TechCrunch editor and founder Michael Arrington has left the popular tech blog to become a partner in a new venture capital firm called CrunchFund. As the proprietor of TechCrunch, Arrington has long been the blogger-turned-kingmaker in the startup ecosystem. With CrunchFund, he has now proclaimed himself king and is looking to build his kingdom. We will see if that is possible now that the influential blog he founded is no longer under his control.
Arrington's departure is indicative of the crumbling state of AOL, which bought TechCrunch last year. Arrington's departure will have a ripple effect felt throughout both the entrepreneur and media communities.
Seeking to disassociate itself with copyright infringement in the eyes of potential business partners, Google says it's made progress in its effort to combat online piracy this year.
The company's four-pronged approach to reeling in the amount of copyright-infringing content found on its sites was announced in December in response to years of criticism from media outlets and rights holders over the ease with which users have been able to publish and find such content via Google's properties, including YouTube and Blog Search.
More people are turning to the Internet to watch television shows rather than tuning into the original broadcast, according to a study conducted by Ericsson ConsumerLab. Forty-four percent of respondents said they stream TV shows online more than once per week.
While this is by no means a new development, the trend is continuing unabated as more consumers depend on Web-based, on-demand streaming as their primary means of viewing TV content and broadcast's popularity drops ever-so-slowly.
Netflix learned today that it may lose a significant source of its content when Starz Entertainment announced it would not renew its distribution deal with the popular streaming service for next year.
It's this contract with Starz that gives Netflix the ability to legally stream a trove of movies from the likes of Walt Disney, Touchstone, Columbia and Sony, among others. If talks don't resume, that's a sizable chunk of content that will be missing from the service. In response to the news, Netflix's stock price dropped 9 percent in after-hours trading.
Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey has put out a call for comment to the platform's developers. In a note posted on Twitter's developer site he says; "I'd like to ask for your candid feedback. We want to know what additional materials you need from us to help you build products, boost distribution and expand your reach."
Dorsey goes on to express enthusiasm for the future of Twitter, especially concerning the upcoming deep integration into iOS 5. "Very soon, anywhere there's an iPhone or an iPad, you'll always find Twitter." Yet, Twitter's relationship with its developer ecosystem has not always been rosy. Is this an olive branch from the service as it prepares to grow?
Building an Android version of its popular, filter-based photo sharing app is a "a major priority" for the team at Instagram, CEO Kevin Systrom told the Guardian recently. Indeed, this is one of the most frequently demanded features for the app, which notoriously only works on iOS.
It may be hard to believe, but Instagram hasn't even been around for a year. It launched for iPhone last October and has since enjoyed enormous popularity, ballooning to 1 million users in just 10 weeks. As of June 2011, Instagram had 5 million users and that number keeps on growing. In early August, the startup announced that its app had published over 150 million photos.
The adoption rate of smartphones in the U.S. continues to climb as 40% of mobile phone owners say they own a smartphone, according to new data from Nielsen.
In terms of operating system share, Android is still in the lead. Of those smartphone users, 40% are using Android and 28% are using iOS. These U.S. numbers don't come as a huge surprise, as last month Gartner reported that Android now commands 43.4% of the smartphone market worldwide. We first saw signs of Android taking the top spot in the beginning of this year.
An experimental startup inside of Yahoo called Sled is undergoing a name change and being open sourced, instead of being shut down all together, the company announced this morning. Open standards community leader Eran Hammer-Lahav led the effort to build what launched as a community list building service with an emphasis on simplicity, family groups and off-line activities. (Planning a party, a house move, getting ready for a new baby, planning a trip.)
Hammer-Lahav wrote today that the service was built using Node.js, MongoDB, Express, Socket.IO, Jade, JS, HTML5 and OAuth 2.0. It included an iPhone app that was never launched. The entire package is now known as Postmile and is available on Github.
Music streaming service Spotify is opening up development tools to iOS developers which will allow them to write tools for the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch. Spotify functionality will now become available for integration into any iOS app and will be able bring the music services library of 15 million tracks to a variety of applications.
The new coding options could spread Spotify far and wide in the application ecosystem. It is the mobile equivalent of being able to put a radio widget into a website. The service, called libspotify, is available for Spotify Premium users and developers starting today.
The news feed has become the de facto primary interface for social media sites. Over the last several years Facebook has been tweaking how the news feed surfaces content, with a couple major changes within the last several months. The trick is to be able to present relevant content near the top of the feed while still holding to a semblance of chronological order. Reports have surfaced that Facebook may be cooking up a filtering tool to increase relevance in its news feed.
While the public awaits the full roll-out of Google Plus, Facebook has a significant opportunity to create a robust news feed product that will put Plus to shame when the mass of users compare them side-by-side.
