Drew Olanoff has over 10 years of marketing, PR, customer service and support, relationship building and management, product management, and technical support experience in multiple verticals. Online, including mobile.
He prides himself on being a connector. Connecting people, stories, information. He has worked under some amazingly talented and gifted PR pros while working for startups as a “Director of Community”, “Community Manager” and “Technology Evangelist”. He has the knack of working stories both mainstream as well as online. Bridging that gap is his passion.
He is a leader AND a team player, and strives for nothing short of success. His life motto is “failure is not an option”.
Disclosure: I currently hold no stock in any company.
As we noted a few weeks ago, Twitter introduced charts for its #Music product. The company’s intentions for the service aren’t known, and it seems like they’re taking somewhat of a public beta approach with it. Having said that, before the service launched, I noted that it could be the next “Top 40″ phenomenon. → Read More
According to Twitter’s status blog and all of Facebook, the service appears to be experiencing site-wide issues including errors on just about every single feature of the site. → Read More
Ryan Sarver, who joined Twitter four years ago and is currently its director of platform, announced today he’ll be leaving the company on June 28th, and has “no plans but rest”. Fittingly, he announced his departure in a series of tweets seen below. → Read More
Even though every major tech company in the world, including Apple, Google and Microsoft, has tried to tackle scheduling, the reality is that the options suck. If we can’t afford a real personal assistant to bug us about every step we’re supposed to take on a given day, we’re not doing a great job of keeping our schedules straight. → Read More
How much is a dinner with SV Angel’s co-founder and managing partner, David Lee, worth? When you put it into the context of where the money will be going, the answer should be “it’s almost priceless.” Today, I got to sit down with Lee, and a special new friend of TechCrunch’s that I’ll introduce in a moment. → Read More
Today, I have to say goodbye to my current home, TechCrunch. I’ve not only gotten the opportunity to work with this amazing team as a writer and Community Director, but I’ve been able to enjoy it as a reader since June 11th, 2005. I’ll continue to be a reader. → Read More
Ten years ago today, WordPress, the open source blogging software, was born. It’s amazing to think that it’s been that long, but considering it had all of the elements that other startups and projects have tried to emulate over the past 10 years, then it makes sense.
When speaking with WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg, you’d think that he was only a small part of the movement that attempted to… → Read More
If your’e a to-do list junkie, then you’ve probably already heard about Any.DO. The leader in the space just nabbed $3.5 million in funding to dive deeper into the personal productivity space. One of the things that Any.DO has done to keep its approach fresh is integrate Kiip’s reward platform, which will give you stuff when you complete a to-do list. → Read More
Google Buzz, the social service that Google launched way back in 2010 and then killed in 2011, reminded former users that their data still lives in and will be moved over to your Google Drive accounts in July. That’s lovely. → Read More
The WSJ has reported that Google is participating in discussions with emerging markets such as Southeast Asia and Africa about setting up wireless network infrastructure in cities and towns. A source told the WSJ that: “The wireless networks would be available to dwellers outside of major cities where wired Internet connections aren’t available and could be used to improve Internet speeds in urban… → Read More
After being acquired by Facebook, the mobile back-end service Parse has been busy integrating itself into the company, as well as launching new services like web hosting for developers.
The service has built tools to help developers focus on the front-end of their product, while handling all of the messy back-end things like cross-platform compatibility and testing. Naturally, Facebook… → Read More
We’ve confirmed with Twitter that it has rolled out a new part of its #Music service for the web, charts that we were accustomed to from the company We Are Hunted, that it acquired and now powers the service. → Read More
Another photo sharing app bites the dust? Or is something with promise getting another chance? Either way you look at it, betaworks is adding more technology and team members to its arsenal, as photo sharing app Piictu has announced that the team will “join forces” with a betaworks company that has yet to launch. → Read More
As Foursquare evolves, it wants to help you find either new places to check out or lead you to places where your friends have already been. Mixed in with that is recommendation technology to show you places that you might be interested in based on where you’ve been before. Today, Foursquare updated its iOS and Android apps with an advanced search option that lets you control how the service seeks… → Read More
Microsoft’s Don Mattrick pulled back the curtain on the Xbox One at a live event at the company’s Redmond campus, and it wasn’t long at all before the talk turned to software. One application in particular has been the subject of speculation for months, and SVP Yusuf Mehdi confirmed that Skype (which, if you recall, Microsoft acquired for $8.5 billion nearly two years ago) is… → Read More
Last year, Twitter announced something it called the Innovator’s Patent Agreement (IPA), which would keep patents in the hands of the designers and engineers that came up with the technology behind them. What this agreement serves as is a promise to only act on a patent for “defensive purposes.” Anything outside of that scope would need to be signed off on the creator of the patent itself. → Read More
Square’s not just for businesses apparently, as an invite-only page for a product called “Square Cash” has popped up. Not many details are known about it, but we’ve reached out to the company for comment. → Read More
Today, Google updated its Google+ app for Android to get up to speed with all of the changes announced during last week’s I/O Developers conference. In all, there were 41 new updates, including a new stream, photos experience and Hangouts.
The Android version has all of that, and one new feature — a new location section. → Read More
Sprint has decided to get deeper into the social and mobile space, announcing today that it has acquired Handmark and its subsidiary OneLouder. The acquisition is meant to beef up its Pinsight Media+ advertising group, specifically. Through Handmark, OneLouder has built social apps like Twitter clients Tweetcaster and Slices, and Friendcaster, a Facebook client. The acquisition price hasn’t… → Read More
It’s been a little over a year since Google started teasing something it called “Project Glass.” The futuristic, wearable computer that would change the way that you interact with the world was nothing more than a series of rumors for months before it was “formally introduced” in April 2012. Not known for hardware and not having a current bonafide physical device that… → Read More
Today, Steve Lee of the Google X and Glass Team, announced that as of last week, all 2,000 developers who signed up for the Glass Explorer program at last year’s I/O conference have now been invited to pick up their devices from Google’s offices in Mountain View, New York City or Los Angeles. → Read More
There has been a lot of talk about rooting your Glass device, or if it’s even possible. Well, it is. During a Hacking Google Glass session today, the team shared the steps to go through to gain root access for your Glass device. Only the Fastboot tool for UNIX works, but there have been issues with using the OS X one. An official native dev kit will be available, too, which was announced… → Read More
Participating in hackathons is nothing new in certain parts of the world, especially Silicon Valley. Once in a blue moon, a small team of people creates something exciting that generates buzz, potentially selling to a larger company.
One developer took on 80 competitors at a hackathon called “TVnext” and won with a solution to save you from reading spoilers on Twitter with an app called… → Read More
Today’s three-hour-long Google I/O keynote came with plenty of announcements, but the company mostly assured us that it is focused on building frameworks that can benefit developers and consumers.
We saw a more unified company that needed three hours in one session to get their message across. Breaking today’s keynote up into two days would have disrupted the momentum coming out of a company… → Read More
Today, a day after discussing his voice issues, Google CEO Larry Page took the stage at the I/O keynote. He skipped last year’s conference and a few earnings calls due to those same voice problems, which he has noted are improving. Page even did something a little new for I/O — taking questions at the end of his talk. → Read More
Using Google Maps today is great for what it’s supposed to do, get you from point A to point B. But there’s a lot of information that Google collects that you never get a chance to glance it, or don’t have a reason to. Google wants to give you more reasons to explore a map, and it’s obvious with the preview of its latest version. This truly is a re-imagination from the… → Read More
Today, Google announced that its conversational search that is available for its Android and iOS apps would be coming to the desktop within the Chrome browser. Until now, you could search for things using your voice…but you couldn’t ask questions. Now, you’ll be able to keep your mic open without clicking a button, by waking Google up with the prompt “OK Google.” This… → Read More
Google+, the social layer that Google introduced almost two years ago, has evolved quite a bit since its launch. Today, the company announced a complete redesign, taking cues from the mobile experience that has drawn positive feedback from those who don’t even use the service. In total, Google has launched 41 new features for Google+, including a completely revamped Photo product, Hangouts app and… → Read More
Today, during Google’s I/O developer conference, the company announced a group of tools for app developers, including a new developer suite called Android Studio. It’s an IDE based on IntelliJ. This was a popular announcement, as the crowd “ooh’d” and “ahh’d” as screenshots were shown on stage. This tool has more options for Android Development… → Read More
Today, Google announced that its Android operating system has reached 900M activations. This is a 500M increase from last year’s announcement. At one point, Google said that it was experiencing 1M Android activations a day. These activations have brought in 48M app installs for developers who have launched on Google Play, which is why the I/O conference exists. As we noted yesterday, Google… → Read More
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