An hour ago, Google made the massive announcement that it’s agreed to acquire Motorola Mobility, which would give it a much stronger position in the mobile patent wars and also put it in direct competition with Android partners like HTC and Samsung.
Google is holding a conference call this morning to discuss the news. The call is beginning at 8:30 AM EST. My notes on the call, which I’ll be… → Read More
First things first: the big news of the day is that Google has announced plans to acquire Motorola Mobility for a whopping $12.5 billion. The deal is going to have massive repercussions for the Android ecosystem, in part because it means Google will have a much stronger patent arsenal to combat Microsoft and Apple with, and in part because it may well lead to a radically different competitive… → Read More
Rumors about the news swirled yesterday, but Time Warner Cable just confirmed it has acquired Midwest cable operator Insight Communications for $3 billion in cash. Insight serves over 750,000 customers in Indiana, Kentucky and Ohio, according to the press release.
Insight offers bundled video, high-speed Internet and voice telephony services to residential and business customers and also… → Read More
Google just announced that it is acquiring Motorola Mobility. The search and online advertising company is buying the company for approximately $12.5 billion (or $40 per share), in cash. The price represents a premium of 63 percent to the closing price of Motorola Mobility shares last Friday. Google had about $39 billion in cash at last count.
Here’s the other important part of the PR (the… → Read More
We’ve spent countless posts, in CrunchGear times, on the gigantic (60 foot) statue of Gundam that was erected in Tokyo and Shizuoka in 2009 and 2010. The “life-size” statue was deconstructed a few months ago, and now Bandai, the company behind the Gundam franchise, decided to bring it back to Tokyo. → Read More
Here is a selection of posts from the past week on TechCrunch Gadgets: → Read More
Buddy Media, a company that provides Facebook Page and social media management tools to brands, has raised $54 million in Series D funding led by GGV Capital with Institutional Venture Partners, Bay Partners and Insight Venture Partners. This brings Buddy Media’s total funding to just under $90 million. GGV partner Jeff Richards has joined the Buddy Media Board of Directors. One of Facebook’s… → Read More
Aviation enthusiasts interested in greener flying might put an Elektra One plane on their wish lists. PC-Aero‘s electric aircraft can fly for up to three hours on one charge with a 100mph cruising speed. The charging happens inside a solar-powered hangar included in the plane’s anticipated purchase price of $145,000. → Read More
Let’s reverse engineer this new Twitter release to get at the heart of the problem. Before the change, there were two ways to navigate the stream. A last in, first out stream of those you follow and their retweets of those you might not. And second, the @mention stream of posts containing a reference to your @username. The @mention stream is by definition high value, but it relies on your personal… → Read More
The Y Combinator funded Contagion Health and Health Month have merged this week to form one big health data focused startup called Habit Labs. Contagion Health’s product, Imoveyou.com has shut down in the merger and instead founders Jen McCabe and Buster Benson will be focusing on their Health Month site and building out the still in stealth Habit AI.
Aside from the early seed funding tagging… → Read More
Every tech founder thinks he or she runs a lean startup. But what exactly does that mean? In the video interview above Eric Ries, who came up with the term The Lean Startup and is the author of an upcoming book of the same name, explains his theory, which boils down to learning from a small number of early customers to improve and perfect your product before exposing it to a wider audience. → Read More
In the wake of news recently that software and computers are being compromised by hackers and rogue states left right and centre (not to mention the recent attacks on Citibank and Sony) it’s clearly going to make sense that your systems are well checked out, whether you’re a large corporate or a startup.
So it’s timely that software testing marketplace uTest is today expanding to offer security… → Read More
Mobile advertising is a booming business, and Google, armed with its $750 million purchase of AdMob, clearly wants a piece of that pie. One angle Google has been pushing late is the combination of local and mobile, whether that be through Places, Offers, Sites, and soon, Google Wallet. Jason Spero, Google’s head of mobile for the Americas sat down with us to give us a little more insight to how… → Read More
In the four weeks since the social protests have begun in Israel, hundreds have been killed, dozens of women have reportedly been raped, a number of children tortured, and countless districts have been looted. The authorities have imposed a complete lock-down on all cellular networks. All access to Facebook and Twitter has been blocked. Little information is going in, or out.
Except the… → Read More
Office inventory management systems: Not exactly the world’s sexiest software to be sure. Yet, without inventory and asset management systems, many enterprises would likely work at a similar pace to the DMV. Currently, SMBs have no shortage of tools to choose from when selecting a software system for tracking office assets and inventory; however, most of these options involve working tirelessly… → Read More
Even though it’s the end of summer and tech news has started to slow to a crawl, there was actually quite a bit to talk about on OMG/JK this week. In this episode, Jason and I focus on three key things: Amazon’s Kindle web reader, Facebook Messenger, and games on Google+. → Read More
The Huffington Post has come across this fascinating five-minute interview of Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook’s Palo Alto office in June 2005. The clip is apparently part of a longer 40-minute-interview from a documentary about millennials shot by Ray Hafner and Derek Franzese. That interview has never been shown in full, and if I were Hafner and Franzese I’d be figuring out a way to do that stat… → Read More
As we noted in June, Apple is building what is sure to be the coolest office building ever in Cuptertino, CA. The building is so important to the company that no less than Steve Jobs went to a Cupertino City Council meeting a couple months ago to seal the deal. They were eating out of his hand. All the rest is really a formality at this point. “There is no chance that we’re saying no,” Cupertino… → Read More
When I was growing up, one of my all-time favorite toys was my Nerf Super Soaker. Every summer, the other neighborhood kids and I would take off on our bikes, Super Soakers strapped to our backs, and have a full-on water war. It’s been a solid decade since I’ve raised my not-so-dangerous weapon, but the other night something magical happened. I got to go to Nerf’s unveiling of its Vortex… → Read More
I want to talk about American politics. No, wait, don’t go! Don’t worry; it’s OK; I’m Canadian. Your nation’s psychotic death spiral of irrational blood vendettas, vampire-squid kleptocrats, and cargo-cult magical thinking means nothing to me. (Other than its undeniable entertainment value.) Yes, I mean both of your political parties. It’s so bizarre that you only have two that matter. We have … → Read More
We’ve been tracking the twists and turns of the Dropbox mega funding round for over a month now. In July Sarah Lacy wrote that they’d be raising $200 million to $300 million at a $5 billion or higher valuation. A week ago MG Siegler wrote that the auction process was over and Dropbox was considering bids as high as $10 billion.
The company has now chosen which investors will lead and… → Read More
The Gillmor Gang — John Borthwick, Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — waxed and waned about the latest in social media buildout. Most notable was Twitter’s new Activities and @mention views, which rolled up not only your @mentions but follow and favoriting signals in a realtime notification stream. Activity view did the same thing for those you follow, with an aggregate stream of… → Read More
MICGadget has some action shots of the Kunming “Apple” store that raised so much Internet ire and mirth a few weeks ago. Although the insides are the same, you’ll notice one big difference: the apple is still there but the text has been replaced by a nail-salonesque sign dubbing the shop the “Smart Store.” They still sell Apple products, but now they’re smarter. → Read More
The Audi A7 is different. The executive five-door fastback sits nearly atop Audi’s lineup, starting out at $59k with my tester wearing $80k on its window sticker. Excluding limited run sports models, a fully decked-out A7 is the third most expensive car Audi sells, placing only lower than the massive A8 sedan and R8 supercar. Still, even looking like a modern and practical station wagon, the A7 is… → Read More
Here are a selection of yesterday’s Gadgets stories: → Read More
As many may be aware by now, Bay Area Rapid Transit, also known fondly as BART and San Francisco’s version of a municipal subway system, has been on the receiving end of quite a bit of criticism over the last 24 hours. The criticism stems from BART temporarily interfering with cell service in four of its stations in order to stifle potentially violent protests that centered around an earlier… → Read More
From its founding in 2007, Taptu was a startup that specialized in search and touch-based interfaces for mobile, launching a realtime mobile search engine in conjunction with OneRiot back in 2009, for example. In November of last year, however, the startup made the smart decision to bring its mobile search proficiency into the news reader market, launching Flipboard-like Android and iPhone apps… → Read More
Developed alongside with the Google/Virgin America Chromebooks partnership, the “Virgin America Traveler” app is now available in the Chrome app store as promised back in June. → Read More
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