December 2013

Bump and Flock, the file sharing apps Google acquired last fall, will be shut down by the end of this month. Both apps will stop working and be removed from…

A site called SnapchatDB.info has saved usernames and phone numbers for 4.6 million accounts and made the information available for download. SnapchatDB says that it got the information through a…

Congratulations, Planet Earth! We made it another 365 days without crashing into the sun. Go team!    It’s the end of the year, and that means three things: booze, ridiculous…

The story of Dell is business legend: How a kid starting in his dorm room, hiding computer parts in the bathroom when his parents visited, managed to build a computing…

As I approach the half-way mark of my crowdfunding project, I wanted to address the thing that makes me feel the worst about this whole process: the spam. As I…

As the co-fathers of the Internet, Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn tend to be pretty protective of their digital masterpiece. Both were early Defense Department engineers of the communications architecture…

2013 was a heady year: a time of hope; a time for sadness; a time for twerking; and a time for doge. But it was also a time for gadgets. As…

According to The Information, Sony could release a Windows Phone device, diversifying its mobile device lineup, bolstering Microsoft, and perhaps demonstrating a growing wish among hardware firms to hedge against…

CES 2014 is — amazingly enough — just around the corner, along with enough new gadgetry to fill several lifetimes. Last year we saw a glut of activity trackers pop…

I stopped going to classes. I had a scholarship that paid all my living expenses ($1,200/month) so I didn’t want to quit (ugh, and get a job?). So I stayed…

Apple has contacted TechCrunch with a statement about the DROPOUTJEEP NSA program that detailed a system by which the organization claimed it could snoop on iPhone users. Apple says that…

BitTorrent has been pitching itself as a legitimate way for content creators to promote their works,  and now the company is announcing what may be its most noteworthy partnership yet…

Remember Qwikster? Wall Street doesn’t. The AP is reporting this morning that the Netflix CEO will get a healthy pay raise in 2014. According to a regulatory filing, Reed Hastings’…

Touchscreen publishing company Onswipe has good news for Samsung. As Onswipe’s Chief Marketing Officer Jason Baptiste put it in an email, “Samsung clearly won Christmas when it comes to tablets.”…

It was only six months ago that Sprint decommissioned and shut down the Nextel iDEN network, and while the carrier has no plans to bring that legacy network back, the…

Choosing an obstetrician can be extremely stressful for expectant parents. Additive Analytics, a new startup, hopes to help patients find trustworthy providers with MaternityCompare, its first product. The site pulls…

This year, several notable apps that connect users with house cleaners have launched or gained traction. These include Homejoy, Exec and laundry service Prim. There are a lot of benefits…

Thanks to a series of high-profile exits and a generally frothy financing environment, it’s not unusual to see successful entrepreneurs spending money at will. But the story of MotionLoft founder…

The fine folks at AdDuplex have provided Paul Thurrott with an early look at their final Windows Phone market data for 2013, giving us in the public a final look…

Teckler is a site where users get a share of the revenue for the articles, photos, and other media that they post. And with the recent launch of the Teckler…

New NSA revelations out this weekend detailed precisely how the NSA’s methods lean on malware and employ cyber attacks in their “snooping,” to use Microsoft’s term. Thus, the NSA’s surveillance…

In this three-part series, we hosted Medallia, an enterprise company that offers customer experience management software, and Sequoia partner and board members Doug Leone in the studio. Co-founder and President…

Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham just published a blog post about what he did and didn’t say during a widely-discussed interview with The Information (if you don’t have a subscription,…

Twitter has had a rough few days in the markets, slipping from north of $74 to just over $60 at the end of trading today. That’s not even half the story, however:…

Netflix has informed TechCrunch that it is indeed testing a $6.99 single-stream plan to new users as part of a test. The option appears to some new users after selecting…

Facebook may be currently facing question marks over how well it’s faring with younger users, but among those over 18 in the U.S. it remains the social network king. According…

Fitbit has just released a major update to its iOS app for iPhone 5s, allowing the smartphone itself to track steps, distance and burned calories. These are basic features, and…

Business Insider’s Joe Wiesenthal today published an interesting piece on Bitcoin, partially responding to Paul Krugman’s somewhat inscrutable recent blog post that called the cryptocurrency “evil,” and partially answering the…

There are already quite a few drones in use in U.S. airspace, but given that commercial drone usage remains off-limits, most of them are either operated by government agencies or…

It may be the holiday season, but Gavin Newsom, California’s tech savvy Lieutenant Governor, is as mad as hell. And he’s not going to take it any more. The fury…