The week’s news has been a fear-mongering marathon between civil libertarians who are convinced we’re on the road to becoming North Korea, and security hawks who are building bunkers for the inevitable post-cyberattack hell scape. Unfortunately, because the most important facts about the National Security Agency’s surveillance programs are top secret, the entire debate has… → Read More
Toronto-based startup Sciencescape came about because of a problem that was significant enough to lure co-founder Sam Molyneux away from a bourgeoning career as a cancer researcher, and into a new venture that wants to tackle the bigger picture issue of fixing the entire system of academic, medical and scientific research. It’s a system that’s incredibly outdated, the Sciencescape team believes… → Read More
With summer coming and surf season in full swing, I thought I’d take a closer look at the Casio EMA100-1AV Edifice watch with tide graph and moon-phase data. Casio is best known for their G-Shock line of beefy (and some would say ugly) plastic sports watches so this steel-cased model is a departure for the brand. Casio announced the watch in April and it is on sale now for $250. → Read More
Editor’s Note: Nir Eyal writes about the intersection of psychology, technology, and business for Dashboard.io and on his blog NirAndFar.com.
Ethan Stock lived the Silicon Valley dream. He had recently sold his company to eBay and emanated the tanned skin and relaxed composure you’d expect of someone who just cashed a big corporate check. But as we sat across from one another in a Palo Alto… → Read More
So, this is weird. Earlier today, if you visited the Square’s hiring page on Jobvite, there were two unusual job listings, one for “Chirply — Potential Acquisition” and another for “SeatMe — Potential Acquisition.”
If those were accurate statements, well, that’s a pretty strange way to announce a pair of pending deals. But before you start sending out those congratulatory tweets and emails… → Read More
Editor’s note: Jonah Berger is a marketing professor at the Wharton School and author of the New York Times bestseller Contagious: Why Things Catch On.
Why do some companies, products and services get more word of mouth than others? It’s not luck. There’s a science behind it. Social media gurus always preach that no one talks about boring products or boring ideas. So you would think that… → Read More
Hampton Creek Foods, a food tech startup backed by Khosla Ventures and Founders Fund, is getting ready to expand beyond its initial product Beyond Eggs — though it’s not leaving eggs behind entirely.
The company recently released the YouTube video embedded below, which gives a brief glimpse of its upcoming scrambled egg replacer. And founder/CEO Josh Tetrick told me that he just got… → Read More
Tristan O’Tierney, a co-founder at payment company Square, announced via tweet that yesterday was his last day at the company.
O’Tierney is less well-known than his co-founders, particularly the company’s CEO Jack Dorsey, but according to his LinkedIn profile (where he describes himself as an iOS engineer), his accomplishments include building the original iPhone app, as well as being a “large… → Read More
Why are so many apps blue? The obvious answer is many tech brands contain blue in their logo or tradedress. But why? What’s with the love of blue tones? I ask because the number of blue icons on my phone has reached a kind of tipping point where I’m often firing up the wrong (blue) app. Apple’s iOS 7 redesign is also pushing away from using lots of blue, towards a more balanced multicoloured look. → Read More
Editor’s note: Chris Moore is a partner at Redpoint Ventures where he focuses on making investments in consumer Internet, online marketing and SaaS companies.
This year alone, there is an $11.4 billion mobile advertising opportunity, which means there is tremendous upside for nimble and innovative startups with disruptive mobile-first models. As we saw from Facebook last year, the company… → Read More
It’s that time of the week for a new episode of CrunchWeek, the weekly show where three of us writers plop ourselves down in the TechCrunch TV studio for some real talk about the most interesting stories from the past seven days.
Colleen Taylor, Greg Kumparak and I chatted this week about private social network Path’s rumored $1 billion valuation and the company’s growth to 12 million users… → Read More
Editor’s note:Glenn Kelman is the CEO of Redfin, a technology-powered real estate broker backed by Madrona Venture Group and Greylock Partners.
Well what do you know! After writing on TechCrunch for the past year about how Silicon Valley’s Gatsbyesque wealth couldn’t find much real estate to buy, Bay Area inventory is up. Bidding wars are down. And rising rates are squeezing buyers who… → Read More
People assume the worst. So when it comes to counting government “requests” for private data, a hard number, even a high number, is far better than the fear of infinity. That’s why tech giants are fighting to show they aren’t open books surrendered to the NSA. They want to prove only the suspicious are spied upon. → Read More
Editor’s note: James Altucher is an investor, programmer, author, and several-times entrepreneur.
I know you do it. We all act like we don’t do it, like we’re all pristine human beings who WOULD NEVER do perverse things like that. But I know you do it. And you do it a lot. You respond to trolls. → Read More
It’s been a good week for old media. The Guardian, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal have all done a superb job of reporting on the NSA/PRISM revelations. Unfortunately it has also been a terrible decade for them. Newspaper advertising revenue has fallen by more than half since 2007, and paywalls aren’t even coming close to covering that loss.
Worse yet… → Read More
Calling all startups from Europe, the Middle East and Africa. We want you. For the very first time, the full TechCrunch Disrupt conference (complete with the main TechCrunch Editors and Writers) is coming to Europe and we’re looking for the very best startups to launch on our Disrupt stage as part of the world-famous Startup Battlefield. The winner gets a shiny Disrupt Cup, $50,000 cash, and a… → Read More
Google X, the secretive lab behind projects like Google Glass and Google’s self-driving cars, announced its latest project today: balloon-powered Internet access for those areas of the earth where regular terrestrial Internet isn’t a good option. Earlier this week, Google started testing these balloons, which are meant to provide Internet access comparable to 3G networks while sailing the… → Read More
Editor’s note: Michael Wellman is a professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Michigan College of Engineering.
At 1:07 p.m. on April 23, a hijacked AP Twitter account falsely reported an attack on the White House. Seconds later, major US stock indexes started to fall. They were down 1 percent by the time the tweet was publicly identified as bogus three minutes… → Read More
Updated. As the PRISM scandal shows no signs of dying down in the public consciousness, Facebook has just released the fullest account to date of the requests it has received from United States law enforcement and governmental authorities for the data surrounding its users. To borrow a phrase from local news sizzle reels, the numbers may surprise you. In a report issued today on Facebook’s… → Read More
Elastic Path has raised an $8 million debt round to fuel the development of its “commerce everywhere,” API — a hypermedia platform that abstracts backend complexity for the front-end developer and business person. Wellington Financial out of Toronto provided the financing.
Elastic Path has traditionally served as an e-commerce company. But over the past few years, it has focused on… → Read More
In April, Google announced a couple of new features that were meant to speed up mobile browsing. Among them was “Quick view,” an experimental feature that added a badge to Wikipedia results on Google’s mobile search results pages that, when you clicked it, loaded the Wikipedia result in around 100 milliseconds. Now, however, it looks like these Quick view badges were indeed just experimental and… → Read More
In this week’s Ask A VC epsiode, we had Canaan Partners’ Maha Ibrahim in the studio to chat about her perspective on social gaming and more.
Ibrahim, who has worked at Canaan since 2000, invests in cloud, social gaming and digital media companies for the firm. We raised an interesting question to Ibrahim: Why aren’t there more female VCs in the industry? According to a recent report, of the 25… → Read More
Square CEO Jack Dorsey and the Mayors of New York City and San Francisco announced today that they will be collaborating on a digital technology summit, to be hosted on September 30th in the Big Apple. At a press conference at Square this afternoon, San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee gave a few details about the upcoming summit, which will bring together industry stakeholders for a big-think meeting of… → Read More
Ebay is generally credited with being the first company to bring auctions — a system that, for nearly 2,500 years, had exclusively taken place live in noisy, public (and offline) forums — into the Digital Era. But, today, in spite of the fact that eCommerce has become a thriving global industry, with online marketplaces collectively topping $1 trillion in sales last year, one market in… → Read More
The upcoming death of Google Reader, the addition of hashtags, and other signs say Facebook may launch a new way to discover and read news at the June 20th press event it’s just sent out mysterious invites to. [Update: However, a TechCrunch source says Facebook may launch a new way to share videos, either within Instagram, Facebook's apps, or in a new standalone app. More update details within.] → Read More
You know what’s worse than waiting all day for an app (an app!) to get back to you? The fact that an article called “Father’s Day: What’s your ROI?” exists.
Finally, someone likens parenting to marketing. Tech newsmedia brethren, have you given up?
I know, I know, some of our guest posts are also atrocious, and our world does have bigger fish to fry, but weren’t Fridays supposed to be… → Read More
When we last left off with the Loog Guitar by Rafael Atijas it had blown past its funding goals on Kickstarter in early 2011 and shipped with much fanfare making it one of the first successful Kickstarter projects on our radar. In the interim it’s become a mini-phenomenon and, most important, people have started using the three-stringed instruments to record albums. → Read More
Groove is a Canadian-made mobile app that’s tearing up the charts, reaching a top 1o spot in over 30 countries, and climbing to number 1 in the Canadian app store over other music apps including Rdio and Songza. The app is part of Montreal-based FounderFuel’s latest cohort, and in move that’s becoming a trend for Founder Fuel companies, it has just gone free, and racked up 85,000 downloads in just… → Read More
The mystery of Path’s mysterious growth deepens. The app, which has been around for nearly three years, miraculously jumped up the charts from between 500th and 600th place to the teens on the free list about two months ago. That raised questions about how the app was able to do that so spontaneously. Was it that Path finally suddenly acquired the network effects and organic growth that it… → Read More
Back in March, I wrote about how Heyzap was introducing advertising to its mobile gaming platform. Now co-founder Jude Gomila says the company has become a significant player in mobile advertising.
Specifically, Gomila sent along the chart showing the growth in publishers running Heyzap ads and the corresponding growth in ad impressions over the past six months. You can’t tell exactly where… → Read More
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