“Distributing a desktop browser is hard and expensive (especially if you don’t have an operating system or the world’s most trafficked website to promote it)” says Rockmelt, so today it announced it will soon stop supporting its social browser. As consolation, existing users (and those with TechCrunch’s invite link) can access the private beta of its new site that ports its… → Read More
Rockmelt’s recently released iPad app only offered signup through Facebook and Twitter, leading 50 percent of users not to sign in at all. So today it followed Pinterest and Spotify by moving away from social-only signup and offering email as a login option. “Users don’t want to add social up front and give access to their information,” Rockmelt’s Eric Vishria tells me. “People want a little… → Read More
Surfing the Internet can feel like you’re running in circles, constantly checking your favorite sites for updates. The RockMelt team believes that content should be delivered, not hunted, so its new browser app for iPad is built around a stream instead of a blank window.
Check out my video demo and interview with co-founder Eric Vishria, where we discuss the next generation of user interface. → Read More
6 months after its public launch, the RockMelt social web browser now has 1.4 million registered users and several hundred thousand weekly active users, CEO Eric Vishria told me this morning. With Internet Explorer and Firefox on the decline, RockMelt’s 2012 will be defined by competition with Chrome. Google’s browser recently moved in the direction of RockMelt, adding login for personalization… → Read More
Facebook announced a trio of related new chat products today: ad hoc group chat, a new chat design, and video calling powered by Skype. The ad hoc group chat lets Facebook users create group chats without first creating a group. The new design makes chat look better on wide screens. But the big announcement is around video calling, which we broke last week.
You can try the video calling now. … → Read More
Is there a future for social browser startup RockMelt? Despite attracting only a few hundred thousand active users since its much-hyped launch, the company filled with ex-Netscape rockstars and backed by former Netscape founder Marc Andreessen just managed to raise another $30 million in a B round led by Accel Partners and Khosla Ventures, with Andreessen Horowitz, Ron Conway, Bill Campbell and… → Read More
Ever since RockMelt launched its social browser, it’s been known unofficially as the Facebook browser. Facebook chat, status updates and sharing are all built right into the browser. Now Facebook and RockMelt are officially working together in a product partnership, and the first fruits of that collaboration can be seen in the latest release available today, RockMelt 3.
RockMelt is still an… → Read More
RockMelt, the social browser, came out with an iPhone app today. If you are familiar with RockMelt, which opened up publicly last month after much of its initial fanfare died down, it adds feeds and streams along the righthand rail. RockMelt Mobile is essentially this right-hand rail repackaged as a mobile app. Co-founder and CTO Tim Howes showed it to me recently (watch the video).
RockMelt… → Read More
s the new Nintendo 3DS all that? Does Rockmelt have a chance? Will mobile wallets ever be adopted by real people in real stores? CrunchGear editor John Biggs and I tackle these questions in this week’s edition of Fly or Die. Watch the video to find out who our surprise guest is this time after we give our verdicts on his company’s product.
The Nintendo 3DS uses simple stereoscopic 3D graphics… → Read More
When RockMelt launched its new browser in private beta last November, it was greeted with an avalanche of press. RockMelt is a new social browser built around Facebook, realtime feeds, and faster search. The fact that Netscape founder Marc Andreessen is a major backer probably had something to do with the intense interest also.
Reviews were mixed and then interest sort of died down. The only… → Read More
You remember RockMelt, right? After the social browser launched two weeks ago, talk about it exploded — then seemed to die down just as quickly. But today brings an update that may get people interested again.
The service has just rolled out their first big update to their browser. Version 0.8.36.74 (sexy name) contains a number of bug fixes and stability improvements. It also updates the… → 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
As with most things on the web, the insanity surrounding the initial launch of RockMelt died down quickly. The first reactions had some people screaming “eureka!”, while others yelled “Flock 2.0!” The truth, as I see it after a few days of usage, is that the latest social web browser is somewhere in the middle of those two extremes.
I know, it’s boring to say, but RockMelt neither sucks nor is it… → Read More
All of a sudden, visual search previews are the hot feature of the week. On Monday, RockMelt unveiled its new browser in private beta. One of its main features is how it handles search from the browser search box. When you type in a search, results are displayed in a column overlay with each underlying page preloaded so that it appears in the main browser window when you click on each… → Read More
Yesterday, a new social browser, RockMelt, launched in a very private beta. You can read my initial review here. But unless you were one of the 500 lucky readers to grab an invite yesterday, or know somebody who did (every user gets three invites), you might have to wait a while before you get to try it out.
In the meantime, you can get a sense of what the browser looks like from this video I… → Read More
If you are going to create a new browser from scratch and go up against the Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, and Apple, you might as well make it really different. Rockmelt, a company backed by Netscape founder Marc Andreessen which has been under wraps until today, is trying to build a new browsing experience from the ground up. Are they crazy? “The big thing,” says Andreessen, “is that the browser… → Read More
Marc Andreessen is backing a new browser company called RockMelt. Not much is known about RockMelt other than it is being designed by an all-star team (including software engineer Robert John Churchill from the Netscape days) and that it is tied into Facebook through Facebook Connect. Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb has a screenshot of the sign-in page and speculates that RockMelt is in… → Read More
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