Frederic Lardinois
Frederic has spent more than five years covering news and providing analysis about technology, the industry and consumer tech related to the Internet with potential to influence industry direction. At TechCrunch, his focus spans from emerging technologies and niche startups to major product advances by industry titans – all innovation focused. Before he joined TechCrunch in 2012, he founded Silicon Filter and wrote for ReadWriteWeb (now ReadWrite).
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Latest from Frederic Lardinois
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Line Of Sight
You’ve probably heard that the FAA proposed its rules for commercial drones last weekend. There’s some good and some bad in those rules. The good thing is that drone startups finally know what kind of rules they will operate under once they are codified in the next year or so. The bad: many of the most interesting use cases for drones, including drone delivery, will be unfeasible… Read More
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Google’s Mobile Search Now Highlights Recent Posts From News Sources
When you use Google’s mobile search to look for your favorite news sources or more information about a hot news topic, you’ll probably notice there’s something different about the search results. Starting today, Google will not just give you a link to the publication, but it will also highlight that publication’s latest stories. Read More
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Google Launches Cloud Security Scanner To Help Find Vulnerabilities In App Engine Sites
Google today launched the beta of a new security tool for developers on its App Engine platform-as-a-service offering. The Google Cloud Security Scanner allows developers to regularly scan their applications for cross-site scripting and mixed content vulnerabilities. Google is obviously not the first company to offer a tool like this, but as it argues in today’s announcement, the… Read More
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Renaissance Learning Acquires UClass
Renaissance Learning, the Google-funded K-12 assessment and learning analytics service with a valuation north of $1 billion, today announced that it has acquired UClass, a cloud storage and content management service school districts can use to store, distribute and analyze their curriculum catalogs. The two companies did not disclose the financial details of the transaction. Read More
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ScienceLogic Raises $43M Series D Round Led By Goldman Sachs
ScienceLogic, an IT monitoring software provider, today announced that it has raised a $43 million Series D funding round led by Goldman Sachs. Current investors NEA (which participated in all of ScieneLogic’s funding rounds) and Intel Capital also participated in this round. Previously, the company raised $41 million. Read More
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Microsoft’s JavaScript Engine Will Soon Support Mozilla’s Asm.js
Over the last few years, Mozilla has developed asm.js, a subset of JavaScript that can be executed fast. Until now, asm.js optimization was only available in Firefox. But soon this technology will also be available in Microsoft’s Chakra JavaScript engine in the upcoming Windows 10. As the company today announced, asm.js support has long been one of the top 10 most-requested features… Read More
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Zillow Closes Trulia Acquisition, Cuts 350 Positions
As expected, Zillow today closed the acquisition of its competitor Trulia in a stock-for-stock transaction. The total price of the acquisition was $2.5 billion. When Zillow first announced its intentions to take over Trulia, the stock price still valued the transaction at $3.5 billion. Read More
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FAA Proposes Rules To Open The Sky To Some Commercial Drones, But Delivery Drones Remain Grounded
After a number of delays, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) today officially announced its proposed rules for small commercial drones. Most of the proposed rules already leaked earlier this weekend. Overall, the proposed rules are pretty straightforward and more lenient than previously expected, but while they open up a number of use cases, they are still strict enough to make… Read More
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Leaked Document Shows FAA Rules For Commercial Drones Will Be Laxer Than Feared
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) will officially announce its proposed rules for small drones (or UAS — unmanned aerial systems — as the agency likes to call them) on Sunday. However, as Forbes first reported earlier this weekend, a document (first discovered by Steve Zeets) leaked out ahead of the announcement that now gives us a pretty good idea of what these… Read More
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Zillow Reports Record Q4 Earnings, Will Complete Trulia Acquisition Next Week
Zillow today announced record earnings with revenue of $92.3 million — up 58 percent year-over-year, for a non-GAAP EPS of $0.24. Basic and diluted GAAP EPS came in at a loss of $0.27 per share, mostly due to acquisition-related costs. Analysts expected revenue to come in around $90 million and earnings per share of around $0.28. Despite those mixed results, the stock is up more than… Read More
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Mozilla’s Shumway Flash Replacement Now Plays Amazon.com Videos
Shumway is Mozilla’s attempt at creating a drop-in Flash player replacement for Firefox based on open standards (and not its attempt at creating a furry, cat-eating alien). The project started in 2012 and has long been included in Mozilla’s experimental Nightly builds of Firefox. For the most part, though, even Nightly users would never really encounter it. Read More
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FAA Drone Test Site In North Dakota Will Soon Cover Two-Thirds Of The State
Two-thirds of North Dakota will soon be open for drone testing. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) today announced that it has greatly expanded the existing drone test site in the state and, thanks to a second expansion that’s already in the works, the test site will eventually cover two-thirds of the state (so this is really becoming more of a “drone test state”). Read More
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Google Launches Open-Source, Cross-Cloud Benchmarking Tool
Google today launched PerfKit, an open-source cloud-benchmarking tool that, in Google’s words, is an “effort to define a canonical set of benchmarks to measure and compare cloud offerings.” The PerfKit tools currently support Google’s own Compute Engine, Amazon’s AWS and Microsoft’s Azure clouds. Google says it has worked on this project with over 30… Read More
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Coursera Partners With Google, Instagram, 500 Startups And Others On Students’ Capstone Projects
About a year ago, online education platform Coursera launched “specializations” — its version of college credentials. To graduate from the programs, students take a number of classes and then finish a “capstone” project that lets them showcase that they can put their academic knowledge into practice — similar to a senior project in a traditional college… Read More
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Atlassian Hires New CFO As It Gears Up For An IPO
When private companies hire new CFOs with experience at a public company, chances are they are gearing up for a potential IPO. With Atlassian, that’s clearly the case. The company today announced that it has hired Erik Bardman as its CFO. Bardman replaces C. Alex Estevez who served as the company’s CFO from 2011 to last October. As Atlassian President Jay Simons told me earlier… Read More
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RapidShare Shuts Down
RapidShare, one of the first file hosting services on the Internet, is shutting down next month. After March 31st, all of its user accounts and data will be deleted. Read More
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Take Google’s Security Checkup, Get 2GB Of Free Google Drive Space
It’s Safer Internet Day today and while you are probably not celebrating the occasion with an overpriced prix fixe dinner and roses, it’s not a bad time to remember that hacks don’t only happen to big media organizations. To give you a bit of extra motivation to check on your security settings in Google, the company is giving away 2GB of permanent Drive space to anybody who… Read More
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3D Robotics Opens Its Flight Control App For Drones To Developers
3D Robotics, the largest U.S.-based drone manufacturer, today announced the launch of its open-source Tower flight control app for drone copters and planes on Android phones and tablets. The app gives users a few new ways to talk to their drones, but far more importantly, it offers developers a new way to build new features for drones into the app without having to reinvent the wheel by… Read More
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NoFlyZone Lets You Establish A No-Fly Zone Over Your Property
If your first reaction to a drone flying over your house is getting out your M16 for some target practice, you can now opt for a less violent option. NoFlyZone.org lets you establish a no-fly zone over your property and a number of drone hardware and software firms have already promised to honor your request. Among the partners in this effort are EHANG (the company behind the Ghost… Read More
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Google Starts Fading Out SPDY Support In Favor Of HTTP/2 Standard
Google today announced that it plans to fade out support for SPDY — its alternative to HTTP — in Chrome by early 2016. Now that the next version of HTTP is well on its way to standardization, Google has decided to abandon its own program in favor of the new standard. Support for HTTP/2 will arrive in Chrome’s main release channel in a few weeks. HTTP/2 will offer a number… Read More
