Apple’s App Store has finally given developers the ability to release up to 50 promotional codes for their applications, allowing them distribute their apps to press and friends free of charge directly through the App Store.While the feature may seem like a minor addition to most people, it will be a boon for developers looking [...]
Germany-based myON-ID Media has raised an undisclosed seven-figure sum in a second round of funding from T-Online Venture Fund to expand its online reputation management platform. MyON-ID is actually more of a combination between a people search engine and an alert service for keywords mentioned across the web.I quicky tried out searching my own name [...]
Today’s Wall Street Journal story talking about yet another takeover attempt of Yahoo is incorrect, say our own sources. And unlike The Times’ story over the weekend, which was equally fictitious, this story had direct consequences in the market.Today’s story as former AOL CEO Jonathan Miller out pitching private equity funds to raise “$28 billion [...]
We at TechCrunch expect a rapid expansion of the market for mobile social networks. And with the iPhone’s success as one of the main catalysts of the development, services like Facebook Mobile, MySpace Mobile, Loopt (which even offers a TechCrunch-branded version), aka-aki, and others keep cropping up. One of the most recent social mobile [...]
Two years ago, when social networking was all the rage, a lot of dedicated community websites for specific (and often very small) groups of people were launched by entrepreneurs trying to cash in on the hype by carving out a certain niche. The strategy proved successful for some, but for others … not so much. [...]
The UK’s Times Online is reporting that “Microsoft is in talks to acquire Yahoo’s online search business for $20 billion.” The report is filled with lots of juicy, specific details that lend it credence, but don’t make a lot of sense when you drill down into them. The new deal, according to the [...]
Startups can be the most conservative organizations in the world. We spend so much energy nurturing our delicate egos against naysayers and self-doubt that we can hardly admit mistakes. This is especially true of first-time CEOs. Thousands of new web companies were born in the last few years, and many of us just got the [...]
Today’s the day that Facebook makes their big press push for their Facebook Connect service, which was first announced last May. The NY Times has a story giving a broad overview of Connect as well as competing services from MySpace (Data Availability) and Google (Friend Connect).All three services are platforms for third party sites (Digg, [...]
Surveillance cameras can sometimes give you a creepy feeling (especially the ones you can’t directly see) but the nation of cute- and friendliness, Japan, now offers two solutions for that problem.One example of a “friendly” CCTV camera is the Daruma surveillance doll. Daruma is a wish doll in Nippon so that many Japanese people see [...]
The company behind MyQuire, a simple but pretty powerful online application that lets individuals and team members work on projects in a social network-like environment, has been recently acquired.That’s about all we know. We got in touch with CEO Michael Dawson but he declined to comment or share any details because the buyer apparently requested [...]
Last year Amazon had trouble filling orders of the then-new Kindle, so eBay took over and prices rocketed to $1,500. This year, same problem. Amazon says orders for Kindles will take 11-13 weeks to fulfill (which is, we believe, when they will launch the Kindle 2). So you aren’t getting one by Christmas directly from [...]
I’m with you on this one Jason. Randall Stross’ article (it’s really an editorial, but not marked as such) rips into Tesla as “not much more than a functioning concept car” and suggests it would be foolish of the government to grant it a loan under a 2007 Federal loan program designed specifically to encourage [...]
We were doubtful last night when the story first broke. There were just too many oddities to The Times’ tale about a complicated Yahoo/Microsoft search arrangement that would guarantee billions to Yahoo in exchange for a ten year search deal. We’ve checked with our sources - all of them - and we can’t verify a [...]
Chances are you use at least two major social networks - 49 million people, for example, visited both MySpace and Facebook in October 2008 (Comscore, worldwide). Nearly 7 million people in the UK use both Bebo and Facebook. A lot of people maintain very different friend lists on LinkedIn than MySpace or Facebook. Etc. [...]
Love it or hate it, Amazon.com’s Kindle e-book reader is selling well — in fact, even at $359 there currently aren’t any in stock. So Amazon certainly doesn’t need any advice from me about how to sell more Kindles, but I have some ideas about how the company could make the device more attractive [...]
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