Category: Tech news

 Mixpanel, the analytics startup incubated at Y Combinator and backed by Andreessen Horowitz, is launching a new feature today for mobile developers who want to test out different variations of their app.
We’ve written about several startups that are focused on mobile A/B testing, such as Taplytics. Optimizely, the big player in desktop A/B testing, recently moved into mobile. Read More

 ***Giveaway has ended. Check back tomorrow for the next round.*** Yes, you heard that right. Enter to win a free ticket to Disrupt. We’ve decided to do something a little crazy this year for the ticket giveaways. We’re giving away tickets…lots of tickets. Almost every day from now until Disrupt we will be giving away tickets to our Disrupt event in San Francisco. Here’s… Read More

 Starting October 7, consumers who opted to buy an Xbox One without a Kinect will be able to snag one for $149.99.
Microsoft unbundled the Kinect device from the Xbox One in a bid to lower the price of its current-generation console. Since then, according to the company, Xbox One sales have increased by more than 100 percent.
The Xbox One is part of Microsoft’s larger Windows strategy… Read More

 The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Keith Teare, Kevin Marks, Dan Farber, and Steve Gillmor — woke up and fell out of bed in what was the most dramatic quake for most of us since ’89 and in my case LA in the ’70s. For the wine industry, this will have major impact, coming as it does as the Napa Valley goes to harvest what is called 25% of the US market. The major… Read More

 Our attachment to computers can play tricks on us. With the ability to navigate anywhere, order anything, calculate any math problem, and answer any question right in the palm of our hands, it would be easy to feel god-like. Infallible, even. But oh, if that were the case! While our computers, and the internet, do make us instantaneously more knowledgable (and even correct our misspellings as… Read More

 PlayStation Network is currently experiencing mass outages for North American users, and the reason behind the downtime is a DDOS attack for which hacker group Lizard Squad has claimed responsibility. Sony says there haven’t been any personal details leaked in the attack, but the rolling outage persists in various locales, some ten hours or more after the attack began. What’s… Read More

 I recently interviewed the co-founders of social marketing startup Niche, when they took the stage at AOL HQ with Robby Ayala, who leads creative partnerships for the company and is also one of their resident Vine stars (with 2.8 million followers). I first covered Niche last fall, after the company raised a small seed round. The team has a built an online platform that connects users who… Read More

 Gillmor Gang – Robert Scoble, Keith Teare, Kevin Marks, Dan Farber, and Steve Gillmor. Live recording session is over for today. Read More

 Android Wear isn’t even a year old, but LG is already ramping up the hype cycle for its second smartwatch based on Google’s wearable software platform. The design for the new device centers around a circular face, a trick that Motorola is pioneering with its Moto 360 smartwatch, which should ship in early September, but which is one of two default screen configurations for Android… Read More

 In Soshanguve, a township just north of Pretoria in South Africa, there was a small kiosk that sold fruit, cigarettes and snacks to passersby. The owner of the kiosk had recently installed Wi-Fi and, soon after, placed tables and chairs out front. And then her customers soon began to linger. They bought more items; they socialized. Her business became a hub, transforming from a corrugated tin to… Read More

 When Yahoo made an offer to buy photo-sharing startup Flickr in early 2005, Stewart Butterfield and his team had a tough decision to make. There were many reasons for Flickr, founded by Butterfield and Caterina Fake, to sell, but also many to hold on and go for a larger exit. Flickr’s acquisition was one of the first significant consumer Internet acquisitions after the dot-com crash… Read More

 There is no doubt that Salesforce is one of the most widely used customer relationship management systems. However, the shift to BYOD is changing the game for sales and marketing, and we need an immediate infusion of technology in CRM. Read More

 E-mail newsletters are so hot right now. Some of the best known are by Ann Friedman, Alexis Madrigal, Dan Hon and Rusty Foster. There’s a web ring for e-mail newsletters now, but really the best newsletters are secret. The authors encourage readers to share the subscribe link with other people who might be interested, but request that no one share the subscribe link on social media or… Read More

 When iPads first came out, they were hailed as the undoing of the PC. Finally, a cheap and reliable computing device for the average user instead of the complicated, quirky PC. After a few years of strong growth for iOS and Android tablets and a corresponding decrease in PC sales, the inverse is suddenly true: PC sales are up and tablet sales are “crashing”. What happened? Read More

 It’s that time of year again. Summer is over for most people and has just begun for San Francisco. And this week, the city becomes emptier than a VC parking lot at 5pm as many of SF’s denizens head to Burning Man, a festival that celebrates human expression — importing in over 60,000 people to Black Rock City, Nevada to party. Read More