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.
There are plenty of ways to get your flight school kicks with your smartphone or tablet — this missile shooting Griffin chopper comes to mind — but few manage to ooze as much style (or cost as much money) as Parrot’s AR.Drone 2.0.
Getting the thing ready to fly is surprisingly simple. Once you’ve popped the battery into place, and turned the thing on, the Drone creates its own Wi-Fi network that the control device connects to. From there, just fire up the FreeFlight app on your iOS or Android device and you’re off to the races.
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If SpaceX founder Elon Musk felt like winning the Super Bowl when the Dragon (perched atop a Falcon 9 rocket) finally launched on Tuesday, he must be absolutely over the moon now.
At 9:56 AM Eastern this morning, astronaut Donald Pettit coaxed the International Space Station’s gangly robotic arm into grabbing the unmanned Dragon capsule, marking the first time a private spacecraft has docked with the station.
“Looks like we’ve got a Dragon by the tail,” Pettit said. → Read More
It looks like the webOS contingent at HP isn’t done losing people. HP laid off 275 webOS employees back in February shortly after they announced their plans for the Open webOS project, and now their Enyo team is being picked apart.
The Verge reported late last night that key members of the Enyo team have left their posts at HP, and will migrate over to Google.
Enyo, in case you’re not steeped in webOS lore, is a JavaScript framework that allows devs to “build and maintain HTML5 applications of any size and complexity” that debuted alongside the ill-fated TouchPad. Considering that the platform is meant to help devs create platform-agnostic apps that can be tailored either for the web or for a mobile device, the team behind it apparently made for an enticing target for Google. → Read More
Late last year, Yahoo filed for a trademark on the phrase “Yahoo Axis.” The filing raised more questions than answers at the time, but after six months Yahoo has finally spilled the proverbial beans — Axis is both a new search-oriented add-on for your web browser, and a new browser app for iOS.
Before I talk about what it’s like to actually use Axis, let’s first discuss why the hell they’re doing this in the first place. TechCrunch spoke to Yahoo’s Director of Product Management Ethan Batraski, and he told us his his job has been to figure out what search looks like over the next few years. Yahoo Axis was one of his answers.
“No one’s innovated on ‘How do I get rid of the search results page altogether’”, Batraski said. “That is what we want to do.”
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David Lawee, Google’s VP of Corporate Development, sat down for an informative chat with MG Siegler at Disrupt NYC this morning, and it wasn’t long before the conversation turned to Google’s track record with mergers and acquisitions.
“We’ve done 120 acquisitions since 2003, maybe one in 2002,” Lawee said. “And two-thirds of them have been successful.”
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Earlier this morning, our own John Biggs was joined on stage by a handful of New York-based makers who have made a name for themselves by building physical things (or in one case, building something that builds other things). Biggs kicked off the panel with a simple question: — can we bring manufacturing back?
Bre Pettis, CEO of Makerbot Industries, has two shifts of workers putting together all of his Makerbots in Brooklyn, and had a bit of advice for hardware creators looking to shift production to China. He recommended that until makers need to produce runs of 50,000-100,000 units, they’re much better off keeping the production process in the United States. It helps to keep makers intimate with their tech, not to mention makes it easier for them to handle any unexpected issues faster. → Read More
They say that all work and no play makes for some dull boys, and I think brothers Darren and Derek Dodge would definitely agree with that sentiment. The two of them have just launched a new iPhone app called About Last Night here on our Disrupt stage that aims to connect fans of the nightlife and help them find the best parties, clubs, concerts, and games every night.
“We like to think of ourselves as a social network completely geared around nightlife,” Darren told me. → Read More
There was a time when I would watch shows like Extreme Couponing with a sense of morbid amusement — there was clearly plenty of money to be saved by clipping bits of dead plant matter out of a newspaper, but the process of keeping track of or remembering them when I go to the store has always stymied me.
That may no longer be the case, if Ted Mann and his Philadelphia-based team have anything to say about it. They’ve just released a new iOS app called SnipSnap that’s meant to simplify the process of snipping, saving, and even sharing those money-saving scraps of paper.
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A Wiimote turned on its side makes for a perfectly serviceable controller when plowing through retro games from the Wii Shop Channel, and the Classic Controller isn’t bad either, but I wouldn’t call either of them an ideal solution.
On the other hand, ThinkGeek’s new Super Famicom controller for the Wii manages to come pretty damned close, especially if you’re a gamer who spends your time steeped in the past. → Read More
Unless an app you have your eye happens to have a free demo version to muck about with, there’s little one can do to try out an Android app on a device in advance. Sure, you could buy the app straight from the Google Play Store and get a refund within 15 minutes if you’re not satisfied, but Amazon has a new solution in place that helps take the friction out of that testing process.
The latest update for the Amazon Appstore Android app packs a welcome surprise — instead of being stuck Test Driving your apps on your PC, you’ll now be able to do it from directly within the app.
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Sprint’s launch plans for the HTC EVO 4G LTE were ruined last week when shipments of their shiny new Android handset were held up by United States Customs, but we’re hearing that they may been hitting doorsteps and store shelves sooner than expected.
According to Sprint, the devices are now currently sitting safely in Sprint’s warehouses and are expected to start trickling out into the world “on or around May 24.” → Read More
TechCrunch contributor Andrew Keen took to the Disrupt stage with our own Alexia Tsotsis earlier this morning to do two things — promote his new book Digital Vertigo, and tackle the problem of sharing too much.
According to Keen, the more of our lives we broadcast, the more transparent we become. Fair enough, though at some point during that process he believes that we are slowly losing “some essential quality of what it means to be human” when we don’t keep secrets.
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After nearly 24 hours of fighting fatigue and crafting code, our Disrupt NY 2012 Hackathon is finally drawing to a close. Not a moment too soon — I think some of our hackers are about ready to keel over at this point.
Nevertheless, we just got an eyeful of 92 projects that our wonderful hackers have been slaving away on through the night, but only three teams will be able to show off their work on the main Disrupt stage this Wednesday. → Read More
It’s been a long, caffeine-fueled ride for the hundreds of hackers who have set up at our big Disrupt NY 2012 Hackathon, but the furious process of taking a wild idea and turning it into something real is finally winding down.
Projects were being finalized, UIs were being tweaked, last minute Red Bulls were being downed — it was a quite a sight to see everyone buckling down for those final few minutes before submissions were due. → Read More
It’s been about eight hours since our big Disrupt Hackathon kicked off, and all of our intrepid hackers have been busy letting the code (and the caffeine) fly ever since.
I managed to tear a few of them away from their work (these folks are pretty motivated, so it took a bit of doing) to tell us a little bit about themselves and what they’ve been trying to crank out during the wee hours of the morning.
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It’s been just over nine months since Google announced their intentions to acquire hardware manufacturer Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion, and now it seems that the final pieces of the deal have fallen into place.
According to a new report from the Associated Press, Chinese officials have finally given the Google-Motorola deal their blessing.
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My set ritual before going to bed each night is as follows — turn out the lights, plug in my iPhone, take off my glasses and attempt vainly to nod off. Step two in that process can be a bit of a crapshoot in the dark, but the folks at Scrap Pile Labs have recently kicked off a new Kickstarter campaign for a product called the CordLite that just may come in handy.
As the name sort of implies, the CordLite is a dock connector cable for iDevices that, well, lights up thanks to a pair of forward-facing LEDs. It’s a very simple concept, but the thoughtful execution is what make this project worth keeping an eye on. → Read More
As if anyone needed any more proof that the Samsung’s Galaxy S III would sell like (slightly more expensive) hotcakes, a report from the Korea Economic Daily reveals that the long-awaited handset racked up over 9 million pre-orders from mobile carriers across the globe.
To put that number in a bit of perspective, the tremendously popular Galaxy S II was officially unveiled at MWC in February 2011, and managed to rack up 3 million global pre-orders by the end of April. Its successor, on the other hand, managed to garner triple the number of pre-orders in the three weeks since it was revealed in London. → Read More
Verizon CFO Fran Shammo ruffled a few feathers yesterday when he mentioned at an investor conference that every one of their customers would be on one of the carrier’s new data share plans.
In an effort to clarify his meaning, Verizon sent a statement to a handful of news outlets today that shines a bit more light on how they plan to make this situation work. → Read More
T-Mobile CEO Philipp Humm noted during their last earning call that their prepaid users helped make up for the loss of 510,000 postpaid subscribers, and now it seems that they’ve got another bone to throw to the their legions of contract-averse customers.
Starting on May 20, T-Mobile will be rolling out a slew of new, no-contract data plans to go with their line of mobile broadband modems, hotspots, and tablets.
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