PressPausePlay, an award-winning documentary about our new digital culture, premiered at SXSW earlier this year. It is playing at film festivals and you can buy it on iTunes, Amazon, and other digital pay sites. If you don’t want to pay for it, you can now download it via a torrent for free. This free option was essential to the filmmakers. As Seth Godin says in the film, ideas that are free… → Read More
Not everyone agrees with Nicholas Carr that the Internet is wrecking our brains. Take, for example, UCLA Brain Research Institute professor Dean Buonomano, the author of Brain Bugs: How the Brain’s Flaws Shape Our Lives. While Buonomano accepts that there is a “price to be paid” for the benefits of the Internet, he believes that our brains will eventually adapt to real-time networks like… → Read More
Thus spoke Howard Hartenbaum, a partner at August Capital, when he sat down with me last week at our Mobile First CrunchUp event in Palo Alto. For Hartenbaum, who admitted to being “tired” of being pitched “social” start-ups, mobile is the inevitable future of digital businesses – so inevitable, indeed, that he thinks the word will eventually disappear because it will become so… → Read More
Who doesn’t want to be more efficient, smarter and healthier? According to Kleiner partner Chi-Hua Chien, the mobile revolution can, potentially, do all three – developing applications and services on our smartphones that make us more efficient, smarter and healther. And that’s why Kleiner, Chien admitted to me when I interviewed him at our Mobile First CrunchUp event last week, is crying… → Read More
No, we are not in a bubble. Not, at least, according to the Kleiner-Perkins partner, Chi-Hua Chien, who spoke at our Mobile First CrunchUp event in Palo Alto last Friday. Indeed, as Chien told me after his CrunchUp panel, he views today’s two great investment sectors – in mobile and in social – as unique opportunities to reinvent all Internet businesses.
According to Chien, everything is… → Read More
Hired in 1999, Doug Edwards was employee #59 at Google. Edward’s six year stint in Mountain View has been recorded in his highly readable new book I’m Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee #59 where he reveals what life was really like at the plex in those early years.
Earlier this week, TechcrunchTV got lucky when Edwards came into our San Francisco studio to tell me what he… → Read More
It was a first. Yesterday, we were fortunate to welcome Google’s two principle architects of Google+, Vic Gundotra (VP Social) and Bradley Horowitz (VP Product), to the TechcrunchTV studio in San Francisco for an extended interview about what they call their “project”.
So what is Google+? As Gundotra told me yesterday, it is an attempt to “understand people” and to make human… → Read More
America’s most talented writers are discovering the electronic network. In “Super Sad True Love Story,” Gary Shteyngart’s best selling trip into the digital future, Shteyngart invents a darkly disturbing world in which we all wear electronic pendants around our necks called “apparats” which reveal everything about us to everybody. In the future, he tells us, privacy will be dead and our blazingly… → Read More
“If you don’t adapt, you die,” Loic Le Meur told me when he came into the TechCrunchTV studio last week. And Loic – aka monsieur Pivot – is certainly one of the Valley’s most skilled adaptors. Having founded Seesmic in 2008 as a video aggregation network, he then transformed it the next year into a popular consumer Twitter client before shifting it earlier this year into a Salesforce and Softbank… → Read More
The political paralysis over network neutrality might be a microcosm of the broader political paralysis in America. Last week, after FCC chairman Julius Genachowksi laid out his Title I compromise strategy to finally resolve this seemingly never-ending debate, radical left and right wing groups conspired to destroy any possibility of consensus. On the left, activist groups like Free Press called… → Read More
Earlier today I had a debate about the Realtime Web with author Andrew Keen on a Blogtalk Radio podcast hosted by Supernova’s Howard Greenstein. (It is embedded below if you have an extra hour to spare).
Andrew thinks that real time streams such as Twitter are overwhelming and not very helpful for normal people yet. He pulled out the old canard that real time media will never replace traditional… → Read More
TechCrunch Europe’s Mike Butcher and I just finished conducting a short video interview with entrepreneur and author Andrew Keen about the end of Web 2.0 and the dawn of a new age of individualism, driven primarily by Twitter.
[Mike Butcher writes] The controversial, anti-Web 2.0, figure of Andrew Keen spoke at the Next Web in Amsterdam and outlined some of the themes that he is developing for… → Read More
Austin, TX
Seattle, WA
San Diego, CA
Menlo Park, CA
San Francisco, CA
Berlin, Germany
