Google is facing a privacy policy probe in Europe. Last year it consolidated more than 60 separate product privacy notices into one unified policy. The move drew criticism from European privacy regulators — which last October called for Google to give users more control over their data. Today they said Google had failed to respond to their suggestions and would face fresh action. → Read More
Last August, Affectiva, developer of a new way to track facial responses to online content, raised $12 million from KPCB, Horizon and others to take its tech to a wider market. Today comes one of the fruits of that effort: the company is announcing a deal with the Ebuzzing Social video advertising platform for the company to integrate Affectiva’s Affdex facial coding software into the Ebuzzing… → Read More
Moment.me, a startup that debuted its automatic, social albums application for iPhone this past fall, has made its way to Android. The app allows users to combine not only photos, but also video, as well as updates from social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Instagram and Google+, into one album. These albums are also augmented with content shared by friends and others who posted… → Read More
Did you happen to get an email from LinkedIn recently, which congratulated you on having one of the most popular profiles on the site? Then, good news – you’re special. Just like millions of others. The campaign, which ran this month in celebration of LinkedIn’s 200-million-users milestone, involved these ego-boosting emails sent to the network’s “top” users, which urged them to share the good… → Read More
GREE, a Tokyo-based mobile gaming company worth $2.8 billion, is deepening its partnership with Yahoo! Japan through the creation of a joint venture that will build social games for smartphones. The new venture will have about 200 million yen or $2.2 million in funding and will be named GxYz. The point of the new company is to marry GREE’s strength in building games with Yahoo! Japan’s… → Read More
Google’s Android platform dominates the U.K.’s smartphone landscape — powering 54 per cent of the handsets in use at the end of 2012 (Kantar’s data). But what apps are U.K. Android owners spending increasing amounts of time on? Researcher Nielsen says Android app usage during May to October 2012 flags up growth in mobile shopping and commerce. → Read More
I find statistics absolutely delicious. Pew research released fresh stats on what slice of Americans are addicted to all of the various social networks as of December 2012. There are a few big business and cultural implications. → Read More
It’s not if, but when. Between crooks, hackers, and foreign governments, Facebook probably can’t avoid a serious user data breach forever. When it happens, Facebook may never be able to quiet fears that “personal data isn’t safe there”. That could cause a chilling effect on sharing, jeopardize its future in commerce, and cut its lifetime short. → Read More
Editor’s note: This guest post is written by Erica Kochi, the co-lead of UNICEF’s Innovation unit. Her team started UNICEF’s open source RapidSMS platform which has been adopted in developing countries worldwide. She co-teaches a class ”Design for Unicef” in NYU’s ITP Program, is a global partner of Stanford’s New Product Design Innovation course, and has lectured at Harvard, Yale… → Read More
Lonely? Wish you had someone to geek out with about the weird stuff you’re into? Sodisco wants to find you a play date. It’s the soon-to-launch startup from Christian Taylor, ex-CEO of Facebook e-commerce platform Payvment that just got bought by Intuit. Taylor called me up to reveal what Sodisco’s all about: analyzing your interests and introducing you to your nearest clones. → Read More
It was just a matter of time before Twitter shut the blogging platform Posterous down, after acquiring the company last March. The team had already been folded into the flock, but this means that nobody has to worry about pesky service interruptions of keeping the service’s diminishing number of users happy. The site will be shutting down on April 30th, but it’s not a completely sad… → Read More
TV commercials that automatically play could soon hit Facebook’s news feed. This week Facebook VP of Business David Fischer admitted auto-play video ads might be distracting, but said “I believe there are ways we could do it.” Fischer said during his Stanford Future Of Media Conference keynote that he admired YouTube’s video ads. But auto-play video spots could be annoying in the quiet news feed. → Read More
Google Plus experienced an outage this morning, and almost no one noticed. Gizmodo poked fun. Engadget wrote a few sentences. Someone posted it to Hacker News. Where it gained zero comments. Google+, reportedly the fastest-growing social network in history (or fastest-growing “thingy” ever), and reportedly the second-biggest social network worldwide, experiences an outage, and nothing hits … → Read More
According to InsideSocialGames, Zynga and EA have settled their legal dispute over the former’s alleged copying of EA’s popular game “The Sims.” It was clear to many that once Zynga started teasing “The Ville,” it took some major elements from EA’s classic. A source has told TechCrunch that no money has exchanged hands as part of the settlement. At the… → Read More
BitTorrent, the once-notorious P2P file-sharing site that has turned a new leaf as a legit, distributed computing provider, is today launching SoShare, a service to send large files from one computer to another, with the first terabyte of files sent free. Out today in beta for Google Chrome, Firefox and Safari for Mac; and Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer for Windows, the service competes… → Read More
Facebook has won a court challenge against its real names policy in Germany. Yesterday an administrative court in the North of Germany granted Facebook’s request for “suspensive effect” against a ruling made by Schleswig-Holstein’s Data Protection Commissioner that Facebook was violating German and European law. → Read More
Twitter and search sound like two peas in a pod, but it’s actually not the marriage made in heaven that you’d think it is. When you think of search, you think of a search engine, like Google, where the world’s information is seemingly at your fingertips. You feel confident that when you Google something, you won’t miss the important information. The secret is that… → Read More
Facebook has coded some special rules into Graph Search to make sure shady adults can’t stalk minors. Today Facebook clarified that searches that could identify kids under 18 by age or location won’t return any results for strange adults. → Read More
What if I there was an app that could make you healthier, smarter, and happier? That could turn your dreams into reality by breaking them into manageable steps and reminding you to take them? Everest wants to be that app. Backed by visionary investor Peter Thiel, Everest helps you with goals through inspiration, organization, and social support. Still a little shaky, it’s now emerging from stealth → Read More
It’s a little ironic that adrenalin-fuelled, sometimes dangerous extreme sports like windsurfing, kiteboarding and skiing also have a very pedestrian angle to them: it’s hard to do them when the weather isn’t quite right. There have been apps developed to try to meet that challenge by tapping into weather data providers, but sometimes these don’t actually give a personal feel of how the wind or… → Read More
Fandrop, a new content sharing site started by a group of growth hackers, is debuting today to help you find out what’s trending across the web. The site surfaces things like tweets and Facebook posts, YouTube videos, images from sites like imgur, articles, web pages, and more. In some ways, it’s similar to other social networks and social sharing sites, in that you can friend and follow other… → Read More
Bitcoin is the “underground” digital money system that’s fueling growth and disruption in the online payment space. Coinbase is a “bitcoin wallet and platform” that lets merchants and consumers make transactions easily using bitcoin. → Read More
Until natural language processing improves, only humans can tell what’s important. So Facebook today starts rolling out the option to pay to promote a friend’s posts and get them seen by more people. This will help critical posts bubble to the top of the feed, and let Facebook earn some money too. The feature respects privacy controls, but could still make you look like a self-important prick. → Read More
Over the last year, it seems that we kept hearing that quality, legit HTML5 gaming was right around the corner. Well, here we are two months into 2013, and the market is still yet to see a single, widely adopted (or even slightly adopted) flagship HTML5 title. → Read More
“In the Studio” continues this week by welcoming a successful founder, entrepreneur, and angel investor, who happened to amass a truly eclectic set of experiences in the Valley, from running a venture-backed company to an acquisition, from investing in some of the most iconic and bold consumer-technology companies in the past decade, and going back to the well again to run his current startup… → Read More
Social TV and the second screen experience is quickly catching on among viewers, but the space as a whole is still nascent. While many are eager for a better social TV experience, as there’s plenty of upside for fans, advertisers and broadcasters alike, collectively we’ve all been waiting for one of these players to hit critical mass.
When Viggle announced in November that it would be merging… → Read More
Like a terrible San Francisco tech party in a poorly lit SOMA bar filled with awkward khaki- or T-shirt clad guys, men outnumber women by almost 2:1 in dating apps, mobile analytics startup Flurry found. They ran an analysis on the 20 top dating apps, which had about 17 million active users and 2.1 billion sessions last month. Dating apps have taken a longer time to mature on Android and iOS, but… → Read More
If you kind of liked the idea behind viral sensation Bang With Friends, the controversial Facebook app that lets you privately nominate friends you want to hook up with, but balked at the idea of using an app that’s all about the sex, then you might find newly launched Trintme to have some appeal. The name, a combo of “true intentions,” is not as clever, sadly – seriously, people, stop making up… → Read More
It can be such a headache trying to figure out what internal collaboration tools a company should use. Even at TechCrunch, where we have a few dozen writers, product and sales people, we’ve switched tools many times and have gripes with all of them. Imagine how it must be for a company with more than 1,000 people, or even 10,000. G2 Crowd is aiming to solve that with a site of user reviews… → Read More
HipChat has been doing some good things since it was acquired by Atlassian back in March 2012, including updating its iOS apps with much-needed improvements, but the sorry excuse for a Mac app it offered built on Adobe AIR remained a huge sore spot. Today, the company is officially launching its native Mac client in beta form, and it’s already a complete 180 from the previous version. → Read More
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