With all the recent TechCrunch drama– not to mention my own busy September giving birth– you might think our upcoming Disrupt Beijing conference had gotten pushed to the back-burner. You’d be wrong.
We’ve been busy ferreting out and booking more of the hottest names in the Chinese startup scene to augment our already announced keynotes by Tencent CEO Pony Ma, Chinese angel and entrepreneur Lei Jun, and a host of Western entrepreneurs who are traveling to China along with the TechCrunch staff.
One of our most anticipated keynotes is no stranger to Silicon Valley: Innovation Works founder and former head of Google China Kai-Fu Lee. Lee is one of those rare executives who has deep experience in the US with top companies like Apple, Microsoft and Google and deep connections in China as well. → Read More
This Facebook mobile developers page is pretty interesting, first of all because it starts with a statistic, “350 million users access Facebook from a mobile device every month,” which was just released and then because it describes Facebook mobile web app features and includes screenshots that are unlike anything we’ve seen live. → Read More
And that, by the way, is why anyone who cares about real journalism mistrusts TechCrunch—Dylan Tweney, VentureBeat
TechCrunch has plenty of critics. But I don’t think I’ve ever read such a botched attempt at a takedown as a post published this evening on VentureBeat by Dylan Tweney titled, How TechCrunch’s back-room deals destroy its credibility (which has now been taken down—here is a splogged version). Tweney emailed me about 20 minutes before he posted claiming, “We have proof that you guys trade favorable coverage for future exclusives, and we’re going to publish this evening.”
What exactly was this “proof”? → Read More
Ever had cows instead of users? You’ve probably never thought about building software for farmers, but Farmeron just raised a round of investment as well as support from 500 Startups, a seed fund and startup aggregator led by Dave McClure. Farmeron is basically buidling an analytics package inspired by the numerous apps you might have used, such as Omniture or Google Analytics, but built for farms.
Farmeron’s solution is a slick web based application in which you, as a farmer, can keep track of your animals, their feeding, deaths etc. Like we all have profiles on Twitter or Facebook, each animal in Farmeron has its own profile as well. → Read More
While startups in the US, especially in the Valley, tend to be able to find funding at different stages of their life-cycle, there remains significant funding gaps remains in Europe, a disparate market of multiple countries. While the seed stage is gradually being addressed by programmes like Seedcamp, SpringBoard, StartupBootcamp and others, the stage just before venture capital kicks in remains problematic. Often that first round of VC is designed for a significant marketing push or expansion. But a new German initiative looks like creating an exciting model for other countries to follow. It’s really worth watching how this pans out. The newly created GMPVC German Media Pooltakes a “media for equity” approach. → Read More
It looks like the wait for the elusive Nexus Prime may soon be over. Samsung has just started sending out invites for a special Samsung/Google event that’s being held on October 11 at 11:30 AM in San Diego. The topic isn’t listed, but the invitation says we’ll see “what’s new from Android”.
The Prime, which has been rumored for months but is still unconfirmed, is expected to be the first device running Ice Cream Sandwich — the next major Android update, which will unify for ‘mobile’ Gingerbread OS with ‘Tablet’ Honeycomb.
It’s also expected to be a beast specs-wise, with a dual-core processor, 4.5″ or 4.65″ screen, and 4G. Oh, and my favorite rumor: it’s supposed to be running on Verizon’s top-notch 4G network. → Read More
Being an Android user as well as a Flickr user has been dangerous territory for quite a long time now. There’s been no official app, and the third-party ones haven’t been too hot. Luckily for us, Yahoo has finally dropped a Flickr app that not only has their official blessing, but doesn’t suck at all. → Read More
Why is it that random eBay shoppers always seem to have the best luck? In what has to be one of the most fortuitous purchases I’ve seen in a while, someone picked up a Nexus S off of the auction site that just happened to be running a build of Google’s latest Android update: Ice Cream Sandwich.
Well, that’s the story, anyway. Thankfully, our lucky buyer was able to contain his or her excitement long enough to take some pictures and video and send them to Engadget. → Read More
Boston-based BetterLesson launched in 2009 with a simple mission: Provide an easy way for educators to connect with each other and share their lessons. As Co-founder and VP of Operations Erin Osborn and Founder and CEO Alex Grodd are both former teachers themselves (and Jonathan Hendler, the third co-founder and CTO has a mom who was a career teacher), they were tired of watching as their colleagues’ cool, original lesson plans would disappear into the folders and hard drives of obsolescence. So the founders set out to design an open, social platform to aggregate the best K thru 12 teacher-generated content.
To help it grow, the startup has announced that it has officially closed a $1.6 million series A round of venture funding from a host of venture firms, including Highland Capital Partners, General Catalyst, New Markets Ventures, and NewSchools Venture Fund — as well as angel investors like Steve Kaufer of Trip Advisor, Matt Greenfield (Stonework Capital), and Shawn and Jennifer Carolan of Menlo Ventures, NewSchools Venture Fund, and more. → Read More
The highlight of today’s Amazon event was when CEO Jeff Bezos finally announced the Kindle Fire about midway through. We captured it on video, and you can see for yourself how Bezos introduced the device.
He demos the unique interface, which highlights the media you’ve interacted with most recently. There is also Whispersync for movies, which lets you pick up watching a movie where you left off when you move between devices. And he even plays Fruit Ninja to show off the dual-core processor’s speed. → Read More
Xoom users, rejoice! Despite having to stick it out for a few extra months, the 3G version of Motorola’s ambitious 10-incher is finally getting a piece of the LTE action starting tomorrow.
Frustrated users may remember that the Xoom was originally slated to get its LTE upgrade some time in Q2 2011, but months have come and gone without a firm release date.
→ Read More
There are two sides to the story of Google’s move to create a massive, seven storey startup / developer hub slap bang in the middle of of Shoreditch, where so many London/UK/European startups seem to be congregating. Drawn by the cluster effect and the plethora of events in the area aimed at developers, Google’s move surely makes sense.
But behind the scenes I happen to know that Number 10 has been lobbying for this kind of move for some time. In fact, rarely have I seen a government quite so pro-tech / startups as this one, to be frank. After the announcement last year by David Cameron to brand East London “Tech City UK”, I expect a lot people thought the whole thing would be forgotten. I didn’t hold out much hope myself. But, incredibly, once every couple of months since then there has been a major meeting either at Number 10 or in Shoreditch itself involving senior government advisors, large and small tech companies. Where possible, I’ve also attended and listened in. → Read More
As Twitter CEO Dick Costolo told the media a few weeks ago, advertising is a key strategy for the company. “Our advertising method is the only one we need to be a big business,” he said at the time. And Twitter has rolled out a number of new products including Promoted Tweets. But according to a new eMarketer report, Twitter’s ad revenue is expected to be lower this year, and will grow significantly over the next few years once the platform’s self-serve ad product rolls out. eMarketer estimates global ad revenues at Twitter will grow 210% to $139.5 million in 2011, up from just $45 million in 2010, in the company’s first full year of selling advertising.
For background, eMarketer forms its estimates for advertising spending on Twitter through an analysis of estimates of consumer usage, marketer usage, ad pricing, and impressions on Twitter, as well as revenue estimates from research firms and other sources.
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While giveaways and “follow us and win!” contests aren’t always worth calling out, this promotion from @NASA is too great to pass up. They’re planning on inviting 150 of their followers to watch the Curiosity Mars Rover launch. Yes, the actual launch, from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. → Read More
isocket, a startup that makes it easy to buy and sell online advertising, is making a few big announcements today, including the closing of a multi-million dollar series A round of funding from their existing seed investors (the startup raised $1.8 million back in 2009), which includes some big name angels/VCs like Tim Draper of Draper Fisher Jurvetson, David Blumberg of Blumberg Capital, Jeff Clavier of SoftTech VC, and David Cohen of TechStars. (Disclosure: TechCrunch uses isocket to power its direct advertising.)
In addition to its new infusion of capital, isocket is announcing that it has poached Ben Trenda from the Rubicon Project. Ben is joining isocket as VP of Sales. TechCrunch covered his exit from Aol (where he was the VP of Agency Relationships) to join Rubicon in April of last year. At Rubicon, Trenda was responsible for launching the company’s realtime bidding business and helped the Project grow to the second largest ad exchange behind Google. → Read More
Mango has already begun to trickle out into the wild, and Microsoft is still trying to figure out exactly what their Windows Phone users want. Case in point: they’ve just unveiled their new Suggestion Box, where users can submit and vote for ideas that they would like to see implemented in Windows Phone 7. → Read More
If you’ve watched the gaming world at all over the last year or so, you’re probably aware of the Humble Bundle, a charity-orientated promotion where you pay what you want for a few standout indie titles. The few so far have had a great reception, raising millions for charity (EFF and Child’s Play). A new one has just launched with acclaimed strategy shooter Frozen Synapse as the main draw, but there’s a new wrinkle in the pricing scheme.
Instead of just having the whole bundle available for any price you want to pay, you receive either just Frozen Synapse or the game plus the whole previous bundle depending on how much you give. Give under the average and get the game, give over the average and get the bundle. It’s a little bit brilliant. → Read More
The Kindle Fire is the device we were all waiting for and when it arrived it did not disappoint. The Fire is a 7-inch media device that plays well with all of Amazon’s media services including the book store, the video store, and the music store. It includes a web browser and supports Amazon’s own Amazon App Store, a branch of the Android App Store that focuses on apps optimized for this device.
→ Read More
Your cell phone knows all sorts of stuff about you. It knows where you’ve been, which websites you’ve visited, who you call most, and, depending on how many times you’ve found yourselves drunk with your cell phone handy, what you look like without pants on. But still, you can be comforted in knowing that all of that information can be destroyed with little more than a brick and a bit of unchecked rage.
But what about the stuff that doesn’t live on your phone? The other half of the wireless formula, the carriers, know a hell of a lot about you too. Who holds onto that data the longest? → Read More
I remember when OverTheAir was all just fields… Just kidding. This year Europe’s largest mobile developer event lands in the UK’s Bletchley Park, the home of the World War II code breakers. Appropriate. From 9am September 30th to 5pm October 1st, up to 400 developers & designers from around the world will meet for 36 hours of non-stop mobile development. Based on the Hack Day model, attendees will share the space used to crack World War Two’s most complex codes. In honour of the location, they are re-enacting WW2 over the two days, culminating in a live show on stage of the D-Day landings (if they’d taken place on Twitter, with mobile devices, loaded with pyrotechnics). There will be over 100 talks from the world’s leading experts in mobile development and design. It will also host an O’Reilly Ignite event on the Friday night. → Read More
