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- June 11, 2005
TechCrunch
A high-drama and high-stakes ScamVille exchange over the weekend left Zynga in the penalty box. Facebook put their newest social game, FishVille, on ice for advertising violations. In response, Zynga said they’d pull down all advertising offers until further notice.Zynga’s now saying ...
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Last week Microsoft’s “Ambassador to Startups” Don Dodge was laid off from Microsoft as part of a broad reduction in staff.We, along with countless others, lamented the decision. Dodge was the face of Microsoft for many, many people. And the comments to our post and other blog c...
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It’s that time of year again. OfficeMax and JibJab have just launched the latest edition of ElfYourself, the massively popular website that features dancing elves you can customize to feature the faces of you and your friends. The site, which serves as a promotion for OfficeMax, has turne...
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Professional social network LinkedIn has long had a feature that lets users update their status on their profile. But it’s plainly obvious that LinkedIn users don’t nearly use the status feature for mass communication as frequently as they use Twitter or Facebook for the same purpose...
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Whenever Rupert Murdoch goes back to his home country of Australia, he loosens up and says things to the press (usually his own outlets) that he might not say in the U.S. Of course, everyone in the U.S. picks up on it and it becomes a big story, as it did today after Murdoch told his own Sky New...
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Back in August, we wrote about Shit My Dad Says, the Twitter account of a 28-year-old guy named Justin who literally just tweeted out things his dad said. At the time, he already had over 100,000 followers on Twitter, now he has over 700,000. And now he just landed a TV deal.Yes, you read that ri...
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Earlier, in my review of Apple’s new Magic Mouse, I expressed my confusion as to why Apple wouldn’t incorporate more multi-touch gestures on the device. Certainly, a part of it is the way you hold the thing, but it seems that something like a double and triple finger click would be ea...
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Here’s an interesting factoid. Panera Bread, the national bakery and cafe chain, has blocked all Bit.ly links from users who happen to be using Panera’s free WiFi. In a tweet to user who was inquiring about the issue, Panera’s official Twitter handle responded that the coffee sh...
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While the tech-loving world continues to debate the merits of the Droid following its launch on Friday, it’s pretty safe to say that the Android platform has seen a pretty hefty influx of users as of late. In the past two weeks alone, we’ve seen the aforementioned Droid, it’s ch...
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A not so well thought-out feature – or defect – allows any LinkedIn user to indicate the company they work for has acquired, merged with or become a division of another company without any third-party verification whatsoever. Worse, when a user falsely claims company A has e.g. purcha...
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When Google CEO Eric Schmidt mentioned a few weeks ago that the M&A spigot is now back on at the search giant, he wasn’t talking about a trickle. Today’s announced deal to by mobile ad startup AdMob for $750 million is Google’s largest acquisition since its $3.1 billion pu...
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Don't forget: John and I will be at the Surly Girl Saloon tonight around 6:30 PM. Look at the happy smiles on those faces! That could be you, this time! Feel free to tell us about the cool world-changing projects on which you're working. We love to meet people working on amazing stuff.
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On the verge of rolling out its new geolocation feature, Twitter is thinking ahead. One potentially powerful use for it will be to showcase trending topics happening in specific places. The overall Trending Topic area has long been getting out of control with spam (which Twitter is now working to...
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I’m doing this just because no one really believes the stuff we get hit with here at TechCrunch every day. None of this ever gets posted. But I’m on a roll today, so why not.And no matter how crazy the message, we do try to respond as helpfully as possible. We’re here all week, ...
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After much trial and tribulation, I finally obtained Apple’s new Magic Mouse last week. Following its release, the $70 device was so popular that practically every store in the Bay Area was sold out of them for much of last week even though most were getting new shipments every morning. Sup...
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Discovery Communications is deepening its investment in online content with the launch of science and technology new site DiscoveryNews. Discovery is also launching a companion iPhone app, which costs $0.99 on the App Store. Discovery News was previously a feature within Discovery Channel’s websi...
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OffiSync, the Microsoft Office plugin that allows users to sync their documents easily with Google Docs, has launched a new release today that will make it even more appealing to businesses: support for Google Sites. Google Sites is the search giant’s answer to Microsoft SharePoint, so thi...
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If you want to sell something to TechCrunch, or anyone, the best way of going about it isn’t to call people at their home number, accuse them of dishonesty, and then follow up with an email requesting a clearly unethical trading of services. All those things happened to me in the last five ...
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As a blackberry user, I generally feel a little left out of of the location-based apps world. FourSquare only provides a mobile site for BlackBerry users (but has an Android app). BrightKite has an innovative BlackBerry app, but it’s not nearly as feature-rich as its sister iPhone app. Toda...
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Some things in life are a certainty. Death. Taxes. Lawsuits. An example: If you steal from your customers for half a decade and then force them to sign a no-lawsuit agreement before you give them their money back, you’re going to get sued.And that’s exactly what happened to SnapNames....
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Good news for Irish startups. The Irish government in partnership with Bank of Ireland and Limerick University have announced a new €26m fund for early stage companies.The Bank of Ireland Seed and Early Stage Equity Fund will make investments ranging from €100,000 to €500,000 and will target R...
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Google has just announced that it has acquired AdMob, the mobile ad platform that has been especially popular on the iPhone, for $750 million. This is a big win for the company’s early investors, which include Sequoia Capital and Accel Partners. More recent investors include DFJ and North...
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Last month Skype was in talks to acquire VoIP startup Gizmo5. It was a perfect backup plan in case all that IP litigation didn’t work out. – Gizmo5’s SIP infrastructure could theoretically replace Skype’s proprietary P2P back end.After the Skype settlement, though, Gizmo5&...
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Back in the olden days, long before the advent of electric light, our forefathers dreamt of a better place. They dreamt of running hot and cold water in their wash rooms, wireless telegraphy, and the rise of the horseless carriage. They dreamt of threshing machines that could tie down an acre of ...
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After lengthy negotiations, Electronic Arts closed it’s anticipated acquisition of social gaming startup Playfish for $275 million in cash. An additional $25 million in stock will be set aside for retaining the top talent at the startup, and another $100 million in earnouts are part of the...
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Come back with me to the turn of the century, about 1996. Your humble narrator was working for campus police at Carnegie-Mellon in Pittsburgh, creating FileMaker databases for their police reports. It wasn't uncommon then to see DOS machines sitting beside Windows 95 machines and the web was a pr...
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Xignite, a San Mateo, CA-based provider of on-demand financial market data, today announced a couple of new customers that are working on interesting things, including micro-blogging information service StockTwits and iPhone app developer Turing Studios. Customer wins are one thing, but Xignite b...
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I’d love to have witnessed the scene at eBay’s house back in 2005 when the FedEx guy delivered their exciting new purchase…“Hey, guys! Skype’s arrived!”“Awesome! Quick – open it…”“Wait, what the hell… this isn’t what we...
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Transactional advertising network provider Adgregate Markets, a finalist at the 2008 TechCrunch50 conference is launching ShopCloud, a platform for building portable shopping carts and other e-commerce applications. ShopCloud’s platform lets developers build a variety of applications arou...
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A couple of weeks ago, we put DotBlu (formerly known as BluBet) in the deadpool. The San Francisco startup, which ran an online betting play at launch which later morphed to some sort of social gaming service, discontinued its operations on October 16 despite the startup being backed by a host of...
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As we were all painfully aware, it took AT&T forever to bring MMS to the iPhone. A new app has just been released that hopes to one-up it.Knocking, made by Pointy Heads Software, is basically a photo-sharing app on steroids. With it, you can pretty much instantaneously share up to 100 photos ...
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