Agree. I am amazed at how most people just bash TechCrunch and leave the matter. No matter one likes it or not, they are the biggest tech blog and so very influential. TC's well-being is in the interest of the startup community.
Most of the editors at Engadget, another tech blog owned by AOL have left publicly citing AOL's editorial policy. I am surprised by the lack of support that Hacker News community is showing to Arrington. Even in the post announcing the sale to AOL, there was clear stress about the editorial independence of TC. Arrington always has had a weird investment policy, but to his credit, he has maintained a strict transparency about his posts. For people who are alleging what happens to those companies which are competitors, won't the same logic apply to Fred Wilson or Om Malik, both of whom are VCs as well as popular bloggers.
I do think Arrington should not have named his fund CrunchFund. Techcrunch runs a database about companies and people involved in the tech industry called Crunchbase. This brings us to a different question. Michael earlier had a plan for a tablet called CrunchPad, which didn't materialize when he had a fall-out with his technical partner. Does the brand name belong to the company or to the founder ? No matter who owns the trademark and other legal stuff, I believe it should stay with the company.
For the first time, I have seen someone calling his ultimate boss "Fuck you" on Twitter. Tim Anderson and AOL have handled this situation in the worst possible manner, but it is sad to see people questioning Arrington's ethics over this matter. TC (for that matter, anything popular) draws a lot of different opinions, but no one can deny that Arrington and TC have done startups a lot of good.
Will TC be the same now ? I don't know. The fact that Mike is no longer at the top, controlling things, makes me feel that AOL may misuse TC. Why did Arrington have to involve AOL in this deal is beyond my understanding ? He has enough repute to set up a VC fund on his own.
Arrington has owed up to his mistakes in the past, and I hope he is writing a post explaining how he plans to handle the conflict of interest between AOL, CrunchFund and TC.
I think this post is undermining the importance of both design and development. Design is not for people who are not interested in it. Surely, developers appreciate the importance of good design, but to expect developers to design it themselves is wrong. Will you ask someone who works at AMG tweaking Mercedes-Benz engines to learn how to design the next Merc ?
When I tested Hadoop, the documentation suggested Sun JDK. Even Android asks for the Sun JDK. http://developer.android.com/sdk/requirements.html I hope all these communities take active effort in supporting OpenJDK henceforth.
Just take a typekit account. For $50 a year, you get unlimited fonts on unlimited number of websites. There is an upper limit on traffic, but if you hit that number, you won't mind paying more.
In India, since the new Mobile Number Portability rules have been introduced, making it very simple to switch your carrier, more than 10 million people are switching their operators every month. The system must be made easy enough so that the operators realize the value of customer service. http://www.medianama.com/2011/08/223-mobile-number-portabili...
Even as a passionate Ubuntu follower, I don't see the possibility of Ubuntu going main-stream. The OS may match or even exceed the capabilities of Windows, but it is more important to have a diverse number of generally used apps. I feel Chrome OS has a very good chance of getting mainstream popularity. It does what it intends to do pretty well.
I don't think there is any point in asking users to connect their FB/Twitter accounts at the pre-launch stage because it will make users uncomfortable in sharing their social media details with a site that they have not tested and know little about.
The point everyone keeps missing about facebook is that they were trying something new in the social space. They did commit mistakes and have accepted it. They also allow you now to download all your data. I believe that if facebook merges friend lists and groups, they have will have a strong product against google.
Installing os x on a non-Apple machine is a hack. Installing linux on simple hardware was never supposed to be a hack. As the author says, the drivers of even linux friendly companies like intel and nvidia don't support their latest developments which forces desktop linux user to get on with inferior hardware.
I agree with you. Price will be the biggest advantage for every other ecosystem. Android's success has largely been possible because of the huge price-range in which you can buy Android devices. Today, you can get an Android phone (unlocked, no contract) for as low as $120. Low price smartphones make a sizable portion of Android sales, (atleast, here in India).
Agree, partnerships can help them compete. But, the problem is that whoever has a good ecosystem is trying to go for the bigger pie. Amazon is building its own Android ecosystem - has an app store and will most probably come up with a tablet. HTC has its own movie and music services on its Sense devices. Even if a partnership happens, I am not sure it will be enough of an attraction for consumers to leave the iOS platform.
Marco's post makes it clear why traditional review sites don't work for the normal consumer. On a different level, this post also raises a big question - how can someone compete with a well established app platform like Apple's ? Android managed to do it on phones because it was the lone competitor to Apple in the touch phone segment, but I feel the same success will be tough to repeat with tablets.
It is similar to Google pushing its own services like Maps and Music results in Search. Also, Amazon may think that users looking for physical goods will stop and get enticed to its now impressive collection of digital stores.
As someone who tags a lot of friends on facebook, I love this feature. It was so painful to tag even 5 people over even a 20 photos album. I don't think this is any kind of privacy violation. Moreover, desktop apps like picasa have had brilliant image recognition abilities for a long time. The only thing I want fb to do is to give me an option to stop being tagged by apps without explicit permission.
I think Microsoft will leverage its relationship with facebook and use skype as their alternative to apple's facetime. Though I am worried about the future of Skype's linux client.
The one thing that the article overlooks is that engineering is still the safest way to get a healthy living standard in India. The salary paid by IT firms is exponentially higher than what middle class India has ever seen. Our culture taboos failure. People are worried about a child doing badly in 1st standard. This aversion to failure mixed with the IT boom has led to such a large number of engineers in India.
Traditional classroom education is too boring. This is not limited to school, but also in colleges unless you have that rare teacher who can make the class interesting. Great to see MIT researchers taking the problem head-on.
India does have many private colleges and universities, but their quality varies a lot. CS courses in most of them are dictated by the needs of the outsourcing biggies like Infosys and TCS, which doesn't gel with traditional CS hacking. However, with the rise in the startup culture, these private universities are changing for good.
PS: I am a student at one of these private universities.
Interesting that you say that because Google did buy Dodgeball, but then didn't support it. Dodgeball founder Dennis Crowley left Google with a lot of bad feelings and went on to start Foursquare. http://www.flickr.com/photos/dpstyles/460987802/
I have been sticking with Delicious in the hope that Yahoo will sell it off to a good team, who can revive Delicious. Strange that no other company takes bookmarks seriously. Google Bookmarks is a joke - it doesn't even sync with Chrome.
Because there are a few rogue players, should everyone be denied from using a subscription model. How painful will it be to actually subscribe to something and go through this slow painful process every month ?
Being financially conservative is different from making adoption of new technology difficult. Today, Paypal doesn't work in India, the payment gateways are in a horrible mess and the one-time-password rule has given mobile commerce a huge setback. I believe the problem lies in not going into the details of implementation. There is a fine balance between security and usability which has to be maintained. As someone who is looking to start a web startup in India, I am disappointed by how consumer concerns are being ignored and online commerce is becoming more and more difficult here.
That depends on how you define a smartphone. Chinese manufacturers as well as Samsung have pushed price of Android phones down to around $150 - unlocked. Samsung's Android phones are not crap. At that price point, it steals the show because the competing Symbian phones were not at all good. Just compare the FB app for Android and that for Nokia. Smartphones will keep getting pushed to lower price-points. Also, they might be offered at cheap rates with 3G data plans. India - one of Nokia's biggest markets just finalized 3G spectrum allocation and there are rumors that operators here will start subsidizing smartphones with fixed data contracts. Nokia denmocratised mobile phones. It won't want to miss out when smartphones become democratised.
Couldn't help thinking of the similarity between what you advocate and the process switching model in OS course. Hope to remember your advice - every switch has an overhead - clearly.
I thought this was about a possible bubble in the VC and Angel market. On a different note, a lot has to be done to ensure fast, no/high cap wired/wireless broadband to the world. All our dreams are based on a platform which operators are making weak every day.