Eric Eldon is the Co-Editor of TechCrunch.
He was previously the co-founder 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.
Eric attended Stanford University and graduated with a degree in international relations in 2005. He reported and edited news for The Stanford Daily student newspaper, and ran its business for a year term.
Disclosure: I own a significant number of shares in WebMediaBrands, and an insignificant number of shares in AOL. I’m also an investor in Afton Field Farm, a natural meat ranch. My fiancé works at education startup Udacity, so I do not write or edit stories in that area.
Mountain View is a quietly intense suburb at the nexus of the San Francisco peninsula and Silicon Valley proper, filled with trees, flowers, and the hum of the highways and office parks off in the distance. It’s like Palo Alto without the ego, and about as different from San Francisco as Silicon Valley gets.
Quora, the quietly ambitious startup that’s creating a smarter, Q&A-style… → Read More
An explosive day of online and traditional campaigning appears to have worked — at least for the present. The Washington DC city council was set to approve an amendment to its far-reaching taxi legislation that would have set a floor price for private cars. But now councilwoman Mary Cheh, who had proposed the so-called “Uber Amendment,” says this morning that she is shelving it.
However, some… → Read More
Uber cannot catch a break in Washington, DC. The city taxi commission tried to shut the private car service down last January over rule violations that it wasn’t actually committing. Now the local government is taking another shot, considering a legislative amendment tomorrow that would force sedan car services like Uber to charge at least five times the minimum cost of cabs.
To be clear, the … → Read More
Our TechCrunch Disrupt event is coming back to San Francisco this September 8 to 12, and the agenda is coming together fast. Andreessen Horowitz co-founder Ben Horowitz will open the show, and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff will be coming by to share his latest on enterprise disruption. Meanwhile, former New York Schools chancellor Joel Klein is also on the agenda to discuss his work on education… → Read More
Nike has been quietly transforming itself from an apparel company to an apparel company that builds sensors into everything… blending man and machine so that we’ll all be able to track our every move and figure out what we’re doing right or wrong on our journey to greater personal fitness.
Path to greater fitness, I suppose (har). Because the private social network has a new update out today… → Read More
Collaborative consumption – generally, marketplaces for buying and selling access to products and services — have been defined recently by startups like TaskRabbit and Zaarly for tasks, or short-term rental service Airbnb.
But Inspirato is bringing the concept to the luxury vacation market, driving down the cost of renting Tuscan villas, Napa cottages, and even a seaborne yacht coming next… → Read More
TechCrunch has been throwing an annual summer party at August Capital since 2006, the point at which Michael Arrington realized it had gotten too big for his Atherton back yard. And this year we’re doing it again, on the same big sunny Sand Hill balcony at the venture firm’s headquarters. The party starts at 5:30 p.m. and goes til 9:00 p.m.
And, we’ll also be back with our fourth-ever CrunchUp… → Read More
Email. Everybody hates it but no tech company has figured out how to replace its old post-office metaphor with something more intuitive for the modern world. But Asana, the high-profile task management company started by early Facebookers, is taking a shot at this goal with a new feature called Inbox.
This isn’t a direct competitor to email, though, as cofounder Justin Rosenstein related to me… → Read More
Big news out of Zynga HQ today. The company is launching what it calls a “social lobby” for all players to meet and play across all social networks and platforms, broadly called the “Zynga With Friends” network. Key features include activity feeds, a new chat interface, multiplayer (which Kim-Mai has covered more here), leaderboards, and a variety of other additions designed to unify the company’s… → Read More
We’re here at Zynga‘s big press event today at the company’s headquarters in San Francisco. Mark Pincus is on stage, sharing a few new stats about the company — with more news to come about game launches, he says.
But first, this post about the stats. He’s not sharing daily active user numbers (which are at 53.3 million today, according to AppData), ARPU, ARPPU or other industry measures. → Read More
Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s four-year chief operating officer, has a new position — and one many people thought she should have gotten long ago. She’s now the first woman on the company’s board of directors.
She’ll have her own vote in all company matters, Facebook confirms with us. Board members of the public company are elected by the existing board or by shareholders (in this case she was… → Read More
Facebook is finally working closely with Apple — on iOS 6 — but it’s also hiring away some of its design talent. The latest is Chris Weeldreyer, who has just left his position as a user interface design manager to become a product design manager at the social network.
What will Weeldreyer be working on? “We’re excited to welcome Chris Weeldryer to Facebook, where he will be a great addition… → Read More
Codecademy, the New York startup that wants to teach the world to code, has capitalized on widespread interest by raising a second venture round of $10 million from top investors — Kleiner Perkins, Index Ventures, Union Square Ventures and Yuri Milner — and serial entrepreneur Richard Branson.
It’s been at the right place at the right time. Thousands of people now want to start their own… → Read More
Startups like Viddy and Socialcam are angling to be the Instagram of video — that is, to figure out some simple way of creating, editing and sharing mobile videos, in a way that resonates with users like the photo-sharing service has.
But it’s hard, Instagram cofounder Kevin Systrom said on stage at Le Web London today, because of the medium. Videos take minutes to load. “Users want a faster… → Read More
The Start Fund, the consortium of top investors who are backing all Y Combinator companies, has a new partner: General Catalyst. The storied 12-year-old venture firm has already been busy expanding into Silicon Valley from its Boston home in recent years — and it has already gotten into around ten YC companies, including top ones like rental marketplace AirBnB and payments company Stripe.
So… → Read More
It’s been anecdotally clear for months now, but Facebook has indeed found a place within mobile developer ecosystems. Today at its App Center launch, the company said it had sent 83 million unique users and a total of 134 million clicks to iOS apps over the course of the last month. Meanwhile, seven of the top ten iOS apps and six of the top ten Android apps have some form of Facebook… → Read More
Okay folks, we’re live at Facebook’s press event for… sure enough, its new mobile App Center, the one that started leaking out earlier today. The company shared most of the details about how the store will work during a May press announcement, but to review: it’ll be one central store for finding any app across web, iOS, Android, mobile web, etc. You’ll get app suggestions based on ratings and… → Read More
Twitter is still busy making changes to its senior management. Following up on product leader Satya Patel’s departure earlier this week, we’ve learned of two other significant moves. The first supports the company’s recent statements about its ad business growing faster than many observers had expected.
Richard Alfonsi has been recruited from a senior sales position at Google to be Twitter’s… → Read More
Facebook is planning to launch a new mobile App Center in the coming days — possibly at an app-themed press event that the company is holding this evening in San Francisco. In the meantime, we’ve just received a slew of screenshots from an iPhone-using reader who appears to be seeing it live already.
Update: Facebook says “Since we announced the App Center to developers last month, we’ve been… → Read More
Satya Patel joined Twitter in March of 2011, after a four-year stint as an investor with Battery Ventures. He took on the big job of managing the company’s core product as well as its growing advertising business. But now, as its ads are starting to take off, he’s leaving the company.
The decision was amicable, I’ve heard from a source familiar with the matter. Twitter’s executive leadership is… → Read More
It’s 2012, you’re a small business, and you know you need a web presence — but where do you turn? Maybe a Facebook Page or Twitter account if you want something social and very simple. But maybe you need a fuller set of features, where you can control the look and feel, and offer functionality like blogging and e-commerce purchasing. Enter Weebly and the big update it’s pushing today.
The web… → Read More
Meebo, the seven year-old chat service that morphed into a website toolbar and ad platform, is indeed selling to Google. The company confirmed the news a few minutes ago, and we’ve since dug up some more details.
First, the amount. After raising some $70 million in four venture rounds, Meebo’s acquisition was in fact for around the rumored $100 million, we’ve heard from a source close to the… → Read More
Meebo has been around in Silicon Valley for seven years, starting off with a site that let users chat with each other across different instant message services — then becoming a social toolbar, and ad platform and much more. Now it’s joining its Mountain View neighbor to the east, Google.
[Update: See our followup post for more info — we’ve confirmed the amount, the focus of the product team… → Read More
“Where are Facebook’s friends? Stock slide deepens,” the Associated Press wondered recently. “Facebook’s flotation: more pokes than likes,” The Guardian quipped. “Status change for Facebook’s IPO?,” MSNBC questioned. After all the awful Facebook puns in headlines over the last few weeks, TechCrunch couldn’t hold back any longer — “After Years Of Flirting, Facebook And Apple Set To Achieve… → Read More
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… → 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. → Read More
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… → 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… → Read More
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… → 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… → Read More
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