Events have always played an important role in the tech industry. Knowledge exchange and networking opportunities have long been a key draw, as Apple's history attests. The motivations for meeting have certainly expanded since the 1970s. Today, every kind of actor in the tech ecosystem holds events: large vendors host conferences to promote development on their platforms, investors host presentations to promote their portfolio companies, and media companies host events to earn the bulk of their...  show all text

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Path CEO Dave Morin explains why his app collects address book data, and how he plans to make good with his users. Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.com SAN FRANCISCO, California — “We thought we were doing this the right way. It turns out, we made a mistake.” Dave Morin, the CEO and creator of social media app Path, tells me this as we sit in his 22nd-floor headquarters in downtown San Francisco. It’s a mere 24 hours after an independent app developer exploded Morin’s world with a simple blog post t...  show all text

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Thanks to our friends at Antengo, who absolutely love the TechCrunch readers, we have two huge prizes to give away this week: an Xbox Kinect and a Samsung Galaxy S II. There will be two winners for this giveaway and two ways to win for each prize. You will have until February 19th, this coming Sunday, to win the Xbox Kinect and you will have until this Friday, February 17th to win the Samsung Galaxy S II. You can enter both giveaways. For all of the husbands/ wives, boyfriends/ girlfriends, and...  show all text

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Nest is ready to fight. The Palo Alto company just issued a followup statement regarding Honeywell’s recent patent infringement suit. In short they’re not going to roll over. They’re going to stand tall. The plan is to “vigorously defend itself” from what they call an attempt to stifle “thoughtful competition.” Nice. Go get ‘em, boys. From Nest Labs: We at Nest are proud of creating products that bring true innovation to home efficiency and we are continuing to innovate and bring products to ma...  show all text

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For music fans, all-you-can-stream music services like Spotify, Rhapsody, MOG and Rdio are kind of dream come true. Signing up gives you instant access to a library of millions of songs from major label and indie acts from around the world. Most services are now free, with some limitations on usage. For paying users, as long as you keep your subscription, there's really no need to pay for most individual tracks or albums (unless you're an audiophile). In the case of Spotify, you can even merge ...  show all text

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Facebook has just filed an amendment to its S-1 that exhibits the agreements between it and Zynga. These 2 developer agreement documents are the same as those filed in Zynga’s own S-1 amendment from last year and don’t include significant new information. The exhibits do spell out how Facebook has promised to help Zynga with advertising on Zynga sites such as FarmVille.com, and share revenue from such a partnership. This should not be confused to mean sharing ad revenue from Zynga’s games on Fa...  show all text

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This morning, Foursquare launched an updated version of its “Explore” feature for both its iPhone and Android applications. The new version brings over several of the features already available through Foursquare on the web, including filters, photos in search results and the ability to change your location. After updating your mobile app, you’ll see the improvements in the “Explore,” section, Foursquare’s local guide which is augmented by your friends’ recommendations and visits as well as oth...  show all text

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Christmas is long gone and the Superbowl is over, which can only mean one thing - Valentine's day is almost here. If you are anything like the CloudSpokes team, you struggle to find a great gift for the love (or "like") in your life by February 14. It's not a secret that we're in love with developers, but we know as well as anyone that the developers in our life have their own unique likes. Given that there is only one week left until Valentine's Day, we wanted to make shopping for the special ...  show all text

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It’s a sign of the times, though not a particularly surprising one: Nokia has finally eliminated its European phone assembly infrastructure and will be moving those 4000 jobs to Asia, according to a Reuters report. The factories are not being shuttered altogether, and localizing and finishing work will still be done there, but the primary assembly work is being relocated. The news and layoffs were expected, as the company has slashed many more thousands of jobs over the last year, but this part...  show all text

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Photo: Ariel Zambelich/Wired.com Just about a year ago, Nokia announced it would be partnering with Microsoft to deliver Nokia-branded Windows Phones. The plan was to jumpstart Microsoft’s fledgling smartphone platform, and save the Finnish phone giant, which still owns the worldwide dumbphone market, from a future of irrelevance. One of the first handsets to spring from that relationship was the Nokia Lumia 800, and it’s finally going to land in the U.S. on Feb. 14. Unfortunately, though, the ...  show all text

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Since 2010, social gaming has been expanding the gaming market and broadening the impact of gamification on business. And with sites like Zynga attrac

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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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TastemakerX, an about-to-launch startup that will help music fans get credit for discovering the next big thing, has raised $1.8 million in Series A funding. The company plans to launch its mobile app in early March, at South by Southwest — which seems perfect, given the event’s strong representation from both the music and tech worlds. Co-founder and CEO Marc Ruxin describes TastemakerX as “fantasy sports for music lovers,” a service where users can share their favorite music with their friends  show all text

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Remember all that talk of how the supporters of SOPA/PIPA were "humbled" by the protests of January 18th, and how they had learned their lessons about trying to push through a bill without actually involving the stakeholders? Remember the...

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As part of news aggregator Techmeme‘s big redesign a couple weeks ago, it moved its flow of top stories to the left to make room for… white space. But founder Gabe Rivera promised at the time that there’d be stuff coming to fill it, and now we know what — an events calendar for the tech world. It’s a play to solidify the site’s position as the watercooler for anyone in tech, especially in Silicon Valley. In a post on the addition today, he says that while anyone can submit an event (sort of like  show all text

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First the news: Yes, the rumors are true. We are indeed buying the assets of ContentNext Media from Guardian News & Media Limited. And no, we are not disclosing the terms of the deal, except that we are buying the entire group of properties — paidContent.org, mocoNews.net, contentSutra and paidContent:UK and that a representative of Guardian News & Media will join our board of directors as an observer. A few weeks ago when Paul Walborsky, CEO of GigaOM, came to the board and suggested that we ...  show all text

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The TechFellow Awards is the Oscars of high-tech entrepreneurship. As selection committee member Sean Parker puts it “We’re shining a spotlight on individuals who are on the cusp of bringing us something revolutionary.” On February 22nd at the SFMOMA, 20 innovators will be presented with $100,000 grants to invest in startups of their choice. Nominations are open through February 17th at the TechFellows website. Today, the TechFellow Awards announced that Emmy-winning nerd hero Jim Parsons, star...  show all text

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Forget what all those ad executives tweeting on #brandbowl and #whartonfoa told you last night: There were 87 commercials during last night's Super Bowl, but very few of them failed to meaningfully connect their message to their social media platforms. The ad execs praised the use of Twitter hashtags, even going as far as saying the hashtag was to 2012 what the URL was to 2000, one year after Victoria's Secret became the first ever firm to use a Super Bowl ad to connect viewers to its online me...  show all text

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Foursquare, about to celebrate its third birthday, is big but not huge. It has signed up 15 million users, hired over 100 employees and now boasts several million check-ins per day. That is impressive work for three years, but it must keep growing. To do so, Foursquare co-founder and CEO Dennis Crowley says the company is in the process of redesigning its mobile app for a broader audience, disassembling it and trying to put its features back together in a way that's more useful and interesting....  show all text

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A representation of America's Interstate highway network using the familiar symbology of a subway or transit map - coloured route lines, 45-degree ang

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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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Hugh MacLeod just earned PTZ on Lockerz.com! Share photos, watch videos, connect with friends and shop on Lockerz.com to earn PTZ (points) toward discounts on top brands and designer fashion.

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It’s beautiful, it’s addictive, and now Pinterest is having its glorious hockey stick moment. TechCrunch has attained exclusive data from comScore showing Pinterest just hit 11.7 million unique monthly U.S. visitors, crossing the 10 million mark faster than any other standalone site in history. In fact, users are spending so much time sharing their favorite images that now only Facebook and Tumblr have more social media time on site than Pinterest. Who’s propelling its rise? 18-34 year old upper  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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