Category Archives: Company & Product Profiles

Microsoft To Pay More Than Half A Billion Dollars To Jump-Start Windows Phone 7

Editor’s note: The following guest post is by Kim-Mai Cutler. Nearly four years after Apple launched the iPhone and two years after Google open-sourced the code for its Android operating system, Microsoft is finally set to re-enter the mobile market...
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Pioneer Bringing Pandora To The Dashboard With New iPhone App

Pioneer is taking a big step in bridging the two landmasses of Internet radio and vehicle entertainment. By utilizing a free iPhone app, Pandora Link, the company is bringing Pandora to two of its in-dash navigation systems. Simply run the app and conn...
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The Unofficial Google Text-To-Speech API

Last month Google unveiled enhancements to Google Translate. Among the new features was a simple text-to-speech function. You can try it out, or watch this video to see how it works (skip to 0:45). There’s no official API for the text-to-speech servi...
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Location Is The Missing Link Between Social Networks And The Real World

Imagine a world where you sit at your computer and you never go outside. Where you never see another human being. This is the world that sites like Google and Facebook want you to live in. Though they’d never admit to such a thing, the reasoning shou...
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Matt Galligan And Joe Stump Are Building An Infrastructure For Location-Based Services

Last May we wrote about a new company called Crash Corp that was being formed by Digg’s long-time Chief Architect Joe Stump and Social Thing founder Matt Galligan, who were looking to build alternate reality mobile games. Over the last six months a ...
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Startup School: Jason Fried of 37Signals On Startups, Crack Cocaine, And More

Jason Fried of 37Signals has taken the stage at Y-Combinator’s Startup School this morning at UC Berkeley. I’m taking my notes below on his talk. Fried has started off by talking about bootstrapping startups. Startups that bootstrap are more “mo...
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Skype Hits 521 Million Users And $185 Million In Quarterly Revenue

Even though it is embroiled in a nasty legal battle with its founders over its future, Skype continues to rack up impressive numbers. In today’s third quarter earnings from eBay (which still owns Skype, but is preparing to unload it), the company b...
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BYD’s Incredibly Sensible House of the Future

SHENZHEN, CHINA– One of my very early posts for TechCrunch referenced the “futurism” of 1950s Americana, where companies like Monsanto and Disney played out dreamy visions of a new automated way of living that never quite came true. I’m writing...
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TC50 Winner RedBeacon Is Now Live In The Bay Area

The wait is finally over, at least for those lucky TechCrunch readers in the Bay Area. Today, TechCrunch50 winner RedBeacon is opening its doors to San Francisco and the surrounding area, allowing users to submit requests to local service providers wi...
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TC50: iTwin Remotely Connects Two Computers Via USB Drives

Remotely connecting two computers is still a pretty big pain. It usually requires two parties jumping through a bunch of hoops to get things working. This includes each computer having the same software, using various passwords, and waiting on a connec...
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