This week we recorded live from the show floor at Disrupt NYC. We sat through 24 hours straight of hot-rod hacking at the Hackathon and now we're preparing for the main show and, most important, the brand new Hardware Alley where we'll have loads of great hardware start-ups for you guys to check out.
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Disrupt NYC 2012 begins in approximately 12 hours (tickets here). But it's been two years since Soluto, the software that will make your computer simply run better, took home the Disrupt cup at the TC Disrupt NYC battlefield in 2010. The company entered the competition with a total of $7.8 million, and after walking away with the $50,000 round, se
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Apple’s planned phase-out of the UDID has introduced considerable angst in the app marketing community. The UDID provides a standard, widely supported method for attributing performance of advertising campaigns. Unfortunately, there’s no single solution to replace the UDID and it appears the iOS market is fragmenting, with multiple technologie
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Congratulations to Facebook for going public. Congratulations to the employees that are now millionaires. Congratulations to the founders who are now billionaires. Congratulations to the bankers, lawyers and investors who have added to their already considerable wealth. You’ve grasped the brass ring we’re all reaching for. Yet the company thatâ
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After nearly 24 hours of fighting fatigue and crafting code, our Disrupt NY 2012 Hackathon is finally drawing to a close. Not a moment too soon -- I think some of our hackers are about ready to keel over at this point. Nevertheless, we just got an eyeful of 92 projects that our wonderful hackers have been slaving away on through the night, but ther
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A temporary solution to the drama that unfolded this morning when Twitter was blocked in Pakistan -- some believe over representations of the Prophet Mohammed and Twitter's refusal to block these images; and some believe while it was testing an image filtering service. Whatever it was, the site is now back up --after an order from Prime Minister. P
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Teaching kids - especially little girls - about electronics is a hard job. First, there's the electricity. Then there's the sense that soldering, wiring, and lining up LEDs is considerably less fun than watching Tangled. This project, called Roominate, aims to change the way girls think about electricity. The kit consists of a set of tiny furniture
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There have been a lot of complaints voiced over the last couple of years from people who wish entrepreneurs would address the world's "real problems" or do "something bigger" rather than create "me too" applications and websites. I'm not a fan of that sentiment but that's really a whole other post I need to write. In all honesty, there's a place and
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SpaceX and Elon Musk will not be held from the history books. Last night the company announced that engineers were currently replacing a faulty valve on engine #5, and if successful pending a data review today, the company would attempt a second launch on Tuesday, May 22nd. This comes as SpaceX's maiden voyage to the International Space Station was
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A life-size fire-breathing dragon. A fully robotic calliope band. A full-scale flight simulator built by teenagers. An entire herd of homemade R2-D2s. Electric cars, steampunk fashion, a robot petting zoo, a piano made of bananas, and a cardboard Trojan Horse. Plus a zillion different interactive attractions, classes, and events for kids of all ages
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With Disrupt NYC 2012 literally a day away (tickets here), it's hard not to think about the past success of our former Battlefield startups. I've taken a close look at quite a few over the past couple weeks, and to be honest none have come as far as Mint.com. The company has rocketed to success since launching at TC40 in September, 2007, and subsequ
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A mere 24 hours ago, coders started hacking with hopes and dreams of building the next great app or program. Many participants stayed overnight, fueled on gumption and Red Bull. Others cut out early, apparently satisfied with their creation. But they're all back now, waiting to present on our massive Disrupt stage. Watch it live!
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It's been a long, caffeine-fueled ride for the hundreds of hackers who have set up at our big Disrupt NY 2012 Hackathon, but the furious process of taking a wild idea and turning it into something real is finally winding down. Projects were being finalized, UIs were being tweaked, last minute Red Bulls were being downed -- it was a quite a sight to
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Pictures of the Prophet Mohammad have always been a highly contentious issue -- they're not explicitly prohibited in the Qu'ran but many Sunni Muslims forbid the idea, while others do not seem to mind as much. Among the latter group are those who feel that banning such images is a restriction on freedom of expression. The issue at the center of the
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Another day, another example of a country making it harder for its citizens to use the web and some of its most effective channels of communication. There are reports coming in from Pakistan that it has become the latest country to ban the use of Twitter. According to the blog Dawn, the chairman of Pakistan's telecommunications authority has today
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It's midnight. The city is alive with Saturday night fever, and Pier 94 is just as awake, and perhaps a bit more drunk. Tequila shots (and plenty of beers) are flowing, along with Red Bull, Mountain Dew, and Energy Bites. In other words, this place is like one giant vat of FourLoko, topped with a sprinkling of coders.
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It's been about eight hours since our big Disrupt Hackathon kicked off, and all of our intrepid hackers have been busy letting the code (and the caffeine) fly ever since. I managed to tear a few of them away from their work (these folks are pretty motivated, so it took a bit of doing) to tell us a little bit about themselves and what they be trying
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What a week. After eight years, Mark Zuckerberg takes Facebook public at a $104 billion valuation. His longtime girlfriend Priscilla Chan gets her medical degree from the UC San Francisco. And to top it all off, they get married today. Mazel tov. An amazing ride for the pair and for the company, and hopefully a lot longer to go too.
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There's a strong murmur in the room with random spurts of excitement. Hackers and coders have teamed up and mostly (hopefully) decided on a project. There are only 15 hours left. But night is approaching. That's when things tend to get loopy thanks to the sudden influx of food and beer. So far the event has been fantastic. There's a 3:2 ratio of Ma
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Hackers aren't necessarily known for their fashion sense. Most of the time, a t-shirt and jeans is as far as it goes. But there are certain circumstances in which it's clear that hackers pay a little extra attention after rolling out of bed in the morning. The TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon is one of those instances, but that doesn't mean that the go-
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Last time I took a look at the most over-hyped topics of the Future of TV, and I thought a great follow-up would be to look at the reverse case. After all, it's easy to sit there and critique, but what about the positive side, where's the action happening but not being talked about as much as it could be? Â Here are four things going on in the TV in
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It's been just over nine months since Google announced their intentions to acquire hardware manufacturer Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion, and now it seems that the final pieces of the deal have fallen into place. According to a new report from the Associated Press, Chinese officials have finally given the Google-Motorola deal their blessing. C
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The anticipation is palpable. Hundreds of hackers have congregated outside Manhattan's Pier 94, planning, strategizing, and praying to baby Jesus that their fates will be similar to those of Group.me and Docracy. We've seen plenty of Hackathon wnners go on to do incredible things, make millions of dollars, and rise to startup stardom levels, but t
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The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, John Taschek, Gabe Rivera, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — play toe jam football in the shadow of the Facebook IPO. Try as we might, we can't shake the weight of Facebook's dominance of Techmeme and maybe the fate of the global economy. Greece, move over. @gaberivera joins near the 30 minute mark. @scobleizer
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Comcast's plans to do away with its 250 GB data cap and charge users based upon usage marks the end of an era for cable TV providers, and for the online video industry. No longer will users be able to endlessly stream all the content to their hearts desire. Not just that, but the fact that usage-based pricing is arriving at the same time that more,
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My set ritual before going to bed each night is as follows -- turn out the lights, plug in my iPhone, take off my glasses and attempt vainly to nod off. Step two in that process can be a bit of a crapshoot in the dark, but the folks at Scrap Pile Labs have recently kicked off a new Kickstarter campaign for a product called the CordLite that just may
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You may have seen it by now…Google’s concept video about its new Project Glass. These glasses will do what your smart phone will do only without having to hold anything…you actually see your options at the side of your view. You can get directions, send and receive texts, make calls, schedule tasks and even share your view with another person
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UK tabloid newspaper The Daily Mail, has decided to raise the issue of Google's influence on the UK government, after uncovering the fact that Conservative party ministers have held meetings with Google an average of once a month since the General Election two years ago. There have been 23 meetings between Tory ministers and Google since June 2010,
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"Entering terminal count autosequence. 60 seconds to engine fire. #DragonLaunch," Tweeted Elon Musk as his space company was less than a minute away from it's historic flight. But the launch didn't happen. Nothing happened as Long-time NASA commentator George Diller counted down the seconds, "3..2..1......We've had a cutoff. Liftoff did not occur."
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When an email hits our inbox, we know not only who it’s from but their entire web imprint. LinkedIn can point out the profile of the woman you interviewed for a sales role last week and the gentleman you spoke with earlier in the year at a conference. And rest assured that the dining room set you checked out over the weekend at CrateAndBarrel.com
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We’ve all watched from the sidelines as companies have come out in a burst of glory, and then, two years later, spent their venture capital, lost their user base, and failed to monetize. This begs the question - what are the factors that drive a company’s survival, differentiate it, and ultimately make it a winner? In today’s online world, per
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SpaceX, the private space exploration company founded by PalPal and Tesla Motors co-founder Elon Musk, is ready to boldly go where no private company has legitimately attempted to go before: The International Space Station. (Live video of the rocket at Cape Canaveral in Florida is embedded above.)
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Some of you are probably reading this post with ad blocker right now — and to be honest, I don't blame you. Sure, there's the occasional amusing or genuinely useful ad, but not terribly often, so why not install a plugin and avoid the whole mess? Of course, those ads make money, so if ad blockers become widespread enough, it could be a real proble
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Facebook's IPO was obviously the single most discussed topic on Twitter today. The good folks over at social media data platform DataSift monitored what Twitter users were saying about the IPO throughout the day and came up with some interesting conclusions. Turns out, the ups and down of how Twitter's users felt about the stock pretty much mirrored
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Just after the markets closed on its first day of public trading, Facebook amended its S-1 with a complete prospectus detailing how much stock each underwriter got to sell. Morgan Stanley, the lead-left bank, received 162.1 million shares ($6.15 billion worth) followed by J.P. Morgan with 84.8 million ($3.22 billion), and Goldman Sachs pulled down 6
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Mark Zuckerberg's remote ringing of the opening bell and Facebook's initial stock trades were a bit anti-climactic in person at the NASDAQ Marketsite in New York City, as we've written -- NASDAQ is a digital exchange after all, so there's not too much to see visually. But being there was still a great opportunity to talk all things Facebook with D
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GameStop is hurting. Same store sales fell 5%-11% and revenue was down 17% to $2 billion. Profit fell to $72.5 million. Arguably, those are still huge numbers and presumably a new console refresh should push the company out of the doldrums. But what the company has just launched - a new MVNO called GameStop Mobile - is almost inexplicable. GameStop
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While, arguably, you’re not going to convince many kids to give up their Topps or Pokemon cards for these things, it’s nice to know they exist. They’re 3D Printer trading cards featuring some of the best 3D printers in the world. You got your Makerbot Replicator, your UP! Printer, and your Printrbot Plus. You got stats on there, a
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Facebook has just acquired mobile commerce startup Karma, which makes apps for gifting friends and family. The terms of the deal are undisclosed but 16 employees of the startup will be joining Facebook. The purchase will help Facebook build up monetization prowess on mobile platforms -- an area that it had said it's admittedly weak in. With the dea
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The underwriters of Facebook's $16 billion debut on NASDAQ fought to the finish to keep the company's shares above last night's final price of $38 a share. Sources tell us that the syndicate of banks underwriting the deal have been putting in buy orders to keep its price afloat. It's not necessarily bad outcome for Facebook as the company didn't lea
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