On Saturday, I attended WISH 2010 in Tokyo (where I live) to see a total of 15 Japanese startups presenting their services onstage to a panel of judges and an audience of 550 people. The event was organized by online marketing company Agile Media Network (“Japan’s Federated Media“).
Eight of the companies won prizes from various national media (i.e. TechCrunch Japan), and there was one big winner (an e-book publishing platform called Puboo). But here are thumbnail sketches of all of the companies that presented at WISH 2010. → Read More
The transformation is now complete. Our favorite random video chat site Chatroulette has gone through a redesign over the past week and is now back up, in what founder Andrei Ternovskiy and those who believe in second chances hope will be a more nudity-free i.e. more monetizable version.
The “renewed and updated” Chatroulette is reportedly one of many recent efforts at shaking the Chatroulette penis stigma and hopefully improving the site’s advertising and investment prospects. → Read More
Cisco has made an offer to acquire Skype before they complete their IPO process, says one of our more reliable sources. We have not been able to confirm this rumor one way or another via other sources, which isn’t surprising. A company in lock down during the IPO process is usually even more tight lipped than normal.
But if true this would be one very big acquisition. Skype insiders are hoping for an out of the gate valuation of $5 billion or so, we’ve heard. Presumably Cisco would have to bidding in that range to make it interesting.
Google was also rumored to be sniffing around Skype, but antitrust concerns may have persuaded them not to make an actual offer. → Read More
This isn’t tech related, other than the fact that I’m writing this post 20,000 or so feet in the air thanks to Gogo on Virgin Flight VX746 from San Francisco to Seattle. But if I’m going to rightly trash Delta for their atrocious behavior on a recent set of flights then it is only fair that I give a high five when I see an airline fail to fail its customers.
Virgin and Southwest Airlines tend to have happier employees, and that translates to a much better customer experience. I’ve found Jet Blue and Alaska to also be decent, but with occasional flaws. None of them are perfect, but it sure feels nice to be on a flight where common empathy isn’t nonexistent.
Case in point – I had just boarded the flight with my carry on luggage (the luggage that Delta says is too big, but Virgin seems not to mind). I was just about last on again, and even up in first class the luggage racks were mostly full. A women in coach with a violin came up and asked a flight attendant if she could find space for her instrument. Because the last thing you want to do is put an extremely fragile violin into the vagaries of the mysteriously brutal checked luggage system. → Read More
“Publishers are all cohorts of the devil.
There must be a special hell for them somewhere.”
- Goethe
If I were a commissioning editor in a major publishing house, I’d be feeling a little unloved right now. Like the wife of a guy who runs over his neighbour’s cat: why does everyone hate me? What did I do?
Maybe hate is too strong a word: hate is when you hope that someone will burst into flames and die. The current feeling towards publishers isn’t quite that: no one wants them to combust – it’s just that, well, they wouldn’t urinate on them if it happened. → Read More
Google, Apple, Microsoft, Netflix, Amazon — when you hear these names, you usually think about how these tech giants all compete with one another. But what if they all teamed up for one cause? They’d be unstoppable, right? We’re about to find out.
All of these companies are currently sitting in the same boat about to storm the beaches. Which beaches? Those belonging to the the cable television providers in the U.S. It has only just begun, but the assault is underway.
Let me start by saying that of course the cable companies aren’t about to go away. Even if the mega assault by the tech juggernauts is successful, it will be many years before everyone’s addiction to cable gives way to something else. But it will. And that something else will be content served over the Internet. → Read More
It’s time for this week’s episode of OMG/JK, the TechCrunch TV show that features fellow TC writer MG Siegler and myself discussing the top stories in tech.
In this episode we cover the integration of Gmail with Google Voice (which is awesome), the launch of Digg 4 (finally), and a peek into our crystal ball to weigh in on next week’s Apple event (MG is already prepping his double rainbow reaction to whatever Steve Jobs holds up). We also take a second look at Facebook Places, which we discussed at length last week.
Here are some links relevant to the stories we discuss this week:
As I was writing this, news of the HP / Dell bidding war for 3PAR broke on the front page of Yahoo. This made me laugh, as it typified just how crazy this story has become—few things outside of a bidding war will make a storage acquisition sexy enough to make mainstream news.
At $30, HP’s current offer is the sixth bid, a 200 percent premium over 3PAR’s previous $10 share price. Not only is this insane, but it’s also nearly unprecedented in M&A history. And since 3PAR is trading above $32 the market thinks Dell will bid even higher. → Read More
Ali Partovi is an angel investor, startup advisor, and serial entrepreneur.
Earlier this month, Paul Graham wrote a terrific article, “What Happened to Yahoo,” blaming Yahoo’s demise on two factors. First, “easy money” from banner ads led Yahoo to ignore search in the late ‘90s. Second, ambivalence about being a technology company meant Yahoo hired sub-par engineers and didn’t empower them to innovate. While I agree with Graham’s points, there’s a broader story to be told.
The story begins in 1996 with an 18-year-old college dropout named Scott Banister, who came up with a simple but elegant concept that turned out to be one of the best business ideas in history.
This is the true story of the search business model — a concept that John Battelle and other search historians have erroneously attributed to Bill Gross for Goto.com. Although Gross deserves the lion’s share of credit for recognizing a good idea and more importantly for implementing it, the credit for developing the idea itself belongs elsewhere. But first, let’s recall the world of search in the late ‘90s. → Read More
Hot on the heels of Facebook overtaking Orkut as India’s most prominent social network with 21 million vs. 20 million unique visitors in July, the company opened up its much anticipated office in Hyderabad earlier this week. Headed by Kirthiga Reddy and Manoj Varghese, the Indian team will include more sales and operations as well as multi-lingual support staff in order provide round-the-clock international support. → Read More
It appears that Foursquare hit the three million user mark sometime over the weekend. The location based social network has been adding users at impressive rates, and only hit 2 million users in early July. It took a year to reach one million; three months to hit 2 million, and a month and a half to hit 3 million.
Some thought Foursquare was doomed when Facebook rolled out its location-based feature, Places, a few weeks ago. In turns out that via the Places API, the feature serves as a platform for services like Foursquare and Gowalla. But Foursquare’s co-founder Dennis Crowley reported that Foursquare had its biggest day of signups following Facebook’s announcement. And Crowley told the LA Times recently that the startup is growing at about 180,000 users every 10 days. → Read More
There’s a growing debate in Silicon Valley as to whether the rise in angel investors coupled with robust deal activity (from the likes of Google, Facebook, Zynga, etc.) is fostering an unhealthy environment for the industry.
It’s not that founders aren’t making money (indeed many are cashing out early) the real issue, as posited by our editor, Michael Arrington, is if this new dynamic is stifling the next Zuckerberg or Brin—- the entrepreneur that doesn’t just want to sell to Google, but wants to be Google. On Thursday, we explored this issue further, inviting David Hornik and Howard Hartenbaum of August Capital to sit down with Arrington on TechCrunch TV, to discuss the state of investing and why once-bold tech warriors seem to be giving up. See video ahead. → Read More
For any entrepreneur, the challenge of taking an idea to launch can be a daunting and expensive journey. Fortunately, Adeo Ressi, founder of TheFunded and startup accelerator, Founder Institute, has a ten step plan.
While there is no foolproof recipe for every launch, Ressi says his template will help any tech entrepreneur get a business off the ground for less than $2,000. The program, which Ressi recently presented at the Founder Institute’s Boston location, is a bare bones guide to securing your startup’s online identity, enhancing your appearance of legitimacy (through low-cost but well designed logos and marketing materials), understanding your startup’s priorities and target consumer, and finally, getting it to the point of a rough web launch.
Click ahead for steps one through ten and Ressi’s video. → Read More
Success in Silicon Valley, most would agree, is more merit driven than almost any other place in the world. It doesn’t matter how old you are, what sex you are, what politics you support or what color you are. If your idea rocks and you can execute, you can change the world and/or get really, stinking rich.
For the most part I’ve sat on the sidelines over the years during the endless debates about how we need to do more to encourage more women to start companies. What I mean by “sat on the sidelines” is this – until today I haven’t really said what I felt. Now I’m going to.
Here’s why. Yet another article, this time in the Wall Street Journal, takes a shot at us and others for not doing enough to help women in tech. Says Rachel Sklar, a perennial TechCrunch critic: → Read More
In terms of brand recognition, it’s hard to top a huge live display billboard in Las Vegas. But Foursquare has managed to do it. As you can see above, they now have a massive, multi-level and multi-angle display practically screaming about the service to all those in Times Square in New York City.
“Check in, find your friends, unlock your city,” the ad reads. In smaller print at the bottom it talks about checking in to American Eagle for some kind of special. Foursquare head of business development Tristan Walker confirms that American Eagle is behind the ad, which he says is the “largest digital billboard in Times Square.” → Read More
This is a guest post by Hunter Walk (@hunterwalk) who conducted a survey of 500 Foursquare users to better understand their check in behaviors and motivations. His obsession with Foursquare is unrelated to his day job leading the consumer product team at YouTube, although he did at one point hold the Mayorship of their San Bruno headquarters.
Have you noticed “Off the Grid” [OTG] appearing in your Foursquare feed recently? No, it’s not the latest trendy West Hollywood club or SF food cart. OTG is Foursquare’s “privacy” feature where you check in to a location but don’t disclose it to your friends (while gaining any applicable points, badges, etc). What purpose does it serve to notify your friends that you’re out on the town but to hide the location? And what does it tell us about the future of location-based services & privacy? This was the question I set out to answer by surveying nearly 500 Foursquare users. → Read More
We’ve written about Fanvibe (formerly FanPulse) a few times because they do a nice job mixing some of the hottest elements of the web these days (tweets, check-ins, gaming elements) with sports. And now we’re about to enter the peak time for sports in the U.S. with the NFL season about to kickoff. With that in mind, the guys behind Fanvibe have come up with a new football-specific iPhone app called TweetQB.
The idea is as simple as can be: you load up the app and you see a list of all the current NFL games. If the games are currently in progress, you see an up-to-date score. If they have yet to start, you’ll see when they do. Clicking on any of these matchups takes you to a screen filled with tweets about that specific game. From here, you can respond to any of these tweets, or start tweeting yourself. → Read More
It’s no secret that Google, Apple and even RIM want a piece of the $1 billion-and-growing mobile advertising market. The fight over share of ad dollars is even resulting in possible anti-competitive practices. Apple’s developer licensing agreement update in June basically says it reserves the right to block Google’s AdMob from serving ads on the iPhone and iPad, allowing only “independent” ad-serving companies to serve ads on the devices. But in July, AdMob founder Omar Hamoui said that Apple had not yet enforced the policy, allowing Google to continue to serve ads on Apple devices. Perhaps the FTC’s recent interest in Apple’s ad policies delayed the blockade, but multiple industry sources take it as a foregone conclusion that it’s only a matter of time before Apple prevents Google completely from serving ads. If and when that does eventually happen, the mobile ad space could change irrevocably.
Clearly, there is a very real danger that Apple will create a domino effect across the mobile advertising industry if it turns off the switch for AdMob. Let’s just think this through. → Read More
Editor’s note: The following guest post is by Nikhyl Singhal, the co-founder and CEO of voice-application startup SayNow.
Is it conceivable that one of our greatest inventions, the phone number, is about to face extinction?
Just ask Mark Zuckerberg. Earlier this year, when asked if Facebook would be around in 100 years, as long as Ma Bell has been around, Zuckerberg responded, “I don’t know. But I don’t know how long telephones will be around for.” Will they be around for ten more years? I’ll go even further. It may not even take 5 years for the phone service, as we know it, to meet its demise.
Who’s going to lead the charge? Voice on Gmail and Skype are just the beginning. What are Facebook, Apple, Yahoo, and Microsoft doing? As AT&T, Verizon, Apple and Google spent this summer hashing out plans for world domination, it seems that Facebook is best positioned to strike the fatal blow against our beloved carriers. And it starts with those phone digits. → Read More
Japanese watch maker Haruo Suekichi is famous for his unique, steampunk style timepieces. Each of the amazing watches is handmade by Suekichi himself, even though he doesn’t have any formal education and actually started his career by hawking the first watches at flea markets. Guest writer Natsuki Yamada sat down with Suekichi in his studio in Tokyo earlier this month to conduct the following interview for CrunchGear. Your watches have an antique, yet very futuristic form and design. Where do they come from? What inspires you? – When I make watches, it doesn’t usually start with design but with “fun”: fun gimmicks, fun looking, unique way of wearing them. They need to be fun, because they are more gadgets than watches to me. So the inspiration comes from everything that I find fun or interesting. My latest watch is based on my latest experience of watching the birth of cicada nymphs. → Read More
