It’s telling that Apple chose an app that debuted more than 14 months ago, Instagram, as its “iPhone App of the Year” for 2011. This should not imply that there was a shortage of quality and groundbreaking apps released this year. Far from it.
From social magazines to music discovery apps to console-quality games that players can hold in the palms of their hands, there are hundreds of new titles in the iTunes App Store that will inform, organize, and entertain virtually anyone who owns an iOS device. As more choices become available to different kinds of consumers, however, it’s difficult to identify the undisputed champions of the app world.
We picked 20 of the best iOS applications that came out or received significant updates in 2011. The list is a healthy mix of free and paid titles that can run on the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch. (We will follow up with a separate top 20 list just for games, which are not included in this list). → Read More
For the first time, the Facebook for Android mobile app has eclipsed the daily active user count of Facebook for iPhone. The Android app launched in September 2009 more than a year after its iPhone sister and has been playing catch-up ever since. Both are developed internally by Facebook. This week the two were briefly tied, but the Android app is now pulling away with 58.3 million DAU compared to the iPhone app’s 57.4 million, according to the AppData tracking service.
With the Android device base growing at 550,000 activations per day and Timeline now available for Android but not yet for iPhone, I expect this gap to widen. → Read More
Because the name “Verizon DROID RAZR by Motorola” seemingly isn’t long enough, it looks like Verizon’s already planning another RAZR with even more words in the name. I kid, of course (does the name even matter? Everyone outside of the tech scene just calls every Android phone “the Droid” anyway), but I pick on the name because it’s pretty much the only thing we know at this point.
Spotted lurking in VZW’s inventory system by the guys at Droid-Life, it looks like the next handset in the DROID RAZR series will be the DROID RAZR MAXX. → Read More
Zynga is still in its quiet period for another 24 days after going public yesterday, so chief operating officer John Schappert wouldn’t answer my more specific questions about the company’s future plans when I talked to him last night.
After opening up at an aggressively priced $10 per share, the company had a slight pop before closing down 5% yesterday. But as Schappert emphasizes to me in the interview below, ZNGA is here for the long-term and its investors should be thinking that way, too.
He adds some color to the roadshow video the company has been showing investors over the last couple weeks, discussing the company’s expansion plans across social and mobile platforms, and internationally. → Read More
You know how the Internet works, right? Of course you do: you’re a TechCrunch reader, a power user. You know what that “HTTP” means in your address bar (if you’re not using Chrome.) You know that behind the scenes, the Domain Name System translates your requests for domain names like techcrunch.com to numeric addresses like 76.74.254.121, and secure connections are encrypted by SSL. You know that web servers send HTML, the lingua franca of the Web, over the wires (or the air) to your computer, and that web developers write JavaScript to control what your browser does with it.
…Unless you’re actually a techie. In which case you probably already know that the above description — let’s call it the Classic Web — is increasingly completely false.
What follows is a little technical, but bear with me, I have a larger point. (Also, even if you’re not a techie yourself, you need to have some understanding of what today’s tech does, and how it does it, in order to make intelligent decisions.)
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The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, John Taschek, and Steve Gillmor — celebrate the freeing of Heather Harde, the health of realtime, the obsolescence of Office, and the gamification of deep enterprise apps. It never ceases to amaze how some people rescue defeat from the jaws of victory, but Techcrunch’s loss of its business leader is our gain.
As @scobleizer shows on his undulating realtime screens, Techcrunch past present and future continues to be at the bleeding edge of the social wave. Just as Microsoft continues to box itself into an innovation-free corner and give disruptive energy room to thrive, so too does AOL watch value flow from editorial through the technologies it uncrunched and onto the social mobile platform. As the crowd of another era shouted, the whole world is watching. The revolution will be streamed. → Read More
Facebook shareholders suck. I know this because this past week I tried to help someone sell about 30 million shares of Facebook for $31 a share. These are weird transactions because never before in history has a private company so large ($80 billion in value) had so many random people buying and selling shares of it.
On the one side are these semi-mythical demigods called “co-founders” who hit the jackpot. On the other side are literally kings of some ancient lost kingdoms in Asia that suddenly want to own tens of millions of shares of Facebook before the IPO. In the middle are enough people to fill a small country. → Read More
Google is full of fun easter eggs hidden within search queries. Remember the barrel roll? Here’s one more that’s been discovered, just in time for the holiday season.
Type ‘let it snow’ in search, and you’ll see snowflakes falling down the page. The first hit is the Christmas carol ‘let it snow’ by Dean Martin (which we’ve embedded below). Eventually your search results page will cloud over and the search button turns into a defrost button to clear out the clouds. → Read More
While some M&A deals turn out to be great successes, it’s no surprise that a lot of mergers and acquisitions fail. The obvious factors explaining the failures include culture clashes or founders leaving – taking the DNA with them in the process.
But M&A is more art than science, and the reasons why so many deals fail to deliver on their 1+1=3 promise are complex. Here are some: → Read More
While the 7-inch Toshiba Thrive is much more comfortable in the hand than its 10-inch counterpart, many of the best features in big brother never migrated over to the 7-incher. That said, this still may be the slate for you if gaming and web-surfing take precedence over e-reading. Otherwise, I’d point you to the Amazon Kindle Fire. → Read More
Last we covered Kicksend in November, the Y Combinator-incubated web file-sharing tool for the non-technical crowd, had just raised $1.8 million in funding from True Ventures, with participation from Digital Garage, SV Angel, Start Fund, and Milo Founder and CEO Jack Abraham. The team was heads-down fixing, tweaking, and developing some new features for their file-sharing service.
But, today, the startup is going mobile with a new iPhone app to let users take all of their photos videos they have stored on their phone and instantly send them to any friend, list of colleagues, or email address, instantly — across platforms. → Read More
Dave Morin and Path’s secondary standalone app With “is winding down”, according to a tweet, email, and blog post from Path. “Now tweet who you’re with directly from Path”, the email explains. The encouraged migration signals the end of Path’s experiment with a stripped down, single feature experience. Details are sparse but this looks like an early warning to With users that the app will be sunsetted soon, though it still currently functions. → Read More
At an investor conference yesterday, health insurance and tech giant Aetna revealed that it acquired Healthagen, the developer of mobile app iTriage, though it did not disclose the price. Aetna’s Chairmen, CEO, and President Mark Bertolini told investors “About a month and a half ago we bought at little company called iTriage…the fastest growing consumer application in healthcare today.” iTriage lets users check symptoms, find doctors, make appointments, and do medical shopping. It will be augmented with new features and become part of Aetna’s accountable care organization. Bertolini said ”We’re going to begin to change the health care industry by giving people tools they can put in the palm of their hand.” → Read More
There is something about waking up day after day to write about people who take risks; You end up rooting for some of them. This is the case with photo-sharing underdog Path. Almost every investor I’ve talked to loves founder Dave Morin and wants him and his talented team to succeed. Morin has managed to hold on to top talent like Nathan Folkman and Danny Trinh despite stiff competition and poaching attempts from some of the hottest startups in the Valley. → Read More
As Dave Chase wrote earlier this year, the healthtech space is heating up, and a lot of serial entrepreneurs with consumer web experience are turning their focus to fixing some of the big problems inherent in the legacy health systems we have today in the U.S. and abroad. Yet, in spite of the $1 billion pool VCs have poured into startups last year, for example, healthtech startups, specifically, aren’t seeing a lot of that capital. There are a lot of challenges inherent to launching a healthtech startup that companies in the consumer web just don’t have to deal with, HIPAA-compliance, among others.
While it’s difficult for all startups, establishing B2B relationships and intricate partnerships is no simple task. That’s where health-focused accelerators like Rock Health come into the picture. (And we need more.) Rock Health has a great list of mentors (more here), and list of financial and health-related partners is growing fast as well. → Read More
The extremely unpopular SOPA bill was supposed to be the last order of business today as the House Judiciary Committee prepared to break for the holidays, but a parade of objections and amendments (over 50) kept the bill in discussion and at last the committee adjourned without resolving the issues.
What was expected in this contingency was for the committee to resume work whenever the House reconvenes in January. After all, with such controversial and far-reaching legislation, it is better to take one’s time. But no: the committee has announced it will continue markup this coming Wednesday, the 21st of December. → Read More
In October of 2001, Rockstar Games dropped a bomb on the gaming world. That bomb was called Grand Theft Auto III. In just one release, Rockstar shifted their flagship 2D series into a 3D world, introduced an enormous chunk of the population to the concept of massive sandbox games, and stirred up the first of many controversies that the company has since become known for.
Just over 10 years later, GTA3 is back — but now it’s mobile. As of yesterday, it’s available for iOS and Android. Same game, same grit, same campy over-the-top action… but in your pocket.
So, how has the game held up? How well did it make the jump from controller to touchscreen? Is it worth your $5?
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It’s hard being a social network not called Facebook, but myYearbook isn’t one of those erstwhile rivals being sold off for assets. Instead, it’s been seeing strong mobile growth and revenue growth over the last year, building on its $100 million merger with QuePasa in July. Expect both to accelerate with the launch of its new iPad app today (available here).
The company is now reaching half a million mobile users daily across major operating systems, chief executive Geoff Cook tells me, with 200 million (unduplicated) monthly sessions in total. Android has grown to be the largest, beating iPhone usage by two to one. The set of mobile app developer acquisitions that the company did earlier this year seems to be paying off. → Read More
Another crop of Apple rumors has grown up under our feet, and it seems a little reaping is in order. Two rumors are making the rounds, both of which warrant a little consideration but should, as usual, be taken lightly until more substantial evidence appears. Both have their origins in Digitimes, which prides itself on catching scraps of news from upstream suppliers but isn’t always correct in its conclusions.
Earlier this week a little bird told Digitimes that the upcoming redesign of the MacBook Pro won’t simply be thinning down the body, but will upgrade the displays to a mind-blowing 2880×1800 resolution. And then just today there has been a recurrence of the 7.85″ iPads we first heard about in October. The implications of the first rumor especially are quite serious, and while the second one seems unlikely, its resilience must be acknowledged.
If these rumors are true, we’ve got a lot to talk about. → Read More
This week the lads and I talk about the iPad Mini, our huge booth at CES, and my new favorite coffeemaker. We also discuss how much it’s going to cost us to interview 50 Cent at CES this year, which is pretty darn wild.
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