posted 1 hour ago

The First Six Months Developing For The Computer On My Face

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Editor’s note: Jon Gottfried is a Developer Evangelist at Twilio, co-founder of the Hacker Union, and a StartupBus Conductor.

Being one of the first cyborgs in the world has meant that I have been privy to a unique set of bizarre experiences. Experiences that lead to some early observations and theories about the future of Google Glass and wearable technology.  → Read More

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May 22nd, 2013

WhyDoesHollywoodHateTheFuture?

A few weeks ago, Chris Dixon tweeted something thought-provoking:

“What were the last Hollywood movies you saw about technology & the future that were optimistic? They seem to be systematically dystopian.”

I happened to be sitting in a movie theater waiting for Iron Man 3 to start, so I tried to come up with a good counter-example. It’s a lot harder than I thought it would be. Then the… → Read More

May 21st, 2013

The Former Flickr Employee Guide To Tumblr Yahoo Survival

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Editor’s note: Kakul Srivastava is CEO and co-founder of Tomfoolery, Inc. She was General Manager for Flickr from 2004 – 2009 and helped the product grow from 37,000 users to over 60 million. Simon Batistoni is VP of Platform and co-founder of Tomfoolery, Inc. He joined Flickr in 2006 as the engineering lead for internationalization.  → Read More

May 19th, 2013

Finding Patterns In The Tableau IPO

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Editor’s note: Glenn Solomon is a partner with GGV Capital. Some of his recent investments include Pandora, Successfactors, Isilon, Domo, Square, Zendesk, Quinstreet, and Nimble Storage.

Stanford-born and Seattle-based Tableau Software (DATA) enjoyed a tremendous debut on the public markets on Friday, closing on its first day of trading at over $50/share, up over 60 percent from its $31/share… → Read More

May 18th, 2013

Confronting The Reality Of US Broadband Performance

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Editor’s note: Richard Bennett is a Senior Fellow with the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation and co-author of ITIF’s 2013 report, “The Whole Picture: Where America’s Broadband Networks Really Stand.”

We’ve all heard the story: America’s broadband networks are second-rate. We pay exorbitant prices for shoddy service because broadband providers print money and hold… → Read More

May 18th, 2013

The Future Of Mobile-Social Could Spell The End For Social Networks

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Editor’s note:  Keith Teare is the founder of just.me and a partner at Archimedes Labs. He is also the co-founder of TechCrunch.

This was a momentous week for those of us who are watching the rapid transition that is taking place from desktop computing to mobile., and particularly for those focused on mobile-social as I am due to my job at just.me. Here is my take on what we just witnessed. → Read More

May 18th, 2013

Why We Aren’t Developing For OUYA

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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

May 18th, 2013

The Time Has Come For Chrome In The Home

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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

May 12th, 2013

Packing For Walden

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I’m probably going to be consigned to whatever level of hell is reserved for pretentious editorialists for saying this, but sometimes when I’m trying to evaluate some new piece of technology, I consider whether Thoreau would have taken it to Walden Pond with him.

Wait, just give me a second. I know how it sounds. Let me explain. → Read More

May 11th, 2013

Backed Or Whacked: Give PC A Chance

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Editor’s note: Ross Rubin is principal analyst at Reticle Research and blogs at Techspressive.

These days, it seems that anything that whiffs of the traditional PC has all the market appeal of a month-old banana. Microsoft and its hardware cohorts are trying to fight back against the image of the staid tower and notebook with touch-enabled, all-in-one computers, clickety-covered tablets and… → Read More

May 11th, 2013

Federal Circuit Rules Software Invention Unpatentable

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Editor’s note: Anthony J. Lombardi practices patent litigation and patent prosecution at Finnegan, Henderson, Farabow, Garrett & Dunner, LLP. He also provides counseling to clients on prelitigation strategy, portfolio development, patent monetization, and licensing activities.

A clear legal standard for determining patent-eligible subject matter remains elusive. On Friday, the Federal… → Read More

May 11th, 2013

Email, Still A Sonofabitch

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Just about two years ago, I went off the deep end. I had come home early from an event in an effort to do something responsible: email. I was on the road and knew the situation would be dire (since I had not been checking my email all day). I was wrong. It was a disaster. It may as well have been Inbox Trillion. There was no way I could get through it all with my sanity intact. So I did the only → Read More

May 11th, 2013

Judge Tosses DMCA Defenses, Creating Unexpected Copyright Liability For Web Services In New York

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Editor’s note: Sid Venkatesan is an IP partner specializing in high stakes IP disputes and IP counseling for technology companies in the Silicon Valley office of Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP. James Freedman is an associate in Orrick’s IP group and a recent Stanford Law School graduate. 

A New York appellate court has recently ruled in UMG Recordings v. Escape Media Group that… → Read More

May 11th, 2013

America’s Carriers Are Terrible. It’s Probably Your Fault.

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A few days ago I landed in England and, expecting little, slipped an old UK SIM card into my phone. I’d bought it when living in London five years ago, and hadn’t used it in over a year. But to my amazement it was still active — as was the money I’d added to its pay-as-you-go account sixteen months earlier…and then I received a friendly text message informing me that my data costs were… → Read More

May 5th, 2013

The Philosophy Of Game Development By The Numbers

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Editor’s note: Hassan Baig is an entrepreneur who runs White Rabbit Studios, a South Asian gaming startup he founded four years ago in Pakistan.

There are several metrics that game developers keep an eye on when tracking the performance of their games. Notions of creativity, novelty and fun are all confined within the prism of an analytics-centric approach: They have wiggle room as long as… → Read More

May 4th, 2013

People Are Speaking, Markets Are Reacting, Fears Are Falling And Hackers Are Gonna Hack!

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Editor’s note: Howard Lindzon is co-founder and CEO of StockTwits, a social network for traders and investors to share real-time ideas and information.

The markets are not changing so much as the technology that makes markets move. The technology has enabled machines to ping each other at speeds that give them an edge over humans (at least in the very short-term) and people are connected to… → Read More

May 4th, 2013

How To Go From $0 To $1,000,000 In Two Years

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Editor’s note: James Altucher is an investor, programmer, author, and several-times entrepreneur.

A few weeks ago I wrote a post about how this was the year you had to quit your job. I gave the reasons why. It wasn’t a gung-ho “you have to be an entrepreneur” article. It was more: bad shit is happening in the corporate world and bit by bit you’re going to feel the urge to quit. → Read More

May 4th, 2013

Google’s Cloud Is Eating Apple’s Lunch

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A new front has opened in the smartphone war, and for the first time in many years, Apple is both outnumbered and outgunned.

I’m not talking about the phones themselves. iOS is still better than Android, although the gap has narrowed. The next iPhone will doubtless be the best phone in the world when it’s released, as ever. It won’t be as customizable – no Swype, no Facebook Home – but those… → Read More

April 27th, 2013

Economies Of Scale As A Service

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Credit where it’s definitely due: this post was inspired by a Twitter conversation with Box CEO Aaron Levie.

Don’t look now, but something remarkable is happening.

Instagram had twelve employees when it was purchased for $700 million; all of its actual computing power was outsourced to Amazon Web Services. Mighty ARM has only 2300 employees, but there are more than 35 billion ARM-based chips… → Read More

April 27th, 2013

Building A Culture That Works: The CEO As The Cultural Epicenter

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Editor’s note: Peter Levine is a partner at Andreessen Horowitz.

As a former CEO and senior executive, there was a time when I did not quite understand the profound impact a CEO has on the culture of a company, even though I always knew culture was important. The organization reflects the behavior and characteristics of the CEO, and that establishes the culture. Foster an environment of open… → Read More

April 21st, 2013

Dawn Of The Digilante

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It’s hard to say with any conviction where we are in the process of, shall we say, crowd-sourcing justice. Like most things, it is a process, not something achieved, and while some question its utility, it’s no good to question its existence.

Some see the events of this week as a turning point, and in a way, they were, but there are dark days ahead for digilantes. → Read More

April 20th, 2013

Put Away The Eulogy, The PC Is Alive And Well

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Editor’s note: Chester Ng is co-founder and CMO of SweetLabs, makers of Pokki, a modern app platform for the PC. Follow him on Twitter @chest.

Over the past couple of weeks, we’ve been blessed by the prescient researchers at Gartner and IDC with fresh data and predictions about the shipment trends for smart devices, especially the PC. This has sparked the typical “PC is dead,”… → Read More

April 20th, 2013

Backed Or Whacked: iPads In Good Standing

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Editor’s note: Ross Rubin is principal analyst at Reticle Research and blogs at Techspressive. Each column will look at crowdfunded products that have either met or missed their funding goals.

Backed or Whacked first explored the murky underworld of iPad wearing devices last November. The GoPad saw its Kickstarter campaign whacked despite a temptation-inducing expository video. With a… → Read More

April 20th, 2013

Behavioral Finance Explains Bubbles

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Editor’s note: Adam Nash is the chief operating officer of Wealthfront. He was formerly executive-in-residence with Greylock Partners and VP of product management at LinkedIn.

Given the incredible volatility we’ve seen lately in the Bitcoin and gold markets, there has been a resurgence of discussion about bubbles. This topic is always top of mind in Silicon Valley, especially given that the… → Read More

April 20th, 2013

OK Glass, RIP Privacy: The Democratization Of Surveillance

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How’s this for synchronicity: Google Glass started shipping on the same week that CISPA passed the House, 3DRobotics unveiled their new site, and 4chan and Reddit pored over surveillance photos trying to crowdsource the identity of the Boston bombers.

Cameras on phones. Cameras on drones. Cameras on glasses. Cameras atop stores, in ATMs, on the street, on lapels, up high in the sky. Modern cars… → Read More

April 19th, 2013

How To Build A Political Social Network That Actually Works

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Editor’s note: Lucas Dailey is a UX designer and chief innovation officer at political social network MyMaryland.net.

My political social network startup died last year, and I eulogized it in a public post-mortem here on TechCrunch. The experience (and the article) led to a job taking over the product reins at nonprofit MyMaryland.net. Here are some tips for charting your own course for… → Read More

April 14th, 2013

Bringing Down The Mexican Tech Mafia: How Hackers Stopped A $9.3 Million Fraud

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Editor’s note: Maria Rocio Paniagua currently works at Flit, a PR firm that helps products, projects and events launch in Mexico.

“When the geeks go marching in, good stuff can happen, but if everyone joins in, real change can take place.” That’s what the hackers and team behind Codeando México, a civil innovation platform where government and organizations publish projects, thought… → Read More

April 13th, 2013

Backed Or Whacked: Get Together With The Band

Backed or Whacked logo

Editor’s note: Ross Rubin is principal analyst at Reticle Research and blogs at Techspressive. Each column will look at crowdfunded products that have either met or missed their funding goals.

Last week, Backed or Whacked look at a trio of wristbands that can hold a buck, make a bun and prevent a burn all without any assistance from a successful mobile app platform. But as a host of digital… → Read More

April 13th, 2013

The eBay Class Of 2000-2005: Where They Are Now And Why We Should Care

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Editor’s note: Sergio Monsalve is a Partner at Norwest Venture Partners where he is focused on early and growth investments in e-commerce, consumerized SaaS, consumer finance, and educational technologies. 

As a venture capital investor, I look for disruptive companies with breakthrough technologies, and — most importantly — I look for highly talented teams. In the e-commerce space… → Read More

April 13th, 2013

What Games Are: The Shady Side Of Games

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A lot of recent moves in the gaming space to ban, investigate or curtail certain aspects of its output can seem egregious. However seen in the light of how shady game makers tend to behave, and the need to keep their sleazy tactics at bay, such moves are often understandable. Still, there are costs to games as a medium that this sort of thing keeps happening. → Read More