Chris Velazco is a mobile enthusiast and writer who studied English and Marketing at Rutgers University. Once upon a time, he was the news intern for MobileCrunch, and in between posts, he worked in wireless sales at Best Buy.
After graduating, he returned to the new TechCrunch to as a full-time mobile writer. He counts advertising, running, musical theater, and soup among his myriad interests.
Oh HTC. You’ve produced one of the finest Android smartphones ever (seriously, just look at all these reviews), but you’ve faced more than your share of challenges when it came to actually pumping your top-tier One smartphone. As it happens, that may all soon change.
FocusTaiwan reported earlier today that HTC is preparing to pump out more of its wonderful Ones in short order — Jack Tong, the… → Read More
If you were among the select few that signed up for NVIDIA’s Shield newsletter then you’ve been able to pre-order the company’s curious handset for a few days now. The remainder of the gaming masses originally had to wait until Monday for their own turn, but that’s no longer the case — NVIDIA’s retail partners have jumped on the pre-order bandwagon too so you can now stake your claim on a Shield… → Read More
The weekend isn’t upon us just yet, but here’s a little project to tuck away for when the Sunday doldrums set in — the New York-based tinkerers/part suppliers at Adafruit Industries have worked up a way to give your old pair of Chuck Taylors a bit of luminescent DIY flair. → Read More
Phew. Google just spent the last three hours or so showing off new developer tools, APIs, service overhauls, and the occasional gadget, but not everything the search giant rolled out today got a turn under the spotlights at the Moscone Center. Case in point: according to a post on the official Google Commerce blog, Google Wallet support has been baked into Gmail, so users will soon be able to send… → Read More
BlackBerry’s wryly jovial CEO Thorsten Heins spent quite a bit of time talking up the new mid-range Q5 at this morning’s BlackBerry Live keynote address, but the folks in Waterloo may be working on a follow-up smartphone that’s staggeringly different than the one we saw today.
According to a report from KnowYourMobile, the struggling Canadian company is working an all-touch BlackBerry… → Read More
Remember NVIDIA’s kooky Project SHIELD tablet? The one it unveiled to an unsuspecting public at back CES? Well, it’s officially not just a “project” anymore — it’s a full-fledged product, and NVIDIA is aiming to get the SHIELD out the door this June complete with a $349 price tag.
To help manage demand for the curious gaming portable, NVIDIA is also preparing to take pre-orders. If you’ve… → Read More
It seems like every other day an upstart wireless service provided inks a wholesale deal with someone like Sprint or T-Mobile and effectively sells access to those big carrier networks under a different banner. And every other day, I ignore most of them, because they’re just so damned boring.
Zact isn’t boring. In fact, Zact — an upstart service provider created by Andreessen Horowitz-backed … → Read More
HTC’s Facebook Home-laden First smartphone may only have debuted on AT&T last month, but it appears that the device may be a dud as far as consumers are concerned. According to a report from BGR’s Zach Epstein, sales of the HTC First smartphone have been so disappointing that AT&T will soon be dropping the device from its lineup completely and shipping all unsold inventory back to HTC. → Read More
After a legal kerfuffle with the band Rush’s management company (no, seriously), the team at Anthm saw their social playlist app get unceremoniously booted from Apple’s App Store. So what’s a down-on-their-luck team of app creators to do? Why, give the app a bunch of new features, a mild facelift, and a new name — Jukio — before pushing it into the wild again. → Read More
Here’s a little noodle-scratcher for you fellow mobile hardware nerds to ponder this evening. This little Motorola Mobility beauty, brandishing the model number XT1058, recently passed through the FCC and left the customary paper trail in its wake. All right, maybe calling it a beauty is a bit of a stretch, but here’s the kicker: The rudimentary sketch included with the listing bears a… → Read More
It’s only been a few weeks since the folks behind music charting app We Are Hunted confirmed that it was acquired by Twitter, and it seems that Twitter isn’t done snapping up startups just yet. Ubalo CEO Jacob Mattingly and CTO Ian Downes announced earlier today via blog post that the folks at Twitter have agreed to acquire the scalable computing technology they’ve been working on for the past two… → Read More
Just a week after rolling out the latest version of its Firefox OS simulator, Mozilla has announced that it’s offering a nifty new proposition to would-be FFOS developers. If you’ve got an idea for a killer HTML5 application and the technical chops (or at least the drive) to make it a reality, Mozilla wants to give you a Firefox OS developer device. → Read More
AT&T customers who took the plunge on Nokia’s Lumia 900 have had to sit idly by and watch Windows Phone 8 supercede the software loaded on their own devices, but they’ll soon be able to experience at least part of what WP8 brings to the table. Nokia announced earlier today via Twitter that the Windows Phone 7.8 update is not available to owners of the one-time AT&T flagship. → Read More
Sure, your Android tablet probably works like a champ when you’re splayed out on the couch, but is it one of your go-to gadgets for when you go traipsing through the great outdoors. I’d wager not — they tend to be a little fragile — and that’s why the folks at Seattle-based Sqigle is looking to a bring a curious tablet named Earl to market. As you might’ve… → Read More
Google’s bound to pull back the curtain on some goodies at its annual I/O conference next week (though it’s being characteristically quiet about the whole thing), but could a redesigned version of Google Maps be one of them? That’s what the folks at the (completely unofficial) Google Operating System blog hint at — they’ve come into possession of a pair of screenshots that supposedly depict… → Read More
Windows 8 launched to mixed reviews just over half a year ago, and Microsoft has dutifully pushed out nearly 740 tweaks and updates over the intervening months. Even so, rumblings of a sizeable update (codenamed “Windows Blue”) have been making the rounds for months now, and we’ve finally got a firm idea of when to expect the first public preview.
Microsoft Windows chief Julie Larson-Green… → Read More
One of the most impressive things we happened upon at CES this year was the Tactus keyboard, a special fluid-filled layer that could be baked into a tablet or smartphone to provide users with a physical keyboard that could recede back into the screen when it wasn’t needed.
Since then the company has been flying under the radar, but it turns out Tactus has been hard at work on a prototype… → Read More
There were plenty of promising startups showing off at Disrupt NY 2013’s Startup Alley (one of them even became a Battlefield finalist as an audience choice), but none managed to yank on the ol’ heartstrings quite as much Tapgram. Long story short, Tapgram aims to dramatically simplify the process of communicating for people who have trouble doing it otherwise. → Read More
Fortune reported earlier today that Mike Brown Jr. and much of the team that ran AOL’s venture funding arm have formed their own VC firm — Bowery Capital — that aims to find and fund enterprise-friendly startups. While it’s somewhat heartening to see a new firm set up shop in New York City, there’s another weighty question here that hasn’t been answered yet: now that nearly all of its… → Read More
Mozilla was keen to talk up the 3.0 version of its Firefox OS simulator back in March, but didn’t have much to share about when eager developers could start fiddling with it. Thankfully for HTML5 buffs, that six-week quiet period is over — the team just announced on the official Mozilla Hacks blog that the newly updated simulator is now available to download. → Read More
Ladies and gentlemen, we have a winner. This year’s crop of Disrupt NY Battlefield startups has been one of our strongest yet, but out of the 30 that entered the fray only seven would go on to the final round. HealthyOut, Enigma, Floored, Glide, HAN:DLE, SupplyShift, and Zenefits emerged from the pack as our seven finalists, and their respective teams were faced with another challenge. They… → Read More
There’s a long-held notion that China should be the go-to place for those in need of inexpensive manufactured products, but some prominent makers don’t buy it. Our own John Biggs sat down with Adafruit Industries founder Limor Fried (perhaps better known as Lady Ada) for a chat on the Disrupt Ny stage that quickly turned to deal with the benefits of manufacturing hardware close to home. → Read More
There’s a sea of interesting public data out there just waiting to be tapped into, but there’s a problem — most people have no earthly idea how to access it. And even if they’re able to make some headway, there’s still an untold number of connections between that data and even more data tucked away in another silo.
That’s where New York startup Enigma comes into play — founded by Hicham… → Read More
It was just about two months ago that Jawbone snapped up mobile health startup Massive Health, and now the company has acquired an even more prominent player in the health monitoring space.
Jawbone has just announced that it will acquire Pittsburgh, PA-based BodyMedia, a maker of wearable health tracking devices —the company wouldn’t comment on how much it paid for BodyMedia, but reliable… → Read More
Expect Labs has already received funding from the likes of Google Ventures and Greylock Partners, but the San Francisco-based startup (and TechCrunch Disrupt alum) announced this morning that Intel Capital, Samsung Ventures, and Telefonica Digital have made their own strategic investments in the company. → Read More
The first day of Disrupt NY 2013 is nearing its end, but we can’t end things without giving our Audience Choice winner a chance to present in front of our judges.
Today, the Israel-based folks behind the video messaging app Glide (not to be confused with Battlefield contestant Glider) have been voted our first Audience Choice Battlefield company, and today they’ve officially launched the beta… → Read More
It was just last week that betaworks announced it had acquired a majority stake in fan-favorite reading service Instapaper, and today on the Disrupt NY stage betaworks CEO John Borthwick shed some new light on the process of striking a deal with Instapaper creator Marco Arment. → Read More
The past 24 hours have just flown by for the hundreds of hackers here at the Disrupt NY Hackathon, but the sun is finally up and it’s time to pass judgment on their caffeine-fueled projects. As it turns out, there’s a ton of them here — with 164 registered projects this is our biggest Hackathon yet, and each presenter only had 60 seconds to wow our judges (not to mention the rest… → Read More
It’s only been about six hours since our Disrupt NY Hackathon officially began, and we’re starting to see our intrepid hackers hit their stride. Granted, some of them are a little farther along than others — Darrell found one guy who made an Arduino-powered robot for physically testing apps and devices — but there’s still plenty of time to bring some of these wild-eyed designs to fruition. Let’s… → Read More
Google felt it appropriate to highlight some of Glass’ specs earlier this week, but there’s much more to the company’s wearable display than just the 5 megapixel camera and its 16GB of internal storage. In case you were hankering for a taste of what else makes Google Glass tick, Android developer (and Glass Explorer) Jay Lee spent some time tinkering with his preview unit and managed to figure out… → Read More
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