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07 Nov 2009 05:09
BitesChomp Eats Up Some Seed Funding. Next, Will Bite Into The Mobile Space »
Smartphone ShowdowniPhone 3GS vs Motorola Droid - Round 2 »
The ads are destroying YouTube. At least this one is. It is a video ad for sustainable energy company from Spain called Acciona. Yeah, I had never heard of them either.
The video starts with this Euro-dude in a suit starting to blow up and crack apart like he’s made from plaster. Halfway through, the actual video player crack in half, and all of the surrounding parts of the site shake and fall away, while an annoying voiceover is saying something about rebirth. I don’t know, maybe it makes more sense in Spanish.
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- Zynga CEO Mark Pincus: "I Did Every Horrible Thing In The Book Just To Get Revenues"167 comments
- Fever Pitch: It's Droid Day, Enjoy The Moment.128 comments
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Google’s Vice President of Search Product and User Experience Marissa Mayer was recently profiled in a Vogue Magazine article that offered a in-depth glimpse into the exec’s lifestyle, loves, career and fashion preferences. Now, Mayer has been named as one of Glamour Magazine’s 2009 Women of the Year. Joining Mayer on the list are a variety of female powerhouses and icons including Maya Angelou, First Lady Michelle Obama, Susan Rice, Euna Lee and Laura Ling.
Mayer has been frequently profiled in business and technology publications over the years, but it’s also nice to see her achievements highlighted in magazines like Vogue and Glamour. The brainy Stanford-grad has been able to set an example for young women everywhere. As one of Google’s early hires, she’s now helping to lead product design for one of the world’s most innovative companies. And she’s only 34. What’s not to love about a successful and geeky coder who also loves to wear Oscar de la Renta, Chanel and Armani?
If you’re a Twitter freak and think that a dedicated Twitter device is just the thing for you, read on. This week we saw the launch of the TwitterPeek, a cute little device built by Peek that will do just about anything you want it to do, as long as all you want it to do is access Twitter. It won’t surf the web. It won’t make phone calls. It won’t support third party apps. But it most certainly does run Twitter.
You can get it in black. Or, if you want to show a little flair, you can get in in cyan.
For some crazy reason I wanted one. A friend bought me one that I will truly love forever(ish). But the company also sent me one. And while I may or may not need one TwitterPeek, I almost certainly don’t need two TwitterPeeks.
This is where you come in.
We’re giving one of these away to a TechCrunch reader. It’s the cool one, cyan, with lifetime service that costs $200. And it’s all yours. Just retweet this post and make sure to include the short URL link – http://bit.ly/3U2Yhy – as well as the #crunch hashtag. Please only tweet the message once, anyone tweeting repeatedly will be disqualified. Tomorrow we’ll sort through all of the tweets and pick one randomly for the win. You’ll get the TweetPeek device in the mail, and we’ll throw in a TechCrunch tshirt. Even the postage is on us. But please note that in this case only U.S. readers are eligible, because the device only works in the U.S.
on November 6, 2009
Up until now, if you wanted to use the location-based service Gowalla on the go, you had to have an iPhone. Today, that expands to Android. But rather than building an app, Gowalla has extended support to Android using the mobile web. This works because Android’s browser is closely tied to the device and is able to access location information, which is vital for Gowalla. The goal is to extend this mobile web support to BlackBerry and a few other location-aware devices in the next week or so, co-founder Josh Williams tells us.As a small team, Gowalla, like its rival , doesn’t have a lot of resources to devote to building apps on all the mobile platforms, so this is a good solution for the time being. Eventually, the plan is to have native apps for all the big platforms, Williams says.
on November 6, 2009
textPlus, a text messaging app that’s powered by GOGII, has just hit the App Store. textPlus lets any iPhone or iPod Touch send free text messages to any cell number by using in-app advertising to cover its costs. There is no limit on how many text messages you can send per month, it’s just a matter of getting WiFi, 3G or an Edge connection. GOGII was one of the first companies that was funded by iFund, the partnership between venture capital firm KPCB and Apple, which was announced at the Apple SDK roadmap event
With version 2.0 of textPlus, GOGII is announcing the availability of textPlus usernames, which can effectively serve as a stand-in for a phone number, which is great for iPod Touch users. Your friends can send standard text messages to you from any phone, simply by sending a text to the shortcode 60611 that leads off with your username followed the rest of their message (so a text to me would look like “DanielBru Hi are you coming to the movie tonight?”).
on November 6, 2009
Droid day — an event that I, like many tech bloggers, have been looking forward to for quite some time. Unlike some people, I wasn’t graced with a test Droid last week, so I was forced to go out and get one the old fashioned way: by getting to the store as early as possible, before the precious devices sold out. And while I was concerned about falling prey to a supply shortage, a part of me still hoped there would be many others like me, helping justify my early morning rise. These are my notes as I searched for the unexpectedly elusive Verizon Droid line.5:30 AM. I woke up this morning to the soothing chimes of my over-priced alarm clock, took a look at the ungodly hour, and immediately sank back into my pillow. It wasn’t until my second alarm (strategically positioned far out of arm’s reach) kicked in that I remembered the task at hand: Droid day
on November 6, 2009
I think it’s safe to assume their Twitter account has been hacked.Update: Yep. Now suspended
TechCrunch Europe on November 6, 2009
So much for the coming mobile nirvana of free mobile content – at least for iPhone users in Germany. Today Europe’s biggest newspaper, BILD-Zeitung, intends to use, in effect, brute force to compel users buy its new iPhone app. The paper tabloid is to block anyone using an iPhone browser from accessing its website.Now, readers will not only have to pay for the dedicated BILD iPhone app, but they also need to pony-up recurring fees for new articles. The same is planned for Axel Springer’s quality paper Die Welt. Users of Nokia, Blackberry, HTC or other smartphone brands will not be blocked – but only for as long as it takes for Springer to develop an app for each device.
on November 6, 2009
It’s not yet clear what Chomp exactly is, but we do know that it’s a rather hot property right now. It took the still stealth start up just 10 days to raise a nice seed round from Ron Conway and a few other big name angel investors, we hear.So what do we know? Well, the company is definitely in the mobile space. In fact, it’s a “BIG mobile play,” founder Ben Keighran tells us. Keighran, who in 2006 started Bluepulse, a mobile messaging app, has most recently served as the lead advisor to Aardvark for their mobile strategy. There’s apparently no website for the company yet, but they do have a Twitter account, which features one tweet: “Working on something sekret…
”Doug Aamoth on November 6, 2009
When news of the Litl Webbook broke out on Wednesday, I was pleased to learn that the company is located here in Boston, since there aren’t nearly as many people in this area making actual hardware devices, as opposed to software and web companies.I got a chance to sit down with CEO John Chuang for a thorough overview of the Webbook, so check out the video inside for some information about the design philosophy and user interface behind the $699 transforming internet computer.
on November 6, 2009
More good news for Indian entrepreneurs! Infosys co-founder and chairman N. R. Narayana Murthy’s new VC firm, now called Catamaran Venture Fund, just added a whole lot more money to its coffers. A few weeks ago, we reported that Murthy was turning to “the dark side” after selling a large amount of company shares in order to set up a venture capital firm. To set up the fund, Murthy reportedly sold 800,000 shares, or 0.13 percent of the company, its total value converting to $38.7 million, more or less.
It appears that Murthy’s wife, Sudha Murthy, who reportedly put up the seed funding for Infosys Technologies at its founding 30 years ago, has sold 2 million shares worth of her Infosys stock, worth roughly $91 million dollars. And Sudha sold 22 percent of her personal holding to fund her husband’s new VC fund.
Erick Schonfeld on November 6, 2009
Do you see something strange in this screenshot of Google’s homepage today? No, not Bert and Ernie (it’s Sesame Street’s 40th birthday). It’s that ad for the Verizon Droid right there under the search box (today is also Droid Day). Although, the juxtaposition does make it seem like Bert and Ernie are trying to get you to buy a Droid.
Google’s homepage is normally an ad-free zone. No more than 28 words are allowed on it, and Google is always trying to find ways to make it even sparer.
on November 6, 2009
This just keeps getting more and more ridiculous. Before I begin, let me start out by saying that all things being equal, I have no problem with the Apple putting Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf into the App Store, as they have today, as both The Next WebEdible Apple spotted. It’s a book, it’s a rather big part of history, it’s in book stores, etc. That said, all things are not equal in the App Store, not even close. And by Apple’s own standards there is no way this should have been approved.Let me remind everyone that Apple rejected a Someecards application last month partially due to the fact that one of the cards included was mocking Hitler (and more specifically, the film Inglourious Basterds). They flat out rejected it, didn’t require a certain rating for the satire, just rejected it. So when you see Mein Kampf in the store, complete with a swastika as its icon, you’ll forgive me if I’m a bit dumbfounded.
on November 6, 2009
Early this morning, 200 Android developers woke up to one hell of an e-mail: they’d made it into the final round of the second Android Developer Challenge, and were thus one giant step closer to as much as $250,000. Android Developer Challenge 2 officially began way back in May, though the actual voting didn’t begin until some time in September. The votes were split amongst Android users and Googlers (with the latter getting a 55% say), with all voting taking place in a special, custom-made application. To be eligible, applications had to be completely fresh to the Android Market (read: no updates allowed) as of August 1st, couldn’t have been a part of the first Challenge, and had to play friendly with Android v1.5.
Leena Rao on November 6, 2009
Zillow, a popular real-estate listings site, recently tweaked the pricing model in its marketplace for mortgages, angering many of the lenders who pay Zillow for customer leads. A few weeks ago, the site announced that it will be introducing a new pricing model for these leads to lenders.
Zillow’s mortgage marketplace, which in 2008, lets borrowers submit loan requests for mortgages and then review quotes provided by lenders. Basically, lenders will be able to submit any number of loan quotes for free, but will be required to pay Zillow a “market-priced fee” when any borrowers contact them regarding their quotes. When a contact is made, the lender will be charged a market-priced fee.
on November 6, 2009
Brizzly is on a roll right now. Just yesterday, it became the first web-based Twitter client to implement Lists, and last week it rolled out Facebook support. Today brings good news for its parent company: More funding.At the end of this month, Thing Labs will close a $600,000 round which is basically an extension of its Series A from back in June of last year, co-founder Jason Shellen tells us. This will bring its total funding to $2.2 million. But this round is more notable for who is involved: angel investor Ron Conway, Steve Olechowski (the former COO of Feedburner, now at Google), and Greg Yaitanes, who was an early Twitter investor, but is better known as a director of Fox’s hit show House. He’s also directed episodes of Lost, Heroes, Grey’s Anatomy, and many other popular TV shows.
MG Siegler on November 6, 2009
Earlier this week, Seesmic rolled out support for the new Twitter Lists for its Desktop client. Today, that same functionality comes to its web-based client. And with it comes a bonus: Geolocation support.Now, to be clear, most users still won’t be able to use this geolocation support just yet, as Twitter has yet to enable it for most users. But if you do happen to have it, Seesmic supports it. As you can see in the screenshot, it looks pretty nice. If you see a little location marker on a tweet, you can hover over it to bring up a Google Map overlay showing where that tweet was sent from.
TechCrunch Europe on November 6, 2009
It is time for the second annual TechCrunch Europe ChristmasCrunch! Yes folks it’s our annual TechCrunch Europe meetup and Festive Holiday party, in one handy package. This year we’re taking a different tack – basing it around one of the the hottest themes right now, namely the rise of realtime streams. We’ve seen the emergence of Twitter, Facebook, Friendfieed and Google Wave but it’s clear that this is only just the beginning of the world going realtime. TechCrunch is running the Realtime Crunchup of course, but this event in London will also feature some of the hottest realtime startups in the world today.
Erick Schonfeld on November 6, 2009
Earlier this morning, Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis settled their lawsuits with eBay and a syndicate of investors in return for a 14 percent stake in the company they founded. The lawsuits were complicating the spin-off of Skype from eBay because the Skype founders still controlled the service’s underlying peer-to-peer technology.
In an interview with me this morning, Marc Andreessen, one of the investors through his new fund Andreessen Horowitz, told me, “The deal was never held up. The money was in escrow and was going to close” even if the lawsuits weren’t settled. The transaction is on track to close later this quarter, and Josh Silvertman will continue to be CEO.
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