Erick Schonfeld is a technology journalist and the executive producer of DEMO. He is also a partner at bMuse, a product incubator in New York City.
Schonfeld is the former Editor in Chief of TechCrunch. At TechCrunch, he oversaw the editorial content of the site, helped to program the Disrupt conferences and CrunchUps, produced TCTV shows, and wrote daily for the blog.
He joined TechCrunch as Co-Editor in 2007, and helped take it from a popular blog to a thriving media property. After founder Michael Arrington left in 2011, Schonfeld became Editor in Chief.
Prior to TechCrunch, he was Editor-at-Large for Business 2.0 magazine, where he wrote feature stories and ran their main blog, The Next Net. He also launched an online video series with CNN/Money and hosted regular panels and conferences of industry luminaries.
Schonfeld started his career at Fortune magazine in 1993. In 1999, he won the prize for best information technology submission at London’s Business Journalist of the Year Awards, and in 2001 he won the prize for best space submission at the Aerospace Journalist of the Year Awards in Paris. In 1996 and 1997, Schonfeld was recognized in the TJFR Business News Reporter’s list of the best and brightest financial journalists under the age of 30.
He appears regularly on CNBC, CNN, and NY1, and is a frequent speaker at industry conferences.
Schonfeld graduated magna cum laude from Cornell University in 1993.
This is my 4,212th post on TechCrunch, and my last as editor in chief. The past few months have been a whirlwind for everyone at TechCrunch. We’ve had a lot of departures lately, but behind the scenes we’ve also quietly been building a new TechCrunch.
For every departure there’s been a new hire, we’ve been rolling out new features across the site (like the video and events hubs), and… → Read More
One of the marks of a great blogger is following your convictions and convincing the world of the truth you know in your heart. Jason Kincaid is that blogger, whether he is calling out Apple for enabling patent trolls or VEVO’s hypocrisy in using pirated video at an event. Jason joined TechCrunch in 2008 straight out of college. He learned fast and just kept getting better, even veering off into… → Read More
Back during the heyday of #OccupyWallStreet in New York City (before winter dispersed most of the protestors there), an iPhone app called Vibe became popular among that community. It allows people to post messages, photos, and videos within a geo-fenced radius—everything from a “whisper” (visible only to people within 165 feet) to a “bellow” (visible worldwide). The messages can be set to… → Read More
Music magazines are getting hit with a double whammy in the age of digital media. Like all print publications, their audience is going online—but so is the music. Why read about a new album when you can just listen to it on Spotify? Spin magazine is responding by shifting its focus online in a big way with a major redesign that literally puts the music first with a music player right at the… → Read More
If anyone has any doubt that iPhones, iPads and other iOS devices are the future if Apple, just take a look at the chart above from Asymco. It shows all iOS products sold cumulatively versus all OS X products ever sold (Macs) over the past 28 years. The iPhone has only been around for four years, but in that time more iPhones have been sold than all the Macs ever sold in Appele’s entire… → Read More
New York City seed investors are growing up, and raising bigger funds. IA Ventures just raised $105 million and ff Venture Capital closed its second $27 million fund last November (which I am reporting here for the first time). I asked ff VC’s John Frankel and David Teten to come into the TCTV studio to talk about the new fund and their approach to investing. Their first $6.3 million fund… → Read More
Ever since Apple released OS X Lion, its desktop operating system started the long trek towards iOS, Apple’s other, more popular operating system. With the next version of OS X, Mountain Lion (released today as a developer preview), OS X will prowl even closer to its iOS cousin.
A number of the new features in OS X come directly from iOS. These include iCloud integration, Messages, Reminders… → Read More
Earlier today, Barry Diller introduced Aereo, a company backed by IAC, at a press conference in New York City. Aereo streams broadcast TV to your browser and provides a DVR in the cloud by miniaturizing TV antennas and packing them in equipment that sits on the network. In the video above, which we took at the event, you can see Diller’s opening remarks and part of CEO Chaitanya Kanojia’s… → Read More
Silicon Valley thrives on change. At TechCrunch, we chronicle change, honor it, and, lately, we’ve been living it. As we rebuild TechCrunch, it’s the talent of our writers that sets us apart. We are adding two new names to the editorial staff: Ingrid Lunden starts today as a TechCrunch writer and Colleen Taylor will soon join us as our TechCrunch TV reporter.
Lunden is an American writer living… → Read More
Barry Diller always enjoys riling the media industry from which he sprang. A few minutes ago at a press conference at IAC headquarters in New York City, Diller introduced a new startup IAC is backing called Aereo that is building a DVR in the cloud that broadcasts live TV to your iPad, computer, or TV. Diller has always believed that Internet TV would be a healthy counterweight to “media… → Read More
Shares of Apple (AAPL) closed above $500 today for the first time, ending the day at $502.60. Apple, the world’s most valuable company, now boasts a market capitalization of almost $470 billion. That is up 9 points from yesterday’s close, and up more than 80 from where the stock was the day Apple announced its impressive quarter on January 24th. Everybody was blown away by the numbers.
The… → Read More
British video search company Blinkx saw its stock spike briefly this morning, following an announcement that it will power AOL’s video search. AOL is one of the largest video destinations on the Web, with about 450 million video views per month according to comScore.
Blinkx will also incorporate AOL’s premium videos in its own search engine. (Presumably, that will include TCTV videos, since we… → Read More
Two weeks ago at the Crunchies, Dan’l Lewin, Microsoft’s top executive in Silicon Valley, came up to me and handed me a Nokia Lumia 800 Windows Phone. It was out of the box, fully charged, and ready to go—alive in my hand. It’s a beautiful phone. Thin, solid, bevelled, and bright. Later that evening, I pulled it from my pocket and I’ve been playing with it ever since. This is not the first… → Read More
The News Corp. phone-hacking scandal continues to spiral out of control, sweeping up more and more of the companies employees and executives. In the UK, 8 people were arrested, including five News Corp journalists, in the broadening scandal, which may embroil deputy COO James Murdoch—Rupert’s son and heir-apparent. A paper copy of a deleted email found in a crate ties James Murdoch directly to… → Read More
It’s February, which means Toy Fair in New York City. Every year, Mind Candy CEO Michael Acton Smith comes to town to peddle his little monsters. Those would be Moshi Monsters, one of the largest social game sites for kids 6 to 11, with 10 million monthly visitors. It’s huge in the UK, and this year Smith is going to make a major push into the U.S.
And it’s not just online. Moshi Monsters are… → Read More
Groupon CEO Andrew Mason just finished his first post-IPO earnings calls with Wall Street analysts. (We covered it live and looked at the numbers). “We believe we are on the cusp of a sea change” in behavior, he noted. “We’re about to see what technology can do for local commerce.”
Listening to the call, I’d say his performance was mixed. He sounded a little nervous at first, but warmed… → Read More
Groupon just announced its first earnings report after going public last October (it missed, read our liveblog of the earnings call here.). For the full year, Groupon’s revenues were $1.6 billion, up 419 percent. The daily deal company, however, lost $350 million, most of that attributable to its very aggressive international expansion (7,000 out of its 10,000 employees are overseas). In North… → Read More
Before big data was a hot investing theme, Roger Ehrenberg was one of the first seed investors to focus almost exclusively on startups using data as a competitive edge. His NYC-based fund, IA Ventures, has backed companies such as Billguard, Coursekit, DataSift, Next Big Sound, Simple, ThinkNear, and Yipit. His first fund, raised in 2010, was a $50 million seed fund. Now, IA Ventures just raised… → Read More
Blip.tv is going through some changes, with founder Mike Hudack gone and a search for a new CEO still ongoing. But the company raised a $6 million C round from its two main investors in December, and now just added to that with another $6 million credit facility from Silicon Valley Bank. There is also a new logo, and the company is now called just Blip.
So how is the indie Web video… → Read More
Yahoo has its new CEO, Scott Thompson, and founder Jerry Yang stepped down from the company and the board a few weeks ago. But all along, people have been asking when is the rest of the Yahoo board going to resign?
Well, that day is today for four more directors, including chairman Roy Bostock. He was sticking around to try to oversee the disposition of Yahoo’s Asian assets. It doesn’t look… → Read More
Brands love marketing across social media, but it is a little like TV advertising in that it is hard to measure how effective it is. Sure, you can count retweets, likes, and Klout scores, but how does that translate into real engagement with a brand or actual spending? SocialFlow is trying to answer these questions, and in the process is growing like crazy.
“I don’t know who put the call out… → Read More
All the major map apps like Google Maps, Bing Maps, and Mapquest have walking directions as a standard feature, but the folks at Lumatic don’t think they are good enough. It is creating mobile maps designed for pedestrians, cyclists, and people who use public transit. Originally a TechStars company called Omniar, serial entrepreneur Scott Rafer (MyBlogLog, Lookery, Mashery) joined as CEO a year… → Read More
Now that Facebook is preparing the biggest tech IPO in history, it is possible to compare its financials and potential market value to Google’s when it went public. At first glance, all of Facebook’s numbers look bigger. Its pre-IPO revenues of $3.7 billion in 2011 are more than two and a half times larger than Google’s 2003 revenues of $1.5 billion (Google’s IPO was in 2004). Facebook’s $1… → Read More
Following in the tradition of “Shit Silicon Valley Says” and other Shit ______ Says memes, August Capital’s David Hornick has made “Shit VCs Say.”
There are some gems in here, including: → Read More
Yammer grew like crazy last year. How crazy? Product VP Jim Patterson just tweeted out the Yammer 2011 Year in Review infographic below with the comment: “Pretty much everything tripled.”
Paid seats went from 300,000 to 800,000, total users went from 1.6 million to 4 million (2.5X growth), and employees went from 80 to 250. Also, all told, 200,000 companies are using Yammer, including 85… → Read More
We learned a lot of things about Facebook today from its IPO filing. But there is one detail that sticks out for its improbable exactness: The $1.000 billion in profits Facebook reported for 2011.
The number wasn’t $998 million. It wasn’t $1.003 billion. It was $1.000 billion right on the dot. → Read More
Facebook just filed its IPO registration (SEC doc here) and its financials are off the charts. Facebook’s IPO document provides the first peek at its financials.
The company did $3.7 billion in revenues in 2011, and $1 billion in profits. That’s right. Net income was $1 billion. Profits grew 65 percent last year from $606 million in 2010. And revenues grew 88 percent. → Read More
Nothing is made in this country anymore. In terms of actual manufacturing, America is increasingly at a disadvantage. The logic of the global economy moves jobs overseas. Get used to it, we are told. Well, Bayard Winthrop thinks the conventional wisdom is wrong. He wants to bring manufacturing back to America, in the apparel industry, no less! His clothing startup, American Giant (gotta love the… → Read More
Andreessen Horowitz is definitely killing it these days. The unconventional VC firm founded by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz is less than three years old, but just raised its third fund. The amount raised: $1.5 billion. That puts Andreessen Horowitz in the rarified realm of only a handful of VC firms with funds of that size.
And how long did it take to raise all that money? “It took about 3… → Read More
Last year, Hulu brought in $420 million in revenues, with was 60 percent above the year before. The news, however, was seen as a miss because Hulu earlier in the year suggested that it would make $500 million.
Today at the D: Dive Into Media conference, CEO Jason Kilar defended his record, revealing that “our board plan was $408 million.” So Hulu came in above the internal goal it had set for… → Read More
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