This might just be the sweetest Valentine’s Day story I’ve ever heard. It’s definitely the sweetest Valentine’s Day story I’ve ever written. Kaitlyn Trigger is a marketing director at Rally.org. She also happens to be Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger’s girlfriend of two and a half years (The 26 year old Krieger and 27 year old Trigger met at a friend’s house in October of 2009 and moved in together in October 2010). And my hero. Last December, Trigger decided she wanted to be able to talk to h...  show all text

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Over the last decade the major music labels — and their trade organization, the Recording Industry Association of America — have established a repeated pattern of attacking consumers in the name of squelching illegal file-sharing. Piracy, they claim, has been the industry’s undoing, accounting for an over 50% drop in sales since 1999 (the industry likes to discount the impact of legal per-song music downloads via services like iTunes, and the myriad other changes facilitated by the rise of high...  show all text

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Young people still watch many television shows, but they are streaming them on computers and phones to a greater degree.

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Gumroad, the buzzy one-man startup launched by Pinterest and Turntable app designer (and 19-year-old college dropout) Sahil Lavingia, officially launches today with over $1.1 million in seed funding from investors Accel Partners, Chris Sacca, Max Levchin, SV Angel, Josh Kopelman, Seth Goldstein, Naval Ravikrant, Collaborative Fund and Danny Rimer. To use the Gumroad, sign in with Facebook or Twitter Auth and submit any link in the entry form, whether it be to a blogpost, Spotify playlist, Insta...  show all text

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The story of the day is definitely about Path (a CrunchFund portfolio company). The company has been copying address book information to their servers without user knowledge. The company was apparently already aware of the issue and was taking steps to address it prior to this post coming out. The Android app has an opt-in, and a version of the apt with an opt-in is awaiting approval at Apple, says CEO Dave Morin in the comments to the original post. Morin has also flat out apologized. This is a  show all text

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Path uploads your entire iPhone address book to its servers 8 Feb 2012 – Singapore It all started innocently enough. I was thinking of implementing a Path Mac OS X app as part of our regularly scheduled hackathon. Using the awesome mitmproxy tool which was featured on the front page of the Hacker News yesterday, I started to observe the various API calls made to Path’s servers from the iPhone app. It all seemed harmless enough until I observed a POST request to https://api.path.com/3/contacts/a...  show all text

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In 2008, we launched Google Chrome to help make the web better. We’re excited that millions of people around the world use Chrome as their primary browser and we want to keep improving that experience. Today, we're introducing Chrome for Android Beta, which brings many of the things you’ve come to love about Chrome to your Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich phone or tablet. Like the desktop version, Chrome for Android Beta is focused on speed and simplicity, but it also features seamless sign-in and  show all text

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Brands love marketing across social media, but it is a little like TV advertising in that it is hard to measure how effective it is. Sure, you can count retweets, likes, and Klout scores, but how does that translate into real engagement with a brand or actual spending? SocialFlow is trying to answer these questions, and in the process is growing like crazy. “I don’t know who put the call out to put money into social media, but it is out there,” says CEO Frank Speiser. A year ago, Socialflow had...  show all text

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As you can tell from my recent post on Amazon S3 Growth for 2011, our customers are uploading new objects to Amazon S3 at an incredible rate. We continue to innovate on your behalf to drive down storage costs and pass along the resultant savings to you at every possible opportunity. We are now happy (some would even say excited) to announce another in a series of price reductions. With this price change, all Amazon S3 standard storage customers will see a significant reduction in their storage ...  show all text

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In last week's SEC filing, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg poked a huge hornet's nest when he referenced "The Hacker Way." Some of the pioneers of the hacker ethos and culture have previously defined hacking as having strong connections to tinkering, "playing" with code and systems, and most imp...

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On Monday morning, thermostat giant Honeywell surprised the world by slapping startup Nest, and retailer Best Buy, with a lawsuit over patent infringement for smart thermostat technology. According to the lawsuit document, Honeywell says that “Honeywell — not Nest Labs — is responsible for many of the ideas that Nest Labs touts as revolutionary, and that many features of the Nest Thermostat infringe Honeywell patents.” Nest sent me its official response this morning which is: “We have not yet r...  show all text

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Conglomerate Honeywell, which develops thermostats, has filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Nest Labs, the developer of the innovative smart thermostat. The lawsuit, which was filed United States District Court for the District of Minnesota, alleges infringement of seven Honeywell patents related to its thermostat technology. As we’ve reported in the past, Nest, which was founded by the godfather of the iPod, not only provides an intelligent thermostat for your home but also saves energy  show all text

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The Web site is trying for pollination: providing the kind of content that will have visitors passing along links from one person to the next, that will in turn bring them around to BuzzFeed.

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Facebook is still working on deleting photos from its servers in a timely manner nearly three years after Ars first brought attention to the topic. The company admitted on Friday that its older systems for storing uploaded content "did not always delete images from content delivery networks in a reasonable period of time even though they were immediately removed from the site," but said it's currently finishing up a newer system that makes the process much quicker. In the meantime, photos that ...  show all text

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Without the free content created by its 850 million users, Facebook would surely not be on the verge of a multibillion-dollar initial public offering.

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Whether you can obtain a job, credit or insurance can be based on your digital doppelgänger — and you may never know why you’ve been turned down.

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Tech writer MG Siegler just noted a remarkable fact: Apple's iPhone business alone is now bigger than Microsoft. Not Windows. Not Office. Microsoft. Think about that. The iPhone did not exist five years ago. And now it's bigger than a company that, 15 years ago, was dragged into court and threatened with forcible break-up because it had amassed an unassailable and unthinkably profitable monopoly. The iPhone also appears to be considerably more profitable than Microsoft. In the December quarter,...  show all text

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Well that title removes any chance that Business Week, Inc, Forbes, etc will pick it up, and that other than Brad Feld and Mark Suster, no one will reblog/retweet/etc, so we can speak plainly. Fuck yes. (Just making sure…) The past few weeks have been really interesting at Graphicly. We have achieved product/market fit, our new product launch has been overwhelming, and there is a clear direction and focus in the company. Revenue is doubling week over week, and our internal mantra has gotten equ...  show all text

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In Silicon Valley, wearing flashy socks is more than an expression of your personality. It signals that you are part of the in crowd.

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This funny little piece of email just got forwarded to me … From: “****, ***” Date: February 3, 2012 10:11:04 AM PST To: Greg Barto [@ TechCrunch] Subject: NapQuest Hey Greg It is one of our goals to get a “nap room” set-up in every location. Basically, it’s a closed room where we would put a chaise or couch, darken the windows and allow people to nap as the [sic] like. This is high on the priority list for Arianna and your office is one of the few where we don’t yet have it in place. When I vi...  show all text

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Yammer grew like crazy last year. How crazy? Product VP Jim Patterson just tweeted out the Yammer 2011 Year in Review infographic below with the comment: “Pretty much everything tripled.” Paid seats went from 300,000 to 800,000, total users went from 1.6 million to 4 million (2.5X growth), and employees went from 80 to 250. Also, all told, 200,000 companies are using Yammer, including 85 percent of the Fortune 500 (and TechCrunch). We just can’t quit you (although we’ve tried). Some of these st...  show all text

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NEW YORK—Shocked and saddened witnesses at the Huffington Post's news-aggregation facility have confirmed that employee Henry Evers, 25, died Wednesday ...

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Marc Andreessen There’s no question that Andreessen Horowitz, the venture capital firm headed up by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, has become a major force since it was founded back in 2009. The young VC firm has funded some of the best and brightest companies in the tech industry: Facebook, Twitter, Zynga, Groupon, Airbnb, Box, Fab.com and Pinterest, to name just a few. And this is just the beginning — Andreessen Horowitz just announced it has raised $1.5 billion in fresh funding to invest ...  show all text

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HeapAudit is not a monitoring tool, but rather an engineering tool that collects actionable data – information sufficient for directly making code change improvements. It is created for the real world, applicable to live running production servers. HeapAudit is a foursquare open source project designed for understanding JVM heap allocations. It is implemented as a Java agent built on top of ASM. Understanding JVM Memory Allocations Performance and scalability issues are generally attributed to ...  show all text

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Attached are my quick thoughts on the Facebook S-1 along with some quick stabs at valuation. As a quick disclosure, Benchmark Capital has a minority position in Facebook as a result of the acquisition of FriendFeed, a company that was incubated in our offices. I thought it would be useful to look at Facebook using [...]

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Facebook’s public offering will make a lot of billionaires and millionaires, some of them prominent people and others not.

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