BERLIN– Yesterday at the Next 11 conference, I interviewed Rovio’s Mighty Eagle Peter Vesterbacka on stage. You may know him as the man who brings us all different versions of Angry Birds, Angry Birds toys, possibly an Angry Birds movie, and– as you’ll see in the clip below– an Angry Birds line of hoodies.
He has a big announcement: Angry Birds downloads have topped 200 million. To put that in… → Read More
Blip.tv started five years ago with a focus on helping budding video producers manage and distribute their shows across the Web. Slowly but surely, though, it’s become a video destination in its own right with 3 billion cumulative video views—currently closing in on one billion a quarter. In light of that growth, it is now fully embracing its destiny as a video destination with a redesign… → Read More
For the third set of interviews from last week’s excellent SFMusicTech event, I talk with David Hyman, the current CEO of MOG, the co-founder of Addicted to Noise, former CEO of Gracenote and one of the smartest and most experienced pioneers of the digital music revolution.
Hyman’s MOG is one of the most interesting and important contemporary start-ups. Like Pandora and Spotify, MOG is… → Read More
In part III of Erick Schonfeld’s interview with the man of many interests, Gary Vaynerchuk, Gary discusses his daily-deal wine venture, Cinderalla Wine and throws props to similar deal delivering sites like Lot18. Overall, he says, on the need of these sites to strategically position themselves. “I think the acquisition of consumers might be on the verge of being mapped” says Vaynercuck, “the… → Read More
The Gillmor Gang — Craig Burton, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — survived the week of Google AeeEeeI/OUuu, Facebook slimeware, and the embalmerization of Microsoft with nary a scratch. Robert Scoble briefly joined via the iPad and FaceTime from a layover at O’Hare, but he couldn’t hear us and we could hear him say so, over and over. Kinda like Facebook, who somehow got its Dumb… → Read More
Should music artists be like the authoritarian Steve Jobs? Is it their responsibility to know what their fans want better than they do? Evan Lowenstein, the successful singer-songwriter and the current CEO of StageIT, certainly seems to think so. In a recent article tantalizingly entitled “The Artist to Fan Relationship: Dating, Love, Texting and Marriage”, Lowenstein argues that “as an… → Read More
When it comes to publishing apps on the iPad, there are two models: 1) social readers that bring all your realtime news feeds together like Flipboard; or 2) single-title apps from major publishers like the New Yorker, The Daily or the New York Times. Those two models are also dividing along the lines of subscriptions versus ad-supported/free.
In the video above, Flipboard CEO Mike McCue makes… → Read More
Earlier this week, I spent a most enjoyable day at the SFMusicTech Summit, the Bay Area’s top Internet music event put on by the digital impressario Brian Zisk. The highpoint for me of the summit was interviewing Brandon Boyd and Mike Einziger from the chart topping rock band Incubus.
From Einziger’s limousine jokes to Boyd’s confession on “feeling dirty” about self-promotion to both… → Read More
The Gillmor Gang — John Borthwick, Robert Scoble, John Taschek, and Steve Gillmor — inaugurated a new kind of Gillmor Gang. To the undisclosed, it looks the same: silly chat, mangled technology disruptions, and dead air. To the more clueful, who recognize we’re entering a new age of social media, the intersection of social monitoring and proactive brand creation tools spells big trouble for… → Read More
If you have been watching TechCrunch TV interviews lately, you may have noticed the videos are much sharper, crisper and much higher quality. The reason: we’ve gone HD. We are now using a new workflow with HD cameras and HD video switcher. Our shows from New York (Fly or Die and Founder Stories) have always been produced in HD at AOL Studios. But, now our San Francisco studio has gotten the… → Read More
Ze Frank thinks that the future of play is a “hot thing.” That’s why he founded Star.me, his soon-to-be fully public startup. And that’s why he’s shifted his focus from stand-up entertainment to stand-up entrepreneurialism.
But why has he gone from being one of the web’s top entertainment stars to yet another star-struck startup guy? As he told me last week when he came into the… → Read More
Ze Frank wants to send us all back to kindergarten. Star.me, Ze’s soon-to-be fully public startup, which raised $500,000 from star-struck investors including Gary Vaynerchuk and Ron Conway, is an attempt to reinvent the kindergarten’s star system of rewards.
As Ze told me when he came into the TechCrunchTV studio earlier this week, “stars are good.” They make us human, they allow us to… → Read More
Following our visit to Berkeley Bionics to talk with the team about their inspiring artificially intelligent, bionic devices, we were lucky enough to visit The Santa Clara Valley Medical Center (VMC) to speak with those involved in the clinical testing of this new technology as part of patient treatment.
Berkeley Bionics has been working in conjunction with VMC Chief of Spinal Cord &… → Read More
Netflix is leading the charge when it comes to streaming movies and TV shows over the Internet. It’s no longer focussed on DVDs, even though it is about to ship its 3 billionth disc. As bandwidth to the home increases, streaming will just continue to become more popular. At the Wired business conference earlier this week, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings predicted that gigabit-per-second speeds to… → Read More
Today during her keynote talk at Social Loco, Google VP of Location and Local Services Marissa Mayer outlined some of the core goals driving Google’s local and location strategies, and how social will tie into that. The gist: Google wants to create serendipitous experiences, and to present you with contextually relevant information before you even search for it. But there are still plenty of… → Read More
About a month ago, I was one of the very first people to ride an Uber car in New York City a few hours after the company put a few test cars out on the streets. It was supposed to be a secret, but I found out about it, and texted Uber CEO Travis Kalanick while I was in the car. Last night was Uber’s “official” launch in New York City with about 100 cars which can be summoned via an iPhone app. … → Read More
The Gillmor Gang — Kevin Marks, Danny Sullivan, JP Rangaswami, John Taschek, and Steve Gillmor — christened the new Gang studio with a surprise welcome to Kevin Marks. It turns out he’s joining salesforce.com on Monday, following JP (six months), JT (7 years), and me, who is celebrating my one year anniversary. Kevin has been a forceful champion of open standards at Apple, Technorati, Google… → Read More
Vibrating sex toys have been around for over a century, starting out as crude steam powered devices and now resembling something very cool that you might pick up at an Apple store. Sex toys have been the source of giggles, controversy, pleasure and up until the last 5 years, were not a mainstream product. They were devices you bought and had shipped in unmarked brown packaging or slipped into a… → Read More
Can gadgets betray us? Is the Pope Catholic?
Last week, we ran an interview with Robert Vamosi, a senior security analyst at Mocana, and the author of When Gadgets Betray Us, about the iPhone location tracking kerfuffle.
But Vamosi’s new book goes beyond a critique of Apple and Google. When Gadgets Betray Us is a broad warning about how the latest technology hardware – from smart meters to… → Read More
TweetDeck’s new iPhone app came out a couple days ago. It is completely redesigned from the ground up and looks more like it’s Android cousin than the first TweetDeck for iPhone. Instead of cramming as much as possible into an iPhone screen, TweetDeck stripped everything out but the essentials. The result is a spare mobile stream reader that packs a lot of punch. We take a look at the new… → Read More
Does founding a non-profit organization require the same skills as founding a traditional start-up company? Are the most successful social entrepreneurs as skilled in personal reinvention as the top Silicon Valley entrepreneurs?
Yes and yes. Take, for example, charity: water, the meteorically successful non-profit organization founded by the charismatic Scott Harrison. Four years ago, Harrison… → Read More
The Gillmor Gang — Danny Sullivan, Doc Searls, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — endured technical glitches and a dissection of the disruption formerly known as TV before settling into a debate about privacy. I know, sounds like the usual nonsense, but this show was high quality nonsense. I forget who brought up the famous iPhone/Android hidden recording file crisis, but things… → Read More
We’re back with another episode of TC Cribs, taking you inside the offices of some of the tech world’s hottest companies. This episode features Meebo, which rose to popularity as a multi-protocol web-based chat client, and has since gotten tons of traction with their Meebo Bar (not to be confused with the numerous drinking holes located in the office, as you’ll see in the episode)).
Tune in to… → Read More
Happy Earth Day everyone!
And to have a good Earth Day, and I mean a really good one, you need to watch a three minute video that was released today. It’s called Water Changes Everything and it’s been made by charity: water, an amazing non-profit organization founded by the incomparable Scott Harrison and actively supported by many Silicon Valley notables including Michael Birch, Jack Dorsey… → Read More
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