TECH CRUNCH
MG SIEGLER
15 SEPT 09
Google Docs has changed the landscape of computing office suites. By moving everything to the cloud, accessing documents is easier now than it ever has been. But unlike a lot of the other things Google is working on, Google Docs isn’t particularly social. Socialwok
, a startup that won the demopit competition today at TechCrunch50 adds a great social layer to Google Docs.
TECH CRUNCH
ERICK SCHONFELD
25 AUG 09
Just before Twitter went down today (yup, it was down again), I noticed something strange. Whenever I clicked on any shortened link in my Twitter stream and look at the address bar of my browser, I saw a fleeting click tracker before it redirected to the final site. It looked something like this: “http://twitter.com/link_click_count . . .” For instance, here is the full URL redirect for one link I managed to capture:
http://twitter.com/link_click_count?url=http%3A%2F%2Fbit.ly%2F3omd6p&linkType=web&tweetId=3541772256&userId=12798452.
TECH CRUNCH
MICHAEL ARRINGTON
25 AUG 09
A reader sent in links to two identical Microsoft marketing sites. One
is a standard U.S./English version, the other in Polish.
The image is identical, except Microsoft has removed the head of the black man in the U.S. version and photoshopped in a white guy’s head instead. The Asian man and white woman made the cut to the Polish site unscathed. Clicking back and forth between the two pages is actually kind of creepy.
TECH CRUNCH
JASON KINCAID
25 AUG 09
Last May, we got our first taste of Mag.ma, the new video portal to come from Rocketboom founder Andrew Baron. We’ve been tracking the site since then, and it appeared at our Real-Time Crunchup last month, but it’s remained in private beta. Today, Mag.ma finally opens up to the public.
As we’ve noted before, most people will use Mag.ma as a great place to kill time. The site presents users with around one hundred video thumbnails on a single page, with hot videos from Twitter, YouTube, Digg, a variety of other services and the web at large.
TECH CRUNCH
MICHAEL ARRINGTON
25 AUG 09
Gideon Yu, the former Facebook CFO unceremoniously shown the door in late March, has joined Khosla Ventures as a General Partner, we’ve heard from multiple sources.
Prior to Facebook, Yu has held positions at Yahoo (SVP Finance), YouTube (CFO) and, most recently, a short stint as a partner at Sequoia Capital. He is credited with being one of the main architects of the landmark $1.65 billion Google acquisition of YouTube in 2006.
TECH CRUNCH
JASON KINCAID
25 AUG 09
Last January, the iPhone was graced with one of its greatest applications yet (at least, for burrito lovers): a native Chipotle app, allowing users to order their meals online for easy pickup. But the joy was to be shortlived — within hours after appearing on the App Store, the Chipotle application was pulled, sparking The Case Of The Missing Burrito. Given the TechCrunch office’s love for Chipotle’s cheesy bundles of awesome, we followed the case closely, tracking down the developers of the app to learn what had caused its early demise only to be told we could expect it to return in around two weeks. Today, over seven months after vanishing without warning, Chipotle has finally made its way back to the iPhone. You can download it here.
TECH CRUNCH
LEENA RAO
25 AUG 09
GooseGrade, a startup that uses crowdsourcing to let anyone copy edit web sites, has tweaked its service to allow readers to copy edit any web site online. Previously, “citizen editors” could only edit sites which already have the gooseGrade plugin installed.
With the launch of the new service, readers only need to install gooseGrade’s new browser bookmarklet, which can be found on gooseGrade’s website.
TECH CRUNCH
ERICK SCHONFELD
25 AUG 09
Back in the 1990s during the original browser wars between Netscape and Internet Explorer, one of Microsoft’s chief weapons was the ability to bundle IE into Windows as the default browser. With bundling came market share, or so the government argued in its antitrust case against Redmond.
TECH CRUNCH
MG SIEGLER
25 AUG 09
I’m sure we’ve all had the situation on Twitter where you want to tweet something without it being attributed to you. Some users have separate accounts for these outbursts, but there’s still a chance those can be linked back to you. But a new service (which is really two new services) wants to make anonymous tweeting easy: Tweet From Above and Tweet From Below.
CNET NEWS
STEPHEN SHANKLAND
24 AUG 09
Multitouch interfaces are all the rage, for good reason, and a Mozilla programmer has been working to enable the technology for Web applications in the Firefox browser.
Firefox today can be controlled with multitouch gestures–a three-finger sweep up and down to go to the top or bottom of a Web page, for example, or two-finger pinch gestures to zoom out. But Felipe Gomes, a Brazilian computer science student who just finished a stint as a Mozilla intern, has demonstrated how Web-based applications, not just Firefox, can use multitouch.