TechCrunch

With the rise of Twitter, we’ve also seen the rise of link shorteners (standard URLS take up too many characters). The king of the link shorteners right now is bit.ly, which is the default shortener on Twitter and accounts for more than 75 percent of all short URLs on the service. Every m...

So this is funny. Yes, Twitter is having downtime issues right now. Yes, again. But that’s nothing new, obviously. What is new is that Twitter being down has also apparently borked the site many people use to check if Twitter is down, downforeveryoneorjustme.While the site, made by Ryan Kin...

Apparently, like everyone else, the Seattle Times is very interested in trying to figure out what to actually use Google Wave for. But while most are trying to use it for either fun, realtime chats, movie reenactments, or inner-business workings, the Seattle Times have tasked Wave with a larger g...

San Francisco based Eventbrite went prime time earlier this month when they raised $6.5 million from Sequoia Capital, and added partner Roelof Botha to their board of directors. We had a chance to sit down with Botha as well as founders Kevin Hartz and Julia Hartz and talk to them about their bus...

As online retailers are witnessed strong Black Friday results, Google is reporting that there was a surge in online shopping searches with “Black Friday” on Thanksgiving day and the Friday after the holiday. Searches with the term “Black Friday” were up by more than 20%, y...

What is it with architects that they feel the need to glom onto the latest buzzwords to justify their projects? A group from M.I.T.’s Senseable City Lab is looking for funding for an ambitious observation deck designed for the 2012 London Olympics. They are calling it the Cloud. It is a ...

Rumors were swirling that IBM would be acquiring database security company Guardium after the Israeli financial newspaper, The Market, reported the acquisition yesterday (translated version here). Big Blue has officially confirmed that it has acquired Guardium but did not disclose financial terms...

Digg has poached Keval Desai away from Google as their new Vice President of Product, we’ve confirmed from the company. Desai’s last day at Google is today.Desai is a long time Google employee, first joining the company in 2003. He’s currently their Director of Product Managemen...

There is a lot of buzz around SimpleGeo right now. The service, which participated in our RealTime CrunchUp earlier this month, also took home two prizes at the Under The Radar conference just prior to that. And that was a big deal for the company considering it won the audience award even though...

You might find this suprising, but the top social gaming companies on the iPhone are not the same ones you know of from Facebook and MySpace. Zynga, despite $54.2M in funding, has hardly made a dent on the iPhone. Neither has Playfish, which was recently bought for $300M. Playdom hasn't done squa...

A round-up from Shakil Khan, effectively Spotify’s consigliari today in London opened the kimono a little on where it’s at.Speaking at the new NOAH Conference in London, the headline points from his talk were that we can, as we expected, see a U.S. launch in Q1 2010 as well as a laun...

There were some interesting panel discussion today at the NOAH conference – a new event in London aimed at presented tech companies to the private equity and banking sector – but the plethora of suited and booted attendees were shocked out of their chairs a little when Klaus Hommels, ...

Rumors have been swirling that IBM will be acquiring database security company Guardium after the Israeli financial newspaper, The Market, reported the acquisition yesterday (translated version here). Big Blue is reportedly shelling out $225 million for Israel-based Guardium. This year alone, IBM...

As more consumers turn to sites like Yelp and Citysearch to find restaurants, it’s important for establishments of all sizes to have a website. While larger restaurants may have more resources to create an informative consumer-facing site, the mom and pop restaurants out there need an easy ...

Streamreaders just keep getting better and better. A new version of TweetDeck is rolling out today with some major improvements, including support for Lists, Retweets, maps for geo-tagged messages, and LinkedIn streams. As soon as Twitter launched Lists (the ability to create and follow groups) a...

It was so close I could taste it. Two weeks ago we were ready to publicly launch the CrunchPad. The device was stable enough for a demo. It went hours without crashing. We could even let people play with the device themselves – the user interface was intuitive enough that people “got ...

[France] A commercial court in Paris has fined eBay €1.7 million euros (roughly £1.6 million) for allegedly not sticking to an injunction banning users from selling on products of luxury goods conglomerate Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton (LVMH in short).Allowing the LVMH perfumes and cosmetics to be ...

Nearly five months after launching a free, ad-supported application for iPhone and iPod Touch, eBuddy is today introducing a paid version of the program, which enables users to communicate with contacts across various instant messaging clients.Priced at $4.99 (iTunes link), which in my opinion is...

As we’ve noted, Chrome for Mac is getting very, very close to its official beta launch. The team is down to a mere 8 bugs to fix before it’s ready (and it looks like the list has been trimmed to 7 as of a few hours ago). This is great news for Mac users who want to try out the Chrome ...

It’s the Monday after Thanksgiving / Black Friday, which means many people will dub today Cyber Monday, a horrendous marketing term that refers to yet another one of the busiest days of the year for retail. And while Microsoft has been making many online shoppers happy the past few days wit...

It’s that time of year again when we see each search engine roll out their top search queries for the year. Scrubbed for pornography and other NSFW stuff, of course. And also manipulated in other ways, like taking out old popular terms, to make sure the list is interesting, if not actually ...

Whenever you want to take a reading of the current zeitgeist, popular search terms can tell you a lot about what’s on people’s minds. Right now, for instance, the hottest search terms on Google Trends include “lakewood police shooting,” “tiger woods mistress,”...

Ever since FriendFeed was sold to Facebook, we’ve been told over and over again that the company and its community were toast. And as if to underline the fact, FriendFeed’s access to the Twitter firehose was terminated and vaguely replaced with a slow version that is currently delivering Twitter ...

There was one complaint I heard over and over again from Indian entrepreneurs during my three weeks shuttling between Delhi, Jaipur, Bangalore, Mumbai and Pune: There aren’t enough angel investors in India.Now, truth be told, that’s a complaint I also hear in the American heartland, in Canada, in...

“Scribd doing 43M revenue this year??” was the subject line of an email sent to me last week, along with a link to this photo, taken in Scribd’s San Francisco offices, showing a list of “important stuff” on a whiteboard. Our tipster must not have read the whole list,...

We know that a beta version of Chrome for Mac is due at least by the end of December, but today brings more confirmation that it may be even closer than that. Mike Pinkerton, the guy leading the Chrome for Mac team, has just tweeted out that there are only “8 remaining M4 Mac beta blockers!...

Earlier this month we did a preview of Tweetie 2.1, the latest version of the popular iPhone Twitter client. Today, it has just hit the App Store as a free download for Tweetie 2 owners. While the .1 increment may make it seem like this update isn’t that big of a deal, the latest version ac...

As you likely know, Tiger Woods was in an accident under apparently mysterious circumstances early Friday morning. Predictably, the reports and reactions thereto pertaining varied somewhat in quality and timeliness, and predictably, this has led to paroxysms of futurist glee in some and sullen co...

It's Sunday and I want you to be happy. That's why I'm offering you your very own Vue Personal Video network so you can keep an eye on Santa as he sneaks up to your back porch and steals your garbage cans.We reviewed this kit a few months ago and were impressed. It's completely wireless and the c...