Contrary to popular opinion, the reason Yahoo’s metrics have been stagnant and its stock has lost half its value in the last two-and-a-half years isn’t because Google did search better than Yahoo. It’s because Yahoo turned its back on what it did well: Building the first online mass media content superstore. In doing so, it [...]

Can someone please explain this Bloomberg Businessweek story to me? I’ve read it a few times and am still having a hard time understanding what is or what isn’t being implied, or not implied, about a partnership between Coinstar and Apple. First of all, the title is awful because most people likely don’t know that [...]

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 [...]

As a bona fide lover of Red Vines*, I found the Red Vines World of Sharing social media promotion quite intruiging. Essentially you go to the site, gain access by logging in or connecting with Facebook, and you then leave a note about Red Vines or sharing or kittens or whatever. After every few notes [...]

Twitter is keeping the hits coming with its Earlybird specials. Hot on the heals of a deal with Buy.com for Madden 11, a new deal today offers the number one album in the U.S. at a nice discount: Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs. But what’s sort of odd about the deal is that it’s for the [...]

I promised myself I wouldn’t get drawn into this nonsense. The ridiculous “my mobile operating system is better than your operating system” back-and-forth that seems to comprise 80-85% of TechCrunch’s journalistic output (and – just before you get too smart-assy about it – a similar percentage of comments and page impressions). There are, after all, [...]

It’s easy to say that online education can never capture the full experience of being in a classroom, the one-on-one chats with the teacher, the face-to-face bonding with classmates, the simplicity of raising your hand when you have a question. Opening a chat window or sending an email just doesn’t compare. The question is: How [...]

Update: BumpTop confirms it was acquired by Google, terms were not disclosed. Rumors are swirling that 3D desktop interface Canadian startup BumpTop has been acquired by Google. We started getting tips yesterday pointing to a now-deleted Tweet from a Canadian VC saying Google had acquired them.  When I called CEO Anand Agarawala on Friday to [...]

Rumors are swirling that 3D desktop interface Canadian startup BumpTop has been acquired by Google. We started getting tips yesterday pointing to a now-deleted Tweet from a Canadian VC saying Google had acquired them.  When I called CEO Anand Agarawala on Friday to ask if BumpTop was acquired, he responded, “Not that I know of.” [...]

Today in the U.S. people are getting their hands on the 3G version of the iPad for the first time. The hardware is supposed to be exactly the same as the WiFi-only version except, of course, it has a cell chip in it to receive data over AT&T’s 3G network when you’re not connected to [...]