Yottaa, web analytics and performance platform, has raised $4 million in series A funding from General Catalyst Partners, Stata Venture Partners and Cambridge West Ventures. → Read More
Plex, the Mac OS X media center, has just made all of its competitors obsolete. A new version, dubbed Plex/Nine, will be released today at midnight EDT, and it introduces a number of new features that make it the media player for Mac OS X—and for the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. That’s right: there’s an iOS App for that, and it’s pretty awesome. → Read More
I am not sure how many of these will actually get sold, but starting today, the Japanese can lay their hands on Super Mario-branded sweaters [JP]. Buyers can choose between four versions in two colors, and the sweaters actually do look quite nice. → Read More
Twitter search and advertising startup platform operator TweetUp has announced today that its search engine for Twitter will be expanding to include bios and updates posted to other social networks, including LinkedIn and Facebook. Because the company will no longer be solely based on Twitter, TweetUp is changing its name to PostUp.
In April, TweetUp, which was incubated by incubated by idealab, opened registration for its bidded marketplace for real-time search, and in May the company launched its search capabilities on a number of sites at the TechCrunch Disrupt event, including at TechCrunch, Topix.com, and Businessinsider.com. → Read More
Are you in the market for a different smart phone operating system? Sick of the mainstream players? Perhaps you have a fondness for immature OSes that are only supported by one manufacturer?
Well, I’d initially recommend the Wave — Samsung’s original Bada-powered smartphone — but I know you’re a bit more budget minded than that. Who wants Super-AMOLED anyway?
Samsung hear ya, buddy, as today they announced their third-ish (fourth, I suppose) Bada-powered phone: the entry-level S7320E Wave 723 (henceforth known as just the Wave 723). → Read More
Yay! Only a little while ago we reported that the Droid X — despite its self destruct trigger — was able to run a custom recovery, with the prospect of running custom ROMs (the goal of any self-respecting Android power user) following in the not-too-distant future.
Well, consider it the future, baby, as the first videos of a Droid X running a custom ROM — namely the AOSP Sapphire ROM — have surfaced from Twitter user MennoMobile. → Read More
You know Infineon, right? They make those tiny baseband chips inside smartphones (like the iPhone 3G). You know, the chips responsible for communicating with the cell towers on your network. Yes? I’m glad we’re on the same page.
Well, today, Intel bought Infineon’s Wireless Solutions Business — WLS — for $1.4 billion of your American dollars.
Why’d they do it? Well, Intel have been trying to get into the phone CPU market, but are having trouble competing with the likes of Qualcomm and ARM, who are able to offer all the communication options — that is, WiFi, Bluetooth, GSM, 3G, 4G — as well as the CPU/GPU, on a single chip. This makes the chips not only smaller (and therefore easier to fit on a logic board), but also more energy efficient. → Read More
You might say the company’s just a tad late to the party, but Miniclip has finally seen the light and is expanding its casual gaming empire by entering the world of mobile games.
With a self-declared user base of more than 57 million casual gamers worldwide and a library of more than 600 online games, it’s a wonder really that the London-based company hasn’t made the move sooner.
After all, Apple’s App Store for one now offers roughly 250,000 apps, many of which are of course casual games and have been available for years. → Read More
Here are some stories from the past week on CrunchGear: New Display Tech Could Have Eight Times The Pixel Density As Retina Display Immortality Via Valve’s Team Fortress 2 Hat-Describing Contest Now You Wily Terrorists Will Be Subject To Long-Range Skeleton Analysis I’d Live In It. Bufalino Camper Combines Car, Bedroom, Office Science! Viral Batteries To Be Woven Into Clothing → Read More
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
