Internet Explorer suddenly became one of the most widely available Internet TV browsers today as it starts rolling out to Xboxes. And early reports say its joystick-based interface is awful. Whatever. It’s v1. What matters is that Microsoft has united the world’s most popular motion sensor tech and one of the world’s most “popular” web browsers.
Wave hello to the future of the Internet. → Read More
We are just getting into reporting season, where some (but not all) handset makers tell us how many handsets they’ve sold in the last three months, but Strategy Analytics has taken a punt to say that Q3 will be the quarter that we have hit a major milestone: there are now more than 1 billion smartphones in use worldwide — 1.038 billion, to be exact. It’s taken 16 years to pass 1 billion, but the… → Read More
MacHeist 4′s puzzles have been keeping members buzzy this year, but now the curtain gets pulled back and the entire software lineup is revealed. After delivering four missions and four nano-missions, the MacHeist bundle now offers a full 15 apps for the low price of $29, with 25 percent of all proceeds going to charity. The company raised $850,000 with its MacHeist 3 bundle in 2009, and it’s… → Read More
Placed is announcing the launch of Placed Panels today, giving its customers a way to constantly collect location data from a limited panel of users.
Previously, Placed allowed publishers to collect location data about whenever someone was using their mobile website or app. That gives publishers valuable information about where their content and services are being accessed — but data… → Read More
AdRise hopes to bring more video to connected devices, by building cross-platform apps that can be watched on multiple platforms. It’s also built an ad delivery service for monetization. With that in mind, it’s raised a $2 million funding round led by Foundation Capital to expand its personnel and go after the burgeoning streaming video market. → Read More
In his six years at Facebook, Ari Steinberg sired the Platform, ran the news feed, and started the Seattle engineering office, but he’s decided to move on, TechCrunch has learned and Facebook as well as Steinberg confirmed. Friday will be his last day working for the social network.
Steinberg verified that founding a travel startup is first on his post-Facebook itinerary. → Read More
Kixeye CEO Will Harbin is lashing out at Zynga for suing the vice president of product that the gaming startup poached earlier this month. Shortly after former Cityville general manager Alan Patmore left for Kixeye, Zynga sued him for theft of trade secrets and breach of contract. → Read More
You get an email, and it’s a pretty important one. If you’re using Gmail, there’s a lot of things you can do with it to make it stand out. Basically, so you don’t lose it. You can filter it to have a label, give it a star or mark it for your priority inbox. Once you open the email though, it’s important that all of the information presented to you is useful and concise.
Today, Google shared… → Read More
David Fischer, Facebook’s vice president of marketing and business relationships, just offered a new statistic on the Facebook Offers program: He said that among the 100 most popular offers on the social network, three-fourths of the claims came not from the people who had been initially targeted with an offer, but instead from someone they had shared it with.
In other words, Offers seems to be… → Read More
Tap for Tap, a Victoria, B.C.-based startup is changing course with a new initiative just over half a year into its existence, based on feedback received from its initial crop of developers. The ad network will now focus on letting developers earn credits towards ad placement in other apps, based on the value of the taps they drive through ads placed in their own software. → Read More
Now that Microsoft has officially announced pricing and availability for its long-awaited Surface tablet (albeit a little early), the time has come to get people worked up about it. Of course, commercials and brief tours of the studio that spawned the device can only offer so much insight — now Surface GM Panos Panay and the rest of the team have taken to Reddit and implored users to ask them… → Read More
Mobile photo-printing and greeting card startup Sincerely wants to encourage users to vote this election season, and to do so, it has partnered with artist Shepard Fairey on the creation of an exclusive new card. Best known as the creator of the Barack Obama “Hope” poster, Fairey’s new card has a similar style and color palette, but offers a non-partisan plea: it just says “Vote!” To get users… → Read More
Intel just reported its third quarter 2012 earnings with revenues of $13.5 billion, flat compared to the prior year. Intel’s net income was $3 billion, up 5.1% compared to last year. Operating income was $3.8 billion, flat compared to a year ago. Its diluted earnings per share were at $0.58 cents per share, a 7.4% increase from last year. Analysts expected Intel to report earnings of $0.50 per… → Read More
IBM just released its Q3 2012 financials. Big Blue’s GAAP earnings came in at $3.8 billion, up 3% from the last quarter. Non-GAAP earnings were $4.2 billion. Overall, the company reported revenue of $24.7 billion, down from $25.8 billion in Q2. → Read More
Does Facebook’s first major video ad campaign confuse you? You know, that commercial that compares Facebook to chairs?
You’re not the only one. Not only has there been a video send-off of the ad using toilets instead chairs, there’s now a dead simple site that now lets you generate your own parody of one of the shots from the commercial. → Read More
Tagged is continuing its acquisition tear, having made its fifth purchase of the past two years. This time, it’s acquiring location-based mobile discovery app Urbantag, and adding co-founders Andrew Hoag and Emma Van Niekerk to its team. As part of the deal, Hoag will take over as Director of Product and Van Niekerk will become Director of Design. Meanwhile, the Urbantag app will remain available. → Read More
In August, Etsy, the popular online marketplace for all things handmade, announced it would be launching the ability to give friends and family gift cards to the marketplace. Today, Etsy is debuting the new feature, allowing you to purchase gift cards online here. → Read More
Google just made it a lot easier for small businesses to track phone calls generated by their AdWords Express ads. For two years now, the full version of AdWords has allowed businesses to track phone calls by using the technology behind Google Voice to create unique phone numbers for every campaign. Starting today, AdWords Express, the somewhat simplified version of AdWords that’s geared… → Read More
Google launched Dart, its class-based object-oriented language for writing complex web apps, exactly year ago and to celebrate its birthday, the Dart team is launching the first stable version of the Dart software development kit (SDK) today. According to the Dart team, this new version of the SDK offers a faster virtual machine that can even outperform Google’s efficient V8 JavaScript engine on… → Read More
Uber has noted in a blog post today that it will indeed be shutting down its taxi beta after around a month of operation, claiming its efforts to provide adequate Uber yellow cab supply was quashed by New York’s Taxi and Limousine Commission. Uber didn’t go into details about how exactly that happened, saying only that the TLC commented in private that Uber’s business is “legal under the rules.” → Read More
Senior VP of Products and User Experience of LinkedIn, Deep Nishar, discussed the company approach to design and iteration, which is extremely interesting. He says that since January 2009, its members has gone from 32M members to 175M+ members. That’s quite a lift for a niche network, especially one that isn’t all fun and games like Facebook. Aaron Bronzan, Product Manager of LinkedIn is showing… → Read More
We learned that over 175K new LinkedIn profiles are created a day, and that 3B people searches have been made as of September 2012. That’s just insane. → Read More
Statistics are everywhere these days, and it’s difficult to know which ones to take seriously. Occasionally, a “report” comes out that’s so misleading it presents a teachable moment on how to spot a bad statistic. Last week, Twitter made headlines for claims that users who are exposed to their political advertisements, in the form of promoted tweets, are about twice as likely to visit a campaign… → Read More
Today at an event in Mountain View called “Meet The New LinkedIn”, the company is discussing its direction and will announce some new things. LinkedIn, the public company that serves as a social network for professionals, has been integrating social features into its product for the past few years. Lately, this has been ramped up. Over time, LinkedIn has dashed in a flavor of Twitter… → Read More
SendHub, the messaging startup backed by $2 million in seed funding from Y Combinator, Kapor Capital, Menlo Ventures, 500 Startups and others, is today announcing a highly in-demand new feature with the launch of Shared Groups, as well as a notable new investor: Jeb Bush, 43rd Governor of Florida. This is the first startup investment for the former Republican governor, and one which saw the… → Read More
Prism SkyLabs, a cloud-based service that allows business owners to bring video feeds online, capture images from these feeds and share this data with consumers and the public, has raised $7.5 million in Series A funding round led by new investors Triangle Peak Partners and Pacific Partners, and joined by Andreessen Horowitz, IDG Ventures, Anthem Venture Partners, Eagle, MkII Ventures, SeriesG… → Read More
Last month as part of our TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield Coverage, we wrote about Famo.us, the company behind a forthcoming HTML5 framework that its developers claim will make it easier to build HTML5 apps that perform as well as native apps. Now the company is revealing more information about how it works and what it can be used for. → Read More
I’ve been using Y Combinator service Snapjoy for some time now to host all of my photos and I absolutely love it. What I dig about it so much is that it lets me go back and see all of my photos that I’ve uploaded in a lovely timeline view, something that came out before Facebook’s own Timeline.
The last time you heard from me about Snapjoy, I was playing around with its iOS app, which was in… → Read More
iTwin made some waves back in 2009 when it revealed its $99 namesake computer-connecting USB dongles at TC50, and the team has been working on ways to extend the thing’s functionality ever since. Now, the company is ready to show off the fruits of its labor with a new feature called SecureBox for the security conscious cloud storage fanatics in your life (everyone’s got a few of those, right?). → Read More
Twitter has made another acquisition to expand its platform development operation. It has bought Cabana, a platform for making highly visual mobile apps. Terms of the deal have not been disclosed, but the team behind the app are joining Twitter, and Cabana as it is known today is shutting down, effective December 1. → Read More
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