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StartX, the startup accelerator for Stanford University students, held its Spring 2012 Demo Day this past week at AOL headquarters in Palo Alto, California. Seven very diverse startups presented to a room of investors, media, and tech industry folks -- the latest batch of StartX startups range from a new method of doing DNA sequencing, to truly educational children's toys, to a new way for women to buy jewelry, and more. TechCrunch TV was there, and in the video embedded above you can see the general scene and also our interview with StartX's founder Cameron Teitelman. We also got six of the presenting companies to give TechCrunch their pitches directly...
PicPlz, the mobile photo sharing app that is perhaps known best for being an early and direct competitor with Instagram, will shut down permanently on July 3. PicPlz delivered the news through a short post on its company blog as well as in a brief email to users that read:
A couple weeks ago I ran this post showing how one Hong Kong developer, Animoca, tests its Android games. The company, which has had more than 70 million downloads, tests every one of their apps on about 400 different devices. The photo above is from their headquarters and is just a taste of all the Android phones and tablets they use. Needless to say, that post pissed Android fanboys off. Some commenters said it intimidated would-be developers, who might get scared off by Android fragmentation and the perception that you have to support hundreds of devices, screen sizes and densities and versions of the OS. So, I asked around to see how other mobile game developers do quality assurance testing for Android. This is what I got:
My son recently tried to call one of our older relatives. He dialed the number and quickly hung up with a confused look on his face. I asked him what was wrong and he replied, "I don't know. There's something wrong with their phone, it kept beeping." I called the number and was amused to hear a landline busy signal, something my cell phone centric pre-teen had never encountered. My son is similarly unacquainted with cable TV. Other than the occasional NBA game, he consumes his video content via our iPad and Xbox. Most of his online viewing is spent on YouTube. He is not alone. Mark Suster, fellow venture capitalist and serial entrepreneur, has written extensively about YouTube's evolution from dogs-on-skateboards to its current status as an entertainment medium rivaling cable television networks. Mark provides an excellent primer regarding the future of Internet TV HERE.
The Evo 4G LTE is a fine phone. There certainly aren't any glaring issues: Sense has been considerably streamlined, and it's really good at what it was made to do, which is entertain. The design language is a little loud, though maybe that's what it takes to shake things up in the land of Android. (LAndroid.) But unlike the Evos that have come before it, this latest iteration doesn't really bring any truly special features to the table. I mean, consider the name. It's the Evo 4G LTE, yet Sprint's 4G LTE network isn't set to go live for another month, at the very earliest. And even if that weren't the case, LTE is no longer a wow factor. It's a soon-to-be norm, which means that the Evo needs something more than fast data to be a big deal. Does it have what it takes? Let's find out together, yes?
There's no shortage of robust, full-featured file storage and sharing services out there, but where do you turn when you want the quickest, simplest way to go? Crate costs money, JustBeamIt requires both users to be online at the same time, but newcomer Dropcanvas? They may be onto something. The beauty behind Dropcanvas is that it requires virtually no thought or effort to use properly. Upon navigating to the site, users are told to drag and drop a file onto the page. Once a file has been dragged onto the so-called "canvas" -- there's no set file size limit though canvases are capped at 5GB -- users are provided with a link to spread around and a share button for easy access to Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit.
Cleveland, known to many as the "Land From Whence The Cleves Came," is rarely mentioned when you think of hotbeds of entrepreneurial energy. But yet it was the long time home to Harvey Pekar and does still have many local colleges, including Case Western Reserve, John Carroll, and Cleveland State. It is also home to Sherwin-Williams, Progressive Insurance, and now LaunchHouse. In other words, it's a city that's ready to make a few sweeping changes.
People keep asking, "Why would anyone of sane mind buy a $17,000 luxury watch with a Space Invader's theme?" If you are familiar with the Swiss watch brand Romain Jerome - you don't need an answer. They are the people that brought you pieces such as the Titanic DNA (with metal from the actual titanic), and the Moon Dust DNA (with yea... real dust the from moon and metal from spare parts of the Apollo XI). So a "luxury licensing" deal with Taito Japan isn't that odd.
Robots are hard to talk to. They're not friendly, they're mostly made of plastic, and, as anyone who has tried to chat with a Roomba can attest, they are often dedicated to a single task. Luckily, there's ApriPetit. Toshiba's R&D department built ApriPetit as a successor to their larger ApriPoco. This little guy is about six inches tall and follows along to conversations by moving its slug-like body and eyes in ways that resemble proper conversation.
The Gillmor Gang — John Taschek, Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor — watches helplessly as robots briefly take over the show. As investors reel from the backwash of the Facebook IPO, Microsoft chooses the moment to start pushing Windows 8. The Gang is underwhelmed. Also: Missing Steve Jobs at the D conference, liner notes on the way to Spotify, and another round of Google Glasses from @scobleizer. The thing is, we want to give permission to be interrupted, not beg for restoration of a clear view. Even when we don't talk push notification, we do.
You guys may remember a post on TechCrunch yesterday about a trademark spat between an entrepreneur named Brian Hamachek, who built an app called Who's Near Me Live, and a Lightbank-backed startup called myRete, who built an app called WhosHere, strikingly similar in both functionality and name. The story unfolded that Hamachek had been bullied by WhosHere in the legal realm, despite the fact that WhosHere was built two years earlier, but there are at least two sides to every story. Hamachek's side of the story was written by Rip yesterday, but the main points you should know are these: Hamachek changed the name of his app to WNM in most (but not all) instances of its appearance after being hit with a C&D from WhosHere over a year ago. But the spat was revived after WNM got some traction on TechCrunch in March (this is where it gets really good).
At TC Disrupt New York, the White House's chief geeks -- CTO Todd Park and CIO Steve Van Roekel -- rang the bell for Silicon Valley to step up and help recode the federal government with their Digital Government Strategy. They hammered home the need for developers to leverage the mountains of open data coming out of the government to create new services and products for consumers. But you shouldn't do this just for fun, or even out of a sense of civic duty: you should do it because there's money there -- lots of it.
So Facebook's IPO was a disaster. Or maybe it wasn't. Yes, it was an utter fiasco. No, wait: "The debacle was not the IPO but all the whining by speculators who didn't make money." Nope, it was "the flop of the decade", the worst first week of any IPO in years. Au contraire: "What we have here is an investment banker acting ethically. And the whole financial press is atwitter about it." Nuh-uh: "The IPO discount is the cost of going public." Yadda, yadda, yadda, ad nauseum. Why, what with all these furious alarums and excursions and outraged complains, Benchmark Capital's Bill Gurley was moved to compare Facebook to another company that immediately dropped below its high-profile IPO issue price and stayed there for weeks and weeks; that well-known loser called ... er ... Amazon.com. You may have heard of it. Why is anyone paying attention to the this ultimately meaningless pageant? Probably because suckerspeople used to think tech IPOs were a guaranteed way for those lucky enough to buy at the issue price to make money. Now everyone is shocked -- shocked! -- that Facebook's investors may have been treated unequally, and grousing "I'm just extremely skeptical about the ability of a retail purchaser to be able to play on a level field in the market." Gee, you think? Come on, folks: it's not like you weren't warned.
One of the most frustrating things I've experienced as a leader is putting months into recruiting an amazing VP or engineer, only to have them change their mind at the 11th hour because of a ridiculous counteroffer. This is the big risk you face when aiming for the best people on the planet (see: "Hiring Rockstars") as they are the "beating heart" of their existing employer, and the incumbent company will often go beyond great lengths to keep them. They may be prized recruits for you, but they are absolutely the most critical people at their current employer. For instance, Google has been rumored to be especially aggressive at countering with restricted stock grants in the millions of dollars for their top people. But they aren't alone. Any employer will do whatever he or she can to keep key talent.
So here's a story that hopefully will be an eye-opener for entrepreneurs and startups, while providing a painful peek into trademark harassment and the importance of due diligence. It goes a little something like this: About two years ago, software engineer Brian Hamachek decided to build an app first on Windows Mobile (how some horror stories have been known to begin), then on Windows Phone, that enables location-based chat -- and calling. In other words, call and chat with new friends who live close by, for free. He called it Who's Near Me Live. Long story short: A Lightbank-backed startup called myRete own and operate a similar app called WhosHere, which was founded two years earlier. Well, they didn't like the name Brian had chosen for the app -- claimed it was too similar -- so they asked him to change it. At first, he said "why no thank you," but then they hit him with a C&D and then a lawsuit, so he acquiesced. Sounds like standard stuff for startup vs. incumbent, right? Well, it doesn't end there.
Affectiva, a startup that tries to measure the emotional response people have to ads and brands, just announced that it has a $500,000 grant from the National Science Foundation. The company spun out of MIT's Media Lab. This is its second NSF grant — in January 2011, it won another grant to help launch its Affdex service, which uses webcams to track consumers' responses as they watch videos. That should allow companies to test their ads with a broad audience in a quick and affordable way. When I spoke to co-founder Rana el Kaliouby last year, she also touted Affectiva's ability to recognize complex emotions — not just whether you're smiling or frowning, but also whether you look confused.
Last summer, after graduating from AngelPad, San Francisco-based Crittercism announced that it had raised $1.2 million in seed funding from the likes of Google Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, Opus Capital, Shasta Ventures, and AOL Ventures. Today, the startup has received further validation for its diagnostic and management tools for mobile developers, as Opus Capital, Shasta Ventures and Google Ventures have all re-upped, investing $5.5 million in the startup's series A financing.
When the Galaxy S and the Galaxy S II made their respective journeys to the United States, they lost a little something that international customers have enjoyed since the beginning: the physical home button. According to some new images obtained by The Verge though, that era may be drawing to a close, as T-Mobile's GSIII variant may sport that home button after all. It may seem like a minor thing to get worked up over (because it is), but it's a considerable shift from the four-capacitive-button days of yore. Those design changes were mandated by carriers, and if true, these new images may mean that Samsung is flexing their muscle as the most prolific smartphone manufacturer in the world.
It's a testament to how important Facebook has become in the web ecosystem that the social network's performance issues yesterday didn't just affect the site itself but also a wide variety of other sites as well. Performance monitoring company Compuware APM, which analyses the performance of thousands of top sites, just sent us some interesting data about how Facebook's problems yesterday correlated with significant slowdowns across major U.S. media and retail sites.
Gillmor Gang - Kevin Marks, John Taschek, Robert Scoble, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor. Recording has concluded.
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Inside StartX Stanford's Spring 2012 Demo Day [TCTV]
Jun 02, 11:30PM
StartX, the startup accelerator for Stanford University students, held its Spring 2012 Demo Day this past week at AOL headquarters in Palo Alto, California. Seven very diverse startups presented to a room of investors, media, and tech industry folks -- the latest batch of StartX startups range from a new method of doing DNA sequencing, to truly educational children's toys, to a new way for women to buy jewelry, and more. TechCrunch TV was there, and in the video embedded above you can see the general scene and also our interview with StartX's founder Cameron Teitelman. We also got six of the presenting companies to give TechCrunch their pitches directly...The Instagram Effect? Mobile Photo Sharing App PicPlz To Shut Down Permanently On July 3
Jun 02, 9:36PM
PicPlz, the mobile photo sharing app that is perhaps known best for being an early and direct competitor with Instagram, will shut down permanently on July 3. PicPlz delivered the news through a short post on its company blog as well as in a brief email to users that read:How Do Top Android Developers QA Test Their Apps?
Jun 02, 9:32PM
A couple weeks ago I ran this post showing how one Hong Kong developer, Animoca, tests its Android games. The company, which has had more than 70 million downloads, tests every one of their apps on about 400 different devices. The photo above is from their headquarters and is just a taste of all the Android phones and tablets they use. Needless to say, that post pissed Android fanboys off. Some commenters said it intimidated would-be developers, who might get scared off by Android fragmentation and the perception that you have to support hundreds of devices, screen sizes and densities and versions of the OS. So, I asked around to see how other mobile game developers do quality assurance testing for Android. This is what I got:YouTube Scores A Solid Return On Its Video Development Fund
Jun 02, 8:10PM
My son recently tried to call one of our older relatives. He dialed the number and quickly hung up with a confused look on his face. I asked him what was wrong and he replied, "I don't know. There's something wrong with their phone, it kept beeping." I called the number and was amused to hear a landline busy signal, something my cell phone centric pre-teen had never encountered. My son is similarly unacquainted with cable TV. Other than the occasional NBA game, he consumes his video content via our iPad and Xbox. Most of his online viewing is spent on YouTube. He is not alone. Mark Suster, fellow venture capitalist and serial entrepreneur, has written extensively about YouTube's evolution from dogs-on-skateboards to its current status as an entertainment medium rivaling cable television networks. Mark provides an excellent primer regarding the future of Internet TV HERE.HTC Evo 4G LTE Review: I Can't See Why Not
Jun 02, 8:04PM
The Evo 4G LTE is a fine phone. There certainly aren't any glaring issues: Sense has been considerably streamlined, and it's really good at what it was made to do, which is entertain. The design language is a little loud, though maybe that's what it takes to shake things up in the land of Android. (LAndroid.) But unlike the Evos that have come before it, this latest iteration doesn't really bring any truly special features to the table. I mean, consider the name. It's the Evo 4G LTE, yet Sprint's 4G LTE network isn't set to go live for another month, at the very earliest. And even if that weren't the case, LTE is no longer a wow factor. It's a soon-to-be norm, which means that the Evo needs something more than fast data to be a big deal. Does it have what it takes? Let's find out together, yes?Dropcanvas Offers Up Free, Dead Simple File Sharing, But Can It Last?
Jun 02, 6:35PM
There's no shortage of robust, full-featured file storage and sharing services out there, but where do you turn when you want the quickest, simplest way to go? Crate costs money, JustBeamIt requires both users to be online at the same time, but newcomer Dropcanvas? They may be onto something. The beauty behind Dropcanvas is that it requires virtually no thought or effort to use properly. Upon navigating to the site, users are told to drag and drop a file onto the page. Once a file has been dragged onto the so-called "canvas" -- there's no set file size limit though canvases are capped at 5GB -- users are provided with a link to spread around and a share button for easy access to Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit.Cleveland-Based LaunchHouse Is Looking For A Few Good Ohio Start-Ups
Jun 02, 6:31PM
Cleveland, known to many as the "Land From Whence The Cleves Came," is rarely mentioned when you think of hotbeds of entrepreneurial energy. But yet it was the long time home to Harvey Pekar and does still have many local colleges, including Case Western Reserve, John Carroll, and Cleveland State. It is also home to Sherwin-Williams, Progressive Insurance, and now LaunchHouse. In other words, it's a city that's ready to make a few sweeping changes.Hands-On With The Romain Jerome Space Invaders Watch For High-End Gamers
Jun 02, 6:14PM
People keep asking, "Why would anyone of sane mind buy a $17,000 luxury watch with a Space Invader's theme?" If you are familiar with the Swiss watch brand Romain Jerome - you don't need an answer. They are the people that brought you pieces such as the Titanic DNA (with metal from the actual titanic), and the Moon Dust DNA (with yea... real dust the from moon and metal from spare parts of the Apollo XI). So a "luxury licensing" deal with Taito Japan isn't that odd.ApriPetit Is A Little Robot That Wants To Talk To You
Jun 02, 6:08PM
Robots are hard to talk to. They're not friendly, they're mostly made of plastic, and, as anyone who has tried to chat with a Roomba can attest, they are often dedicated to a single task. Luckily, there's ApriPetit. Toshiba's R&D department built ApriPetit as a successor to their larger ApriPoco. This little guy is about six inches tall and follows along to conversations by moving its slug-like body and eyes in ways that resemble proper conversation.Gillmor Gang: Beneath Blue Suburban Skies
Jun 02, 5:00PM
The Gillmor Gang — John Taschek, Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor — watches helplessly as robots briefly take over the show. As investors reel from the backwash of the Facebook IPO, Microsoft chooses the moment to start pushing Windows 8. The Gang is underwhelmed. Also: Missing Steve Jobs at the D conference, liner notes on the way to Spotify, and another round of Google Glasses from @scobleizer. The thing is, we want to give permission to be interrupted, not beg for restoration of a clear view. Even when we don't talk push notification, we do.The Other Side Of The Story: WhosHere vs. Who's Near Me Live
Jun 02, 3:59PM
You guys may remember a post on TechCrunch yesterday about a trademark spat between an entrepreneur named Brian Hamachek, who built an app called Who's Near Me Live, and a Lightbank-backed startup called myRete, who built an app called WhosHere, strikingly similar in both functionality and name. The story unfolded that Hamachek had been bullied by WhosHere in the legal realm, despite the fact that WhosHere was built two years earlier, but there are at least two sides to every story. Hamachek's side of the story was written by Rip yesterday, but the main points you should know are these: Hamachek changed the name of his app to WNM in most (but not all) instances of its appearance after being hit with a C&D from WhosHere over a year ago. But the spat was revived after WNM got some traction on TechCrunch in March (this is where it gets really good).How To Cash In On Government As A Platform
Jun 02, 3:00PM
At TC Disrupt New York, the White House's chief geeks -- CTO Todd Park and CIO Steve Van Roekel -- rang the bell for Silicon Valley to step up and help recode the federal government with their Digital Government Strategy. They hammered home the need for developers to leverage the mountains of open data coming out of the government to create new services and products for consumers. But you shouldn't do this just for fun, or even out of a sense of civic duty: you should do it because there's money there -- lots of it.Bashing Facebook For All The Wrong Reasons
Jun 02, 12:00PM
So Facebook's IPO was a disaster. Or maybe it wasn't. Yes, it was an utter fiasco. No, wait: "The debacle was not the IPO but all the whining by speculators who didn't make money." Nope, it was "the flop of the decade", the worst first week of any IPO in years. Au contraire: "What we have here is an investment banker acting ethically. And the whole financial press is atwitter about it." Nuh-uh: "The IPO discount is the cost of going public." Yadda, yadda, yadda, ad nauseum. Why, what with all these furious alarums and excursions and outraged complains, Benchmark Capital's Bill Gurley was moved to compare Facebook to another company that immediately dropped below its high-profile IPO issue price and stayed there for weeks and weeks; that well-known loser called ... er ... Amazon.com. You may have heard of it. Why is anyone paying attention to the this ultimately meaningless pageant? Probably because Guerilla Recruiting: Combating The Counteroffer
Jun 02, 4:30AM
One of the most frustrating things I've experienced as a leader is putting months into recruiting an amazing VP or engineer, only to have them change their mind at the 11th hour because of a ridiculous counteroffer. This is the big risk you face when aiming for the best people on the planet (see: "Hiring Rockstars") as they are the "beating heart" of their existing employer, and the incumbent company will often go beyond great lengths to keep them. They may be prized recruits for you, but they are absolutely the most critical people at their current employer. For instance, Google has been rumored to be especially aggressive at countering with restricted stock grants in the millions of dollars for their top people. But they aren't alone. Any employer will do whatever he or she can to keep key talent.Startups Vs. Startups: App Developer Gets Sued By Lightbank-Backed WhosHere
Jun 02, 3:32AM
So here's a story that hopefully will be an eye-opener for entrepreneurs and startups, while providing a painful peek into trademark harassment and the importance of due diligence. It goes a little something like this: About two years ago, software engineer Brian Hamachek decided to build an app first on Windows Mobile (how some horror stories have been known to begin), then on Windows Phone, that enables location-based chat -- and calling. In other words, call and chat with new friends who live close by, for free. He called it Who's Near Me Live. Long story short: A Lightbank-backed startup called myRete own and operate a similar app called WhosHere, which was founded two years earlier. Well, they didn't like the name Brian had chosen for the app -- claimed it was too similar -- so they asked him to change it. At first, he said "why no thank you," but then they hit him with a C&D and then a lawsuit, so he acquiesced. Sounds like standard stuff for startup vs. incumbent, right? Well, it doesn't end there.Emotion Measurement Platform Affectiva Wins $500K NSF Grant
Jun 02, 1:27AM
Affectiva, a startup that tries to measure the emotional response people have to ads and brands, just announced that it has a $500,000 grant from the National Science Foundation. The company spun out of MIT's Media Lab. This is its second NSF grant — in January 2011, it won another grant to help launch its Affdex service, which uses webcams to track consumers' responses as they watch videos. That should allow companies to test their ads with a broad audience in a quick and affordable way. When I spoke to co-founder Rana el Kaliouby last year, she also touted Affectiva's ability to recognize complex emotions — not just whether you're smiling or frowning, but also whether you look confused.With $5.5M From Google Ventures, Opus, Crittercism Launches An App Performance Management Solution
Jun 01, 10:48PM
Last summer, after graduating from AngelPad, San Francisco-based Crittercism announced that it had raised $1.2 million in seed funding from the likes of Google Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, Opus Capital, Shasta Ventures, and AOL Ventures. Today, the startup has received further validation for its diagnostic and management tools for mobile developers, as Opus Capital, Shasta Ventures and Google Ventures have all re-upped, investing $5.5 million in the startup's series A financing.T-Mobile's Galaxy S III May Not Get A Facelift Before It Launches In The U.S.
Jun 01, 10:20PM
When the Galaxy S and the Galaxy S II made their respective journeys to the United States, they lost a little something that international customers have enjoyed since the beginning: the physical home button. According to some new images obtained by The Verge though, that era may be drawing to a close, as T-Mobile's GSIII variant may sport that home button after all. It may seem like a minor thing to get worked up over (because it is), but it's a considerable shift from the four-capacitive-button days of yore. Those design changes were mandated by carriers, and if true, these new images may mean that Samsung is flexing their muscle as the most prolific smartphone manufacturer in the world.Study: Yesterday's Facebook Outage Also Slowed Down Major Media And Retail Sites
Jun 01, 8:30PM
It's a testament to how important Facebook has become in the web ecosystem that the social network's performance issues yesterday didn't just affect the site itself but also a wide variety of other sites as well. Performance monitoring company Compuware APM, which analyses the performance of thousands of top sites, just sent us some interesting data about how Facebook's problems yesterday correlated with significant slowdowns across major U.S. media and retail sites.Gillmor Gang 06.01.12 (TCTV)
Jun 01, 8:02PM
Gillmor Gang - Kevin Marks, John Taschek, Robert Scoble, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor. Recording has concluded.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
Well, it's about time. Many of us were absolutely floored by the 
There's been a lot of flirting going on in recent months between Apple and Facebook. In February, Apple CEO Tim Cook 
One interesting trend I've been watching over the last year or so is the intersection of social and personalization as a way to discover new videos. And, of course, how it helps users to discover new music videos. The latest entrant into the social music video discovery category is Rockify, which just launched its public-facing portal for music videos, Rockify.TV, in public beta. Rockify.TV is kind of like Pandora for music videos, but with social hooks to help users find interesting content based on their own musical preferences, and those of friends. Like most other video sites, it takes advantage of social networks by allowing users to share the videos they're watching with their friends, which is pretty standard stuff. The big difference comes in how Rockify displays videos to users -- like the way MTV used to do it. Once signed in, users get a stream of music videos, based on trending music, personal favorites, and personalized suggestions. The site serves up a continuous stream of content, meaning that users never have to stop and search for the next video they want to watch -- that is, unless they want to.
If you've got a vacation coming up, a startup called 
The Nokia Lumia 900 The Dark Knight Rises Edition handset has made its way on the interwebs recently and it's nothing short of a beauty, with a black polycarbonate unibody frame and a laser-etched Batman logo across the back. Moreover, the phone — which is usually limited to either a black or white background and a handful of color themes like Nokia blue, teal, lime, mango, and pink — will also come with a black and grey theme. Of course, plenty of Dark Knight Rises content will come pre-loaded as well, including a game called Claim Gotham City and the Dark Knight Rises app. We had gotten a glimpse of the phone in what appears to be official press shots (or renders) a few days ago, but the first hands-on photos of the phone have surfaced, courtesy of 
Ticket search engine 
The online mapping space is quickly heating up. What used to be a relatively straightforward competition between 
Earlier this month, Bing, the other 
In an excellent piece by 
Max Schrems, the Austrian founder of 
While in the US the visibility of women in technology startups is pretty well established, in Europe it's suffered a little from the more general problem of the fragmented nature of the European tech scene. Things have improved slightly in recent years (at least that's my impression, although who knows about the stats on the ground?), but it remains the case that there are far more men than women. So lifting the visibility of women in technology is no bad thing, especially if it encourages other women to pursue careers in tech startups, which are typically more about meritocratic, flat management that the traditional "IT" roles. So it's a welcome moment that the newly established 
Waxing for two at Take-It-Offs in Scranton? $100 worth of Polka lessons for 40 cents? An avant garde grilled cheese sandwich meal with metal shavings in it at Chez Naif for $60? You don't want any of those daily deals, right? But they're still coming. Two people (lovers, really), Edwin Hermawan and Lea Pische, wanted to fight back. And they did. With 
Happy Friday, here's some more patent trolling nonsense for you today: Google said on Thursday it had filed a complaint with the European Commission which claims cell phone maker Nokia is colluding with Microsoft to make money off their patents. The complaint states that the two companies are using proxy companies (read: patent trolls) to fight against Google Android. Nokia has since called the complaint both "frivolous" and "wrong," while Microsoft said it was a "desperate tactic."
Cricket Communications made waves yesterday morning when they announced that they would be the first prepaid carrier in the country to offer Apple's iPhone, and now it seems that other contract-averse carriers may soon do the same. 
Another entry in the mobile-first, private social networking for families space (yes, apparently 
With Skype under Microsoft ownership, 
If you want to learn about the booming tech startup scene in New York City, it doesn't get much better than talking to 
"Let me tell you the difference between Facebook and everyone else, we don't crash EVER!" - 'Mark Zuckerberg', The Social Network. Not quite. Facebook has been offline or slow to load for some users around the world for over two hours. Reports started 
The 
Manipulating images for your website is such a tedious chore. You need to open Photoshop, click your mouse about ten thousand times, then save the file and upload it. Then next month you redesign your site and suddenly need to re-size all your image elements again! Startup 
Yancey Strickler, co-founder of 
Another day, another iPhone 5 leak. This time we're looking at a four-inch long front panel of what appears to be a new iPhone. This panel suggests a longer, 16:9 style body and screen and lines up with previous news of a 
It was just last September that we 
I'm smack dab in the middle of my HTC Evo 4G LTE review (the full review will be up tomorrow), but as I judge, I felt the need to bring John Biggs into the mix for a little Fly or Die. Now, John is notoriously hard on Android phones, namely because they're all incredibly similar. The Evo 4G LTE is no different. I, on the other hand, think it brings some pretty strong design language to the table, which could be great for someone looking to stand out.
Y Combinator's Paul Graham 
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Remember 
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Businesses struggle to come up with what to post to their Facebook Page each day, and making those posts actually get seen is a difficult as the dark arts. That's why 
OnSwipe's been around for 
"In the Studio" begins the summer by welcoming an entrepreneur from Austin who worked in various roles at different startups before she tried to return a cable box to TimeWarner, an experience which motivated her to assemble a new squad, form a new company, and move west to Silicon Valley where she now leads a small team based out of 500 Startups that may be sitting on the next 
Privacy guidelines such as the "
Quite a bit hangs on the horizon in the world of gadgets. E3 is right around the corner, as is WWDC (Apple's Developer conference), and while hardware gets cooler and cooler, the spec does not. John, Matt and I discuss this and more in this week's TC/Gadgets webcast.
Today, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) closed its
