Category: Tech news

 Dropbox has just acquired MobileSpan, a startup that helps enterprise employees access corporate firewalled content securely. MobileSpan will shut down at the end of 2014, and active development will cease immediately. Dropbox has spent the last year-and-a-half concentrating on making its Dropbox For Business product secure enough for big enterprises. MobileSpan’s knowledge of the… Read More

 Amazon wants to be your one-stop shop for everything – including trades and services, according to a new report by Reuters. The company is looking at debuting sales of things like babysitting, handymen services, painters, haircuts, home repair and more. The move would extend Amazon’s range of competitors to sites like Angie’s List and Craigslist. According to Reuters,… Read More

 Those interested in buying an Amazon Kindle e-reader or tablet can now pay in a series of five equal monthly payments instead of one lump sum at checkout.
According to the promotion page, this payment plan doesn’t require a credit check and doesn’t add anything to the price of the gadget, making it a pretty sweet deal for those on a budget looking to pick up a device. Read More

 Opera Software is making another acquisition to build out its mobile advertising business: It has either purchased or is close to purchasing mobile video advertising startup AdColony, according to sources with knowledge of the companies.
We’ve contacted both companies asking for comment. Opera spokespeople in the U.S. and Europe have told us that the company will not comment on market… Read More

 A new Y Combinator-backed startup called Roost wants to succeed where RSS readers perhaps failed with the introduction of a new service that lets consumers subscribe to websites using browser-based push notifications. However, unlike a browser plug-in system such as PageMonitor, for example, Roost is based on an upcoming standard for web push, which is built into Safari and is coming soon… Read More

 Immigration reform, conventional wisdom goes, becomes less likely to pass the closer we come to the midterm election cycle. Despite that, and recent reticence of House Republicans to put the issue on the agenda at all, the Mark Zuckerberg-backed FWD.us lobbying group is spending $250,000 to air new advertisements on cable. Why? According to the group, to “prod” the lower chamber… Read More

 PhotoDrive, a fantastic photo uploading service powered by Flickr, is being shut down – but that’s because its founder, Jeff Bargmann, is now joining Flickr, as it turns out. This one-man startup machine had earlier impressed us with his mobile apps and newer photo uploading service, which worked something like Dropbox (or the recent Dropbox acquisition Loom) to provide you with… Read More

 Speaking at the Southland Conference, former Vice President Al Gore declined to call former NSA contractor Edward Snowden a traitor for leaking tens of thousands of secret government documents to journalists. Read More

 Startup Weotta has focused for the last few years on helping users find cool activities that they’re interested in. Today it’s unveiling a search engine-style interface that mirrors how you think and ask about those kinds of activities. So if you’re wondering, “Where should I go for date night?” or “Where can I take my kids this weekend?” you can… Read More

 No one can predict with perfect accuracy what technology trend will birth the next set of billion-dollar, venture-backed companies or “unicorns.” Even more difficult is determining where the next $100B+ “super unicorn” will come from, as history tells us this rare breed of company only emerges once or twice in a decade. Yet given that the last three U.S. super unicorns… Read More

 Court of Justice that requires Google to consider information removal requests from individuals whose data its search engine has indexed. In comments emailed to TechCrunch, Wales described the ruling as censorship of knowledge — pure and simple. “In the case of truthful, non-defamatory information obtained legally, I think there is no possibility of any defensible… Read More

 At Macworld 2001, Steve Jobs famously introduced the “digital hub” strategy for the Mac, making it the device where all of the single-purpose gadgets for things like recording movies or playing music would be managed. At this year’s WWDC event, Apple showed that the iPhone is the new hub, and your Mac, iPad, and everything in the cloud is now just an accessory. Read More

 The Gillmor Gang — Dan Farber, Kevin Marks, Robert Scoble, and Steve Gillmor. The setup: a delicious Apple muscle-flexing that to some somehow escaped the gravity of the Post Jobs era into orbit. We barely got to all the delights in the candy store — even upstarts with plenty to lose like the Box guy sat in the front row with a grin on his face at the sheer fun of Apple’s… Read More

 Firefox OS is a tough project to evaluate. Mozilla’s phone operating system is meant for developing countries and first-time smartphone owners. To keep the price of the phones down, the hardware it comes on doesn’t really compare to today’s flagship phones, either. Instead of native apps, Firefox OS runs web apps written in HTML5 and JavaScript, which naturally incurs a… Read More

 I spend my Saturdays ranting opining here on TechCrunch, but I spend my work weeks writing software, building apps, sites, and services for the fine startup-to-Fortune-500 clients of the software consultancy HappyFunCorp. (Check out our spiffy new web site!) In that time I have learned many lessons from our clients…the hard way. Read More