Web startups are made out of two things: people and code. The people make the code, and the code makes the people rich. Code is like a poem; it has to follow certain structural requirements, and yet out of that structure can come art. But code is art that does something. It is the assembly of something brand new from nothing but an idea. More »

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Quora co-founders Charlie Cheever & Adam D’Angelo @ Crunchies 2010 Quora, a Palo Alto-based knowledge (read: Q&A) community has raised a whopping $50 million in Series B funding from co-founder Adam D’Angelo along with Facebook early funder Peter Thiel, Northbridge Ventures and Matrix Ventures. D’Angelo, who was chief technology officer of Facebook, has put $20 million of his own money (big props for that) in Quora while others chipped in the rest.  D’Angelo co-founded the company with Charlie ...  show all text

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An ode to the father of the electric age. View

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More than nine million apps and services use Facebook Connect, the Open Graph developer platform, which gives company powers to predict the future. It can turn on the traffic spigot for some apps such as Socialcam. But it can turn off the spigot, equally fast.

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Dave McClure speaking at the US Embassy in Mexico City. Photo by George Kellerman It’s around 8:30 on a warm Friday night in Mexico City, and we’re all milling around a podium set up in the lobby of the private residence of the U.S. Ambassador to Mexico, Earl Anthony Wayne. Dozens of Mexico’s tech entrepreneurs and investing elite are mingling with more than 40 members of Geeks on a Plane, a traveling tech-revue of sorts organized by the Silicon Valley investment group, 500 Startups. Just outsi...  show all text

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When it comes to the traditional screen that families gather around, live television is competing against a growing array of self-selected content, and audiences are bolting.

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Kara Swisher / AllThingsD: Exclusive: Yahoo's Thompson Out; Levinsohn In; Board Settlement With Loeb Nears Completion  —  Yahoo's embattled CEO Scott Thompson (pictured here) is set to step down from his job at the Silicon Valley Internet giant, in what will be dramatic end to a controversy over a fake computer science degree …

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Yahoo’s embattled CEO Scott Thompson (pictured here) is set to step down from his job at the Silicon Valley Internet giant, in what will be a dramatic end to a controversy over a fake computer science degree that he had on his bio, according to multiple sources close to the situation. The company will apparently say he is leaving for “personal reasons.” But the evolving crisis — which is just over a week old — centered on his botched resume, and how he handled the thorny issue is clearly the key  show all text

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Facebook’s founder will soon face the unfamiliar landscape of running a public company, monitored by a merciless stock market.

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When Eduardo Saverin was 13, his family discovered that his name had turned up on a list of victims to be kidnapped by Brazilian gangs. Saverin’s father was a wealthy businessman in São Paulo, and it was inevitable that he’d attract this kind of unwanted attention. Now the family had to make a permanent decision. They hastily arranged a move out of the country. And of all the places in the world they could move to, the Saverin family saw only one option. They took their talents to Miami. Would ...  show all text

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[Re-posted from last night.] Below is a remarkable document. It's a memo circulated by Jan van Lohuizen, a highly respected Republican pollster, (he polled for George W. Bush in 2004), to various leading Republican operatives, candidates and insiders. It's on the fast-shifting poll data on marriage equality and gay rights in general, and how that should affect Republican policy and language. And the pollster's conclusion is clear: if the GOP keeps up its current rhetoric and positions on gays a...  show all text

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turntable connects you and your friends in a real time music listening experience. Play music together for free on the internet or your iPhone.

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Only 12% of your friends see your average status update, but Facebook is testing an option called "Highlight" that lets you pay a few dollars to have one of your posts appear to more friends. Highlight lets users, not Pages or businesses, select an "important post" and "make sure friends see this", but not color it yellow as Stuff wrote when it first spotted the feature. A tiny percentage of the user base is now seeing tests of a paid version of Highlight, but there's also a free one designed t...

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Gina Trapani says the technology companies that promote a culture of frat house fun will lose out in attracting the smartest people.

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From Yahoo! News: President Obama today announced that he now supports same-sex marriage, reversing his longstanding opposition amid growing pressure from the Democratic base and even his own vice president.

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We weren’t sure about this one at first, but now we have two independent sources confirming that AOL is exploring the sale of its cornerstone technology sites Engadget and TechCrunch. The two would likely be sold together as AOL Tech, possibly including smaller assets like TUAW and Joystiq. The asking price? A hefty $70 million to $100 million. AOL is hoping to make something off the drama of the past couple of years: $70 million would net the struggling Internet company about $10 million profit  show all text

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Gay rights laws in America have evolved to allow — but in some cases ban — rights for gay, lesbian and transgender people on a range of issues, including marriage, hospital visitation, adoption…

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No, Facebook news reader apps aren't declining because users suddenly got fed up with auto-sharing. The user loss is likely due to the transition to "trending articles", a new way of surfacing recently read articles in the news feed that Facebook is testing. Update: The Washington Post confirms my hypothesis: "Social reader "collapse" is b/c of evolving FB modules. Before: "double-double," 4-5 stories down in a list, w/ friend icon - drove growth."Previously, Facebook had been driving huge numb...

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Are you annoyed by all those automatic Facebook news apps? Apparently you're not alone. They're falling off a cliff right now. The Washington Post was the first publication to experiment with a "frictionless" social reader app, which launched last year. If you use Facebook you've probably come across it: it manifests as a clustered list of stories that are almost completely unrelated except for the fact that they all come from the same publication. If you decide to click on a link it doesn't ...  show all text

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Last year we introduced Hangouts On Air to a limited number of broadcasters, enabling them to go live with friends and fans, for all the world to see. Since then, this small community has grown the feature in lots of creative ways. And they’ve made one thing crystal clear: when groups of passionate individuals can broadcast live, together, the results are truly remarkable: Today we're excited to launch Hangouts On Air to Google+ users worldwide. So if you have something to say—as an aspiring...  show all text

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Incredibly, Mark Zuckerberg has grown up to become an ace CEO—one whose way of thinking might drive Wall Street nuts.

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Fashion retailer C&A may be a fading brand in much of Europe, but its Brazilian arm is doing what it can to stay on the pulse of social media. A new initiative called Fashion Like allows people...

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We may be seeing the beginnings of a lesson as to why it's not always the best idea to buy your competition outright. Mobile giant Zynga's game development philosophy has always been, "If you can' beat 'em, buy 'em," followed by the less welcome "If you can't buy 'em, clone [...]

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Updated. Today was just another Saturday morning in blog land when Robert Scoble, the well-known tech startup enthusiast, went to post a comment on a Facebook post written by Carnegie Mellon student (and TechCrunch commenter extraordinaire) Max Woolf about the nature of today’s tech blogging scene. Scoble’s comment itself was pretty par-for-the-course — generally agreeing with Woolf’s sentiments and adding in his own two cents. But when Scoble went to click post, he received an odd error messag...  show all text

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A little under one month after its acquisition of Instagram, Facebook has acquired Highlight competitor and ambient location app Glancee. The social network has already shut down the developer’s passive location app and all three co-founders, Glancee’s only full-time employees, will join Facebook, which now owns its technology. Eric Eldon described Glancee as, “A nice-guy ambient social location app for normal people,” so its ideas and founders should fit in well building for Facebook’s mainstr...  show all text

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I first met Adam Yauch in 1982, in Brooklyn, when I was fifteen. I was sitting on the red steps in the lobby of St. Ann’s, where I was a sophomore in high school. His bandmate, Michael Diamond, was a grade ahead of me. Occasionally Mike and I would talk about records and argue. We talked about doing a newsletter, but that was also just talk. His hardcore band, the Beastie Boys, was getting bigger in the very small pond of downtown Manhattan. (In the nineteen-eighties, folks didn’t play rock mus...  show all text

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Randall Stephenson, AT&T's chief executive, spoke about the state of the wireless industry at a conference this week, and he shared some surprisingly frank comments about the iPhone. He said he loses sleep over services like iMessage.

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Sometimes people ask me why we’re still here even though we’re owned by poopy pants Aol, and I’m all like, “Huh what? Oh I’m sorry I’m drunk, who are you again?” Lolz. Okay so the real reason that I and the rest of the TC team are here, despite the fact that we’re all so incredibly and obviously employable, is that we get to work with a bunch of geniuses all day every day. Seriously, it is awesome just getting to set a record/ be a part of this crazy time while also inadvertently creating jobs ...  show all text

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“The visionary lies to himself, the liar only to others.” – Friedrich Nietzsche Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson has lied about receiving a computer science degree. Or at any rate he’s never corrected his biographical information that includes that information, and it’s nearly impossible to believe that he simply never noticed it. The allegation was first raised by Third Point LLC, a Yahoo shareholder, in a letter to the board of directors earlier today (embedded here). Yahoo confirmed the accuracy of ...  show all text

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