Happy April First, errybody! Yes, that’s right, we’ve reached that special, inimitable time of year. April Fools Day 2013. At TechCrunch, we have a long history of taking April Fools seriously. Deadly, deadly seriously. So, we’ve taken it upon ourselves to create a master list (which will be updated throughout the day) with the best tomfoolery, pranks, WTFs and LOLs the Internet and the tech… → Read More
The era of VCs investing in successful consumer Internet startups such as eBay led to a belief system that seemed to permeate many enterprise software startups that hiring sales or implementation people was a bad thing. And many enterprise startups I meet try to convince me they don’t need professional services teams. This is a big mistake. This post explains why … → Read More
Playnomics, a San Francisco-based startup that helps mobile game developers earn more from their existing players, just picked up another $5 million in funding from Vanedge Capital and existing investors including FirstMark Capital and XSeed Capital. Vanedge is a Vancouver-based fund co-created by a couple Electronic Arts veterans including former president of worldwide studios Paul Lee. The… → Read More
Millions of people across the U.S. are preparing their jerseys, face paint and horrific nachos. Yes, football fans rejoice, the big game finally kicks off tomorrow in New Orleans — that is, Super Bowl XLVII, between the Baltimore Ravens and the San Franciso 49ers. The Super Bowl is always one of the biggest media events per year, and our inboxes have been flooded with “OMG this is going to be the… → Read More
Today, Google.org’s VP, Matthew Stepka, announced that the non-profit arm of Google is going to be giving a large sum money to Sunlight Foundation and mySociety to promote civic innovation through technology. Specifically, its Civic Information API will help fuel new applications and services for places worldwide. Big and small. Here’s what Stepka had to say about the initiative… → Read More
Citigroup took a big hit yesterday, as its new CEO Michael Corbat announced the company’s intention to lay off 11,000 employees and “pull back in emerging markets” in an effort to cut costs amidst challenging times for big banks. According to Bloomberg, this represents a 4.2 percent reduction of Citi’s total workforce and hits hardest in trading, investment banking and transaction services groups… → Read More
A new Ray Kurzweil book is always a major event. And his latest work, How To Create A Mind: The Secret Of Human Thought Revealed, is classic Kurzweil – both infuriatingly brilliant and brilliantly infuriating. → Read More
In the most recent episode of my Foundation video series, I sat down with the founder of StyleSeat, Melody McCloskey. Melody shares how her frustration with finding a stylist inspired her to build the platform. She also talks through the challenges of reaching an audience who isn’t in front of a computer all day and how the web helps them grow their business and improve their client… → Read More
Attending this year’s #BoxWorks conference has been extremely interesting for me, as I’ve gotten to talk to a group of people that I rarely interact with, enterprise folks. There’s a nice mix of developers here, too, which makes it feel much more comfortable for those of us not working for a gigantic company. Well, I suppose I work for a gigantic company, but you know what I mean. → Read More
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the social network is focused on supporting Instagram’s growth, following the close of a roughly $750 million deal to buy the photo-sharing app. Instagram is the most unusual acquisition in Facebook’s history, considering the huge sticker price, the startup’s small team, and a pledge to stay hands-off with the service. Most of Facebook’s other deals have been… → Read More
Anthony Coombs is CEO of Interact and a passionate Philly tech booster who helped us gather a great group of people last week to our Mini Meet Up. I took him into a dark quiet corner to talk about his startup, the tech scene in Philly, and the burgeoning NJ/PA tech corridor. → Read More
Screens with a 1024×768 resolution are a bit like Windows XP: they have long been surpassed by better options but still remained the most often used screens on the web. That is, until now. According to the latest data from StatCounter, 1366×768 screens just surpassed 1024×768 as the most popular screen resolution used by the visitors to StatCounter’s global network of sites. Three years ago… → Read More
There are a fair amount of third-party iPhone email clients out there, but few ever received the kind of reception that Sparrow for iPhone got a few weeks ago. Sadly, though, unless you have a jailbroken iPhone or use a third-party service like Boxcar, you won’t be able to get push notifications for new emails from Sparrow – but this could soon change. → Read More
As we enter 2012, shouldn’t we all be traveling around in flying cars by now? That was the prediction in the Jetsons cartoon tv show. The futuristic series, first produced by Hanna-Barbera in 1962, was set in 2062, exactly 50 years from today. 2012 is the halfway point, so we’ve still got some time before we are all driving around in flying cars. But, many other technology advances from the… → Read More
As the Occupy Wall Street movement keeps growing, many of the issues raised by the protestors continue to gain support from the average American. In particular, the erosion of the middle class due to job losses and the increasingly large income gap have become key issues in the 2012 presidential elections.
At the moment, Wall Street and big corporations are getting the lion’s share of blame… → Read More
A new report put out today by PricewaterhouseCoopers lays out the tech M&A landscape. Technology deals totaled $26 billion in the second quarter of 2011, slightly down from the $26.6 billion worth of deals in the first quarter, but up 6.7 percent from the same quarter a year ago. These numbers include only deals closed in the quarter like Qualcomm’s $3.5 billion acquisition of Atheros… → Read More
Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by (@msuster) Mark Suster, a 2x entrepreneur, now VC at GRP Partners. Read more about Suster at Bothsidesofthetable
Are we headed for a long era of innovation in which startups are the new norm? Are we seeing a time in which pre-revenue companies are more valuable than our offline institutional brands?
Yes, there is unprecedented innovation. The… → Read More
The WiMAX Forum says that WiMAX will expand coverage to potentially serve a billion people by the end of this year. Last year, the strongest growing areas included the United States (with Clearwire), Japan, Korea, Malaysia and the Philippines. → Read More
It happens to everyone; you buy that new phone, or laptop – and then a new more powerful version of the same product comes out the very next week. Best Buy has come out with a program designed to help with this phenomenon, but it doesn’t come cheap. → Read More
The compass has been around, pretty much forever. Currently technology isn’t really that far from a magnetized sliver of metal floating on a cork, but that may be about to change. A group of physicists have been working on a new type of compass, one that uses rubidium atoms to measure the magnetic field and provide a more accurate reading. → Read More
There’s a myth out there that technology will ruin soccer, what Pelé (and others) once called “the beautiful game.” Let me ask you something: is this Cristiano Ronaldo free kick any less beautiful because he’s wearing the latest Nike boots? Do you have any idea how many hours are spent developing the technology that’s built into things like the Nike Mercurial Vapor Superfly II? Rest assured that… → Read More
In most years, come rain or shine, executive pay at technology startups always goes up because the competition for talent is always so intense. In 2009, however, cash compensation for CEOs at private technology companies will be flat compared to last year, according to a new CompStudy by executive search firm J. Robert Scott and Ernst & Young. This will be the first time CEO pay at private… → Read More
Well, I think we finally know what Asus does when they get a dead motherboard. They take it apart, and turn it into a picture! Behold the loveliness that is the Motherboard Mona Lisa, a model of PCI and AGP slot beauty and mystery. → Read More
Yesterday’s trip down memory lane with the Gopher protocol got me thinking about all the other protocols I used to use, and those that I continue to use on a regular basis. There’s little doubt that hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) is one of the most widely used protocols on the Internet today. But there are a host of other protocols used every day! Let’s look at a few of my current favorites… → Read More
Graphene, as everyone knows, “is a one-atom-thick planar sheet of sp2-bonded carbon atoms that are densely packed in a honeycomb crystal lattice.” (Seriously, I didn’t just check Wikipedia for that.) Scientists have been using the material for lots of different applications for some time now. Recent work at IBM’s T. J. Watson Research Center has focused on using graphene as a photodetector, and it… → Read More
Apparently you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to help NASA. The space agency just posted a request for suggestions for future prize contests on their website, and anyone may submit an idea. → Read More
I’m in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia for the inauguration ceremony of KAUST, the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology. This is a 30-square kilometer state-of-the-art research institution with faculty and students from all over the world. For the next couple of days I’ll be getting some behind-the-scenes access to technology in use here, both for education and research, as well as the tools… → Read More
It’s pretty easy, in this day and age, to get frustrated with technology, and lose sight of how awesome our world is as a result of technological innovation. Every now and then some piece of news will come along to remind us of how great technology can be, leading us on an adventure of knowledge, and restoring our appreciation for science. Today, that news is word that the 50,000th pacemaker has… → Read More
The generation gap all too often expresses itself as a technology gap. A survey of white collar workers (most of them in the legal profession) commissioned by NexisLexis offers a glimpse at changing attitudes towards technology between Baby Boomers, Gen Xers and Gen Yers. One thing Baby Boomers apparently really hate is when the rest of us are not paying attention during meetings and instead… → Read More
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