In the past few months, Facebook’s patent portfolio has grown exponentially as a result of acquisitions of patent portfolios from IBM and Microsoft. After acquiring 650 AOL patents and patent applications from Microsoft, the company now has approximately 1,400 patent assets. Amazingly, only 46 of these assets (24 issued patents and 22 published applications) were originally filed by… → Read More
Tumblr President John Maloney just posted (on his Tumblr, natch) that he’s stepping down from a day-to-day operational role at the company.
“It’s the right time for me and a good time for Tumblr,” Maloney writes. “We’re in great hands with David and the excellent leadership team we’ve built.” → Read More
Spanning, which already offers a backup service for Google Apps, is now riding the coattails of Google Drive.
Two days after the Drive announcement, Spanning released a new, free tool called Spanning Stats that helps users understand what’s in their Google Drive. The company says its report gives you data including the percentage documents in your Google Drive by type, the 10 newest and oldest… → Read More
It’s a Friday afternoon (in some parts of the world, at least), so go ahead — take a nice long drink of your favorite alcoholic beverage. If you’re like me, you’ll need it to make it through the CNBC interview with the Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss that aired today. It is embedded above for your viewing pleasure, with CNBC reporters asking for the Winklevii’s autographs and all. Really, drink… → Read More
Google Glass isn’t the only game in town.
Misfit Wearables, a wearable computing startup from the founding team of mobile health company Agamatrix and former Apple chief executive John Sculley, just raised $7.6 million in a round co-led by Founders Fund. The other notable firm in the deal isn’t disclosed, but we hear through a source that it’s Khosla Ventures.
Misfit isn’t saying too much… → Read More
MLOVE is a European mobile conference with a difference. If a mobile conference was crossed with TED and a music festival, that’s vaguely like MLove. Its big annual event is in an old East German castle 200 miles outside of Berlin. Yes, it’s as exotic as it sounds. But this week it took the plunge and brought its special atmosphere to Monterey.
Amid the excellent speeches about the future of… → Read More
Google TV, the company’s first serious foray into the living room, hasn’t exactly set the world on fire. That doesn’t mean Google has given up, though. Far from it. While there hasn’t been much news about Google TV itself lately, the YouTube app for Google TV is getting an update today. Google says that its developers have “been working like it’s a 24/7 hackathon over here to bring all of YouTube… → Read More
It’s an interesting story.
One day, Dave Carroll was taking a flight with his band-mates on United Airlines. When he landed at his destination, he noticed that United staff were throwing his $3,500 Taylor guitar around, and ultimately, damaging it pretty badly.
When United did nothing to help, Carroll took matters into his own hands with the help of a little video sharing site called… → Read More
Restaurants just love to put Flash intros with auto-playing music and animations on their front pages. If you are trying to look at one of these sites on your mobile browser without Flash, chances are you can’t even get to anything else on the site because far too often, there is no way to bypass the animation and get to the information you want, or because the complete site was designed in… → Read More
With the announcement that the Kindle Fire has grabbed 54.4% of the Android Tablet market, it’s clear to see that Amazon’s Trojan Horse strategy paid off. As I wrote back in December, the Fire is Amazon’s way of making all of their offerings “real.” Movies, books, and games were Amazon’s core competency back when all of that stuff was on disks and on paper and that core competency is repurposed… → Read More
Sony’s Android-powered Xperia Play debuted to mixed reviews last year, but according to a newly published patent, Sony was apparently toying with the idea of making something much more interesting before settling on the design they ran with.
Not content with a single physical keypad meant strictly for gaming, the images associated with the patent depict a Sony smartphone with two of them — one… → Read More
Gillmor Gang – John Borthwick, Danny Sullivan, John Taschek, and Steve Gillmor. Recording has concluded. → Read More
Today Yahoo hit Facebook with five big counter-counterclaims designed to invalidate the patents cited in the social network’s infringement countersuit. If the court concurs, Facebook could be left wide-open in settlement negotiations, and might have to pay Yahoo a hefty sum of cash and/or stock.
Specifically, the old web portal claims that after it sued for patent infringement, Facebook … → Read More
The mobile apps from stealthy loyalty startup Punchcard have only been on the market since February, but the company is now reporting it’s close to being cash-flow positive. Like a digital version of paper punchcards which reward repeat customers for their business, Punchcard’s app lets customers snap photos of their receipts in exchange for cash payouts or other rewards directly from the… → Read More
It’s official: We’re back in boom times from a tech IPO standpoint.
2012 is now on pace to be a record-breaking year for initial public offerings, and technology companies are leading the way. Fifty-seven IPOs have been priced since January 1st, which is the most U.S. IPO pricings the US market has seen during the first four months of year since 2000, according to new data out of IPO-focused… → Read More
SimpleGeo’s Matt Galligan and Icanhascheezburger’s Ben Huh have teamed up to change the way people consume news via mobile. Their startup Circa, which boasts a newsworthy list of advisors like former Digg CEO Jay Adelson, has just raised 750K in seed funding from eonCapital, Quotidian Ventures, Techstars’ David Cohen and David Tisch, Tumblr’s David Karp, Eric Norlin, Manesh Arora, Pedro… → Read More
Startups do the darndest things. As you may or may not have seen, Y Combinator startup 42Floors made a bold and fairly unprecedented move today — as hiring goes, in any case. 42Floors Co-founder Jason Freedman had been following the work of UPenn sophomore Dan Shipper on Hacker News. The two had chatted a few times by phone and on Twitter, and Freedman was so impressed by the quality of Shipper’s… → Read More
Ever since Google released its cloud storage service Google Drive earlier this week, there has been some speculation as to what its integration with ChromeOS, Google’s cloud-centric operating system, would look like. Today, Google released the first developer version of ChromeOS 20 with support for Google Drive. As expected, Google Drive is now deeply integrated into the ChromeOS file manager… → Read More
Today my Twitter friends are going nuts about Klouchebag, the service that takes social media parody (and Klout puns) to the next level, with algorithms and stuff.
As with Klout, you enter your Twitter handle and are given a score between 1 and 100. But instead of measuring social media influence, Klouchebag tells you “how much of an asshat you are on Twitter.” Apparently, you’re judged on four… → Read More
TechCrunch Disrupt NYC is almost here! Yes, we are very excited. And you should be, too. We have already announced some incredible speakers and judges who will be joining us next month in New York, and we have even more surprises in store that will be announced as we get closer to the event.
Starting this week, we are going to be giving two free tickets away every Friday. So, if you don’t win… → Read More
In another sign that something fundamental is changing on the iOS and Android platforms, mobile analytics provider Flurry has found that consumers are spending as much time in social networking apps as they are in mobile games.
Games have historically led usage on mobile. The last time that Flurry took a look back in January, it found that half of app sessions were spent in games while 30… → Read More
As of yesterday Y Combinator began its marathon series of interviews to decide which startup teams will ultimately go through the – now world-renowned – program. Interviews go on for five days. Rumours that people have been seen running screaming from the building shouting “The Horror!” have not been confirmed. But I’m currently in the Valley catching up with one or two of those European hopefuls… → Read More
Just watching TV without also using a tablet or smartphone at the same time seems to be on its way out. Earlier this month, Nielsen launched the first part of its report on primetime TV viewers in the U.S. and today, the analytics company is taking a deeper dive into the demographics of those who simultaneously watch TV and use their tablets. According to Nielsen, 45% of tablet owners watch TV and… → Read More
NYC-based financial services startup for families, Tykoon, is exiting its private beta and is launching its first mobile app for iPhone. The company, which aims to change the ways kids think about and use money, is more that your typical allowance tracker application – it’s a platform for earning, saving, giving and spending, the latter which includes kid-friendly access to a curated and… → Read More
The Titan II is yet another success for the hardware team over at HTC. It feels excellent in the hand, even if it’s huge, has a nice balanced weight to it, and the little chin at the bottom gives it some extra pizazz when lined up against other designs on store shelves. It calls to me.
But there are a few issues, as is the case with most any phone. The first, and most important one, is the… → Read More
Apple’s iOS App Store always seems to outshine its computer-based counterpart, but it seems the company’s Mac App Store has just hit a big milestone of its own. With the help of some timely database queries, French blog MacGeneration reported earlier today that Apple’s Mac App Store now plays host to over 10,000 applications.
A quick check with iOS and Mac app directory AppShopper homes in a… → Read More
Downloads for the top 200 free apps in the U.S. iTunes app store took a 30 percent dive in March, according to Fiksu, a Charles River Ventures-backed company that helps mobile developers find users cheaply.
The culprit? Two things. One is that we’re just coming out of the very lucrative holiday season, when downloads spike and people get new phones that they’re eager to experiment with through… → Read More
Samsung has been, for years, slowly approaching Nokia as the world’s biggest handset maker, and today looks like the day the crown has been passed: As of last quarter, Strategy Analytics noted that Samsung shipped the most mobile devices of any single manufacturer world-wide, also taking pole position in smartphones. At the same time, Nokia not only slipped in those rankings but it also got… → Read More
San Francisco-based Fingerprint Digital, a startup building educational apps for kids as well as a parent-child communication system for iOS apps, is doubling the size of its network today with the addition of a series of six new apps from French developer Happy Blue Fish Studio. The developer has chosen Fingerprint’s in-app “Mom-Comm” system (as the company calls it) to enhance its “The… → Read More
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