Greg Kumparak is the Mobile Editor at Techcrunch. Greg has been writing for the TechCrunch network since May of 2008.
Greg was born just outside of San Jose, and now lives in the East Bay of California.
During the Facebook Home launch, Zuck premiered their first Home commercial. It was… pretty bad. A guy behind me whispered “Is this real life?“, faces were palmed, and the room was pretty quiet as the lights came back up. They aimed for weird-funny, but ended up with mostly just weird.
Their second attempt is much, much better, if only because it has a goat that screams in Zuck’s face. → Read More
This week, word leaked out that Microsoft is purportedly working on a feature for the next Xbox that can automatically pause videos when it detects that your eyes are no longer on the screen. Just weeks ago, Samsung announced a similar feature for the Galaxy S4.
No. No, No, No, No.
No one in the world wants this. → Read More
Hey Marissa! Check this one out.
Sqwiggle is browser-based group video chat built with work-from-homers in mind. It’s got the office-like immediacy that Skype lacks, but without the noise of a Google Hangout. As someone who’s worked from home for much of the last 5 years, I’m kind of in love. → Read More
It’s been a while since we’ve heard about Ellen Pao, the former Kleiner Perkins partner who’d sued her firm for alleged gender discrimination. After she disclosed that she’d been fired from her position (followed by a bit of a debate on what being “fired” meant), the story went quiet.
Today, we’re finding out her next steps: she’s joined team reddit. → Read More
Hiring good developers is one helluva process.
First you’ve gotta find the rare developer who isn’t already drowning in job offers. Then you’ve gotta sit down and chat ‘em up to make sure they’ll be a good fit for your team. Then you’ve gotta make sure they can actually, you know, code.
By combining a collaborative code editor with live video chat, Codassium makes the process a bit less… → Read More
Sometimes you just need a disposable phone number. Why? Maybe you’re not too sure about that dude you just met, but you want to give him a chance. Maybe you don’t want weirdos from Craigslist calling you once your couch is gone.
Last August, an app called Burner came along that popularized the idea of disposable numbers at the push of a button. After 9 months as an iOS-only app, Burner is… → Read More
There’s been a break-in! And this time, it’s a physical, real-world break-in — not the digital variety we’ve grown accustomed to.
Vudu, the video streaming service acquired by Walmart in 2010, has just sent an email to customers letting them know of a break-in that occurred in their Santa Clara, CA office on March 24th. While it appears that credit card info is mostly safe (Vudu says they… → Read More
Word has just come in that TripAdvisor has acquired Jetsetter, Gilt’s private community for exclusive travel deals. → Read More
A year ago, Icelandic game studio Plain Vanilla had hit a wall. The product they’d poured their hearts into for months had fallen from the charts almost immediately after launch, and they were just weeks from running out of cash.
This morning, the company is announcing a 2.4 million dollar Series A, following up on a 1 million dollar seed round they closed just nine months ago.
So what… → Read More
Sometimes, the product you should be building is hidden beneath the one you already are.
Back in 2012, four friends set out to build TapIn.TV. As one of many competitors in the live mobile video broadcasting space, TapIn.TV focused primarily on video. After months of development, they noticed something troubling: building video stuff is too damned hard. So they’re setting out to fix it. → Read More
Oh, man. If Microsoft thinks Facebook Home is bitin’ their style, they’re just going to love this.
Fliple is a new, free contacts app replacement for iOS. It’s largely inspired (cough) by Microsoft’s Windows Phone OS… and yet, it’s actually pretty darn good. → Read More
Shortly after Facebook’s Home announcement, I got to chat with Tom Allison, Facebook’s Android Engineering Manager. We discussed his favorite parts of Home, how much they changed the underlying OS, and the biggest challenges they faced during Home’s development.
Plus: A bonus look at Home running on a Samsung Galaxy Note 2, and a peek at how Home can happily co-exist with your old homescreen. → Read More
Good morning, Internet! We’re live from Facebook Headquarters in Menlo Park, where the company is expected to finally detail the bordering-on-mythical Facebook Phone. Will it be just one phone? Will it be software to turn many Android phones into the Facebook Phone? We’re here to find out! → Read More
Are you ready for a Facebook Phone? Because it’s a-comin’. Zuck should take the stage at 10 a.m. Pacific today, where he’ll be showing off the company’s “new home on Android.” We’ll undoubtedly have all kinds of coverage for you throughout the day — but if you’re the kind who likes to camp out and watch an event, you can catch the live video stream of the event right here. → Read More
Pour one out for the Gold Guy tonight, my fellow gamers. A sage pillar of the industry has fallen. Just 154 days after acquiring LucasArts as part of their larger, $4B acquisition of Lucasfilm, Disney has dissolved the classic video game development company. Beginning today, Disney will continue to license out the LucasArts properties (namely Star Wars), but has ceased the development of all… → Read More
If you were one of the three million people who watched Google’s Gmail Blue prank yesterday and found yourself wondering just how horrible it’d be if it weren’t, you know, a joke — you’re in luck! → Read More
Let’s say we build a phone, theoretically. We’re not! But if we did, we could get maybe 10 million people to use it. 20 million. That doesn’t move the needle for us.
With today’s leaks, it’s looking like Zuck was being almost completely honest.
They aren’t building a Facebook Phone. They’re letting HTC do it for them.
But that’s probably not the end goal, here. → Read More
Famo.us, the Javascript framework that’s designed for building crazy rich (yet still fast) interfaces in pure HTML5, is making two announcements out of the HTML5 Developer Conference in San Francisco this morning: the framework will be free to developers thanks to a few “huge hardware vendors” taking interest, and it’s getting a physics engine. → Read More
Google is shutting down YouTube? Good riddance! There hasn’t been a video worth watching since Paula Abdul’s Opposites Attract anyway.
With their newest totally real project, Google is making it clear that they know where the future of online entertainment really is: smells. Meet Google Nose. → Read More
Hard drive backups are like the socks of gifts you give yourself. They’re initially about as unexciting as gifts can get, only to become the best gift ever in a pinch. Got a meeting in 20 minutes and your normal sock reserve is empty? Thanks for the bag-o-socks, Uncle Steve! Your HDD just exploded, taking the past 3 years of your digital life with it? Thanks for the backup, past-me! → Read More
Super Awesome Party A has just ended, and you need to figure out how to get to Super Awesome Party B stat… and preferably by spending as little money as possible.
So what do you do? Muni? Uber? Lyft? Sidecar? Hoof it? You could switch between half a dozen different apps and try to figure out which of the options is cheapest and fastest…
Or you could just open Corral Rides. → Read More
For a team that has somehow stayed mostly off the tech press’ radar, TiKL has had a pretty friggin’ good year.
With $0 spent on marketing, their two apps, TiKL and Talkray, have nabbed a total of 28M downloads. After taking part in YC’s Winter 2012 class, they raised $2.1M from some of the Valley’s biggest names.
Today TiKL is unveiling the other half of their business strategy: the Talkray… → Read More
Still feelin’ all ragey about the way Bravo portrayed the Valley in Start-Ups? Worried Mike Judge won’t do it right (wait, does Mike Judge ever do anything not-right?) with his upcoming Silicon Valley series?
A new challenger approaches! Amazon has just announced that they’ve greenlit a pilot of ‘Betas’, a show about “four computer geeks and their quest for nerd fame”. → Read More
Champagne corks are a-flyin’ this morning at Eventbrite, where the online event ticketing company is about to announce that they’ve just sold their 100 millionth ticket.
All in all, that works out to $1.5 billion in gross ticket sales, up from a total of $1B sold by June of last year. → Read More
Anyone remember the last time I said “Wow! Look at how pretty this web app is!”? Because I don’t.
At least, not before this morning when I saw Forecast. → Read More
Even if you’ve got no idea what the Havok engine is, you’ve probably seen it before. Name a best-selling video game, and the odds that it’s using Havok in one way or another are pretty huge.
This morning, Havok announced Project Anarchy, a 3D engine for mobile games that they plan to release this Spring. The twist? They don’t want your money. → Read More
A few years ago, I received a panicked phone call from a friend I hadn’t heard from in months. His Internet connection was on the fritz, and he had a huge project due the next morning. He’d called his ISP, and they were no help. As his only friend that, as he said, “knew computers and stuff”*, I was bound by International Homie Law to fix his crap. → Read More
Powerpoint presentations. Not once in the history of humanity has someone said “Oh man, I LOVE giving Powerpoint presentations” non-sarcastically. Really, I looked it up. Presefy, a four-man team out of Finland, is making presenting a whole lot less painful by harnessing the power of the Interwebs to do away with some of the classic problems. As anyone who has studied in the fine art… → Read More
Damn it, Internet. I had things I needed to do this afternoon.
So much for that. A VHS recording of a 1984 Apple enthusiast meetup was recently rediscovered, and it had at least one very special gem tucked inside: footage of a 34-year old Steve Wozniak giving a speech on just about everything you’d want to see 34-year old Steve Wozniak talking about. Pranks. The decision to quit everything and… → Read More
While T-Mobile is a bit late to the LTE game, the company confirmed on Monday that their new network would be launching by the end of the month. Where it would launch, however, was kept under wraps.
That’s the idea, at least. Thanks to some data mined out of a third-party network testing application, we’ve got a pretty good idea where T-Mobile is starting to fire things up. → Read More
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