The latest from TechCrunch
- 50 Cent Weighs In: Waterproof Phones And Fighting Poverty
- U.S. PC Shipments Slip 6 Percent In Q4, While Apple's Jump 21 Percent
- Sharks Circle Around Google Search+: EPIC Cries Antitrust, Twitter Provides Evidence
- Urtak Raises $500k To Ask You The Big Questions: Yes? No? Don't Care?
- Keen On…. Ed Schmit: Can AT&T Really Innovate?
- Vuzix: SMART Glasses Explained
- Live At CES: 50 Cent Talks About His New Headphone Line And The Business Of Music
- On The Heels Of Hiring Skype's Former Strategy Boss, Urban Airship Hits 10 Billion Notifications Pushed
- GrubWithUs Goes Mobile With A (Really Pretty) iPhone App
- 10 Things All Entrepreneurs Fail At
- OnLive Viewer Hits Google TV, Full Gaming Capability Potentially On The Way
- Why Samsung Is The Next Apple
- Appifier Launches New Service That Turns WordPress Sites Into Mobile Apps
- Riding The Bull At CES 2012
- Apple Announces Education Event On January 19 In NYC
- Eric Schmidt: Android Is Differentiated, Not Fragmented
- Google+ Search = A Way To Call The Feds In On IPO-Bound Facebook (?)
- Watch Us Live From The CES 2012 Floor!
- TC/Gadgets Interview: Up Close With The Lytro
- Shazam Launches New App Focused On Lyric Play: Shazam Player
| 50 Cent Weighs In: Waterproof Phones And Fighting Poverty | Top |
 50 Cent took the stage with our very own Matt Burns to talk about his line of SMS headphones, but that's not all he felt like chatting about. In between giveaways, the tech-savvy musician/businessman took a moment to talk about some of the cool things to be seen at CES as well his stance on philanthropy. | |
| U.S. PC Shipments Slip 6 Percent In Q4, While Apple's Jump 21 Percent | Top |
 The PC industry is in decline. Or hadn't you noticed? According to Gartner, PC shipments in the U.S slipped 5.9 percent in the fourth quarter of 2011. (Microsoft also warned earlier this week that Q4 PC shipments were down). The only bright spot seems to be Apple, which grew shipments in the U.S. an estimated 20.7 percent. That makes Apple The No. 3 PC maker in the U.S. HP and Dell are No. 1 and No. 2 respectively. They still command twice Apple's 11.6 percent market share, with 23.1 percent share for HP and 22.4 percent share for Dell. But Apple is the only PC manufacturer in the top 5 that is growing. Halo effect, anyone? Or maybe it's the stores. The only PC manufacturer which grew faster in the U.S than Apple was Lenovo, which grew 40 percent. But it didn't sell enough PCs in the U.S. to crack the top 5. | |
| Sharks Circle Around Google Search+: EPIC Cries Antitrust, Twitter Provides Evidence | Top |
 There's blood in the water surrounding Google Search+ (what we're now calling Google Search Plus Your World). The Electronic Privacy Information Center recommends the FTC look at Search+ for possible privacy or antitrust concerns. Meanwhile, Twitter's General Counsel Alexander Macgillivray provides apparently damning evidence for why Search+ unfairly skews search results towards Google+ content instead of the most relevant results. | |
| Urtak Raises $500k To Ask You The Big Questions: Yes? No? Don't Care? | Top |
 Back in the old days of online publishing (say, 2007), you'd reach the bottom of a blog post or news article, peruse the comment section, possibly leave one of your own, and then move on to the next hot story. It was a simpler time. These days, things are a lot different. Many sites are now experimenting with myriad widgets: story recommendations, games, polls, a dozen sharing options — if you can think of it, someone has tried embedding it at the bottom of a post. One company that's part of this trend is Urtak, a startup that participated in the most recent batch of TechStars NYC. And today it's announcing that it's raised a $500,000 seed funding round with investors including Vaizra Investments, Quotidian Ventures, Advancit Capital, and Esther Dyson. | |
| Keen On…. Ed Schmit: Can AT&T Really Innovate? | Top |
 One of the most interesting events at CES earlier this week was the AT&T Developer Summit which not only featured a guest appearance a fist pumping/back slapping Steve Ballmer, but also a really impressive hackathon for over 150 young developers. | |
| Vuzix: SMART Glasses Explained | Top |
 The story about Vuzix's new AR/holographic enabled concept glasses broke last week, but I had a chance to catch up with Clark Dever from Vuzix (with my rouge TechCrunch ghetto cam) for a brief video explanation and demo of the technology. The short of it is that it involves some highfalutin' technolgy to get the displays to accurately display into the lens material. Their displays were quite clear and the demo devices show that accurately. Additionally, the displays will ultimately be able to work with a series of wearable gyroscopes for truly "hands on" interface interaction. | |
| Live At CES: 50 Cent Talks About His New Headphone Line And The Business Of Music | Top |
 You can view our interview with 50 Cent live at CES today at Noon Pacific/3pm Eastern. Why Fiddy and why at CES? Because the musician is now moving into electronics, following Dr. Dre with his Beats line and, in another sense, the ease with which smaller companies (and individuals) can actually build and market interesting hardware. | |
| On The Heels Of Hiring Skype's Former Strategy Boss, Urban Airship Hits 10 Billion Notifications Pushed | Top |
 Urban Airship has been working pretty hard of late to plant itself firmly on the "Startups to Watch" list. The Portland and San Francisco-based startup, a platform provider that gives developers a simple way to build in-app purchases and push notifications into their mobile apps, grabbed some media attention when it acquired SimpleGeo back in October for $3 million. As SimpleGeo provided location-based services and data to mobile developers, the acquisition made a lot of sense for Urban Airship, providing a complement to its push notifications focus; and given the early hype around SimpleGeo, it was a bargain. (Plus, there was the added benefit of getting the founders as advisors.) | |
| GrubWithUs Goes Mobile With A (Really Pretty) iPhone App | Top |
 "So I pay... to eat with strangers? And I don't even pick my food? ...Why would I do this?" The idea behind GrubWithUs can seem strange at first — but once you've had your first meal with them, everything just sort of clicks. You pay, you sit, you eat, you meet people, and you leave. They handle all of the annoying bits (the check splitting, the tipping, the ... finding people for you to eat with) and you handle the eating. Easy. | |
| 10 Things All Entrepreneurs Fail At | Top |
 I was on the phone with Tony Conrad at True Ventures pitching a business idea I had in early 2009. The site was built and we even had people registered for it and I had about a half million dollars already committed but I wanted a VC firm on my side as well. I don't know why. Maybe I thought it would give me some credibility and I desperately craved it after the divorce I had been going through. Tony asked a question I thought was very smart. And now I forget exactly what it was. But I'm going to paraphrase what I think he said. He asked, "What have you failed at already in this business and how have you learned from it?" | |
| OnLive Viewer Hits Google TV, Full Gaming Capability Potentially On The Way | Top |
 Google TV needs content. Onlive has content. The match is perfect. Starting today, the Onlive Viewer app is available for downloading via Google TV's Android Market. This app allows anyone to view gamers hacking away at OnLive games. Note, the app doesn't bring gaming capabilities to Google TV, but OnLive expects to add that functionality later down the road. | |
| Why Samsung Is The Next Apple | Top |
 For most of the ten years I've been coming to CES, every presentation, every booth, has had one goal: to create an ecosystem in order to encourage consumer lock in. Year after year, presentation after presentation, someone has come out to show how the phone will connect to the fridge which, in turn, will connect to the TV. And year after year, they failed. Until now. Samsung, and to some extent the other vendors, have finally cracked it. For most of the past few years they've watched as Apple ran circles around them in terms of media sharing and remote control. Obviously Apple's systems have been limited to iPod/iTunes/iPad/Mac but Samsung, a major player in both the white goods and the mobile markets, can now have it all. | |
| Appifier Launches New Service That Turns WordPress Sites Into Mobile Apps | Top |
 Appifier is a new service, previously in beta, that turns WordPress sites into mobile apps. That's not mobile websites, mind you, but actual mobile applications complete with push notifications, offline access, Twitter and Facebook sharing, plus a native look, feel and speed. Unlike many DIY app creators (and there are many), Appifier isn't doing a freemium offering. You can test out your app for free, but if you want to publish it in the app store, there are fees involved. | |
| Riding The Bull At CES 2012 | Top |
| Jordan was wrong. Oh how she was wrong. She though that being a native Texan she could beat me, a manly man on a mechanical bull. Neither of us had ever rode one of these fictitious creatures so we hoped on one while browsing the wares at Pepcom's Digital Experience. These mini tradeshows are popular at CES. They bring together just venders and press where CES mixes in salesmen, marketing types and general weirdoes. But you have to entertain the press. We tend to have short attention spans hence gimmicks like the cowboy them and mechanical bulls. I like it. And I won. | |
| Apple Announces Education Event On January 19 In NYC | Top |
 Apple has always been bullish when it came to supporting education, and that trend continues with the announcement of an education event on January 19 at New York's famous Guggenheim Museum. | |
| Eric Schmidt: Android Is Differentiated, Not Fragmented | Top |
 We've spent the better part of yesterday cruising around the Central Hall on a quest to highlight the coolest tech at CES, but Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt was on hand to talk about the "next big thing in consumer electronics." While doing so, he (perhaps unsurprisingly) made it clear that he isn't a fan of the word "fragmentation" when it comes to Google's Android OS. | |
| Google+ Search = A Way To Call The Feds In On IPO-Bound Facebook (?) | Top |
 Like everyone else, I've been trying to get my head around why Google has force-integrated its Google+ social network into its main search feed at the expense of leading social services like Facebook and Twitter. The situation seems like an antitrust case waiting to happen, because Google could easily choose to feature the publicly available, searchable content from its social rivals in the same way it is showing its own product within its market-dominating search engine. It just hasn't. You'd think that Google has an intimate awareness of what it can and can't get away with, given how often it has been scrutinized for antitrust issues already. So, actually, yeah, let's assume it does... that it has predicted this criticism, and even an investigation by the US Department of Justice. What's the plan? I suspect that there's a master strategy for provoking the US government to investigate the market shares of search and social products as a single issue, in a way that puts Facebook on the defensive, especially as it looks to go public. | |
| Watch Us Live From The CES 2012 Floor! | Top |
| Yesterday was awesome. We hit up LG, Samsung, and Sony to name a few and had a helluva good time doing it. But today is a different day, a different hall and a bevy of new companies and booths. So grab some popcorn — seriously, go now because you only have a few minutes before we're on — and get ready to come on a crazy journey with us. Oh, and if you want to ask us some questions or participate in any way, just tweet to @TechCrunch using the #CEScrunch hash tag. We'll try to answer any questions you have in real-time, and if you want to see more of a certain thing or booth we're totally open to suggestions. | |
| TC/Gadgets Interview: Up Close With The Lytro | Top |
 Yesterday we had the opportunity to play with the world's first mass-market light-field camera, the Lytro. VP of Marketing Kira Wampler ran us through its paces as we learned how the camera grabs not only the color and intensity but the direction of light coming in from a scene. | |
| Shazam Launches New App Focused On Lyric Play: Shazam Player | Top |
 iTunes is great and everything, but it's still just a standard music player. The most exciting feature of the whole program is Genius, at least in my opinion, and even that can be off from time to time. But Shazam wants you to ingest your music a bit differently from here on out, and has launched the Shazam Player app to give users a better chance to leverage its new feature, Lyric Play. Lyric Play is already available in the premium version of Shazam, Shazam Encore, and allows users to see lyrics playing in time with the music, as the song is being discovered. This technology is clearly nothing short of impressive, but the 20 seconds spent tagging a song isn't really the ideal platform for this feature to be shown off. That said, the Shazam Player app lets you get your Lyric Play on throughout the entirety of songs. However, there will be a small fee. | |
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