When Crowdsourcing Fails: Cambrian House Headed to the Deadpool
4:25 pm PDT • May 12, 2008
Crowdsourcing sounds good in theory—pull together a bunch of smart, motivated individuals from across the Web to create a new product or business—but in practice it is not so easy…
Google Confirms Friend Connect
6:43 am PDT • May 12, 2008
As we reported on Friday, Google will be launching its own data portability effort called Friend Connect. It will be announcing more details about the preview later tonight, but in…
Media & Entertainment
The iFund Has Competition: $150 Million Blackberry Fund To Be Announced Soon
6:42 pm PDT • May 10, 2008
The platform wars are going mobile. Whether it’s the iPhone, Blackberry, Android or Windows Mobile, the mobile platform that will win in the end will be the one with the…
Sneak Peak At Android Apps Out of MIT
4:34 pm PDT • May 9, 2008
A class at MIT built some mobile apps for Google’s Android operating system and presented them today. CrunchGear’s own superblogger Doug Aamoth reports on the seven apps—loco, Flare, GeoLife, Re:public,…
Why the WiMax Deal Is A Disaster, Part II (Or, How Craig McCaw Snookered Eric Schmidt)
1:37 pm PDT • May 9, 2008
The more I learn about the $3.2 billion deal announced earlier this week to salvage Clearwire’s and Sprint’s WiMax businesses by merging them together, the more I am convinced that…
Search Startup Surf Canyon Raises a Seed Round
8:01 am PDT • May 9, 2008
It’s hard to compete in the search engine market, but one approach taken by several startups is to sit on top of the big search engines and try to improve…
Update: Mowser Assets Find a home at dotMobi
6:56 am PDT • May 9, 2008
It’s always a good idea to kill your startup in public. Russell Beattie did that last month with Mowser, a service that converts regular Web addresses into mobile-friendly ones, because…
Yahoo's Answer to Google's Universal Search is Glue (Coming Soon to America)
10:36 pm PDT • May 8, 2008
Sometimes the only way to get new products out the door at a big company like Yahoo is to launch it far away from HQ. That’s what happened with Yahoo…
Microsoft Tells Its Alternate Yahoo Board Members It Won't Be Needing Them
4:08 pm PDT • May 8, 2008
Microsoft is taking one of its options off the table in its on-again, off-again pursuit of Yahoo. It has told members of the alternate board of directors it had lined…
Shawn Fanning Finally Gets A Real Payday: Electronic Arts Buys Rupture For $30 Million
3:12 pm PDT • May 8, 2008
[Update 8/4/08: The acquisition price subsequently reported by EA is $15 million, not $30 million. But that amount does not include any additional earnout for the founders]. Shawn Fanning, best…
Scoop: Facebook To Announce Safety And Privacy Deal With 49 States
8:39 am PDT • May 8, 2008
The Attorney General of Connecticut, Richard Blumenthal, is about to make an announcement at noon ET that he and the attorneys generals from 48 other states have negotiated a deal…
Weakness At MySpace
8:15 am PDT • May 8, 2008
During yesterday’s News Corp. earnings call, Rupert Murdoch and COO Peter Chernin talked a little bit about the weakness at MySpace. They expect Fox Interactive Media (which includes MySpace, Photobucket,…
Twitter Starts Blacklisting Spammers
12:01 pm PDT • May 7, 2008
You know you’ve made it as a communications medium when you start attracting spammers. On Twitter, the problem is getting bad enough that the service is starting to blacklist people…
Fora.TV Squeezes Another $2 Million Out of Hearst and Adobe, But Still Comes Up Short
11:03 am PDT • May 7, 2008
Web video for intellectuals is a hard sell. The videos on Fora.TV come from speeches given by intellectuals and business people. It competes with Big Think, which has a slightly…
Why Google Invested in Clearwire
7:32 am PDT • May 7, 2008
Google wants to usher in the world of wireless broadband so much that it is willing to spend vast sums to make it happen. It bid more than $4.6 billion…
$3.2 Billion WiMax Deal Goes Through. Take Cover.
11:06 pm PDT • May 6, 2008
The deal to combine Sprint Nextel’s and Clearwire’s fledgling WiMax businesses that was rumored last March is finally expected to go through. Comcast and Intel are supposed to put in…
Spot Runner Raises $51 Million To Expand To New Markets
8:59 pm PDT • May 6, 2008
The first rule of Startup Club is take the money when you can. Spot Runner CEO Nick Grouf understands that, which is why he just raised $51 million in a…
Arrington and Ross Sorkin Talk About Yahoo On Charlie Rose
3:32 pm PDT • May 6, 2008
http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=87760211704934203:144000:725000&hl=en Last night, Andrew Ross Sorkin of the New York Times and our own Michael Arrington appeared on the Charlie Rose Show to talk about —what else?—Yahoo, Microsoft and the…
Is Yang Still In Control At Yahoo?
2:45 pm PDT • May 6, 2008
Here’s the latest Yahoo rumor that we’re chasing: The Yahoo board of directors met earlier today and authorized chairman Roy Bostock, not CEO Jerry Yang, to call Ballmer about re-starting…
Could AOL Be Next on Microsoft's List?
8:36 am PDT • May 6, 2008
With Microsoft walking away from the Yahoo deal, there’s been a lot of talk about what it’s next best option would be. Going after AOL is an obvious choice. It…
At Rearden Commerce, Addiction is Job One ($100 Million Round Confirmed, Major Deal With JPMorgan Chase)
12:05 am PDT • May 6, 2008
Patrick Grady has spent the past eight years of his life building the ultimate personal Web assistant in relative obscurity. But now his company, Rearden Commerce, is quietly emerging as…
Zuckerberg Hires Another VP From Google: Elliot Schrage
9:13 pm PDT • May 5, 2008
Mark Zuckerberg loves to hire folks from Google. His poaching started in earnest last year, and includes Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, CFO Gideon Yu, and others. The latest is Elliot…
CNN.com Adds Mixx To Its Mix Of Bookmarking Buttons
8:00 pm PDT • May 5, 2008
Digg competitor Mixx landed another big distribution deal. CNN.com will be adding a “Mixx It” button after every article on the site. This will be right next to the “e-mail”…
Food Review Site Zeer Launches
6:01 pm PDT • May 5, 2008
It’s hard to find a place to research food—the kind that you buy at the grocery store and put into your body every day. As people become more aware, and…
Jammed Shut: Google Is Worried What Verizon Might Have For Future Customers Behind Door No. 2
2:02 pm PDT • May 5, 2008
During the FCC’s recent auctions of the 700MHz wireless spectrum, Google risked owing the government slightly more than $4.6 billion simply to ensure that the open access rules it fought…
Techmeme: Where the A-Listers Party With the Long Tail.
11:49 am PDT • May 5, 2008
One of the favorite bitchmeme’s on Techmeme, the popular blog and news headline site that keeps track of the most talked-about tech stories on the Web, is that it is…
Grouptivity Launches Social News On Facebook
10:02 am PDT • May 5, 2008
There are plenty of feed readers on Facebook. None are particularly popular. News apps, in general, don’t do well on Facebook (it is not even a major app category). But…
Yahoo's Black Monday Begins With Shares Down 20 Percent.
7:09 am PDT • May 5, 2008
How black will today be for Yahoo’s shares? Following Microsoft’s withdrawal of its takeover offer on Saturday, shares of Yahoo took a 20 percent hit after the market opened this…
Does Ballmer Need To Go?
8:48 am PDT • May 4, 2008
Microsoft’s dramatic decision this weekend to withdraw its offer for Yahoo and not pursue a hostile bid raises a whole host of questions. What happens to Yahoo now? What happens…
Who Should Collect The Amazon Tax?
11:00 am PDT • May 2, 2008
A fight is brewing between Amazon and the State of New York over who is responsible for collecting state sales taxes on online purchases. Up until now, online retailers have…