Eric Eldon is the Co-Editor of TechCrunch.
He was previously the cofounder and editor of Inside Network, where he managed publications including Inside Facebook, Inside Social Games and Inside Mobile Apps.
Before that, he spent a couple years covering technology and finance at VentureBeat, a leading Silicon Valley publication where he was the first employee.
While Inside Network sold to WebMediaBrands for $14 million in May of 2011, Eric also had a failed startup a few years ago. Called WriteWith, it offered online writing collaboration software.
Before getting into the tech world, Eric attended Stanford University and graduated with a degree in international relations in 2005. There, he reported and edited news for The Stanford Daily student newspaper, and ran its business for a year.
In its latest move to get top technical students to New York and started on new projects, the city’s Cornell campus has named a top technologist to a new position. Greg Pass, the former CTO of Twitter and previously the co-founder of search startup Summize, is now its Founding Entrepreneurial Officer.
I’ll be getting the details on what the hire means when I talk with Dan Huttenlocher, Cornell’s dean for the new campus, later today at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York City. → Read More
It has been a wild week so far at this year’s TechCrunch Disrupt in New York City. Rainstorms and traffic jams couldn’t stop nearly 2,000 people from making it to our big weekend hackathon, and our last two days of interviews, panels and startup presentations over at Pier 94 in Hell’s Kitchen.
Tomorrow is going to be the grand finale.
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Box has been grabbing headlines lately because it has been nailing a big market: enterprise customers who need to easily share and store big collections of documents online. But a quiet Silicon Valley rival has also been winning a bunch of this turf — YouSendIt. Today, the company is backing up its position with some new stats, and a new chief executive, Brad Garlinghouse.
He’s coming off a two-year stint as the head of consumer products at AOL, and a previous five years heading up consumer and enterprise apps at Yahoo. He also has roots as an investor and entrepreneur, so this move is going back to that. → Read More
Our action packed Disrupt conference is coming to Pier 94 in New York in less than a week. Get ready, because the agenda is chock full of leaders from the city’s up-and-coming tech industry and, of course, Silicon Valley and the world.
Thirty startups have also been working around the clock to launch at the show. But only one of them can win the Disrupt Cup, take home the $50,000 check and everlasting glory. On hand to judge the best contestants and pick the winner, we’re excited to announce a top set of finals judges….
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The modern online newsroom is a 24/7 operation. It needs power tools to work efficiently, like modern carpenters need electric drills to build houses. The problem is that most content management systems, including web-native ones like WordPress, Tumblr, etc, are intended for smaller organizations or slower-paced writing. Which is why I’m so interested in Vox Media‘s Chorus.
The rest of us have been stuck turning screwdrivers. Features from last decade like admin interfaces full of buttons that need to be clicked, as well as heavy metadata entry requirements, static site designs, and weak distribution options. Chorus has evolved to solve these problems, and much more. → Read More
Photos, location, professional networking, or all your real-life friends… Instagram, Foursquare, LinkedIn and Facebook lead social networking today because they’ve found existing the types of networks to connect users around.
Now a new generation of startups has been showing up in recent months, trying to nail another type of networking that so far has yielded no big success: small, very personal networks. Like you how use texts with your closest friends.
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“You guys might want to cover this before he resigns tomorrow,” one hardcore reader emailed in this evening. And yes indeed, newish Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson’s “inadvertent error” about which degree he got in college is looking like it could cost him his new job. It should.
After a day of TechCrunch covering companies who are busy pushing the world forward — like Facebook and its big IPO plans — here’s our obligatory late-night story about the guy who is, uh, suing the massive social network over some old patents that are supposedly infringing on the aging web portal.
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I keep hearing rumors about the ridiculous amounts of money that Weebly is making. But the San Francisco company, which provides a set of tools for small businesses and other organizations to easily create their own web sites, has only scoffed at the nine-figure amounts I’ve thrown at them. Instead, they’ve shared something else — a new mobile app that lets new users quickly create their own sites, or existing folks manage what they have going.
In a series of quick swipes, it lets you get through naming a site, upload images, choosing a theme, and publishing your first post. If you want to get fancier, you can also take photos and alter them with a set of filters, or shoot videos to publish. → Read More
CareZone has been busy discovering a few key markets since launching in February, chief executive Jonathan Schwartz tells me. And the results are good enough to warrant a big round of funding: nearly $13 million from New Enterprise Associates, Catamount Ventures, and Schwartz himself.
Founded as an intranet for people who are taking care of aging parents, children, or anyone else in need of special attention, it has connected with communities around autism, Parkinson’s disease, and other illnesses.
Seven years in, Revision3 and its stable of web stars have more than survived the tough early days of building a video content business on the web. The San Francisco company is now bringing in a respectable 100 million video views per month, following a big 2011 — and it may be about to cash in. → Read More
Old movie buffs (and older readers) may remember a time when beer was sold in steel cans that were opened with a “church key.” Entourage star Adrian Grenier is tapping into that nostalgia, we hear, with a new beer startup he’s cofounding, Churchkey Can Co.
The cans are the old-timey variety that you probably haven’t seen since the 60s. They’re made of fully-recyclable steel, and require a churchkey opener to get into. You puncture one corner of the top, then make a deeper puncture on the other side to drink out of. Ever noticed a triangle-shaped piece of metal on the other end of some bottle openers? It’s for these types of cans. → Read More
In the grand tradition of industry barons — but not so much venture capitalists — the six general partners at Andreessen Horowitz are donating at least half of the income from their investing activities to philanthropy. The firm has already been turning heads up and down Sand Hill Road, but this move might cause some whiplash.
Sure, American capitalists have been donating large portions of their wealth since the 19th century. And sure, the newest generation of tech titans, like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, are following in their footsteps. But VCs have not traditionally done so, at least at the firm level; major philanthropy in the industry has mostly come from individuals, like John Doerr and Michael Moritz. → Read More
There’s lots going on behind the scenes here at TechCrunch — not only are we hiring top writers and putting together a kick-ass lineup for Disrupt in New York next month, we’re also getting a chief operating officer (among other moves soon to be announced).
Ned Desmond, a veteran media executive from Time Inc and more recently an entrepreneur, will be joining us as COO on May 7th. He’s going to be leading all of our non-editorial operations out of our San Francisco headquarters. He’ll also serve as the general manager of the AOL Tech properties. which include Engadget, TUAW and Joystiq. → Read More
Asana has been slowly sleeping across TechCrunch lately, and the low-key but ambitious company revealed last week that it has been doing the same elsewhere – Twitter, Foursquare, LinkedIn, and Airbnb are some of the other workplaces it’s been showing up. And today, the shared task-list maker is rolling out the next part of its enterprise plan. It will now be officially available to teams of more than 30 people, via a monthly membership fee. → Read More
In the quest for the Holy Grail of project management software — a product that just feels natural and easy to use — Siasto has made it further than most. If this were The Last Crusade, it’d be somewhere inside the temple, crossing the bridge of faith to reach the chalice.
Siasto might seem a little too familiar at first, as it uses the same concepts as you’ve seen in competing products like Basecamp. You create projects, you add tasks to them, you upload documents, you invite other users, and so on. What’s special is the how the Y Combinator-backed company has organized the interface, and how it’s busy tying in with Google.
Here’s a quick walk-through of what it’s doing. → Read More
If Facebook itself isn’t a covert dating site, then at least its social graph could be — a big group of startups have been going for this honeypot of user data and connections ever since the company launched its platform back in 2007. Few have really taken off, and incumbent dating sites like the not-so-social Match.com have continued to hold mindshare with date-seekers.
This is where theComplete.me sees the opportunity. The company quietly launched a Facebook app in March that pulls in and analyzes data from Facebook and other social sites to figure out who you might be a good fit with — and goes way beyond most rivals in its effort to undermine the incumbents. → Read More
Voxer, a walkie talkie mobile app that lets you talk to friends across iPhones and Androids, looked like an overnight success last November when it soared to its current place as a top social networking app in the app stores. But the company is five years old and has been working hard to figure out the software and design it needed to win big.
It’s ready to go all the way, having just closed a funding round of more than $30 million led by Institutional Venture Partners, Intel Capital and numerous angels, I’ve heard from multiple sources. The company has confirmed the amount and agreed to share more — but it didn’t confirm the valuation, which I hear ended up at $180 million pre-money after a couple months of discussions with many interested investors. → Read More
You’ve probably heard of a few newish venture-operator groups out there — Betaworks, Churn Labs and Science, Inc are some examples. They’re basically organizations that take the idea of incubation to the next level, by being professional venture firms that build companies to be run by seasoned entrepreneurs. But Minor Ventures was doing this back in 2005, and quietly won big over the years with hits like GrandCentral (now Google Voice), OpenDNS and Scout Labs.
Today, its namesake, Halsey Minor has become embroiled in various other issues, but Ron Palmeri has been putting together a new firm, called MkII Ventures (“mark 2” meaning new model or variant, such as for military hardware). → Read More
One would guess that the big Yahoo layoff-reorganization includes a culling of some the company’s weaker properties — and yes, we’re hearing today that this includes Music and possibly Movies, popular sites that don’t monetize well.
Word has been leaking out since last week, when Digital Music News wrote a well-sourced article that didn’t make the situation sound good. “Will there be a music-dot-yahoo-dot-com?,” it quoted one person as saying. “Yes. But will it be integral to the future success to Yahoo? No. Has the traffic been good? No. Has this content been consistently interesting to advertisers? No.” → Read More
Sure, legends like Babe Ruth and Mickey Mantle don’t play for the Yankees now, but the team hasn’t just survived the ups and downs over the years. Hate it or love it, the franchise attracts many of the best players in baseball today, and wins championships.
That’s TechCrunch, too.
Peter Ha is returning to us after a few very solid years of editing successes under his belt. He started out as a CrunchGear writer under John Biggs, back in 2006. He went on to found the Techland blog for Time and turned it into a growth story. Then he became the tech editor at The Daily, News Corp’s ambitious tablet project. → Read More
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