Editor’s note: Ross Rubin is principal analyst at Reticle Research and blogs at Techspressive.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one. A guy walks into a watch store and… a smartwatch business partnership is formed. OK, it’s not a funny joke; in fact, it’s not a joke at all. When Secret Labs’ founder and CTO Chris Walker walked into the House of Horology store on Prince Street owned by… → Read More
My father put together a Heathkit shortwave radio in his youth. The radio is still there in my childhood home. He’s still alive so this isn’t saccharine reminisces of a man who passed. Dad still sits in that room with the radio, the radio still works, his hands pound away at the Internet all day now, the radio forgotten but still as vital as the day he built it. My Dad is a little less vital, but… → Read More
A growing number of YouTube creators and multichannel networks are beginning to grumble about the revenue share that the site has with its partners and their inability to monetize their huge audience of viewers on the site. And, increasingly, they’re looking for off-YouTube solutions to better distribute and monetize their videos. → Read More
Apple is building a big, visually stunning store in the Stanford shopping center. A few hundred yards from the construction site sits a small, modest Apple location. Last spring, Microsoft opened a flagship spot right next to the small Apple store with a free Maroon 5 concert.
This new flagship location offers enormous space for testing new retail products. → Read More
Yesterday, a CNET story that alleged that the NSA disclosed during a secret Capitol Hill briefing that its analysts can listen to domestic phone calls “simply based on an analyst deciding that,” got a lot of play in the tech and political blogosphere. Today, however, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) released a statement that denounces this story as “incorrect.” → Read More
E3 was wild and loud, and Sony seemed to rise while Microsoft fell low. Yet it doesn’t really change anything as regards the long-term future of big budget consoe games. With costs continuing to escalate and the break-even point passing 5,6 or 10 million copies, the next generation will be the last for some. → Read More
This coming Friday night, I’ll be at the API Days conference in San Francisco to talk for a few minutes about my perspectives of the API economy. I am not a developer — just an observer — so my views are not deeply technical. That just means I have to ask more questions and talk to more people about APIs and what they represent.
But then I have to simmer it down, collect my thoughts, and… → Read More
No other university in the world has so profoundly shaped our modern age,” New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg said today in his commencement speech at Stanford University. Bloomberg’s speech was relevant to both the tech and Stanford communities, and often self serving, as he touched on entrepreneurship, immigration reform, and marriage equality. → Read More
The Internet has plenty of dark corners, but one of the darkest is surely the growing number of sites that traffic in child pornography. Google, which has no interest in surfacing any of these sites and images, has long worked with numerous non-profit organizations and law enforcement agencies to help protect children online and keep these sites out of its index. The company has, however, recently… → Read More
In 2013, we have seen a reincarnation of “man vs. machine,” except this time, the machines aren’t algorithms — the machine is government. Within a few months, various levels of government across the United States have made headlines with respect to new technologies, products, and services. Unmanned aerial drones, which have a touchy relationship with citizens worldwide already, present… → Read More
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
Seattle, WA
San Diego, CA
Menlo Park, CA
San Francisco, CA
Berlin, Germany
Boston, MA
