Home / techcrunch.com rss archive / August-26-2007


Google Will Be Beaten By Facebook, Mahalo: Scoble
Above is part 3 of a 3 part Robert Scoble video blog series on “Why Mahalo, TechMeme, and Facebook are going to kick Googles butt in four years.” To see the other parts scroll on the player; Part 2 at around the 6 minute mark gets to the main points*.Essentially Scoble argues that Google is [...]

AllofMP3 To Rise From The Dead
The owners of the now infamous cut price Russian MP3 retail site AllofMP3 have posted that the site will soon recommence trading.The announcement follows a Russian court decision August 15 that found AllofMP3’s previous CEO was not guilty of breaching Russian copyright laws, and therefore the AllofMP3 service was legal.EMI, NBC Universal and Time Warner [...]

All New Bloglines Launches in Beta
Bloglines, the grandfather of web based RSS readers, launched a new beta site this evening at beta.bloglines.com. Like everyone else these days, the most notable new feature is an Ajax customizable home page where users can drag and reorder feeds for a quick view.Bloglines now has three viewing options - quick view (the new Ajax [...]

Twitter Adds Gmail Import Feature
Buried by the news this week of Twitter adding search was another Twitter feature release: invite friends.The new invite friends option in Twitter allows users to invite friends by adding an email address or by importing Gmail contacts.Twitter investor Fred Wilson writes that to date “Twitter has made it nearly impossible to find friends on [...]

Yahoo Mail Out of Beta; New Features
The new Yahoo Mail interface went into public beta in September 2006, although Yahoo was testing it long before that. Tonight Yahoo takes the “beta” label off of the product and makes it the default interface for all new Yahoo mail accounts. Yahoo mail already has an integrated RSS reader and instant messaging. They also [...]

Could The GPhone Be Nigh?
Todays completely unsubstantiated rumor comes from Rediff News, a usually well respected source of news based in India. Rediff is reporting that the Google Phone is set to be launched in 2 weeks time! The GPhone is said to simultaneously launch in both Europe and the United States, with the only thing standing in Google’s [...]

Is Orkut A Social Networking Heavyweight? Comscore Says Yes.
The upcoming Orkut redesign prompted us to check out Orkut’s page view numbers according to Comscore. U.S. Comscore data shows, as expected, barely a blip from Orkut (Facebook shown for comparison). Orkut has 425 million monthly page views compared to 15 billion for Facebook:But, wow, take a look at the worldwide Comscore numbers - Facebook [...]

MocoSpace Has Strong Growth; Race To Be MySpace For Mobile
Forget watching the big social networks slug it out for market share. People want to take their social networks with them when they step away from the computer. That means applications have to be mobile friendly.Most of the big networks have mobile versions of their site, with stripped down functionality. Facebook has, hands down, the [...]

Finding DRM-Free Music Online
Over the past half year we have seen arguably the most significant change in the online music industry since Apple launched their iTunes store in 2003. Following Steve Jobs’ open letter clarifying Apple’s position on digital rights management (DRM) in Februrary, major record companies have begun providing their music online free of piracy protection mechanisms.The [...]

Check This Guy Out
Bill Snitzer, one of the tech guys at BitGravity, is driving to Los Angeles and showing it live on the Internet. He’s got a webcam up showing the drive and a Google Map mashup with a GPS device showing his progress.Bitgravity, located in Burlingame, California, hasn’t officially launched. But the company is the content delivery [...]

YouBeQB Launches - Predict Game Plays, Win Points
YouBeQB is a new Football game playing site that will snatch up even more time from fantasy sports junkies (see Screaming Sports and FleaFlicker for examples of some of the new thinking around fantasy sports). Watch a game on TV and play along against other players by trying to predict the next play. Users can [...]

Intuit Shuts Down Zipingo. Yelp Winning This Space Through Attrition
Zipingo, the small business review site launched by Intuit in late 2005, shut down yesterday. When it launched, Zipingo competed with a slew of other startups that were targeting local business reviews. Of the three that we mentioned - Yelp, Judy’s Book and Insider Pages - only one, Yelp, remains in it’s original form. Judy’s [...]

Now That The iPhone Can Be Unlocked, Will Apple Try To Block The Hack?
For those who might have missed it: Engadget has the scoop on a new software solution that unlocks Apple’s iPhone, allowing it to be used on any mobile carrier worldwide (presuming of course they run a 2G GSM network).The creators of the iPhone hack (iPhoneSimFree.com) claim that the hack is “restore and upgrade resistant”; essentially [...]

Orkut Redesign. Borrrrrring
When I wrote about the upcoming Orkut redesign yesterday I was hoping for something a little more…I don’t know. Inspiring? Instead we get new icons and rounded corners. I’d love to hear what some of the designers out there think about Orkut.The new look for the second biggest social network on the planet is below. [...]

Eventbee: AdSense for Events Has Busy Plans
Eventbee an event management startup out of Sunnyvale, CA has been a busy little bee lately. They are rumoured to be launching two Facebook apps (one for event registration and one for event recommendation) in the next week or so (who isn’t?). They are also developing a channel on Ustream.tv to cover local events. The [...]

Attack Of The Fake Bloggers
Whilst Fake Steve Jobs has gained the most attention in the fake personal blog scene, a number of other fake blogs have been launched this year. Here’s a quick run down of a few that might be worthy of adding to your feed reader…or maybe not.The Secret Diary of Steve JobsNo list of fake blogs [...]

Saturday Morning: Im Watching Tubecast
Good find over at Go2Web2 - Tubecast.tv is a new Internet video startup that, like others, is building a user interface layer on top of the online video services like YouTube, Veoh, etc.For the most part the site has grabbed a lot of content from those sites and organized it into channels ranging from music [...]

See All Sex Offenders In Your Neighborhood
Vision 20/20 offers a free web based mashup of sex offender data and Windows Live Maps.Users simply add their address, city and/ or zip code to the Vision 20/20 site, and then the locations of sex offenders in the immediate vicinity are displayed over a map. Clicking on each sex offender leads to a profile [...]

Is The Internet Dead And Boring?
Mark Cuban wrote Friday that he believes the internet to be “dead and boring.”Cuban argues that:“Some of you may not want to admit it, but that’s exactly what the net has become. A utility. It has stopped evolving. Your Internet experience today is not much different than it was 5 years ago….Web 2.0 is proof [...]

Dapper to Launch Instant Facebook AppMaker
This Tuesday, Israel-based Dapper will launch the private beta of Facebook AppMaker, a new tool that the company claims will provide people with a dead simple way to create new Facebook applications. At its core, Dapper allows users to create API’s called “Dapps” by selecting data from Websites, RSS/XML feeds, Google Gadgets, and more. Each [...]