Google used to be a company where experimentation was encouraged -- or at least it felt like that from the outside. Now it's hard to remember when Google last launched a new product that was an immediate hit. But with NotebookLM and its AI podcasts, Google finally scored
I don't think anyone outside of Matt Mullenweg had the recent WordPress/WP Engine drama on their bingo card for this year. After a bit of early confusion, I think it's now clear that this is, in many ways, an extension of the open source discussions
I've followed the development of quantum computing for the better part of the last decade. For the longest time, it's been "just around the corner" and with the advent of generative AI, any of the hype around the technology has receded into the background.
It's been a week... Given everything that's happened lately, it's hard to believe that the CrowdStrike outages hit only a week ago. We're now deep in the clean-up phase of that particular disaster and while the blame for this particular incident falls
Renting servers in the cloud isn't cheap. Traditionally, the argument has been that it's still cheaper than buying your own hardware and having a dedicated staff managing servers. Plus, you get to benefit from the innovations that Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Co. are bringing to market.
Another busy week in tech news, but mostly in areas outside of my immediate beat (goodbye, Apple Car), allowing me to focus on just a few stories and even get out of the house for a few in-person meetings. This week, I got to chat with GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke.
One nice thing about writing a newsletter is that it’s a break from the day-to-day hustle to get stories out of the door. It’s also a chance to go back to some older stories and see how they played out – and sometimes it only takes a week for
The last few months have been rough for the news business. I was going to write something about that last week, but then it was TechCrunch's time to get hit with a round of layoffs (my team and I got spared, thankfully). The company also shut down our
It's been a week. After snow and ice paralyzed Portland over the long MLK weekend and we lost power for well over a day, more ice and wind wreaked havoc throughout the week. America's infrastructure is brittle, but with more extreme weather by the year, maybe
Go, the increasingly popular programming language Google first announced in late 2009, is now available in its first stable version. This release also marks the first time that a native support for Go is available to Windows users. Dart, another language developed by Google’s engineers, is mostly meant for
Google has been very conservative about releasing APIs for Google+ and may not even release a full read/write API for its social network before the end of this year. The one API the Google+ team has put its weight behind, though, is the Hangouts API, which gives developers access
Mozilla, in cooperation with French developer Little Workshop, launched a new MMORPG called BrowserQuest today to demonstrate what developers can do with HTML5, WebSocket, Canvas and other advanced web technologies, including Node.js. The game, which is actually quite fun in its own right, should work with virtually every modern
cherry blossom
Just in time for the cherry blossom season in Japan, Google today launched what it calls a "new visual travel guide" for the country. This new interactive guide, which Google created in cooperation with the Japan Tourism Agency and the Japan National Tourism Organization, is based on Google&
Car manufacturers are slowly but surely morphing into technology companies and it's not just upstart manufacturers like Tesla who are trying to piggyback on Silicon Valley's deep pool of engineering and academic talent. General Motors, for example, already has offices in Palo Alto and today, Ford
Adolescence
About three quarters of U.S. teens (77%) now have a cell phone. This number is, according to a new report by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, up slightly from September 2009 (75%). Looking back to 2004, though, it’s clear how this number has increased dramatically over
ReadWriteWeb, which was acquired by SAY Media late last year, just saw its first departure after the acquisition. The site's COO Sean Ammirati today announced that he is leaving RWW to start Birchmere Labs, which he describes and a early stage seed and studio fund. Ammirati will become
firefox
Last year, Mozilla managed to get Firefox back on track. While the long delay of Firefox 4 gave competitors like the up-and-coming Google Chrome a chance to gain quite a bit of market share, Mozilla adapted to the changing environment and switched to a Chrome-like rapid-release schedule that is focused
8moms
Google has been quietly expanding its network of parters for its daily deals service Google Offers since it first launched last year. Today, the company is announcing that 11 new partners are joining its platform. These new partners are 8Moms, APDailyDeals, AT&T Interactive, Boston.com, DailyDeals.com, DoubleTakeDeals,
deutschland
Spotify, the popular streaming music service, launched in Germany today. The company had been planning this launch for a while and had already been operating a German-language version in Austria since last year. Quite a few pundits assumed that the delay was due to rights negotiations with the German royalty
Cascading Style Sheets
Yesterday, Mozilla announced that it would delay today's planned launch of Firefox 11 for a few days in order to scrutinize a potential security issue and to avoid issues with Microsoft's Patch Tuesday updates today. Now, however, Mozilla has canceled this delay and announced that Firefox
developer conference
Google I/O is Google's premier annual conference for developers and last year, the event sold out in less than an hour. After postponing the event and expanding it to three days, Google just announced that tickets will go on sale on March 27th at 7am PT. Once
apple
Camera+ is probably the most popular iOS camera app around. Today, taptaptap, the developers of Camera+, launched the latest version of their app ($0.99) and it's a major step forward for what was arguably already the best camera app for the iPhone. Among other things, Camera+ users
It's been just about six weeks since the last Firefox release and version 11 was scheduled to be released tomorrow, but Mozilla just announced that users will have to wait a little bit longer for the next version of the popular browser. Johnathan Nightingale, the senior director of
acquisition
Twitter just announced that it has acquired Posterous, the popular minimalist blogging service. Posterous’ services will remain up and running for the time being and the company’s blog promises to “give users ample notice if we make any changes to the service.” The Posterous team will join Twitter and