Red-hot Foursquare struggles with uptime

The red-hot location-based service Foursquare is supposedly bringing in 15,000 users a day and recently passed the 1 million user mark. It seems to be having problems keeping up, though, as there are increasing reports on Foursquare downtime, recognized by a tweet from the company, apologizing for the “ups and downs”.

The tweet, sent by “Foursquare” at around 11am Pacific time, reads as follows: “Sorry all about the ups-and-downs at the moment (growing pains, oww). … Continue Reading

Facebook's forthcoming privacy changes — it's all about the defaults

Tomorrow Facebook will launch a host of new privacy controls that it says will be simpler for users to navigate. But what all keen observers will be watching are the default settings.

This is where Facebook will signal whether it has internalized much of the feedback critics have lobbed at it over the past six months.

This criticism is borne out of the somewhat mixed signals the social network has been sending since last fall. … Continue Reading

McAfee's buying spree continues as it picks up Trust Digital

McAfee is acquiring Trust Digital today to shore up its offerings in mobile and enterprise security. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Santa Clara, Calif.-based McAfee plans to integrate Trust Digital’s policy and device management technology into its McAfee’s ePolicy Orchestrator product. Trust Digital chief executive Mark Shull said the goal is to improve security in smartphone operating systems, including iPhone OS, Palm’s Web OS, Windows Mobile and Symbian.

As smartphones become more popular, … Continue Reading

How to win at advertising on Facebook — according to Facebook

Ads with images outperform those without. Put your brand name at the top. Change your ad’s image or title every couple of days so it appears fresh. And always, always tell your audience exactly what you want them to do, even if it’s as basic as “Click here to get started.”

These are among the dozens of tips and examples in a new section of Facebook aimed at helping advertisers on the almost-500-million-member social network … Continue Reading

New competititon scours the earth for innovative location apps

The mission: One week to build a cool location-based application. The prize: $2,500, an iPad and, according to the Location Wild competition organizers, mad publicity.

The London, UK-based competition kicks off for the first time ever on Saturday May 29, and is open to anyone in the world who has skills to build an app which leverages users’ location information to build a creative service. However, entrants don’t have to build everything from scratch in … Continue Reading

Mayor Bloomberg tells TechCrunch Disrupt audience New York is awesome

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg was a surprise guest at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference this morning, and he didn’t waste any time in promoting the city as the perfect spot for emerging startups.

According to Bloomberg, “When you want to start a business, you don’t have any choice. This is where the best and the brightest are.”

Bloomberg pointed out that venture funding in NYC rose by 19 percent, when it fell in most other … Continue Reading

Viacom turned down $592M YouTube revenue share from Google

In 2007, Google managers made an offer to Viacom, the massive media company that owns Comedy Central, Paramount Pictures and MTV Networks. Viacom, at the time, had sued Google for $1 billion, even as some of Viacom’s divisions posted content to YouTube as promotional clips.

Google, the released documents show, offered Viacom $592 million in guaranteed revenue share from ads run on YouTube, on the basis that a certain fraction of the clips belonged to … Continue Reading

The rise and fall of Microsoft's Xbox champions, Robbie Bach and J Allard

Microsoft has initiated one of its biggest management shakeups in years, as it announced today that Robbie Bach and J Allard, the masterminds behind the company’s hugely successful push into video-game consoles, are leaving the company after decades of leading the Windows giant into new markets.

Bach (pictured left), the head of Microsoft’s Entertainment & Devices group, is retiring after 22 years at Microsoft, according to an announcement today by Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer, … Continue Reading

Tripping creates an easy way to connect travelers and hosts

Tripping, a site that’s ending its beta test today, aims to connect travelers who want a richer experience than your average tourist trip with hosts who can help provide it.

Cofounder and chief executive Jen O’Neal is a big traveler herself, and she acknowledged that there are other services with a similar concept. The most well-known is a nonprofit site, couchsurfing.com, but O’Neal said there was nothing until Tripping that used modern Web technology and … Continue Reading

MySpace chiefs planning massive product launches and a redesign

(Correction: This post originally and incorrectly said that MySpace co-president Jason Hirschhorn had promised a redesign of the site this summer, based on the word of two attendees. Video from the event shows that Hirschhorn promised new products in the summer, and a redesign in the fall. Skip to the 20:00 mark. MySpace management has confirmed this schedule.)

Struggling social network MySpace has a major, massive, complete overhaul in the works that the News Corp. … Continue Reading

Next iPhone will add video chat, say rumorologists

The fourth-generation iPhone due in June will allow users to conduct video chat sessions, according to the ace rumormongers at Engadget. Hit movie producer Sam Mendes (American Beauty) is said to be filming video commercials in which a mother and daughter talk to each other on their iPhone screens.

Apple’s rollout will be a test of whether people will or won’t use a videophone they can carry with them. In the past, tests of videophone … Continue Reading

Yext's Rep monitors Yelp, Google, and other sites for local businesses

New York-based startup Yext has been working to bring more effective advertising and analytics to local businesses for some time. Today at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference, Yext CEO Howard Lerman announced its next big product: Yext Rep, a simple way for local businesses to manage their online reputation in real-time.

Rep centers around a real-time feed that shows businesses what users are doing across major sites like Yelp, Google Places, and Superpages. It also helps … Continue Reading

Scribd: HTML5 revamp led to users spending twice as long on the site

The document sharing site Scribd has extolled the virtues of its move away from Adobe’s Flash technology, and towards HTML5, earlier this month. Today at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference, company CTO and cofounder Jared Friedman offered even more insight into how HTML5 is helping to make its product better.

Friedman started off by delivering an impressive stat: Users now spend more than twice as long on Scribd as they did two weeks ago, thanks to … Continue Reading

Violin Memory is music to the ears of those who hate hard disks

Flash memory appliance maker Violin Memory is introducing a new flash memory product today that it hopes will steal market share away from hard disks in corporate data centers. That means storage operations that once took hours can now be done in a matter of minutes.

Hard disks are now the dominant storage devices in the vast arrays in big corporate data centers. But Violin Memory argues that its improvements in both flash memory and … Continue Reading

A future full of touchscreens? It's all in the software

Editor’s note: This story is part of our Microsoft-sponsored series on cutting-edge innovation. Dr. Andrew Hsu is Technology Strategist for human interface company Synaptics.

Until recently, a device designer wanting to add a touchscreen to a device would have faced a lot of challenges. Integration issues, increased cost, usability problems would have stood in the way. But now that mobile handsets have made touchscreens ubiquitous, that resistance has all but evaporated. A number of suppliers … Continue Reading

Aria Systems lets merchants offer subscription services via PayPal

Online payment vendors such as eBay’s PayPal have become popular for one-time purchases. But Aria Systems is expanding PayPal’s repertoire to subscription management.

PayPal has handled the payments part of subscriptions for years. But to date, subscription management systems have been clunky and hard to use. Aria wants to enable vendors such as PayPal to offer subscription management as a self-service option for merchants, said Lance Walter, vice president of marketing for Aria Systems in … Continue Reading

Fortune editors launch Techonomy, a media company that preaches technology can solve all ills

Three former editors of Fortune Magazine are announcing later today the launch of their new media company, Techonomy, beginning with a conference planned in Tahoe, California this summer. The conference will focus on a message that technology can be used to solve some of societies biggest challenges.

The editors, David Kirkpatrick, Peter Petre and Brent Schlender, say they are optimists about progress. Kirkpatrick, who first told me last year about his plans to launch the … Continue Reading

Yahoo buys a Foursquare clone in Indonesia

Yahoo may not have nailed a much-rumored deal to acquire Foursquare, but it looks like it has succeeded in buying the location service’s Indonesian cousin.

Yahoo has purchased Jakarta-based Koprol for an undisclosed price. The social geolocation business is quite similar to Foursquare, which Yahoo reportedly offered $100 million to buy, to no avail.

Users can use Koprol to check in at places and share information with friends. It essentially gives Yahoo a foothold in … Continue Reading

Sony teams up with HBO to release TV shows for PlayStation Network

It’s showtime. So turn on your game console, baby.

Home Box Office is teaming up with Sony to provide original television programming for the PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Portable game systems.

The shows will be delivered via download over the internet to Sony’s PlayStation Network, which can display the videos on your TV set through the game console.

Starting today, popular HBO shows will be viewable on the PlayStation Network, including True Blood, Big Love, … Continue Reading