Presentations for the TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon are in full swing (tune in for the live stream!), and we’ve already seen some very nifty nascent apps and services. One that just caught my eye is NerdNearby, a simple app that detects your current location and presents every tweet, Foursquare check-in, and Instagram photo that has been shared from that area in the recent past. In other words… → Read More
We’ve spent much of the last week exploring Berlin, attending the Next11 conference and meeting a few local startups. The biggest problem from a video entertainment standpoint? We both agree that Berlin feels like a better startup town than London.
“Feels like” is an important disclaimer here. Berlin certainly doesn’t have the track record, local sophisticated investor class, nor does it have… → Read More
Around 500 hackers participated from late last night to early today morning at the TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon in New York, building in teams and waking up or popping enough Redbull this am in order to show off their hacks to notables including VC Jeff Clavier and Canv.as, VP of Product Bradley Horowitz and Canv.as founder Christopher Poole.
This year’s NYC Hackathon was our largest showing… → Read More
Jerry Lee Lewis would have been proud. Even as the clock ticked past midnight at Pier 94 in Hell’s Kitchen, there was a whole lotta hackin’ goin’ on. Beginning around noon on Saturday, hackers filed into the spacious room at the site of Disrupt NYC to begin networking and scheming in earnest. As the day wore on, groups solidified, team names were chosen, and at the height of activity, we estimate… → Read More
That was fast. Just like that Square passed $3 million in transactions processed, on a Saturday no less, according to a Tweet an hour ago by CEO Jack Dorsey.
The mobile payments startup is seeing an acceleration in transaction volume. It took about 10 months from its public launch for Square to reach $1 million a day in payments going through its mobile app. Getting to $2 million a day only… → Read More
Talent scouting at the 2011 Hackathon in Manhattan today, TCTV caught up with three alumni hax0rz and one n00b, who gave us a sneak peek of their apps and ideas. They included: a couple of dating sites, one with a hyper local twist, a mobile web application that lets you see nearby job opportunities using data from your Foursquare network and… → Read More
The tables here at Pier 94 are full of enterprising hackers, swapping code and networking furiously. The Red Bull is flowing freely and snacks crunch underfoot — pigeons flit to and fro looking for crumbs and perhaps some seed funds. And it’s only just beginning.
The hacking will continue all night, punctuated by API demonstrations by the likes of Twitter, Qualcomm, and Google, and at 9:30… → Read More
Squadify is a stealth-mode startup planning to try and disrupt the world of casual team sports. We interviewed the company as part of our new video series, The Roundabout Tapes, documenting the startups in the area of East London that has come to be known as Silicon Roundabout.
Squadify is a startup aiming to allow people to find sports teams they want to play in, or even form. Close to a kind of… → Read More
Bitcoin. Oh, man, where to begin. Its Hype-O-Meter got cranked to 11 this week, and breathless histrionics are everywhere. Death and Taxes called this new currency “a seismic event“; Adam Cohen says it’s nothing but a giant scam; Jason Calacanis calls it “the most dangerous project we’ve ever seen“; and they’re all completely wrong. It’s interesting, and innovative, and down the line it might even… → Read More
The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, Dick Hardt, and Steve Gillmor — got all LinkedIn in the wake of the startup’s successful IPO. Amid the fear mongering about another tech bubble, it seemed more likely that LinkedIn was the first of at least a trio of big social plays going public. Facebook and Twitter seem no brainers, each with their own dynamics in terms of revenue plus… → Read More
Last year Breitling came out with an entirely new Superocean watch. It featured a modern looking design in a smaller 42mm case. While a lot of people wanted a smaller Breitling diver, even more didn’t. So, just one year later, the Superocean II has been refreshed and enlarged. Now, for 2011, Breitling offers the Superocean 44. It comes in two versions: A three-hand, and a chronograph. There is… → Read More
I’ll bet that got your attention. Finally, an app that wants to buy you a drink. Well, not exactly, but it’s the next best thing. LoSo is a location-based social media app for the iPhone that re-launches today to bring the best parts of Foursquare, Yelp, and OpenTable together in one app for your mobile phone. An ambitious goal, yes, but to counterbalance that, LoSo is targeting a very specific… → Read More
Weekend Giveaway: A REAL FREAKING THOR HAMMER Video: Space Invaders in Real Life Superplayers Take Arcade Gaming To New Heights Current Honeycomb Builds Include A Secret Gingerbread Interface The iPad Flexible Arm Lets You “Comfortably” Use Tablets In Bed → Read More
Ever wonder how super angel and man-about-town Chris Sacca spends his Friday nights? Well, right now you can find him at Turntable.fm, a stealthy, you-can-only-get-in-if-you-know-someone online DJ party. I just stumbled onto it by accident. You can only gain entry if you are Facebook friends with someone already inside.
As it happens, I knew some people. Turntable.fm is a project of Seth… → Read More
RadiumOne is emerging as a leader in a new breed of advertising networks, with enhanced targeting based on social data. The company is positioning itself to lock in data sources before competitors even get rolling.
“Behavioral targeting in advertising led to double digit increases in effectiveness,” RadiumOne’s CEO Gurbaksh Chahal tells me. And he should know, this is his third advertising… → Read More
We’ve been watching the British legal system turn itself into knots for the last couple of weeks, largely due to the ability of Twitter users to break just about any legal ‘super injunction’ a ‘celebrity’ (usually footballers) has on the reporting of their private life (usually affairs). So far so normal for Twitter. What’s a super injunction? It’s when someone rich (these things are very… → Read More
Back in April, when rumors about Nintendo’s next system were flying fast, we heard there would be a user-facing camera on the controller. At the time I thought it ridiculous, but I also thought the 6″ touchscreen was ridiculous, and that seems to be accepted as fact now. So I guess it’s no surprise that a second source has confirmed that the controller will have a camera on it. → Read More
We heard about the SD1 back in September: a Foveon-based DSLR with 45 megapixels, as they define them, though the “megapixel” rating is difficult to compare when you have different sensor patterns going on. They’re confident enough to price this thing above even Canon and Nikon’s pro level cameras. Yes, it’ll set you back $9700. That’s $2000 more than a 1D mk III and $4000 more than a D3X or… → Read More
Comcast donated $18,000 to a non-profit filmmaker’s group, the ReelGrrls, dedicated to giving young girls a voice and more confidence through film-making. One of the members expressed concern over the upcoming NBC/Comcast merger on Twitter, stating her disbelief that the FCC Commissioner Meredith Baker just quit to move to Comcast after approving the merger.
Almost immediately one of Comcast’s… → Read More
I first met Charles Nouÿrit at Le Web in 2007. Surrounded by ‘boothe babes’ in tight white T-shirts, he was handing out cards about something called Myid.is. Was this the standard French startup pitch at Le Web? It probably was back in 2007. And it was a little hard to take the pitch, such as it was, seriously. But Identity? “ID”? Yes, it was a hot topic even then – and still is. Since then 600… → Read More
Google is on a mission to make the Web faster. One thing that slows down pageload times are fat image files. Even JPEG and PNG files can get pretty big. So Google is developing a new image format called WebP (which is a sister format to its WebM project for videos).
The images above, for instance, are from this gallery comparing JPEG to WebP. The WebP images are significantly smaller, but… → Read More
If you saw them on the street, you’d keep walking. If you saw them in an arcade, your jaw would drop. They’re called superplayers, and they make our idea of hardcore gaming look like child’s play. Instead of sitting on the couch, covered in yesterday’s food, these gamers take to the arcades and not only break records, but put on one hell of a show.
I’ve chosen a couple of my favorite videos from… → Read More
If you’ve seen George Clooney and Jason Reitman’s Up In The Air, you know that George Clooney’s character in the film is the epitome of a savvy, frequent flier. His life’s ambition is to accumulate miles, and he knows exactly what his rewards packages entail. Most of us, though we may similarly heavy travel schedules, are by no means masters of miles or travel rewards. If you’re anything like me… → Read More
I’m not going to get my hopes up – they’ve been promising a Neuromancer movie for years and, I fear, no one will be able to the book justice – but Vincenzo Natali, director of Splice and Cube, says he is in pre-production on William Gibson’s seminal cyberpunk novel and they will soon begin filming in Canada, Istanbul, Tokyo, and London. → Read More
Firefox beta for Android has been updated today with the ability for users to turn on the “Do Not Track” privacy feature, making it one of the first mobile browsers to offer the privacy option.
Mozilla’s Do Not Track allows users to have more control over how their browsing behavior is tracked and used online. When the feature is enabled, Firefox will tell advertising networks and other websites… → Read More
Cast out from the ice halls of his father Othin, doomed to carry the world serpent in his teeth as he wings his justice across the face of the dead earth, great world-eater Thor is here to mete justice on us, his iron eyes hard over a blazing red beard. Woe betide he who looks upon his lover Járnsaxa with avarice for Thor mess not with that sort of thing and will totally flatten you. Why do I… → Read More
Twitter CTO Greg Pass has as of today stepped down from his post at Twitter according to people familiar with the matter.
Prior to becoming Twitter CTO, Pass held the VP of engineering position at the company, after being CTO and co-founder at Summize, which was acquired by Twitter in July 2008 and was eventually turned into Twitter Search. Prior to Summize he was Systems Architect at Aol.
As VP… → Read More
UPDATED – What appears to be a fire or explosion engulfed one of the buildings at the Foxconn Factory in Chengdu, China. Foxconn is reporting two casualties and 16 hurt and the damage does look severe and quite thorough. MICGadget reported that “10 fire engines, ambulances and 10 police cars” arrived on the scene. Reports state that a few floors in Building A5 (apparently part of the iPad 2… → Read More
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