Here at TechCrunch Disrupt we do things in realtime. So when news starting breaking that IAC CEO Barry Diller was stepping down as chairman of the board of Live Nation, we did the obvious thing: we asked him.
Diller took the stage at Disrupt this morning to speak with our own Michael Arrington. We we brought up the Live Nation rumor, Diller said that he did tell the rest of the board that by the end of the year, they should start looking for a new Chairman. But he also said that there was “no rush” to do this. → Read More
Many of us may have forgotten that Ask.com is a search engine just like Google and Bing. It seems that IAC’s Barry Diller, who owns Ask.com, seems to have no memory of Ask’s value as well. Diller sat down with Michael Arrington today at TechCrunch Disrupt, and spoke candidly about the future of Ask.com.
Says Diller, “I don’t think Ask.com is going to gain search share; everyone copied us.” He added that Ask is not competitive with Google at all. When an audience member asked whether Ask would be more valuable outside of IAC rather than within the network; Diller quipped: Ask has no value inside of IAC, so why would it add value as a standalone site? He also said that IAC hasn’t been able to grown Ask the way he thought the company would be able to. → Read More
Yes, HDCP was indeed cracked, and now there’s an open-source decoding system for it. Right now the system requires a fairly beefy PC, but that may change as people poke around the code a bit. → Read More
Roaming the Startup Alley at TechCrunch Disrupt I came across Teamly, a new web app designed to help businesses manage their employees better. Yes, I know that sounds familiar, but what I liked about it was that this was a super, super simple app compared to a lot of the feature-crammed companies out there in this space.
The issue here is that a lot of corporate systems for managing people are really not designed for small businesses. They are just too complex, being packed full of to-do’s, tasks and projects. So Teamly is out to try and makes all that performance monitoring way easier. → Read More
With 80 million members, LinkedIn is steadily growing as the go-to professional social network. And as the company reportedly readies for an IPO within the next year, all eyes are on LinkedIn to see if the company can scale. Today, Michael Arrington sat down with LinkedIn ‘s CEO Jeff Weiner, a former longtime employee at Yahoo, about plans for an IPO, future strategy plans, and more.
Weiner was mum about taking the company public, saying that an IPO is just one way that would allow LinkedIn to achieve long term goals. Weiner, who was formerly the Executive Vice President of Yahoo’s Network Division, did elaborate on his beliefs of where the internet is today and what the future potential of his former employer, Yahoo. → Read More
It’s a red-letter day, folks: Gateway just release a $700 NV laptop with WiMAX built-in, namely the Intel 6250 Wi-Fi/WiMax card. Otherwise this is pretty bog-standard for a laptop although it does seem to mirror HP’s sexy styling on their own Envy line. WiMax connectivity comes from carriers across the country and isn’t included in the package. Press release after the jump. → Read More
Over the past two days, we’ve seen 25 startups (and 2 from the Startup Alley) launch on stage at our TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco. Our panel of experts questioned and voted on each. And now we’re down to the final seven in the race to accept the TechCrunch Disrupt Cup from Soluto, the winner of our last Disrupt conference last May.
Without further ado, the final seven startups in the running: → Read More
Daily deals site Groupon has chosen TCDisrupt to launch Grouspawn, their latest publicity stunt and exercise in strange company culture. Groupon CEO Andrew Mason has decided that as the company expands, there will inevitably be babies born off the “intercourse” people are having on dates where they use Groupons. → Read More
EngageSciences, exhibiting in the Startup Alley at TechCrunch Disrupt this week, has revealed it’s closed an angel investment of $750,000 from private European investors. Terms were not disclosed but we understand the round came from some UK and European angels.
The startup has been developing its application since December, focusing the concept of “social nurturing” – a fancy way of saying its about getting more fans for brand brands and companies. The startup is slightly different form the the current crop of U.S. social media marketing vendors, in that too many of these companies just focus on just getting more “Likes” for brands or increasing their fan count or simply running a one-off contest. This is rather tactical and avoids the issue of user retention in the longer term. → Read More
Fresh out of AT&T’s mouth comes word that they’ll be taking two exclusive handsets off of RIM’s hands: the BlackBerry Curve 3G (left, above) and BlackBerry Pearl 3G. → Read More
Watchismo has a great Fall sale going on featuring some of its more interesting German watches. I’m not a huge Tauchmeister fan – they’re kind of an eBay brand – but there are few cool pieces here and if you’re into the steampunk look, they might be for you. → Read More
LinkedIn’s CEO Jeff Weiner has just unveiled LinkedIn Signal at TechCrunch Disrupt, a new feature that neatly marries the worlds of LinkedIn and Twitter and allows users to apply the professional social network’s filters to Twitter’s firehose. Think of it as a window into Twitter (and LinkedIn’s updates), through the eyes of LinkedIn.
Intrigued? We have exclusive access for 250 TechCrunch readers. → Read More
Vevo CEO Rio Caraeff took the stage today at TechCrunch Disrupt to talk about how Vevo, like a Hulu for music launched in December 2009, is now the third largest source for video on the web. Vevo, whose core philosophy is that the Internet is about choice, now receives 49 million unique video viewers a month, with 500 million views in the US and 1.4 billion around the world. → Read More
I love me some Dell Streak. It is, in short, one of the best slates I’ve seen since the iPad (I haven’t seen the SamGalTab yet, but Greg liked it). Well, Dell is at it again with another 7-incher in the next few weeks and a 10-inch model in the next few months. → Read More
It’s the third and final day of Disrupt, but hold your tears. There’s already been so much good stuff that we’ve had trouble fitting it into the time we have, and today promises to be just as eventful. We’ve got special guests, new products being launched, and of course today is the the day we choose a winner in the Startup Battlefield. And you can watch it all live on TCTV.
To follow along or contribute to our coverage, use the #tcdisrupt tag on Twitter and when you post your pictures on Flickr, Twitpic, and so on. Of course, we have our own Flickr stream, constantly being added to, from which I’ll be posting a few highlights later in the day. → Read More
Back in June we previewed a new product by social media search engine Kosmix called TweetBeat. Essentially, it’s a way to follow news being discussed on Twitter in realtime. Today during our TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco, Kosmix is officially releasing the product.
Kosmix calls TweetBeat “the end of hashtags”. Because they scan all tweets being sent out for all kinds of semantic data, you no longer have to explicitly tag things with hashtag, is their stance. For example, over the past few days there have been almost 64,000 tweets about Disrupt from over 11,000 people — but only a small percentage have used the “#tcdisrupt” tag. TweetBeat found the tweets anyway. → Read More
Google TV is going to be big. Well, at least that’s what us Internet know-it-alls think. The average consumer will actually dictate its reach and household penetration, but apparently Logitech is siding with us on this one. According to a report published by DigiTimes, the company is expecting to ship 500k of their Revue boxes in this year alone. That’s commitment. → Read More
Threaded emails in Gmail is a controversial subject. Some say that the automation of drawing emails together within Gmail saves them the time of figuring out which emails are connected. Others find the feature complicated. What it comes down to is either you love the way Gmail clusters conversations together, or you hate it. Today, Gmail is giving people the option to turn on threaded conversations or mute the feature completely.
Within setting, you’ll be able to toggle off conversation view to see email as individual messages in chronological order. Some actions commonly associated with unthreaded email can be accomplished with searches in Gmail. → Read More
The all-in-one form factor isn’t going anywhere and Gateway is just reaffirmed their commitment with two new models. Even though these things hit for less than a grand, they’re still capabile machines and might fit your requirements. Both the 21.5- and 23-inch models rock Full HD touchscreens, 4GB of Ram, at least a 500GB hard drive, and Blu-ray drives. The larger, 23-inch ZX6951 model rocks a Core i3 and TV tuner though. Not too bad for a $999 MSRP. Look for them as soon as today at the usual electronic retailers. → Read More
Japan-based electronics company Murata caused a splash two years ago with Little Seiko, a a small humanoid robot [JP] that can unicycle forward and backward and is also able to stop without falling over. A male version, Little Seisaku [ENG], with similar skills exists, too. And now, Murata has announced [JP] 2010 updates for the robots. → Read More
