One of the most frustrating things I’ve experienced as a leader is putting months into recruiting an amazing VP or engineer, only to have them change their mind at the 11th hour because of a ridiculous counteroffer. This is the big risk you face when aiming for the best people on the planet (see: “Hiring Rockstars”) as they are the “beating heart” of their existing employer, and the… → Read More
So here’s a story that hopefully will be an eye-opener for entrepreneurs and startups, while providing a painful peek into trademark harassment and the importance of due diligence. It goes a little something like this: About two years ago, software engineer Brian Hamachek decided to build an app first on Windows Mobile (how some horror stories have been known to begin), then on Windows Phone, that… → Read More
Affectiva, a startup that tries to measure the emotional response people have to ads and brands, just announced that it has a $500,000 grant from the National Science Foundation.
The company spun out of MIT’s Media Lab. This is its second NSF grant — in January 2011, it won another grant to help launch its Affdex service, which uses webcams to track consumers’ responses as they watch videos. → Read More
Last summer, after graduating from AngelPad, San Francisco-based Crittercism announced that it had raised $1.2 million in seed funding from the likes of Google Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, Opus Capital, Shasta Ventures, and AOL Ventures.
Today, the startup has received further validation for its diagnostic and management tools for mobile developers, as Opus Capital, Shasta Ventures and Google… → Read More
When the Galaxy S and the Galaxy S II made their respective journeys to the United States, they lost a little something that international customers have enjoyed since the beginning: the physical home button.
According to some new images obtained by The Verge though, that era may be drawing to a close, as T-Mobile’s GSIII variant may sport that home button after all.
It may seem like a… → Read More
It’s a testament to how important Facebook has become in the web ecosystem that the social network’s performance issues yesterday didn’t just affect the site itself but also a wide variety of other sites as well. Performance monitoring company Compuware APM, which analyses the performance of thousands of top sites, just sent us some interesting data about how Facebook’s problems yesterday… → Read More
Gillmor Gang – Kevin Marks, John Taschek, Robert Scoble, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor. Recording has concluded. → Read More
Well, it’s about time. Many of us were absolutely floored by the iCache Geode mobile wallet when it first appeared back in April, and now the company has announced that the hotly-awaited accessory is now available for $199.
In case you missed it the first time around, the iCache Geode is an iPhone case with a particularly wonderful twist — in addition to just wrapping a protective layer of… → Read More
There’s been a lot of flirting going on in recent months between Apple and Facebook. In February, Apple CEO Tim Cook told a group of investors that Facebook was “the one company that is closest to being like Apple”. Last week, Apple did a big App Store promotion for Facebook’s new Camera app, and clearly knew about it well beforehand. Then, of course, there were Cook’s comments at the D10… → Read More
One interesting trend I’ve been watching over the last year or so is the intersection of social and personalization as a way to discover new videos. And, of course, how it helps users to discover new music videos. The latest entrant into the social music video discovery category is Rockify, which just launched its public-facing portal for music videos, Rockify.TV, in public beta.
Rockify.TV is… → Read More
If you’ve got a vacation coming up, a startup called HoozTrippin is aiming to make it more fun by connecting you with other travelers.
Co-founder and CEO Steven Oh (who was formerly the head of product at Rotten Tomatoes and Movielink), describes the site as “Match.com for travelers,” except broader: “We don’t limit ourselves to just singles.” In some ways, it sounds like a complement to a… → Read More
The Nokia Lumia 900 The Dark Knight Rises Edition handset has made its way on the interwebs recently and it’s nothing short of a beauty, with a black polycarbonate unibody frame and a laser-etched Batman logo across the back. Moreover, the phone — which is usually limited to either a black or white background and a handful of color themes like Nokia blue, teal, lime, mango, and pink — will… → Read More
Zillow, the popular online real estate search engine, just announced that it has closed its previously announced $40 million acquisition of RentJuice. With RentJuice, Zillow now owns a rental relationship management service for landlords, property managers and rental brokers that helps them market their inventory and client relationships. RentJuice is currently being used to manage one million… → Read More
Ticket search engine SeatGeek is best known as the place to find good deals on sports tickets, but it’s working to dominate ticketing for any live events, including concerts. It just announced its first partnership deals on the music side, with AOL Music (which is, yes, owned by the same parent company as TechCrunch), Pollstar, and Emusic.
Now, if you go to AOL Music, for example, and you’re… → Read More
The online mapping space is quickly heating up. What used to be a relatively straightforward competition between Google and Microsoft (with Openstreetmap and a few other smaller players standing on the sidelines) will likely become a far more complex scenario now that Apple is likely to reveal its own solution at its WWDC later this month. Google, it seems, is trying to steal some thunder from… → Read More
Earlier this month, Bing, the other white meat search engine, revealed its big redesign, which put a heavy emphasis on social search. Today, Microsoft announced the new version of Bing.com is now available to all U.S. users. Nothing has changed between then and now, but if you regularly visit Bing.com to perform searches (ha, right?) then you’ll definitely notice a big difference. The new search… → Read More
In an excellent piece by David Sanger, the NY Times has confirmed what we all suspected: that the US deployed the Stuxnet worm, a powerful worm that targets very specific machines within Iran’s nuclear enrichment program.
Mr. Obama decided to accelerate the attacks — begun in the Bush administration and code-named Olympic Games — even after an element of the program accidentally became… → Read More
Max Schrems, the Austrian founder of Europe Vs. Facebook, has forced Facebook to put proposed policy changes up for a vote by all its users. By mobilizing his privacy group to flood Facebook’s Site Governance page with pasted messages, many more than 7,000 comments were received on the proposal — the threshold for triggering a vote. Europe Vs. Facebook is demanding sweeping changes to… → Read More
While in the US the visibility of women in technology startups is pretty well established, in Europe it’s suffered a little from the more general problem of the fragmented nature of the European tech scene. Things have improved slightly in recent years (at least that’s my impression, although who knows about the stats on the ground?), but it remains the case that there are far more men than women. → Read More
Waxing for two at Take-It-Offs in Scranton? $100 worth of Polka lessons for 40 cents? An avant garde grilled cheese sandwich meal with metal shavings in it at Chez Naif for $60? You don’t want any of those daily deals, right? But they’re still coming.
Two people (lovers, really), Edwin Hermawan and Lea Pische, wanted to fight back. And they did. With UnsubscribeDeals.com.
“We stopped buying… → Read More
Happy Friday, here’s some more patent trolling nonsense for you today: Google said on Thursday it had filed a complaint with the European Commission which claims cell phone maker Nokia is colluding with Microsoft to make money off their patents. The complaint states that the two companies are using proxy companies (read: patent trolls) to fight against Google Android.
Nokia has since called the… → Read More
Cricket Communications made waves yesterday morning when they announced that they would be the first prepaid carrier in the country to offer Apple’s iPhone, and now it seems that other contract-averse carriers may soon do the same.
TechnoBuffalo purports that Sprint-owned Boost Mobile will soon enter the fray by selling Apple’s little mobile juggernaut come “early September.”
Like Cricket… → Read More
Another entry in the mobile-first, private social networking for families space (yes, apparently this is a thing now): 23snaps, a new iOS application that works like a mini-Facebook for posting status updates, photos and videos of your kids. The app isn’t anywhere near as dazzling as current private social network darling Path, but it’s a functional and easy-to-use alternative to the typical… → Read More
Watch out, Best Buy and Samsung. Ikea is seemingly doing to home entertainment systems what Apple did to portable electronics. The company previously revealed its upcoming entrance into the home theater market. As the video above clearly shows, Ikea is injecting a full dose of their Swedish magic into the Uppleva line. Never mind about the thought that Apple might disrupt the TV market. Ikea is… → Read More
Much of the time when you talk about browser market share, it’s in the context of IE vs. Chrome vs. all the rest. But new data released from e-commerce technology company Monetate today has thrown the mobile version of Safari into the mix. The result? The firm found Mobile Safari to be the most rapidly growing web browser over the past year on its sites, going from 5.84% in Q1 2011 to 11.12% in… → Read More
Ever want to re-watch one of those awesome and inspirational five-minute Nike ads, but didn’t know where to look? Video ad distributor Sharethrough has rolled out a new video portal that is designed to bring together all the most innovative branded ads all in one place.
With the launch of Sharethrough.tv, the startup hopes to aggregate the largest repository of branded videos on the web. By… → Read More
The powers at the ETSI just released the specifications for a new SIM format. This card, the fourth form factor or the 4FF, is 40% smaller than the current micro-SIM card. It looks very similar to traditional SIM cards with a rectangle design and a notched corner. It’s just smaller at 12.3mm by 8.mm with the same thickness as the current cards. Even with the smaller size, these cards will be… → Read More
Property startup Zoopla and the A&N Media (DMGT)-owned Digital Property Group (Findaproperty / Primelocation) have formally completed their merger following approval by the UK’s Office of Fair Trading (OFT). The transaction, which was agreed last October, had been pending subject to clearance from the OFT which was granted in April.
The deal creates a property giant which now takes on … → Read More
MoneySupermarket, a UK-based price comparison site for financial services, is acquiring advice site MoneySavingExpert from founder Martin Lewis, for £87 million ($133 million).
Lewis, a personal finance journalist, launched MoneySavingExpert in 2003. According to the site’s Google Analytics metrics it gets 39 million unique visitors and about 277 million page impressions a month. That makes it… → Read More
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