Colleen Taylor is based in San Francisco where she is a reporter for TechCrunch and TechCrunch TV.
Previously she worked as a reporter for GigaOM, the Financial Times’ Mergermarket newswire, and the semiconductor industry newsletter Electronic News.
Disclosure: Colleen holds a small amount of shares in AOL, which were awarded as part of her employment contract with TechCrunch. She personally does not hold shares in any other public company. Colleen’s spouse is employed as a software engineer for Google; he holds stock in the company as part of this employment.
Congratulations! You’ve managed to avoid the intergalactic debris that’s been flying around to survive another action-packed week in the tech industry. And you know what else that means? It’s time for CrunchWeek, the weekly show where a few of us writers hang out in the TechCrunch TV studio and dish on the biggest stories from the past seven days. → Read More
A number of Silicon Valley investors are starting the long weekend with a smile. That’s thanks to Xoom Corporation, the online money transfer technology and services company, which made a very successful debut today on the NASDAQ stock market.
The company’s stock zoomed (sorry, I had to do it) up a full 59 percent from its $16 per share initial public offering price to close out the trading… → Read More
As we reported this morning, Blackjet, the startup that aims to be the “Uber for private jets” by letting people book relatively lower priced private jet travel through web and mobile apps, today extended its service to two new cities: San Francisco and Las Vegas.
But TechCrunch has learned that today also brought big news for Blackjet on a more behind-the-scenes level. Shervin Pishevar, the… → Read More
Geographically Hollywood is hundreds of miles away from Silicon Valley, but it seems like the two are getting closer and closer in metaphorical ways.
The latest example of this is The Internship, the new buddy movie starring Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson that’s set to premiere this upcoming summer. In it, Vaughn and Wilson play middle-aged laid off salesmen who somehow nab internships at Google. → Read More
Brad Feld, the Boulder, Colorado-based entrepreneur and early stage investor, is well known for helping to encourage and establish new tech and entrepreneurial ecosystems in areas outside of the well-trodden Silicon Valley region.
The most recent place on which he’s set his sights? Kansas City.
The Kansas City metropolitan area (which spans both the states of Kansas and Missouri) is of… → Read More
On his current visit to San Francisco, today former United States Vice President Al Gore swung through local PBS radio affiliate KQED for an hour-long appearance on the program Forum With Michael Krasny.
It was a very interesting wide-ranging conversation, as Krasny’s interviews often tend to be. But one part in particular caught my attention, when Gore was asked about the environment of… → Read More
Nextdoor, the company that lets people create private social networks with others who live in their local neighborhoods, has raised $21.6 million in a new funding round led by Greylock Partners with the participation of existing investors Benchmark, DAG Ventures, Shasta Ventures, Allen & Company, Pinnacle Ventures, along with new investors Bezos Expeditions and Google Ventures. → Read More
TechCrunch TV recently made the trek to Las Vegas, where we had the chance to check out the burgeoning startup community that’s taking shape there thanks in large part to a $350 million initiative called the “Downtown Project.” When many people think of Vegas, they think of nothing but the casino-, tourist-, and hotel-packed area known as the Strip — but the Downtown Project, which is headed up… → Read More
All too often, tech startup founders feel like they have to move their headquarters to an industry hub such as the San Francisco Bay Area in order to really be successful. But while it’s good to be in touch with the hustle and bustle of Silicon Valley or New York City, there can also be big benefits to building your startup outside of these typical tech epicenters. A great example of this is … → Read More
How are those New Year’s resolutions to work out more holding up? Not so well? Not at all? Yeah, us too.
So we figured that it’s a good time to check back in with GAIN Fitness, the startup that aims to bring workouts from personal trainers right to your iPhone or iPad. → Read More
Apple said this afternoon it is evaluating the possibility of issuing preferred stock as part of its ongoing effort to return $45 billion to its shareholders which was initiated in March of last year. The evaluation is apparently in response to Greenlight Capital, a hedge fund led by David Einhorn that currently holds some 1.3 million shares of Apple stock. Greenlight has been very publicly… → Read More
Early stage VC fund 500 Startups today held the first of several demo day events for the fifth batch of startups graduating from its accelerator program. It was a fun event, with 32 high-energy founders pitching their companies to a room full of investors and tech press.
All of the companies were compelling in their own ways, covering a wide range of technologies, geographies, and sectors … → Read More
In an on-stage conversation today with Dave McClure at 500 Startups’ fifth Demo Day event, AngelList co-founder Naval Ravikant gave data-driven insights on the current state of venture capital. In short, he’s forecasting a world with more startups, more bootstrapping, ‘shrinking’ funding rounds, and a boost in cross-border investing. → Read More
Just four months after announcing the sale of Lucasfilm production company to Disney in a $4 billion deal, George Lucas, the screenwriter and director best known for the Star Wars series, has made a move toward cashing out — big time.
In a regulatory document filed today with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Disney disclosed that George Lucas’ personal trust has registered for the… → Read More
It’s demo day time once again for 500 Startups, the early stage venture capital fund and startup accelerator headed up by Silicon Valley’s favorite foul-mouthed investor, techie, and man about town Dave McClure.
We’re here in a packed room at Microsoft’s Mountain View headquarters, where 32 new startups are set to show off the products they’ve worked on over the past four months as part of 500… → Read More
Today marks the official public debut of Bitcasa, the startup we first met at TechCrunch Disrupt back in September 2011 that promises to replace traditional hard drives with its own cloud-based “infinite drive” system. The company has been available in beta form for some months, but it’s now launching to be available to the public across a number of devices and operating systems — iOS, Android… → Read More
Maynard Webb knows a thing or two about navigating through a career path. From the start of his professional life as an entry-level employee at IBM, he has risen to be one of the tech industry’s most respected veterans. After working his way up through increasingly senior ranks at technology firms, he became perhaps best known for working in executive roles including COO at eBay from 1999 to 2006… → Read More
I’m hearing that gdgt (pronounced ‘gadget’), the consumer electronics review site founded by Engadget co-founder Peter Rojas and former Engadget editor-in-chief Ryan Block, is in late-stage acquisition talks with AOL. Sources tell me that a deal appears to be nearing closure in a matter of days.
I’ve reached out both to gdgt and to executives at AOL for confirmation or comment, but have not yet… → Read More
If you watched the Super Bowl yesterday, or have seen any college or professional football game in recent years, you know that football can be a very high-impact sport. That is part of the beauty of the game, but it can also be incredibly dangerous in ways that have only started to become apparent. It is not just the bones and muscles of players that can be hurt with a powerful tackle — we now… → Read More
Ready for a break from all that football to talk some tech? Well you’re in luck, because it’s time for CrunchWeek, the TechCrunch TV show where a few of us writers take a look back at the past seven days and talk about a few of the week’s most interesting stories. It was as interesting a week as ever for the tech world, so we pushed back posting a bit today to make sure we didn’t get too lost in… → Read More
Peter Thiel, the tech industry magnate known among other things for co-founding PayPal and investing very early in Facebook, took home the VC of the Year award at the 6th annual Crunchies this week for his individual investments and his work with Founders Fund, the San Francisco venture capital firm he co-founded in 2005 focused on companies with “revolutionary technologies.”
I think Thiel is… → Read More
Updated. Amazon.com’s main website appears to be down for many users at the moment, with the site returning a mostly blank page that reads “Http/1.1 Service Unavailable.”
A look at a cURL of the site shows that Amazon’s homepage is returning a 503 Error, which indicates that the server powering the site is temporarily down due to maintenance or overloading. → Read More
Productivity technology Evernote has been hard at work lately. Alongside the dramatic update to its personal contacts app Hello (which you can read about here), today Evernote also released an updated version of Penultimate, the popular handwriting app it acquired in May 2012.
The most notable part about Penultimate is that the app, which previously cost 99 cents to download, is now free. → Read More
Evernote today is releasing a dramatically updated 2.0 version of Hello for iOS, the app for remembering details about the people you meet that first launched just over a year ago in December 2011.
The Hello 2.0 app has a host of new features, including business card scanning and “Evernote Connect,” which uses audio tones to transfer information among phones that are in proximity to each other… → Read More
Many entrepreneurs, investors, and early employees in startups in the state of California are now starting to receive big bills in the mail for back taxes that they never expected to owe.
That’s because in late December, when many of us were heading out for the holiday break, the state’s Franchise Tax Board eliminated a deduction that had been available since 1993 to people who made money from… → Read More
The startup world woke up to some exciting news this morning, with the $10 million cash sale of restaurant dish photo sharing and recommendation app Foodspotting to online restaurant reservation giant OpenTable.
So were very pleased to have Foodspotting co-founder and CEO Alexa Andrzejewski stop by TechCrunch TV this afternoon (after what was certainly a very long day) to give us the scoop on… → Read More
It’s time for another episode of Cribs, the TechCrunch TV series that takes you behind the gates of some of the tech industry’s hottest companies to see the factory floor where the tastiest app and gadget sausage is made.
It’s great to stretch our wings a bit beyond TechCrunch’s San Francisco base to check out Cribs in other locales — and this particular sojourn was really worth it. Earlier… → Read More
Jody Sherman, a longtime web entrepreneur most recently known as the co-founder and CEO of healthy kids products site Ecomom, has passed away. He was 47.
Details on the cause of death have not been confirmed. The news was relayed earlier today to close friends, family, and business associates, and has spread this evening from a Facebook post written on his profile today by his wife Kerri… → Read More
Yahoo today released its financial results for the fourth quarter of 2012, marking the end of a key year for the long-running web portal. Q4 2012 was Yahoo’s second full quarter with Marissa Mayer at the helm as CEO, and investors are no doubt looking for real validation that she is steering the company in a positive direction toward recapturing its former status as a web giant to be… → Read More
BetaBait, a service that connects startups with people to try and test early “beta” versions of web and mobile apps, is shutting down effective February 1st, 2013.
The company, which first launched a year ago in December 2011, announced the closure in an email sent to users. → Read More
New York City
