June 30th, 2011

Buddy Media CEO Michael Lazerow Joins SavingStar Board of Directors

SavingStar, the national paperless grocery coupon service, announced today that Michael Lazerow, the founder and CEO of Buddy Media, has joined the company’s board of directors. Launched in April 2011, SavingStar provides digital coupons to more than 24,000 stores and over 100 supermarket and drugstore chains across the U.S. → Read More

June 30th, 2011

Turn Google+ Into Facebook

<The social networking wars have dialed it up to 11 this week, with Google unleashing its highly anticipated (and highly leaked) Google+ social initiative upon the world on Tuesday — to not a bad response, to be honest. So it’s not that surprising that today Facebook countered the + hubbub with its own “we’ve got something awesome” unveiling planned for next week. You crazy kids!

The… → Read More

June 30th, 2011

Behold: Path Comes To Android In Public Beta

Well, well, well. It looks like everybody’s favorite limited social networking and photo-sharing app has finally come to Android. That’s right, Path announced via its blog that Path for Android will be available in the Android Market beginning today. And sure it enough, it is. Check it out. But this is by no means a finished product. Path considers Version 1.0 of its Android app to be a public… → Read More

June 30th, 2011

IBM Takes Another Step Towards Reliable Phase-Change Memory

phase-change-ibm

Although the world is currently enamored of flash memory, today’s standard for solid-state storage, companies like IBM need to think a few years ahead. One of the technologies they’re looking at is called phase-change memory, in which a memory cell changes from a crystalline to amorphous phase, changing its resistance. Put a bunch of those together, and you’ve got yourself a binary storage system. → Read More

June 30th, 2011

A startup called Huddle legally ponders the Google+ Huddle feature

As part of the new Google+ service came Huddle, a group texting app available to Android users. This makes mobile group collaboration easier, says Google. So far so good. Except…

There’s already a five-year-old group collaboration startup called Huddle, which has to date raised $14.2m in venture capital and has office in San Francisco and London. → Read More

June 30th, 2011

Bing Gordon: Every Startup CEO Should Understand Gamification

Former EA executive, KPCB sFund lead and all around inspiring person Bing Gordon led a talk today at the sFund Gamification Summit breaking down platitudes like “gamification is important” into key actionable takeaways on how succeed with gamification, takeaways that could be reformatted and applied to any company as a measure of success.

When asked why he went through the trouble of putting his… → Read More

June 30th, 2011

Want To See Which Ads Perform Best? YC-Backed MixRank Is A Spy Tool For AdSense

Online advertising is growing, and much of that growth is happening in display advertising. While search ads still make up 46 percent of the total over display’s 38 percent, display grew twice as fast as search in 2010. Many online businesses rely on advertising as a supplemental revenue stream in support of their business model — if not the sole source — especially from AdSense. As such… → Read More

June 30th, 2011

Samsung's Galaxy Tab 8.9 Hits The FCC

We caught a brief glimpse of the Galaxy Tab 8.9 about a month ago, but it’s just now hitting the FCC for all its tests, readings, and diagnostics. The new Tab is much the same as the old Tab (i.e. the 10.1) but packed into a smaller package. I’m excited for better pixel density, though Samsung is also working on a monster increase in resolution. The 8.9 has a 3G radio communicating on… → Read More

June 30th, 2011

Sanyo's XX Eneloop Rechargeable AAs Are Clearly XXtreme

xx-rechargeable

Rechargeable batteries aren’t exactly headline news these days, but Sanyo seems so excited about their new XX line of NiMH AAs that it would be cruel of me not to post them. The XX series stores 2500mAh per battery and maintains a smooth, stable voltage all the way down to the end of the charge. They’ll cost $25 for four. → Read More

June 30th, 2011

Tictacti secures funding to take on Heyzap in game aggregation

A lot of companies would like to get on the flash games bandwagon but have no core competency to do it. Out of Israel is a new white label solution called Tictacti. The startup has also now raised a $500,000 round led by Kima Ventures and other undisclosed investors. To date the startup has pulled in $1.6m in funding so far.

Tictacti plans to compete with existing players Mochi Media and heyzap→ Read More

June 30th, 2011

What's Facebook Releasing Next Week? Not Project Spartan.

Apparently, Facebook is gearing up to show off something “awesome” next week. At least, that’s what CEO Mark Zuckerberg told reporters while he was visting the Seattle Facebook offices yesterday. Reuters reports that whatever it is, it has been developed by the 40-person team based in Seattle. And they think it might be in the mobile or tablet space.

All we know for sure is that it won’t be → Read More

June 30th, 2011

How Secure Is Your Laptop Lock? This HP One Can Be Cracked In Seconds

You guys might remember a few years back when someone demonstrated that many tubular locks, like those use on many Kryptonite bike locks, could be opened with a common Bic pen. That someone was Marc Weber Tobias, and he’s back now to warn you again that your laptop lock might not be as secure as you think. Case in point: this HP lock, which his associate opens on camera in just a few seconds by… → Read More

dragonfly
June 30th, 2011

Student-DesignedMicromechanicalDragonflyIsOneMillimeterWide

The winners of the the yearly MEMS (Microelectromechanical system) design competition held by Sandia National Labs were announced a short time ago, and they’re pretty impressive. Students from CMU and Texas Tech were honored and their designs highlighted: the Texas Tech team built a set of millimeter-wide dragonfly wings, and CMU made an electrostatically-activated microvalve. These things are → Read More

June 30th, 2011

Pool Party: Google Has Their Own Secret Photo-Sharing App Too — Built By Slide

Back in March, we first exposed Disco, a group messaging app that the Slide team within Google had built. And that’s not all they’ve been working on. Say hello to Pool Party, another secret project by the same team within Google.

We don’t know much about Pool Party other than it’s a photo-sharing app that the Slide team has built. The emphasis is said to be on creating group albums (“pools”) that… → Read More

June 30th, 2011

Steam Summer Camp Sale Now Underway!

Steam’s big Summer Camp Sale starts today! Not that you can buy anything right now, since the store is buckling under the weight of the traffic. Reddit user Remmib has put together a nice little listing of most of the deals here, but you might want to wait an hour or two before trying to get in there. Some standouts: Valve Complete Pack (Portal 2 included) for $50, Borderlands for $5, a… → Read More

June 30th, 2011

How to hack Google+ to send your friends invites (maybe)

Here in Europe we woke up to find Google had shut down the invitation process to Google +. So after a bit of testing I’ve found out the following how to bring your friends in to it while Google has a lock-down on the service.

If you have an invite to join Google+, right click on the invite link you were sent on email and save the URL. Paste that URL to Twitter or Facebook or email it to some… → Read More

June 30th, 2011

How Making Can Help Our Economy, Improve Education, And Make Us Happy

PBS NewsHour sent their tech reporter Miles O’Brien to Maker Faire where he found the weird, wonderful, and wild arrayed before him. In an excellent few minutes O’Brien experiences the wonder of making and posits that DIY could help us out of a number of doldrums. → Read More

z000006-s2-spiegel
June 30th, 2011

Video:AnExtremelyShortHands-OnWithSony'sS2FoldingTablet

The unique form factors and Playstation branding of Sony’s S1 and S2 tablets have us fairly excited to test them out, but Sony hasn’t been very obliging on that front. Luckily, German tech site Golem had a bit more luck. → Read More

June 30th, 2011

LinkedIn Is Sending Us Far More Referral Traffic Than Twitter.com Now

If I asked you which of the major social sites you thought sent us the most traffic, you might think it was Twitter. After all, the TechCrunch Twitter account has over 1.7 million followers. When you compare this to the (just under) 250,000 fans our Facebook TechCrunch page has, it should be no contest, right? Wrong.

The truth is that if this were October of last year, you would have been right… → Read More

June 30th, 2011

Microsoft Takes A Few Minutes To Laud The New Surface

It’s a bit of a random time for a video like this, seeing as the announcement was back at CES and we had a nice, thorough hands-on with the new SUR40 Surface then, but hey. Maybe you missed it. If you don’t mind a little redundancy (and of course, the ever-present soft techno), this is a nice way to catch up on Microsoft’s Surface project. → Read More

June 30th, 2011

Twitter Reaches 200 Million Tweets A Day, But How Many Come From Bots?

Twitter just crossed another huge milestone. People are now sending 200 million tweets per day across the service. This is up from 65 million tweets per day a year ago, or about 200 percent growth in a year. Last March, Twitter reported 140 million tweets per day last March. Way back in January, 2009 people were only sending 2 million tweets per day.

Well, “people” is perhaps a generous term. → Read More

June 30th, 2011

Google's Uphill Battle With Social, Animated

NMA continues in its tech blog baiting campaign, this time capturing Google’s multiple attempts to crack the nut of social in subtitled CGI format. Our ingenious Taiwanese friends have chose to represent the Buzz debacle as a guy who conspicuously resembles Mark Zuckerberg spying on a woman in the shower and Google Wave as a group of people trying and failing to surf.

Google+, in contrast, is… → Read More

June 30th, 2011

RIM Responds To The Open Letter From A "High-Level" Employee, Doubts Its Authenticity

In response to this morning’s Open Letter from a purportedly “high level” RIM employee to the CEOs of the company, RIM sent over the following statement: → Read More

June 30th, 2011

U.S. And U.K. Latest Victims Of Nokia's Online Store Shutdowns

We already know that Nokia has started shutting down some of its online stores, such as those in Spain, France, and Finland, but we didn’t expect to see the U.S. and U.K. web outlets close so soon after.

That’s right folks, Nokia online is gone. Forever. In fact, the only online stores Nokia has left are in China, Portugal and a few South American countries. Luckily for the end user, Nokia… → Read More

June 30th, 2011

Google Takeout, An Easier Way To Take Your Data With You

Lost in all the buzz around Google+ is an important new feature rolled out alongside it that makes it way easier to take all your data out of Google. It is called, appropriately enough, Google Takeout. It’s got it’s own separate site and is also part of settings within Google+. In settings, you click on “Data Liberation” and then you are given the option to download all of your profile data… → Read More

June 30th, 2011

Starbucks Merges Their Two iOS Apps, Lets You Gift Your Friends Coffee From Your Phone

Oh, how great it is to live in the future. Sure, we may never explore the galaxy in our personal space cruisers (single tear.), but we can buy our friends coffee without even being at a coffee shop. From our phones! → Read More

June 30th, 2011

Andreessen-Horowitz Adds Jeff Jordan As General Partner, Leads $5M+ LikeALittle Series A

Andreessen-Horowitz, the prestigious VC firm started by Silicon Valley veterans Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, has just announced that it’s added a new general partner: Jeff Jordan, the former CEO of OpenTable and former executive at PayPal and eBay.

In conjunction with the news, A-H is also announcing Jordan’s first investment: a Series A funding round in hot Palo-Alto based startup LAL (also… → Read More

June 30th, 2011

Windows Phone 7 Mango To Bring Front-facing Camera Support?

Oh man! That girl you met in the hostel in Prague wants to video chat. It’s like 2 a.m there! This can only be good! HIGH FIVE! Wait. No. No high-five. I TAKE MY HIGH FIVE BACK. You’ve only got a Windows Phone 7 handset. They don’t having front-facing camera support, much less video chat support. Sad trombone. Fortunately, it looks like a fix is on the way. Well, sort of. Anyone… → Read More

June 30th, 2011

Hublot's Complicated F1 Tourbillon Chronograph Watch

I am not always sure what Jean-Claude Biver is thinking. The machine-gun minded Swiss CEO covers so many bases when deciding what new Hublot watches are made that it can be almost impossible to predict what will come next. However, I do know one thing: Mr. Biver is watch lover. It might sound ironic, or silly, but when a watch lover runs a watch brand, it is a good thing. And trust me, not all… → Read More

June 30th, 2011

Skype For Android Gets Video Chat Support On (Very) Select Handsets

When it comes to doin’ video stuff on Android, things can get a bit.. complicated — especially when that video is streamed. That’s why just about every video app to launch on Android is launching on but a handful of handsets at a time. Netflix initially launched on five. Hulu launched on six. This morning’s somewhat-limited-launch? Skype 2.0 for Android. Though it’s not… → Read More