Boom! With HTC and Verizon teasin’ up a storm around their upcoming 4G Android handset, the Thunderbolt (previously known round the ol’ rumor mill as the Incredible HD, or “Mecha”), it was only a matter of time before this thing got a proper, exhaustive photo leak.
And so it goes. → Read More
As many of you have noticed, we (and by “we”, I mainly mean “me”) have been using Quora a lot as a source of inspiration for story ideas. Some people seem to think this is a great idea. Others seem to think it’s the end of TechCrunch, blogging, and the world — perhaps not in that exact order. But here’s what it really is: business as usual.
One reader, Elias Bizannes, tweeted the following yesterday, “Blogging 3.0 according to @parislemon 1) Follow the founders of Quora 2) Spend all day on Quora 3) Rehash voted-up Quora posts on TechCrunch“. My response to this was as follows, “@EliasBiz so was blogging 2.0 doing the same thing on twitter? and blogging 1.0 doing the same thing on blogs?” → Read More
It’s not much of a hack – JWhelton simply removed an app and looked at the underlying OS – but this is proof of concept stuff that shows that the iPod Nano is essentially a stripped-down iOS device with severe limitations. → Read More
Here’s a bit of a sticky situation: Apple is facing a class-action lawsuit alleging that they are allowing apps and ad partners to identify specific users — a breach of Apple’s privacy policy and supposedly of privacy itself.
Apple’s privacy policy touches on this directly, yet leaves plenty of room for movement on their side, which is really what the suit is all about, though Apple is simply the biggest target at the moment. The lawsuit alleges that the “non-personal information” collected by likes of Pandora and The Weather Channel can easily be collated and used to identify individuals. → Read More
Lots of excitement today about Groupon’s intention to raise a new monster round of financing, with speculation that the valuation of the still-young startup reaching nearly $8 billion. That speculation is only partially right, says a source with knowledge of the financing.
The company is raising big money – around $950 million. And the valuation is an impressive $4.75 billion valuation. Just not quite as impressive as the earlier figure being thrown around. A separate source says Allen & Co. is advising Groupon on the deal.
The company, which just recently turned down an acquisition offer from Google, has raised $171 million to date, much of it taken off the table by founders and execs. Our expectation is that much of this new round of financing, if not all of it, will also be used to cash out existing investors. → Read More
Not content to programming in the Three Rules, Japanese roboticists are now crash testing their creations using techniques learned from car tests. Take this video, for example: it shows a pair of legs being tested to see if they have enough strength to crush bone and sinew during the uprising. → Read More
Just what we need: more Wi-Fi to foul up our genes and mutate our babies! AT&T is now blanketing Time Square and parts of San Francisco with public Wi-FI (N.B. “public” != free. You still have to pay or be an AT&T subscriber.) However, the best thing is that it will effect areas with the worst AT&T data coverage, which will severely improve your iPhone experience in those areas. → Read More
I don’t suppose this news will really rock anyone’s world, but if you’re in the market for an ultraslim laptop, this $200 price drop might be the factor that pushes the Dell up to the top of the heap. The Adamo (not the XPS, but the vanilla Adamo) laptop has decent specs except for the video card, and is a fairly slick-looking and compact machine. Check out the specs here; even with the new starting price of $899, you’re still paying through the nose for the form factor, though. [via TechEye and TechReport] → Read More
We see bamboo here and there on CrunchGear (the Dodocase, laptops, bikes), but I’m usually suspicious of bamboo-type products, because they usually make specious claims of greenness.
This kit seems useful, though, if only because it provides a semi-eco-friendly way to put together a new bike. Interestingly, it does not provide the bike parts or the bamboo. Hey, what the… → Read More
This is kind of exciting but also not: the Olympus E-PL2 appeared in the camera rumornet but it’s not a major upgrade – at least so far – from the E-PL1. Improved features include a new “PENPAL” Bluetooth module that connects to the hotshoe and a new filter called “Dramatic Tone.” Sadly, it has the same good sensor but the size and shape are slightly different. One more pic after the jump. → Read More
Note: A source is now telling us that the valuation is $4.75 Billion on a $950 Million Raise.
According to a VC Experts report, Groupon gave the State of Delaware a heads up on December 17th with an Amended Certificate to authorize a $980 million round of Series G funding.
While this doesn’t necessarily mean the company will be raising that amount, it does give it the capacity to do so. The report says to expect a SEC Form D with the exact amount of finacing to be filed next week. → Read More
Man, they’re still fighting, aren’t they? ChillingEffects’ stats, by way of TorrentFreak, reveal that the “international music industry,” in the form of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, has sent the most DMCA takedowns notices in 2010, with some 1,272 notices sent in the year. In third place is some Brazilian hardware site, Clube do Hardware. In third place we have Twentieth Century Fox, the movie studio that brought us hits like Knight and Day, Predators, Machete, and Wall Street: The Kid From Even Stevens Edition. Oh, and Avatar. → Read More
Yesterday, our post about AOL’s promotional discs by way of an excellent thread on Quora invoked quite a bit of feedback. That’s hardly surprising given that every man, woman, and child (at least in the United States) probably had their hands on one of the discs at some point in the 1990s. In fact, Jan Brandt, AOL’s former Chief Marketing Officer, dropped a huge knowledge bomb in the Quora thread after we published our original post: “At one point, 50% of the CD’s produced worldwide had an AOL logo on it,” she wrote. Wow.
And she followed up today in a new thread with even more interesting information about the program. Specifically, someone asked: What was the Conversion Rate of AOL CDs in the 1990′s? Given how widespread the discs were, you might think AOL wasn’t (or wasn’t able to) monitor the rates so closely. But they were, according to Brandt. “The profitability of each and every disk and promotion effort was tracked and analyzed. We conducted approximately 2000 different tests each year and used these results to develop future programs. Despite the label ‘carpet bombing,’ there was actually a very high level of marketing sophistication and almost all decisions were data and results driven,” she writes. → Read More
Earlier this years Linkedin Labs, which showcases projects created by LinkedIn employees, launched a feature that lets you quickly convert your profile on the professional social networking site into a more traditional resume. It’s quite slick, with a handful of templates to choose from and buttons to convert it to PDF for easy printing (or to share it on Twitter and Facebook).
Now SnapPages, a website builder that we’ve covered before, has launched a new feature that does something similar, but with a bit more flexibility. → Read More
How many of you played Resident Evil 4 and thought to yourself, “Man, Leon has a really nice jacket”? I certainly did. Like, I really did: I walked around stupid New York trying to find a jacket that even resembled his jacket. No luck. If only Capcom had thought of this sooner, then. → Read More
Oh, ruinous day. The tablet-lover’s great white hope, the RIM Playbook is apparently getting “just a few hours” of battery life, suggesting it is a bit more power-hungry than the 6 hour GalTab and the 10 hour iPad. While this is obviously based on non-final hardware, the chance that the Playbook will hit two hours or less of life is pretty bad, especially considering this is supposed to be the “anything but Apple/Android” solution for the vast majority of future tablet users. → Read More
Over the weekend, there was a ton of talk about 2011 being the year in which Android “explodes” onto the market. You could argue that 2010 was already that year, but plenty of numbers indicate that 2011 will be much bigger for the platform. But despite Android as a whole already outselling the iPhone, there’s little debate that amongst developers, iOS is still the platform you develop for first. But this could change as well in 2011, at least according to one developer. And it’s significant because he’s been an iPhone-first guy up until now.
Akshay Kothari is the co-founder of Alphonso Labs, the development house behind the popular Pulse news reader app. Pulse started as an iPad app first, then expanded to the iPhone, then came to Android. Kothari credits both the support they’ve received from Apple and the press surrounding the iPad as the reason why they’ve been so iOS-centric up until now. But, “our thinking about the Android platform has changed significantly over the last couple weeks,” he writes to us. → Read More
Following up that inane Net Neutrality babble with a fun video. Here was have a man playing World of Warcraft using nothing more than a Kinect. Well done, chap. → Read More
Well, here’s one we can file away in the “Things I never would’ve guessed would exist” bin. A company called Redpark Product Development has just announced plans to manufacture serial cables compatible with the iPhone, “Made for iPhone” certification and all. Yep, serial cables. Remember those? → Read More
Only four more days of 2010; four more days till we get to 2011. So what to expect in the new year? What do we most hope for and fear about 2011?
For TechCrunch co-editor Erick Schonfeld, 2011 might be the year that touch becomes central to the computing experience. It may also be the year when both mobile and social – John Doerr’s third wave – grows up to finally become the dominant sector of the tech industry.
Could 2011 be 2000 all over again? Could we see a collapse of all the optimism now surrounding mobile and social? Were Fred Wilson’s warnings about tech’s current irrational exuberance correct? Not according to Schonfeld who, while acknowledging that there are too many me-too companies, believes that the established players driving the current boom – Facebook, Groupon, Zynga and Twitter – are for real.
Is Schonfeld right? Should we be partying like it’s 1999? Or could 2011, like 2000, be remembered as the year when the music died?
Video ahead. → Read More
