This morning Google opened up registration for its annual Google I/O conference, a two-day event focused on developer topics that will feature Android, App Engine, Chrome, GWT, and AJAX APIs. According to Tom Stocky, Director of Product Management at Google, the event has a broad appeal for both small startups and large, established companies. [...]
Cubic Telecom, the TechCrunch40 company behind the traveler-friendly SIM card MAXroam, has partnered with Dopplr to sell the card through its online store. The Dopplr-branded SIM card will be available for a reduced rate of ?45 (down five euro from its normal price).Both companies have a strong travel focus: Cubic Telecom’s MAXroam allows users [...]
German mind mapping application builder MeisterLabs, the startup behind brainstorm & planning tool MindMeister, has acquired MindMaker, to our knowledge the third iPhone application to get sold after the sale of Where To and Tapulous buying Tweetsville.MindMaker, on sale for ?3.99 (or $4.99), allows you to structure your ideas and concepts visually using a fairly [...]
While Internet slang and abbreviations have become second nature for some technophiles, many of us have trouble converting our words into the pseudo-gibberish sometimes required to make long messages fit into the 140 character limit set by Twitter. 140it, a new service put together over the weekend by the guys behind Yipit, is looking [...]
Website security software company Websense has acquired Defensio, a comment spam blocker used by blogs. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.Defensio competes with Akismet, the spam blocker that comes with Wordpress, and Mollom. One of Defensio’s features is that it can sort blocked comments by spamminess and also offers an API for [...]
Mobile video service Kyte is trying hard these days to please its biggest (paying) customers: music labels and their artists, primarily. Performers such as 50 Cent and John Legend use Kyte to record behind-the-scenes moments on their cell phones and then share them over the web immediately with their fans. To help its [...]
The Mozilla Foundation is putting its weight behind an effort to create an open video format on the Web. It is doing this by giving $100,000 in grant money, to be administered by the Wikimedia Foundation, towards the development and support of Theora, an open-source video codec. More importantly, it is also building [...]
It can be illuminating to compare the strategies of the major cloud platform vendors. Instead of matching currently exposed features, let’s imagine what each major player could do to tack away from competitor strengths and toward their own. For example, Google.Unlike Amazon Web Services or Microsoft’s forthcoming Azure cloud, Google’s overall application architecture is firewalled [...]
Perhaps it’s because I’m stuck in a Munich hotel with the flu, but this most recent round of rumors about Steve Jobs undergoing surgery today is annoying me more than normal. The entire report is based on something someone heard someone else say at a party. That kind of stuff is fine when it’s a [...]
If you want to track the most popular fan pages on Facebook, AllFacebook pushed out a new Facebook Pages Tracker last night that keeps stats on 611,213 fan pages on the social network. Only about 57,000 of those pages have more than 1,000 fans. The tracker also shows the fastest-growing fan pages. [...]
SkyGrid, a new aggregation startup that is preparing to launch a free version of its product, has an angry ex-employee on its hands named Sara Parker. Parker, a “Process and Documentation Specialist” at the company from August 2008 to December 2008 according to her LinkedIn Profile, says via Twitter that “after discovering baaad things about [...]
Last August, I upgraded from a simple flip phone to a HTC Touch. Immediately I began looking for a way to avoid manually entering my Gmail contacts into the phone.After several hours of fruitless searching, I stumbled on NuevaSync–a free service that sync’d both my Gmail contacts and my Google Calendar. Thankfully, they also [...]
I didn’t quite believe it when one of my most trusted sources told me that AOL was seriously considering selling Bebo, the social network it acquired for $850 million only a year ago. But I have now confirmed the rumor with three other sources intimately acquainted with the company. AOL is indeed quietly pondering a [...]
Mobile VoIP and IM service fring, one of the more popular mobile communication services around, is experimenting with porting a bunch of third-party apps to the fring client and will be announcing a number of those in the course of this year. Today, fring is launching a custom mobile-optimized Last.fm music radio add-on that brings [...]
With yesterday’s release of IE8 RC, I was reminded of an annoyance my partner had when I first installed Google Chrome because she was unable to use her Hotmail (short for the official name Windows Live Hotmail and not to be confused with Windows Live Mail) account properly using the new browser. I checked if [...]