The latest from TechCrunch
- SkrillexQuest, The Future Of Music Marketing: Dubstep Superstar Promotes Single With Online Advergame
- Games Industry Transitions In 2013: Will Consoles And Windows Rise Again?
- No Exceptions For Tech Industry: High Skilled Visas Now Tied To Comprehensive Reform
- Gift Guide: Sony Cyber-Shot RX100 Compact Camera
- Finding It Difficult To Get Your Startup Off The Ground? Try Doing It Under Missile Fire
- Inspired By A VC's Baby, Designed By MIT Grads, Spuni Is A Smart Baby Spoon
- P2P Lending & Education: CommonBond Launches With $3.5M, Joining SoFi In Quest To Solve The Student Debt Crisis
- My First Customer Is Now Dead
- New iMac Teardown Reveals Dual Microphones, Hard To Reach RAM
- SkyDrive Assets Hint At Web-Based Streaming Music Player Coming From Microsoft
- Security Is Hard, But That Doesn't Mean You Should Ignore It
- Apple Gains On Samsung In U.S. Mobile Phone Market Share, Lands Second Overall For The First Time
- HTC Won't Sell The Entry-Level Windows Phone 8S Smartphone In The U.S.
- For A Stranger In Silicon Valley, Success Isn't Only About Who You Know
- Language Learning Service Verbling Launches Google Hangouts-Powered Classes, Adds Support For 9 New Languages
- Why Did Google Buy BufferBox? Because The Entire Mail And Package Delivery System Is Broken
- Enterprise Apps Are Moving To Single-Page Design
- The Weekly Good: Gurbaksh Chahal, BeProud.org And Putting An End To Hate
- Backops Outsources Your Startup's Back Office Using The Best Enterprise Apps, Raises $1.5M
- Settle Down, Facebook Users, 'Cause You're Not Getting $1M For Sharing A Pic Of A Fake Lottery Ticket
| SkrillexQuest, The Future Of Music Marketing: Dubstep Superstar Promotes Single With Online Advergame | Top |
 When you beat Skrillex's Legend Of Zelda-style flash game, you see a link to buy its soundtrack on iTunes. SkrillexQuest is an advergame and its next generation of music marketing. You build an emotional attachment to the dubstep DJ's song "Summit" while it plays as you save the princess. That's something passive consumption of a music video, 30-second mp3 preview, or banner ad cannot do. | |
| Games Industry Transitions In 2013: Will Consoles And Windows Rise Again? | Top |
 For retailers and publishers in video games, Christmas is the busiest time of the year. On the digital side, Christmas is often one of the slower periods but, when the dust settles and spring begins, often new heroes emerge. For both, the holidays mark when we begin to wonder what's going on for games in 2013? | |
| No Exceptions For Tech Industry: High Skilled Visas Now Tied To Comprehensive Reform | Top |
 Powerful technology lobbies expected special treatment this week from Congress and got a tough lesson in rejection: there will be no more high-skilled work visas without comprehensive immigration reform. The probable failure of the STEMS Jobs Act, which would add 55,000 work visas for science-oriented immigrants, has become a casualty of war over the low-skilled immigrants dilemma. Despite $14.7M in campaign donations from the Bay Area and a full-court press from the likes of Aol* founder, Steve Case, Silicon Valley heavy-weights could not get Congress to set aside their differences on comprehensive reform for a favor to engineer-starved tech firms. Coastal isolation in startup land has caused an unfounded exceptionalism that so long as Silicon Valley kept producing world-changing products, the government would leave the area alone. Influence, however, had the unintended side effect of forced interdependence, and now the tech lobby will have deal with the rest of the country's issues before it can get more engineers. | |
| Gift Guide: Sony Cyber-Shot RX100 Compact Camera | Top |
 Sony's compact camera with pro features including manual focusing and RAW support comes with a hefty price tag, but it costs that much for a reason: This is simply the best camera currently available for shooters who want something that fits in a front pocket but still delivers image quality so breathtaking, your friends will think you've been toting around a DSLR. | |
| Finding It Difficult To Get Your Startup Off The Ground? Try Doing It Under Missile Fire | Top |
 Editor's note: Ben Lang is a growth hacker at lool ventures and creator of Mapped In Israel. The recent battle between Israel and Gaza revolutionized real-time war reporting, with both sides taking to Twitter, Facebook and other platforms to report the latest news. What you may have missed is how thousands of Israeli startups continued to function while under missile fire. | |
| Inspired By A VC's Baby, Designed By MIT Grads, Spuni Is A Smart Baby Spoon | Top |
 We interrupt or normal tech geekery to go a little gaga and goo-goo about a subject that it likely to come as a saving grace to you if you are at that life stage involving the reproduction process, to whit: messy babies during feeding time. Now, while it might not be on Paul Graham's list of big problems that need solving, it is a big problem for a lot of people, and the way Spuni came up with a solution should satisfy the tech oriented amongst us, especially since it's been created by two former graduates of MIT, and was part inspired by an Instagram photo from well known VC investor Chris Sacca. | |
| P2P Lending & Education: CommonBond Launches With $3.5M, Joining SoFi In Quest To Solve The Student Debt Crisis | Top |
 Piggy-backing on the recent launch (and massive funding) of SoFi, a new startup is launching today that wants to breathe some fresh air into the broken, complex and mollasses-slow student loan system. New York City-based CommonBond aims to bring the power of crowdsourcing to bear on student debt by connecting student borrowers and alumni investors and offering loans at a lower fixed rate than what they'd find with Uncle Sam. And, to help kick-start this initiative, the startup is announcing today that it has raised $3.5 million in outside funding. | |
| My First Customer Is Now Dead | Top |
 Editor's note: James Altucher is an investor, programmer, author, and entrepreneur. I was lonely and I wanted money. I was living in a one-bedroom apartment in Astoria, Queens, NYC in 1995. I knew nobody in the area. I would write my phone number on two dollar bills and tip waitresses with them. Nobody called me. | |
| New iMac Teardown Reveals Dual Microphones, Hard To Reach RAM | Top |
 As you might have expected, the new iMac redesign that introduces a much slimmer case also has some negative consequences for overall device repairability and DIY upgrades, iFixit's teardown of the machine has revealed. The site's traditional peek under the hood of Apple's latest all-in-one also shows off some impressive feats of engineering to fit all that good stuff in a much sleeker package. | |
| SkyDrive Assets Hint At Web-Based Streaming Music Player Coming From Microsoft | Top |
 Microsoft is doing a lot lately to unify services across its platforms, and Xbox Music, a scan-and-match cloud music locker that's planned for iOS, Android, Windows Phone and Windows 8 is a big part of that. Now, it looks like that service might also become part of SkyDrive, making it available from any browser, according to a new report. | |
| Security Is Hard, But That Doesn't Mean You Should Ignore It | Top |
 Six weeks ago I was out drinking in a Kipling-themed bar in Rangoon, Myanmar--as you do--and happened to find myself next to a table of high-powered international telecommunications consultants, overhearing juicy lines like "Skype and Viber are going to kill us." Needless to say I told Twitter right away. Then an old friend who's also a genuine International Man Of Mystery got in touch and asked if we could chat about Myanmar's proposed ban on VOIP. Securely. He has his very good reasons to insist on secure communications. But to my embarrassment and dismay, given that I'm a software pro with scads of hacker friends, I was largely unprepared for that request. | |
| Apple Gains On Samsung In U.S. Mobile Phone Market Share, Lands Second Overall For The First Time | Top |
 For the first time in the history of comScore's MobiLens U.S. mobile market share report, Apple has come in second overall among handset OEMs. Apple grew its U.S. market share by 1.5 percentage points from 16.3 to 17.8 percent in the three month period ending October 2012, according to the report. During the same period, Samsung also saw its share grow, but only by 0.7 percentage points, from 25.6 to 26.3 percent. | |
| HTC Won't Sell The Entry-Level Windows Phone 8S Smartphone In The U.S. | Top |
 The HTC 8S is a Windows Phone 8 handset that's lightly specced compared to its more powerful sibling, the HTC 8X. The 8X is HTC's flagship phone based on Microsoft's mobile OS, and apparently the only one the U.S. market may ever see, according to an official statement from HTC issued late Friday afternoon. The budget 8S won't make it to U.S. shores, an HTC official told Engadget, which shouldn't come as much of a surprise. | |
| For A Stranger In Silicon Valley, Success Isn't Only About Who You Know | Top |
 Editor's note: Cherian Thomas is founder and CEO of Cucumbertown, a recipe-publishing platform. Cucumbertown raised its first round from the Valley a month ago and during the course of this journey, I realized that, as a first-time entrepreneur without any solid Valley footing, my run toward raising funds as a non-American co-founder was somewhat unique. | |
| Language Learning Service Verbling Launches Google Hangouts-Powered Classes, Adds Support For 9 New Languages | Top |
 Learning a new language can be tedious and frustrating. Thankfully, a new generation of startups are leveraging advances in mobile and web technologies to make that process more enjoyable and rewarding. Today, companies like Livemocha, PlaySay, Voxy, italki, MindSnacks and Duolingo provide increasingly viable alternatives to traditional language-learning software -- the Rosetta Stones of the world. Another recent entrant into the space is Y Combinator grad Verbling, a venture-backed startup that wants to help turn language learners into polyglots by using video chat to connect them with real, live native speakers. | |
| Why Did Google Buy BufferBox? Because The Entire Mail And Package Delivery System Is Broken | Top |
 Today, Google bought an Ontario-based company called BufferBox. In a way, it kind of came out of left field. Since it's a Google Ventures company, one can guess that those on Google's campus were very familiar with the service, which provides an easy alternative to waiting around for packages at your house. Not only is package delivery a bummer, because things get lost, hitting up your mailbox when you get home isn't that much fun either. The worst is when you don't even have a mailbox and you come home to twenty pieces of junkmail slipped under your door. The mail delivery system is broken and old. It's ripe for...disruption. | |
| Enterprise Apps Are Moving To Single-Page Design | Top |
 Editor's note: Alexander Aghassipour is chief product officer and co-founder of Zendesk, and Shajith Chacko is lead software engineer at Zendesk. Our traditional app had been serving our business and customers quite well. Yet we recently decided to shift from an HTML browser-based app to a modern JavaScript-fueled single page application. We're here to tell you why and how. | |
| The Weekly Good: Gurbaksh Chahal, BeProud.org And Putting An End To Hate | Top |
 Sometimes, it's not political powerhouses who have the power to change the world, sometimes it's true-blue entrepreneurs who live to solve problems. One such person is Gurbaksh Chahal, who has launched BeProud.org, launched after the shootings at the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin in August 2012, with some pretty impressive backers. The point of the multi-million dollar campaign is to put an end to hatred, and to encourage self-pride. Using the web to help bring attention to this is a fantastic idea. I had a chance to chat with Chahal on his background and the future of the BeProud initiative. | |
| Backops Outsources Your Startup's Back Office Using The Best Enterprise Apps, Raises $1.5M | Top |
 Early-stage startups die if they don’t nail their core products quickly. But like all companies, they also need to process loads of paperwork required for basic operations, from crunching numbers in Quickbooks to churning out piles of human-resource forms for new hires. So, as any startup executive knows, the balance between product development and rote paperwork is a constant frustration — which is where Backops comes in. The company, which has just closed a $1.5 million seed round, combines 15 or so modern business productivity tools with crowdsourced labor from stay-at-home workers. Startups get a simple dashboard that shows them what’s happening across the organization, from accounts received to job offers accepted. If the exec wants more detail than the dashboard’s accounting summaries and human resource statuses provides, they can request custom reports or data dumps from Backops. So, sure, there are a few established office outsourcing businesses out there already, like TriNet for human resources, but a closer look at Backops plans shows why it’s such a smart new idea. The first is the overall “consumerization of IT” trend. A wave of well-designed online business software has been gradually rising over the past decade, sweeping away expensive legacy systems for accounting, HR, content management, customer relations, and more. The result is that workers can learn new systems and produce results more easily. This fits in well with the other trend that Backops takes advantage of, which is crowdsourcing labor from people who work from home. A long list of companies, like Amazon and its Mechanical Turk, have created marketplaces for workers. Perhaps pushed by high unemployment and underemployment, more and more workers are looking for additional income through online jobs. Backops does a few other smart things to capitalize on these trends. On the software side, it’s staying nimble, swapping in new productivity apps as they become available. Right now it’s using Expensify to help process expenses, Bill.com for bill processing, and popular accounting software like Quickbooks. It doesn’t disclose the full list of vendors, but cofounder Mark H Goldstein tells me that they just brought in a new HR system over the weekend. That adaptability is in sharp contrast to the time it would take a business to change its own internal software, or the time it would take a traditional vendor. Even if business software is getting easier to use, experienced workers can do a better job | |
| Settle Down, Facebook Users, 'Cause You're Not Getting $1M For Sharing A Pic Of A Fake Lottery Ticket | Top |
 In today's edition of Facebook scams comes the story of Nolan Daniels and his $1M lottery ticket picture. "Looks like I won't be going to work EVER!!!! Share this photo and I will give a random person 1 million dollars!", says the Facebook pic. Of course this is legit. It's on Facebook. Never mind that the numbers on the ticket are out-of-order. | |
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