4 days ago

We are just starting to announce the first speakers at the upcoming TechCrunch Disrupt conference in New York City on May 24 - 26 . TechCrunch Disrupt is a three-day, single-track conference and startup competition to immerse you in the debate about what’s changing in media and technology right now, what’s causing it and what we need to do about it to survive and thrive in real time. Join 2,000 or so of your closest friends to talk about what's most important in the collision of technology ..

8 days ago

FlyScreen , the mobile phone lock-screen replacement from Israeli startup Cellogic, has added Foursquare integration to its Android app ahead of this year's South by Southwest festival. The new Foursquare widget lets users of the location-based social network access its main features, including the ability to quickly find places nearby, "check-in", share their location with friends via Foursquare, Twitter and/or Facebook, as well as access their foursquare friends-list.

10 days ago

Team Europe Ventures , the Berlin-based VC firm, has launched a new €6 million fund for early stage startups in the Internet and mobile Internet space. The fund is mainly targeting companies in Germany and Europe, but also in the USA, and the focus will be on the seed stage, with 4-5 startups being invested in per-year for a maximum of €500K per company. This is bound to be good news for startups in Europe, and particularly in Germany where seed funding is seen to be a problem for early ..

AMEE , the US/UK-based startup that aims to build the largest engine for computing greenhouse gas emissions, has secured a $5.5m series B financing lead by Amadeus Capital Partners alongside existing investors, including O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures and Union Square Ventures. AMEE will use the funding to expand its geographic reach and platform. The prize AMEE is aiming for, known in the sector as "enterprise carbon management", is expected to reach $4 billion by 2017 because of government and ..

A decade ago most of us were using AltaVista or something similar for search. No one was really complaining very much about the huge amount of spam and other noise that cluttered the results because we didn't know there was a better way. Then Google came along with Page Rank, and had a profound effect on the quality of Internet search. Suddenly (and it really was that sudden), we couldn't imagine going back to AltaVista and searching pages of results for the thing that Google gave us ..

Wikia , a for-profit group of user generated wiki sites that was founded by Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales in 2004, is now a profitable company. CEO Gil Penchina says the company's revenues grew 4x in 2009 while they kept costs in check. Late last year the company reported strong financial results, but hadn't yet reached true profitability. He won't disclose what revenues are, but the company currently has 40 employees and has open spots for a dozen more, he says (although I only count eight positions ..

Back in July 2008, Tapulous released a music game for the iPhone called Tap Tap Revenge (TTR). The game proved to be a massive hit, growing to 1 million users within its first few weeks.  Over the last year and a half, TTR and its sequels have become the most popular series on the App Store, with over 25 million installs. And tonight, Tapulous is ready to release an entirely new music-focused gaming series: Riddim Ribbon (iTunes link), featuring the Black Eyed Peas. Riddim Ribbon is a fusion ..

As predicted , Hell has indeed frozen over. Yesterday, Google CEO Eric Schmidt sent a tweet hinting at something most people probably never expected to see: a Google Super Bowl ad. But the contents of the ad, and even the product it would be promoting, remained a mystery. Moments ago some 90 million Americans watched as Google showed off the search functionality that it's famous for, in an ad called Parisian Love . We've embedded the ad below. Yesterday, John Battelle correctly predicted that ..

Yesterday, California's Chief Technology Officer, P.K. Agarwal, wrote that the government is using a crowdsourcing tool, IdeaScale, to get a consensus on the ideas to spur IT innovation around the California's IT systems. IdeaScale, which is a crowdsourcing tool produced by startup Survey Analytics, is gaining serious traction as a crowdsourcing tool for government agencies. Currently, 24 agencies in the U.S. Federal Government are using IdeaScale to power crowdsourcing initiatives. IdeaScale's ..

Editor’s note : This is the fourth in a series of posts on the state of online video by guest writer Ashkan Karbasfrooshan . He is the founder and CEO of WatchMojo . In Search of Profits Ten years ago, web companies didn’t generate much revenue.   These days, web companies are some of the most profitable around.  Online video is where the Web was ten years ago: in investment mode as video companies that are generating high revenue are not necessarily the most profitable. Are those ..

When the mobile payment service Square launched in December, VeriFone rushed to get its own version on the market. A couple weeks ago, they accomplished that with the launch of PayWARE Mobile . Now they're looking to take out their competitor the good old fashioned way: out-spending them. VeriFone is already heavily advertising its PayWARE Mobile product with huge ads in New York City taxis. As you can see in the picture, VeriFone is paying for big screen real estate on the screens that are in ..

We all know that Ashton Kutcher is a fan of Twitter. Last year, Kutcher raced CNN to a million Twitter followers (Kutcher won ). Kutcher hosted Saturday Night Live yesterday night, and as a web exclusive, SNL released this bit Kutcher did about Tooter, which Twitter-like network that broadcasts Kutcher's flatulence emissions, or "gissions." It's up to you to decide how funny the sketch is, but it's certainly an entertaining poke at the celeb's love for the microblogging network and social ..

Everyone with eyes in their head can see the bright future of multi-touch displays, but the huge variety of technologies out there makes it hard to place a bet. Will capacitive film rule? Or will it be the IR overlay ? Or will Microsoft's foresight in nurturing the Surface project pay off once they reveal their new, flatter display? Well, there's one more competitor joining the already-crowded field, and they're coming in heavy with $18 million in funding. There is some question of whether ..

Here's a recap of all of the interviews and other videos of technology executives who attended the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland last week:

There's a certain irony that TechCrunch's in-house satirist Paul Carr is currently slaving over the sequel to his book about his failure to launch a startup. Fridaycities was to be a site which allowed anyone to swap information in real time about London, and eventually other cities. The site failed, Paul wrote his book (and a few other things, let's admit) and the rest is history, including our little run in , thankfully. If only he'd done it in the era of Facebook rise into the mainstream. ..

The website Tata Consultancy Services, India's largest software vendor, has been hacked. The hacker has posted a "For Sale" message on the site, which is written in both French and English. Ironically, the company produces security systems software. The hack is believed to be a DNS hijack, which is similar to the breach that Twitter succumbed to last year. TechCrunch was also recently hacked earlier this year.

“People in technology businesses are drawn to places known for diversity of thought and open-mindedness”, is what Professor Richard Florida concluded after studying the growth and success of 50 metropolitan areas in the U.S. The most successful regions were those with the most gays, bohemians, and immigrants. These groups flourish in Silicon Valley, and its diversity has undoubtedly provided it with great advantage. But after attending the recent Crunchies Awards , I realized that something ..

This time last week I rattled off the world's laziest column . I was struggling against my book deadline which expired 24 hours later and I simply didn't have time to write anything else. This week should have been different; I should have finished the book days ago and now be sitting on a beach in the Caribbean, sipping a Diet Coke martini and lazily writing a long, well-thought-out column about some vital issue of the day. Why it's inadvisable to write a mea culpa in the passive voice ..

If you can't laugh at yourself... Robert Scoble insisted ( insisted! ) that we take these photos. Possibly to let the healing process begin after yesterday's Google phone drama . And he isn't the only one who wants to turn this into some kind of meme. I hope we call just let this go now, and move on with our lives. I promise to try to use a headset much more often while driving in those states that require it, and otherwise abide by the laws of the land.

Today, the blog Chromium Notes , which is written by a developer who works on the open source project (that Google Chrome is built on top of), posted a very interesting graph: one that shows the number of code commits to WebKit . Notably, it appears that Google has overtaken Apple as the organization that contributes the most commits to the open source project. Now, the author is quick to point out the caveats of the graph (and does so for four paragraphs), and notes that he was hesitant to ..