It is true. Everyone loves puppies. Online gaming site OMGPOP wisely chose Puppy World to be its first iPhone game. In the mobile game, you take care of puppies, give them to children and increase the happiness in the world. In the two weeks since launch, the game has been downloaded almost one million times already, and is among both the top 100 free Games and top 100 grossing Games (players… → Read More
I am extremely unmusical (on the verge of being tone-deaf) so I can’t decide whether this new iPhone app is good or bad: Japan-based musical instrument maker Kawai has developed a camera app that scans music notes printed on paper and plays them back in real-time. Dubbed Gakufu Camera [JP], the app is said to be the first of its kind. → Read More
Apple and HTC are at it again — but this time the fight has migrated over to the UK. On July 29 in London, HTC filed a lawsuit against Apple, reports Bloomberg. There hasn’t been any word confirming that this lawsuit is tied to the current patent tussle between the two phone makers, but it would be quite the surprise if it wasn’t. → Read More
It’s never too late to fix bad press with a straightforward, unconditional apology. That’s what the world got from Airbnb today. It was the first time that the company addressed the robbery/ransacking issue on its blog, and CEO Brian Chesky offered an unconditional apology. From the post: → Read More
Earlier this year SV Angel and Yuri Milner partnered on a new venture fund, called Start Fund, to invest $150,000 in every new Y Combinator startup. All but one company from that class took the money. And LikeALittle, the holdout, had already taken funding from both Milner and SV Angel.
At TechCrunch Disrupt in New York a couple of months ago SV Angel said they were making the same offer to the… → Read More
Last week, Facebook’s marketing head, Randi Zuckerberg, caused a stir when she asserted that online anonymity has to go away. But the reason large, powerful networks are pushing for a world in which our verified and authenticated identities exist online isn’t simply to stop cyber-bullying and to create incentives for users to behave more nicely. This is about money. Part of the company’s drive… → Read More
A quiet update this morning to the Apple TV, seems to indicate a pretty big change in strategy. Of course, Apple would never frame it this way, but with the emphasis now squarely back on purchases, it seems pretty safe to say that the television show rental model was a failure.
To be clear, there are still rentals available on the device. But it’s the same limited selection of shows that have… → Read More
Many of you may know this, or may not, but Michael Arrington has an amazing new assistant, Greg Barto. Greg came to us from Hollywood and we have been kindly teaching him the ropes of TechCrunch and what to expect. However, we are not sure we prepared him for this.
Since Greg is somewhat new to San Francisco, he still doesn’t know the city that well. So, Mike has decided to give Greg a… → Read More
This is an interesting little concept/design piece that’s more about the act of taking pictures than, you know, actually taking pictures. The Buttons camera isn’t fitted with a lens or any way to take a shot at all — but it’s shaped like a camera and has a “shutter” button and LCD screen. You hit the button and after a while a picture will show up, but there’s a little more to it than that. → Read More
I’ll say it now, before anyone gets their hopes up: this is most definitely not an iPhone 5. Those blurry, Big-Foot-esque shots from last week still may very well be the real deal, but this is not. This is yet another fake iPhone out of Shenzhen, China — but here’s the twist: its design is supposedly stolen straight from that of the actual iPhone 5. → Read More
The limitations of online-only DRM are, perhaps, in truth only hypothetical. It’s possible to imagine a DRM scheme that must be online all the time, yet handles outages gracefully and never limits your play. Unfortunately, that DRM is not the kind Blizzard is installing on Diablo 3, one of the most anticipated titles of the year. At a briefing given to a few gaming sites, it was revealed that the… → Read More
An Apple TV update is rolling out today. But this device update isn’t the news. Sure, streaming purchased TV shows to the device is a welcomed, but not really novel idea. Now, post update, users will have the choice to either buy or rent a TV show and stream it to their Apple TV. Great. But this update turns Apple’s little hobby into a full-fledged money-making machine. → Read More
Firefox may be getting a very nice facelift soon.
Mozilla designer Stephen Horlander has posted a set of screenshots showing off what may be the the future of Firefox’s interface, and it includes some major changes that give it a more modern look. My first reaction: this looks a whole lot of Chrome. And my second reaction: that isn’t a bad thing at all. You can find the whole set right… → Read More
No, we are not in a bubble. Not, at least, according to the Kleiner-Perkins partner, Chi-Hua Chien, who spoke at our Mobile First CrunchUp event in Palo Alto last Friday. Indeed, as Chien told me after his CrunchUp panel, he views today’s two great investment sectors – in mobile and in social – as unique opportunities to reinvent all Internet businesses.
According to Chien, everything is… → Read More
Anyone who’s ever taken a stab at reading through a Terms & Conditions agreement knows that they normally rival the Iliad in length. There are two reasons companies do this: first, the more words, the more coverage and protection that company gets within its T&C, and second, the less likely you are to actually read it and find out that you’ve agreed to sell your first born child as… → Read More
Those who resist purchasing an electric car because charging stations are less ubiquitous than gas stations or figuring out how to charge your car at home seems complicated have one less excuse to go green. A new system from British startup HaloIPT allows cars to be charge wirelessly using induction.
The wirelessly transmitted power goes to the car’s battery for an ongoing charge, similar to… → Read More
When Zynga acquired mobile game studio Newtoy last December, the social gaming giant took command of one of the Texas gaming studio’s most popular titles, Words The Friends. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Words With Friends, the mobile game (iOS and Android) is similar to playing a Scrabble-like word game against one of your friends. Today Zynga is announcing an upcoming web-based… → Read More
The mystery machine that Jordan introduced us to last week has appeared again, but maybe not in the way we expected. Instead of posing for the camera again, the Atrix-esque handset has popped up in AT&T’s billing system, which seems to confirm that the device has been provisioned with a special tracking code unique to LTE devices. → Read More
rome2rio, a search engine headed by two ex-Microsoft engineers which lets you literally work out how to get from A to B (not unlike FromAtoB.com) via a Google Map with multi-modal travel options, has now added carbon neutral travel to its offering with a partnership with Offset Options.
This allows users to compare the carbon footprint of every travel option available, thus factoring in the… → Read More
Earlier this year, Yuri Milner, SV Angel, and Y Combinator shook the early-stage investment world with Start Fund, a $150,000 investment offered to every startup in every new Y Combinator class, no questions asked. Today, another startup incubator, AngelPad — you know, the one run by a bunch of ex-Googlers — is announcing a similar offer. But it’s more traditional from the investment… → Read More
Robots that have the ability to “learn” to do specific tasks are nothing new, but truly autonomous models are still a thing of the future. The Tokyo Institute of Technology is working on a robot that’s supposed to be able to learn, adapt to new situations and act in a human-like way someday. → Read More
Daily deal aggregator ‘The Dealmap’ has just announced its acquisition by Google. → Read More
LikeALittle, the social network for college students who want a place to anonymously flirt on college campuses, announces the launch of its first mobile product today, LikeALittle People. Like a Color but with text or a Yobongo focusing on Interests, the LikeALittle people app allows you to log in with Facebook and immediately see the Interests of LikeALittle users around you. → Read More
After weeks of speculation, Twitter has just published a blog post confirming that it has indeed raised a “significant round of funding led by the venture firm DST Global, with the participation of several of our existing investors.”
Several reports over the last month preceded today’s official announcement. In early July the WSJ reported that Twitter was looking to raise a new round at a $7… → Read More
Riding high from the release of the (admittedly) mid-range Nokia 500, the folks over at the Nokia Conversations blog have just released something else they seem very proud of: new product naming guidelines!
Starting with the 500, Nokia is returning to their numerical roots for all of their future handsets. This feels like a step backward, but Nokia promises that they have applied a bit of… → Read More
Zynga has been slapped with patent lawsuit from a Segan LLC, which alleges that the social gaming giant has infringed on a patent titled “System for Viewing Content Over A Network and Method Thenrfor.” You can access the complaint here.
According to the document, the technology was developed and patented by Marc Segan and Gene Lewin in 2006 for a system and method for viewing content over the… → Read More
The classic “my dog ate my homework” excuse just got a lot harder to pull off for students at the University of Southern Mississippi. The University today announced plans to hook up its Honors College students with the inedible Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 to extend access to educational content. → Read More
If there’s one thing I’ve learned from dealing with wireless carriers for years, it’s that everyone takes ideas from everyone else.
Sometimes it signals a real benefit for customers (AT&T now offers a “mobile to any mobile” feature that seems suspiciously like Sprint’s), and sometimes… well, sometimes it doesn’t. Case in point: AT&T’s appropriation of T-Mobile’s… → Read More
Twitter is partnering with a German company called Brainloop in an effort to more effectively safeguard, share and collaborate on confidential internal documents.
Brainloop offers an online platform that helps companies like Twitter but also clients BMW and Nokia protect confidential documents and automatically apply the necessary security policies to files that they’d like to shield from… → Read More
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