TechCrunch

At Microsoft’s PDC event a few weeks ago, Microsoft Live Labs introduced a new technology, called Pivot, to make sense of interconnectedness between objects on the web. The underlying base for Pivot is to view relationships between “collections” of individual information on the...

It's all over the news in Russia this morning: Mail.ru, the leading Internet portal in the country, will reportedly be replacing Russian search king Yandex as its default search provider and hand over the keys to Google again.While nothing has been official confirmed by either party yet, the info...

Rumor has it that actress Salma Hayek never smoked before filming the movie Frida. But she had to learn how to play artist Frida Kahlo, and after the movie she had trouble quitting.I know exactly how she feels. Because part of the fallout of all the Scamville posts I wrote last month is a lingeri...

US retailing giant Amazon is in deep and secret negotiations with Vente-Privee, the French private sales club which has taken the ecommerce and fashion industries by storm, our sources say.We asked Xavier Court, marketing director at Vente-Privee, on the record if Amazon had acquired Vente-Privee...

In a brief interview with FOX Business Network, Google CEO Eric Schmidt talked about his views on the talking points of Obama’s Jobs Summit at The White House, which he attended.The full clip is embedded below, but here are the highlights of what Schmidt said:- small and medium sized busine...

We recently previewed the upcoming put.io cloud storage service which fetches media files and lets you stream them immediately. The service has created a lot of buzz, because it’s able to keep redundant copies of your files which you can access from anywhere with a browser, including files ...

Google has quietly rolled out its own online dictionary, complete with multilingual support and accompanying photos. The new site was first discovered by the LA Times Tech Blog, and you can access it at Google.com/Dictionary.It works exactly as you’d expect: type in a word, and Google will...

Wow. Bing is completely and utterly down right now and has been for several minutes. The tweets about it are flying in at a massive pace. As are the tips to us.It’s one thing when startups, like Twitter, go down, which happens all the time. It’s another when a major search portal does...

If you use Twitter frequently on your smartphone, there’s a good chance you use a native Twitter client. Between apps like Tweetie on the iPhone, Twidroid on Android, and Seesmic on Blackberry, there’s no shortage of quality apps that put advanced features at your fingertips. But, ac...

It seems that every day there’s a new travel site looking to streamline the process of planning out your itinerary. And for good reason: trips, even the fun ones, are usually a total pain to plan. Those problems are only magnified when you’re trying to plan a trip with more than one ...

Next Big Sound, a TechStars 2009 company that tracks the growth and popularity of music groups across major web properties like MySpace, Twitter, Last.fm, and others, has raised a seed round in the $1 million range. The company would not reveal the exact amount, but did confirm that they had rece...

Who says Twitter isn’t mainstream? Vogue Italia has just dedicated an issue to the microblogging network. The magazine’s December cover features a montage of TwitPics of some of the world’s most famous models, including Gisele Bundchen, Christy Turlington, and Natalia Vodianova....

Does anybody go to Second Life anymore? It seems like a ghost town these days, although every now and then you hear rumblings of a quiet comeback for the proto-virtual world. Well, at the very least Second Life will be getting a second life at the movies. A documentary called Life 2.0 will be...

Robert Scoble allows 1,768 people to know where he is at all times. Let me repeat that: 1,768 people know his location at all times. How do I know that? A new list from Osnapz told me.Osnapz’ Top Foursquare Users list takes advantage of Foursquare’s new API to create a list that sorts...

A couple months ago, Wolfram Alpha launched an impressive iPhone application based on their “computational knowledge engine” (a fancy word for search engine predicated on math) of the same name. Unfortunately, they horribly miscalcuted what it should cost when they set the price at $5...

Wow. Marketing email software provider ExactTarget has secured another $70 million in funding, according to an SEC filing, bringing the startup’s total funding this year alone to $145 million. The company raised $70 million earlier this year from Battery Ventures, Scale Venture Partners an...

AOL won’t officially become an independently traded company again until December 10 when CEO Tim Armstrong is scheduled to ring the bell on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. When AOL announced the details of the spin-off last month, it was possible to estimate a valuation for AOL a...

As far as I’m concerned Chicago is just a place that your flights get delayed overnight because of the horrendous weather eight months out of the year (that picture isn’t Chicago, but it’s how I imagine it). But one of our star writers here at TechCrunch, Leena Rao, has actuall...

Though its had an application store of its own for many months now, Palm’s webOS has really yet to flourish as a development platform. As it currently stands, webOS’ App Catalog only offers up around 400 applications. This stunted growth is largely because Palm still considers the App...

We recently wrote about Zyxio, a startup that has developed a proprietary technology called SensaWaft that lets people control computers via air flow. Basically Zyxio’s technology enables anyone to control a mechanical device, or a mouse pointer on a screen, or whatever, by blowing. How har...

Considering that it's still one of the App Store's top grossing apps of all time, I Am T-Pain is pretty great. With that said, it's not exactly something you'd want to pull out at your family Christmas party. Believe it or not, Grandma probably wont be impressed with the on-the-fly Autotuning tec...

Sometime in the past few hours, the Mac Detailed Status page on Chromium’s website has been changed to the “Mac OS X Roadmap.” Why? Because the team has wiped out the bugs that were blocking a beta release of Chrome for Mac, and it is on the verge of launching.Yes, those 8 remai...

Google just announced Google Public DNS, a new service that lets consumers use Google as their DNS service provider. The benefits to users are a theoretically faster and more stable browsing experience, and some additional security against malware type sites. The benefit to Google – tons mo...

The problem with most ads is that they suck. Publishers sign up for ad networks and they have to take what they are given, which is usually some weight-loss ad showing way too much belly flab. But what if Website publishers could create their own ads? They know their audience best, right?That&...

I’m fairly certain that TechCrunch readers are far ahead of the curve in abandoning wired landlines at home. But I’d like to know just how far ahead of the curve you really are. Please let us know below what you use for your primary home phone service – landline, VoIP, mobile, e...

As mobile web usage increases, conference attendees need real-time, updated information on the go that can be accessible from mobile devices. Mobile Roadie, a startup that helps develops iPhone apps, has developed the official iPhone app for LeWeb, the foremost European technology conference orga...

Google’s been taking a beating from the newspaper industry lately, and Rupert Murdoch in particular. But the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal let Google CEO Eric Schmidt respond today in an Op-Ed piece which basically says: Hey, we know the Internet is killing your business, but don&#8217...

Zoosk, the dating service with a focus on social networks, has closed a $30 million Series D funding round led by Bessemer Venture Partners, with existing investors Canaan Partners and ATA Ventures participating as well. Bessemer’s David Cowan will be joining the Zoosk board of directors.W...

Le Web in Paris is next week, and it’s one of the best lineup of speakers I’ve seen at a conference in a long time. This isn’t just Europe’s most important tech event any more. Le Web is turning into a must-attend event for people around the world. We’re going to giv...