Category: Tech news

 Mozilla today announced that it will reluctantly implement the HTML5 DRM standard in its Firefox browser. With more and more copyrighted content being streamed over the Internet, rights holders have long been worried that there is no standardized way to wrap a DRM solution around these streams in HTML5 without resorting to using Flash or Silverlight. A while ago, Microsoft and Google decided to… Read More

The Tablo is a set-top box without the set, a standalone over-the-air DVR you tuck away in whatever corner of the house gets the best OTA reception.

 Editor’s Note: Fara Warner is the editorial director of Aol Tech, overseeing editorial teams on TechCrunch, Engadget, Joystiq and TUAW. She also heads up editorial for Aol’s newest platform This Built America. (www.thisbuiltamerica.com). She has worked at the Wall Street Journal and Fast Company, and is the author of “The Power of the Purse: How Smart Companies Are Adapting to… Read More

 The potential acquisition of Beats by Apple has captured the public imagination. Though it is not yet official, we’ve spent all weekend making jokes about it on Twitter, shocked at Andre Romelle Young’s uncharacteristic confirmation of the buy, joking that Forbes should change its list because he’s now a billionaire, for some reason. Quite honestly, part of the appeal of this… Read More

 Despite what you may have read, Mozilla isn’t canning its plans to sell sponsored tiles on its new-tab page. A few days ago, Mozilla’s Vice President of Firefox Jonathan Nightingale wrote a brief blog post defending the organization’s plans to include sponsored tiles on Firefox’s new-tab page. For some reason, a couple of people interpreted Nightingale’s comments as… Read More

 How do you do? My name’s Mike Butcher. I’ve been writing for TechCrunch since 190… I mean 2007, based out of London, England, although I seem to find myself on a plane a lot. Generally I visit and cover tech startups and venture capital in European countries (West and East), but I’ve also covered tech in many other parts of the world. This week I’m beginning a new weekly… Read More

 Quora has plenty to learn from Y Combinator about growth and monetization, but it’s not giving up the traditional 7% equity share to join the accelerator. Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo tells me “YC invested an amount that was similar to their standard $120k. They invested as part of the Tiger round.” That $80 million round valued Quora at $900 million, so the startup only traded away around 0.013%. Read More

 Autodesk is known primarily for enterprise software. It’s a great company in a lucrative space, but not exactly who you might expect to have an especially fun office space. But for months now, people have been telling me that Autodesk’s new “workshop” that opened this past fall on Pier 9 on the San Francisco waterfront is a must-visit for TechCrunch video. So we headed over to see what all the… Read More

 It’s never good for someone inside an organization to defend its actions to the outside. It smacks of self-serving and one-sided debate, and, as the Bard wrote, “the lady doth protest too much, methinks.”

Be here I go protesting too much. Read More

 European ad-tech company Adform is announcing that it has raised $5.5 million in Series B funding.

The company was founded more than a decade ago, in 2002. Chief Marketing Officer Martin Stockfelth Larsen told me it sells its technology to both advertisers and publishers, with products including a demand side platform for ad-buying from multiple sources. Read More

 SketchVid is a cool new iOS app that lets even the most ham-handed doodler make striking animations for Instagram. Read More

 It was inevitable. In a place where you could pay for almost anything to come to you via mobile, to have empty parking spots eventually come to you via mobile. That is the premise behind Italian app MonkeyParking, which allows you to “sell” your parking spot (or rather, the inside information about whether your parking spot will be available shortly) starting at $5. Read More

 Finnish startup Fjuul is tackling activity tracking with an iOS app aiming for mainstream users that can track the intensity of activity. It’s been backed by €400,000 ($550,000) in funding thus far from VC Vision+ and local public funding agency, Tekes. Read More

 Travel still provides some of the highest human anxieties of anything we do on a routine basis. There are countless variables when it comes to travel: weather, mechanical issues, overbooked flights, traffic, human delays and so much more. But if we could combine all of our intelligent data in a way that it works together, travel disruptions could be corrected automatically and efficiently. Read More

 The Gillmor Gang — Josh Miller, Robert Scoble, Keith Teare, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — welcome the latest Jobsian takedown of the music cartel, the presumed acquisition of the Beats hardware/streaming empire by Apple. How the Gang winds its way through the leaks and feints of BigTech is left as an exercise for you. As one Ganger channeled John Lennon early in the chat: “I don’t… Read More