VentureBeat is reporting that Microsoft has agreed to buy semantic search engine Powerset for somewhere around $100 million, which is the price we previously reported was being offered to the company. Our sources have been saying this deal is highly likely since May, but hasn’t actually been signed yet and could still be disrupted by the [...]

What does Yahoo’s latest reorganization all mean, especially in light of the situation with Microsoft still being up in the air? Like yesterday’s assertive letter to shareholders defending its Google deal, Yahoo is trying to show that it is getting on with its life, thank you very much. The announcement is clearly aimed [...]

Have you submitted your application to launch at TechCrunch50 yet? The deadline is tomorrow, Friday, at midnight, so you have about another day and a half to send it in (the application page is here). Three more experts join our panel this week - Mark Cuban, Marc Benioff and Don Dodge. They, along with our previously [...]

Google employees are so special that they even get Japanese space toilets on which to rest their stock options. SFist found these sexy Japanese Toto toilets in Google’s headquarters. They feature front and rear cleansing along with a dryer and some sort of insane wand cleaning system that may be part of Google’s 80-20 projects [...]

Clickpass, a startup that has simplified the OpenID login platform, has built out support for additional third parties that brings the promise of a universal login even closer. Users will now be able to use their Google, Facebook, Yahoo, or Hotmail passwords on any site that includes the Clickpass authentication system. The new Clickpass system requires [...]

Yahoo has announced its anticipated reorganization. As expected executives Hilary Schneider and Ash Patel are consolidating power under president Sue Decker. All product development will come under the responsibility of Patel, a Yahoo veteran and Yang loyalist. Schneider will take over all the advertising sales teams across the company. A third [...]

After looking for a nearly a year, Google has finally found a new chief financial officer to replace outgoing CFO George Reyes. So who’s job will it be to count all of Google’s cash? The lucky winner of what must have been one of the most intense executive searches of the year is [...]

Israeli-based animation site aniBoom is about to announce a $10 million B round, a source tells us. We believe the round was led by Draper Fisher Jurvetson, although the company won’t confirm this. An announcement is expected on Monday. The company previously raised $4.5 million in February, 2007. AniBoom wants to be the [...]

MySpace was the first of the Big Three to announce tools for third party sites to integrate MySpace user data into their services (called, collectively, Data Availability). A day later Facebook announced Facebook Connect, then came Google Friend Connect three days after that. Today MySpace is fully launching Data Availability (look for it this afternoon at [...]

Last week Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang literally dropped off the grid for a couple of days, leaving his top execs (other than, presumably, President Sue Decker) in the dark. As I wrote on Saturday, no one could locate Yang, and, given the sheer number of high level departures and looming reorganization, those remaining in their [...]

CrunchGear’s Peter Ha got a chance to spend a day at the Dyson test labs in Malmesbury where he spoke with James Dyson about his design and engineering principles. One of his most important principles? The CEO of the company shouldn’t be able to easily break the products. Watch this hilarious/stunning/crazy video and ask yourself: [...]

Citizen journalism seems all the rage these days, with normal people breaking news to the world with their mobile phones and portable computers. News sites like GroundReport and CNN’s iReport are offering users outlets for their eyewitness stories, and with emerging mobile broadcasting products like Twitter and Qik, we’re only going to see the [...]

MySpace used to be notorious for simply banning third party widgets that didn’t play nice (”not playing nice” generally meant any kind of advertisements in the widgets, but it was very arbitrary). Those days are long gone. Maybe now, though, Facebook is having a go at it. Until now Facebook combated black hat applications by [...]

New startup Instinctiv launches today and simultaneously announces a first round of angel financing. The company’s product, Instinctiv Shuffle, is an iPhone application (jailbroken iPhones only, for now), that watches your listening habits to make a smart guess about which song you’ll want to listen to next. It claims to guess your mood and [...]

Jingle Networks, the operator 1-800-Free-411, will announce tomorrow that they’ve become profitable on a per call basis - a huge milestone and proof of concept for a startup that is trying to destroy entrenched competition by offering free 411 calls. This is a company we’ve been tracking since 2006 when call volume really began to [...]

Xobni, the email startup that we’ve described as “The Superplugin for Outlook”, has partnered with LinkedIn to automatically pull contact information from the popular professional network. Xobni will now draw from public profiles on the LinkedIn network, displaying information about contacts’ employers, job titles, and pictures as part of the plugin’s sidebar. Xobni’s sidebar [...]

Eyealike, a video and image recognition company, has released an update to its ‘Eyealike Faces’ product that makes it easier for users to find their ideal match on dating sites. Eyealike Faces uses image matching technology to compare faces across databases consisting of millions of photos - the idea being that you can upload [...]

Should the Internet be owned and maintained by the government, just like the highways? Vint Cerf, the “father of the Internet” and Google’s Internet evangelist, made this radical suggestion while he was sitting next to me on a panel yesterday about national tech policy at the Personal Democracy Forum. Maybe he was inspired [...]

Internet-giant Amazon has acquired Fabric.com, an online fabric store that calls itself “The Place To Go When You Sew”. According to the press release, the deal will allow Fabric.com to expand its selection of sewing materials while giving Amazon a better catalog of hobby and craft materials. The cost of the deal was [...]

In a letter to shareholders that reminds me of the saying “why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free,” Yahoo Chairman Roy Bostock and CEO Jerry Yang explain why it chose a search deal with Google over Microsoft. For the record, we agree - given a choice between the Google [...]

TripSay, the site that uses social recommendations to guide users through the plethora of travel information on the web, has introduced a number of new features that it hopes will improve the site’s accuracy and encourage collaboration. The site now features leaderboards that should encourage users to become “experts” in their region, which will [...]

Last February we hinted at South San Francisco startup Rocketon’s plan to release a virtual world that spanned the web. At the time, it appeared as though the company was pursuing an embeddable widget strategy. But instead of integrating virtual worlds into webpages, it has actually placed one on top of them so that avatars [...]

Wix, the browser-based designer that lets users create Flash-based widgets and full-scale webpages, has launched in public beta. The site specializes in creating colorful Flash pages without requiring any coding, and seems to appeal most to “MySpacers” looking to add some flair to their sites (Wix does have some more professional templates for businesses). [...]

Polls are popular on the Web because they are interactive without requiring too much effort. They are also a good way to collect a lot of data from users across the Web. SodaHead, a startup founded by former MySpace executives Jason Feffer and Michael Glazer, announced an $8.4 million series B investment today. [...]

What are venture capitalists looking for? If you are a startup entrepreneur looking for funding, it’s always a good idea to know what investment themes a VC is interested and tailor your pitch to those themes. Yesterday morning, I saw presentations from three venture firms—Union Square Ventures, DFJ Gotham Ventures, and First Round [...]

Wanted Exclusive Trailer HD MySpace and TechCrunch are hosting a special pre-screening of the new Angelina Jolie film “Wanted” on Monday, June 23 in San Francisco, four days before the official June 27, 2008 release. The theatrical release of “Wanted” is promoted as part of the MySpace Black Curtain Screening program. MySpace is providing the TechCrunch [...]

The New York Times’ Saul Hansell has now written three articles defending the Associated Press and their attempts to broaden content rights beyond what copyright laws allow. The A.P., in short, doesn’t want anyone quoting more than four words from their articles without paying, and they’ve been threatening to sue (and actually suing) parties who [...]

Powerset, the natural language search engine that partially launched in May, has released a mobile version of their site that allows users to quickly search Wikipedia from their iPhone. Since the release of the iPhone a number of sites including iPodia and Wapedia have released optimized versions of Wikipedia (though none actually made by the online [...]

If you don’t have an all-you-can-eat subscription plan for your mobile phone that includes text messages, those messages can really add up on your bill. Especially if you are a teenager. Or a Twitter addict. Now there is a way to bypass those costly text-message fees when you are online. A [...]

Despite getting off to a slow start yesterday, the official release of the Firefox 3 browser was downloaded 8.3 million times (that’s the unofficial tally as of 11:16 AM PT today). Mozilla beat its goal of 5 million downloads by 3 million and set a new world record! All right, there was no [...]

ClickTale, a hosted website analytics solution that has provided a range of solutions from user experience videos to interaction heatmaps, is releasing a new tool today for identifying pain spots in online forms. The new Forms Analytics software, according to ClickTale, addresses three areas in particular: - Which fields take the longest to complete - Which fields [...]

Louis Vuitton has partnered with Soundwalk to produce a series of surreal audio tours that whisk listeners through some of China’s most well-known cities: Beijing, Hong Kong, and Shanghai. The tours offer a strange and captivating mix of music, sound effects, and narration that are sure to enhance any traveler’s visit to the country. [...]

Interview with FriendFeed Steve Gillmor and I did a video interview with Bret Taylor from FriendFeed. There are some interesting responses and content in here and it expands on a few points that were discussed during a panel today at the Supernova 2008 conference. To begin with, Bret states that they re-thought how FriendFeed could work as [...]

Xoopit, the social webmail plugin that indexes your Gmail account’s media attachments, has launched Gmail Media Search. The new feature compliments Gmail’s standard text search by including a sidebar that lists file attachments, photos, and videos. The first 500 TechCrunch readers to sign up here will gain access to the service, which is [...]

The MySpace redesign that Michael wrote about last week is now live to all of its users. The design is much cleaner, with fewer tabs across the top of the homepage and drop-down menus for everything else. Navigation in general, has been completely revamped to reduce the number of clicks it takes to [...]

Today is Jerry Yang’s first anniversary as CEO of the company he founded. There will be lots of bad news coming out about the company in the coming weeks as more executives depart, Yahoo releases quarterly earnings and Google and Microsoft continue to play tug-of-war with the company’s remaining assets. So as a brief interlude, we [...]

Covestor, a social investing site where people share the performance of their real stock portfolios, came out of private beta this morning. Now anyone can join, and it is welcoming voyeurs who only want to watch other’s performance but not share their own. This should broaden the appeal of the site and provide [...]

I wrote about twitturly in April. The service scans Twitter, looks for links that people are talking about then organizes them by popularity on the home page, and the stories then degrade over time. Anyone who uses Digg, TechMeme, Reddit or other news aggregators will feel at home there. Right now, for example, the page [...]

OKCupid, a free online dating site, found that users were not only interested in creating and taking its tests to establish their compatibility with others. They were also using them for a range of plutonic purposes out of general curiosity about themselves and how they compared to friends. So the site spun off a new web [...]

It is not easy being No.2. As we hinted yesterday, Reddit, the news voting site that was bought by Conde Nast in 2006, is making the code behind its site open source. (The code can be found here). That means anyone can now make their own Digg-like site. Not that there [...]

Microsoft is going after the $70 billion spent on TV ads every year. This morning it announced that it will acquire Navic Networks, a company based in Waltham, Massachusetts that delivers interactive ads across cable TV networks. The price was not disclosed, but a source close to the company pegs it at between [...]

Kaltura, the open-source video platform, has released a new version of its MediaWiki extension that allows users to embed and edit video, images, and audio on wiki pages. MediaWiki is a wiki software package that was initially developed for Wikipedia and has since been used by a number of other sites. Kaltura says that the [...]

The TechCrunch50 conference in San Francisco is just around the corner. And while we are busy reviewing early applications for new startups that will be launching there, it’s time to announce a few more industry experts who will judge and discuss each of the presenting startups. The previously announced panelists are here: Marc Andreessen, Roelof Botha, [...]

Feeds and commenting aggregator fav.or.it has finally come out of the door into public beta, reports TechCrunch UK. It has a large number of new features aimed at simplifying interaction with news sites and blogs. Founder Nick Halstead has now focused on the core goal of making feed reading and commenting as mass market friendly [...]

Online broadcasting continues to make headway against the monolithic cable companies as more sports fans turn to the web for their fix. This year’s Wimbledon tournament will be streamed online by MediaZone at Wimbledon LIVE beginning June 23rd. An all access pass to the tournament costs $25, but you can grab one of [...]

If Yahoo Local were a standalone startup, it might look like Center’d. Partly that is because CEO Jennifer Dulski used to be the general manager in charge of Yahoo Local. Center’d, which publicly launches today, is a mixture of an event-planning/invitation site and a highly targeted local search engine, with a little social networking [...]

California’s Department of Public Health has issued cease and desist letters to 13 genetic testing startups - most notably 23andMe, which Michael tried out earlier this year. The C&D’s are mandating that the labs demonstrate that they have been certified by both the state and federal government, and, perhaps more importantly, that all genetic [...]

LinkedIn has raised $53 million from Bain Capital Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Greylock Partners, and Bessemer Ventures. The investment values the business social network at just over $1 billion. We reported in early May that Allen & Co was out trying to pitch LinkedIn at that valuation. It turns out the company was not actually working with [...]

Today at the Supernova conference there was a panel about who owns the social graph. The panelists were Kevin Marks from Google, Joseph Smarr from Plaxo and Dave Morin, Facebook’s Senior Platform Manager. The conversation turned very interesting when moderator Tantek Celik pointed out a post by David Recordon that showed how Facebook is blocking [...]

Social news website Reddit will be making an announcement at its invite-only party tomorrow in San Francisco. Invites include the image above, prominently featuring a mysterious penguin alongside the company’s logo (the alien thing). So what are they getting at? Penguins have long been associated with the open-source OS Linux, stemming from Linus Torvalds’s [...]

EchoStar (now known as DISH Network Corporation) was dealt yet another blow in its ongoing patent battle with Tivo as the U.S. Appeals Court ruled against them. The dispute involves EchoStar’s alleged infringement of Tivo’s TimeWarp patent, which allows users to record one program while watching another. Tivo applied for the patent in [...]

Following Michael’s post the other day about the future of social networking, we have heard of several more ways the mobile, location-aware nut is being cracked already. One of these is an “experiment” by MyBlogLog started at eTech and SXSW that leverages Bluetooth technology to discover the people around you. The Java-based service, previously named [...]

Google’s data infrastructure is massive and spread across the world. All that Web crawling, indexing, and searching takes enormous amounts of computing power, not to mention everyone pounding away at Gmail, Google Apps, Blogger, Google Reader, and every other project dreamed up at the Googleplex. But where are all of these data centers [...]

The Associated Press Online Video Network (OVN), a joint project between the AP and Microsoft, has implemented a new syndicated video feature that will allow AP affiliates around the world to easily share content with each other’s websites. Members are able to selectively choose which affiliates will be allowed to use their media, [...]

Last night, Microsoft pushed out a ton of new features to Windows Live Maps, including a face-lift to some of its 3-D cities (Las Vegas, Dallas, Denver and Phoenix), the ability to export your collections to GPS devices and GeoRSS feeds (which means I can make custom maps for my Dash GPS), support for 3D-map [...]

With the excitement brewing about our Meet-Up on May 1 in New York, we’ve decided to slowly open up RSVPs to about 200 more people in the expectation that we’ll have a bigger venue picked by the middle of next week. Sponsorships are lining up quite nicely and we look forward to some amazing giveaways [...]

We all know by now that if you could vote on the Internet, Barack Obama would already be president. His Website has always attracted more traffic than those of other candidates. Unaffiliated video-endorsement site YouBama popped up spontaneously to collect video endorsements from supporters. MoveOn.org is getting its constituents across the [...]

San Diego based V-Enable, a free 411 service provider we first wrote about in December is celebrating April 11 (4/11) with a new product that adds real humans to the mix. FreeMobile411 (available at both freemobile411.com and fm411.mobi) expands on V-Enables previous handset only offering by providing any mobile free 411 service complete with the regular [...]

Gartner analysts Michael Silver and Neil MacDonald told a conference audience yesterday that Microsoft’s Windows product is collapsing and must make radical changes to its operating system or risk becoming a has-been. They specifically pointed out the slow adoption rate by businesses - just 6% to date - and the fact that the Vista code [...]

TechCrunch reader Nicolas Hoizey noticed a blog post on the official Google Docs Blog today written by Andrew Cheng, a Google Marketing Manager. Hoizey sent us the NetNewsWire screen shot above (click for large view). The post, based on the screen shot, appears to be a simple to do list. But the post was removed [...]

Google has hired boutique investment bank Qatalyst Group to provide advice on the ongoing battle between Microsoft and Yahoo. Qatalyst Group is headed by colorful Silicon Valley investment banker Frank Quattrone, who as we noted in March has returned to the Valley after spending years in the wilderness fighting obstruction of justice charges. Quattrone was head technology [...]

In fine Flickr tradition, users are protesting against the latest change at Flickr, Tuesday’s introduction of video. Over 24,000 members have joined the We Say NO to Videos on Flickr group and NO VIDEO ON FLICKR!!! has 10,000 members. Complaints against video on Flickr range from slowing Flickr down, lack of community consultation and video [...]

Earlier today, venture capitalist Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures wrote a post expressing concern that Web startups tend to languish after they are bought by big companies. To help make his point, Wilson reproduced the comScore chart above, which suggests that the number of people visiting the bookmarking service del.icio.us, which is owned [...]

The Facebook Beacon controversy may not be making headlines any more, but the privacy concerns it raised still linger. According to this post about MyDataIsMyData, an upcoming privacy-monitoring service sponsored by classifieds site Flugpo, Beacon may still monitor traffic and personal data, even if a user has opted-out of the system. In [...]

Unlike dating in the real world where friends and family provide introductions and serve as wingmen, online dating is usually a very solitary experience. Singles browse through profile after profile (perhaps in addition to filling out tedious questionnaires and compatibility tests) in hopes that they’ll stumble upon someone with a mutual attraction. Engage is a [...]

Interesting news coming out of Washington D.C. today around the addition of Google advertisements on Yahoo search result pages. House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, Jr. (D-MI) (pictured) and Judiciary Ranking Member Lamar Smith (R-TX) made a joint statement saying that the deal “further underscore[s] the need for a hearing on the state of [...]

Tonight’s TechCrunch MeetUp in LA co-hosted with PopSugar is sold out. For the 2,000 of you coming (and 500 on the wait list), here are the final details that you need to know. MySpace will be spinning MySpace Music artists for us all night, they’re bringing in celebrity DJ Perry Ferrell for a special appearance. [...]

Everybody’s got an opinion, and if you can collect them together that can be worth quite a bit of money. Angie’s List, one of the largest sites for local service provider ratings, has received $35 million from Battery Ventures, bringing its total funding to $48M. Battery will now hold a minority stake in [...]

It was only a matter of time before someone created an online video-shopping marketplace. Mix together eBay and YouTube and you get Shopflick, a Los Angeles-based startup in private beta that wants to bring the art of video selling to the Web. Sellers can set up shop with their own page highlighting their [...]

Fon, the Spanish startup that wants to bring free WiFi across the planet, just raised $9.5 million (six million Euros) in a C round led by Coral Capital Management. Also investing was British Telecom (which struck a distribution partnership with Fon last October), Google (a previous investor), investment bank Allen & Co., founder Martin [...]

mediaFORGE has launched a new interactive ad platform that marries banner ads and widgets. mediaFORGE’s widget focused offering adds fully customizable widgets as a rollover to traditional ads. As visitors roll over the ad, a flash-based widget appears allowing users interact with content, be it shopping, browsing specials, deals, viewing videos or pictures, or listening to [...]

Dimdim is an open source alternative to proprietary web conferencing packages like WebEx and GoToMeeting. We first wrote about them back in September 2006 when they were offering an alpha version of their on-premise solution. Today the company is releasing a hosted version of that solution that requires no setup to use - not even a [...]

Design guru James Dyson talks about design versus engineering. It’s was a little noisy at the event but getting opportunity to talk to the guy who made our favorite vacuum talks about the need for US/UK engineers and the rise of the East as an innovation center… and rugby. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the [...]

From Doug Aamoth at CrunchGear: Hey what’s another box underneath your TV, right? Especially when it’s got movies streaming directly from Movielink and Blockbuster, yeah? According to Reuters, Blockbuster “is developing a set-top device for streaming films directly to TV sets and is expected to announce the offering sometime this month.” So we’ll have another Vudu-like hardware [...]

Are you feeling Twitter overload, or just sick of hearing about it? Blogger/Cartoonist/Ad Man Hugh McLeod feels the same way. He illustrated a post titled Why I Deleted My Twitter Account with the following cartoon: Kind of says it all. CrunchBase Information Twitter Information provided by CrunchBase Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Sprint has a new website up called My Cell Style that asks you a few questions and then tells you what kind of mobile phone personality you have. I took the quiz and answered the questions honestly. What does your cell phone say about you? According to a new website launched this week, if you’re sporting [...]

The day before yesterday I showed the above video (it has now been viewed nearly 100,000 times), which shows some jaw dropping examples of next generation image manipulation, and said “I want this in PhotoShop immediately.” Well, that may be happening sooner rather than later. Co-inventor Shai Avidan has now joined Adobe and will work [...]

The pace of rumors and leaks around the fabled Google Phone is picking up, suggesting that Google is making a real push to launch something early next year and is no longer trying to keep everyone quiet. Yesterday CrunchGear got confirmation from a senior (and anonymous) HTC exec that they’ve created some twenty devices for Google [...]

Get ready for the next mini run specialty lego set from Podbrix - this time it’s the “Young Woz and Jobs Playset” and goes on sale on Wednesday (8/29) at 6 pm PST: Re-creating the early years of Woz and Jobs collaboration the Young Woz and Jobs Playset is a 300 unit limited numbered edition and [...]

CNN.com and Google have announced an agreement that will see Google’s AdSense become the exclusive text link advertising provider on CNN.com. The deal will also open up the extensive inventory on CNN.com to Adwords’ advertisers. Senior VP and GM of CNN.com David Payne said the deal would help deliver relevant ads to CNN users, “enhancing their overall [...]

Videohybrid, a site we first linked to in April as part of a broader post on online video piracy, has relaunched with a new version that is just asking for trouble. Videohybrid 3.0 marries Q&A functionality with social voting. Users are now able to submit movies, and TV shows they are looking for online, other users [...]

Israeli startup MyHeritage was a bit of a sleeping giant. Until newcomer Geni came along and shook up the genealogy world with its slick new viral family tree application. Geni quickly reached 5 million people profiles and a monster $100 million valuation just a few months after launching. MyHeritage has been around since 2005. They’ve quietly [...]

Changes to the Digg template and feature set discussed by Kevin Rose August 22 are now live. The biggest change with the new look Digg is the inclusion of video on the front page. Other changes include tweaks to page and story summary layouts, streamlined navigation, and more customization options. Stories are now able to be buried [...]

Last week Facebook updated their developer platform to restrict some of the more egregious abuses of users by application developers - bait and switch profile advertisements and friend spamming. Today they announced additional changes. And Facebook also announced that they are changing the way applications are measured to show user engagement instead of just how [...]

Mesa Dynamics has announced the alpha preview release of Amnesty Hypercube, a desktop platform for web widgets. Amnesty Hypercube allows users to use web widgets, such as those provided by Google Gadgets, Pageflakes, Widgetbox and others on their desktop in a similar fashion to Apple’s Dashboard, Yahoo Widgets, Google Desktop and the Vista Sidebar. The theory goes [...]

Jaxtr has raised a $10 million Series A round led by August Capital with Mayfield Fund, Draper Richards, Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Luxemburg-based Mangrove Capital participating. They’ve also doubled their registered user base over last month, totalling 1 million users. They plan on getting to a break even point on the investment and to total [...]

IT software maker SpiceWorks just closed an $8 million in series B financing. The funding round was led by Shasta Ventures with participation from Spiceworks series A investor, Austin Ventures. Their series A was $5 million. Shasta Ventures co-founder and managing director, Ravi Mohan, and former Dell senior executive, John Hamlin, have joined the Spiceworks [...]

Social bookmarking service turned Q&A style site Wis.dm was taken $5 Million in a round led by North Bridge Venture Partners. Wis.dm was founded by uDate founder Martin Clifford. North Bridge’s Michael Skok will join the Wis.dm board as part of the deal. Wis.dm provides a simple yes/no question service which aims to avoid long answers to [...]

If you are into the social music scene, bookmark ContraStream, a new music discovery engine, and go back to it on September 3 when they launch. The site promises to help users find good music quickly. Artists upload indie music and others vote on it Digg-fashion to push the good stuff to the top of the [...]

YouTube is in a spot of bother in Germany for hosting Nazi related material uploaded by users. Clips include scenes from the 1940 Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda film Jud Suess and music videos German far-right rock band Landser. A German parliamentarian was quoted as saying that YouTube hosting these films “amounts to aiding and abetting incitement of these [...]

I’ve been beating up on MyLiveSearch for months now. The startup promises to create the first real time search engine, where results are indexed literally as the search is conducted. It all started back in May when the unknown startup got big press in Australia as a search startup that “Google is keeping a close eye [...]

If you felt a little green with envy when Disney bought juvenile virtual world Club Penguin for $700 million in cash and earn out, this could be your chance to grab a piece of the virtual pie. WhuddleWorld, Inc., creator of eponymous online hangout for kids WhuddleWorld, was forced to shut down in April after running [...]

Online photo editors keep getting better and better. For hardcore image manipulation, desktop software like Photoshop or Gimp will always have its place, but online editors are free, easy to use and a lot of fun. We covered most of the online editors back in February (Fauxto, Picnik, Picture2Life, Preloadr, PXN8 and Snipshot). But a [...]

KickApps, provider of a platform for building white label social networks, will announce today that it has taken two initiatives to make the social networks hosted on its platform more accessible to iPhone users. First, all videos uploaded to KickApps affiliate networks will be viewable on the iPhone despite the device’s lack of Flash support. [...]

“Meet no friends, attend no events and make no connections.” NoSo, short for No Social, is more of an art project and cultural backlash than an actual startup. You join, get a user number (everything is anonymous) and then create and/or join “NoSo’s,” which are held wherever the organizer chooses to have it: parks, cafes, street [...]

This image resizing and manipulation demonstration is sort of jaw dropping, particularly as the video goes on. The related paper, written by Dr. Ariel Shamir and Dr. Shai Avidan is available here. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Above is part 3 of a 3 part Robert Scoble video blog series on “Why Mahalo, TechMeme, and Facebook are going to kick Google’s 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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]