Are you addicted to Twitter? Do you have an iPad? Even if the answer to both is “no” right now, after you see Twitter for iPad, those answers are going to change — quickly. Yes, the wait is over. Launching tonight in the App Store is Twitter for iPad — the first official native iPad app from the company. We all knew it was coming (Twitter even said so a few months ago), but it has been a long wait. It was definitely worth it. Like most people, I wander into hyperbole fro..   show all text

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When it comes to seed investing, New York City is becoming a hotbed. And now TechStars, the incubator that began in Boulder. Colorado and has spawned nearly 40 startups, is coming to New York. This will be the fourth (and supposedly last) city TechStars expands to, according to CEO David Cohen (the other two are Boston and Seattle). TechStars is accepting applications for the New York City Class of 2011, which will start in January. TechStars provides a little bit of cash ($6,000 per founder fo..   show all text

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Next month, the federal government will launch a new .gov website with a big idea behind it and high hopes that there will be big ideas generated within it. Challenge.gov is the latest effort in the evolution of collaborative innovation in open government. Should the approach succeed, challenges and contests have the potential to leverage the collective expertise of citizens, just as apps contests have been used to drive innovation in D.C. and beyond. Sponsor Guest author Alexander B. Howard ..   show all text

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In a short amount of time since its launch in April, 2009 and its redesign a year later, realtime analytics startup Chartbeat has gained an impressive following of more than 2,500 paying corporate customers. All of this was done so far with 5 employees, led by general manager Tony Haile. Now, the betaworks-incubated company has gained an impressive roster of investors in a $3 million Series A financing. The round was led by Index Ventures, and includes some serious superangels such as Ron Conwa..   show all text

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Posted by Doug Aberdeen, Software Engineer People tell us all that time that they’re getting more and more mail and often feel overwhelmed by it all. We know what you mean—here at Google we run on email. Our inboxes are slammed with hundreds, sometimes thousands of messages a day—mail from colleagues, from lists, about appointments and automated mail that’s often not important. It’s time-consuming to figure out what needs to be read and what needs a reply. Today, ..   show all text

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Success in Silicon Valley, most would agree, is more merit driven than almost any other place in the world. It doesn’t matter how old you are, what sex you are, what politics you support or what color you are. If you idea rocks and you can execute, you can change the world and/or get really, stinking rich. For the most part I’ve sat on the sidelines over the years during the endless debates about how we need to do more to encourage more women to start companies. What I mean by &ldqu..   show all text

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This is a guest post by Hunter Walk (@hunterwalk) who conducted a survey of 500 Foursquare users to better understand their check in behaviors and motivations. His obsession with Foursquare is unrelated to his day job leading the consumer product team at YouTube, although he did at one point hold the Mayorship of their San Bruno headquarters. Have you noticed “Off the Grid” [OTG] appearing in your Foursquare feed recently? No, it’s not the latest trendy West Hollywood club or ..   show all text

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If you want to take a good look at what's happened to America's middle class, read Third World America, by Arianna Huffington. It's not pretty, but it's real. A few politicians, over eight years, created an economic Pearl Harbor. Still, I see a lot of vitality in the American middle class. America's response to Pearl Harbor reminds us that Americans can do anything, and we can rise above the current situation and come out ahead. Me, I've signed up for twenty years of this, a kind of voyage, to ..   show all text

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An interesting paradox in the technology world is that there is both a shortage and a surplus of engineers in the United States. Talk to those working at any Silicon Valley company, and they will tell you how hard it is to find qualified talent. But listen to the heart-wrenching stories of unemployed engineers, and you will realize that there are tens of thousands who can’t get jobs. What gives? The harsh reality is that in the tech world, companies prefer to hire young, inexperienced, en..   show all text

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A few weeks ago, I wrote Pandas and Lobsters: Why Google Cannot Build Social Applications, a post that dissected why Google doesn’t get social. Since then, Google appears to have stepped up its efforts to develop a coherent social strategy. To paraphrase the Black Eyed Peas, Google is so 2000 and late, trying to get into a business that Facebook lost interest in a couple years ago. Since Google didn’t have the social DNA, it’s taken the strategy used by awkward rich guys ever..   show all text

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I think it’s fair to say that the reaction to our User Streams Preview version of TweetDeck was extremely positive. TechCrunch called it “Crack for Real-time Web Junkies”. The Next Web summarised their experience succinctly as “Twitter in real time. Mind. Blown." The world of Twitter at true real-time really is a new and exciting place, with Tweets and alerts flying in at lightning speed, making your conversations more like instant messaging rather than asynchr..   show all text

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On May 22 this year 300 hackers converged in New York at TechCrunch Disrupt for a day and half long hack day before the conference itself started. At least one of the projects created at the hack day has now become an actual business, and has raised an angel round of funding from top tier investors. GroupMe launches today. What is it? It’s a dead simple way to create a private SMS group with your friends. Just go to the site and type in your mobile number (U.S. phones only at this point)...   show all text

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Posted by Robin Schriebman, Software Engineer Gmail voice and video chat makes it easy to stay in touch with friends and family using your computer’s microphone and speakers. But until now, this required both people to be at their computers, signed into Gmail at the same time. Given that most of us don’t spend all day in front of our computers, we thought, “wouldn’t it be nice if you could call people directly on their phones?” Starting today, you can call any ph..   show all text

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People love taking pictures of food. It’s just a fact of life. Don’t even bother arguing about it. It’s just the way it is. Case in point: Foodspotting, the service which asks you to take pictures of your food to share with others. People love this service. Since its formal launch in January 2010, people around the work have “spotted” just about 100,000 different pieces of food. And now a group of angel investors have decided to put their money where their mouths a..   show all text

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Keith Rabois is paying it forward. Not only did Google land technology to help boost its social networking ambitions when it bought Slide this month, it got PayPal veteran and Internet superstar Max Levchin as well. But San Francisco startup Square netted Slide executive Keith Rabois, a PayPal veteran who is also one of Silicon Valley’s top angel investors. Square, which launched to great fanfare and a $40-million valuation, has suffered from problems with its hardware and with credit pr..   show all text

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Looking for old tweets? Look to Topsy. The service has just expanded to have what it claims to be the largest searchable collection of past tweets, over 5 billion of them, stretching back to at least May 2008. That makes it more comprehensive than Google’s Twitter search or even Twitter’s own Twitter Search. Topsy will be [...] *** Read the full post by clicking on the headline above ***

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Up until a few months ago, I was using Facebook the same way I was using Twitter. That is, I was allowing anyone to follow me. But it was different. With Twitter, anyone can follow me without my approval. On Facebook, everyone needs my approval. Though perhaps ill-advised, I was simply blindly approving anyone. Then I stopped. There was no single reason why I switched my Facebook habits, but I decided that I was going to start using the service the way Facebook made it seem it should be used: b..   show all text

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The novelist Fanny Burney stared pain in the face, teaching a lesson in character we would do well to recover.

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Twitter has hired Adam Bain as head of all revenue for the company, we’ve heard from multiple sources. His title will be President, Revenue and he’ll be reporting to COO Dick Costolo. Twitter has also hired Brent Hill away from Google to run sales in the midwest region. Hill, along with recent hires Amanda Levy and Dan Coughlin, will report to Bain. Until very recently, Bain reported to Jon Miller and was President of the Fox Audience Network, the monetization arm for MySpace, IGN a..   show all text

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The lead scientist at Bitly is trying to automate e-mail so it wastes less of her time.

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Something happened tonight that made me question everything I’ve done with social media since I first joined Twitter in late 2006. You know me – I’m a complete web whore. I sign up for every site, try every web app, use every service I can find. It’s my job, but I also love doing it. I believe in the Internet as a communication tool. I love trying the myriad new ways people are using it to connect and I believed that social media specifically had some magic new potential..   show all text

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How to lose 75 pounds in 6 months, 140 characters at a time.

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Founder Mark Zuckerberg has been locked in a standoff with the filmmakers over the tale of the social network.

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A huge challenge for user-generated websites is overcoming the chicken-and-egg problem: attracting users and contributors when you are starting with zero content. One way to approach this challenge is to use what Geoffrey Moore calls the bowling pin strategy: find a niche where the chicken-and-egg problem is more easily overcome and then find ways to hop from that niche to other niches and eventually to the broader market. Facebook executed the bowling pin strategy brilliantly by..   show all text

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