The idea of a VC having its own news aggregator was a bit outlandish in 2007. But Y Combinator was in an unusual position in those days anyway. Startup incubators had been a highly visible part of the dot-com crash, and Silicon Valley was still skeptical of the concept nearly a decade later. So YC set out to be something different — a community of hackers building companies on their own terms. → Read More
It’s that time of the week for CrunchWeek, the show where a few of us writers chat up the most interesting stories from the past seven days.
Ryan Lawler, Drew Olanoff (clad in his Google Glass), and I discussed all things Google I/O, including Larry Page’s keynote, Google+’s new photo features, and the latest Google Glass apps and more. We also chatted about Square’s new hardware, Stand, which… → Read More
Did Google’s conference succeed? It launched dozens of products in its 205-minute keynote, but did the world understand them? I saw some of the smartest journalists in technology struggling to handle the information density. But what’s the alternative? Break it up across multiple days, or even multiple conferences? Google’s breadth presents it with a challenge unique among the tech giants. → Read More
It’s still practically a newborn but Indian mobile messaging app Hike is already channelling almost a billion messages a month between its 5m registered users. Those numbers sound insignificant when you stack them up against the big beasts of the messaging space – WhatsApp claims 200m+ monthly active users, and 600bn messages – but Hike’s growth is impressive when you consider it’s 4… → Read More
This Gillmor Gang was recorded live at betaday, the betaworks annual gathering in New York. The Gillmor Gang included John Borthwick, Robert Scoble, Douglas Rushkoff, Paul Davison, and Steve Gillmor. Enjoy. → Read More
Google is prepping… something. An announced Google media streamer was recently found in the FCC’s testing database. Details are nearly nonexistent as most are held under a confidentiality agreement for the next 45 days. However, the documents released to the public call the device several times a “media player” and that it features WiFi connectivity. → Read More
Editor’s note: Tolga Ozuygur is the co-founder of Overdose Caffeine, an indie game-development company from Turkey that develops cross-platform, real-time multiplayer games. Follow him on Twitter @tolgaozuygur.
We at Overdose Caffeine had previously announced that Pocket Fleet, a real-time multiplayer space dogfight game developed for mobile devices, would be available soon on OUYA. Our… → Read More
I’ve spent the last two weeks wandering around London, Paris, and Istanbul (not Constantinople.) As an experiment, I left my trusty MacBook Pro behind and brought only the $199 Chromebook on which I type this. And to my considerable surprise it has served admirably. So admirably, in fact, that I believe ChromeOS is only one or two iterations away from being the right choice for many-if not most… → Read More
Google is facing another competition investigation, according to the Financial Post. The Canadian Competition Bureau has informed Mountain View of its plans to launch a formal investigation of its Canadian operations. It has not yet requested any information or documents from Google but has informed the search giant of its intention to launch a probe. → Read More
Sources close to acquisition talks between Yahoo and Tumblr say the blogging platform feels that Yahoo’s $1.1 billion offer is “too low” and views it as “only a first offer.” Yahoo may have to significantly increase the offer to close the deal. An acquisition by some tech giant is likely in the cards for Tumblr, though, as sources say the company only has a couple of months of cash runway left. → Read More
Today, thanks to the maturation of the web, digital tech, and smartphones now in seemingly every pocket, startups are finding it easier than ever before to build scalable solutions to finally address the many inefficiencies in our food manufacturing, production and distribution systems.
As interest in food tech balloons, one area in particular appears to already be at the tipping point: Online… → Read More
Oh HTC. You’ve produced one of the finest Android smartphones ever (seriously, just look at all these reviews), but you’ve faced more than your share of challenges when it came to actually pumping your top-tier One smartphone. As it happens, that may all soon change.
FocusTaiwan reported earlier today that HTC is preparing to pump out more of its wonderful Ones in short order — Jack Tong, the… → Read More
Google made a relatively quiet announcement today regarding how it’s pushing the developer ecosystem forward around Google Now, its intelligent personal assistant for Android devices. The company has begun extending mark up tools for emails from select partners, which help highlight flight schedules, hotel bookings and various types of reservations, to make sure that Gmail can spot that… → Read More
Just about six months ago, Uber won a big battle with D.C. regulators to have its on-demand car service approved for operation within the nation’s capital. But new regulations from the D.C. Taxi Commission could severely hamper the company’s ability to offer low-cost services in the nation’s capital. → Read More
Zynga has apparently told the makers of the dating website CupidWithFriends that they need to change the site’s name, because it allegedly infringes on Zynga’s trademarks.
CupidWithFriends was built by the startup Apartment 7 (which also released the dating apps Flock and Wednesday Night). The site launched a couple of months ago, allowing users to build and edit dating profiles for their… → Read More
Mozilla today bumped up Firefox Aurora, the pre-beta release channel of the popular browser, to version 23. With this, it is introducing a number of new tools for developers that will now slowly make their way into the stable release channel over the next few months. Sadly (or maybe not), this is also the first version of Firefox that does away with the good old blink element, a former staple of… → Read More
Google’s Vikram Aggarwal, a software engineer working on the Android platform, revealed today that Gmail and Email, the native Android client that still ships on Android devices as well, now has a combined user base of over 100 million across the Android install base. It’s an interesting stat, because although Gmail and Email only represent two of a multitude of email clients available on Android… → Read More
Uh oh.
Less than ten days after Bang With Friends made its mobile debut on the iOS App Store, Apple has seemingly changed its mind and given it the boot. → Read More
This week, we hosted Accel Partners’ Rich Wong in the studio for our Ask A VC show.
Wong, who has invested in Angry Birds (Rovio), Dealer.com, Mobilespaces, Atlassian, MoPub, talked about where he sees the next wave of disruption in mobile technologies. He believes mobile security is a huge opportunity mobile, especially at the enterprise level. → Read More
$FB is still stuck at $26.25, way down from its $38 IPO price, but it’s made important progress since going public a year ago. Daily users up 26%, mobile monthly users up 56%, and revenue up 38% are some highlights. It’s running out of people to sign up in the developed world, but with this growth and no serious competitor in sight, it’s survived its hardest year yet. → Read More
Any programmer or blogger knows that when you work on the Internet, on a computer, it’s easy to gain weight. Tech office pantries are stocked with Red Bull, candy, chips and even things you wouldn’t think were too unhealthy, like protein bars. Protein bars are basically injections of sugar. That’s why they taste like a Snickers.
But what no one talks about is that the “Startup 15″ or 40 is… → Read More
Google’s major developer conference, Google I/O, went down this week. Was it a bit of a letdown? Probably. Did cool stuff still come out of the event? Eh? Maybe? We discuss these topics and more this week on the TC Gadgets podcast. In fact, we even had Frederic Lardinois join as a guest, along with John Biggs, Matt Burns, Jordan Crook (that’s me!), Romain Dillet, and Darrell Etherington as Bob… → Read More
One of the more interesting projects to emerge from Evernote’s 2013 Devcup hackathon is called Postach.io, a new blogging platform that turns your Evernote notebook into a content management system. Input Logic, the Vancouver-based company behind the now just four-week-old service, has already caught the attention of local investors, as well as Evernote, who met with the team to discuss possible… → Read More
On Monday, it seems that we may get a better sense of what Yahoo plans to build in the wake of its acquisition spree, as CNBC is reporting that the company will be holding a “product-related” news event on Monday in New York City. Marissa Mayer will reportedly be speaking at the press conference, but that’s all we know about the contents of the event at this point. → Read More
About a month and a half ago, Google switched to its own WebP image format in its Google+ Android app, the company revealed at its I/O developer conference in San Francisco today. This, Stephen Konig, a Google product manager who focuses on WebP and Chrome Remote desktop, and Make the Web Fast team member and Chrome developer advocate Ilya Grigorik said in today’s presentation, is saving… → Read More
Google held a session today at I/O 2013 about how to make money on Android, and in the initial few minutes it shared some updated stats around Google Play revenues and how those are progressing. Not surprisingly, the big growth is coming with in-app purchases, though Google’s recently launched subscription model is also making headway. → Read More
Google unveiled its completely redesigned Google Maps product on the web at I/O 2013, and at a panel dedicated to the new Maps experience, Maps User Experience Design Lead Jonah Jones and Engineering Director for Maps on the web Yatin Chawathe took us through what went into creating Maps and the engineering effort behind the considerable change seems prodigious. → Read More
Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, the twin Harvard graduates who famously sparred with Mark Zuckerberg over the founding of Facebook and are now working as tech investors through Winklevoss Capital, are part of the growing group of venture capitalists who have taken a keen interest in Bitcoins. Last month, it was revealed that they personally own roughly one percent of the currency, a stake worth the… → Read More
Native Client – a technology that allows developers to run native compiled C and C++ code as part of their web apps – has long been a part of Google Chrome. Even though other browser vendors haven’t adopted it yet, Google is clearly putting quite a few resources behind this technology and at I/O this year, it announced Portable Native Client (or PNaCl, which Google says we should pronounce as… → Read More
It sounds like a nice idea, if you don’t own a calculator. The governor of Wisconsin wants to give his residents a tax break, using the revenue from a proposed Internet Sales tax to lower the state’s income tax. “I want to make clear, should federal Marketplace legislation become law, my intention would be for any resulting additional revenue be used to provide individual income… → Read More
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Disrupt Europe: Berlin Hackathon
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