TechCrunch

As the Web becomes more social, privacy becomes harder and harder to come by. People are over-sharing on Facebook and Twitter, broadcasting their whereabouts every ten steps on Foursquare and Gowalla, and uploading photos and videos of their most private moments to the Web for all to see. It&#8...

Foursquare, the geo-location based check-in game, just announced that it is combining badges and promotions. On Foursquare you get badges for checking into places. The person who checks into a place the most becomes the “Mayor.” You also get promotions from restaurants and bars near...

Anyone who follows John Mayer on Twitter knows that he’s a smart guy. A bit kooky at times, sure. But he’s definitely not just shooting his mouth off with self-promotional drivel. He’s built up quite a following on the service too, with over 2.8 million Twitter followers. So wh...

It's almost January 1st, 2010 and we've been mulling over our favorites of 2009 - and the previous decade. Here we present another installment in our "Of the Decade" lists.The aughts were a great time for gamers. The decade began auspiciously with the launch of the PlayStation2, and is ending qui...

Newsflash: Tomorrow is the last day of 2009. That means we’re moving into the first new decade of the 2000s. And we have a decision to make.Say “2009″ outloud. Chances are you’re saying “two thousand and nine.” But if you think about it, that’s weird. Say...

Between CES and Google’s press event, next week is bound to be a torrential mess of press releases. Looking to sneak onto the radar before every tech writer in the lands is pulled into cranking out post after post on the latest and great from the industry’s big guns, iPhone accessory ...

Back in November, I wrote up a review of the new Magic Mouse, noting that it was “Apple’s best mouse ever, but…” Essentially, the problem is a software one. Apple gave its new mouse multi-touch capabilities, but only takes advantage of a fraction of what it can do. (And ye...

It’s been a big year for Hulu, the video streaming site that lets you watch a large variety of premium content free of charge. The site has grown from a destination for the tech-savvy to a mainstream hit in the two years since its launch, and much of that growth came in the last 10 months ...

Amazon has just released its "Best of 2009" lists, showing the top-selling devices, books, DVDs, and such from this, the final year of the aughts. And although 2009 has not brought us hovercycles or Lunar colonies, it has brought us love-stricken vampires and a great number of replacements for pa...

The third (and likely final) batch of 150 tickets to attend the Crunchies Awards are on sale now, courtesy of Eventbrite. Balcony seats are $45 (orchestra is sold out.) If you’re dead set on an orchestra seat, please contact Jeanne Logozzo for sponsorship options. We have creative packages ...

When Swype was nice enough to give us the world’s first hands-on with their ultra-nifty alternative keyboard on the Android platform, I wasn’t about to leak the installation files. It’s just not my style. Now that someone else has gone and leaked them, though, I’m more or ...

Startup Twilio has raised $3.7 million in Series A funding from Union Square Ventures. The startup previously raised $600,000 in seed funding from The Founders Fund, David Cohen, Mitch Kapor, Manu Kumar and other angel investors. Twilio creates a powerful API for phone services that allows develo...

Times Square was evacuated earlier today when the bomb squad was called in to inspect a suspicious parked van. It turned out to be nothing, but as people were scrambling for information they would have been better off doing a search on Bing than on Google. A search for “Times Square&#8221...

Charlie Rose welcomed Zynga CEO Mark Pincus on his show last night for a 15 minute interview. Pincus says 60-70 million people a day are playing social games on Facebook and MySpace, and 1%-2% are willing to shell out actual cash to enhance gameplay. Mobile social gaming is still small, just 5 mi...

The idea of a life recorder that captures every moments of your life on video is still a bit of a tech fantasy, but an early version of the life recorder already exists. It is called Evernote, the popular iPhone (and now Android) app which lets you record your memories by snapping geo-tagged pho...

SpinVox, a London-based technology startup that transcribes voicemails to text so that they can be more easily digitized, searched, and manipulated, has been acquired by speech recognition company Nuance for $102.5 million. We reported on the rumors of the acquisition a few weeks ago, when a $150...

Mobile search and general Web search are two different beasts, especially when it comes to voice search, which is becoming increasingly popular. The list of the top ten mobile voice searches below by mobile voice app startup Vlingo confirms that people are much more action-oriented when they are...

On deviantART, the site for anyone who thinks they are an artist, member submissions are known as “deviations.” The site’s been around since 2000, attracts 33 million monthly visitors (comScore), and just recently passed its 100 millionth deviation. It is, appropriately enough...

Forget the Academy Awards and the professional movie critics. Flixster users reviewed movies 55 million times in 2009, says the company, and they’ve released the top movies based on those ratings. At the top is Avatar with a 92% like rating (compared to 83% for the critics). Second is Star ...

What do Thomas Seibel, Condoloeeza Rice and $26 million have in common? They are all connected to stealth energy startup C3, which may be entering the business of managing carbon cap-and-trade systems for corporations. In the past two weeks, C3 has filed three Form Ds with the SEC disclosing fi...

Earlier this evening Gizmodo published leaked images that apparently show off the pricing details for Google’s upcoming Nexus One phone. The Nexus One comes in at a hefty $530 for an unlocked device, or $180 with contract on T-Mobile — pricing that’s pretty standard for a smart phone...

Two weeks ago, Apple opened the floodgates for video recording apps on the iPhone, ending a longstanding ban. Nobody was waiting longer for the change than mobile video startup Qik, which tonight is further building out its collection of iPhone apps with the launch of the Qik VideoCamera. The ne...

You remember OnLive, right? The service, which lets you play any game remotely on a distant server, has produced much skepticism and much interest, and is now in public beta. We got a good look at it back in March when we were at GDC, and it appears that things are much the same. However, the com...

January 5. That’s the day we’ll learn all we want to know about the Nexus One. Google didn’t explicitly say anything about the device in its invites today for an “Android press gathering,” but we all know what is coming. And T-Mobile, which will be the initial carrie...