Every once in a while we show some of the stats about the feed readers people are using to access TechCrunch content. Since we recently passed a million daily RSS readers, now is a good time for a new update. In June 2006 Firefox, Bloglines and Newsgator were the three largest readers, in that order. Feedburner did an analysis later in 2006 with similar results. Long ago Google reader eclipsed all of those readers. And recently, Outlook has surged as the feed reader of choice. Of our roughly 1.4 million RSS readers, 520,000, or about 38%, come from Outlook. 390,000,...
Kingston bumps thumbdrive capacities to 64GB Space: Astronaut loses grip on tools, finds out it’s even worse than dropping your keys in a lake Review: Zlatoust Diver The thermometer gets a mother’s touch upgrade Nanoscaffolding regrows limbs, organs Contest: Win a copy of Target Limited Edition Shaun White Snowboarding for the Xbox 360...
Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware....
It’s hard to believe that nearly a year has gone by since we gave out those crazy gorilla awards to the best startup and product successes in Silicon Valley and around the world. Some of the photos from last year are here. The Crunchies are back. We are once again partnering with some of our favorite blogs - thank you to co-hosts GigaOm, Silicon Alley Insider and VentureBeat (click the links for their announcements). The Awards Ceremony will be held on Jan. 9, 2009, 7:30 pm at the Herbst Theater across the street from City Hall in San Francisco. The...
It’s not easy being a wrestler. Inside the ring your pounding an opponent’s head against the corner post, but outside the ring it’s hard to meet people. Nobody really wants to be your friend. Not even on MySpace. They say their your friends, but they are not really your friends. Wrestlers aren’t stupid. They know everybody thinks they are just a bunch of clowns. That’s why the company that employs all the wrestlers you see on TV, World Wrestling Entertainment, created WWE Universe, a social network just for them and their fans. Okay, it’s not really a social network....
Even Google is getting into the downsizing spirit. It just announced that it is killing Lively, its browser-baseed virtual worlds that could be embedded into other Websites. Lively launched just last July. The death notice on the site says it will shut down on December 31, so we are adding Lively to the deadpool. Lively just never took off, and was extremely far afield for Google. A post on the Google Blog explains the decision: . . . we want to ensure that we prioritize our resources and focus more on our core search, ads and apps business. We...
Yahoo Glue, a new search results page design that the company has been testing in India, is rolling out to the US market this evening. You can view it at glue.yahoo.com, although Yahoo says it is rolling out in stages, so sit tight if you don’t see it. It’s also a little different than the Indian version, and includes a number of resources beyond simple search results. On a typical query, content from Wikipedia, Yahoo Shopping, Yahoo Answers, blog search results (from Google) and YouTube videos are shown. For the US, Yahoo is starting with a limited set of...
The cutbacks continue, even at seemingly healthy startups. Social recommendation engine Strands let exactly 10 percent, or 14 people go (7 in the U.S. and 7 in Spain), the company confirms. Strands has raised a total of $55 million, still employs 125 people, and is hiring for other positions. It also just announced a mobile version for Nokia S60 phones. Qik, which lets you stream live video from your cell phone, also laid off about 10 percent of its employees, which in its case amounted to five people. We got a tip that the reason for the layoffs is...
In other Mozilla news, Firefox and other Mozilla products hit a major milestone today with the one billionth download of add-on software for the browser. That feat took three and half years. Many of those downloads are never used more than once or twice, of course. But there is no doubt about it that Firefox is major software platform. Just look at StumbleUpon, it was built on top of Firefox. What is atop the current list of most popular add-ons? Adblock Plus, followed by a bunch of download tools. And let’s not forget Greesemonkey at No. 9, which is...
Chinese Democracy, the first new Guns N’ Roses album since 1991, debuts tonight at 9 PM PST exclusively on MySpace Music, where fans can listen to it for free. Well, actually it debuted on BitTorrent a while ago, but we’re not talking about that. Also, the band has previously released two songs, Chinese Democracy and Better, to radio stations and music sites in the past couple of weeks. But tonight is the big debut, and for most people it will be the first time they hear the music. It will be available in 25 countries: US, Canada, Argentina, Mexico, Brazil,...
2007 person-to-person music downloads were worth a staggering $69 billion, and movie/television piracy continues to grow, says a new study. And all that free promotion didn’t cost them a penny. At least, that’s how Techdirt sees it. And I agree. Instead of embracing what might be the largest free marketing giveaway in the history of the world, the music labels instead sue their customers. And ask the social networks for handouts. Somebody over there needs to put their thinking cap on, quit screwing around and just give the damn music away for free with no lawsuit strings attached. Then use...
Apparently a lucky few Gmail users had a “Themes” tab pop up under settings. No longer do you have to suffer through the boring-if-functional standard Gmail interface for the 16 hours a day that you keep the page loaded. Try “Ninja” instead. Thanks for the tip Dan. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0...
New York-based advertising firm MediaWhiz, never one to worry about gray areas when it comes to advertising, has launched a new product today called InLinks. It’s fairly straightforward - advertisers who want their sites associated with specific keywords simply buy ads. Links to those sites are then added to publishers sites whenever those words pop up in content. These aren’t ghost links like Kontera and others include in content - they’re full blown links without any notation (like a nofollow) that they are advertisements meant primarily for SEO juice. Content sites are paid a flat rate per month per ad...
Video infrastructure site Delve Networks launched TroopTube in partnership with the Department of Defense a few days ago as a more secure alternative to YouTube, which the DoD banned in 2007. TroopTube is basically Youtube, but without the embedding feature, and the DoD has moderation and censorship controls. Now Delve Networks CEO says Google is up to no good, trying to convince the DoD that TroopTube won’t scale, and that YouTube’s exclusive arrangement with Barack Obama means the troops won’t be able to watch the president’s weekly talks. “Google is trying to attack TroopTube,” he says. The email is below,...
A team of ex-Googlers, with backing from Y Combinator, the Friendfeed founders and others, have created what might be both the ugliest and most useful group productivity app we’ve seen. Etherpad, a new product from Appjet, launches this morning, and you must try it out. It’s comparable to Google Docs or a wiki, but it’s far more useful. You start off by creating a new workspace. You type basic text on numbered lines at will. Then invite someone else in and have them type as well. Each user’s edits are highlighted a different color. Changes are made in absolute...
Mobile advertising network Apptera has closed a $10.5 million funding round led by Alloy Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Walden International. The company is also announcing that David Karnstedt, Yahoo’s former SVP of North American Sales who has extensive experience in advertising, has joined its board. Apptera offers a suite of audio and visual advertising solutions for companies looking to place ads on mobile devices. The company is behind many of the voice ads when you hear on free 411 services, as well as the ads found on AOL’s Moviefone. The company estimates that its ads reach over 100...
Local review site Yelp is not going to sit around and let competitor CitySearch have even a day to celebrate their new beta launch. CEO Jeremy Stopellman, noticing our Comscore comparison of the services - “According to comScore, Citysearch brought in 14.6 million unique visitors in the U.S in October, compared to 143 million uniques across its ad network. (Yelp, by the way, did 6 million uniques)” - emailed us with some of their internal traffic numbers and stats. Yelp’s Google Analytics stats for the past thirty days show 15.8 million unique visitors, way above the six million Comscore records....
