Today brings some rather high-profile recruiting from Google: the director of DARPA, the Department of Defense’s research arm, is leaving after three years of heading the agency to join Google at a “senior executive position.”
The news comes from a DARPA spokesman, who reports that Dugan felt she couldn’t refuse an offer from such an “innovative company.” She has worked at the agency on and off since 1996, and most recently has brought its budget and resources to bear on more practical problems like securing military networks. What role she will play at Google is unknown, but it is probably at least partially security-related. → Read More
Academy Award winning actor Forest Whitaker was at SXSW this past weekend, where his JuntoBox Films studio — which combines crowdsourcing social media technology with traditional film production — announced it has greenlit its first movie. Watch his interview with TechCrunch TV to see him discuss how technology is democratizing the filmmaking process, how Hollywood is slowly getting over its fear of the web, and how many apps he has on his iPhone (spoiler alert: it’s a lot!) → Read More
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To publish a “review” of the Lytro as it is today is, in a way, very premature. But it’s also only fair. The product is shipping and, to an extent, complete. But given the number of features and planned improvements in the pipes, a review today will be obsolete in a few months. Nevertheless, an initial judgment on the device must be made.
So here is what can be said of the Lytro in a form that can only really be called a public beta.
We also recently got to talk with Lytro founder Ren Ng and their director of photography, Eric Cheng, at an event in San Francisco. I cornered them for a few minutes to talk about the product and their plans for the future. Watch the video inside. → Read More
Twitter just announced that it has acquired Posterous, the YCombinator-backed blogging and sharing platform that competed early on with Tumblr.
Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed. Posterous had raised $10.1 million in two venture rounds plus early fundraising with angels. Posterous says its service Spaces will stay up and running and that the company will give plenty of notice to users if they start to change the service. → Read More
Legendary scientist, inventor, futurist, and all-around tech icon Ray Kurzweil is attending the ongoing South By Southwest Interactive conference for the first time ever this year, and TechCrunch TV was very excited to be able to sit down with him for an interview. In this first half of our talk, watch Kurzweil discuss why we need more young entrepreneurs, how today’s consumer app landscape proves his Law of Accelerating Returns, how education is stuck in the 19th century, why privacy isn’t as big of a problem as we think, and lots more.
If your company doesn’t have a Facebook Timeline app yet, you’re late to the party. 3,000 Timeline apps have spawned since Facebook launched the platform 3 months ago, and today Foursquare, VEVO, The Onion, Fandango, BandPage, and more big companies are unveiling theirs to cash in on the free virality. Pinterest and others have already seen wild growth from the platform’s ability to automatically publish to the Facebook Ticker, news feed, and Timeline when users take action.
These new launches, and especially Nike’s, are likely to convince more brands and startups that Timeline app development is worth the investment. That means soon there will be even more apps feeding user behaviors into Facebook’s content feeds and ad targeting engine. → Read More
I usually trash any email that comes my way pitching an iPad case and/or stand. Sorry, but there are just so many of them that they really need to stand out. The Mogul, a Kickstarter project, certainly stands out and just so happens to solve a bit of a pain point, too.
See, the Mogul isn’t your average iPad stand. It’s actually meant to be used as a point-of-sale module in conjunction with Square and (yep, you guessed it) the iPad. → Read More
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Swedish gaming company King.com just acquired Stockholm-based developer Fabrication Games in a big push to expand onto Android and iOS this year.
With the deal, King.com picks up Fabrication’s talent, games and developer tools. Terms weren’t disclosed, but I would assume the acquisition is priced in the talent-range. Fabrication had titles that cropped up on certain game category rankings like Sprinkle (which was developed by Mediocre AB) and Ionocraft Racing, but it lacked an enduring chart-topper. Fabrication had 12 employees and was founded as a spin-off of Jadestone Mobile. → Read More
Today you can help someone escape poverty by trying out microlending platform Kiva, and it won’t cost you a dime. Go to Kiva.org/free where Reid Hoffman has put up $1 million of his money to let 40,000 people give $25 microloans to help those in need start farms and general stores that can support their families. The Kiva Free Trials program hopes to introduce people to the positive impact of microfinance philanthropy, and get them to lend their own money next time.
TechCrunch is proud to work with Kiva to officially announce the Free Trials, and we’re challenging you our readers to see if we can loan out $250,000 by the end of the day. So visit kiva.org/free and share it with friends. Let’s use entrepreneurship to makes the world a better place. → Read More
There has been some speculation about when Facebook might launch an advertising network to run on sites apart from its own, using its trove of data on what its 845 million users like and share.
But while the company has been silent on whether it plans to do this, it has also quietly moved into display ads in the wider world of the Internet — via a series of ads for Facebook itself. And one of its ad network partners, ironically, has also been one of its biggest competitors: Google. → Read More
As everyone knows, multiplayer is better than single player, and as the geeks among us know, there’s a set of multiplayer games, like Minecraft and Urban Terror, that offer software that allows gamers to host their own servers. For games like Minecraft, running your own server means that you don’t have to be subject to the rules and regulations of other hosts — you get to invite all of your friends into your world to play, and you get to set the rules.
While this can make the game experience infinitely more fun, gamers have to rent their own servers for $70 a month, be their own sysadmin, and are thus subject to their system’s RAM and CPU constraints. In other words, for hardware novices, the process can get complicated. This is where Minefold enters into the picture. Minefold, a new Y Combinator startup launching today, wants to be a more consumer-focused Amazon EC2 for the multiplayer gaming world, offering on-demand game servers for a nominal monthly fee ($5). → Read More
Warsaw-based, three-person startup AppCod.es just released new tools that will appeal to mobile app developers, both of which are intent on helping developers achieve better ASO, or App Store Optimization. ASO is basically a new form of SEO, but instead of boosting search engine rankings, it’s about boosting the ranking of your mobile app in iTunes, the Android Market (I mean Google Play…sigh), or another app store.
Today AppCod.es is rolling out two utilities for ASO in iTunes: one, a keyword prediction tool which aims to guess the keywords used by your app’s competition, and two, a tool that predicts your position in the app store for a given keyword. → Read More
BandPage, Facebook’s top app for artists trying to stream and promote their music to fans, now powers 500,000 musician Pages. Just 6 months ago that number was 250,000, showing the rapid shift in focus of bands from MySpace and standalone websites to Facebook where fan retention is better. BandPage also just announced new features that allow listeners to tell friends about favorite songs through their Facebook Timeline and the Ticker feed with a single click.
Publishing to Ticker helped Spotify score massive growth and it could do the same for BandPage. BandPage needs to do whatever it takes to keep growing its artist count since it can’t rely on big checks for custom development work from the world’s most popular acts — a model that’s helping other musician marketing services turn quick profits. → Read More
TxtRoo, a company that was invented and coded into existence from the Stanford StartupBus headed to SXSW in Austin, Texas last week, can best be described as a Yelp for the feature phone market. Like Yelp, which delivers user reviews and other local business information to both web and smartphone users, TxtRoo aims to do the same using SMS text messages.
What’s most interesting about TxtRoo, however, is how quickly it was able to sign up customers. The team had commitments from half a dozen local businesses before the prototype was even finished – about 6 hours into its development. → Read More
Streaming subscription music company Spotify will launch in Germany tomorrow. The company has made no statement in English but is talking to German media outlets, and we’ve confirmed via other sources. Axel Bringéus will be its Director of International Growth based out of Berlin. Local partners include the German edition of Interview magazine and the festival guide Eventim.
Users will face the same 9.99 euro ($13.10; £8.40) monthly fee for the business’s premium service that is charged the EU. Spotify goes up against Simfy (which has funding from DuMont Venture and Earlybird) as well as Rdio and Deezer, which have previously launched in Germany, among other territories.
Right now Spotify has 10 million registered users (over 3 million pay the subscription for ad-free music) and 16 million tracks available and it works in 13 countries worldwide.
→ Read More
Silicon Valley may be a garden of innovation, but many of the seeds were sown by Hollywood. Earlier generations of innovators were inspired by shows such as Star Trek, Lost in Space, and The Jetsons; later generations, by films such as Aliens, Terminator, and Avatar. Hollywood brought science fiction to the masses and gave people big things to dream about. And music spread the inspiration — it was a social network before social networks existed.
These were some of the things we discussed at the Singularity University executive program on the Mulberry Street set at Hollywood’s Fox Studios, last weekend. → Read More
After forming a strange alliance to score control of Nortel Networks’ patents, Apple, Microsoft, RIM, Sony, and Ericsson can finally breathe a sigh of relief. Now that a Department of Justice waiting period has finally expired, the members of the so-called Rockstar Consortium can finally finish up their $4.5 billion acquisition of the one-time telecom giant’s hefty patent portfolio.
→ Read More
A development in the ongoing story about PayPal and requirements it made on e-book distributors to remove certain kinds of erotica from their catalogs: there are signs the eBay-owned company could be preparing to reverse its position as early as this week, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
The digital rights group has been among those meeting with the payments company in recent weeks, as part of a process to get PayPal to reconsider its decision. The last meeting between the EFF and PayPal was on Friday, and its activism director, Rainey Reitman, told TechCrunch that she left with a “good feeling,” with PayPal’s general counsel indicating that they would be “discussing it internally and might even be able to make a public statement in the next week.” → Read More
Nokia is announcing today it plans to shut down its mobile payments service known as Nokia Money in India, as a part of a shift in strategy that will allow the company to more narrowly focus on its handset business and related location-based services offerings. According to a company spokesperson, “the mobile financial services business is not core to Nokia, so we plan to exit the business.”
Nokia Money was available in India, and had previously been expected to roll out to other emerging markets. → Read More
Empire Avenue, while a great service, has been a bit confusing. In fact, the idea itself can kind of boggle the mind — users build up their personal brands via Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks, and allow people to buy and sell virtual shares of human beings. Users can also turn the value of their web-based contributions into actual revenue by tapping into an advertising platform used by the startup to deliver relevant and targeted ads, while buying and selling virtual shares in any other user is free.
It’s actually pretty nifty once you get it, but reaching that point of understanding can be difficult. That’s why Empire Avenue has relaunched with a brand new interface, which is meant to make things easier to use and more straight-forward. → Read More
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