TechCrunch is a web publication that offers technology news and analysis, as well as profiles of startup companies, products, and websites. It was founded by Michael Arrington in 2005, and was first published on June 11, 2005.

The website's Technorati rank is 4, and is 4th in the Info/Tech category. As of April 10, 2012 (2012 -04-10)^[update], it has over 1,628,000 RSS feed subscribers as measured by tracking company FeedBurner. On September 28, 2010, at its TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco, AOL announced that it would acquire TechCrunch for $25 million.

TechCrunch is now affiliated with several other websites, commonly referred to as The TechCrunch Network. As of July 28, 2008, these include:

The organization held a live event, the TechCrunch50, on September 8–10, 2008 in San Francisco, California and again on September 14–15, 2009; in 2010, the event was canceled. TechCrunch also runs The Europas awards and is a founding host of The Crunchies. Furthermore TechCrunch organises various one day events, ie. TechCrunch London and twice per year the TechCrunch Disrupt event.

Marissa Ann Mayer (born on May 30, 1975) is Vice President of Location and Local Services at Google. She has become one of the public faces of Google, providing a number of press interviews and appearing at events frequently to speak on behalf of the company.

After graduating from Wausau West High School in 1993, Mayer was one of two delegates from Wisconsin selected by the Governor of that state to attend the National Youth Science Camp in West Virginia.

Mayer received her B.S. in symbolic systems, graduating with honors, and M.S. in Computer Science from Stanford University. For both degrees, she specialized in artificial intelligence. In 2009, the Illinois Institute of Technology granted Mayer an honoris causa doctorate degree honoring her pathfinding work in the field of search.

Mayer was the first female engineer hired at Google and one of their first 20 employees, joining the company in June 1999. Prior to joining Google, Mayer worked at the UBS research lab (Ubilab) in Zurich, Switzerland, and at SRI International in Menlo Park, California.

Jack Dorsey (born November 19, 1976) is an American software architect and businessman widely known as the creator of Twitter and as the founder and CEO of Square, a mobile payments company. In 2008, he was named to the MIT Technology Review TR35 as one of the top 35 innovators in the world under the age of 35.

Dorsey grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, and by age 13, he had become interested in dispatch routing. Some of the open source software he created in the area of dispatch logistics is still used by many taxi cab companies. He went to high school at Bishop DuBourg High School and attended the Missouri University of Science and Technology before subsequently transferring to New York University, where he first conceived the idea for Twitter.

While working on dispatching as a programmer he later moved to California.

In Oakland in 2000, Dorsey started his company to dispatch couriers, taxis, and emergency services from the Web. His other projects and ideas at this time included networks of medical devices and a "frictionless service market". In July 2000, building on dispatching and inspired in part by LiveJournal and possibly by AOL Instant Messenger, he had the idea for a Web-based realtime status/short message communication service.

Marc Russell Benioff (born September 25, 1964) is Chairman & CEO of salesforce.com, a cloud computing company.

Benioff started salesforce.com in March 1999 in a rented San Francisco apartment and defined its mission as The End of Software. He is “credited with turning the software industry on its head” by using the Internet to “revamp the way software programs are designed and distributed.” He has long evangelized software as a service as the model that would replace traditional enterprise software. He is the creator of the term “platform as a service” and has extended salesforce.com’s reach by allowing customers to build their own applications on the company’s architecture, or in the salesforce.com “cloud”. He is the author of three books, including the national best seller Behind the Cloud.

Prior to founding salesforce.com, Benioff was at Oracle Corporation for 13 years in a variety of executive positions in sales, marketing, and product development. At 23, he was named Oracle's Rookie of the Year and three years later he was promoted to vice president, the company's youngest person to hold that title. Before joining Oracle, Benioff worked as an assembly language programmer at the Macintosh Division of Apple Computer, where he was inspired by the company and its co-founder, Steve Jobs. While still in high school, he founded Liberty Software, which specialized in microcomputer games, creating and selling games for the Atari system among others.

Steven Paul "Steve" Jobs (/ˈdʒɒbz/; February 24, 1955 – October 5, 2011) was an American businessman, designer and inventor. He is best known as the co-founder, chairman, and chief executive officer of Apple Inc. Through Apple, he was widely recognized as a charismatic pioneer of the personal computer revolution and for his influential career in the computer and consumer electronics fields. Jobs also co-founded and served as chief executive of Pixar Animation Studios; he became a member of the board of directors of The Walt Disney Company in 2006, when Disney acquired Pixar.

In the late 1970s, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak engineered one of the first commercially successful lines of personal computers, the Apple II series. Jobs was among the first to see the commercial potential of Xerox PARC's mouse-driven graphical user interface, which led to the creation of the Apple Lisa and, one year later, the Macintosh. During this period he also led efforts that would begin the desktop publishing revolution, notably through the introduction of the LaserWriter and the associated PageMaker software.