Evan Williams and Biz Stone are probably still best known for their roles in co-founding Twitter, but what many people in the general public don’t realize is that Twitter was actually born as just a small project within a technology startup called The Obvious Corporation.
In recent months, Williams and Stone (along with Jason Goldman) have shifted a good deal of their focus back to Obvious, making it into a very unique kind of company — part incubator, part investment vehicle, part idea lab — with the simple goal of “creating products that matter.” → Read More
Everywhere you turned last week, there was another story about iOS 6 Maps. Some feel like it’s a great new direction for Apple, but people like me feel like we’re left with an ugly experience that shouldn’t have been introduced to the public in its current state. → Read More
Richard Lai is reporting that over 2,000 employees of the Taiyan Foxconn plant rioted last night, causing damage on the factory campus after a guard allegedly hit a worked at 10pm.
The Taiyuan plant is notorious for their mandatory overtime requirements. Quoth Lai: → Read More
Editor’s note: Jon Bischke is a founder of Entelo and is an advisor to several startups. In the interest of full disclosure, the author is a National Co-Chair for Technology for Obama (T4O). You can follow Jon on Twitter here.
It’s election season again and 2012 is likely to be remembered for many things, one of which is the amount of money spent on political advertising. Indeed, this year’s Presidential Campaign is likely to be the most expensive in history. But amidst the talk of Super PACs and $50,000-a-plate dinners attended by amateur videographers, an interesting and inspiring shift is taking place: The increasing ability of the average citizen to connect directly with candidates through technology. → Read More
The handsomest man in the world, Bre Pettis, gives the second handsomest man in the world, Phil Torrone, a nice visit to the Makerbot Store in Manhattan. The store is now selling Makerbots, filament, as well as pre-made items like watches and toys.
The store is at 298 Mulberry Street. → Read More
Editor’s Note: Tadhg Kelly is a game designer with 20 years experience. He is the creator of the leading game design blog What Games Are, and consults for many companies on game design and development. You can follow him on Twitter here.
The really big change that social games brought about was proving that the Asian model of monetising games through virtual goods and other free-to-play business models works just as well in the West. Now big videogame makers want to try and adapt that idea to existing hardcore markets. Is that realistic? → Read More
Intel’s second bite at the smartphone market has been more akin to a gentle nibbling around the edges. At the end of last year the chipmaker teased a smartphone reference design running its new Medfield x86 chip. Nine months Intel chips have found their way inside six smartphones, yet none apparently destined for the U.S. → Read More
Editor’s note: Michael Weinberg is a staff attorney at Public Knowledge, an organization that preserves the openness of the Internet and the public’s access to knowledge; promotes creativity through balanced copyright; and upholds and protects the rights of consumers to use innovative technology lawfully. Michael focuses primarily on copyright, issues before the FCC and emerging technologies like 3D printing. Follow him on Twitter.
FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski wrote last week on TechCrunch about the importance of speed. Specifically, he highlighted the importance of speed in the next wave of Internet innovation. While he is right about the importance of speed, he missed one key point: broadband speed isn’t worth much if it is crippled by data caps. → Read More
It seems that the Iranian government is working to take even tighter control of the country’s already heavily-censored version of the Internet.
The government said that it’s going to launch its own domestic Internet, and that the system will be fully operational by March 2013, according to Reuters and others (who, in turn, seem to be basing their reports on the Iranian media). It’s not clear whether all access to sites outside of Iran will be blocked once the domestic system is live. → Read More
Apple is pursuing people with experience working on Google Maps to develop its own product, according to a source with connections on both teams. Using recruiters, Apple is pursuing a strategy of luring away Google Maps employees who helped develop the search giant’s product on contract, and many of those individuals seem eager to accept due in part to the opportunity Apple represents to build new product, instead of just doing “tedious updates” on a largely complete platform. → Read More
Editor’s Note: Leonid (“Lenny”) Kravets is a patent attorney at Panitch, Schwarze, Belisario and Nadel, LLP in Philadelphia, PA. Lenny focuses his practice on patent prosecution and intellectual property transactions in computer-related technology areas. He specializes in developing IP strategy for young technology companies and blogs on this topic at StartupsIP. Follow Lenny on Twitter: @lkravets and @startupsIP.
While perusing the latest patent lawsuit filings on PriorSmart this week, I was drawn to a series of cases filed by a small company called PersonalWeb against RackSpace (possibly for hosting Github), Nexsan, Facebook, Apple, Yahoo, Microsoft, and IBM. → Read More
Just about an hour after Apple’s iPhone 5 became available for pre-order, the company’s website started alerting customers that their phones would likely arrive a week or two after the phone went on sale in its retail stores on September 21. Clearly, most pundits assumed, this meant that the demand for the iPhone 5 was so overwhelming that even Apple’s finely tuned supply chain couldn’t quite keep up with demand. It turns out, however, that instead of having to wait two weeks or more, many of these customers who were originally told their phones would arrive on October 5 or later are now getting their phones delivered tomorrow or a bit later in the week. → Read More
Most Apple fans become slightly uncomfortable at the sight of Apple’s latest television commercials featuring celebrities talking aimlessly to their iPhones. A subtle message in these ads is that consumer technologies can now place virtual assistants in the palms of our hands. The advertising logic is as follows: get a new iPhone, ask it for information or to run tasks, and it will oblige. In the case of those celebrity commercials, it almost feel as if they’re talking to a digital version of the real life assistants they employ.
When it does work, Siri helps Apple create a deeper emotional bond between the consumer and their technology. While handheld technologies are providing varying levels of assistance to users, a similar wave is taking over the San Francisco Bay Area, not just with bits, but humans, too. A number of separate forces are converging to make segment, organize, and mobilize human workforces for just about any human-powered task one could imagine. → Read More
Editor’s note: Daniel Gross is CEO and co-founder of Cue. You can follow him on Twitter here.
After meticulously analyzing virtually every aspect of his digital life since 1989, Stephen Wolfram noticed this: “The more routine I can make the basic practical aspects of my life, the more I am able to be energetic—and spontaneous—about intellectual and other things.” → Read More
The legal fight between mega-listings site Craigslist and third parties that have used its data in their own applications looks like it is taking on a new dimension this week. 3Taps, the company sued by Craigslist in July over 3Taps’ Craigslist data API, is planning to file a countersuit against Craigslist, citing unfair and uncompetitive business practices in violation of federal and state antitrust laws, TechCrunch has learned. The suit will be filed in Federal Court in the Northern District of California on Monday.
At issue is the claim that the information on Craigslist is already publicly available through searches on sites like Google. Here’s one example: → Read More
Editor’s note: Sarah Downey is a senior privacy strategist at Albine, provider of online privacy solutions. Keep track of her on her blog and on Twitter.
The ad industry says that Do Not Track will destroy the free Internet. We love the Internet and would be pretty upset if it died, so we looked deeper into this claim.
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Editor’s note: This guest post was written by Mike Shema, director of engineering at Qualys, a leading provider of cloud security and compliance solutions. Mike is also author of the recently published book “Hacking Web Apps: Detecting and Preventing Web Application Security Problems.” Contact him here.
HTML5 reinvigorates a technology that’s been driving web content for more than 20 years. Notably, modern browsers can still render the majority of decades-old sites still lingering from the web’s early days, but modern sites expect browsers to be a significantly more powerful platform than their predecessors. → Read More
Yes, Apple Maps redirect to Google Maps on desktop, Android and any non-iOS 6 phones when you share your location. Womp. Obviously this is happening because there’s no hub for Apple Maps on the web, but still, the absurdity of this loop is exemplary of how ill-thought out this whole Maps switch was. → Read More
I was always a smart kid. Did very well on tests all through grade school, didn’t have to do much work because the work I did do suggested to my teachers that there wasn’t an issue. Just a couple missing worksheets, he’ll do fine. When I got to middle school, I took the usual approach to things, which, for me, was always to just do them. That had worked brilliantly before, so I kept right on going.
I failed. And I don’t mean I got an A- and fretted about it like an overachiever. I fully failed math, test after test, almost ended up in remedial classes. Eventually I got it together, but years later I’ve accepted that among the things I have talent in, math is not one of them. Learning that about myself was an important step. Learning it about others is also important, but sometimes it has the distressing but necessary side effect of disillusionment.
Apple’s wretched maps app is a good opportunity for the company to learn something similar about itself, and for the world to recast its opinion of them. We’re all grown-ups here. Why don’t we relate like grown-ups to the companies we love — and hate? → Read More
Editor’s note: Ronen Shilo is the founder, chairman, and CEO of Conduit, a provider of cloud-based solutions that empower web and mobile publishers to engage their users across multiple platforms. Follow him on his Conduit blog and on Twitter.
Every day I thank the universe for my inexperience. Why do I say that? Because one of the distinct advantages of not focusing one’s energies on becoming CEO of a big company – big, at least, by Israeli standards – is that you aren’t a prisoner of expectations. Or convention. → Read More
Editor’s note: Navin Chaddha is a Managing Director at Mayfield Fund, a global early-stage venture capital firm with over $3 billion under management, whose portfolio companies leverage the drivers of cloud/SaaS, mobile, social, energytech and big data. Some current Mayfield Fund investments include Appcelerator, Fab, Marketo, Poshmark, Solarcity, and Zimride.
The U.S. e-commerce market is estimated at $200 billion and is still projected to account for only 9 percent of total retail by 2016 (source: Forrester Research Feb. 2012 U.S. Online Retail forecast). We believe there is ample room for growth, and much of it will come from marketplaces.
Editor’s note: Justin Moore is CEO of Axcient, a cloud solution for data, application, and system uptime. You can follow him on Twitter at @justinrmoore.
Many great technology breakthroughs are subject to analyst predictions about how quickly that technology will take over the world. In 2007, Gartner famously forecasted that all PCs would be virtualized by 2010. While this didn’t happen then and is not close to happening now, business leaders and analysts continue to predict that all business systems will be in the cloud in five years. → Read More
You’d think that doing an iPhone 5 Fly Or Die would be a piece of cake, what with 2 million pre-orders in 24 hours, but it’s not so simple. All the complaining of boredom and slight lack of innovation out of Apple… well, it’s not too far off of the truth.
Apple took a huge risk with the original iPhone, and even with the iPod. But it turns out that those products changed their respective industries. And the iPhone, in particular, is the company’s most profitable product ever, usurping the iPod. Now, Apple is the most valuable publicly traded company in the world, and while they’ll take smaller risks with products like the iPad, there’s no reason to make a major change to their shining star. → Read More
Late on Friday night in California, Apple made more legal filings against Samsung (we’ve embedded them below), in which it is requesting a further $707 million in damages related to the $1.05 billion verdict against Samsung in Apple’s patent case — and along with it, a request for a sales ban on all of Samsung’s Android handsets — potentially far more damaging to Samsung longer term. The text of one of the filings makes a couple of references to something that is of great concern to Apple, and is particularly timely given that the filing was made just as Apple went into its first weekend of retail iPhone 5 sales: it doesn’t want Samsung to get an edge on brand loyalty among first-time smartphone buyers, which it considers a “highly coveted group.”
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Grant Paul AKA @chpwn has posted the first screenshots of a jailbroken iPhone 5, taller screens and all. While the method isn’t public yet, chpwn has posted screenshots of the “alt” App Store Cydia running at full iPhone 5 resolution.
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There are very few things that will get me out of bed at 5am: a family tragedy, more than $100,000 in cash, and a new iPhone. Of course, Matt and I were there to cover the launch of the iPhone 5 live, but we weren’t the only early risers yesterday. Thousands of people, including fanboys, brands, and members of the media (not to mention Apple geniuses) were at Apple’s Fifth Ave. flagship store in NYC at the crack of dawn.
Yes, all for a phone.
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Pandora listeners may notice their regularly scheduled commercial breaks of Ford products and tight jeans were interrupted by a call to support a bill called “The Internet Radio Fairness Act.” The proposed bill would reduce the royalty fees paid by Internet music-streaming services to those paid by other digital and satellite radio stations (the so-called “801(b)” standard). The Hill reports that online radio services shell out more than 55% of their revenue to pay off royalty fees, while satellite and cable companies only pay somewhere between 7 and 16 percent, according to co-sponsor Rep Jason Chaffetz’s office. → Read More
Editor’s note: Glenn Kelman, is CEO of Redfin, a technology-powered real estate broker, backed by Greylock Partners and Madrona Venture Group, with more than $7 billion of home sales. He previously co-founded Plumtree Software, which had a 2002 IPO. He writes a quarterly column on Silicon Valley real estate for TechCrunch.
When Michael Arrington calls, you answer. Even if you’re perusing evangelical memorabilia at a South Carolina gas-and-sip. → Read More
There have been a lot of social marketing efforts aimed squarely at making content go viral, but equally there seems to be a rising trend, fuelled by big data analytics, of brands (and social media sites themselves) looking at ways of targeting very specific groups of users who are the most likely to respond. Linqia, which has developed a platform to deliver highly targeted “stories” to specific audiences, is among the latter group. The company has just exited stealth mode with a $3.475 million Series A round behind it, led by $2.5 million from Jed Katz of Javelin Venture Partners, along with participation from existing angel investors including Esther Dyson, and a plan to transform how social media marketing is done today.
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