One of the things that’s frustrating about Apple’s Maps is that you don’t get the integrated transit information that’s the lifeblood of living in a place like New York City or San Francisco. Google Maps has always had that information integrated into the product, which is a huge help for people who live in those metropolitan areas. The difficulty for Google is to keep up… → Read More
Podio, the social business collaboration and project management platform Citrix acquired last year, just announced a set of product updates that bring more real-time features to the service. The over 200,000 companies that currently use Podio will now, for example, get real-time comments, so users won’t have to press the “refresh” button anymore to see when new comments appear on their documents… → Read More
Y Combinator company Glassmap, a location-aware app that was big back in the day (last year), has just announced that is has been acquired by Groupon. A representative from Groupon has confirmed to TechCrunch that the company has indeed acquired Glassmap and is ”excited to bring the team aboard.” This makes total sense, because Groupon needs to know where you are, who you’re… → Read More
Realtime, a technology developed by a company which has been around since the Internet’s earliest days with the practically un-Googleable name “Internet Business Technologies,” has just received a massive $100 million investment to help fund its lofty plan to build the real-time web. The company offers a developer framework that now powers 2,000 real-time client applications, but, until now, it… → Read More
In what appears to be a test among some users, Twitter is adding “Top News” and “Top People” results at the top of its realtime search results. When you search for a hot story like “gmail” (which came out with a buggy iPhone app today) or even “Humanoid” (a new startup I just wrote about), you will see a highlighted boxed result with a link to a top news story along with a thumbnail image from… → Read More
TV is just not the same without Twitter and Facebook chatter. Tonight’s prequel movie Burn Notice: The Fall of Sam Axe comes with social chatter about the show on your laptop courtesy of Echo, the realtime commenting system. The USA Network launched this companion site, which pulls in comments, Tweets, Facebook status updates and Fan Page comments, as well as YouTube video and Twitpic photos… → Read More
Push notifications are the new prime time, water-front property, Boardwalk and Park Place of phase 2 realtime. The domino effect of this alert mechanism will transform the iPad and therefore the downlevel iPhone and Web clients in turn. Soon we will be able to write filters directly to that middle layer buffer where state is stored, with business rules that let some things through to compliant… → Read More
Week One of the Age of iPad was barely weekended when Keith Olbermann was removed from his position at NBC/Comcast. I missed his final show, mostly because I stopped watching it and all the cable news channels once the election was over. But then I remembered we are now in the Age of iPad, and guess what I found when I turned on Apple TV. There it was right in the podcasts section, ready to… → Read More
The news on Monday appears to be that Facebook will reinvent email. TechCrunch says it’s the long awaited Gmail killer. Others say it’s Gmail inventor Paul Buchheit’s project since he came to Facebook in the FriendFeed acquisition. Paul says he hasn’t been working on that, but rather the Big Freaking Zip File app where we can download all our Facebook bits. And anyway, he’s gone — off… → Read More
Realtime search has come a long way from just a year ago when the only option really was Twitter’s own search engine. Now Google, Bing, and a gaggle of realtime search startups all have products up and running (even Facebook is expanding its own realtime search to include everybody’s public stream). Today, one of those realtime search startups, CrowdEye, released a bunch of new features that… → Read More
An interesting firefight broke out over the weekend as Google engineer DeWitt Clinton defended Google data policies in Buzz and related “open” standards. Those who remember the politics of RSS and the games companies played around its buildout would recognize a number of the names and tactics of the current positioning. Closed comment threads, insinuations, calls to action — only the… → Read More
Lady Gaga blared from the speakers as my 16 year old daughter drove away from the house. I didn’t want to like Lady Gaga, but her duet with Elton John at the Grammys changed everything. She seemed to draw strength with every traded verse, turning his phrasing to her advantage, his blues to her power. This was not a generational shift, but a reach across the eras. Now there was my little girl… → Read More
Rumors of the death of Flash are greatly exaggerated, says Jeremy Allaire in a TechCrunch guest post. Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch touts the ability to update the millions of Flash-powered devices over the network. Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz resigns in realtime over Twitter. Nexus One updates the Android OS in realtime when I switch it on this morning. The iPad arrives in March. Here’s another… → Read More
We’ve only got a few days to go before Steve Jobs tells us what we’re spending our money on this year. From all the leaks and positioning announcements, it appears we’re being pushed into the Pay Zone. The NY Times, the top four or five TV shows, the embargo-free bestseller. The bet is we’ll pay for same-day-as access to discretionary consumption of media. I think… → Read More
The dominoes are falling fast in the wake of NBC Universal’s decision to ax its experiment with late night in prime time. What seemed a simple revolt by local affiliate stations may spell the beginning of a complete reworking of mainstream media around the emerging realtime architecture of Twitter. RSS and its podcasting offspring triggered a process of democratization that offered users a… → Read More
In the age of Twitter, no one can keep a secret. That’s clear from the announcements about the Gphone, the iSlate, and the likely fact that nothing will happen at CES. Comdex has been dead for years, Oracle conferences feature endless rehashes by Scott McNealy about the Sun merger, and in general most trade shows have been denuded of any real news. That leaves product announcements by the… → Read More
Over the holidays I had the great pleasure of watching the Seinfeld reunion story arc on the seventh season of Curb Your Enthusiasm. It’s about to disappear from Comcast OnDemand, presumably to traipse off to the increasingly less-profitable domains of the DVD. But not only did the perfect reanimation of Seinfeldian celebration of nothing get around the impossible task of going home again, it made… → Read More
FriendFeed’s return of its realtime Twitter feed is a great end to a turbulent year. Watching the river flow is a maddening exercise in gauging the value of the stream, but having the option again is invigorating as much as it underlines the futility of keeping up. That’s where the Kindle comes in. Kindle is a vacation from the stream; it’s checking into the Millstream motel and communing with old… → Read More
The following guest post was written by Edo Segal (@edosegal).
It was 1993 and I had just decided to drop out of college. I was a graphic design major in a great art school but decided I want to start my second company. Knowing this would mark the conclusion of my studies there I set out to create my final project. I would write a short story, design and produce it in print. I put out an edition… → Read More
The RSS-is-not-dead-it’s just-Twitter Lobby is finally getting the point. As Dave Winer, Anil Dash, Stowe Boyd, Fred Wilson, and whoever else thinks the time for the Bum’s Rush is upon us are proclaiming, the Open Twitter API can save the world from onecompanyitis. In five words: Bearhug Twitter and feed them PB&J until they explode. I know that’s 9 words, but in this upside… → Read More
If Google Analytics just isn’t fast enough for you, there’s Chartbeat, a betaworks company which provides realtime analytics to Website owners. It gives Website publishers a second-by-second view of the number of visitors on their site, which pages are spiking in popularity, referring sites, as well as alerts on slow load times and server crashes. It is particularly useful for blogs.
Today… → Read More
Earlier this week, Google made a massive push into realtime search, taking advantage of its newly gained access to Twitter’s firehose of data, as well as realtime feeds from Facebook, MySpace and others. You can see these realtime results for every search you do by selecting the Updates option, Bing is also in the realtime race.
So what’s Yahoo’s less-than-realtime response three days later? → Read More
Today, at its Search Event in Mountain View, Google Fellow Amit Singhal (who recently participated in our Realtime Crunchup) took the stage to announce a big new feature for the search giant: Realtime. “It’s Google’s relevance technology meeting the realtime web,” is how Singhal described it.
As we’ve learned over the past several months with Twitter Search, relevancy is perhaps the key to… → Read More
Earlier this summer I traveled to Redmond to talk realtime and the cloud with senior Microsoft executives. In this conversation with Robbie Bach, President of Microsoft’s Entertainment & Devices Division, I tried to delve into what “we inelegantly call Three Screens and A Cloud” from Bach’s vantage point atop Xbox, Zune, Windows Mobile, Media Server, and related hardware. The subtext… → Read More
We’re here at the second TechCrunch RealTime CrunchUp in San Francisco, where we’ll be taking a deeper dive into realtime technology and where the streams are taking us. Kicking off the event is a conversation with Twitter COO Dick Costolo. And we’ll have much more real-time goodness coming your way throughout the day (see the agenda below). Watch the live stream of the event, powered by… → Read More
If you believe the noise emanating from the retweetsphere, this realtime thing is something we don’t need, don’t want, destroys our sense of normalcy, prevents real thought from emerging, is populated by charlatans and idiots with more time than sense on their hands, and besides it causes seizures.
I went to Scoble’s blog on the recommendation of some retweet and found myself watching a realtime… → Read More
The Gillmor Gang debated the virtues and otherwise of the smartphone’s latest pretender to the iPhone crown: Droid. Michael Arrington led the Droid’s faction, with a QVC-like enthusiasm for the power of Any Phone That Runs Google Voice. Of course, he keeps his iPhone and iTouch a handy arm-grab away, but with Droid he may finally have some rationale for excommunicating himself from the Apple… → Read More
The Gillmor Gang debated the virtues and otherwise of the smartphone’s latest pretender to the iPhone crown: Droid. Michael Arrington led the Droid’s faction, with a QVC-like enthusiasm for the power of Any Phone That Runs Google Voice. Of course, he keeps his iPhone and iTouch a handy arm-grab away, but with Droid he may finally have some rationale for excommunicating himself from the Apple… → Read More
Earlier this summer I traveled to Redmond to meet with a number of Microsoft executives, including Bob Muglia, President of the Server and Tools Business. Muglia’s group has grown rapidly to become the critical swing vote in Microsoft’s transition to the cloud, now closing in on almost a third of the giant’s overall revenue. And as Silverlight and realtime become the strategic heart of the… → Read More
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Disrupt Europe: Berlin Hackathon
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