
There are many sites that show trending links across the web including TweetMeme, Topsy, and Bit.ly. Recently launched splurb is now in the mix with its site that shows the most popular links that are trending on social media sites. splurb currently indexes Digg, Reddit, Mixx, Propeller, TweetMe...
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Last week Zynga CEO Mark Pincus said that they would take steps to remove scammy advertising offers from their social games. There have been a couple of missteps since then, and Facebook responded by taking Zynga’s newest game, FishVille, offline.Zynga insists they are serious about cleanin...
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Here are some stories from this week on CrunchGear: Japanese company announces Dragon Ball headphones Toyjector: Cute mini projector to be released in Japan Choken Bako: Cute Japanese piggy bank
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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. Zynga’s other games, including FarmVille ...
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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...
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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 Ge...
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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...
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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 yeste...
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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 ...
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Last month, Apple rejected the Someecards iPhone app because it contained satirical comedy about public figures. After attempting to make their case and getting stonewalled, Someecards eventually gave into Apple and removed the offending cards which made fun of Hitler and Roman Polanski, among ot...
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Earlier this week the domain name industry was rocked by a shill bidding scandal at SnapNames. The company made the right early moves by admitting the problem and promising refunds, plus interest, to customers. Now, though, they are forcing customers to release them from liability to get the ref...
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The dawn of the 21st century brought us a problem: we had lots of data, but no real way to bring that data into the real world. We could feasibly lug laptops and phones around, but did they ever do exactly what we needed them to do? Don’t answer that.Manufacturers, in their wisdom, decided to do ...
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Being a blogger, I often find design elements on the web for my posts or my blog in general. It’s becoming a very common experience for bloggers to know a thing or two about web design. I’m guessing it is the web that taught us to be quasi-designers by offering us lots of easy-to-use ...
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Now that they got what they wanted – a renewed stake and board representation in the Skype that will be spun off eBay soon – the Scandinavian duo Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis can divert more of their attention again to the latest Internet venture they’re putting their weight...
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I’m in India this weekend with fellow TechCrunch/BusinessWeek writer Sarah Lacy. After we’re done with the elephant rides in Jaipur, we’re going to be meeting local tech startups. Then we head back to New Delhi to meet more aspiring entrepreneurs. Sarah is writing a book on how startup cult...
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The ads are destroying YouTube. At least this one is. It is a video ad for sustainable energy company from Spain called Acciona. Yeah, I had never heard of them either. The video starts with this Euro-dude in a suit starting to blow up and crack apart like he’s made from plaster. Halfwa...
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Google’s Vice President of Search Product and User Experience Marissa Mayer was recently profiled in a Vogue Magazine article that offered a in-depth glimpse into the exec’s lifestyle, loves, career and fashion preferences. Now, Mayer has been named as one of Glamour Magazine’s...
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If you’re a Twitter freak and think that a dedicated Twitter device is just the thing for you, read on. This week we saw the launch of the TwitterPeek, a cute little device built by Peek that will do just about anything you want it to do, as long as all you want it to do is access Twitter. ...
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Up until now, if you wanted to use the location-based service Gowalla on the go, you had to have an iPhone. Today, that expands to Android. But rather than building an app, Gowalla has extended support to Android using the mobile web. This works because Android’s browser is closely tied to ...
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textPlus, a text messaging app that’s powered by GOGII, has just hit the App Store. textPlus lets any iPhone or iPod Touch send free text messages to any cell number by using in-app advertising to cover its costs. There is no limit on how many text messages you can send per month, it’...
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I think it’s safe to assume their Twitter account has been hacked. Update: Yep. Now suspended. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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Today is Droid day — an event that I, like many tech bloggers, have been looking forward to for quite some time. Unlike some people, I wasn’t graced with a test Droid last week, so I was forced to go out and get one the old fashioned way: by getting to the store as early as possible, before...
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So much for the coming mobile nirvana of free mobile content – at least for iPhone users in Germany. Today Europe’s biggest newspaper, BILD-Zeitung, intends to use, in effect, brute force to compel users buy its new iPhone app. The paper tabloid is to block anyone using an iPhone brow...
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It’s not yet clear what Chomp exactly is, but we do know that it’s a rather hot property right now. It took the still stealth start up just 10 days to raise a nice seed round from Ron Conway and a few other big name angel investors, we hear.So what do we know? Well, the company is def...
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When news of the Litl Webbook broke out on Wednesday, I was pleased to learn that the company is located here in Boston, since there aren't nearly as many people in this area making actual hardware devices, as opposed to software and web companies.I got a chance to sit down with CEO John Chuang f...
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More good news for Indian entrepreneurs! Infosys co-founder and chairman N. R. Narayana Murthy’s new VC firm, now called Catamaran Venture Fund, just added a whole lot more money to its coffers. A few weeks ago, we reported that Murthy was turning to “the dark side” after selling a large am...
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Do you see something strange in this screenshot of Google’s homepage today? No, not Bert and Ernie (it’s Sesame Street’s 40th birthday). It’s that ad for the Verizon Droid right there under the search box (today is also Droid Day). Although, the juxtaposition does make ...
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This just keeps getting better and better. Before I begin, let me start out by saying that all things being equal, I have no problem with the Apple putting Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf into the App Store, as they have today, as both The Next Web and Edible Apple spotted. It’s a book, it&...
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Early this morning, 200 Android developers woke up to one hell of an e-mail: they’d made it into the final round of the second Android Developer Challenge, and were thus one giant step closer to as much as $250,000. Android Developer Challenge 2 officially began way back in May, though the ...
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Zillow, a popular real-estate listings site, recently tweaked the pricing model in its marketplace for mortgages, angering many of the lenders who pay Zillow for customer leads. A few weeks ago, the site announced that it will be introducing a new pricing model for these leads to lenders.Zillow&#...
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Brizzly is on a roll right now. Just yesterday, it became the first web-based Twitter client to implement Lists, and last week it rolled out Facebook support. Today brings good news for its parent company: More funding.At the end of this month, Thing Labs will close a $600,000 round which is basi...
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