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.
Supporters of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) may be on the run in the face of growing online protests, but SOPA and its Senate counterpart, PIPA, is not dead yet. “The fight isn’t over,” Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian tells me in the TCTV video interview above. → Read More
Okay, it’s official. TechCrunch readers love slides. We occasionally embed slideshows from SlideShare like the one below (which is filled with its 2011 zeitgeist stats). In 2011, TechCrunch generated more slideshow traffic for SlideShare than any other tech blog—a dubious honor, but we’ll take it.
Since you all love slides so much, here are a few more facts from SlideShare. → Read More
One of the fastest growing enterprise software companies is Sydney-based Atlassian, which makes product management software for software development. CEO Scott Farquhar and president Jay Simons were in New York City last week talking to investment bankers exploring an eventual IPO and dropped by the TCTV studio.
Revenues for calendar year 2011 (which is different than its fiscal year) were… → Read More
Support in Washington for the SOPA anti-piracy bill in Congress (and its Senate equivalent, PIPA), is waning. After weeks of mounting uproar online, Congressional leaders started backpedaling last week and the Obama Administration weighed in on Saturday in response to online petitions to stop the bills. The White House issued a clear rejection of some of the main principles of SOPA.
While the… → Read More
One of the best jobs in media just opened up: running TechCrunch’s business and AOL’s other technology properties (Engadget, Joystiq, and The Unofficial Apple Weblog). AOL is hiring a COO (apply here) to lead all of its technology properties, which collectively reach 30 million people a month and produce 250 million pageviews.
The job is in San Francisco, working out of TechCrunch’s offices. → Read More
Blogging is still a relatively young part of the media industry. But already there are a cadre of professional reporters who cut their teeth blogging, who are used to the pace and get an adrenaline rush from covering events as they unfold. Anthony Ha is one of them, and I am very pleased to announce that he will be joining the TechCrunch writing staff next week in San Francisco.
Anthony… → Read More
The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) is packed this year, yet its relevance seems increasingly in decline. Microsoft is bailing, no iconic products launched this year, and Apple’s presence can be felt everywhere even though they don’t exhibit at the show. In this episode of Fly or Die, TechCrunch Gadgets editor John Biggs (who is running our CES coverage) joins me remotely from Las Vegas to discuss… → Read More
There’s a war brewing against the Internet, and it’s not just SOPA (the bill in Congress that threatens to break the Internet in the name of fighting overseas content piracy). It is, in the words of Cory Doctorow, a “war on general-purpose computing.” (read his post, “Lockdown,” on BoingBoing if you haven’t already).
What he means is that in trying to clamp down on a very specific problem on… → Read More
The PC industry is in decline. Or hadn’t you noticed? According to Gartner, PC shipments in the U.S slipped 5.9 percent in the fourth quarter of 2011. (Microsoft also warned earlier this week that Q4 PC shipments were down). The only bright spot seems to be Apple, which grew shipments in the U.S. an estimated 20.7 percent. That makes Apple The No. 3 PC maker in the U.S.
HP and Dell are No. 1… → Read More
Apple finally confirmed earlier reports that it bought Israeli semiconductor startup Anobit Technologies. Apple did not confirm the price, which is believed to be between $400 million and $500 million.
Apple bought Anobit for two reasons: its flash memory controllers are a key component of all Apple’s leading products (from iPads and iPhones to MacBook Airs), and in one fell swoop it just added… → Read More
The web, as we all know, was built for humans. A nice graphical interface to the internet, which has been around much longer. But as the web has grown from a nice way to display information to the largest computing infrastructure on the planet, we need to make the web friendlier for computers once again. Computers don’t want to look at pretty web pages. They want data.
Of course, there are a… → Read More
Buying mobile ads across different apps and mobile sites is a highly inefficient process today. There are dozens of ad formats, about 85 percent of mobile ad inventory goes unsold, and it is difficult for advertisers to reach the scale they require. Mobile ads are ripe for a marketplace to make it more efficient, but publishers are wary of ad marketplaces, having seen how they pushed down average… → Read More
One of the unending debates in blogging circles is about the value of comments. How do you encourage the best comments and discourage the anonymous trolls? Do you even need comments? Or do you enforce civility by requiring real names, through the use of Facebook comments (which is what we currently use on TechCrunch) at the expense of discouraging conversation?
But there is a middle ground… → Read More
We are less than ten days into 2012, but here is a prediction that is easy to make: We are going to see a lot of original Web TV shows announced this year with big stars.
It’s already happening. Tom Hanks is making a cartoon TV series for Yahoo. Steven Van Zandt is starring in a Web-original drama on Netflix. House of Cards, starring Kevin Spacey, will also appear on Netflix, along with other… → Read More
At this point, video is just a regular part of the web. But how is it gaining on regular TV watching. Just in terms of audience reach, Nielsen estimates that almost 145 million people watch video online in the U.S., compared to about 290 million who watch traditional TV. So the penetration of online video is already about half of the overall TV-watching population.
For all the video people… → Read More
The nominations have been tabulated and the votes are in. Over 300,000 nominations were calculated across 20 categories. Along with our partners GigaOm and VentureBeat, we are very proud to announce the finalists for 2011′s best in technology. Voting begins now.
For 2011, we’ve added some new categories. Best Location App, Best Cloud Services and Biggest Social Impact join the Crunchies ranks… → Read More
Worldwide IT spending growth is expected to grow 3.7 percent in 2012, a slowdown from the 6.9 percent growth in 2011, according to a new forecast from Gartner. The research firm lowered its 2012 forecast from its previous estimate of 4.6 percent due to global economic woes and theThailand floods which hit the hard disc drive industry.
The good news is that global IT spending is still… → Read More
Wall Street was not super-impressed with today’s announcement of Yahoo’s new CEO Scott Thompson. The stock was down 2 percent in the morning and ended the day down 3 percent. I spoke with analyst Colin Gillis of BGC Financial in the video above who says the drumming the stock got was “less a vote on Scott’s ability” than a “vote on Yahoo not going private.” → Read More
Is Yahoo a technology company or a media company? Newly appointed CEO Scott Thompson tried to answer that age-old question in his first conference call with Wall Street analysts this morning. It’s both “excellent technology and content, not one or the other,” he says. “Yahoo’s core business,” he continues, is to provide experiences that “engages our users. Everything flows from that.”
Thompson… → Read More
After months of searching, Yahoo announced its new CEO this morning: Scott Thompson, former president of PayPal. The market’s initial reaction? Yahoo shares are trading down 2 percent from yesterday’s close of $16.29 as the market absorbs the news and tries to make sense of it.
Thompson is an operator and a technologist. That might just be what Yahoo needs at this point. We’ll see if the market… → Read More
The Lean Startup mantra tells entrepreneurs to get a basic version of your product out there to test the waters, and then build the real product afterwards with the knowledge you gain from this early customer feedback. You iterate with live customers instead of on your design board because this is how you learn to build a better product faster. Lean Startup author Eric Ries recommends failing… → Read More
We are only one working day into 2012, and already two data startups announced funding rounds. Klout confirmed its Series C, and now social music data gatherer, Next Big Sound, is set to announce a $6.5 million Series A. The TechStars startup (Class of 2009) just got backing from IA Ventures and Foundry Group. It will also be opening an office in New York City (it is headquartered in Boulder… → Read More
Klout’s reputation is growing among investors. The startup, which provides a social credit score for more than 100 million public profiles across various social networks, raised C round of financing of around $30 million. Business Insider was the first to report the funding. The company declined to disclose the exact amount it raised, but we’ve confirmed that $30 million is close to the correct… → Read More
With nearly 7 million new Android phones and iPhones activated on Christmas Day, an app-downloading frenzy was a foregone conclusion. App research firm Flurry estimates that a combined total of 1.2 billion apps were downloaded during the holiday week between December 25-31. That compares to an average of 750,000 mobile apps downloaded per week earlier in December, or a 60 percent jump. → Read More
Android isn’t the only Google product that gobbled up market share in 2011. Its Chrome browser also had an amazing year. By one measure, StatCounter, Chrome went from 15 percent market share a year ago to 27 percent share in December, 2011. Chrome ended the year two points above Firefox’s 25 percent share (which is down from 31 percent a year ago). Even as Google recently renegotiated its deal… → Read More
Keeping up with TechCrunch can be overwhelming. And sometimes great posts get lost in the flow, pushed down the homepage before many readers even get a chance to see them. If you click on the subject tabs at the top of the site, you can filter by subjects such as Startups, Mobile, Gadgets, and Enterprise. But we are going to add even more ways to filter all the posts and videos that make it onto… → Read More
What a difference just one year can make. In our Year in Tech post, I pointed out that 2011 was the year that Apple and Google won the smartphone wars. I put together the chart above from comScore U.S. mobile subscriber estimates to illustrate the dramatic shift in market share in the smartphone market. In less than 18 months, Apple’s and Google’s combined market share of U.S. mobile subscribers… → Read More
There’s always been a tension on the Internet between humans and algorithms. In the early days, Yahoo was a human-curated index, remember? But humans couldn’t keep up, and the algorithms took over. Today, the human factor is rising in importance once again with Facebook, Twitter, and countless mobile applications like Instagram. Everything is social. The tension today is between social and… → Read More
Okay, last workday of the year. It’s nostalgia time. Let’s take a quick glance in the rearview mirror at the year in Tech, before we speed forward again in 2012. There were defining moments, epic battles, new product introductions, and major corporate screw-ups. Mobile and social drove many of the changes in tech, and we’ve certainly gone through our own major transition here at TechCrunch (but… → Read More
Blip Networks, which operates Blip.tv, is raising more money. According to an SEC filing, the New York City company sold $6 million worth of stock beginning on December 22, 2011 in an offering that could expand to as much as $11.1 million. Presumably, this is part of a Series D offering, since Blip raised a $10 million Series C in May, 2010, almost 18 months ago.
Blip is trying to become a … → Read More
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