Matt Burns, Jordan Crook, Darrell Etherington, and Natasha Lomas touch on all of this and more.iOS 7 Eliminates MAC Address As Tracking Option, Signaling Final Push Towards Apple's Own Ad Identifier Technology
Jun 14, 6:28PM
Apple has now taken another step to push app publishers to use its preferred ad tracking option, the Identifier for Advertisers (IDFA), with the debut of the iOS 7 beta. Confirming what many have suspected, Apple is eliminating an alternative option involving tracking by MAC addresses. This method had sprung up following a change to Apple's Developer Documentation in 2011, announcing its intention to end developers' reliance on the unique identifier known as the UDID.Disrupt SF Is Around The Corner So Submit Your Startup Battlefield Applications By June 19th
Jun 14, 5:26PM
TechCrunch Disrupt SF is back! We're very excited to announce tickets are on sale and that companies in stealth mode can apply for Startup Battlefield for until Wednesday, the 19. After that, we're pulling the plug on submissions. You have less than a week. This September 7-11, we're bringing Disrupt back to San Francisco to welcome an all new slate of outstanding startups, influential speakers, guests and more to the stage. It marks the seventh time we've set up shop here in SF and once again all the action -- starting with our 24 hour Hackathon -- happens at The Concourse at San Francisco Design Center.PiCloud Is A Model Cloud Made Of Raspberry Pi & LEGO For Teaching Students About Web Platforms
Jun 14, 5:23PM
Here's another interesting implementation of the $35 Raspberry Pi microcromputer -- or rather a stack of 56 Pis, linked together to form a model web platform called PiCloud, using LEGO bricks as bespoke racks for the Pi stacks. The project comes out of the University of Glasgow, and is intended as a teaching aid for students to hack around with cloud technologies.Optimizely Explains How It Boosted SimCity Pre-Order Revenue
Jun 14, 5:16PM
Here's an example of a company using Optimizely's A/B testing tools for a high-profile game launch. The startup, which recently raised a $28 million Series A, is releasing a case study today about how Electronic Arts used Optimizely to boost preorders for the new version of SimCity. Prior to the SimCity launch (and before all of that launch's attendant problems) EA division Maxis was trying to drive online pre-orders by offering a discount, and it was promoting the deal in a large banner on the preorder page and in ads — but it wasn't seeing the improvement that it expected.Fly Or Die: Divvy
Jun 14, 5:06PM
As photo-sharing truly hits its stride, an entire ecosystem is born around it. But what is creation without consumption? That's what Divvy is all about. We met the folks behind Divvy at the TC Meetup + Pitch-Off. At it's core, the app aggregates all your photos from Facebook and Instagram (Twitter, Flickr, Dropbox all coming soon) into one filter-capable stream. You can also save photos from Instagram, zoom in on photos, and share with groups or individuals.Microsoft Adds Support For Google Cloud Messaging, Git And Custom APIs To Azure Mobile Services
Jun 14, 4:55PM
Microsoft today announced a number of updates to its Azure Mobile Services that include support for Git source control, custom APIs and Android push notifications through Google Cloud Messaging to its mobile backend service. Azure users now also get a free 20MB SQL database for mobile services and web sites for 12 months.Some Foreign Telcos Reportedly Defied NSA Phone Spying Order
Jun 14, 4:33PM
T-Mobile and Verizon reportedly refused to kowtow to the National Security Agency's demand to collect all phone call records. According to the Wall Street Journal, because T-Mobile USA and Verizon Wireless are owned by European parent companies, they were able to successfully refuse the NSA's court order.Me Books Brings Children's Favorite Books To iPad, Lets You Be The Narrator
Jun 14, 4:29PM
Many of the children's e-book applications for iPad today use a combination of animations, video or even games to make books more "interactive" for their young readers. Me Books, a London-based digital e-book app and retailer launching today in the U.S., has a slightly different take. Instead of animation, the app uses audio to add an additional element to stories. The e-books are narrated, and include artwork that kids can tap to hear characters speak, too. In addition, readers (or their parents) can also record their own voices over the default narration to customize the experience even further.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.
To stop all future emails from feed2email.net you can reply to this email with STOP in the subject line. Thanks
