Earlier this month we took a look at Pinger, the company behind Textfree, a massively popular application for the iPhone and iPod Touch that gives users free, unlimited text messaging. Since launching in March 2009, users have sent over 4 billion text messages with the app, which has been downloaded 8 million times (these numbers effectively put Pinger in the top ten US carriers, volume-wise). And today at TechCrunch Disrupt, the company is announcing that it’s venturing into new territory: voice calls.
Textfree will soon include a true SIP-based VOIP client that works over both 3G and Wifi. The feature is enabled by the fact that Pinger gives all of its users free, unique, real phone numbers (it distributed 1.7 million phone numbers last quarter; AT&T gave out 1.6 million in the same time span). Calling works as you’d expect: hit the call button, and you’ll see a dialpad — you’ll be able to place calls whenever you have a data connection. This is especially huge for iPod Touch users, who already comprise most of Textfree’s userbase and can now use their devices as phones. → Read More
Channel surfing may not be the most social experience, but as anyone who has watched their Twitter stream during a broadcast of Mad Men, Lost, or Jersey Shore can attest to, it sure is fun to chat with your friends online about what just happened in the latest episode of your favorite show. yap.TV is a new startup launching today with an application for the iPad that wants to be the platform for this kind of conversation — a central place where you can chat with your friends about current television content. You can grab the application here.
The free application just hit the App Store, and it looks great — which doesn’t come as a huge surprise because the yap.TV team includes some former Apple employees who worked on the iPad. After firing up the app, you’ll see what’s essentially an interactive TV Guide, which lets you scroll through the day’s TV listings by flicking your finger a few times. → Read More
We all have experienced customer service nightmares. Often, one of the must frustrating parts of a poor customer service experience is feeling that your feedback is falling on deaf ears. Tello, which is launching at TechCrunch Disrupt today, is hoping to fill this gap by offering companies a realtime feedback app that consumers can use on their mobile phones to rate customer service on the fly.
On the consumer side, Tello is a free web and mobile service that aggregates ratings for businesses (business listing are aggregated from Localeze) from across the web and allows users to post comments about their experience at a business. Users can provide feedback on specific employees, recommend an employees and share a positive or negative story about the employee. → Read More
Acer’s AspireRevo has started shipping to the US. The new small form factor computer was announced earlier this month, and looks to be a viable machine for someone looking for an inexpensive computer. → Read More
Well, this is kind of awkward.
A couple weeks ago, we reported that AOL was in the process of acquiring of Thing Labs, makers of Brizzly. Neither AOL or Thing Labs would comment at the time, but we had multiple good sources on the deal. Fast forward to today: AOL is finally confirming the deal — right after they just acquired us.
So yes, like we said, AOL is acquiring Thing Labs. Only now, it’s technically our parent company that is buying them. So congrats to us, I guess?! → Read More
Panasonic just announced the Toughbook S9, a 12.1-inch laptop with DVD drive and Core i5 processor. It starts at about $2,400 and offers 11 hours of battery life on one charge. Again, good old Kyp gives us the tour. → Read More
Today at our TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco, Google CEO Eric Schmidt took the stage to give a speech about his thoughts on the future. It was a very interesting talk which spanned a variety of topics. Naturally, the most important topic that Schmidt talked about was search.
“We want to give you your time back,” Schmidt said. He noted that we live in an age of information overload, where we all have too much to do. The first step in getting your time back is Google Instant, the realtime search feature that Google recently launched, Schmidt said. While the feature may only shave a couple of seconds off of any search, in aggregate (Google is doing 2 billion searches a day), this is a huge amount of time saved. → Read More
The BlackBerry PlayBook hit yesterday and Amazon was ready with a presser announcing a Kindle app for the platform. Great news, no doubt. However, the WattPad app is the top eReading app in the BlackBerry App World so it should make a good amount of dedicated BlackBerry users happy to know that the app will launch alongside the PlayBook early next year. → Read More
Women in tech, the song that never ends … Somebody realizes that the ratio of women versus men in tech is 80 to 20 and decides to write a blog post blaming something or in the case of Mediaite’s Rachel Sklar writing a piece in the WSJ calling out TechCrunch founder Mike Arrington for the lack of women in tech, to which he responded. → Read More
Twitter has just announced on the Twitter Development Talk Google Group that their User Streams feature of the Twitter Streaming API is now in regular product. This means that any third-party client can now access it — and all its realtime goodness. While it’s specifically meant for desktop clients, Twitter notes that “experimentation in other use cases is encouraged.”
Twitter had been beta testing User Streams since July. The hope is that this new API will ease the overall strain on Twitter’s APIs. Twitter Head of Platform, Ryan Sarver, called this a “big milestone”. → Read More
These $50 earbuds are designed for swimmers and heavy sweaters who need a little extra protection as they glide around the waters of their local pool like a pasty, bulbous manta ray. That said, H2OAudio has been pretty strong in the waterproof devices and cases department so there’s no reason to think these aren’t good. → Read More
Today at TechCrunch Disrupt, our own MG Siegler led a panel called Design vs. Engineering, featuring Charlie Cheever (Quora), Jason Goldman (Twitter), and Bradley Horowitz (Google). The conversation focused on the relationship between UI and the engineering muscle driving it, and how important each is to the success of a product.
During the panel, Jason Goldman, who leads product at Twitter, mentioned that New Twitter — which is a total redesign of the site with a bevy of new features — was initially planned to be a less ambitious, more iterative product. But CEO Evan Williams stepped in and said that users needed “something much better for end users”. → Read More
Yammer, which launched as the “Twitter for businesses” at TechCrunch 50 in 2008, is launching the next-gen version of its platform today. Aiming to be a full-fledged social network for the enterprise, Yammer 2.0 is being released today at TechCrunch Disrupt. As we wrote in our initial review of the new platform, Yammer is adding a number of applications to its platform that increases its functionality beyond just a communications platform.
These new applications include polls, chat, events, links, topics, Q&A, ideas, and more. And a new Activity Feed will aggregate stories about co-worker actions within all of their enterprise apps (both on and off Yammer) and will allow users to follow content. → Read More
Do you subscribe to Sky Broadband in the UK? Have you ever torrented pr0n? Terrible news! The names of many thousands of you—5,000 at last count—have been leaked onto the Internet. It’s pretty much the most egregious leak of this sort that I can ever remember, because now the whole world will know you downloaded Hot Chicks Doing Stuff Vols. 1-9! → Read More
Want an easy Halloween custom? Buy this $450 Iron Man briefcase from Entertainment Earth, don your best suit and sunglasses, and go as Tony Stark. The ladies will love it and at least you’re briefcase will look the part even if your frumpy nerd frame doesn’t exactly scream superhero. Entertainment Earth’s replica is finished in bright red aluminum with leather pockets and a laser cut EVA foam complete with an Stark logo inside. Of course it doesn’t contain the Mark V armor inside, but that’s probably for the best. It’s not like you have an Arc Reactor embedded in your chest. [Entertainment Earth via Baller House] → Read More
As you may have heard, AOL’s CEO Tim Armstrong had some fairly significant news to announce at TechCrunch Disrupt this morning.
Yes, AOL is acquiring TechCrunch and all of our properties and yes, we will be joining the AOL Technology Network. If you missed the live feed, we have videos of the on-stage announcement and co-editor Erick Schonfeld’s backstage interview with Armstrong. See videos ahead. → Read More
Do you need a lot of storage? I mean, an amount that can be officially described as a shit-ton? But the only requirement you have is that the device has to be the size of a toaster. Well, buddy, do I have good news for you. Let me introduce you to the Seagate BlackArmor NAS 440. → Read More
You may not have heard of GreenDot, a $2 billion public company, but you’ve seen their products everywhere — they’re largely responsible for the pre-paid credit cards that litter retail outlets around the country. Last night, we wrote a look at Green Dot’s past, and for good reason: today at TechCrunch Disrupt, Green Dot founder and CEO Steve Streit and celebrated Sequoia Capital Partner Michael Moritz took the stage to talk about Green Dot, entrepreneurship, and what makes Moritz such a successful investor. Our own Michael Arrington moderated.
The discussion kicked off with a brief history of Green Dot. Streit recounted how he had started the company in his home over a decade ago, when he decided he wanted to give young people a way to buy things online (online purchases generally require the user to have a credit card). Streit says that at the time, these cards were called “host-based stored value cards”, which isn’t exactly a marketable product to consumers. → Read More
