January 2008

[photopress:applestore_1.jpg,full,center] Here it is just a week after Stevenote, which featured the introduction of the MacBook Air (of which you’ll hear more from me later), Time Capsule, and iTunes rentals,…

The saga of Scrabulous is nearing an end. The Facebook version of Scrabble raised the ire of Hasbro and Mattel, which jointly own the rights to the game abroad and…

HTC’s Smart handset family of products, which is billed as a rival to Apple’s iPhone, sold 2 million units last year. The company sold nearly 12 million handsets overall last…

Travel organization service Tripit, a TechCrunch 40 finalist that was recently named by Michael as one of the companies he couldn’t live with out, is getting more social with new…

[photopress:newstacks.jpg,full,center] That awful translucent menu bar in Leopard is now optional. Leaked screenshots of 10.5.2 show the option to turn on/off that menu bar “feature,” which, along with Stacks’ erratic…

The Japanese government is planning to offer exams for people who want to be mobile phone guides. The guides will help customers learn how to use all the functions that…

Netvibes is opening up the beta for its Ginger release, and 500 invites have been reserved for the first TechCrunch readers to sign up here (enter code: “TCGINGER500”). Ginger will…

Last October, at the Web 2.0 Launch Pad, the startup voted “Most Likely to Exit First” was CleverSet. Now three months later, CleverSet has sold itself to e-commerce software company…

A democratic solution to the neverending party DJ problem TokyoFlash Tibida: White LEDs! Time-killing list: Top 25 tech flops Spaceships to be made out of paper if Japan Folded Paper…

Comments are the greasy oil that keeps the blog machine running. Here are three great (and 100% unedited) comments recently posted by your fellow readers. AT&T will sell you just…

It is not just Yahoo that is going through some rough times. After a decade at the helm, eBay CEO Meg Whitman is preparing to retire, reports the WSJ (subscr.…

Bringing home the point that the venture cycle is maturing with later-stage deals sucking up more and more capital, London- and Geneva-based Index Ventures is launching a $577 million (400…

San Mateo based embeddable widget provider MixerCast has taken $6 million Series B in a round led by Intel Capital that included ONSET Ventures and Velocity Interactive Group. MixerCast allows…

Last Friday, when I reported that a small team of about 30 people at Yahoo had lost their jobs, I hinted that “more substantial layoffs are around the corner.” In…

Database software provider Greenplum has taken $27 million Series C is a round led by Meritech Capital Partners that included Sun Microsystems and SAP Ventures. Greenplum leverages open source database…

We’ve been looking at different ways of using video in relation to startup reviews. I’ve always told people pitching us that they should absolutely have an embeddable demo video because…

[photopress:kirkspockbath.jpg,full,center] That Star Trek trailer that’s been thrown around the Web all weekend in lo-rez camphone quality? The one you really want to see? Here you’ve got it in HD…

It seems some mobile phone gurus were talking about mobile games at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. One of the biggest problems that the game industry…

HTC makes your smartphone. OK, maybe not all of yours, but chances are if your phone is a smarty, it came from HTCs factory. They make handsets for Palm and…

[photopress:kirk.jpg,full,center] I know that some of you didn’t like Cloverfield. I haven’t seen it yet being as I’m stranded in Mexico, but I want to like it. I like JJ…

This guest post was written by Muhammad Saleem, a social media consultant and a top-ranked community member on multiple social news sites. Most of us know the Digg story. All…

http://www.collegehumor.com/moogaloop/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=1789288&fullscreen=1 We love all things Nintendo, it’s true. Well, except that VirtualBoy thing, what’s up with that? It was a cool idea, but 3D-VR based on red LEDs? That means…

In the endless march towards world domination, Apple is talking to Thailands Advanced Info Service to sell the iPhone in the land of great skewered meat and kickboxing. “We are…

Pownce, a service that lets users send messages, files, links, and events to friends, first launched into private beta over six months ago. It was founded by Leah Culver, Kevin…

I personally haven’t had any trouble with chromatic aberration in the non-visible wavelengths of light, but then again I’m not shooting in infrared. You should though, it’s cool, but there…

The article is a little vague (an ambiguous summary of some second-hand information from a Chinese newspaper) but apparently Lenovo is going to be hiring Taiwanese manufacturers for its notebooks…

We all knew this time would come, and last week’s disturbing news that Time Warner would be testing bandwidth caps in Texas came as no surprise. But we never thought…

The organizers of the DLD conference in Munich put on a great show today. One of the more lively sessions was called “Humans Disrupting Algorithms” and featured Wikipedia/Wikia Search’s Jimmy…

Event and venue-centric social network IPartee, which we have compared to a crowd of other online event services, has released a widget that allows users to share event details through…

Web metrics service Quantcast has closed $20 million Series B in a round that included Founders Fund and Polaris Venture Partners. Quantcast offers a “new media measurement service” that competes…