Aliens are streaming our music! A crop circle bearing a striking resemblance to the Spotify logo has appeared in Wiltshire, England near Stonehenge. The Swedish startup denies having anything to do with the formation pressed into a canola seed field.
Sirius XM satellite radio must feel a little jealous, as it’s been beaming music into space for years. Hopefully the extraterrestrials like to… → Read More
“She told me that she Googled my name up / Shootings, robberies and big coke came up”. These are lyrics from “Google That”, a vulgar, violent new rap song from NORE Styles P, and Wu-Tang Clan member Raekwon immortalizing the search engine. In it, the rappers brag about how their crimes and jail time are so famous you can find them on the Internet.
Most tech companies probably wouldn’t mind… → Read More
Earning calls are super fascinating when you think about it; For multiple hours a quarter we tune in with the thousands of other tech bloggers to dissect the financials of the public companies we spend our lives covering. Here at TC we’ve started calling covering these calls “putting our Rao face on,” inspired by our star senior editor Leena Rao, who is just amazing at covering earnings.
Like… → Read More
Oh San Francisco, has it really come to this?
Are we now at the point where the disheveled men on street corners no longer ask for change, but rather developers? Apparently so.
I walked out of the TechCrunch offices yesterday afternoon and passed this guy at the Caltrain station. He handed me a business card, cut out of cardboard with the URL fingg.com scrawled onto it in black Sharpie… → Read More
Late last week, one Justin Watt discovered something suspicious going on with the wi-fi at his hotel, the Times Square Marriott. Not content to charge him hundreds for the room and $16.95 for internet access, it appeared that the service provider was using JavaScript injection to serve banner ads on every website guests visited.
The story spread like wildfire for obvious reasons, and at last… → Read More
The Big Apple is looking into upgrading its existing pay phones, and a pilot study is underway that replaces everyone’s favorite anachronism with something a little more 21st-century: giant touchscreens. According the NY Post, the city will unveil 250 revamped phone booths next month that have been revamped with 32-inch touchable displays. These access points would be set up for Skype and other… → Read More
Richard Clarke was a major feature in US security for a decade, serving as a member of the National Security Council and special adviser for cybersecurity to President George W. Bush. He has written a column for the New York Times that details just how serious the threat of cyber attacks is for this country, something increasingly evident in light of things like the creaking infrastructure of… → Read More
Today’s PSA is brought to you by the letter L. What word starts with L? Linen! If you’ve ever used Google Docs, you’ll recall that the interface is wildly ugly. Well no longer. Using a plugin and a nice big Linen JPG, you can turn GDocs into a thing of beauty.
For whatever reason (probably for SEO), a Brisbane, Australia driving school is hosting this Linen background for GDocs and is offering… → Read More
When Mark Zuckerberg called for a “Space Hackathon” to decorate Facebook’s massive new headquarters at 1 Hacker Way, he probably didn’t expect employees to take him so literally. A few scurried up to the roof with some tar paint, and now there’s a 42-foot wide QR code on the roof that’s visible from space.
Scanning it opens the new FB QR Code Page on Facebook which may host puzzles, jokes, and… → Read More
A slightly cryptic announcement by the Pirate Bay yesterday has the Internet speculating whether the site might have accidentally posted their April Fools joke early. “We’re going to experiment with sending out some small drones that will float some kilometers up in the air.”
You can be skeptical, it’s all right. One does not simply launch a fleet of autonomous server drones. But the… → Read More
When last I met with Craig Muth it was in lovely Columbus, Ohio and he was a down-to-earth hacker working on memorize.com, a site dedicated to making the world a better place. Clearly a useful and noble pursuit. Craig moved to San Francisco a while back, and just sent me an email with details of his latest project: a space-saving font he’s calling dotsies.
Dotsies characters are built from five… → Read More
6 drinks for an 160-pound, 30-year-old male? That’ll take 2 days off your lifespan. Just in time for SXSW, 100Proof is a mobile web app from healthtech startup 100Plus that calculates how your drinking shortens or even lengthens your lifespan. Cute graphics shows you how much sex or time boxing a kangaroo you’d have to spend to work off those calories.
Founder Chris Hogg tells me… → Read More
Seriously: this is what is going to do our fighting soon. Imagine stand-off situations with this bastard rolling through the door and then skittering across the marble floor of Oslo City Hall straight into a crowd of hostages, aiming right at the gunman. The design is based on Big Dog, our former favorite dangerous monster robot, but this guy can to 18 miles an hour, five miles faster than the… → Read More
Ahead of Mobile World Congress and an appearance by Facebook to explain its next moves in mobile, the social networking giant is coming under increasing strain over its use of users’ personal information. Mobile startups and operators are both fretting over the issue this week, as smartphones and the apps that come with them increasingly eclipse the feature phones of old. We’ve already seen how … → Read More
Out of the annals of history comes this doozy. A man by the name of Theodore Gray is a co-founder of Wolfram Research, best known as the creator of Wolfram Alpha, the two-year-old computational answer engine, which Siri uses for 25 percent of her mobile searches.
Yesterday, a new video, or rather episode of “Bytesize Science,” emerged on YouTube wherein Gray discusses the tale behind his… → Read More
Are you enough of a photo geek to build your own camera? Maybe. But are you enough of one to build it out of LEGO and some spare bits you had lying around the house? Probably not. But Carl-Frederic Salicath over in Norway is. And he did. He calls it the Legoflex B1. → Read More
Some rather inflammatory news has been making its way around the web today: a user posting on the Pirateweb message board has accused Google of removing copyrighted MP3 music files from a Gmail account — possibly using the scanning services that Google employs to block illegal content on YouTube, possibly using something else.
Shocking if true, so we went to Google to get a response. And the… → Read More
I was debating with myself whether this should be a post or not, and then decided I should just ask out loud on Twitter if it was a good idea or not.
Because three people immediately told me that it was (two of those people were smart, attractive women, I might add), and because TechCrunch founder and former fearless leader Michael Arrington has a long history of identifying porn clones, you… → Read More
Google has been going to great lengths to keep advertisers who sell counterfeit goods online out of its AdWords program, but as far as Montblanc, the Germany-based maker of ‘writing instruments’, watches, jewelry and whatnot, is concerned, they ought to be doing more.
Montblanc-Simplo GmbH, as the holding is called, is taking Google to court in an effort to obtain the identity of a certain … → Read More
In a few months time, here’s what the world will be fighting to get its hands on, or get rid of depending on your confidence in Facebook’s business plan. The image of a Facebook stock certificate was included in the amended S-1 Facebook filed today with the SEC. It’s sure to become coveted by Scripophiliacs, or people who collect historic stock certificates, along with those from Google, Apple… → Read More
Yelp built its ad business by attracting users that know what they want, just not who to buy it from — exactly when ads are most effective. That’s why I find today’s VentureBeat piece by Rocky Agrawal titled “Yelp advertising is a rip-off for small advertisers” to be ridiculous. His sources say Yelp charges a $600 CPM, or 1,000-times the standard online CPM rate.
Yes, these ads are expensive… → Read More
There have been whispers in the past of augmented reality goggles or glasses, but generally we have been able to dismiss them as exaggerations or concepts. The technology, while it isn’t unrealistic, simply isn’t quite there yet.
Apparently that hasn’t stopped Google: a new report is appearing corroborating earlier ones that they are working on a pair of augmented reality glasses. They’d… → Read More
Today, Rdio is releasing a brand new application for Android phones chock-full of fresh features, which is awesome. Mainly because it gives me an excuse to write up a rant I would have published at some point anyway. → Read More
Tsavo Media, which operates a network of roughly 300 websites and blogs as an indirect subsidiary of Canadian online publishing and advertising company Cyberplex, is being retroactively charged $4.8 million “over a reasonable time period” by Yahoo for sending the latter company’s advertisers “low quality traffic” in 2011.
To boot, Cyberplex president Ted Hastings (formerly Tsavo Media’s CEO)… → Read More
Clearly controversy is swirling around web lockers and online storage companies in the wake of the Federal swoop on Megaupload, but if it all goes wrong rest assured that DropBox founder and CEO Drew Houston has a second career to fall back on.
The World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland (or just “Davos” to those in the know) is a great place for the world’s millionaires and billionaires to… → Read More
The shit really hit the fan over at massively popular file hosting site MegaUpload. Yesterday, the United States Department of Justice seized and shut down the site and commenced criminal cases against its owners and others, sparking retaliatory actions from hacker collective Anonymous.
Yesterday, following the DoJ indictment, the Organised and Financial Crime Agency of New Zealand arrested… → Read More
Popular file-hosting site Megaupload, probably known to our readers for a variety of reasons, has been taken down after the FBI charged some of its staff with copyright infringement and “conspiracy to commit racketeering.” Seven people have been charged, and four arrested (in New Zealand), and the site itself appears to be down as authorities around the world closed in on the site’s… → Read More
Today people take to the streets and black out the web to protest unfair piracy legislation. To the tune of Don McLean’s ‘American Pie’ they’ll be singing:
”Why, why are laws a thing you can buy? / They got paid off, should be laid off, re-election denied / Our web means more than lawyers, lobbies and lies / So speak up before the internet dies / Speak up before the internet dies”. Watch the… → Read More
President and CEO of the Motion Pictures Association of America Chris Dodd has issued a strongly-worded statement regarding tomorrow’s planned outages and protests relating to the SOPA and PIPA legislation. If you didn’t already think the MPAA was a ship of fools, this will convince you once and for all. → Read More
A study by the British Psychological Society found a link between stress levels and the number of times a person picks up their smartphone to check messages and mails. As an addict, I can completely agree with this finding. In short, the more you do it, the worse you feel.
Oddly, the study found that less stress was induced when checking work e-mail rather than other online interactions. The… → Read More
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