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.
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
Google’s ambitious Glass display is still a ways off from its public release, but it looks like those newly-minted Glass Explorers now have something else to do besides taking first-person photos. The New York Times just pulled back the curtain on its own Glass-friendly app today, which makes it the first installable third-party app available for the ambitious headset (Path was technically the… → Read More
Things fell apart spectacularly the last time T-Mobile USA was tied up in a potential merger transaction, but it doesn’t look like history will repeat itself this time around. According to a report from Bloomberg, MetroPCS shareholders voted today to approve a deal that would see the nation’s fourth and fifth largest wireless carriers merge. → Read More
FreedomPop has been promising to bring mostly free 4G internet access to the masses for over a year now, but those ambitions have been hampered by partner Clearwire’s spotty WiMax coverage — there are sizable swaths of the country where you just can’t get service. That won’t be the case for much longer though, as FreedomPop has just started taking orders its first Sprint-friendly wireless… → Read More
Look, it’s no secret that HTC knows how to put together a nice phone. Despite the quality of its wares though, HTC spent most of 2012 releasing disappointing earnings statements and being outflanked by much larger rivals — what’s a company to do in a situation like that? The answer, according to CEO Peter Chou, was to double down on innovation and design in hopes of creating a device that would… → Read More
Apple just released its fiscal Q2 2013 earnings, and as always there’s plenty to dig into. In case you’re more of a visual learner (or just don’t have the time to read through multiple posts), take a peek at these charts to get a feel for how the folks in Cupertino did for themselves this time around. If you feel like learning a little more, clicking each of the charts will take you to a full post… → Read More
Apple has been the subject of plenty of financial scrutiny (perhaps even more so than usual) recently, and now all that speculation has come to a head.
The Cupertino company has just released its fiscal Q2 2013 earnings — it reported $43.6 billion in revenue (up from $39.2 billion in the year-ago quarter) along with $9.5 billion in quarterly net profit, which works out to earnings of $10.09… → Read More
The Nest thermostat has already gone through a hardware revision or two and found its way onto plenty of physical and virtual store shelves, but parent company Nest Labs is eager to get it into even more households in short order.
The Palo Alto company has just announced that it has teamed up with energy providers from across the country that will see new climate-control services (not to… → Read More
My car’s steering wheel has taken a beating because of the all the lousy drum fills I’ve banged out on it over the years, and at least one entrepreneur thinks that experience could use a little bit of improvement.
Gregor Hanuschak (who, in a previous life, worked for NASA) has put together a Kickstarter project for the Smack Attack, an in-car gadget that lets users make those steering wheel… → Read More
Google’s last two earnings releases were made even more notable than usual because of the unexpected events that preceded them, but today’s release of the company’s fiscal Q1 2013 financials was as almost as straightforward as it used to be.
For this past quarter, the search giant reported revenues of $14 billion (that’s up 31% from Q1 2012), non-GAAP earnings of $11.58 per share, and… → Read More
It was only about three weeks ago when the team behind predictive intelligence app Sherpa announced a hefty seed round and that it was rolling the app out to private beta users. Now it seems they’re all ready for prime time… with a few changes.
Since there’s already a glut of mobile apps named Sherpa floating around out there, founder and CEO Bill Ferrell thought it was high time for a bit of… → Read More
Facebook boldly moved to expand its presence in the mobile space with its Android-only replacement last week (with mixed results), but it’s far from the only company who has shown interest in Google’s mobile OS as a springboard for better social connection. Speaking at the D: Dive Into Mobile, recently installed Twitter VP of product Michael Sippey seemed intrigued by the sorts of… → Read More
If you like outside the United States, have the prerequisite hardware, and have been absolutely dying for a chance to (officially) take Facebook Home for a spin, today is your lucky day. Speaking at the D: Dive Into Mobile conference in New York, Facebook VP of mobile engineering Corey Ondrejka confirmed that Facebook Home will begin its international rollout later today. → Read More
Microsoft Windows Phone chief Terry Ryerson took the stage at the D: Dive Into Mobile conference this morning, and wanted to make it very clear that he sees Windows Phone a little differently than others might.
Given that Windows Phone is still an underdog when it comes to the mobile OS arms race, it’s not exactly a surprise to hear Ryerson characterize the WP team as a scrappy (albeit… → Read More
Snapchat has been picking up steam like crazy over the past weeks and months, and today at the D: Dive Into Mobile conference co-founder and CEO Evan Spiegel gave us a brief update on just how much traction the transient messaging app has picked up lately.
As of today, Snapchat sees a whopping 150 million images shared each day — that’s up from the 60 million images sent as of this past… → Read More
Apple, Google, LG, and Samsung are all reportedly working on wrist-worn computing devices behind closed doors, and it seems like that little club of big companies may soon get another member. If a new report from the Wall Street Journal is to be believed, Microsoft has been in touch with an undisclosed number of suppliers who have apparently been tasked with delivering components for a… → Read More
I was fortunate enough to spend a solid chunk of my adolescence strapped into an ill-fitting vest and shooting lasers at friends of mine, but a group of technically minded youngsters and their mentors in southern California didn’t just want to play laser tag.
No, the crew at San Diego-based ThoughtSTEM wanted to whip up a (slightly) more subtle laser tag system of their own, and they’re just… → Read More
T-Mobile finally began selling the iPhone 5 earlier today, and it seems as though all that pent-up consumer tension has resulted in some promising sales for the carrier.
“Today has been gangbusters for T-Mobile,” CMO Mike Sievert noted to AllThingsD earlier today. Naturally, Sievert wouldn’t discuss just how many iPhones were moved during the course of the day, but he did point out that… → Read More
In case you happened to miss the furor earlier today (or yesterday, depending on your timezone), Facebook officially pushed its Facebook Home launcher into the Google Play Store for owners of a select few devices to muck around with. Early impressions seem to run the gamut, but unless you had the right hardware you were plumb out of luck if you wanted to take Home for a spin.
Well, let me… → Read More
Say what you will about Dish Networks, but the Colorado company’s brass has some moxie. The satellite media service provider has been trying for years now to link up with notable national wireless carrier to help operate a mobile service to sell alongside its current offerings, and according to a recent report from Bloomberg, Dish Network chairman Charlie Ergen has approached T-Mobile parent… → Read More
“Lame pitch. Marketing email. Marketing email. Really lame pitch. Marketing email. Oh, well that’s pretty neat.”
If you can imagine that muttered monologue taking place every 15 minutes or so for an entire day, you’ve got my email situation in a nutshell. There’s not much I can do about those lackluster pitches, but New York startup Unroll.me has just rolled out a revamped version of its… → Read More
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