What is it about taxi startups launching in time for LeWeb? Then again, you can’t beat a captive audience. And so it is that Taxibeat, the hail-a-cab smartphone app and taxi driver marketplace, has launched in Paris this week, just in time to help ferry a bunch of geeks to the LeWeb conference and countless after parties.
For Taxibeat it represents a fairly aggressive international roll-out… → Read More
Dropbox has become the latest tech company to open an office in Dublin — land of Guinness and low corporate tax rates. Dropbox said the new office, its first in Europe, will serve as the center of the its international operations — enabling it “to better provide technical support and product acumen” to Dropbox’s millions of European users, plus other international customers. → Read More
On December 3rd, 1992 in the little town of Newbury, Berkshire, a UK programmer sent his best mate a few lines of greeting using a unique new technique called Short Messaging Service. The programmer, Neil Papworth, was a test engineer for the Sema Group, and sent the message via PC to the phone of Richard Jarvis, a Vodafone employee. The message was “Merry Christmas.” Vodafone intended the service… → Read More
Whatsapp, the multiplatform mobile messaging app that has been one of the runaway success stories for ad-free, paid services, has been in talks to be acquired by Facebook, according to sources close to the matter.
We’re still digging around on potential price and other details about how advanced the deal is. But as mobile becomes the latest battleground in the Internet’s game of thrones, you… → Read More
Top Southeast Asia VCs Golden Gate Ventures and JFDI.Asia have announced a new strategic alliance that will focus on supporting early-stage digital start-up companies as they transition from concept to substantial pre-series A funding. → Read More
Editor’s note: Dan Greenberg is the founder & CEO of Sharethrough, the native video advertising company.
Five months ago, I published an article on TechCrunch that provided the first framework for the emerging Native Advertising market. At the time, “native advertising” (a term coined by Fred Wilson) was a new name for an old concept — monetization models that emerge from the… → Read More
The Open Data Institute, a UK-based incubator and promoter of open-data businesses that was first conceived by Tim Berners-Lee and artificial intelligence pioneer Nigel Shadbolt, is today announcing its first international investment. The Omidyar Network, the investment firm co-founded by eBay’s Pierre Omidyar and his wife Pam, is putting $750,000 towards early funding of open data startups. The… → Read More
We’ve been wowed by the record breaking Black Friday and Cyber Monday spending data, but it looks like consumers are continuing to spend online for holiday shopping. comScore says that retail e-commerce spending for the first 30 days of the November–December 2012 holiday season amounts to $20.4 billion, which is a 15 percent increase versus the corresponding days last year. → Read More
What does it say about us as a culture that is slowly killing off its primary method of information transferral. In 20 years, if there are no physical books, what will future cultures know about is in 220 years, when digital memories are likely wiped away? → Read More
Philips Hue are wireless LED lightbulbs that are controlled via an iOS app — allowing you to change the shade and intensity of light they beam out, turn the bulbs on and off remotely, and set them to come on at scheduled times. Let there be micro-managed light! → Read More
On stage at AWS re:Invent last week, CTO Werner Vogels discussed Amazon Web Services’ cloud philosophy, increasingly driven by a belief in building architecture that is cost-aware and designed to optimize economies of scale so it can do volume transactions at thin margins. The talk, a first-day keynote with Senior Vice President Andy Jassy, predicated the group’s belief in a… → Read More
As we mentioned a few weeks ago, we’re introducing a new TechCrunch TV show called CrunchWeek, where we discuss a few of the past week’s more interesting stories. The aim is to get a bit more into the stories behind the stories that you read about on TechCrunch’s main blog page. → Read More
Two weeks ago, France Telecom-owned carrier Orange announced Party Call, an app Orange said it created in “partnership” with Facebook for users to make mobile calls via the social network. Now a small startup, Telesocial, says the idea was theirs first. → Read More
Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham just had a few interesting things to say about the accelerator’s Winter 2013 batch, the biggest of which is that it’s going to smaller than before. There’s no firm number just yet, but Graham noted in a new missive on the Y Combinator website that there may be less than 50 startups in the mix this time around. → Read More
The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, John Borthwick, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — survived a rare Saturday recording session at the unstable directorial hands of Gillmor. Topics included iPad Mini, Nexus 7, the latest Twitter UI on said iPad Mini, the lack of communication across platform firewalls, and a bit of Windows 8 Surface and Google Glasses smack. Rated B for Buttcast. → Read More
Over the past few years, I’ve helped a small handful friends move from one gig to another. It’s a highly personal process, and I’m not a “recruiting expert.” Generally, in my limited experience, it often takes many conversations even before a close friend opens up about their desire to move or try something new. The motivations for each change are so different. Some want to work in a different… → Read More
Today, I got to judge a really cool competition, the Dronegames. Basically, a bunch of teams that like to hack on helicopter-like Drones came together in Groupon’s San Francisco office to come up with some really cool creations. I expected things to spin and go upside down, but these folks did things way more advanced.
What’s a Drone exactly? Let’s ask Wikipedia:
An unmanned combat air… → Read More
If the Internet, at its most basic level, was built around the idea of one human connecting with another human, is it really changing how this is done? To make it easier and better is no insignificant accomplishment, but are actually changing the way people communicate with one another?
It seems to me that we’re not fashioning a thunderbolt, but greasing the lightning that’s already there. → Read More
Editor’s note: Ross Rubin is principal analyst at Reticle Research and blogs at Techspressive.
High-quality videoconferencing was once the exclusive province of rich institutions with dedicated high-speed connections. Two recent Kickstarter projects take iPhone video interaction to places it has never been before. → Read More
Editor’s Note: Nir Eyal writes about the intersection of psychology, technology, and business at NirAndFar.com.
A reader recently asked me a pointed question: “I’ve read your work on creating user habits. It’s all well and good for getting people to do things, like using an app on their iPhone, but I’ve got a bigger problem. How do I get people to do things they don’t want to do?” → Read More
Editor’s note: Phil Freo leads the engineering team at ElasticSales.
I have had to explain, even to technical recruiters, the differences between the roles on a web engineering team and that the lines that separate them are often fuzzy. Here is the framework I use to evaluate whether someone is a good fit for a startup. → Read More
Editor’s note: DJ Patil is a data scientist in residence at Greylock Partners, and Julie Deroche runs the firm’s university recruiting program.
The pressure is already on for building the class of 2013 summer internships. Since we’ve both been heavily involved in building the intern programs at LinkedIn and Mozilla, we’re often asked by organizations and students about what makes a… → Read More
Editor’s Note: Alexander Haislip is a marketing executive with cloud-based server automation startup ScaleXtreme and the author of Essentials of Venture Capital and The Modern Business Guide to Panel Discussions.
Netflix uses Amazon infrastructure, competes with Amazon to stream video, and pays Amazon massive amounts of cash to handle its data. Is Amazon too good to leave? → Read More
Facebook was already taking in 300 million photos a day, and that rate is about to dramatically increase. It’s now ushering users onto its background uploads feature Photo Sync with a big banner at the top of its mobile apps’ news feed. Just two taps and your last 20 photos plus every one you take in the future are auto-uploaded to a private album from which you can share and Facebook can mine… → Read More
Editor’s note: Scott Weiss is a partner at Andreessen Horowitz and the former co-founder and CEO of IronPort Systems, which was acquired by Cisco in 2007.
An approachable and authentic CEO is essential to fostering a high-performance, open communications culture. → Read More
Editor’s note: David Haber is an analyst at Spark Capital. Prior to Spark, David helped launch Locus Analytics, a start-up asset management business.
The Internet provides the perfect medium to aggregate the long tail of fragmented and illiquid markets. This dynamic has made the opportunity for creating online marketplaces so compelling → Read More
When you beat Skrillex’s Legend Of Zelda-style flash game, you see a link to buy its soundtrack on iTunes. SkrillexQuest is an advergame and its next generation of music marketing. You build an emotional attachment to the dubstep DJ’s song “Summit” while it plays as you save the princess. That’s something passive consumption of a music video, 30-second mp3 preview, or banner ad cannot do. → Read More
For retailers and publishers in video games, Christmas is the busiest time of the year. On the digital side, Christmas is often one of the slower periods but, when the dust settles and spring begins, often new heroes emerge. For both, the holidays mark when we begin to wonder what’s going on for games in 2013? → Read More
Powerful technology lobbies expected special treatment this week from Congress and got a tough lesson in rejection: there will be no more high-skilled work visas without comprehensive immigration reform. The probable failure of the STEMS Jobs Act, which would add 55,000 work visas for science-oriented immigrants, has become a casualty of war over the low-skilled immigrants dilemma. Despite $14.7M… → Read More
Sony’s compact camera with pro features including manual focusing and RAW support comes with a hefty price tag, but it costs that much for a reason: This is simply the best camera currently available for shooters who want something that fits in a front pocket but still delivers image quality so breathtaking, your friends will think you’ve been toting around a DSLR. → Read More
The 6th Annual Crunchies Awards
San Francisco
New York City
