I recently hit Bucharest in Romania to experience the rising star event of the Central and Eastern European scene, HowToWeb. This annual conference is doing an amazing job of bringing CEE entrepreneurs together, and Bucharest is gradually emerging as one of the key tech hubs in the region. The reason? It’s pretty simple – there is great engineering talent, plenty of it (there are 22 million Romanians) and it’s affordable. I could of course name any other number of cities that fit this profile – Kiev, Ljubljana, Sofia, Warsaw and more – but at the moment HowToWeb is bringing many startups and entrepreneurs in from the region to network and party, and mashing them up with international speakers such as Mark Randall of Adobe, Michael Breidenbruecker, founder of Last.fm and RjDj and Pablos Holman of Intellectual Ventures Lab.
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Would our society come crumbling down if Facebook suddenly disappeared? A hilarious new parody film trailer explores a ghastly future where “Zuckerberg deleted Facebook. And then he killed himself. Forever.” Click through to watch the panic ensue. → Read More
Well, this isn’t the strategy I was expecting, but it seems the FCC’s request to investigate the AT&T/T-Mobile deal under the lens of an administrative law judge last week just doesnt sit well with AT&T. Rather than be scrutinized, the company has instead withdrawn its application for the merger.
But don’t let that confuse you. Buying Deutsche Telekom AG’s T-Mobile is still the big blue carrier’s end goal — the FCC just happens to be blocking the road at the moment. → Read More
Shenzhen is a town of migrants. The estimated median ages is between 15 and 25 and the old and battered sits in wild contrast with the brand new. Even in the few years between my last visit and this one, the city has changed so drastically that I barely recognized it. The last time I was here I imagined the place as a cross between a favela and Blade Runner, high and low tech mashed together, the sharp tails of known carcinogens mixing with the soft end of Suntory in a highball glass and the scent of a young executive assistant’s Chanel No 5.
Now it’s mostly Suntory and Chanel, the carcinogens banished to the outskirts of town. There’s a boom in China, and Foxconn’s executives see a way out of many of the messes, real or imagined, that plagued the company.
Foxconn is pinning their future success on their employees’ future success. While this may seem like uncessary largesse, it is an interesting bet on the future of a working class that has been transformed into a middle class. And those workers, once forced by circumstance to stand for ten hours a day, are workers that no longer need or want what seemingly meager financial benefits Foxconn has to offer.
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The European Court of Justice this morning ruled that content owners can not strong-arm Internet service providers (ISPs) into filtering out copyright-infringing content.
This case has its origin in a dispute between ISP Scarlet and SABAM, a Belgian management company responsible for authorizing the use by third parties of the musical works of authors, composers and editors. In 2004, the right-holders group established that users of Scarlet’s services were downloading such musical works from its catalogue by means of peer-to-peer (p2p) file-sharing networks. → Read More
Israeli startup Superfly, which debuted at TechCrunch Disrupt in 2010, launched earlier this year as a service to organize travel rewards (i.e. frequent flier miles or hotel rewards) and educate users on how to maximize their value when using rewards points or miles.
Today, Superfly is taking this a step further by allowing users to book air travel through the website and receive personalized recommendations based on status, miles and more. → Read More
Looking for a last-minute holiday gift? How about that Groupon you never used? Daily deal vouchers wouldn’t actually make bad presents if there was a way to gift them that didn’t involve an email printout tucked into a card. That’s where Presentify.me, which turns deal vouchers into attractive gift certificates, can help.
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Alibaba.com, the massive B2B e-commerce company based in China, this morning published (PDF) its results for the third quarter of the year. The company reported a 11.9 percent increase (to $64 million) in its Q3 net profit, with revenues rising 10.6 percent to $250 million, year-over-year.
This was below Wall Street expectations; Alibaba blamed a weak U.S. economy, a decline in manufacturing, the eurozone debt crisis and on-going platform enhancement activities for missing analysts’ forecasts. → Read More
I recently had the pleasure of visiting a European city which is to a great extent a true example of how technology is changing society and business across Europe today. Once, Krakow was a city infamous for its nearness to Auschwitz and a terrifying example of how the Nazis could destroy a previously peaceful society where people of many creeds had lived together in peace. Under the Soviet occupation, it was just another grey Polish city. But since liberation in the later 1980s and the emergence of a strong Polish market economy in the 1990s/2000s, Krakow is taking its place in the technology world, along with the major hub of Warsaw, as a crucible of technology innovation.
I flew to Krakow to join the burgeoning startup group there known as Hive which showcased pitches from local startups aiming to go global. While there I shot the ‘mini documentary’ below which gives you a flavour of some of the early startup companies in Poland.
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Simroid, a super-realistic dental training robot developed in Japan, caused quite a splash in news outlets worldwide when it made its debut in 2007. The level of realism was pretty high back then, but it’s even higher in the new version that was showcased in Tokyo a few days ago.
The basic idea is that Simroid simulates a human patient during a dental check-up by moving and speaking as realistically as possible, including the simulation of gag reflexes or negative reactions when the doctor touches her “breasts” by accident. Two cameras are recording the treatment, which makes it possible to evaluate the performance of dental students after each training session. → Read More
Here are some recent stories on TechCrunch Gadgets: → Read More
Several news outlets today wrongly reported that Anonymous Antisec hackers had leaked “newly available” Facebook law enforcement guidelines that explain how and what data can be obtained by officials with a subpoena, warrant, or court order. In fact, many versions of the outdated guides were already widely available thanks to an Electronic Frontier Foundation Freedom of Information Act request, as well as other sources.
Though previously available and out of date, the new coverage about how Facebook provides user information when obliged by law could stoke fears about data privacy and Big Brother. By being more public with its law enforcement, guidelines Facebook could have avoided seemingly like it had something worth “leaking”. → Read More
As AllThingsD reported in September, travel search engine Kayak has put its IPO on hold until market conditions improve. Kayak filed its S-1 for a public offering nearly a year ago. Today, the company just filed a new S-1 with its revenue numbers from the third quarter ended September 30, 2011.
During the most recent quarter, Kayak posted $61.16 million in revenue, up 28 percent from the same quarter in 2010. The company also increased revenue slightly from the second quarter 2011, which came in at $56.7 million.
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Yesterday, Bloomberg published a story stating that Apple had made a major (and, frankly, somewhat surprising) change to its App Store policies: it was going to begin allowing game publishers to sell bundles of games as monthly subscriptions, as opposed to a la carte. Historically all games on the App Store have been sold as one-off purchases (or for free), and they can generate further revenue by offering in-app goods and services.
But last week, game developer Big Fish Games introduced an app with a different model. Gamers would purchase the app, and, for $6.99 a month, they’d have access to “dozens” of games within that application (in other words, each game would not require a separate download). Such a model could potentially be a big deal for other gaming companies like Zynga, which could establish ‘hub’ apps rather than having to launch a new app for each game.
As it turns out, that doesn’t seem to be happening any time soon. → Read More
Good news people who are really curious about Quora growth! You might one day be reading an article like this about Quora …
Because Quora has hired a former Twitter and Facebook guy, Andy Johns, to focus on user growth and engagement. Johns, who tweets under the apropos username @ibringtraffic, spent a year and four months at Twitter, two years at Facebook and is now taking his speciality to the fancy Q&A startup.
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Most of the communications apps that have gotten big on smartphones have been built by well-established companies that have existing user bases they can promote to, with Facebook, Twitter and Skype being the top examples. The other successes have most often had venture money to help them cover advertising costs.
But a smaller startup has been climbing up the iTunes App Store and Android Market charges over the last few days. Called Voxer, it provides a walkie talkie push-to-talk voice service reminiscent of Nextel. Or, in modern parlance, it’s sort of like text messages but with voice instead of text. It’s basically a direct competitor to another startup, HeyTell, that we’ve covered, as well as TalkBox… and getting to be more of a competitor every day, judging by its recent trajectory.
The app has gone from #40 to #7 within the past week within the social networking category of the United States App Store, following its rise earlier this year in random other countries like Brazil and Saudi Arabia. It’s now a trend among many Twitter users, too. (Yeah, the social networking category isn’t especially big once you get past the leading web services, but this much growth for this type of app is unusual.) → Read More
Yesterday afternoon, we wrote about an Android developer who’d received a cease-and-desist letter from Carrier IQ, a company whose Android software he’d been investigating.
This morning, under the light of a dozen spotlights, Carrier IQ has retracted their C&D and publicly apologized to the developer. → Read More
The consumer electronics search service Decide.com is teaming up with Consumer Reports on a new deals site which aims to help shoppers know what and when to buy new electronics. Although the companies are referring to the project as a “daily deals” outlet, they don’t mean “deals” in the sense of Groupon, Living Social or flash sale sites like Gilt or One Kings Lane.
Instead, the service is more like a blog/reviews site which features Consumer Reports’ product recommendations alongside Decide’s own data telling you when to buy the item in question. → Read More
Pro Tip: If your new business plan entails buying a bunch of domains that are clearly just one letter off from that of a major brand, you’re probably doing it wrong.
Such is the case for one gent from Illinois, who snatched up not one, not two, but six domains meant to look nearly identical to YouTube.com, filling them dubious surveys. As you’d expect, Google has now moved to seize the domains. → Read More
Guess who seems to be most interested in the plight of the 99%? “Jetset urbanites” according to Experian Hitwise, which used its Experian Mosiac audience profiling system to track traffic to Occupy movement sites from various consumer lifestyles, because hey, why not?
According to Experian Mosaic, which separates people into Starbucks-esque categories like “Gotham Blend,” “Dare to Dream,” “Aging of Aquarius” and “Bohemian Grove” (a little vomit just came up into my mouth), sites like occupywallstreet.org and others in the Occupy category were most visited in the past three months by “Jetset Urbanites,” a segment of the population that was “highly affluent, progressive and tends to live in major metropolitan areas” with a group of people known as “Colleges and Cafes” coming in second with regards to visits. Quelle surprise! → Read More
