The TechCrunch Japan TokyoCamp 2009, a demo event for web startups that took place this Friday , was a total blast. No less than 350 people came to the demo pit and meetup, which were co-organized by DESIGN IT!, LLC (a Sociomedia group company that runs TechCrunch Japan) and Nikkei Digital Core (a community under the umbrella of the Nikkei , Japan’s biggest business publication). This time,...
Michael Arrington posted yesterday on mobile offerings still being shown in our new game fishville. I want to explain why this occurred and how we are taking more aggressive steps to ensure this never happens again. zynga has not been able to control the ad content as it is managed by the offer companies that we work with. with regards to yesterday's incident, the offer provider, doubleding, told...
Over at TechCrunch Europe where I’ve been helping out over the last two weeks (that’s why it’s been a quiet around here) I’ve covered two Internet TV-related stories that maybe of interest to last100 readers. Voddler, the Spotify-for-movies, partners with Paramount and Disney Voddler is beginning to garner quite a lot of buzz in Europe, having been [...]
NSFW: After Fort Hood, another example of how ‘citizen journalists’ can’t handle the truth This Techcrunch piece makes some good points, but the video Paul Carr includes in the post makes all the same points with more elegance and fewer reasoning problems. It’s from This American Life . I also love this bit from the very end of the Techcrunch piece. Instead he pointed his camera...
Every once in a while you get to see a mainstream outlet cover a story right alongside a blog, so you can put them up against each other and see why one was so much better than the other. This week TechCrunch and the New York Times (photo) provided just such an object lesson. The issue was a company called Zynga, which makes online games, like FarmVille, that have become incredibly popular on Facebook...
Zynga's most recent Facebook game, FishVille, has temporarily been taken offline by Facebook for advertising violations . This is a relatively light slap on the wrist since the game only launched two days ago and had a couple of thousand users (Update: Zynga says FishVille had 875,000 users yesterday. wow). Zynga's other games, including FarmVille with 63 million monthly users, remain online, despite...
The biggest hassle with business cards is getting the contact information into your address book as fast as possible — that’s where Business Card Reader for the iPhone comes in, reports TechCrunch. Business Card Reader scans and “reads” the picture using ABBYY’s text recognition technology and enters the data into the iPhone or iPod touch address [...]
TechCrunch reviews the website Infectious which you could use to start your own microbusiness. Infectious, a startup that makes high quality decals and skins that let you customize the look of your iPhone, car, laptop, skateboards, and more, is launching a new feature: one off prints of your own custom designs. Users will be able to use [...]
Proving that microloans can help to change the world one little bit at a time, Kiva.org hit a major milestone, TechCrunch reports. Since it’s founding four years ago, it has now made possible $100 million in microloans between individual lenders and entrepreneurs all around the world. The company has brought together 573,000 lenders (people like you [...]
Yoaní Sánchez , Cuba's most famous blogger, who has received countless international awards for her activism, was detained briefly and beaten by Cuban authorities on November 6, along with fellow bloggers, Claudia Cadelo (a Global Voices contributor) and Orlando Luís Pardo Lazo . Bloggers express their views concerning the incident . Yoaní has written [es] about the incident...
Executives from Tudou—one of two companies left fighting it out to be the YouTube of China—were in San Francisco earlier this week to meet with investors and do a little schmoozing. I met up with CEO Gary Wang and COO Sam Lai, who already raised some $85 million from Granite Global Ventures and General Catalyst Partners, and they swore they weren’t here trying to raise more cash....
I'd probably feel slightly smug, if I didn't feel so sick. Smug that after two weeks of me suggesting that social media might not be an unequivocally Good Thing in terms of privacy and human decency , the news has delivered the perfect example to support my view. Unfortunately it's hard to feel smug - hard to feel anything but sadness and nausea - when thirteen innocent people are dead.
Just five days ago Zynga CEO Mark Pincus said mobile subscriptions, among other scammy offers, would be removed from Zynga's popular Facebook and MySpace games. "We have also removed all mobile ads until we see any that offer clear user value," he said. So we were surprised yesterday to see a screen shot clearly showing a mobile subscription ad in a post on InsideSocialGames about the launch...
Yesterday I detailed my quest to find the throngs of Droid fans who had woken up at the crack of dawn to grab a place in line before Verizon unleashed the phone to the masses. Yet despite reports of lines elsewhere, I failed — the Verizon store in Palo Alto was a ghost town, as was the Best Buy down the street. Some commenters took my story and similar reports as an indication that the Droid's...
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