Welcome to the Summer of 2013. Welcome to the summer when you’re not quite sure which of your Internet activities are being tracked. When you want to start Snapchatting everyone because at least then data “disappears.” Except when it doesn’t. This is the summer when, despite the machinations being clearly reported last year and even over a decade ago, revelations of the… → Read More
Popular exercise- and nutrition-tracking service MyFitnessPal is making its first significant effort to reach an international audience.
Co-founder Mike Lee said that MyFitnessPal now has “well north of” 40 million registered users. That already includes users in other countries: “In absolute numbers it’s large, but … it’s just a small percentage of our total userbase.” So Lee argued that… → Read More
Yahoo! is now the latest tech company to disclose the number of government requests for data it has received over the past 18 months, prompted by the fallout from the NSA spying scandal.
In a statement co-signed by CEO Marissa Mayer and Yahoo! general counsel Ron Bell, the company said that Yahoo! received 12,000 to 13,000 requests from FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) and U.S. law… → Read More
The tech industry has been buzzing about “big data” for years now. And according to venture capital firm Accel Partners, the excitement around the big data space is not set to die down any time soon — it’s just about to enter into a new phase.
Accel is announcing tonight that it has closed on $100 million for a new investment fund called Big Data Fund 2. The fund is the same size as Accel’s… → Read More
Yahoo is offering to purchase social email startup Xobni for $30 million to $40 million, according to AllThingsD’s sources. If the deal goes through, Xobni would be the latest acquisition by Yahoo as CEO Marissa Meyer seeks to boost the company’s talent roster and product offerings. → Read More
I get as excited as anyone thinking about the upcoming 49ers season. Quite a bit has happened since we were 5 years from winning the Super Bowl. The stadium was branded with the Levi’s logo, we got Anquan Boldin from the Ravens for pretty much nothing, and Michael Crabtree suffered a hefty injury. Yahoo!, while on a purchasing spree of startups, decided to align themselves with SF’s most… → Read More
Jack Conte, musician and founder of Patreon, has been on a tear lately with a set of unique music remixes performed by him and a group of pneumatic robots that fire off audio sequences to create some amazing music. → Read More
If there’s one striking thing about those PRISM slides, other than their hideous aesthetics, it’s that Apple’s allocated yellow oval, instead of a date, has the words “(added Oct 2012)” underneath it. That difference is most striking when you consider the fact that Apple competitor Microsoft cooperated with the government a full five years earlier. The company, which… → Read More
Here’s a fun comparison from Optimal, a social advertising and analytics startup: If you look at big brands on social networks, their following seems to be growing more quickly on Twitter than on Facebook.
Optimal says it looked at the data from 4,330 brands, representing a total of 3.49 billion Facebook Likes and 595 million Twitter followers. Last week, those brands added 18.5 million new… → Read More
Following up on their massively successful $2.4M Kickstarter campagin, Oculus VR has just locked down a gigantic $16M Series A to help them build their truly amazing virtual reality goggles, the Oculus Rift. → Read More
The eyesore of a PowerPoint deck that contractor Edward Snowden had leaked had globally recognized names: Microsoft. Google. Yahoo. Facebook. Apple. AOL. Skype. YouTube. The NSA had allegedly collaborated with all of these Internet giants to request and access data on foreign users. But then there was also PalTalk. WTF? Even Stephen Colbert ribbed them last week. “You heard right. → Read More
When most men go out to buy a casual shirt, they think of sizing in terms of small, medium, or large. But a new startup called Trumaker wants men to start expecting more from the fit of their day to day shirts, by bringing personalized made-to-measure fitting to the world of casual men’s shirts — all at a price point that’s in line with the current offerings from mainstream men’s clothing… → Read More
President Obama finally took a sit-down interview on the National Security Agency scandal and we’ve pasted a partial transcript below. Disappointingly, most of it is (very) generic and defensive. But, there is one important takeaway: President Obama couldn’t answer whether oversight courts (FISA) have ever rejected a single NSA spying request. PBS’s Charlie Rose asked, pointedly… → Read More
Online coupon giant RetailMeNot has just filed for $230 million IPO, according to an S-1 released today. → Read More
“The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed,” wrote William Gibson. He’s right. Luckily, the future is mostly in my attic workshop.
I’ve been lucky enough to have access to a Form 1 3D printer for the past week and have come away with a better sense of the platform, the way forward of 3D printing in general and Form 1 in particular. In short, the Form 1 is one of the… → Read More
TechCrunch writer Kim-Mai Cutler and Benchmark Capital general partner Mitch Lasky recently wrote two insightful pieces on venture investment in games (here and here) – both expressing some degree of skepticism of venture capital models for funding game startups. I agree venture funding is not for every game startup, and certainly not every game startup makes for a great venture investment. → Read More
We tend to do a fair number of giveaways here on TechCrunch, but today we’re giving away something extra special: power. Well, no — it’s more like we’re giving away knowledge, but knowledge is power. So we’re giving away power. The world’s largest video education platform creativeLIVE is hosting a “Secrets from Silicon Valley” workshop later this week… → Read More
At first glance, the similarities between PicMix and Instagram are obvious. Both apps are photo sharing platforms with simple, square Polaroid-esque aesthetics, and display photos from friends in streaming feed. But while Instagram is figuring out how to monetize, Indonesian startup, PicMix seems to have nailed it from the get-go. PicMix makes it part of the core photo posting process for users to… → Read More
Google sure isn’t giving up on its Chromebook initiative, even though it’s not clear that the company’s Chrome OS-based laptops are selling all that well. Today, Google announced that it’s expanding its brick-and-mortar retail efforts for Chromebooks through partnerships with Walmart and Staples. → Read More
The MacBook Air was the only new Apple hardware to be announced and launched at WWDC this year (besides the new AirPort Extreme), and while it isn’t a big change from the previous version, it packs some crucial improvements that really cater to the Air’s existing strengths. The 2013 Air is really Apple pushing the envelope with its ultraportable, and that has helped make one of the best computers… → Read More
You know who you are. You check into CrunchBase every day, maybe a few times, just to make sure your competition has not closed that new round. If you are that guy, CrunchBase is about to make your life a little easier. Today we are launching the CrunchBase Daily, an email roundup of the latest funding data from CrunchBase. You can sign up for the CrunchBase Daily by joining our mailing list… → Read More
There is no shortage of apps on the market to help users find new, interesting videos to watch and enjoy. But video discovery startup Squrl still thinks there’s work to be done. The company just released a new version of its iPhone and iPad app that provides new ways to share with friends and find content that is more personally relevant to them. → Read More
GitHub is rolling out a major redesign over the next few days with the intent of putting more emphasis on content, speed and interactivity.
A year in the making, the new redesign is meant to be optimized for how people interact with GitHub on a daily basis. → Read More
This started out as a list titled Fashion Apps Actual Fashionistas Would Use, but in sifting through numerous style-centric apps, I realized that girls like Alexa Chung aren’t going to be using any of them. Outfit selfie services like Pose and Cloth are awesome if you’re an everyday clotheshorse looking to share your new haul — and, seriously, I’m all about the democratization of fashion… → Read More
The most famous man on the lam, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, has answered reader questions in a live Q&A on the Guardian’s blog. Snowden skyrocketed to international fame/infamy after leaking a top-secret program about monitoring Americans’ online behavior. After disappearing from his Hong Kong hideaway, Snowden resurfaced for the online Q&A. You can read the full… → Read More
In the “ask me anything” format made famous by Reddit, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden returned to the Guardian’s website this morning to answer questions from the general public as part of a live event known as “AskSnowden.”
It was a fascinating exchange, and you can see the whole thing here — and we’ll have a rundown of the full event here soon. But there was one standout bit of good news… → Read More
Jottacloud, a cloud storage service based in Norway, is promoting itself as a safe and secure haven, free of the NSA’s long reach that it has with services such as SkyDrive, Dropbox and iCloud. → Read More
Digg today announced that the first public beta of its Google Reader replacement Digg Reader will launch next week and will be available to everybody by June 26th. Judging from the early screenshots the team just posted, we’re looking at a straight-up feed reader with a clean design and – at least for the time being – without any of the social media integrations the company hinted at earlier this… → Read More
What better way for an anti-social app to get noticed than by insulting its target audience? London-based app design studio ustwo has just put up a pair of billboards in the hipster heartland of Shoreditch, East London, a stone’s throw from where its own studio is based, which brazenly proclaim: You have no friends and No one likes you. → Read More
Google may have acquired Geoffrey Hinton’s DNNresearch and is now using his technologies to power its Google+ photo search features, but the academic work Hinton did on deep neural networks (DNN) is now also helping Microsoft to improve its speech recognition systems. Microsoft today announced that it is using DNNs to double the speed of its speech recognition engine for Windows Phone while… → Read More
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