Andrew Mason must be some kind of spirit animal of optimism. We assumed he was kidding when today he wrote that he had recorded “a seven song album of motivational business music”. Just three months ago the founder and CEO got booted from Groupon. But we’ve just confirmed with him that his album “Hardly Workin’” is for real. Hold on to your ear holes, startup people. → Read More
Meet the PR2 personal robot from Willow Garage. The human-sized bot can learn to fold clothes and do other activities via voice commands, and it can even get into sword fights. Watch as I challenge the PR2 to a lightsaber duel today at Google I/O, and learn how Willow Garage could help anyone run their own experiments with robots. → Read More
Every now and then I see something so ridiculously stupid, it’s just begging to be called out. That’s the case with this promotional video from the kind folks at Rippln, which is more or less a two-minute case study in how not to pitch your soon-to-be ultra-viral app to the general public, or the press, or potential employees or investors. → Read More
No app has ever broken my heart quite like Vine, Twitter’s six-second animation maker. You capture a scene, then pocket your phone while you think of a witty way to describe. But when you open it a few minutes later or the app randomly crashes, it’s gone. That moment, that memory, deleted. I still love Vine, but I’ll never forgive it for the visions it stole from me. → Read More
“Success Theater” means only sharing an idealized version of yourself where you’re always happy. Now a bug in Facebook’s new mood sharing feature is taking that concept way too literally. Select that you’re “Unhappy” and Facebook adds a smiley face to your post instead of a frown emoticon. → Read More
He might not be bulletproof, but simultaneously running Twitter and Square qualifies Jack Dorsey as a superhero. This week a new unauthorized comic book about him was released, called “Jack Dorsey: Co-Founder of Twitter #1″. Check out these page scans posted by Comic Book Resources that preview his quest to recover stolen quantum networking technology. → Read More
I love you Spotify, but you’re freaking me out. Today you showed off your first television commercial. It’s supposed to introduce the mainstream world to the wonder of listening to almost any song ever on demand. Yet with a useful product to sell and all the emotional resonance of music to lean on, the ad comes off vague, haunting, and devoid of soul. So much so I couldn’t help but parody it. → Read More
Twitter has done a great job at keeping the whole “blue badge” verification process a mystery. If curiosity eats away at you like it does me, you’re in luck. A new video from comedians Hari and Ashok Kondabolu, featuring Anil Dash who has around 500k followers, shows the magical transformation from start to finish.
First off, it’s important to know that you can’t ask to be verified. Twitter… → Read More
Our beds used to be finite. A limited range of activities took place there. We’d sleep, or try to, make love, eat, and maybe read a paperback. But we could only hide from the world for so long. The nagging puppet strings of our desire to learn and experience would pull taught. Eventually we had to rise. Then we found someone to cuddle with. → Read More
Who wins basketball games is an immutable fact. No one owns that information, so why should some random sports sites get the windfall of traffic as millions of sports fan search Google for the NCAA March Madness bracket updates? In Google’s latest application of making the world’s information universally accessible, it’s now embedding the March Madness at the top of a variety of search results. → Read More
Google announced yesterday that it would shut down Google Reader, Google’s RSS feed reading product, on July 1. In response, an online petition was started by Daniel Lewis (no relation) asking the search giant to let Reader live. As of the time of writing, the petition already has over 30,000 signatures. → Read More
Matthew Inman is sick of memes about bacon and kitties. Better known as web comic artist The Oatmeal, Inman gave TechCrunch the lowdown on what’s funny, what’s not, and how he finds inspiration. In this video interview he shoots off his thoughts on 4Chan and The Harlem Shake. When asked about LolCats, he bluntly replied, “Tired of that”. → Read More
Video gaming for hours is exhausting, so surely it counts as some sort of workout too, right? One publication from Japan just estimated how many calories it takes to click a mouse button once. ‘Convert Anything To Calories’, published by PHP Science World Shinsho, has narrowed down a mouse click to 1.4 calories. This is based on an index finger at a volume of 10.8 cubic centimeters, with a… → Read More
Don’t ever sit on the black balls at the kids table in Apple retail stores, recommends supposed former employee and Redditor Mister_Rabbit. It seems that as 370 million people visit an Apple Store each year, a few of the kids are leaving something behind when they go. → Read More
Hey Bros of Virool, I know you think it’s cool that your launch party is being written up in TechCrunch. But seriously, half-naked girls in silver mono-kinis dancing in front of floating arithmetic, fractions and percentage signs? Why would women want to work for this company? When did Silicon Valley become so thin on actual technology that startups had to have “nerd” or… → Read More
Every week, Eric and Alexia update the TechCrunch editorial team on our performance, providing important stat breakdowns for the week, such as total number of posts and pageviews. They also provide updates on notable news within the team and organization — things like new hires, new roles, and important upcoming events and goals. This was my response to our fearless leaders this week. → Read More
The physical world wasn’t built for $500 devices we need every other minute. This is never more obvious than when I strain my back and curse like a sailor because my phone has fallen into the gap beside my car or plane seat. As tech companies obsess over usability, the thoughtlessness that mars the meatspace comes into painfully sharp relief. → Read More
A five-minute video? Ain’t nobody got time for that. Not to watch one, or to make one. But the Harlem Shake dance videos are capped at 30 seconds. That’s why we’re so willing to watch just one more incarnation, and why it’s easy to recruit friends to make them. The result is one of the most pervasive gags in history. A “Symbiotic Meme”, the Harlem Shake has a lesson to teach all content creators. → Read More
It wouldn’t be a BlackBerry press event without something totally unexpected and semi-weird thrown in the mix. Today, at BlackBerry’s media conference revealing BlackBerry 10, the company appointed Alicia Keys as the new Global Creative Director.
Her first act as GCD was to talk about how much she loves BlackBerry 10 at today’s media conference. Her other responsibilities are somewhat unclear… → Read More
Scott Hartley, a venture capitalist at Mohr Davidow, decided to completely overhaul his investment strategy today after returning from a trip to New York. Hartley, who is originally from Palo Alto, spent a few days in New York for meetings and an interview on Bloomberg TV. When he unlocked his Sand Hill Road office today, he found that his colleague Abhas Gupta had cheerfully Bieberized his new… → Read More
One of the stranger things I came across while in Tokyo last month was a digital artist who built a human camera that requires touch from another person to snap photos. It is artist Eric Siu’s bit of rebellion against an increasingly technology-dependent world that distances people from real-life interactions. This effect is especially pronounced where Siu lives in Japan, as the Internet has… → Read More
The first ever musical recording in space (that we know of anyway) was performed just a few days ago on the International Space Station by Col. Chris Hadfield, commander of the International Space Station. The song, which is already climbing up Reddit’s r/Music page, is an original Christmas Carol called Jewel in the Night.
Based on the commander’s Facebook and Twitter pages, he and his crew… → Read More
Mark Zuckerberg invented Poking, one of Facebook’s earliest features, so it’s fitting he was part of the small team that built the new Poke app over the last 12 days. Sources say Zuckerberg actually wrote code for Poke despite saying he rarely programs for Facebook anymore. And that voice that blurts out “Poke” when you get a push notification about a new Poke message? That’s Zuck, too. → Read More
The NRA just wasted its chance at redemption and used its highly anticipated press conference to shift the blame to video games, and insinuate about a conspiracy to downplay the role of violent media. “There exists in this country, sadly, a callous, corrupt and corrupting shadow industry that sells and stows violence against its own people,” cried NRA Vice President, Wayne LaPierre, in a… → Read More
On Black Friday, discounted boxed smartphones seem to be the equivalent of dry foods in a post-apocalyptic movie.
This video, first spotted by the Telegraph, shows customers of a Walmart in Moultrie, Georgia duking it out over discounted pay-as-you-go smartphones. → Read More
How young will the casualties become in the ongoing war against online piracy? You have to wonder, when you learn that a 9-year old girl’s laptop was seized by Finnish police in a raid on her home, following a complaint by the CIAPC anti-piracy group which had ISPs block The Pirate Bay in Finland. The raid followed a request that the girl’s father pay up around €600 to settle piracy accusations. → Read More
Can Matthew Inman catch a break? This time the cartoonist also known as The Oatmeal is being sued by Oatmeal Studios, a card manufacturer famous for their Spenser’s Gifts-style greeting cards including the classic “At our age who needs a GPS… …if we can’t remember why we got in the car in the first place?! Have a memorable birthday!” → Read More
Welcome to the future of 360-degree video.
MakingView, a company out of Norway, has created a camera called the ViewCam, an ultra lightweight camera that can be mounted almost anywhere and take full 360-degree video.
Unlike the Dot or GoPro, however, consumers can’t purchase the ViewCam, as it’s only available as proprietary technology, licensed out to companies like RedBull. But that… → Read More
“How do I love thee, cloud storage? Let me count the ways.” You see, Dropbox’s CEO Drew Houston is an inspiring guy, and a joy to talk to as a tech journalist because he’s not afraid to describe the grand vision for his company in bold quotes. So this morning after writing up my interview with him about the significance of Dropbox hitting 100 million registered users, I wrote this little poem. → Read More
Scientists are yesterday’s wizards and demigods. And Nate Silver is a scientist. One whose ability to predict the outcome of elections is so precise, it’s nearly indistinguishable from magic. That’s why IsNateSilverAWitch.com is so funny. But really what his flawless prediction of the presidential election signifies is the coming of age of the quantified universe. → Read More
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