The latest from TechCrunch
- Chinese Servant Gets Ten Years In Jail Stealing Overpriced Nokia Vertu Handset
- Fashion For Home Scores New Funding As Samwer Brothers' Rocket Internet Exit
- How To Build A Successful Company From The Ground Up
- Beats' Acquisition Of MOG Confirmed: The Aim Is A 'Truly End To End Experience'
- Uber Opens Up Platform To Non-Limo Vehicles With "Uber X," Service Will Be 35% Less Expensive
- The New Google Gets In Touch With Its Emotions, Wants To Be "Delightful" and "Magical"
- Funnyjunk's Lawyer, Charles Carreon, Is Charging The Oatmeal With "Impersonating A Charity"
- With "Connected Apps," Foursquare Firms Its Position As The Social Network For Places
- RIM Is Hurting, But It's Not Dead Just Yet
- Saturday's 'Leap Second' Added More Heat To This Weekend's Tech Meltdowns
- Social Media Is Making Today's Girls Actually Say What They Mean
- How to Rebrand A Social Network And Live To Tell About It
- Facebook's Mobile Future Rests On Today's Feature Phone Users
- Rise Of The Enterprise "Toys"
- The Art Of Manipulation
- Facebook Just Removed The Home Page Ticker, But It Should Be Back Soon
- With Tech From Space, Ministry Of Supply Is Building The Next Generation Of Dress Shirts
- Thanks, Science! New Study Says CrunchBase Is An Information Treasure Trove
- Steve Would Be Proud: How Apple Won The War Against Flash
- Where Are All The iPad Shopping Apps?
| Chinese Servant Gets Ten Years In Jail Stealing Overpriced Nokia Vertu Handset | Top |
 Here's a sad, and slightly ridiculous, coda to the story of Vertu, Nokia's wrong turn into making bling-tastic handsets encrusted with diamonds and gold: a servant in China convicted of stealing one from her boss has been sentenced to 10 years in prison and fined 20,000 yuan (over $3,000). The story, as published in the English edition of the Chinese People's Daily Online, notes that Ms Zhang Yun's defense was that she had not realized the value of the phone when she took it, and did so in the first place because she had not been paid. The incident happened in Henan Province. | |
| Fashion For Home Scores New Funding As Samwer Brothers' Rocket Internet Exit | Top |
 Fashion For Home, the online designer furniture store, has scored a new funding round led by the Munich-based VC Acton Capital Partners, while Holtzbrinck Ventures has also participated. And with it we have an exit of sorts. That's because, as part of the round, the Samwer brothers' incubator, Rocket Internet, has sold its shares, although terms of the transaction aren't being disclosed -- unsurprising given the Samwers notorious reputation for secrecy. It's also especially curious when you factor in last year's leaked memo where Oliver Samwer described ambitions to become "number one" in the ecommerce sector for furniture with a strategy he controversially likened to "blitzkrieg". Fashion For Home's new funding round as a whole is said to be in the "lower double-digit millions", so also make of that what you will. | |
| How To Build A Successful Company From The Ground Up | Top |
 Editor's note: This is a guest post by Jay Fulcher; Fulcher is the CEO of Ooyala, a rapidly growing video technology startup that has more than 500 customers worldwide. You can follow him on Twitter @jbfulcher. His previous TechCrunch articles include "A Fistful of Streaming Media Dollars," "Fear and Loathing in Online Video Fred Wilson, co-founder of Union Square Ventures and investor in Tumblr, Foursquare, Twitter and Zynga, wrote a great post on his blog the other day about how startups can retain their best employees. | |
| Beats' Acquisition Of MOG Confirmed: The Aim Is A 'Truly End To End Experience' | Top |
 Looks like the reports that have been in play for months now have finally been confirmed: Beats Electronics, known best for their hip Dr Dre headphones and partly backed by HTC (who had also been a rumored MOG buyer), is indeed buying the music streaming service MOG, with the acquisition now confirmed by both sides. The move will give MOG -- struggling to grow against the runaway success of Spotify -- a new lease of life tied to a specific hardware maker; and Beats another step up on the consumer electronics experience, following in the mold of Apple in providing the whole package from one brand. "The addition of MOG's music service to the Beats portfolio will provide a truly end-to-end music experience," David Hyman, the founder and CEO of MOG told USA Today. Although the deal has been in play since March of this year, this was in fact the first confirmation by either side that they are linking up. We're still contacting both companies for a direct confirmation. | |
| Uber Opens Up Platform To Non-Limo Vehicles With "Uber X," Service Will Be 35% Less Expensive | Top |
 Declaring its independence from the traditional Lincoln Towncar (sorry, couldn't resist), Uber is going beyond black cars this Fourth of July, bringing its up until now secret "Uber X" project public. "Uber X" will allow Uber partners to use its dispatching software in order to dole out vehicles beyond Lincoln Towncars, giving passengers a choice between Prius Hybrids and SUVs like the Cadillac Escalade, etc. | |
| The New Google Gets In Touch With Its Emotions, Wants To Be "Delightful" and "Magical" | Top |
 The Google+ project is changing Google. Watching the keynotes at I/O this week, it was hard not to notice how Google has become a company that doesn't just want to catalog the world's information anymore. The company has decided that it wants to be "delightful," that its products should have a touch of "magic" and that just giving us ten blue links isn't enough anymore. | |
| Funnyjunk's Lawyer, Charles Carreon, Is Charging The Oatmeal With "Impersonating A Charity" | Top |
 In Part Umpteen of the endless struggle by Matthew Inman AKA The Oatmeal vs. weird lawyer Charles Carreon, we find our hero beset by the accusation that he is impersonating a charity for collecting a large amount of money and giving it to the NWF and ACS. ""If IndieGoGo pays Inman the money in the Charitable Fund, and Inman personally donates the money to NWF and ACS, he will be unjustly enriched by receiving a large tax write-off that should properly be allocated pro-rata to the 14,406 small donors who contributed to the Charitable Fund," wrote Carreon. Yeah. He really thinks differently than you and me. To recap, Carreon asked for $20,000 in damages from Inman for insulting Funnyjunk, a site whose users stole Inman's comics. Inman wrote he would collect the $20,000 in cash and photograph it with a crude representation of the lawyer's mother sexing up a bear. A few days later, Inman had collected over $200,000 for the National Wildlife Fund and the American Cancer Society. Then the lawyer got weird. He wanted to sue the charities and now wants to prevent the money from being dispersed. | |
| With "Connected Apps," Foursquare Firms Its Position As The Social Network For Places | Top |
 The timing was horrendous - right in the middle of Google I/O - but location-based social network Foursquare announced a major change to its mobile platform this week which shouldn't go unnoticed (even if it didn't involve skydivers wearing futuristic eyewear). The company introduced a developer preview of what it's calling its "next evolution" - Connected Apps. The new framework allows developers create their own experiences inside Foursquare, which enables them to connect with Foursquare users as events are happening. The result? Foursquare is setting itself up as mobile users' go-to app for socializing around a location. | |
| RIM Is Hurting, But It's Not Dead Just Yet | Top |
 There's been plenty said about RIM since it released its rough fiscal financials a few days ago, just about all of it negative. It's hard not to be, honestly — the company reported its first operating loss in eight years, announced that a full 5,000 employees would be getting the axe, and topped it all off by revealing that the first BlackBerry 10 devices wouldn't hit the market until the beginning of 2013. It seems to me that RIM's problem (well, one of them anyway) is that the company's brass seems to look at the game they're playing as one of time, and they think they have plenty of it. | |
| Saturday's 'Leap Second' Added More Heat To This Weekend's Tech Meltdowns | Top |
 If you were hoping to spend the last couple days catching up with your favorite websites while maybe streaming a Netflix movie, you've probably discovered by now that you had pretty lousy timing for a lazy web-surfing weekend. | |
| Social Media Is Making Today's Girls Actually Say What They Mean | Top |
 The stereotype is that women generally enjoy talking and communicating more than men. But they haven't always been known to be the most straightforward with the nitty-gritty of what they really think and feel -- females are sometimes wired to be a people-pleasing bunch. But according to a recent article in the UK's Daily Mail, some language experts say that today's girls are becoming more blunt and direct, thanks to the rise of technologies such as texting and social media. | |
| How to Rebrand A Social Network And Live To Tell About It | Top |
 Editor's Note: This guest post is written by Geoff Cook, cofounder and CEO of social networking site myYearbook. Imagine the outcry if Facebook were to change its name. People would grab their pitchforks, join a posse, and burn the Internet down. That nightmarish vision led to many sleepless nights for our team after we decided to do the unthinkable: rebrand a social network used by more than a million people a day. We changed the name of myYearbook, a social network for meeting new people, to MeetMe. | |
| Facebook's Mobile Future Rests On Today's Feature Phone Users | Top |
 Editor's Note: The following guest post by Thomas Clayton, the Chief Executive Officer of voice blogging startup Bubble Motion. Prior to Bubble Motion, Clayton was GM of the Worldwide Telecom Business at BEA Systems, an infrastructure software company acquired by Oracle for $8.5B USD. Clayton holds a BA from Harvard Business School and a BS degree from UC Berkeley. | |
| Rise Of The Enterprise "Toys" | Top |
 The enterprise software market has been uncharacteristically turbulent of late. Beyond several hefty funding rounds and well-performing IPOs, the ecosystem has experienced some major consolidation with SAP's purchase of SuccessFactors and Ariba, Oracle's acquisition of RightNow and Taleo, and even IBM's multiple cloud additions. All totaled, we've seen more than $10 billion in enterprise cloud consolidation over the past three quarters. But Microsoft's $1.2 billion acquisition of Yammer is a little different. Not just because it underscores the importance of social in the enterprise and cements Yammer's rapid rise to more than a billion dollars in value. Rather, it's different because it signals the severity of the disruption occurring in enterprise software – disruption that will make it very difficult for incumbent vendors to hold on, and disruption that's coming from entirely new places and in new ways. | |
| The Art Of Manipulation | Top |
 Let's admit it, we in the consumer web industry are in the manipulation business. We build products meant to persuade people to do what we want them to do. We call these people "users" and even if we don't say it aloud, we secretly wish every one of them would become fiendishly addicted. Users take our technologies with them to bed. When they wake up, they check for notifications, tweets, and updates before saying "good morning" to their loved ones. Ian Bogost, the famed game creator and professor, calls the wave of habit-forming technologies the "cigarette of this century" and warns of equally addictive and potentially destructive side-effects. | |
| Facebook Just Removed The Home Page Ticker, But It Should Be Back Soon | Top |
 Poof. Vanished. Gone. Many Facebook users are no longer seeing the real-time news "Ticker" on the right side of their home page, but apparently it should reappear soon. While nothing was posted to Facebook's Known Issues Page, one Twitter user relayed that his friend who works at Facebook said Ticker "will be back online soon". There's a chance the removal could be more permanent, though. The Ticker is essentially Facebook's firehose, showing abbreviated stories about nearly every action taken by your friends, no matter how insignificant. If Facebook did remove the Ticker, it could make it harder for third-party apps to grow, but give Facebook more prime real-estate above the fold to show ads. | |
| With Tech From Space, Ministry Of Supply Is Building The Next Generation Of Dress Shirts | Top |
 Nobody likes to admit it, but if you're a working professional, there's a good chance you're familiar with sweat stains. The commute to work, the stress of meeting a deadline, the faulty air conditioning in the boardroom, cotton weaves -- all of these things and many more have been known to conspire against you, the working professional. Luckily, Ministry of Supply feels your stinky, stinky pain. While athletes have Under Armour, business attire has more or less remained the same for the last century. Armed with some of the same technology NASA uses in its space suits, Ministry of Supply has developed a line of dress shirts -- called "Apollo" -- that adapt to your body to control perspiration, reduce odor, and make you feel like a million bucks. So, to help get these futuristic shirts onto the backs of sweaty professionals, the project's founders, MIT grads Gihan Amarasiriwardena, Aman Advani, Kit Hickey and Kevin Rustagi, took to Kickstarter, where the project has blown up. | |
| Thanks, Science! New Study Says CrunchBase Is An Information Treasure Trove | Top |
 "I believe CrunchBase will gain a lot of attention from the academia soon, which is always eager for high-quality data set," writes Guang Xiang of Carnegie Mellon University, who found that he could predict Mergers and Acquisitions much better using the unique business variables available in CrunchBase than the traditional databases used by academics. Thanks, Xiang, flattery will get you everywhere. | |
| Steve Would Be Proud: How Apple Won The War Against Flash | Top |
 Late Thursday, an extraordinary thing happened: Adobe announced in a blog post that it would not provide Flash Player support for devices running Android 4.1, and that it was pulling the plugin from the Google Play store on August 15. The retreat comes five years after the introduction of the iPhone, the device which led to Flash's mobile ambitions, almost even before they began. That Adobe would make such an announcement nearly five years to the day that the first iPhone was sold is kind of funny. I'd like to think that the Flash team has a sense of humor and was well aware of the timing when it posted the blog entry, but I could also see the entry as unintentionally ironic. Either way, it caps off a five-year battle to win the mobile landscape -- one which for Adobe ended in defeat. | |
| Where Are All The iPad Shopping Apps? | Top |
 For a tech company founder in San Francisco, I'm a terribly late adopter of new technology. My buddy in med school had a smart phone before I did. The iPhone was out for a year before I bought the 3G. The iPad? I'm embarrassed to admit, I got my first one a month ago. I held out on the iPad because I didn't get it. It didn't have retina display, and comparing the screen after looking at the iPhone 4, it just seemed... pixelated. My friends who had the original version bought them as a novelty, which quickly seemed to wear off. I didn't know what I would do with one once I had one. So, when I finally buckled and got the iPad 3, I came to the realization that the rest of the world had over 2 years ago: the iPad is an amazing consumption device. You don't need a keyboard, because if you're doing any work at all it will be to send iPhone length one-liner emails. Most of what you'll be doing on the iPad is playing games, watching videos and shopping. | |
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