On the 5th floor of 36 Cooper Square, the Foursquare team works alongside Curbed and Hard Candy Shell. There are no offices in the cramped room, just rows of thin desks, monitors, a couch, a couple of classroom chairs stacked in the corner and a small conference room off to the side.
At the center of the room, Dennis Crowley presides, sitting a few feet away from his co-founder Naveen Selvadurai. Because the 5th floor doesn’t fit the entire 25-person staff, a handful have set up ad hoc work stations a few flights below.
This is the guts of Foursquare, the widely acknowledged front runner in the red-hot location based service market. We go inside their offices and talk to founders Crowley and Selvadurai after the break (this video is the first in our series of company profiles for TechCrunch TV). → Read More
In honor of the passing of Nicolas Hayek, CEO of the Swatch Group, we decided to wax a little nostalgic about his most breathtaking – and lucrative – product: the Swatch watch. Swatch was the brainchild of Elmar Mock and Jacques Müller in an attempt to make the thinnest wristwatch in the world. Instead, they created a simple plastic quartz watch with a movement that contained only about sixty pieces instead of the 100-plus found in Japanese quartz movements at the time. Hayek saw this as an excellent opportunity to create a “throwaway” watch that could be worn for a season and then swapped with another model. Artist and designers adorned the watches in odd patterns and the company brought the nascent Swatch Group, formed by Hayek in the early 1980s, to the forefront of Swiss watch manufacturing. At $20 or so, these watches were amazingly cheap and many collectors bought two at a time: one to wear and one to keep hidden away. The watches married high tech with high design and, given their fashion-forward nature, are the precursors to many of the design decisions made today by CE manufacturers. The iPod as an object of desire couldn’t have existed without the Swatch paving the way for inexpensive but highly designed objects to woo the consumer into regular purchases. Here are ten of our favorite Swatch innovations: → Read More
It’s finally here. After months of planning and building and learning and fixing and hiring and spending, TechCrunch TV goes live right… NOW.
Broadcasting daily from our fully-featured San Francisco studio, TechCrunch TV will be packed with some of the most recognizable and inspiring faces in tech. The entrepreneurs, the investors, the developers — everyone in fact who is helping to change the world, one start-up at a time. We’ll also be travelling the country (and the world), livecasting major events, visiting start-up offices and generally poking our cameras into every corner of the tech globe.
(Intro video and studio tour after the link…) → Read More
Fun fact: All of these computers are owned by one dude. And you guys call us fanboys. [via TUAW] → Read More
I’d say about 90% of all robotics-related news we cover on CrunchGear is from Japan, so getting to report about a new robot that’s actually made in the US is a nice change of pace. The little guy you see on the picture and in the video embedded below is called DARwIn-LC and was developed by the Robotics and Mechanisms Laboratory (Romela) at Virginia Tech. → Read More
Oh look, a random pair of UK-only, Bluetooth headphones! They’re the Beewi BBH100, and I will readily admit that they look fairly spiffy. Not too expensive either, at £32.90, or around $50. → Read More
When it comes to local advertising, everybody wants to replace the Yellow Pages, which makes money hand-over-fist from local merchants across the country. Seeing Interactive, A Y Combinator startup which launched last March, just raised a seed round of about $1 million from some high-profile investors to help local newspapers take more of those local advertising dollars away from the phone directories. The investors include Baseline Ventures, Lerer Ventures, FriendFeed co-founder Paul Buchheit, Delicious founder Joshua Schachter, and Alex Moore (an early employee at Palantir).
In small towns across the country where many people still haven’t heard of Yelp, the Yellow Pages is the only game in town for local business advertising. Seeing Interactive goes to the local papers and gives them a white-label service for selling online ads and services to local businesses. They are already selling these businesses print ads for $200 or so. Now for an extra $5 or so, they can turn those exact same print ads into online ads. They can also get listed in an online SEO-optimized directory of local businesses, and even get their own simple Website (via Weebly). In other words, Seeing interactive creates an online presence for local businesses and leverages the existing salesforce of local newspapers to sell those ads. → Read More
1.7 million iPhone 4s sold in three days. It’s a massive number any way you slice it. But it’s perhaps even more impressive when you consider the initial pre-order system failures, the device shortages (which Apple apologized for in their release), and the fact that half of the family isn’t even available yet (the white iPhone 4). And most impressive may be that those who bought it in the U.S. were willing to sell their souls to AT&T for another two years.
But GigaOM’s Kevin Tofel gives the beleaguered network credit for the launch today, citing the network as a “huge reason” Apple sold so many iPhones. On one hand, he has a good point. If AT&T hadn’t advanced the upgrade eligibility time (in some cases by as much as six months), it would have been much more expensive for many of them to upgrade from the iPhone 3GS to the iPhone 4 — and many likely wouldn’t have. → Read More
I have before me the two hottest clamshell PCs on the market: the Viliv N5 and the UMID mbook BZ. I’m not sure if hot is the right word seeing as I’m still not convinced there’s even a market for these devices, but let’s move on. The two are very similar. They both share the same form factor, target demographic, and functions and so what follows is my quest to determine the best device. However, I’m not sure I succeeded. → Read More
Red-hot deal site Groupon has been a tear lately. Hot off a $135 million funding round that valued the company at $1.35 billion, it recently acquired European deal powerhouse CityDeal, Chilean deal site ClanDescuento, and mobile development studio Mob.ly. But it seems that some of its expansion strategies are downright shady: we’ve received three separate reports that ClubeUrbano, Groupon’s Brazilian site that it acquired earlier this month, is loaded with fake deals and venues that don’t even exist. As one source put it: “Fake names, stock photos, fake addresses, everything.”
We reached out to Groupon, which confirmed that the majority of the deals are not real, save for one running in São Paulo — deals from the site’s 30+ other locations are for venues that don’t exist. So why is this happening? Groupon President Rob Solomon explains that Groupon’s standard practice when it expands to a new market is to show users examples of the kind of deals they could get once the site goes live in their city. All of the fake deals on ClubeUrbano, he says, are meant to serve this purpose, but he concedes that Groupon has “done a terrible job of calling that out on the website”. → Read More
Kobe Bryant, fresh from bringing another championship to Los Angeles, is in South Africa enjoying the sights and sounds of the World Cup. Even if Team USA is out, there’s still plenty of reasons to celebrate, chief among them that my fantasy team’s captain, Holland’s Wesley Sneijder, scored another goal. Beyond that, though, Kobe, a longtime soccer fan (remember when he visited FC Barcelona?), has been taking advantage of that Nike thing I mentioned the other day, the giant screen in the middle of Johannesburg. → Read More
I can’t say much about the Galaxy S Captivate that hasn’t been said, other than to inform you that this ultra-slim Android phone is amazingly small, light, and very exciting. Styled like the EVO 4G but running on AT&T, the phone features 16GB internal storage and a 1GHz processor. The model I saw was production-ready and ran Android 2.2. → Read More
Finally, there is now a Kindle reader for Android phones. Amazon wants to sell electronic books across multiple mobile devices, and currently supports its own Kindle readers, iPhone, iPad, IPod Touch, Blackberries, PC and Mac computers via a desktop client, and now Android.
You can read any of the 620,000 books available on the Kindle in the Android reader, and sync your bookmarks and library across other devices so you can pick up where you left off on your laptop or Kindle reader. Compared to other Android apps, the Kindle is a winner and will likely become extremely popular on the platform. It promises to turn any Android tablet into a serious e-reader
But compared to the latest version of Kindle for the iPhone and IPad, which just came out last night, it lacks a couple key features: namely support for audio and video playback. The Video Kindle, as I like to call it, is only available on the iPad/iPhone. → Read More
There’s no doubt about it: 3D is here to stay. Although it’s been almost two years since I gawked at 3D TVs at IFA 2008, there’s still little penetration in the consumer space. Hollywood is going gangbusters with the technology, though: 25 major films are slated to be released in 3D in 2011, and DreamWorks and Disney have promised that all of their animated films will be released in 3D. If you’re a movie buff and want to really enjoy 3D movies in the theater, you might consider the new line of Gunnar Optiks 3D glasses. Caveat: these are passive circular polarized lenses, which work with passive 3D displays. If you’re eyeing one of the new 3D TVs from Panasonic, Samsung, or Sony, you’ll need the active lenses from the TV manufacturer or some kind of universal glasses. → Read More
A document purportedly leaked to a Microsoft enthusiast blog (yes, there’s truly a niche for everything on the Internet!) lists a number of features that are intended to be included in Windows 8. In addition to USB 3 and Bluetooth 3, there’s talk about faster boot sequences, ambient light sensing, and more. Pardon my yawn: Mac laptops have had superb power management and ambient light sensing for how long, now? Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure Windows 8 will include all manner of wonderful things, but leaking this kind of information isn’t likely to drum up a lot of excitement. I’m especially skeptical of the instant-on stuff, given how bloated Windows installations tend to become over time. → Read More
Fifa , world soccer’s organizing body, has responded to requests for goal-line technology (among other technologies) with a non-response. Said the organization, by way of spokesman Nicolas Maignot, at a media briefing earlier today: “The International FA Board, which Fifa is a member of along with the four British associations, dealt with this topic in March. A clear decision on the use of technology was taken at the time.” He then added, “We will not enter into any debate on refereeing at the daily media briefing. I am not competent to do so.” Competent, you say? /me taps nose → Read More
Perhaps you’ve heard the news by now that Matthew Papakipos, the key architect of Chrome OS, is leaving Google to go to Facebook. While it’s not entirely clear what Papakipos will be doing yet at Facebook beyond joining the engineering team, this is massive news. This is the key component of Chrome OS leaving the company before its launch to join what can perhaps be seen as Google’s most important competitor going forward. So what does Google think about the defection?
“Matt made great contributions to Google and Chrome OS, and we know he’ll do the same in his next endeavors. We wish him the best. We have a deep bench of talent and are very excited about the launch of Chrome OS devices later this year,” a Google spokesperson tells us. → Read More
Whatever you say, Microsoft. The House that Gates built believes that “hardcore gamers” will be the first to buy the Kinect, which comes out in November. Or, in the exact words of one of their marketing managers: “I think we know that hardcore gamers will be the first to go out and buy it, as they are with any product.” That’s interesting, seeing as though a recent survey suggests that only 8 percent of 360 owners intended to buy Kinect (or Natal, as it was known at the time). → Read More
The latest issue of Edge magazine has a fun little article abbot South Korea’s obsession with StarCraft. One of the issues the article brings up is: what happens to the game when Blizzard releases StarCraft II next month? Nobody knows! (My guess is that StarCraft will be around forever, no matter how many sequels Blizzard develops.) Along the same lines, kinda, Blizzard plans to give free copies of StarCraft II to Korean gamers who have an active World of Warcraft account. → Read More
Amazon and other holders of business method patents can breathe easy for now. (One of the most famous business method patents is Amazon’s One-Click shopping cart patent).
In a ruling today, the Supreme Court basically punted on whether or not business method patents, in general, should be upheld. Instead, it ruled narrowly on the business method patent in question in the case, Bilski v. Kappos . That patent was thrown out. In that sense, it affirmed an earlier U.S. Federal Appeals Court ruling.
But the Court also warned people not to read to much into its decision. → Read More
