The latest from TechCrunch
- How Technology Is Empowering Teachers, Minting Millionaires, And Improving Education
- Italians Take Up The Torch To Ignite Their Own Tech Startup Scene
- A Tech Way Around "Creative Block"
- Klout Would Like Potential Employers To Consider Your Score Before Hiring You. And That's Stupid.
- A Venture Capitalist's E-Commerce Shopping List
- Five Big Changes In The iOS 6 App Store (And What Developers Should Do)
- Canadian Internet Provider Rogers Experiencing Major, Prolonged Outage [Update: It's Back!]
- Hate
- The Search For Minority Entrepreneurs Is Over — Now They Need To Be Ready For Investors
- Kickstarter: Helios, An iPhone Telepresence Rig On A Budget
- Facebook Updates Messenger For iOS With New Chat UI, iOS 6 And iPhone 5 Support
- The Next Big E-Commerce Wave: Vertically Integrated Commerce
- Bootstrap's Maintainers Leave Twitter For GitHub And Obvious Corp., Will Move It Into Its Own Organization
- Should You Trust Your Gut? The Answer Is Yes.
- PSA For Win8 Devs: The Only Way To Distribute Your Metro Apps Is Through The Windows Store
- Gillmor Gang: Platformicide
- Apple's Maps Is A Black Eye, Nothing More
- Lessons From The Dramatic Slow-Motion Death Of Wikitravel
- Startup Success Requires The Drive For Data
- Here Are The Singers Competing In Next Week's 'American Idol For The Geek Set'
| How Technology Is Empowering Teachers, Minting Millionaires, And Improving Education | Top |
 Thanks to the rise of in-classroom technology, the focus in education tends to be on student engagement and how to improve learning. It becomes easy to forget the importance of great teachers. Startups, entrepreneurs, businesses (and the rest) need to remember that technology doesn't have to put teachers in jeopardy; it can help them lead the education evolution, even if their traditional role in the classroom becomes obsolete. Today, in spite of the significance and potential long-term value of the job they do every day, teachers (especially in K-12 and public education) tend to be underpaid. In May, we wrote about a few platforms that are looking to change that -- to empower the world's under-salaried educators. TeachersPayTeachers, a platform that enables teachers to buy, sell, and share their original content and lesson plans, hit a big milestone this week which is sure to catch the attention of educators around the country: It minted its first millionaire. | |
| Italians Take Up The Torch To Ignite Their Own Tech Startup Scene | Top |
 Last year Italy's official statistics bureau, ISTAT, produced a report on the state of the internet in Italy. It found that in world terms, Italy was below average in terms of Internet usage. The European average is 73% usage by population, but Italians were hovering around the 63% mark. But official statistics can be cruel and out of date - and it's clear now to any observer on the ground that whatever is happening in the home market, Italian tech startups aren't just shooting for their own country but for yours as well. Evidence of this emerged when Facebook bought Italy-based Glancee, this year - this was the location based mobile story of the year. And there have been other undercurrents. The Italian Startup Scene Facebook Group which now has over 8,300 members, up from less than 3,000 last year - is still growing. Clearly many of the old attitudes are changing fast, and are probably out of date as we speak. For instance, the TechCrunch Italy CrunchUp event in Rome this last week was originally supposed to be a simple meetup. But it's a sign that Italy's startup eco-system has exploded in the last 18 months or so that we ended up having to find a venue for over 1,000 people who wanted to come. Italy has clearly changed since I scratched around a tiny Italian-only event in 2008. | |
| A Tech Way Around "Creative Block" | Top |
 Editor's note: Alex Cornell is co-founder and creative director at Firespotter Labs, makers of ÜberConference, NoshList, Nosh, and Jotly. Firespotter is backed by Andressen Horowitz and Google Ventures. Follow him on his website and on Twitter. I've always found it interesting when the non-creatives in a company estimate how long it will take the creative team to accomplish something. What's often baked into their scheduling assumption is that the creatives will deliver results at a predictable and regular rate. They expect that 10 hours of creative work will produce 10 hours worth of pretty pictures; as predictable as a banker crunching numbers. | |
| Klout Would Like Potential Employers To Consider Your Score Before Hiring You. And That's Stupid. | Top |
 Let's put it out there right now: I am personally not a fan of Klout, which ranks people based on their Internet interactions and engagement on services like Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. I have nothing against the company whatsoever, and this is a vertical that someone was going to get into sooner or later. However, I still feel like the whole concept is bunk. | |
| A Venture Capitalist's E-Commerce Shopping List | Top |
 Editor's note: Sergio Monsalve is a Partner at Norwest Venture Partners where he is focused on early and growth investments in the digital media, mobile, and social areas. Follow him on Twitter. E-commerce is one of the fastest-growing sectors in technology and is poised to get even hotter, with sales expected to double between 2010 and 2015, according to eMarketer. So how can discerning investors find the most promising opportunities? They have to first take off the rose-colored glasses. | |
| Five Big Changes In The iOS 6 App Store (And What Developers Should Do) | Top |
 Is the new iOS App Store a step forward or step back for mobile app developers, users, and the app economy overall? Some developers are complaining that since the introduction of the Chomp-inspired App Store redesign in iOS 6, sales have noticeably dropped. Others say the changes are good for indie developers. Whichever side of the coin you're on, there are a number of reasons why developers are feeling the effects. In the new iOS App Store, the user interface now encourages a slower search method (flipping through cards, not scrolling through vertical lists), less attention is given to new releases and category-based search as "Genius" recommendations are given a higher billing, App Store SEO (ASO) is basically a black box that no one seems to understand, and more. | |
| Canadian Internet Provider Rogers Experiencing Major, Prolonged Outage [Update: It's Back!] | Top |
 Canadian wireless and internet provider Rogers is currently experiencing a widespread, continued outage of services on both its cellular and cable home internet data networks, according to various user reports. Rogers is the second-largest internet provider in Canada by subscriber count, and the largest cellphone provider with somewhere around 10 million mobile customers. | |
| Hate | Top |
 It's a powerful thing, this Internet of ours. The greatest tool for the distribution of knowledge, the administration of compassion, and development of conversation ever created. And the events of this week have shown how it can be a platform for tolerance and understanding, for love and peace. Particularly touching was the story of a man who, with the assistance of friends and the Internet, was able to confront a tormentor with his misdeeds, bringing the young troll to heel and redeeming a child who surely knew not what he did. An example for the ages of gentleness and cooler minds prevailing over humanity's companion and adversary, hate. Yes, isn't it pretty to think so? | |
| The Search For Minority Entrepreneurs Is Over — Now They Need To Be Ready For Investors | Top |
 Editor's note: Wayne Sutton is the founder and CEO of PitchTo, a mobile development lab that builds tools for investors to make smarter decisions and help entrepreneurs deliver exceptional pitches. This article is inspired by Dave McClure's "Women in Tech: Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is." post. Follow Wayne on Twitter. What a difference a year makes. Last year the question was "Where are the minority entrepreneurs?" It was highly motivated by the 2010 CBinsights Venture Capital Human Capital Report, which stated that only 1 percent of minority tech startup founders were founded by African-Americans. But the conversation about minority entrepreneurs didn't only apply to African-Americans, it also included women and Hispanics. The dialogue reached its peak by various snippets from the CNN's "Black in America 4" documentary and niche tech blogs. | |
| Kickstarter: Helios, An iPhone Telepresence Rig On A Budget | Top |
 Another day, another iOS-based telepresence rig. The Helios is a tiny little two-wheeled car that drives around with your iPhone or Touch in the passenger seat, allowing you to move around a scene and interact with remote subjects through the magic of telepresence. They are raising money through Kickstarter. | |
| Facebook Updates Messenger For iOS With New Chat UI, iOS 6 And iPhone 5 Support | Top |
 Facebook just launched a new version of its Messenger app for iOS. Messenger, the company's stand-alone chat app, got a bit of a user interface refresh with this update, as well as a speed boost and official support for iOS 6 and the iPhone 5's larger display. Today's update comes just a bit more than a week after Facebook also launched an update to its Messenger app for Android and, for the most part, this update brings the iOS app's design on par with the Android app. | |
| The Next Big E-Commerce Wave: Vertically Integrated Commerce | Top |
 Editor's note: Boris Wertz is the founder of version one ventures, and has invested in more than 35 early-stage consumer Internet and mobile companies, including Chloe & Isabel, Julep, and Indochino. Follow him on his blog and Twitter. There has been more e-commerce innovation during the past year than there has been during the last decade. First, flash-sale and daily-deal sites brought a much-needed breath of fresh air to a vertical that hadn't seen much change since Amazon and eBay arrived on the scene. Now there's a whole new generation of e-commerce players. | |
| Bootstrap's Maintainers Leave Twitter For GitHub And Obvious Corp., Will Move It Into Its Own Organization | Top |
 Twitter's Bootstrap, an open-source framework for quickly building web sites and apps, has been a massive success. It's even starting to spawn its own ecosystem of related services now. Mark Otto and Jacob Thornton, the two developers behind the project, however, have now decided to leave the company to pursue new opportunities at GitHub and Biz Stone's and Evan Williams' Obvious Corp. respectively. | |
| Should You Trust Your Gut? The Answer Is Yes. | Top |
| Editor's note: Derek Andersen is the founder of Startup Grind, a 30-city event series hosted in 15-countries that educates, inspires, and connects entrepreneurs. He's ex-Electronic Arts as well as the founder of Commonred. A few years ago I asked a successful entrepreneur for advice on what I should do with my latest product idea. His reply was simple. "Trust your gut. What does your gut tell you?" I confidently replied, "That this is a $100MM business." To which he added, "Then go for it." So that's exactly what we did. We went for it and a year later we didn't have a $100MM business or even a $10MM business. We didn't even have a….ok I'll stop there. But how did I get it so wrong? Is my gut untrustable? Was I wrong to follow it? Or was my stomach just acting up after a recent trip overseas? I recently sat down with Charles River Ventures Partner George Zachary who has had his fair share of big successes. | |
| PSA For Win8 Devs: The Only Way To Distribute Your Metro Apps Is Through The Windows Store | Top |
 Here is a reminder for developers who want to write apps for Windows 8's Metro mode (or whatever Microsoft prefers to call it these days): the only way to distribute your apps to consumers is through the Windows Store. This isn't actually a new policy but one that Microsoft announced a year ago. Judging from this Hacker News thread, though, this still comes as a surprise to many developers and it's clearly something Microsoft hasn't stressed enough in the run-up to the Windows 8 launch on October 26. | |
| Gillmor Gang: Platformicide | Top |
 The Gillmor Gang — John Borthwick, Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor — watched in amazement as Twitter made good on its promise to hobble the core of its viral power adopter developers and users. By shutting down third-party clients to focus monetization on its core clients and the Web, Twitter leaves itself exposed to its challengers for control of the realtime wave. To some of the Gang, Apple's move to eject Google Maps in favor of its own immature product seems similarly motivated and fated to bad results. But Twitter has historically made these kinds of protective overreaching moves in order to protect the fledgling company from being overrun by more powerful competitors. This time it's different, as Twitter releases services designed to capitalize on the innovations of its ecosystem. The real calculation is whether the openings provided to Google+ and, to a lesser extent, Facebook can be leveraged before innovation dries up in the Twitter pipeline. A high-stakes game of Chicken. | |
| Apple's Maps Is A Black Eye, Nothing More | Top |
 Editor's Note: Jim Dalrymple is a former Editor at Large at Macworld, and contributing expert on Apple-related topics on CNN, Fox, CBS and ABC. You can follow Jim on Twitter at@jdalrymple, and on his blog The Loop. With the release of iOS 6 last week, Apple introduced a brand new version of Maps, the company's new turn-by-turn mapping application that replaced Google's offering on the iPhone. While the fervor over Maps has given Apple a black eye, it's certainly not the beginning of a downward spiral for the company, as some tech pundits like to say. | |
| Lessons From The Dramatic Slow-Motion Death Of Wikitravel | Top |
 Once upon a time, in 2003, there were two entrepeneurs with a dream. Their names were Evan Prodromou and Michele Ann Jenkins, and they dreamed of a collectively edited global travel guide -- a Wikipedia for travel, if you will. So they created Wikitravel. And it went over like the proverbial "lead zeppelin." Two years later, a company named Internet Brands bought it from them for $1.7 million; pretty good money for those long-lost days before the startup craze began. And Wikitravel thrived, and lo, it was good. Until Paradise came crashing down in flames. | |
| Startup Success Requires The Drive For Data | Top |
 Editor's note: Jeff Ma is the founder of tenXer, a startup that provides tools to help people better understand their performance, progress, and productivity at work. Previously, he helped start GolfSpan.com, CircleLending, and Citizen Sports. Follow him on Twitter. The first thing you learn when you start playing Blackjack is something called basic strategy - a decision matrix that tells you the correct play for every hand based on your cards and the dealer's exposed card. Data and statistics will tell you that basic strategy is always the optimal strategy. In fact, following it perfectly reduces the casino's edge over the average player from 3 percent to 0.5 percent. | |
| Here Are The Singers Competing In Next Week's 'American Idol For The Geek Set' | Top |
 Earlier this month, I wrote about Silicon Valley Voice, a karaoke competition for the tech world hosted by Silicon Valley Bank and Coverflow (a cover band made up of techies including Mayfield Fund's Tim Chang, Facebook's Ethan Beard, and Fandalism's Philip Kaplan). Now, the finalists have been selected, and you don't even have to wait until next week's event to hear them sing. Coverflow member (and Mayfield managing director) Raj Kapoor tells me that all of the regular tickets have sold out, with 800 RSVPs. But the organizers convinced Silicon Valley Bank to expand the budget, which means there's room for another 200 people. | |
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