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.
While Pinterest is still rolling out its brand new look to users, it decided to listen to some feedback along the way and make some tweaks. Since the site relies heavily, or completely, on its users pinning things to boards like crazy, some features that were dropped from the new design were re-added due to popular demand. One of the features that caused the community to clammer the most was… → Read More
Google really cares about the web being faster. In 2010 it led a group of contributors in releasing a module for Apache web servers called PageSpeed. Today, the same group has released a version for Nginx, an alternative to Apache, which is also open source and used by massively trafficked sites like Netflix, Hulu, Pinterest, Airbnb, WordPress.com, Zynga, Zappos and GitHub. In alpha testing… → Read More
As more developers are receiving their pair of Google Glass, the tinkering with the device is heating up. One developer found a very interesting easter egg within Glass itself, which introduces you to the entire Glass team. The steps to reproduce it are fairly simple: Settings -> Device info -> View licenses -> Tap the touchpad 9 times -> Tap Meet Team Here’s a video demo… → Read More
Square has announced the hiring of a new Business Lead, Francoise Brougher, and she comes straight from spending eight years at Google. For the past three years, Brougher held the title of SMB Global Sales and Operations for the online advertising unit at Google. Although Square has grown its footprint considerably, in part because of its high-profile partnership with Starbucks, the company has… → Read More
Today, photo editing platform Aviary is unleashing the creative ad platform that it soft-launched last week with GapKids. Coinciding with a wider campaign for Diane von Furstenberg’s collection of clothing exclusively for GapKids and babyGap, Aviary is adding a custom sticker, frame and filter pack that fits in with the clothing’s safari motif. The hope is that whether people are using… → Read More
According to a report from Bloomberg Businessweek, e-commerce behemoth Amazon is preparing to launch a set-top box this fall, in hopes that you’ll consume all of your content through its spin on the now-common device. The company is already working hard to push its Kindle line to consumers, and this box would be for people who don’t want to deal with the fanciness of Apple products… → Read More
Google isn’t the only company working on mapping out the entire world with satellite imagery and detailed information about every nook and cranny in the universe. Two companies are teaming up to create publishable information on your site or news article using detailed satellite imagery and advanced publishing tools. Skybox, a company that has raised $91 million to launch its own satellites… → Read More
There are very few platforms that have something that you use on a daily basis, let alone on a minute-by-minute basis. Team communication platform service, Convo, is one of those for us at TechCrunch. Today, the company has released an update for its essential iOS app, which is something that we use here quite often to communicate about everything you can think of. Since using the service, our… → Read More
For those in the United States and other locations that are lucky enough to be able to purchase huge data packages for their smartphones, thinking about deciding to “tweet or not to tweet” based on the cost that it could incur is a foreign concept, pun intended. For cell customers in India, it’s a very real situation, and Reliance Communications has partnered with Twitter to… → Read More
In what was a mind-boggling series of events in real time, one Associated Press hack and a false tweet about the White House sent the stock market into a momentary free fall. Twitter hopes to stop intrusions like that in the future by introducing a two-factor authentication process, Wired has learned. When this offering will be available to users is unknown. The company has been working on this at… → Read More
Last September, we reported that VC firm Greylock Partners was planning on having a second Hackfest after the first one was a rousing success. The Greylock Hackfest will take place on July 27 at Airbnb’s office in San Francisco. The idea of this particular event is to bring a selected group of university students from around the world for a 24-hour hackathon. During the process, the… → Read More
Foursquare today launched redesigned venue pages to focus on its Explore and Discover functionality, bringing them more in line with its homepage. The changes, which come two weeks after the company raised another round of funding and released an updated iOS app, are designed to capitalize on the traffic that Foursquare gets from Google, which has doubled the site’s traffic over the past… → Read More
When Twitter #Music launched last week, it wasn’t a surprise at all to those following tech stories, since rumors had been kicking up about its existence for months. However, it was a surprise to the Frances Cone Band, which is popping up in the “emerging artists” section of the app. In a world where we focus so much on “big stars,” especially ones with millions of… → Read More
Football is a sport that brings everyone together, even if you’re not a diehard fan or have never played the game yourself. The rush of energy that comes with rooting for your favorite team and arm-chair-quarterbacking an entire game is something people around the world do every Sunday. For those who need to live, eat and breathe football throughout the week, fantasy football is an essential… → Read More
As we reported a few weeks ago, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone is up to something new, and it’s called Jelly. Not much is known about it other than it’s a mobile-focused project. Stone shared a little bit more about the project today, introducing Ben Finkel as his co-founder. The two have something in common, time spent at Twitter, as Finkel was a co-founder of Fluther, a social Q&A… → Read More
Last week, we told you about an open source alternative to music services such as Rdio and Spotify, called Napster.fm. The name alone got our attention, and after using it, there were a few features that were reminiscent of its predecessor, which made it even cooler. Today, the service is changing its name to Peer.fm to steer clear of legal issues, since Best Buy acquired the service and brand and… → Read More
Today, Google quietly ushered in a new application built on top of its nonprofit arm, Google.org. The app is called One Today, and it’s currently invite only for Android users at this time. The aim is to get people to donate $1 to different organizations, while getting the complete information about how your donation will be used up front. This is a huge stumbling block for nonprofits… → Read More
During today’s Google Q1 2013 earnings call, CEO Larry Page gave us a rundown on exactly what the company has been up to in this quarter, as well as some insight into how he’s currently running the company. Page took over from Eric Schmidt in early 2011, and since then has started bringing all of the company’s services together, under the umbrella of helping people get access to… → Read More
As we shared yesterday, the process to actually pay for the Glass Explorer Edition was quite simple. The next step in the process is picking up your device at either the Mountain View, Los Angeles or New York City Google Campus. Of course, you can opt to have them shipped to you if you’re not in one of those areas, but what’s the fun in that? I picked up my Google Glass today in… → Read More
The “personal assistant” craze is in full effect on mobile devices, with Apple’s SIRI kicking off the fun. The dream of being able to speak out loud and have information come back to you is something that technologists have been discussing for years. The smarter that our devices are, and the more we use them, the more we expect in return. Google is in the game with its own… → Read More
When Google wanted to get into the game of selling social ads across all platforms, it decided to acquire Wildfire, a company that had the market on lockdown. Since the acquisition last July, little has changed as far as what Wildfire offered, how it offered it and there was little to no impact for current customers. Today, the Wildfire team has announced that its first major shift is upon us… → Read More
If you were one of the people who signed up last year at Google’s I/O conference to be a part of the “Glass Explorer” program, you might be getting your instructions on how to actually…purchase the thing and get it into your geeky little hands. In case you weren’t sure, Google Glass is real, and they’re shipping as we speak. Today, my number was called and I… → Read More
The overall landscape of mobile apps is an interesting one, with most of the top free titles on Apple’s App Store being games or services pushed by massive companies like Twitter (Vine) or Google (Maps). Is there a place for yet another service to pick up steam before a larger network like Facebook re-creates copies its functionality? That’s the interesting future that lies ahead… → Read More
Today, Google has introduced a few new features for when you’re searching on the go. The ability to find the information that you want on the fly is something that is required for mobile searching and the company continues to tweak its result pages to help you get to the details that you need to make decisions or perform another search or task. All of these tweaks are speeding up mobile… → Read More
At the beginning of the month, we broke the news that Google’s acquisition, BufferBox, was planning on setting up shop in the Bay Area. Today, it’s clear that this wasn’t just a plan, as its co-founder proudly shared the first U.S. BufferBox location, the nicely trafficked Coffee Bar in San Francisco. It’s no surprise that BufferBox will be setting up these shipment lockers… → Read More
ZipDial, the company based in India that has turned missed calls into a business, has raised new funds from Jungle Ventures and launched its service in Sri Lanka. The company has clients like P&G and Disney, who have realized that the common social interaction of missed calls in India, are turning to ZipDial instead of focusing on driving likes to Facebook pages or chasing followers on… → Read More
Anyone who has had a computer and a connection to the Internet in 1999 quickly knew what it felt like to find any song that you wanted, and then listen to it almost immediately. Well, the immediate part wasn’t true, since you had to download the MP3s, which usually took quite a bit of time on a dialup connection. Since Napster, and it getting sued into oblivion (and then acquired for bits… → Read More
Since we have nothing much to go on other than a static landing page for Twitter #music, some folks didfurther inspection within the CSS on the login page, and certain features and integrations became apparent. We’ve reached out to Twitter to confirm what we’ve seen, and we’ll update our story once we hear back. Until then, here’s what can be taken from the styling code… → Read More
As we wait for Twitter’s music app to be launched, the company has put up a site at http://music.twitter.com giving you the chance to sign in. Some outlets reported it would launch today, but then updated to say that the weekend was the target to tie-in with Coachella. We’ll be watching. The site itself? It’s very exciting It just loops you back to the same page, so nothing… → Read More
As we reported on Tuesday, publishing platform Medium added some new collaboration tools, allowing your friends to add notes to your pre- and post-published articles. It’s a nice way of getting feedback when you want it, especially if it would have been helpful before sharing your thoughts with the world. One thing that the company left out, though, was that since you can invite any friend… → Read More
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