Over the last few days the TechCrunch tips box has seen a surge in complaints from Facebook developers who have had their applications disabled without warning. Facebook’s developer forum is filled with threads as developers cry foul, saying that Facebook is killing their businesses without warning or just cause. And developers in a thread on Hacker News are reporting similar problems. So what’s going on?
The sudden bans are the result of an automated Facebook bot, which automatically shuts down applications that it deems to be spammy. Obviously neither users nor Facebook want spammy applications on the platform, but there’s one problem: Facebook recently tweaked this bot to be much more aggressive, and it didn’t give developers any warning before it set it loose. → Read More
Good news, everybody! My head, scanned at Makerbot Industries by artist Jon Monaghan with a high-resolution laser scanner, is now a Thing, available for everyone to own, covet, and place into terrible places.
That’s right: I’m now 3D-printable. → Read More
The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Phil Windley, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — celebrated the news that apps are moving past web sites as the default architecture of the planet. I say celebrate because I think the trend is one that will continue, and even accelerate, as iOS notifications make interoperation between apps more useful. In the process, as @windley notes, notifications and the processes that are triggered, become the focal point of what used to be known as the operating system.
What that means for Windows is cloudy at the moment, pun intended. Though many analysts suggest Windows Phone 7 will gain significant penetration alongside iOS and Android, it will only be possible should important apps drive that adoption. @scobleizer is dubious, and @kevinmarks suggests the locus of power in notification has moved away from OS to Facebook and Twitter. @stevegillmor has his money on @mentions, where social and Web meet in a native wrapper too tasty to ignore. → Read More
What’s more impressive than a car that can do over a thousand miles per gallon? One that was designed by school kids.
In the UK, students from regional schools and universities took part in the annual Mileage Marathon Challenge near Leicester, England, each team vying to set new gas mileage efficiency records in a race around a track. Cars were allowed to coast, but had to maintain a minimum speed of 15 miles per hour. Students worked on the vehicle prototypes, many in partnership with design and engineering firms. → Read More
There’s a lot of hate out there these days from the press when it comes to the daily deals industry. I’m looking at you, TechCrunch. Sure, Groupon has become the whale in this industry, but that doesn’t mean Groupon constitutes the entire industry. Sure, while Groupon may sometimes structure lousy deals for merchants, it doesn’t mean the entire daily deal business model isn’t sustainable or beneficial for small businesses. When done right, the daily deal can actually be very lucrative for everyone involved: Merchants, customers and the daily deal sites themselves.
So why should you take my word for it? It’s true, I’ve got my biases. But so many people have quickly elevated themselves to “experts” on this space that it’s hard to filter truth from the noise. My company, KASA Capital, started Crowd Cut in May 2010. We are now a top player in our markets, generating eight figures of profitable revenues. So, when I talk about the daily deal space, I do so with direct experience. I talk to merchants and customers every day. I have numbers to back my claims. I’m a player in this game, not a self-proclaimed expert who sits on the sidelines. → Read More
Dear Gene,
I was just reading your most recent Washington Post column: an open letter to a j-school student who wrote to you, at her professor’s behest, asking how you built your “personal brand” in journalism. You sure showed her!
Of course, you’re absolutely right that the desire to build a “personal brand” has encouraged some journalists to eschew good reporting in favor of self-aggrandizing positioning statements calculated to increase their own popularity. Similarly, I share your frustration at how user generated content is taking over from real journalism. No-one hates “users” more than me, Gene.
Still, a couple of points you might have considered before filing your column… → Read More
Well actually it was an Instagram of a Foursquare check-in, posted to Twitter …
So I actually haven’t been following news at all today, and when I say news I mean actual news, not tech news which I keep up with like an addiction. And I so had no idea that a bill to legalize gay marriage was passing through the New York State Senate at the very moment I was writing this post about the Quora redesign.
I was actually pretty surprised when TechCrunch Managing Editor Erick Schonfeld Skyped me with “Look at your Twitter feed.” In a quick game of Internet catch up, I scrolled through my feed. → Read More
Quora has just announced a redesign of its Topic Pages and the introduction of Topic Groups, aiming to make information discovery and navigation on the site a little bit easier. The motivation behind these changes is a thrust towards ease of search and content relevancy on Quora, as there is currently a ton of content on the site that people need to figure out how to navigate.
Now instead of a chronological stream on Topics Pages (which you can get to via the tags in questions), users will see Best Questions, Open Questions as well as Featured Questions and Frequently Asked Questions depending on the topic. → Read More
Update: It’s over! Congrats to all the winners – emails have been sent. Thanks for entering, everyone, your bookcases are all very interesting. If you’re curious about the new generation of touchable e-readers, now’s your chance to pick one up just for being a CrunchGear reader. Kobo has been generous enough to donate one of their new eReader Touch Editions for us to give away, and a few gift cards as well. I like the device: it’s a simple, responsive e-reader that would tempt me if I weren’t a scurrilous, paper-loving Luddite. So how do you win? → Read More
Here’s a fun little project, a little too advanced for me but worth looking into if you’re okay with a little soldering and such. Basically you’re just replacing the innards of a book with a frame (or you could cut out the pages, which would look cooler) and putting an LED strip and some opaque acrylic in there. Makes a nice diffuse light that turns off when you shut the book. Instructions and video here. [via Red Ferret and BoingBoing] → Read More
As part of a $500 million package aimed at funding homegrown innovation and high-tech jobs, the National Robotics Initiative is $70 million intended for “the development and use of robots in the United States that work beside, or cooperatively with, people.” Sounds good to me! We’ve already got enough hunter-killers and such. → Read More
Marathon was the Mac answer to Doom, and when I was younger I preferred it infinitely (in my innocence), lauding its creative level design, intense multiplayer, and insanely well thought-out story. When it gave way to Halo I pretty much stopped caring about Bungie, but now they’ve gotten my attention again. Marathon is comin’ to the iPad. → Read More
So you’re walking along the beach, daydreaming, and you think to yourself “How much more fun would it be if I could get up on some weird contraption and fly around at 17 miles an hour just below the surface of the water while children, families, and the elderly scatter in front of me like vanquished enemies?”
Well you’re in luck because this wild-looking vehicle will offer you that privilege for a mere $500. As you see from the video below, the vehicle offers a graceful and tactful way to skip across a pond like a huge freak, bouncing around on a flimsy-looking hydrofoil thinger that will inevitably cause you to flip over and spill your beer. → Read More
It looks like a 9.7-inch WiFi-only TouchPad and a 3G/Wi-Fi TouchPad aren’t quite enough for HP, as rumors suggest that the company may be building a 7-inch model of the TouchPad to be released in August.
This should come as pretty good news to those of you who, like myself, prefer a smaller, more portable tablet. → Read More
Something is happening in Europe. The tectonic plates in the startup ecosystem are moving and, like penguins on ice-flows, we all are slithering around trying to get a handle on how things will play out over the next couple of years.
We’re having exits (such as Tweetdeck to Twitter for $40million), large funding rounds (such as Wooga raising $24 million) and higher valuations (like Moshi Monsters).
Events have ramped up considerably. GeeknRolla in London was a blast this year, as was DLD, Founders Forum and the 1,000-strong Dublin Web Summit. And we still have The Europas and Le Web to go.
At the same time the incubator and accelerator scene is booming. A new study named Seedcamp as the top European accelerator with StartupBoootcamp looking like a pretty strong second.
And this week the brand new Oxygen Accelerator in the UK said it would literally give away £75,000 ($84,000 Euro / $120,000) with no equity tie as a prize to the ‘most improved startup on its programme’ (applications close June 30th, apply here).
This goes to show just how white hot the incubator and accelerator market in Europe is right now.
But despite studies I really feel that, amidst the birth pangs of a genuine pan-European tech startup scene, it is far too early to be ranking incubators and accelerators. There remains a huge amount of chaos in the market, and what appears to be a scramble for positions across territories and cities. → Read More
While Sony hasn’t given a yea or nay on this rumor, industry people are making noise about a possible price cut coming this fall to the PS3. Developers and merchants say software sales are down and it’s up to one of the big guys to start the price wars up again. Will it be Sony? → Read More
After several years languishing in the backwoods of Google’s server farms, Google Health got its plug pulled today. Why did the ambitious project to record your health record online and help you research your every ailment fail? I asked this to Adam Bosworth, the former Googler who originally created Google Health, a few weeks ago when he was in the TCTV studio to talk about his new health startup Keas.
In a sentence, he said, “It’s not social.” In the video clip above, we talk about why Google Health never seemed to go anywhere. Bosworth says the problem was that “Google didn’t push to see what could they do that people would want. They basically offered a place to store date, but people don’t want a place to store data.” → Read More
Sometimes I miss old-school technology, but only on a surface level. I get all giddy every time I see an iPad stand that looks like a vintage TV set or an old-school Game Boy iPhone case.
Brand new technology hidden under old-fashioned designs truly pulls at my heart strings, which is why I was so excited to see Skullcandy’s new Vandal iPhone speaker dock. → Read More
It’s been an incredibly rough week for Dropbox. On Monday, news broke that a bug in the service’s authentication software effectively made passwords optional for around four hours over the weekend — meaning that you could log into anyone’s account simply by entering their user name.
Given what Dropbox is used for — namely, syncing your most important files between computers — that’s a huge deal. Especially since the service has promoted its security features as one of its selling points. At the time Dropbox said that “much less than 1 percent” of users could have potentially been affected. Now we’ve obtained an email that Dropbox sent out this afternoon to users who were affected by the breach and it’s much more specific.
First, the good news: the scale of the attack affected “fewer than a hundred accounts”. But according to the letter, those accounts were all accessed by a single individual. In other words, these weren’t accidental logins due to typos — someone discovered the hole and actively used it to access files that were not theirs. That’s obviously very alarming. → Read More
Spark Ventures has sold half of its stake in Mind Candy, creators of the online children’s game, Moshi Monsters, for $4.9m, generating a 15x return. The move means that Mind Candy / Moshi Monsters is now valued at $200m. Spark originally invested in 2004.
That means that Mind Candy is now one of the most valuable players in the London startup scene around Silicon Roundabout, after the sale of TweetDeck to Twitter for $40m recently.
Moshi Monsters – used by seven to 14 year olds to create their own pet monsters – has 50m users globally and generates millions in revenue from in-game payments, offline merchandising such as toys, books and trading cards. The “Facebook for kids” now has one in three British children as a player and it has significant traction in the US. → Read More
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