Looking to turn yourself (or your show) into a YouTube star but don’t know where to begin? YouTube’s looking to help — the video portal has launched a comprehensive guide outlining how content producers should be approaching the platform and which features they can take advantage of. The 70 page guide has a fitting title: The Creator Playbook.
The new document was discussed today at the… → Read More
BigCommerce, a company that provides e-commerce software to online retailers and merchants, has raised $15 Million in Series A funding from General Catalyst Partners.
Launched in 2009, BigCommerce provides a comprehensive SaaS for retailers and merchants to manage e-commerce online. BigCommerce helps small businesses power anything and everything related to an online storefront from search to… → Read More
It’s time to bring TechCrunch Disrupt back home to San Francisco. We are accepting applications for startups to launch at the Disrupt Startup Battlefield until midnight tonight. Applications for the Startup Battlefield can be submitted here.
Does your startup have what it takes to be the next Getaround, Qwiki, or Soluto—and make it through the judges gauntlet to claim the top prize of… → Read More
Google+ is not on this list, yet. Mostly because I haven’t got a handle on its core value as a news trigger. If you’re Scoble, the value is obvious as he is now demonstrating by turning it into his blog. But sooner or later the service will have to decide what it wants to be when it grows up — a conversation hub with no tools for rapid synthesis of knowledge, a social graph to challenge Twitter… → Read More
This last week we’ve all watched in horror as the story unfolded about an Airbnb user who had her home ransacked a month ago.
Other than the sideshow of us getting dragged into the story, it seemed to be winding down yesterday. The company appears to be bending over backwards to compensate the victim and avoid another of her blog posts where she writes about how scared she is, still homeless… → Read More
We’re back for a new episode of OMG/JK — featuring both of your hosts reunited in the TCHQ studio (I was back in SF for our Mobile First CrunchUp). Oh, and this episode also includes a cameo by a man in a large yellow jacket. I won’t spoil it.
We kick off this week’s episode by diving into Twitter’s new ad format, which allows brands to place Promoted Tweets at the top of their followers’… → Read More
Flush with $100 million in new funding, Square is continuing to grow like a weed in the mobile payments space. After passing the $3 million mark at the end of May, Square is now processing $4 million in mobile payments daily, and is on track to reach over $100 million in transactions in July. And COO Keith Rabois tells us that he expects the company to double this volume by October.
In late… → Read More
After 3.5 years, I’ve finally re-joined the community of car owners.
Between February 2008 and last week, I was car-less. I borrowed and rented cars, took taxis and Zip cars, and occasionally biked. I also bummed a lot of rides (thank you very much – you know who you are). It had started when the warranty on my fancy German gas guzzler expired; I sold the thing, and never really found the… → Read More
Editor’s note: This guest post was written by Dave Chase, the CEO of Avado.com, a health technology company that was a TechCrunch Disrupt finalist. Previously he was a management consultant for Accenture’s healthcare practice consulting to 25 hospitals and was the founder of Microsoft’s Health business. You can follow him on Twitter @chasedave.
Since the latter half of the 90’s, the… → Read More
‘”Business!” cried the Ghost, wringing his hands again. “Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence were all my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!”‘ – A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens
I know, I know. I’m old. Worse than that, I’m nostalgic. In the past few months… → Read More
We had a blast yesterday at our Mobile First Crunchup and 6th Annual Summer Party at August Capital. At our CrunchUp, we had some amazing speakers and special guests. Even Chamillionaire managed to make a certain speaker sweat and started a debate on why Android doesn’t have a decent phone.
Later in the day, the drinks were flowing at August Capital and even Ron Conway was spotted enjoying a… → Read More
Startups love to point to big growth numbers, and the press loves to publish them. We are as guilty as anyone else in this regard: one million downloads, 10 million registered users, 200 million tweets per day. These growth metrics can often be signs of traction (which is why we report them), but just as often they are not. It is important to distinguish between real metrics and what Lean… → Read More
The Gillmor Gang — Danny Sullivan, Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — covered the gamut between Google+ and well, Google+. The new social platform continues to delight and confound the early adopters in record numbers. @scobleizer remains optimistic that the search giant will roll out filtering features to cut down on the noise of squids, kittens, and well, Scoble comment… → Read More
Oh, how embarrassing. Earlier this week, Elizabeth May, the leader of Canada’s Green Party, took to her Twitter account and declared war on wi-fi. To think I very nearly voted for these clowns in our recent election. Lesson for my American friends: just because you find all the major parties unpalatable doesn’t mean that the fringe parties aren’t even worse. Meanwhile, can someone please get an… → Read More
Here are some of yesterday’s stories on TechCrunch Gadgets: → Read More
You’ve doubtless heard about the Airbnb fiasco – being dubbed #ransackgate by some – that’s been exploding the last couple of days. If you’re not familiar with the story, we first covered it here, and there’s some terrific source material from the woman who’s home was ransacked and robbed here and here.
Today Y Combinator founder (and Airbnb investor) Paul Graham wrote this: → Read More
Last November, TechCrunch’s own Sarah Lacy sat down with Vineet Devaiah from “social streetview” startup, Phototour.in, which, at the time, had just received term sheets from a number of high-profile U.S. investors and had recently been awarded the “Top Emerging Technology Company of 2010″ by Nvidia. The startup was the first international, non-funded, under-20-member company to win the award… → Read More
Today at Aol West Headquarters, a number of entrepreneurs, VCs, and executives gathered to discuss the state of the mobile industry and mobile technology. After a series of individual panels, the day concluded with the crowd of panelists gathering together for a lively discussion about the future of mobile, current mobile trends gaining legs, as well as what’s missing. Chi-Hua Chien of Kleiner… → Read More
As we closed out today’s Mobile First CrunchUp, all of our speakers took the stage for an extended roundtable discussing a variety of topics affecting mobile: design, gaming mechanics, and, of course, iPhone vs Android.
One of the last questions posed during the roundtable came from Wired’s Mike Isaac, who asked how the next version of Android, which is called Ice Cream Sandwich, would help… → Read More
“I’ve used all these different devices — they suck.”
Short. Sweet. To the point. Rarely do you find that at tech conferences. Luckily, Chamillionaire loves coming to ours.
That was the hip-hop star’s words to Android design lead Matias Duarte during our Mobile First CrunchUp today. During the closing panel, Chamillionaire got up to express his love for the iPhone and his frustration that… → Read More
just.me, a stealth startup playing in the social and mobile spaces, has just raised $600,000 in seed funding from a list of all star investors including Google Ventures, True Ventures, SV Angel, Betaworks, Don Dodge, Patrick Gannon, Michael Parekh, Steve McArthur, and Four Horsemen LLC.
just.me was founded by Keith Teare, a serial entrepreneur and a co-founder of TechCrunch. Teare previously… → Read More
Kleiner Perkins VC Chi-Hua Chien kicked off the “Money Matters” panel at the TechCrunch Mobile First CrunchUp with a telling understatement, “There seems to be a lot of new business models around mobile.” Indeed, what makes mobile unique as a communication platform is that traditional advertising isn’t the default. See: Kiip.
As Chien pointed out, because of constraints on-screen size, display… → Read More
Next Jump, which powers rewards programs for thousands of corporations and credit card companies, has been steadily expanding its platform to offer a more social experience for consumers. For example, the startup inked a deal with LivingSocial to get access to its inventory of daily deals, and allows users to use Next Jump’s WOWpoints to buy deals and merchandise from retailers like Target and… → Read More
What would Craigslist look like if it was a mobile app? It might look a little bit like Blockboard, a neighborhood app which is expanding today from its initial neighborhood of the Mission in San Francisco to the rest of the city. Co-founder Stephen Hood demoed the app at our Mobile First CrunchUp today.
It is designed from the ground-up as a neighborhood app through which neighbors can… → Read More
Ten startups were showcased to investors at the brand new Springboard accelerator programme in the UK today, which has joined Seedcamp, Startup Bootcamp and Hackfwd as one of the bigger programmes across Europe.
The startups to present were the following, (click the links to get our coverage of each company):
Adwings, Arachnys, Apiary, HubFlow, Mayday, MiniMonos, Playmob, Publification, … → Read More
Perhaps one of the most interesting new startups to emerge from the Springboard accelerator programme at its first investor day today has been Publification.
Right now there is a problem with ebooks. They are files. They are not dynamic. You need a reader. Not all readers work with all files. Plus, publishers are in hoc to the platforms like Kindle and iBooks. It’s a total pain, for publishers… → Read More
Today during our Mobile First CrunchUp in Palo Alto, CA, our own Jason Kincaid led a panel focused on designing the mobile experience. On the panel were Bump’s Jake Mintz, Soundtracking’s Steve Jang, and Google’s Matias Duarte (the Director of User Experience for Android). Not surprisingly, much of the talk was iOS versus Android. Such is the state of the mobile world right now.
It was a good… → Read More
At today’s Mobile First CrunchUp, Erick Schonfeld sat down with AdMob and Churn Labs founder Omar Hamoui, and Instagram founder Kevin Systrom to discuss how both founders approached mobile development vs. the web.
Systrom, whose popular iOS photo sharing app just passed 7 million users, explained that the biggest opportunities for Instagram are on mobile, not the web. “I don’t believe… → Read More
Here at the TechCrunch Mobile First Crunchup storied mobile developer Joe Hewitt spoke about the future of native and mobile Web apps with TC writer MG Siegler. Hewitt is most famously the Facebook mobile developer that stopped doing work on Facebook’s iOS efforts after he got fed up with Apple’s staunch App Store rules.
Hewitt seemed softer with regards to Apple at today’s talk, even telling… → Read More
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