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Virgin America Makes A Safety Video That's Now A YouTube Hit
Nov 04, 8:47AM
Last week, Virgin America launched of all things, a safety video that has become a YouTube hit with now more than 4 million views. It's a musical that makes buckling a seat beat seem like fun. It celebrates the experience of flying with a focus on the fundamentals of safety that only a company like Virgin can pull off.
eBay CEO John Donahoe Is Bullish On Digital Currency, And He's Keeping Tabs On Bitcoin
Nov 04, 6:00AM
There's no doubt that Bitcoin is getting plenty of attention these days -- we've seen folks like the Winklevoss Twins and Chamath Palihapitiya throw their financial weight behind Bitcoin in a big way -- but despite all that it hasn't been embraced by the teeming millions. Arguably, all it would take is the support of one big name to get the ball rolling, and for months Bitcoin aficionados have wondered if eBay would be willing to take up that mantle. It's not hard to see why -- in a brief interview with the Financial Times, eBay president and CEO John Donahoe said that the company was keeping its eye on Bitcoin and that in the months and years to come, digital currency is going to be "a very powerful thing".
YouTube Music Awards Were Chaos You'll Never See On TV
Nov 04, 12:23AM
Can YouTube create live content that inspires watercooler zeitgeist moments like television? Google's giving it a shot with the YouTube Music Awards, a celebration of do-it-yourself Internet culture livestreaming on YouTube right now. It's chaotic, innovative, offensive, silly, and downright weird. But one thing's for sure. You won't see this on TV.
Plotting The Way To IPO, Twitter's Product Roadmap Has Become Too Data Driven
Nov 03, 10:11PM
In its rush towards becoming a public company, Twitter is in danger of sacrificing focus on the altar of growth. And it's doing it with decisions based heavily on data and testing, rather than with an overall vision. This week, Twitter shipped an update to its iOS, web and Android apps that features in-line image previews, a preponderance of action buttons and new tools for advertisers to caress your eyeballs. Over the past few months, the Twitter product has evolved haltingly, with missteps like the external #Music app that have turned attention inwards to the core offering.
What Games Are: The Power Conversation
Nov 03, 10:00PM
Given the degree to which graphics have not changed over the last few years in high-end games, it's surprising how strong the idea of graphical power remains in the games industry. Gamers are still hotly arguing over which games look best on which console, yet they are doing so over increasingly ephemeral details. Will this power conversation always dominate the gaming medium, or will it eventually give way to something else? 
Pixelstick Takes Your Long Exposure Photography To A Trippy New Level
Nov 03, 9:29PM
Remember that night when you and your friends discovered how to "draw" with your camera's long exposure function? You started out simple, piercing the dark with a cheap handheld flashlight as you traced a terrible rendition of your name through the air. You were hardly halfway through the last letter of your name before you were running over to the camera to see if it worked. You, like many a bored digital camera owner before you, had discovered light painting. Pixelstick takes that concept to a pretty ridiculous extreme. As its name implies, Pixelstick is… a stick of pixels. More specifically, the Pixelstick is a 6' bar containing 198 full color LEDs. At the core of Pixelstick is a simple brain: a handheld controller, an SD card reader, and a bit of lightweight circuitry to parse images pulled from the card. Pixelstick displays those images just one vertical line at a time. To the naked eye, it's a mess of flashing color. Move it slowly in front of the open aperture of a camera during a long exposure, however, and each pixel becomes a paint stroke. Flash by flash, your ethereal imagery is burned onto your shot. While that in itself would be quite cool, things start to get really trippy when you bring in animation. You can load up a bunch of sequential images onto the SD card, then use the handbox to switch between them as you shoot a series of photos. If you havent already, check out the video above for some particularly impressive examples. Oh, and the pixelstick can be unlocked and spun around its handle, allowing for all sorts of crazy experiments in spirography. Pixelstick set out to raise $110,000 on Kickstarter, a goal which they pretty much immediately destroyed. Just 4 days into the campaign, they've already more than doubled that (at the time of publishing, they'd raised just over $245,000.) Alas, the cheapest tier to actually come with a Pixelstick — the $250 "Early Bird" package — has long since sold out; at this point, you'll need to drop at least $300. (If you pick one of these up, you'll probably want to drop some more cash for a set of rechargable batteries, while you're at it. It takes 8 AA batteries at a time, and the team says they can chew through those in a night or two)
Cambridge Audio Minx Xi Review: Give All Your Digital Audio A Big Upgrade – For A Price
Nov 03, 9:00PM
UK-based Cambridge Audio has long made very well-regarded high-end audio equipment, but recently that's a market that has changed considerably, thanks to the advent of digital audio and online streaming services. The company has changed, too, and one example of that change is the new Minx Xi all-in one streaming device, which adds to Cambridge Audio's growing family of digital-focused Minx products.
Benchmark Partner Peter Fenton On Investor Luck, Tech IPOs And More
Nov 03, 7:00PM
This past week, we were lucky enough to sit down with Benchmark partner and Twitter board member Peter Fenton backstage at TechCrunch Europe to talk about his magic touch. 
App Indexing, Predictive Services, And Unlocking Mobile Distribution
Nov 03, 6:00PM
There is a "perfect storm" brewing in consumer mobile: Developers, companies, and investors see the explosive growth of smartphones (with no sign of slowing down), yet consumers only have so much bandwidth to interact with a small set of apps, let alone enough time in the day for another app. Consumer eyeballs are fixated on smartphones, triggering once-in-a-lifetime opportunities for application creators to reinvent products, interactions, and industries, but tragically, limited means of getting their creations discovered, or reengaged with, or paid through them. The result, for the time being, is driving app installs and engagement is all the rage, as companies frantically line Facebook's pockets to help drive downloads and retention of their mobile apps while a bustling ecosystem of third-party app analytic providers wait to scoop up the remains. Something has to give, right?
There Are No More "Tech Issues"
Nov 03, 5:42PM
Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius is not a tech founder. President Barack Obama does not have a GitHub account. The failed launch of the new health insurance e-commerce website, Healthcare.gov, came as a shock to political leaders that were too steeped in government shutdowns and the machinations of two-party infighting to understand how their hired geeks could flub a computer project.
Competitive Ruling Will Bring New Generation Of Swiss-Made Smartwatches
Nov 03, 12:06AM
The Swatch Group has long been the primary movement supplier to the majority of Swiss (and non-Swiss) watch manufacturers. These movements - essentially the guts of the watch - have powered 60% of the world's watches in the past decade. That's about to end. 
Chippy Is A Fish & Chip Shop Simulator For iOS That Puts The Fun Into Deep-Fat Frying
Nov 02, 8:00PM
Simulation video games are often purposefully, gloriously mundane. But they can also make the quotidian highly entertaining. And that's certainly true of this U.K.-made example of the genre. Meet: Chippy, a fish & chip shop simulator game for iOS that's plenty of fun to play -- partly because its subject matter is so spectacularly mundane (frying fish and chips), but also because it turns that mundane task into an addictive game of time management.
Welcome To The Unicorn Club: Learning From Billion-Dollar Startups
Nov 02, 6:00PM
Many entrepreneurs, and the venture investors who back them, seek to build billion-dollar companies. Why do investors seem to care about "billion dollar exits"? Historically, top venture funds have driven returns from their ownership in just a few companies in a given fund of many companies. Plus, traditional venture funds have grown in size, requiring larger "exits" to deliver acceptable returns. For example - to return just the initial capital of a $400 million venture fund, that might mean needing to own 20 percent of two different $1 billion companies, or 20 percent of a $2 billion company when the company is acquired or goes public.
Delta And JetBlue Now Let You Use Your Gadgets During Taxi, Takeoff And Landing
Nov 02, 5:30PM
It's been a long time since flying was fun (unless you are reading this on the upper deck of a 747, of course). This week, however, things got a bit more bearable thanks to the FAA's decision that airlines can now allow their passengers to keep their gadgets on – in airplane mode – during taxi, takeoff and landing. The first two airlines to actually put this into practice are Delta and JetBlue.
Gillmor Gang: Dynamic Clusters
Nov 02, 5:00PM
The Gillmor Gang — John Borthwick, Keith Teare, Kevin Marks, John Taschek, and Steve Gillmor — move further and further toward the Golden Age of Push Notification. What some see as a fragmented sea of apps, others see as a ripe opportunity to unify notifications as the successor to email, social streaming to the core. As Windows gets sucked into the tidal wave of mobility, it's up to individual apps to intermediate themselves into the relentless flow.
Women 2.0, A Media Company Built Around Female Entrepreneurship, Gears Up For Las Vegas
Nov 02, 4:15PM
Over the past few years, Women 2.0 has become one of the most reliable places to find stories from female entrepreneurs, successful and otherwise. It has also, according to co-founder and CEO Shaherose Charania, become a profitable business. That's particularly surprising since the Women 2.0 site doesn't run any advertising. Not that Charania said she's completely opposed to the idea ("Maybe we will [run ads] eventually, but it will be thoughtful"). However, she sounded more excited about the company's conferences, and about the different membership plans that it's experimenting with, where readers pay a monthly or annual fee (currently the lower-priced plan costs $20 a month) for access to a combination of online and offline features, such as conference discounts and virtual happy hours.
Dear Google, What's Wrong With You?
Nov 02, 1:00PM
Dear Google: What's wrong? I ask because last weekend, while in San Francisco, I asked Google Maps for "hot chocolate mission" -- and was promptly directed to an ARCO station in Fremont, 40 miles away. Similarly, last month I searched for "coffee" while in the Embarcadero Center, one of the denser coffee hotspots in America, and was sent to a Starbucks more than two miles away. And it hasn't escaped my notice that you keep highlighting faraway places with Zagat listings over much closer places without. Now, sure, if you're thinking "hey, you're just abusing your position as a highfalutin tech columnist to make anecdotal complaints here!" -- well, you're not entirely wrong.
Snowden Is Not Going To Work At VKontakte
Nov 02, 10:34AM
Despite having a very public job offer handed to him last August, Edward Snowden will not be joining Russian social networking website VKontakte, its founder Pavel Durov has confirmed to TechCrunch.
11 Or 12 Things I Learned About Life From Day Trading Millions Of Dollars
Nov 02, 9:00AM
I was a day trader for many years, and it almost killed me. I made money by making profits on my own money and also taking a percentage of the profits for the people I traded for. I traded up to $40 million or $50 million a day at my peak. I did this from 2001 to 2004. I learned about day trading but I also learned a lot about myself and what I was good at, what I was horrible at, and what I was psychotic at. Things that had nothing to do with day trading.
Britain's GCHQ Collaborated With Other EU Nations To Enable Broad Internet Surveillance
Nov 01, 10:13PM
Today The Guardian reported that the GCHQ, Britain’s NSA equivalent, worked with several foreign governments to help them tap Internet traffic and phone communications. The Swedish, French, Spanish, and German governments are said to be involved. It has been known for some time that the United States and British governments, through a number of programs such as the UK’s Tempora effort, directly tap the fiber-optic cables that are the backbone of the Internet, collecting data in massive quantity. That four other countries do the same is, therefore, not surprising, but it is dispiriting. It will be far harder than we initially perhaps hoped to end this sort of mass surveillance. That the GCHQ was willing to provide what is described as “a leading role in advising its European counterparts” in how to get around legal restrictions is simply depressing. The NSA acts in a similar fashion. After it was banned from collecting data sent in between data centers of private companies on the country’s soil, it started doing so overseas. Problem? Solved. Presumably the GCHQ, close cousin and partner in crime to the NSA, is teaching similar methods. Previously, James Clapper, director of National Intelligence, joked that furor over news of NSA’s spying on the phone of the German Chancellor was asinine: “Some of this reminds me a lot of the classic movie ‘Casablanca’: ‘My God, there’s gambling going on here!’” Clapper is correct, it appears. The losers here are the regular folks who are having their Internet traffic and telephony data absorbed by more than just their own governments, but by apparently a cadre of nations working in concert to ensure that digital privacy is kaput. The GCHQ is zealous in its will to help allies get around their own law. The Guardian’s quote about Holland is downright depressing: “The Dutch have some legislative issues that they need to work through before their legal environment would allow them to operate in the way that GCHQ does. We are providing legal advice on how we have tackled some of these issues to Dutch lawyers.” Frankly, I think that at this point it is reasonable to state that wholesale monitoring of the raw data that flows through the trunk cables of the web will not stop. The only solution is some sort of new encryption technique that is unhackable – though the NSA is working on ending that protection as well.
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