The latest from TechCrunch
- As Retail E-Commerce Sees Three Billion Dollar-Plus Days In The Past Week, Online Holiday Sales Jump 15 Percent To $20.4B
- The Death Of Paper
- Gift Guide: Philips Hue
- The Philosophy Behind Amazon Web Services' Cloud Strategy
- CrunchWeek, Vol. 2: Is Mason Out At Groupon; Twitter Vs. PeopleBrowsr And ICOA-Gate [TCTV]
- Startup Claims That Party Call, France Telecom's Facebook Calling App, Was Its Idea
- Paul Graham Says Y Combinator's New Class Could Have "Less Than 50″ Startups
- Gillmor Gang: Talking Tablet Smack
- Iterations: Let's Hear From Developers In "The War For Talent"
- Dronegames In San Francisco Features Twitter Fists, Groupon Leashes, MiFi And Botnets
- Reach Out And Touch No One
- Backed Or Whacked: A Smartphone Robot For Playtime And Panorama-Style Mobile HD Video
- Ways To Get People To Do Things They Don't Want To Do
- A Full-Stack Web Team Will Provide Much-Needed Breadth And Depth To Your Startup
- Make Internships Count For The Student And The Company
- Breaking Through Cloud Addiction
- Facebook Makes A Huge Data Grab By Aggressively Promoting Photo Sync
- CEOs Don't Come Pre-Made, Authentic Leadership Has To Be Learned
- The Magic of Liquidity: Web Marketplaces Still Have A Long Way To Go
- SkrillexQuest, The Future Of Music Marketing: Dubstep Superstar Promotes Single With Online Advergame
| As Retail E-Commerce Sees Three Billion Dollar-Plus Days In The Past Week, Online Holiday Sales Jump 15 Percent To $20.4B | Top |
 We've been wowed by the record breaking Black Friday and Cyber Monday spending data, but it looks like consumers are continuing to spend online for holiday shopping. comScore says that retail e-commerce spending for the first 30 days of the November–December 2012 holiday season amounts to $20.4 billion, which is a 15 percent increase versus the corresponding days last year. | |
| The Death Of Paper | Top |
 What does it say about us as a culture that is slowly killing off its primary method of information transferral. In 20 years, if there are no physical books, what will future cultures know about is in 220 years, when digital memories are likely wiped away? | |
| Gift Guide: Philips Hue | Top |
 Philips Hue are wireless LED lightbulbs that are controlled via an iOS app -- allowing you to change the shade and intensity of light they beam out, turn the bulbs on and off remotely, and set them to come on at scheduled times. Let there be micro-managed light! | |
| The Philosophy Behind Amazon Web Services' Cloud Strategy | Top |
 On stage at AWS re:Invent last week, CTO Werner Vogels discussed Amazon Web Services’ cloud philosophy, increasingly driven by a belief in building architecture that is cost-aware and designed to optimize economies of scale so it can do volume transactions at thin margins. The talk, a first-day keynote with Senior Vice President Andy Jassy, predicated the group’s belief in a programmable infrastructure that has more instance types and object storage than any public cloud services provider. For example, Frederic Lardinois wrote about AWS introduction of a "Cluster High Memory" instance type that will offer a massive 240 GB of RAM and two 120 GB SSDs. Jassy also unveiled a "High Storage" instance focused on storage and will come with 117 GB of RAM and 24 hard drives for a total of 48 terabytes of HDD space. The two keynotes illustrated AWS’s view on cloud computing, which differs from enterprise vendors that have focused on selling hardware to customers for “private clouds.” It was the first time AWS has stated so clearly how it views cloud computing and its competitors, which they say have been “cloudwashing” customers into believing that their costly solutions are better than the rest. AWS, through its programmable architecture, has built a $1.5 billion business on volume and thin-as-possible margins. The group has dropped pricing 23 times since 2006, including an approximate 25 percent cut that Jassy announced during his keynote. He attributed the drop in price to what he called a virtuous lifecycle. On Thursday, Vogels showed how a business-driven infrastructure gives customers their own ability to develop businesses that are data driven and optimized to make their operations so tight that they can also operate on low margins. Vogels explained how an architecture can adapt to changing business needs based on automated practices that use data to analyze and then program instances that auto-scale with expected increases or decreases in demand. He described it as “cost aware architecture,” meaning that the infrastructure drives application development, as opposed to the other way around. Embodied in this is the increasing requirement for the applications to be controllable, resilient, adaptive and data driven. Amazon.com started AWS because they needed more infrastructure in order for the business to scale. They also needed a better way to handle the fluctuations that would come when they had ups and downs in web traffic. Customers will often have to estimate physical storage, for | |
| CrunchWeek, Vol. 2: Is Mason Out At Groupon; Twitter Vs. PeopleBrowsr And ICOA-Gate [TCTV] | Top |
| As we mentioned a few weeks ago, we're introducing a new TechCrunch TV show called CrunchWeek, where we discuss a few of the past week's more interesting stories. The aim is to get a bit more into the stories behind the stories that you read about on TechCrunch's main blog page. | |
| Startup Claims That Party Call, France Telecom's Facebook Calling App, Was Its Idea | Top |
 Two weeks ago, France Telecom-owned carrier Orange announced Party Call, an app Orange said it created in "partnership" with Facebook for users to make mobile calls via the social network. Now a small startup, Telesocial, says the idea was theirs first. | |
| Paul Graham Says Y Combinator's New Class Could Have "Less Than 50″ Startups | Top |
 Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham just had a few interesting things to say about the accelerator's Winter 2013 batch, the biggest of which is that it's going to smaller than before. There's no firm number just yet, but Graham noted in a new missive on the Y Combinator website that there may be less than 50 startups in the mix this time around. | |
| Gillmor Gang: Talking Tablet Smack | Top |
 The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, John Borthwick, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — survived a rare Saturday recording session at the unstable directorial hands of Gillmor. Topics included iPad Mini, Nexus 7, the latest Twitter UI on said iPad Mini, the lack of communication across platform firewalls, and a bit of Windows 8 Surface and Google Glasses smack. Rated B for Buttcast. | |
| Iterations: Let's Hear From Developers In "The War For Talent" | Top |
 Over the past few years, I've helped a small handful friends move from one gig to another. It's a highly personal process, and I'm not a "recruiting expert." Generally, in my limited experience, it often takes many conversations even before a close friend opens up about their desire to move or try something new. The motivations for each change are so different. Some want to work in a different industry, on a different technical problem, in a different city, for a different boss, for a different title, and so on. And, through these conversations, some patterns emerge, dangerous to extrapolate from, though illuminating given the fact every investor and founder stays up at night wondering how to deploy that early capital to find the right people to build out their vision. | |
| Dronegames In San Francisco Features Twitter Fists, Groupon Leashes, MiFi And Botnets | Top |
 Today, I got to judge a really cool competition, the Dronegames. Basically, a bunch of teams that like to hack on helicopter-like Drones came together in Groupon's San Francisco office to come up with some really cool creations. I expected things to spin and go upside down, but these folks did things way more advanced. What's a Drone exactly? Let's ask Wikipedia: An unmanned combat air vehicle or combat drone or simply "drone" is an unmanned aerial vehicle that is armed and has no onboard pilot. Currently operational drones are under real-time human control of unknown precision. | |
| Reach Out And Touch No One | Top |
 If the Internet, at its most basic level, was built around the idea of one human connecting with another human, is it really changing how this is done? To make it easier and better is no insignificant accomplishment, but are actually changing the way people communicate with one another? It seems to me that we're not fashioning a thunderbolt, but greasing the lightning that's already there. | |
| Backed Or Whacked: A Smartphone Robot For Playtime And Panorama-Style Mobile HD Video | Top |
 Editor's note: Ross Rubin is principal analyst at Reticle Research and blogs at Techspressive. High-quality videoconferencing was once the exclusive province of rich institutions with dedicated high-speed connections. Two recent Kickstarter projects take iPhone video interaction to places it has never been before. | |
| Ways To Get People To Do Things They Don't Want To Do | Top |
 Editor's Note: Nir Eyal writes about the intersection of psychology, technology, and business at NirAndFar.com. A reader recently asked me a pointed question: "I've read your work on creating user habits. It's all well and good for getting people to do things, like using an app on their iPhone, but I've got a bigger problem. How do I get people to do things they don't want to do?" | |
| A Full-Stack Web Team Will Provide Much-Needed Breadth And Depth To Your Startup | Top |
 Editor's note: Phil Freo leads the engineering team at ElasticSales. I have had to explain, even to technical recruiters, the differences between the roles on a web engineering team and that the lines that separate them are often fuzzy. Here is the framework I use to evaluate whether someone is a good fit for a startup. | |
| Make Internships Count For The Student And The Company | Top |
 Editor's note: DJ Patil is a data scientist in residence at Greylock Partners, and Julie Deroche runs the firm's university recruiting program. The pressure is already on for building the class of 2013 summer internships. Since we've both been heavily involved in building the intern programs at LinkedIn and Mozilla, we're often asked by organizations and students about what makes a successful internship summer. | |
| Breaking Through Cloud Addiction | Top |
 Editor's Note: Alexander Haislip is a marketing executive with cloud-based server automation startup ScaleXtreme and the author of Essentials of Venture Capital and The Modern Business Guide to Panel Discussions. Netflix uses Amazon infrastructure, competes with Amazon to stream video, and pays Amazon massive amounts of cash to handle its data. Is Amazon too good to leave? | |
| Facebook Makes A Huge Data Grab By Aggressively Promoting Photo Sync | Top |
 Facebook was already taking in 300 million photos a day, and that rate is about to dramatically increase. It's now ushering users onto its background uploads feature Photo Sync with a big banner at the top of its mobile apps' news feed. Just two taps and your last 20 photos plus every one you take in the future are auto-uploaded to a private album from which you can share and Facebook can mine metadata. | |
| CEOs Don't Come Pre-Made, Authentic Leadership Has To Be Learned | Top |
 Editor's note: Scott Weiss is a partner at Andreessen Horowitz and the former co-founder and CEO of IronPort Systems, which was acquired by Cisco in 2007. An approachable and authentic CEO is essential to fostering a high-performance, open communications culture. | |
| The Magic of Liquidity: Web Marketplaces Still Have A Long Way To Go | Top |
 Editor's note: David Haber is an analyst at Spark Capital. Prior to Spark, David helped launch Locus Analytics, a start-up asset management business. The Internet provides the perfect medium to aggregate the long tail of fragmented and illiquid markets. This dynamic has made the opportunity for creating online marketplaces so compelling | |
| 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. | |
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