Today was Duncan Riley’s last day at TechCrunch, and he will be greatly missed. Duncan joined us exactly one year ago and was our most prolific writer, covering tech and startup news seven days a week. He is the author of our highest trafficked post ever, and, based on TechMeme headline counts, he is the Go to site
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- » Japan’s Mixi: A Social Network As A Purely Local Phenomenon
- Japan’s biggest social network is called Mixi, launched in February 2004 by the company of the same name. Drawing in one in five web users in the country, Mixi now boasts over 15 million members. The site ranks sixth on Alexa Japan and racks up over 14 billion page views monthly. Google Trends for Websites
- » Tesla Motors Unveils Jaw-Dropping Menlo Park Showroom
- Tesla Motors, the automobile startup with backers that include Sergey Brin and Larry Page, held a party tonight to mark the launch of its Menlo Park storefront. The store, which is the company’s second, will be open to the general public beginning this Tuesday.Despite Tesla Motors’ well deserved reputation as a high-end car manufacturer,
- » Startup Job Site Gets Backing From Y Combinator, Relauches As Startuply
- New Y Combinator startup Startuply launches today. It’s a free job listing service aimed squarely at small startups, which have a lot of trouble getting the attention of new engineering graduates over the noise of the brand recognition and recruiting efforts of larger companies like Google and Microsoft.Startuply is actually a fresh relaunch of Jowba,
- » Finalist In McDonalds/MySpace Jingle Contest Is Former McDonalds Armed Robber
- Well, here’s something that’s so ridiculous it couldn’t be made up. McDonald’s teamed up with MySpace to create a new jingle for the 40th anniversary of the Big Mac. The original song (two all beef patties, special sauce, lettuce…) was created back in 1974. Over 1,000 user created songs and videos were submitted - the
- » This Week on TechCrunch Elevator Pitches
- A few weeks back we launched Elevator Pitches, our community video project that allows entrepreneurs to pitch their startups through 60 second YouTube videos. Since then we’ve received a number of of pitches covering everything from a fandom portal to a site focusing on group based text messaging.Above, we’ve embedded the most popular of the
- » Facebook Sues German Social Network StudiVZ
- Facebook is pursuiting social networks it believes have copied their design or features by suing German social network StudiVZ. The Financial Times has reported that Facebook have filed a suit in the Californian Supreme Court against the German company for what it claims is an infringement of Facebooks “look, feel, features and services”. StudiVZ claims
- » What Will Facebook Announce at Its F8 Developer Conference Next Week? Let the Speculation Begin.
- Next Wednesday is Facebook’s F8 developer conference, and speculation is swirling about what Facebok might announce at the event. Last year, CEO Mark Zuckerberg kicked off the Facebook Platform for Web app developers, which is now its’ own mini-industry. So what will Facebook announce this year? We’ve suggested that Facebook might take the
- » Fighting For Its Life, Yahoo Uses Its Homepage To Battle Carl Icahn
- Yahoo is pulling out its biggest gun in the showdown with Carl Icahn: the Yahoo homepage itself. Right now on Yahoo.com, the single most-visited page on the Web (with 304 million unique visitors worldwide in May, according to comScore), there is a big purple button the third box down aimed squarely at Yahoo shareholders.
- » You Have Three Days To Check Out Wuala’s ‘Social Grid’ Storage
- Wuala, the innovative P2P social grid storage coming out of Switzerland, is doing a sneak preview of its public beta from now until Monday evening, after which it will close until the full launch on August 14. It’s worth checking this out before the window closes as I’m betting Wuala is pretty much unlike any
- » Google Buys Russian Contextual Ads Service for $140m
- BREAKING NOW: Google is buying Russian contextual advertising company ZAO Begun for $140 million from Rambler Media, a UK-registered company. Rambler owns 50.1 percent of Begun, so to secrue the deal it is buying the remaining 49.9 percent stake from owner Bannatyne Limited and then selling the entire firm to Google. Rambler says it
- » Microsoft Testing New Self Serve Publisher Advertising Product
- Microsoft is testing a new pilot program that will let third party publishers add Microsoft’s contextual ads next to their content in a self-serve format. From what we can tell from the email below, it will be very similar to Google’ Adsense and Yahoo’s Publisher Network. Google dominates this space (and all other contextual advertising)
- » Twitter Testing A New Design
- Some Twitter users have been seeing a new design appear while using the microblogging service today…only to see it disappear once they refresh.Below is a screenshot that Zain Memon managed to grab before it went away. Tabs like Recent, Replies, and Everyone have been moved to the right-hand column. Overall, nothing too major. Corvida from
- » Google Announces Q2 Earnings And Stock Plummets
- Google announced their Q2 results today after the market had closed. Shares are down by as much as 12% as earnings growth reported was below analysts expectations. Net income for the quarter was $1.25B, up from $925M. The company reported a profit of $4.63 per share, which was slightly below the $4.72 average expectation from
- » PodTech Sells For Less Than $500k
- VentureBeat is reporting that technology media startup PodTech has been sold to ViewPartner, a “communications technology company” , for less than half a million dollars.PodTech is perhaps best known for the long tech videos produced by blogger Robert Scoble, who left the company last December to work for Fast Company. He was originally snagged from
- » GoDaddy’s Domain Registration Totally Screws .me
- Earlier this year GoDaddy won the rights to distribute domains under the extension .me, which belongs to the country of Montenegro. After a number of private distribution periods for corporations, the highly desirable extension finally went on sale this morning for $20 dollars a year (with a minimum 2 year purchase - nice).
- » Last.fm’s Buggy, New Design
- Last.fm has a new look today that simplifies the navigation of the main site and makes finding music easier. Or at least, it would make finding music easier if the site wasn’t so buggy. (At least for me. I couldn’t even log in without getting an error. This may be due to
- » Is there room for a ‘Wordpress for mobile blogging’?
- Is there such a concept left in the lexicon as mobile blogging, or “moblogging”? Devices like the iPhone, services like Twitter and mobile photo blogging apps like Shozu blur the lines between “presence” updates, micro-blogging and mobile blogging. What is left to be done in this space that’s new?The UK-based Moblog.net thinks that a platform
- » Is This The Future Of Search?
- The video above shows a user interface being bucket tested by Google to select (probably randomly determined) users. Earlier today we showed a screen shot of the interface and a video of the search history, recorded by Adrian Pike, the CTO of startup Tatango. This new video, however (also recorded by Pike), shows the full
- » Google Continues To Test A Search Interface That Looks More Like Digg Every Day
- A couple of days ago we posted screen shots of a new search interface being bucket tested by Google that lets users vote up or down on search results. The resulting interface was very Digg-like, and included a total vote count, etc.Today Adrian Pike, the CTO of startup Tatango, noticed that the interface changed yet
- » Facebook, MySpace Ignore Location On iPhone At Their Peril
- Facebook and MySpace, the two largest social networks, eagerly launched new iPhone applications last Friday. Both quickly shot up the the top apps list. Apple has since turned off the download count feature, but Facebook is no. 7 on the free list, MySpace is no. 11. But while both applications are useful for heavy users,