TechCrunch World

Paul Carr: An open letter to Sam Sethi, on the occasion of him completely losing his mind

Wed, 05 Aug 2009 17:26:19 GMT

If you’ve been following the whole Sam Sethi/TechCrunch lawsuit debacle (see here and here and here), you’ll want to read this post by Paul Carr as well, where he prints emails from Sethi sent on record. I’m also reprinting below, these things have a tendency to disappear when lawsuits strike: An open letter to Sam Sethi, on [...]

RSS Management

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 13:40:21 GMT

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Foo Camp 2009

Mon, 31 Aug 2009 11:23:49 GMT

Just back from Foo Camp 2009. You don’t see a ton of stuff on the Internet about Foo because it’s mostly off record. Here are my notes From Foo Camp 2008. This year I decided to do something a little different and created an Animoto show with their new video product. Cool stuff. CrunchBase Information Animoto Information provided [...]

Update On Sam Sethi Litigation: We Decline To Participate

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 09:58:53 GMT

Update to our June post on the…absurd…Sam Sethi litigation. Our lawyers sent a letter letting them know that we have no intention of submitting the the jurisdiction of the UK courts, although we’d be happy to litigate his claims here in California. Sethi obtained a default judgment on July 30 and is now messaging people [...]

Sam Sethi: The Lawsuit

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 00:21:48 GMT

Many of you know all about Sam Sethi, the former TechCrunch writer who left after a disagreement and then went on to create BlogNation. Two days ago Sethi filed a lawsuit against us for libel and other issues. As we always do, we’re posting the litigation threats and will continue to fight the litigation [...]

ETA Bombs Spanish Newspaper

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 10:30:50 GMT

The ETA may or may not have a legitimate goal in demanding Basque independence, but bombing a building full of journalists is no way to win karma points or influence people.

Daily Crunch: Pac Directions Edition

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 08:00:07 GMT

Lian Li ?spider? case seen creeping around Taiwan Heat powered arcade mugs The red TomTom EASE is probably meant to be a Valentine?s Day gift because it?s red

Apple job posting hints at video option for iPads

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 06:00:32 GMT

It's crazy how the slightest little hint of something starts all the rampant speculation about Apple's product development. This is the third clue that the next generation of iPad will have a camera, if not video capability. It certainly explains the stuff that was found in the SDK.

It?s time to kill off the Dotcom Hero CEO

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 17:04:12 GMT

As I sit here listening to Ben Cohen's radio documentary about how he nearly became a teenage dotcom millionaire, I'm reminded of how tedious us journalists all found him back in the late 90s. We don't now of course - now that's he's grown up and actually turned out to be a pretty good tech reporter for Channel 4 News, and quite an OK guy, I'd quite happily have a pint with him. But the story of how he became a teenage dotcom (paper-only) millionaire and finally fell to earth has something to tell us about the nature of startups and Europe and why we must finally kill off the myth of the Dotcom Hero CEO. In 2010 there is no more room for dumbass Internet heroes. From now on we must focus on products, teams and businesses. Sure there will always be "the story" about a startup, or how it started with one person's idea. But as soon as that becomes their focus that are quite simply dead. Ideas are two-a-penny, it's execution that counts, and you can't execute anything totally on your own.

The Long Tail Of Video Sites Capture Half Of All Viewing Minutes

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 05:01:59 GMT

YouTube might be streaming more than 13 billion videos a month, or nearly 40 percent of total individual streams, but when you measure by time spent YouTube only accounted for 26 percent of all viewing minutes on the Web last year. ?It is not surprising that it commands a smaller share of time spent watching videos than number of streams watched, since?most YouTube videos are so short. ?But what is surprising is how fragmented the Web video landscape remains once you go out past the top 25 sites. According to comScore's 2009 U.S. Digital Year in Review, more than half of all time spent watching videos on the Web (52 percent) last year was on Long Tail video sites beyond the top 25. ?What you see is a real barbell distribution, with Youtube on one end and the Long Tail sites on the other. ?Total video views more than doubled between December, 2008 and December, 2009, from 14 billion to 33 billion streams.?So there is hope yet for niche video producers.

blueKiwi Rides the Freemium Wave

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 04:48:18 GMT

With the continued success of Twitter and other social networking tools, any criticism (or praise) of products and companies is becoming increasingly public. Finding a way to manage these external communications in the internal decision-making process is an ongoing challenge for many businesses. Today, in an effort to help marketers and community managers better deal with such outside correspondence, blueKiwi, an Europas shortlist finalist, has announced the introduction of a free version of its Social Business Platform aimed at integrating outside conversations into daily internal communications to improve the decision making process. Instead of community managers simply engaging with outside audiences via social networking tools, blueKiwi pulls outside conversations into internal discussions in order to leverage the thoughts and ideas of its user base, much like Salesforce aims to do with Chatter or Bantam Live. It is social CRM. BlueKiwi combines a slew of web 2.0 capabilities: such as collaboration, document sharing, blogging, event posting, and polling, into a single, unified solution. The use of social analytics tools ensures that the most pertinent conversations reach the eyes of the community managers.

Saving Private Ryan to storm Blu-ray

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 04:30:59 GMT

You might want to sit down for this one. Are you ready? Saving Private Ryan is coming to Blu-ray. Yep, the 1998 Academy award-winning movie is finally coming to Blu-ray on May 4th. Expect the ad machine to fire up some time in April, since you're going to want to buy another version of this movie as well, right?

Video: ?Parisian Oops? Mocks Google?s Super Bowl Commercial

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 04:14:05 GMT

It actually took longer than I would have expected for someone to come up with a good mocking of Google's "Parisian Love" commercial that played during the Super Bowl yesterday. But today brings us just that. The video comes compliments of the Upright Citizens Brigade Beta Team "The Brig." They've named their video "Parisian Oops" and have given it the tagline, "Romance, Consequences, Awkwardness. Search on." Watch it below.

The Ten Biggest Advertising Publishers On The Web

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 03:41:08 GMT

Last year, Yahoo still dominated display advertising on the Web in terms of sheer number of ad impressions on its properties, but social networking sites MySpace and Facebook came on strong. Some new data from comScore in its just-released 2009 U.S. Digital Year in Review ranks the top Web properties by the number of display ad impressions. Yahoo served up an estimated 521 billion impressions last year, according to the report, followed by Fox Interactive Media (i.e. MySpace) with 368 billion, and Facebook with 330 billion. Microsoft sites (No.4) only served up 218 billion display ads, whereas Google (No. 6) served up only 70 billion. (These numbers do not include paid search text ads) Here's the full ranking:

Sparkeo?s video platform could make your knowledge pay off ? invites

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 15:28:25 GMT

[France/Israel] Sparkeo places its bets on advanced visual learning, offering a portable video platform specifically designed for experts from any field to create, distribute and monetize their expertise online. Why? Frederic Ankin, Spakeo's CEO, argues for the need for simple video monetization to enable people to sell their knowledge on the Web. "Currently, the highest quality end content is not online since the experts have no motivation to give it away," he says. And I guess he's right. We recently covered Sofatutor, also playing in the online education field out of Germany. The big difference between Sparkeo and other how-to and expertise video portals (ie. Mindbites, Sclipo, Edufire) , is that Sparkeo is not a portal, but rather a stand alone video player that users can embed anywhere, bringing their paying audience and students to any site, blog or major social network of their choice.

Pandora open-source handheld is go

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 03:16:03 GMT

For quite a while now, I’ve been following the progress of the Pandora, an open-source handheld for music, movies, and games. It’s hard to stay excited, though, when there’s the constant threat of the thing ceasing to exist. That seemed to be a risk for a while, but now we’re being told that all the [...]

Today is Safer Internet Day in Europe, but before you laugh try this game

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 15:10:53 GMT

[France] Ok listen-up kids. Today is "Safer internet Day". Got that? So put that web browser down right now before you take someone eye out. But seriously folks - the day is organized each year by Insafe, a "European network of Awareness Centres" promoting safe, responsible use of the Internet and mobile devices to young people. Yes if that sounds like it's co-funded by the European Union's Safer Internet Programme, that's because it is. In case you can't guess, the idea is to promote safer and more responsible use of online technology and mobile phones, especially amongst children and young people. So far so do-gooder. This year, the topic is "Think B4 U post". (It reminds me of think before you tweet). In a few years, it has become important for young people to understand the impact of their online presence, their actions on the web. But in all seriousness, it's our role - that of startups, social networks, social media etc - not to forget that children and teenagers can use our new wonderful tools in a way they were not thought of: posting pictures on Facebook, meeting new people within communities, posting videos from their mobile phone... all these features are both wonderful but also potentially dangerous when not used correctly. Especially now that location based services are taking off.

Google Launches Phone Support For The Nexus One, Lowers ETF By $200

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 03:02:41 GMT

Since the launch of the Nexus One, early adopters have likely had one question lurking in the back of their minds: who to take the phone to if it broke. You see, when the phone was first launched, Google was directing people to either T-Mobile (Google's carrier partner) or HTC (the device manufacturer) depending on the problem, which could lead to an endless circle of hold times and few results. Today, Google has just rolled out its solution: it's launching its own phone support line specifically for Nexus One customers. Call 888-48-NEXUS (63987) and within a few minutes, you'll be talking to a real live Google support tech (the line is open from 7AM to 10PM EST).

This is, of course, a fairly major departure from Google's standard protocol of making it incredibly difficult to reach anyone for phone support for most of its products.

British Library to give away thousands of classics away as e-books

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 02:30:29 GMT

Got a Kindle? Get thee to the British Library! Not only are they giving away a ton of old 19th-century literature in e-book form, but they're a special "first edition" e-book with the original typeface and illustrations baked in. The 1800s encompass nearly all of my favorite literature, so this is actually making me want a Kindle pretty bad right now. Original typefaces! O lawd!

Still No Native Comments, But Tumblr Toys With Photo Replies

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 02:14:09 GMT

Probably the most controversial thing about the blogging service Tumblr is that it doesn't have a built-in way to comment on posts. You sort of can do it now if you reblog an item and add your own note (which then shows up under the original post), but it's not the same. And while they still haven't added comments, tonight they've temporarily turned on a new feature: Photo Replies. While it doesn't appear the feature is working just yet, Tumblr notes that they're going to turn it on for the next 48 hours as an experiment. When it is on, you will presumably see a new photo icon in your dashboard which will allow you to upload a picture in response to a Tumblr post. So yes, basically it's a photo comment.

The Richter Scales Debut Animated Video Of ?I?ve Got Mail And I?ve Got It Made?

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 02:10:59 GMT

We're big fans of The Richter Scales, the musical group that have brought us Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas, Here Comes Another Bubble, and gut-busting songs at the 2008 Crunchies and most recently the parody of Silicon Valley at the 2009 Crunchies a few weeks ago. The group is releasing an animated video of its song 'I've Got Mail and I've Got it Made,' which was one of the two songs The Richters sang at the first Crunchies in 2007. As you may remember, it's about what happens to a guy when he follows the instructions in all the spam email he receives. Enjoy!

The ISS gets its own HD video tour

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 02:00:09 GMT

Sit back, relax, and enjoy this extensive HD video tour of International Space Station. You better enjoy the ISS while you can. There’s a good chance it’s going to crash into Planet Earth within the next couple of years because of budget issues unless the ESA can save it.

DataInherit lets you store passwords in the cloud and assign beneficiaries

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 12:12:16 GMT

[Switzerland] Would you be comfortable with storing your passwords in the cloud? That's the hope of DataInherit, from Swiss banking security specialists DSwiss, which launched a new password 'safe' that lets you store your most important passwords on the company's servers. Along with the advantage of being able to retrieve those passwords from wherever you have an Internet connection, the service offers an interesting additional feature: the ability to assign beneficiaries - loved ones, or perhaps business associates or next-of-kin - should anything happen to you. It's an increasingly awkward problem as we move more and more of our life into the digital domain, how to give others access to that data after we're gone.

Synctus aims to speed up file sharing between office locations

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 10:13:13 GMT

[UK] Larry Ellison isn't the only one who has his reservations regarding the legitimacy of cloud computing. Synctus, a bootstrapped Manchester-based startup, is emerging from stealth with the introduction of a hardware product aimed at increasing the speed and efficiency of sharing files between different offices of the same company.

Facebook, Tesla And Solyndra Dominate SecondMarket Transactions In January

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 01:45:45 GMT

Last month SecondMarket published data on private company stock sales that they helped complete in 2009. They've now released last month's data as well. A total of a little more than $13 million in sales occurred, with the average transaction size of around $2 million. There continues to be very strong demand for consumer products and services startups (which includes companies like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Digg, etc.). But the sellers are spread out more evenly across all categories, particularly consumer, IT, Healthcare, energy and cleantech. 36% of the transactions were sales of Facebook stock, and we've heard from independent sources that sales are being completed for as high as $40 per share (or a $17.6 billion valuation). That's a substantial price increase from less than a month ago. Tesla took 29% of the transactions, and sales of Solyndra stock were 28% of the total. Gridpoint rounded the group out with 7% of the total.

Lian Li ?spider? case seen creeping around Taiwan

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 01:30:56 GMT

Beware the coming of the spider! This strange creature was seen in a back alley, eating cats, small dogs, and any memory chips it happens to find. It has the capability to disguise itself as the Lian Li T1 Pitstop, which is a Mini-atx case with room for a full size power supply. Of course, [...]

Social travel guide tripwolf?s iPhone app goes freemium, introduces in-app purchases

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 13:22:09 GMT

[Austria] Social travel guide tripwolf has released an updated iPhone app that ramps up the company's freemium offering with the introduction of in-app purchases for destinations where tripwolf has more in-depth information. The premium content is garnered from the Vienna-based startup's existing partnerships with travel guide publishers Footprints and Marco Polo (a subsidiary of Mair Dumont), which is supplemented with user-generated content from the tripwolf community. Additionally, the iPhone app offers a bunch interactive features, including photo-uploads, the ability to vote for locations, write reviews, search for points of interest, and add new locations or places to the tripwolf travel guides.

Amazon is ready to take your Olympus E-PL1 pre-orders

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 01:00:24 GMT

The Olympus E-PL1 budget micro four thirds camera launched last week but Amazon already has it available for pre-order. On one hand this pre-order will ensure you’re one of the first kids at school with the new toy, but that’s not going to be until next month away so you may wanna hold on to [...]

BlackBerry Curve, iPhone, and Moto Droid lead smartphone sales in Q4 2009

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 20:58:19 GMT

Market research firm IDC has just released their quarterly report on the top selling smartphones (or “converged mobile devices”, as they call them) in the US for the fourth quarter of 2009. RIM and Apple dominate the list in an almost absurd manner, but a few welcome surprises managed to sneak their way in. Want to [...]

The Filter relaunches as white-label recommendation engine, adds Doug Merrill to board

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 20:02:32 GMT

Almost two years ago The Filter, a startup backed by Peter Gabriel, launched to bring better music and movie recommendations to consumers. The site got lost in the abundance of more popular music and movie sites out there, so about a year ago CEO David Maher Roberts decided to shift gears and start licensing his recommendation engine to other businesses. It was the right move. Today, the Filter powers recommendations for sites and devices with a combined reach of about 20 million people, with two more large media deals in the final stages of converting from a trail to a full license which will bring its total reach up to 85 million. The startup's revenues went from $150,000 in 2008 to about $1 million in 2009. "All that money came from licensing," says Roberts. "I think we git $2,000 from Google for advertising." Since November, the company has been "borderline breakeven." And it just added to its board of directors former Google engineering VP Doug Merrill.

Motorola DROID to be blessed with Android 2.1 in coming update [UPDATED]

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 20:00:51 GMT

When the Nexus One was announced, many folks were questioning Google’s game plan and why it would release such an amazing device shortly after the Motorola DROID’s release. If that wasn’t enough to make some DROID owners envious, the Nexus One received a multitouch update last week which allowed pinch-to-zoom gestures within Google Maps, the [...]

T-Mobile isn?t ready to touch your trackballs just yet

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 20:00:30 GMT

If you’ve been camping outside of your local T-Mobile store ever since word first got out that they’d be replacing busted trackballs on a handful of BlackBerry models, you should probably run to the store and grab some more supplies. Looks like things have been pushed back a few days. According to TmoNews, the trackball replacement [...]

In a stroke of genius, Vertu preps pink phone for Valentine?s Day

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 19:15:54 GMT

Vertu, French for "virtue," has a pink phone just in time for Valentine's Day. It's the Constellation Ayxt only it's pink. Fascinating.

The Qisda QCM-330 is gorgeous, headed for Vodafone, and quite possibly Android-powered

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 18:44:42 GMT

When it comes to bar-shaped smartphones, it takes a good amount of effort to design something visually appealing. There’s really only so much you can do with a flat slab – and whatever can be done likely already has. With that said, there’s just something about this handset, the Qisda QCM-330. I’m not sure what that [...]

New Tweetdeck version puts Twitter on crack, brings in YouTube and Flickr

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 18:38:09 GMT

There remains an ongoing desktop Twitter application war. Traditionally Tweetdeck and Seesmic have been at loggerheads for the lion share, although Tweetdeck has remained in the lead so far. Increasingly it appears that Seesmic is heading towards trying to be a much more mainstream application, for anyone on any platform, from celebs to your non-tech friends. But for power Twitter users, Tweetdeck seems to be the go-to app so far. Of course, all that can change, but that seems to be the landscape at the moment. Just now Tweetdeck has released the latest version of its desktop Air application, this one is v0.33. It's available right now as a manual download here. Existing Tweedeck users will get an auto upgrade in the next few days. For uber-Tweetdeck users (like social media experts, as we know) Tweetdeck can get pretty long as they plug in every search term they can think of to avert that client disaster (Eurostar, we're looking at you). So there are a bunch of new features which extend the app quite a bit and greatly enhance its speed of access to the Twitter firehouse.

Google dials down early termination fee for the Nexus One

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 23:20:46 GMT

No one likes early termination fees, but for one reason or another they can become a necessary evil. When Google introduced a new channel for buying the Nexus One, I was excited at the thought of grabbing a phone without being hassled by a retail sales rep. The only downside was that if I bought it at the subsidized price and wanted to cancel within 120 days, Google would charge a $350 device recovery fee... on top of the carrier's cancelation fees!

Locus OS: hybrid concept mobile OS with bits of Zune, TouchFLO

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 23:00:27 GMT

This isn’t official or anything, just a concept that happens to use some Microsoft assets, but what it Windows Mobile 7 looked like this? I think we all know it will not, but until the hammer actually falls at MWC, hope springs eternal. The “location-based desktops” idea is a good one for a MID or [...]

Rad: Rise of the Triad comes to iPhone

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 22:28:10 GMT

While pundits were arguing about whether Doom was damaging to us kids, we were busy having our sensibilities shocked by the phenomenally violent Rise of the Triad. While it wasn’t as flashy as Doom (it was Wolf3D-based), it had crazy weapons, fire, and enemies that would beg for their lives. So ahead of its time! [...]

Choosing between Buddy and a buddy.

Sun, 15 Nov 2009 19:54:12 GMT

A couple of weeks ago Loren Feldmen put on the Audience Conference in New York. We supported the conferece, first announcing it and then writing more posts and tweets to help with ticket sales. I also committed to speaking at the event. About a week before the event I was asked if I could foster [...]

A Day In Our Lives At TechCrunch

Wed, 06 Jan 2010 09:06:48 GMT

Sometimes we get into it a little bit on our Yammer account at TechCrunch. It’s usually me and MG, and every once in a while I like to post the exchanges. See this one for example. Tonights fabulous discussion – embargoes and the frustration they cause.