Alexia Tsotsis is the co-editor of TechCrunch. She attended the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, CA, majoring in Writing and Art, and moved to New York City shortly after graduation to work in the Media industry.
After four years of living in New York and attending courses at New York University, she returned to Los Angeles in order to continue her career in new media, first as LA Weekly’s Internet culture reporter, and then as SF Weekly’s web editor. Before she joined TechCrunch, Alexia ran the SFweekly.com website while staying on top of memes, the tech scene, and human behavior in the digital age.
At TechCrunch, Tsotsis covers early stage startups, and has had the opportunity to interview everyone from Groupon’s Andrew Mason to FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski. Most recently Tsotsis made the Forbes “30 Under 30: Rising Stars of Media List.” Her Twitter bio reads, “Breaks news, hearts.”
In the midst of today’s news whirl, this tidbit slipped through the cracks; Part of the design team Cuban Council has apparently been acq-hired by Google, according to a note on their blog. Google has also confirmed the mini-acquisition in an email to TechCrunch.
“We’re very excited to share that some folks on our team will be joining Google to focus on design aspects of Google+,” reads the Cuban Council blog, titled “A New Voyage,” ”Having worked closely with a variety of Google product teams since 2005, we’re thrilled to have the opportunity to focus our creative efforts within the organization.”
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The Yahoo second quarter 2012 earnings call is tomorrow, which is why the news that Google star Marissa Mayer is taking over as CEO today is shocking but not, sort of like the news that someone you’ve known for a long time is pregnant. Because yeah that happened too, to Mayer.
After a succession of terrible CEOs, Yahoo finally has a good one with Mayer, or at least one who is under 40. If anything, what Aol* competitor Yahoo needs right now is youth, hipness. My dark horse for Yahoo CEO was Dennis Crowley, but Mayer, who I wouldn’t have pegged for a long shot, was indeed a lot more qualified and possibly cheaper than the Foursquare founder. → Read More
The lore is that news doesn’t really break at Allen and Co’s Sun Valley mogul retreat, but it definitely gets made. Everywhere you look there’s an interesting pairing of successful individuals hanging out, which is what you’d assume would happen at a convergence of hundreds of the most powerful media, entertainment and technology elite.
A conversation here can often turn into tomorrow’s front page headline or top Techmeme hit. From Sheryl and Sergey taking a stroll, to New Jersey Governor Chris Christie chilling post bar with Activision’s Bobby Kotick to Peter Thiel and Palantir’s Alex Karp grabbing a coffee between panels at the lodge, one finds themselves in a constant state of wanting to find out about what everyone’s talking about. → Read More
Sun Valley aside, the story of the day today is that social news site Digg has sold its remaining assets for $500K to the NYC-based tech firm Betaworks; While that number is indeed in the ballpark, we’re hearing from multiple sources that the total price of the Digg acquisition was around $16 million, including the price paid for IP by a previously unreported acquirer, LinkedIn. → Read More
Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt offered some new insight into Google’s self-driving car today at his press talk at Allen and Co.’s Sun Valley conference.
Schmidt revealed that Google had talked to “all” of the auto-manufacturers globally about the product, which he called “not yet ready for productization options” facing challenges including getting individual states to approve it.
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SimpleGeo co-founder and former Digg lead architect Joe Stump has raised 500K in seed funding for his latest startup Sprintly.
The project management and collaboration tool is one of the first investments from Facebook Director of Engineering Andrew Bosworth and has brought together bold-faced backers like Matt Mullenweg, Simple co-founder Alex Payne, Ooga Labs’ Stan Chudnovsky, Twitter lead architect Blaine Cook, About.me’s Ryan Freitas, Chartbeat’s Tony Haile, Founders Dens’ Michael Levit, Ross Dargahi, Engine Yard’s Eamon Leonard, Brizzly’s Jason Shellen, and The Barbarian Group’s Rick Webb. → Read More
Allen & Co.’s Sun Valley retreat definitely wins the prize for “Most Ironic Conference” as it is a media conference that very vehemently shuns media. Just this morning one intrepid reporter was told to stop harassing the guests as she walked down the rainy thoroughfare with her friend who also happened to be an attendee (and, no, it wasn’t me).
My boss and guest Tim Armstrong technically isn’t allowed to talk to me about anything that isn’t smalltalk (Hi Tim!). Really. → Read More
General Catalyst and Andreessen Horowitz have given $4 million in Series A to stealth startup Parlay Labs we’re hearing, with General Catalyst leading the round. Notable angels also in the round include YouTube’s Shishir Mehrotra, Drew Houston and Xobni founders Matt Brezina and Adam Smith.
The newest member of the groundswell of enterprise communication startups, which includes TCDisrupt winners Yammer and UberConference, Palo Alto based Parlay Labs wants to “reinvent the way people are communicating at work” according to its website. → Read More
White-hot payments startup Stripe has closed a $20 million Series B round of financing, led by General Catalyst with existing A-list investors Sequoia, Peter Thiel (personally) and angels Chris Dixon, Aaron Levie and Elad Gil also following on. Redpoint will be coming on as a new investor.
Stripe’s valuation during this Series B was in the hundreds of millions, up to a half-billion dollars, according to a source (It’s unclear whether that valuation is pre- or post-money). The relatively under-the-radar company has already raised $20 million in prior funding from the aforementioned investors as well as PayPal co-founders Max Levchin and Elon Musk, with the under-reported $20 million Series A happening 12 months before this round closed. → Read More
The tech news cycle is a desperate bitch, as we’ve brought up before; A brief rundown of yesterday’s bitchmeme sparked by a mere tweet from my colleague MG Siegler once again proves how absurd it is.
“I used to love to plant one really weird bit of random information (sometimes even false) into stories to catch the rewrites,” MG wrote in response to developer Marco Arment’s concise analysis of the insatiable tech news beast. → Read More
Yesterday afternoon, I was looking for a science-obsessed TC writer to take on the Higgs Boson story . Instead, I got an extremely elegant Yammer summation of the discovery news from TechCrunch executive assistant Greg Barto. It’s pretty self-explanatory.
When I asked him later via text where he learned about physics, Greg said, “My dad got me into as a kid. Also been a fan of Steven Hawking and read his books. This has been on the verge of discovery for like 5 years so I’ve been following it.” → Read More
It’s not exactly clear when Google ceased to be a search company. It became more like a company that wanted a finger in every pot in order to protect its future as a search company; Perhaps it was the early acquisition of Google Earth? Perhaps, but, if it only counts when viewed as a defensive effort, my guess would be the later acquisition of YouTube.
Anyways, what is clear after this I/O is that Google is now a hardware company, a social company and a mobile company; And it’s a company destined to be at war with other companies. → Read More
Call it the way we flirt now. Facebook games like Song Pop and Draw Something and apps like Pair are discovering novel ways to get you to hook up connect online. The space is ballooning to the point where there’s even a couples app for co-founders.
A little over a month since its late May launch, breakout app Song Pop has hit 2 million daily active users, CEO Mathieu Nouzareth tells me. Though the game shows around 1.9 million daily active users on AppData, Nouzareth reveals that the real number is over 2 million because many people actually log in via their independent Song Pop accounts on iOS and Android. For context, hit Angry Birds Friends is presently at 3.3 million daily active users. → Read More
Declaring its independence from the traditional Lincoln Town Car (sorry, couldn’t resist), Uber is going beyond black cars this Fourth of July, bringing its up until now secret “Uber X” project public.
“Uber X” will allow Uber partners to use its dispatching software in order to dole out vehicles beyond Lincoln Town Cars, giving passengers a choice between Toyota Prius Hybrids and SUVs like the Cadillac Escalade, etc. → Read More
Are you out at a Friday night dinner somewhere, trying to take a filtered picture of some fancypants dessert and post it to Instagram to no avail? Are you currently making futile efforts to pin said dessert to your “Fancy Dessert” board on Pinterest but failing?
Well you’re out of luck, digital hipsters! Because of storms in North Virginia, power outages have impaired Amazon Web Services data centers in the region tonight, which means no Pinterest, Instagram, Netflix, Heroku and other sundry AWS-dependent services for you.
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Nothing is more fascinating than the tech platform API wars because they are so, so similar to high school. Once a company feels it’s too cool for another company, it starts shutting off parts of its API to that company, like what happened here with Facebook and Google. It’s basically one of those big, swinging dick types of things, that I, as a female, entirely understand. → Read More
Today at Google I/O, Clay Bavor, director of product management for Google Apps, announced that Google Docs will now work for offline editing. Bavor proved it by opening a Google Doc via Google Drive right on stage, entering in offline text.
The Google Docs offline editing should work on multiple devices, including the Chromebook and smartphones. All formatting changes will now be saved to a local cache and then synched to Google Docs once the user gets back online.
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Fuckers I am so sick of reporting on incremental tech news for fucking two years now, so sick I’m pretty much considering reverting full-time to fashion coverage. (Don’t believe me? Well, how amazing and beautiful is my “Clothing I Like and Want To Buy” Pinterest board? A.k.a. my greatest accomplishment in my life thus far …).
But yeah, The New York Times took a step towards the future this blasted Sunday night and all of us tech press are expected to cover it like lemmings. Fine. Sure. It’s a big deal, in a business that is slowly dying, to show an understanding of 21st century distribution mechanisms. Kudos NYT. You’re still worth less than Instagram. Hahahahhaha, lol (drink).
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I like Joe Fernandez a lot, more than I like most people. He’s a true entrepreneur and badass, asking specifically to be onstage with me at LeWeb London because he knew that I had serious misgivings about his product, Klout. He told me he wanted a challenge and to put himself outside his comfort zone, both before and after the interview. Cool, anyone who’s not scared of being in the hot seat garners my immediate esteem. → Read More
Pro tip: Don’t let the following happen to your PR pitch/intern.
So I know this is a particularly egregious case of “pot calling the kettle black” (I personally am a Black Belt in typos) but, instead of being psyched up to “Party Our Apps Off!”at Google i/o next week, our team has been discussing the simple grammar mistake in the subject line of the below email for at least 30 minutes this morning.
I thought I would share the thread with you guys, if anything to remind you again that there’s a crucial difference between “your” and “you’re” (“its” and “it’s” are also tricky). → Read More
