Yesterday, we also had a chance to interview Mozilla’s chairperson Mitchell Baker at LeWeb in Paris. During this discussion, we talked about Mozilla’s plans for the coming year, which involve a renewed focus on speed, app stores for the Web and open audio and video in the browser. We also touched upon Mozilla’s vision for giving users the ability…
Evernote Gets Down to Business: Launches Sponsored Accounts for Schools and Companies
Evernote just announced the launch of sponsored business accounts for organizations and businesses. These new account types will give schools, businesses and other organizations the option to pay for their members’ and employees’ accounts. As the company’s CEO Phil Libin just told us during an interview at LeWeb in Paris, the majority of the tools…
Twitter: We Need to Create a Better Consumption Experience for Our Users
Jason Goldman, Twitter’s vice president of product, just joined TechCrunch’s MG Siegler on stage at this year’s LeWeb in Paris. During this interview, he noted that Twitter will ramp up its integration with third-party apps in the near future and roll out more partnerships shortly. Asked about Twitter’s product plans for the future, Goldman noted…
Facebook: We Spend More Time and Resources Thinking About Privacy Than Any Other Company in the World
During his keynote interview TechCrunch’s editor Michael Arrington at LeWeb10 in Paris this morning, Facebook’s director for the company’s developer network Ethan Beard noted that “no other company in the world currently spends us much time and resources on privacy as Facebook.” He also categorically denied the existence of a Facebook phone.
Location-Based Cola Wars: Pepsi, Coke, Foursquare and SCVNGR
Even though many location-based social networks continue to struggle to find mainstream adoption, more and more big brands are hopping on the bandwagon now and are experimenting with how to best use these services for their purposes. Disney and Gowalla announced a partnership yesterday and Foursquare announced a deal with Pepsi and Safeway’s Vons…
Low Volume and No Retweets: Ping Is Not Going Viral on Twitter
Last week, Apple launched a partnership with Twitter that allows the users of its Ping social network to send their likes to their Twitter streams. Using Microsoft’s Archivist, we tapped into the Twitter firehose over the last few days and took a look at how Ping is doing on Twitter. Before the launch of this integration, there was a lot of talk…
Amazon Enables E-Book Gifting for Kindle
Just ahead of the holiday shopping season, Amazon has enabled a new feature in its Kindle store: e-book gift giving. Amazon’s customers will now be able to give Kindle books to anybody with an e-mail address, whether they are existing Kindle users or not. According to Amazon, the Kindle store is “the first major bookstore to offer eBook gifting…
Google Faces More Resistance in Germany as Street View Expands to More Cities
The arrival of Google Street View in Germany has not been without controversy. Indeed, thousands of Germans decided to opt out of the program and asked Google to blur their houses. Faced with the issues, Google decided to roll this service out slowly in Germany, starting with one small town two weeks ago. Today, however, Google is bringing Street…
Can Gowalla’s Disney Deal Help Location Check-Ins go Mainstream?
Location-based social check-in apps were the hot topic earlier this year, but things have markedly cooled down in this segment. Facebook’s Places product threatens all of the smaller competitors like Foursquare and Gowalla, which never quite managed to get mainstream traction. Things have been especially quiet around Gowalla, but the company just…
250,000 Sensors to Fight Internet Traffic Jams
RIPE NCC, the regional Internet registry for Europe, the Middle East and some parts of Central Asia is planning to install up to 250,000 sensors that can measure Internet speeds and help engineers to predict and diagnose online traffic jams. Instead of building small, separate, private infrastructures to measure online traffic, RIPE proposes to…
Google’s New Honor System for Highlighting Original Journalism on the Web
A lot of content on the Web today is syndicated across multiple sites. For Google News, that’s a problem, as the service has to determine which one of these sources to pick as a headline. Today, Google introduced two new metatags that allow publishers to give “credit where credit is due,” as the company puts it, and highlight original sources and…
What Facebook Didn’t Mention: Microsoft Office Web Apps Come to New Messaging Platform
Facebook’s newly announced messaging platform will deeply integrate Microsoft’s Office Web Apps so that Facebook users can view Word, Excel and PowerPoint attachments without having to leave the site. Rumors about this integration started to make the rounds on the Internet last week. Oddly, though, Facebook didn’t mention this integration during…
New Study Says Cord Cutting Remains a Myth
While there has been a lot of talk about cord cutting lately – that is, cancelling your cable subscription in favor of going Internet TV-only – a new study by Nielsen, commissioned by the Cable & Telecommunications Association for Marketing (CTAM) found that only 11% of the U.S. population currently watches “some TV shows and movies from the…
Apple Launches iTunes 10.1 in Preparation for iOS 4.2 Update
Apple just launched iTunes 10.1. This new version brings support for playing videos over AirPlay and “stability and performance improvements.” The new version of iTunes is also required for syncing devices that run the forthcoming iOS 4.2. Given that the iOS 4.2 update can only be installed with iTunes 10.1, chances are that the next version of…
Inboxes Rejoice: Spam Volume Down 47% Since August
The total volume of spam hitting our collective inboxes continues to decline. According to the latest data from Symantec, the global spam volume in October declined by 22% month-over-month and over 47% since August. This reduction can be attributed to the shutdown of major spam networks like spamit.com and the Bredolab botnet. Even with this…
Zulu and Afrikaans: Google Brings Voice Search to Underrepresented Languages
Today, voice recognition works best for English and other major European languages as virtually all of the related research focuses on these languages. Now, however, Google is making a push to improve its voice search for underrepresented languages by adding Zulu, Afrikaans and South African-accented English.
FarmVille is Still the Most Popular Facebook App – But #2 is a Surprise
Over 16 million people watered their FarmVille crops yesterday. While AppData’s Facebook app top 10 is mostly populated by games like Zynga’s popular farming game, Texas HoldEm Poker, FrontierVille and Café World, Microsoft’s instant messenger app Windows Live Messenger is the second most popular app in this list with over 9 million daily active…
Mobile Users Want Branded Apps that Are Useful, Not Just Marketing
Branded mobile apps – that is apps from companies like Starbucks, eBay or Nike – are now a standard fixture in mobile app stores, but a new survey that user interface design and app development agency EffectiveUI commissioned from Harris Interactive found that 38% of users today are not satisfied with these branded apps. That alone would be bad…
Hasbro Plans to Bring 3D to the iPhone and iPod Touch
Remember the Nintendo’s Virtual Boy? In 1995, the Japanese game company launched this 3D version of its popular Game Boy. The device turned out to be a big flop. Today, however, the 3D hype is back and toy maker Hasbro has decided to jump on the bandwagon with the My3D – a $30 set of binoculars with a slot for an iPod touch or iPhone that…
Google Launches Its Own Windows Phone 7 Search App
By default, Windows Phone 7 uses Bing as its search engine and Microsoft doesn’t currently give users the option to switch to another search provider. Just like Bing launched multiple iPhone apps, though, Google is also bringing its own mobile apps to Windows Phone 7. Just in time for the U.S. launch of Windows Phone 7, you can now download…