The latest from TechCrunch
- Classy: Google Is Running Zagat Ads Against Mobile Searches For "Yelp"
- Apple Revealed As Purchaser Of Mapping Tech Company C3
- It's Time For Google To Let Google Voice Live Up To Its Promise
- The Most Effective Habit For Entrepreneurs
- Keen On … It's Official: Privacy Is Dead (TCTV)
- Late-night Scenes From The Beijing Hackathon
- (Founder Stories) Houston On Pitching Dropbox: "Tom Cruise In Minority Report Is Not Carrying Around A Thumb Drive"
- EA Wants To Take On Zynga, But Does This Just Mean 'More Madden'?
- TechCrunch Disrupt Beijing Hackathon: The Night Shift
- In The Halls Of The Hedge Fund Hackers
- How Klout Got Klout.com
- Nokia Vs. The Industry: A Look At The Global Battle Over Mobile Advertising [Infographic]
- (Sort Of) Live From The Beijing Hackathon: We Talk To The Hackers
- Daily Crunch: Glass
- Meet The Disrupt BJ Hackathon Hackers
- New Site Wants To Crowdsource Stories And Photos From The Peace Corps
- California Finally Approves Online Voter Registration (Sadly, It's Just 1 Of 11 States To Have Done So)
- The TechCrunch Hackathon Beijing Is About To Begin #disruptbj
- YouTube Confirms Plans To Take On Cable With 'Channels', Names Dozens Of Partners
- Marc Benioff Wants To #OccupyTheEnterprise
| Classy: Google Is Running Zagat Ads Against Mobile Searches For "Yelp" | Top |
 If you search for "Yelp" on Google from your mobile phone the top paid result, even above the organic result to Yelp.com, takes you to Zagat. While it is a common practice for companies to advertise against their competitors' names in search advertising, in this case it is Google itself which is bidding for that search term and taking the top spot. A classy move. Google bought Zagat last September to shore up its local reviews for Google Places, which is its answer to Yelp. Google Places and Yelp have a contentious history, with Google borrowing liberally from yelp to help build up its local directory. Now with Zagat, Google finally has a large corpus if its own review, in addition to the ones people are slowly adding to Google Places. By redirecting some of the people who are looking for Yelp to Zagat, Google is keeping up its pattern of punching Yelp in the face every chance it gets. | |
| Apple Revealed As Purchaser Of Mapping Tech Company C3 | Top |
 Back in March, we posted a demo of C3 Technology's extremely cool 3D maps. The reconstructions of landmarks and buildings are created by a technique (as I understand it) similar to the Kinect hack we posted that uses compiled depth and parallax data to continually build and refine a 3D model of whatever it's looking at. C3's version obviously works on a larger scale and thus has different strengths and requirements, but it's almost completely automated as long as you can afford to send a plane or copter up with the equipment. They were bought earlier this year, but the purchaser was not known at the time. 9to5Mac has been informed that the buyer was none other than Apple. It makes sense: Apple has bought two other mapping companies, Placebase in 2009 and Poly9 in 2010. It seems beyond a doubt that they are deep into a skunk works operation to revamp their maps. | |
| It's Time For Google To Let Google Voice Live Up To Its Promise | Top |
 Last week TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington wrote a post highlighting the fact that iPhone users can get a surprisingly good experience using Google Voice if they're willing to switch to Sprint. Google Voice on the iPhone typically has some hurdles, mostly because Apple won't let the native Google Voice app 'take over' the dialer the way it can on Android (not to mention the fact that the iOS GV app is notoriously buggy). But Sprint has done some unique, deep integration at the carrier level that minimizes these issues. His post got me thinking about my experience with Google Voice since I began using it exclusively in November 2009. My conclusion: there are a lot of areas for improvement. The latency and occasional cutouts range from mildly annoying to infuriating. Text messages sometimes seem to arrive much later than they should. And MMS simply isn't offered for most people (Sprint just launched support, but none of the other carriers do). But a few hours later, as I dealt with my carrier T-Mobile dropping two calls in succession, I realized there's one simple feature that Google Voice could easily offer that would do a lot to make up for all of its quirks: VoIP support. | |
| The Most Effective Habit For Entrepreneurs | Top |
 There was a girl at a party, Ona, who then started telling me how she met her current boyfriend. She just simply told him she liked him. I was insanely jealous right then of this guy. Here was this beautiful, hysterically funny girl who told a guy she liked him and now he was having regular sex with her. That doesn't happen, right? It never happened to me. I sat there nodding, not being able to say anything but thinking, what if she said, "I like you" to me right then. I would've been happy. Instead, I got depressed and went to sit on the stairs. There was another girl there. She was crying.I tried to comfort her by telling her I was an artist. | |
| Keen On … It's Official: Privacy Is Dead (TCTV) | Top |
 Yes, it's really true. Nobody can hide anything anymore in our digital age of transparency. And thus, Dov Seidman, author of the re-released How and CEO of LRN, says we have entered an "era of behavior" in which we can no longer separate our private and public lives. As Seidman told me when we caught up earlier this week on Skype, the era of behavior means that our reputations now always "precede us". And this "unprecedented transparency" compounds the possibility of doing both good and evil. For Seidman, this is all excellent news. | |
| Late-night Scenes From The Beijing Hackathon | Top |
 With all chips in, see what our hackers are up to in the wee hours of the night at the TechCrunch Disrupt Beijing hackathon! | |
| (Founder Stories) Houston On Pitching Dropbox: "Tom Cruise In Minority Report Is Not Carrying Around A Thumb Drive" | Top |
 Dropbox co-founder, Drew Houston recently sat down with TechCrunch Editor, Erick Schonfeld to discuss the origins of Dropbox - a service that allows users to upload and access their files from virtually any device, anywhere. With $250-million in funding and 45-million users, Dropbox is shaking up the world of digital storage. The roots of Dropbox were planted when Houston was a student at MIT. "You could sit down at any of tens-of-thousands of computers on campus and not only your files but your whole environment was just in front of you and kind of followed you around." Then graduation hit and Houston says he was thrown "back to the stone age." | |
| EA Wants To Take On Zynga, But Does This Just Mean 'More Madden'? | Top |
 After churning out a parade of sequels to all of their flagship games, has EA finally learned its lesson? Last month, EA CEO John Riccitiello said that his company is taking dead aim at Zynga, implying that perhaps the company understands what's at stake, and is determined to be just as much of a player in digital games as it has been on consoles. EA's acquisition of PopCap Games, the makers of Plants Vs Zombies and Bejeweled, was a great way to convince investors (and fans) that it's serious about making a play into online and social games. Granted, EA paid upwards of $1.3 billion for PopCap (with a market cap of right around $8 billion!), but it succeeded in snatching the casual game maker from the eager claws of Zynga, which made a $1 billion offer for the game developer. | |
| TechCrunch Disrupt Beijing Hackathon: The Night Shift | Top |
 It's 12:49 am at the TechCrunch Disrupt Beijing Hackathon; Unlike any other hackathon I've attended, the late night hacker snacks here take the prize for unique brain fuel. They include Tea Eggs, Italian Red Meat Flavor potato chips, Yanjing beer, Apples, and Pokki sticks. Other differences? Well I'm writing this through a VPN because Wordpress is blocked, and I'm probably going to have to go back to the hotel room to finish because the Internet keeps crapping out half way in the middle of my post. Despite it being a hard day's night basically, there are about 100 intrepid programmers still here at the CNCC conference center in the Olympic Village, working all through the night with the fervor of well, programmers. Despite the lack of Red Bull. And Internet. | |
| In The Halls Of The Hedge Fund Hackers | Top |
 I went down to the demonstration today, to get my fair share of bemusement. Occupy Wall Street seemed drizzly, dejected, and oddly disconnected from the world around it. I approve of their goals, and I think their message is very clear indeed, but I'm not so sure their methods are effective. We'll see. But they did spur me to go back and reread, of all things, some Mark Cuban. I don't usually have much time for Cuban, but in a post last year he made a really interesting point: "Wall Street is a platform. It's a platform to be exploited by every technological and intellectual means possible. The best analogy for traders? They are hackers. Just as hackers search for and exploit operating system and application shortcomings, traders do the same thing." Matt Taibbi, in a recent Rolling Stone piece, is far more adversarial -- "Wall Street Isn't Really Winning, It's Cheating" -- but he makes essentially the same point. Most of the "cheats" he cites are examples of hacking the system, rather than breaking the law. (The big exception being the now-infamous Abacus case, but intelligent people have argued otherwise.) It's worth noting that the tech world's attitude towards hacking the system, any system, generally ranges from "grudging respect" to "outright approval." Steve Jobs was a phone phreak. MIT memorializes its finest hacks. Mark Zuckerberg's famous FaceMash hack was the precursor to Facebook. | |
| How Klout Got Klout.com | Top |
 While everyone is making up their minds about whether Klout is an utterly meaningless service or the divine "standard for influence" the world has been clamoring for, I had an interesting chat with Klout co-founder and CEO Joe Fernandez the other day at the F.ounders conference in Dublin, Ireland. When I informed him that, if anything, I think that the name of the company was well chosen, he told me the story of how he obtained the domain name klout.com. Since I have a huge interest in that type of small behind-the-scenes story - and in domain names - I loved it and found it interesting enough to be worth sharing here. | |
| Nokia Vs. The Industry: A Look At The Global Battle Over Mobile Advertising [Infographic] | Top |
 Mobile advertising as you've likely heard, is hott right now. (With two "t's", yes.) According to comScore, mobile advertising spend is projected to hit $2.5 billion by 2014, with $2.7 billion projected in mobile ad revenues for this year and $6.6 billion by 2016. What's more, in August, 84.5 million people in the U.S. owned smartphones, and that number continues to grow... | |
| (Sort Of) Live From The Beijing Hackathon: We Talk To The Hackers | Top |
| Our own Greg Kumparak walked through the Hackathon Hall this evening, talking to all and sundry about their projects. Some notable hacks included an app for the ladies. How does it work? In Asia, guys buy girls gifts before they ask them out. With this app, the ladies can take a picture of an item and then broadcast her desire for it to the men nearby. The fellow who is quickest to his wallet will, it is assumed, receive a date. For those still working on projects, may I suggest a related app that would involve a system for giving me beer and Peking duck on demand, no dates promised or expected? | |
| Daily Crunch: Glass | Top |
 Here are some of yesterday’s stories on TechCrunch Gadgets: Glareless Glass, Flexible Solar-Powered E-Paper, And More From FPDI Best Buy Has 32GB TouchPads For $149, But There's A Catch Video: Murata Shows Robotic Walking Aid / Shopping Cart Nintendo Is Planning In-Game Virtual Item Sales For 3DS Google TV Update Rolls Out On Sunday: Better Content Discovery, Android Market, But Hulu Is Still Blocked | |
| Meet The Disrupt BJ Hackathon Hackers | Top |
 And we're off! These are some of our Hackathon Hackers, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and ready to hack here at TC Disrupt BJ. We tried our hardest to grab some great folks and it's a pleasure working with these hardcore coders. | |
| New Site Wants To Crowdsource Stories And Photos From The Peace Corps | Top |
 To celebrate the fifty years of the Peace Corps's work in 139 countries, journalist and former Peace Corps volunteer Maureen Orth has created an online platform, called PeaceCorpsPostcards, for former volunteers to contribute their own stories, pictures and "Video postcards." In case you aren't familiar, The Peace Corps is a volunteer program run by the United States Government. Post-college grads work abroad for two years; volunteering in building schools, infrastructure development, government, agriculture and more. | |
| California Finally Approves Online Voter Registration (Sadly, It's Just 1 Of 11 States To Have Done So) | Top |
 So, this piece of news managed to sneak under the radar, but it's worth recognizing as a victory for the Internet and for the state of California. Digital technology has been slow to come to some offline institutions, a glaring (and sad) example being the very democratic process of registering to vote (and then actually voting) in local and state elections. A few weeks ago, California Governor Jerry Brown signed a bill that (once again) legalizes online voter registration in the state of California. As TheVotingNews points out, while California does in fact have a voter registration database, until the passage of 3B 397, residents could not fully register to vote online. Instead, voters could go through the process of filling out registration forms, but instead of hitting "approve" or "send" and closing the loop, Californians had to then print out the completed form and send it to their local county election office for approval. | |
| The TechCrunch Hackathon Beijing Is About To Begin #disruptbj | Top |
 We're about fifteen minutes away from the start of Disrupt Hackathon Beijing and it looks like we have about 350 people on the floor and teams are forming now. It will be interesting to see what folks come up with at this our first Disrupt in China - let alone our first Disrupt event outside of the US. | |
| YouTube Confirms Plans To Take On Cable With 'Channels', Names Dozens Of Partners | Top |
 YouTube's ambitions to challenge cable television head-on are getting a big boost tonight: the world's largest video site is announcing that it's lined up a slew of new content partners who will be developing shows for the site, covering everything from sports to comedy to music. The news had been rumored for some time, including a report last week in the WSJ. In a blog post announcing the news, YouTube says its goal with these channels is to "[give] you more reasons to keep coming back again and again". The post references the so-called "defining channels" born out of cable, like MTV, ESPN, and CNN, and says that the next generation of these will emerge on YouTube. | |
| Marc Benioff Wants To #OccupyTheEnterprise | Top |
| Salesforce founder and CEO Marc Benioff has a knack for taking what is happening on the consumer web and applying it to business. He even spins #OccupyWallStreet as a something businesses should learn from and emulate. He makes his case in the video above, which I shot yesterday in New York with my iPhone (sorry for the bad lighting). His point is that if protesters can use Twitter and Facebook to #OccupyOakland, why can't companies use the same social tools to organize themselves and motivate their customers? "Facebook is really eating the Web," he says, echoing Marc Andreessen's notion of software eating the world. Benioff points to the fact that people are spending 4 hours a day on the social network. | |
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