We’re headed to Austin, Texas tomorrow along with the crew from Wired’s Underwire blog to attend South By Southwest Interactive. The week-long nerd fest starts Friday, and we’ll be reporting from the trenches. If you’re headed down to SXSWi, here’s what Webmonkey will be checking out. If you’re not going this year, you’ll be able to [...]
We’re giving away a pair of passes to Google I/O today. A little over a week ago, we kicked off our contest, encouraging you to send us any HTML5 web apps or Google Chrome browser extensions you’ve built. Alternatively, we asked you to tell us how you’d describe a web app to your grandmother. We got [...]
If you head over to YouTube right now, you may find that the videos on the homepage are significantly better than usual. Well, maybe not — but at least they’ll have a strong bias for startups, Silicon Valley, and the tech industry in general. That’s because YouTube has invited us to be part of their ‘Curator of the Month’ program, which means we got to submit a playlist of our favorite videos, which will be shown on the homepage throughout the day. You can find our full list of choices right here.
To build the playlist, we polled the whole TechCrunch crew for their favorite clips, which range from JESS3’s State of the Internet to a Jeff Bezos talk on minimizing regret. There are a few oddballs in there too, like this bizarrely catchy song about Excavator Trucks (a favorite of TC co-editor Erick Schonfeld’s kids).
A total of 19 Japanese startups were given the chance to show their services at TokyoCamp, a demo event held by TechCrunch Japan (one of the country’s biggest blogs) this Friday. The event, which was co-organized by hosting company KDDI Web Communications, was a blast and attracted over 200 people this time.
This was the third TokyoCamp (see here and here for my previous reports), and here are short profiles of all the startups that presented there. (Please note not all of the services offer English homepages.)
Google’s premiere developer event is coming up in just a couple of months, and we’ve got two passes to give away. Google I/O takes place on May 19 and 20 at Moscone Center in San Francisco. It’s the company’s largest developer event, with hundreds of sessions and demos of all the latest Google tech. Plus, there [...]
Google’s premiere developer event is coming up in just a couple of months, and we’ve got two passes to give away. Google I/O takes place on May 19 and 20 at Moscone Center in San Francisco. It’s the company’s largest developer event, with hundreds of sessions and demos of all the latest Google tech. Plus, there [...]
TechCrunch Europe is plotting the next series of events we’re planning this year.
But we’re going to need your help.
We’re looking for speakers and startups to appear at our events, and we’re especially interested in new startups planning to launch (read on about why).
Meanwhile we’ve set up ticketing sites for you now so you can actually go and get early bird ticket prices right now. See below for details.
So far this year we’ve partnered with or created events in Istanbul and Barcelona for tech startups. The next series of events require YOU to get as involved as you can.
These take us to the Summer, after which we’ll be hitting other cities.
In all cases, here’s what we want:
MySpace cofounder Tom Anderson supposedly begged to keep his job when the rest of the founding team was shown the door nine months ago. They kept him on, almost as a mascot. He was, after all, the first friend everyone had when signing up to MySpace.
He lost his President title (now shared by Mike Jones and Jason Hirschhorn). And he is rarely seen in the office. Still, MySpace insiders said he was important to have around as a tie to the old days.
No more, it seems. Tom hasn’t actually signed in to MySpace since January 24, and his last status update was on Christmas day.
But more striking is the fact that Tom is no longer automatically added as a new MySpace user’s first friend. Instead, a couple of days ago, new users were simply given “MySpace Today” as their first friend.
Google has announced details for the next Google I/O, the company’s largest developer event. It runs May 19 and 20, 2010, at Moscone Center in San Francisco. Registration is $400 now, but the price goes up to $500 a month before the event, so register early. Students and faculty can get in for $100, but [...]
With all the excitement about the Crunchies awards, I thought I should cast my ballot: Twitter. No, not because it’s the best product (I think Android is), but because it has impacted me the most. To young TechCrunch readers, this post will seem pretty lame. An old professor trying to seem hip by writing about social networking. Yawn. But I’ve never been a fan of social media. I have more than 500 connections on LinkedIn, but have never invited anyone to network with me. I’ve never used LinkedIn to ask anyone for an introduction. I never had a blog (I find it much more effective to write for BusinessWeek and TechCrunch). I never had a Myspace account (does anyone still use Myspace?). Even when I signed up for Facebook, I did it reluctantly because I kept getting friend requests and wanted to see what all the fuss was about.
But Twitter is a different. I get a stream of concise notes from people who want to bring things to my attention and from news outlets. I can follow anyone who seems extraordinarily interesting (and doesn’t tweet about brushing their teeth every morning). And I can read up about people I’m not following any time I want. And I get immediate feedback to my ideas.
I didn’t feel this way a few months ago. To me, Twitter seemed like another silly tool for kids to tell each other how much alcohol they had just consumed.