The NY Times is now confirming our report last week the sale of Skype to an investor group led by Andreessen Horowitz is imminent. The deal will be announced Tuesday, says Brad Stone and Claire Cain Miller, citing unnamed sources (perhaps people that…read our post last week).
As we reported, Index Ventures is also participating in the acquisition. And the unnamed private equity firm is apparently Silver Lake Partners, who is likely supplying the bulk of the capital needed to pay the $2 billion price tag.
eBay, which announced earlier this year that they would be spinning off the company in an initial public offering in 2010, is said to be looking for $2 billion or more for Skype. Companies quite often talk about IPOs (and even actually file) to generate acquisition buzz. → Read More
I do my fair share of complaining about poor service. And if you follow me on Twitter, you might say that I do more than my fair share. Here’s my issue: It’s not so much that your service sucks, it’s that you refuse to be held accountable for it sucking, and rarely, if ever, do anything about it. I’m looking at you, Comcast and AT&T. That’s why it’s so perplexingly wonderful when a company does the right thing, like Netflix.
Tonight, Netflix emailed a large number of its subscribers to apologize for a Xbox Live streaming outage that occurred yesterday. They’re offering to refund 2% of users’ monthly bills back to them, if they simply click on the link that was emailed. It’s not a lot of money, but what’s remarkable is that Netflix did this for most of us completely unprompted. → Read More
Another day, another story of Apple’s ridiculous App Store approval policies gone awry. Joe Stump, the former lead architect for Digg who is well known in the developer community, has posted an entirely NSFW rant to his blog that condemns Apple for preventing a key update to his application from going live for over six weeks. Stump’s language is quite colorful so I’m not going to quote it extensively, but be sure to read his full blog post.
In the post, Stump outlines a problem that he had with Chess Wars, the Facebook Connect-enabled chess game that came out in July. After catching a show-stopping bug soon after the initial release, his company Blunder Move promptly issued an update. Soon thereafter they noticed another bug, which they quickly released a fix for. Unfortunately, this second update has sat in App Store purgatory for many weeks now, and Apple has gone silent on when it will be approved. → Read More
In July we said we would be giving away substantial amounts of advertising to promote the new startups and products launching at TechCrunch50 on September 14-15.
Today I’m pleased to announce that four of our key partners will be giving an aggregate of $1 million in advertising to TechCrunch50 companies. Facebook, Google (Youtube), Microsoft (Bing) and MySpace are all participating with substantial donations. We expect more partners to join shortly.
One of the cooler additional ideas was proposed by the Bing team. They’ll make tshirts that say “Bing Loves [company/logo]” and Bing staff will wear these tshirts, each one promoting a different TechCrunch50 startup, to various events and conferences they’ll attend throughout the year. They promise that the team will be familiar with the startup/product they’re promoting on their tshirts and be ready to talk about it when people ask. Crazy idea right? I love it. → Read More
Today we are trusting the web with our most personal and important data, from private photos and social graphs to finances and key work documents. Our hesitation to share such information has dropped over the years as our trust in our favorite services grows. Yet all the while, the web is actually growing less secure, as sites are left open to new attacks that can spread easily and leave users totally unaware when they’ve been compromised. Looking back on the history of the web, classic security protection involved patching servers to assure latest versions were running, monitoring advisories from vendors, and maintaining some level of filtering and firewall to keep basic attacks out. Simple moves on the part of an admin or developer could protect sites from 99% of automated scripts. But a few years ago, a new security can-of-worms was opened, as new exploits that took advantage of simple oversights within web applications were being used to steal large amounts of user data. This new class of vulnerabilities took advantage of attack vectors within custom built web applications, using techniques like passing Javascript calls into web forms which would then be published back to an unsuspecting user. This new breed of attack was referred to as Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) — in short, the ability to manipulate a trusted website to run untrusted scripting code on a victim’s browser. Cross-Site Scripting, and its related cousin, Cross-Site Request Forgery (XSRF), have led to attacks and exploits such as MySpace being taken down (via a worm, Sammy), data being stolen from 18 Million users of a Korean auction site, a Gmail weakness used to blackmail a domain owner and even an exploit targeted at changing the settings on a user’s local broadband router. All of these exploits were accomplished by convincing the user to click a link, an email (where an embedded image containing an exploit payload was displayed) or by simply visiting a site they trusted and had previously visited. Various statistics claim that up to 80% of security vulnerabilities (pdf link) in the past 2 years have been the result of XSS and XSRF. There are claims that at various points, over 70% of websites were vulnerable to either one or the other. Anybody who understand how these attacks work, and who understands how to conduct a simple test (i.e. feed something like ‘<script>alert(‘y0′);’ into a web app and see → Read More
Over the last twelve weeks, 24 startups have been working out of Facebook’s old headquarters in downtown Palo Alto as part of fbFund REV, Facebook’s startup incubator program that’s jointly run with Accel Partners and Founders Fund. During that time the startups have receieved mentorship from some of Silicon Valley’s elite, as well as help from Facebook engineers. Tomorrow, they’ll be presenting at the program’s Demo Day (we’ll have full coverage beginning tomorrow afternoon). In light of the close of this session, we’ve compiled a number of the mentor presentations given thoughout the summer, and sat down with fbFund team member Dave McClure, who outlined what made the program unique. → Read More
img src=”http://www.techcrunchit.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/cast-iron-systems.jpg” class=”shot2″>
One of the hurdles that enterprises face when adopting cloud computing is the task of migrating data from on-premise data centers to the cloud and then ensuring that the cloud-based server is fully connected to the rest of the enterprise. Cast Iron Systems is a company that helps businesses solve this problem. Today, Cast Iron has announced a partnership with Amazon Web Services to offer migration to EC2 servers.
Called the Cast Iron Cloud, the product’s data migration and integration templates for hundreds of enterprise applications will help to expedite customer on-boarding to AWS. Plus, the offering will integrate cloud environments with other data systems within the enterprise. For example, Hoovers, the business intelligence company, is leveraging Cast iron Cloud with Amazon EC2 to synchronize and migrate data from the company’s on-premise data centers to their cloud-based servers. → Read More
Help me understand this. Toyota today announced some sort of anti-drunk driving “gadget” (more like a complete system, including a digital camera and a breathalyzer) that prevents a car from being turned on if it detects a certain amount of alcohol in your system. You know, to help reduce the number of drunk driving-related accidents, which in the U.S. caused nearly 12,000 deaths last year. That’s one death every 45 minutes. → Read More
Casio is recently best-known for their Exilim FC100 and FS10, the compact cameras capable of shooting 1000FPS, among other things. I certainly loved the FC100 and recommend it every chance I get. But of course, Casio also makes regular old point-and-shoots, and now there are two more than there used to be. → Read More
Man, Rockstar is bringing the thunder today. A little bit after dropping word that Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars is being developed for the iPhone (and iPod Touch), it also announced that Beaterator would be coming to the iPhone (and iPod Touch). I don’t know why (I do that). → Read More
As most Mac users have undoubtedly read over the past few days, there are some pieces of software that are a bit buggy with the latest version of OS X, Snow Leopard, which was released on Friday. Applications that have been having issues include the developer builds of Chrome and Chromium for OS X. While these versions are obviously still not complete yet, there are more and more people using them as they had been becoming increasingly stable and usable under OS X Leopard. And today, Google rolled out a bunch of bug fixed to keep it purring along in Snow Leopard as well.
Specifically, version 4.0.203.4 of the Dev channel build of Chrome fixes a host of problems, ranging from text being garbled to favicons no longer working. Find the full list of changes here. → Read More
One of the downsides to covering gadgets on a daily basis for as long as I have is the fact that I think everything is crap. Very few things excite me and anything that does usually ends up falling short of my expectations. It’s unfortunate, but once in a blue moon does something not only impress, but also exceed my expectations. Case in point, the Pentax K-7. → Read More
Who doesn’t want their very own a robotic rickshaw driver? Are they called drivers? Pullers? Doesn’t matter. I just hope they’re working on a version of this thing that can pull a 200+ pound man. I’ll call him Gary and we’ll go everywhere together. Everywhere! [via Gizmodo] → Read More
Newegg has the most ridiculous names for its sales. For example, today we have SHELL SHOCKER, written in some aggressive-looking font, along with a picture of a broken shell, to drive home the theme. As for the deal itself, I spy Adobe Photoshop Elements for $49, a full 44 percent off the regular price. → Read More
Tablet PCs never really caught on, did they? And yet, nearly every laptop sold today has a touchpad / trackpad thingie. Wouldn’t it be cool to use that for the few tablet-y things you’d like to do, like signing your autograph on a document, or making a doodle? Well now you can, with Autograph! → Read More
Tech21 is a case manufacturer with a fairly unique product. It’s basically a sort of state-changing material that can take impact much like Silly Putty. When it hits a hard surface it goes completely stiff, takes the impact, and releases it without damaging the device inside. → Read More
Although I’m always skeptical of security measures like Find My iPhone, it’s always nice to hear when they work. In this case, a fairly ordinary phonejacking in Pittsburg was foiled when the fools forgot to remove the SIM from their recently acquired booty. After the perps took off, the victim went home, booted up his Mac, and tracked them to a local Wal-Mart, then to a restaurant. Officers apprehended them there, where they found the iPhone and other stolen stuff. At last, the security measures we thrilled to in Enemy of the State and The Net are coming to fruition! [via The Register] → Read More
It’s no secret that Apple’s App Store has been leaps and bounds more succesful than Android’s comparable Market, but it isn’t often we get concrete data that shows just how poorly Android’s store is faring in comparison. Today Android developer Larva Labs has posted some of the sales figures for its top applications, and the results are not impressive: Larva has two apps in Android’s top paid apps list called Battle For Mars and RetroDefense, ranking #5 and #12 respectively, and between them the company has raked in an average of $62.39 per day over the last month. Ouch. → Read More
So. You guys still eating gummy bears one by one? That’s cool, I guess. As a prognosticator of internet trends, I can tell you that the Next Big Thing (TM) will be this five-pound gummy bear that costs $40. Just saying. → Read More
