In a blog post, Google has given their take on the whole brouhaha over the restriction of outbound Google Voice calls to phone numbers in “rural” areas. Google wites that the reason they restrict these calls to local phone carriers’ in rural areas is not only because they charge pricey termination rates for calls but because these carriers are partnering with adult sex phone operations and free conferencing call centers to drive traffic. Google says that because Voice is a free application, they can’t afford to pay for these rates — and that because it is not a traditional phone service, it shouldn’t have to.
Microsoft’s new Bing search engine just can’t seem to stay out of the red light district, no matter how hard they try.
Dropico is a brand new service that allows you to drag and drop pictures from multiple social networks rapidly and seamlessly, without the need to upload photos and other imagery to each of them separately. Have any pictures stored on your TwitPic account that you want to share with your Facebook Friends, or want to bring a couple of your Flickr shots to your MySpace account? Just log on to Dropico, log into the services you use and start dragging and dropping.
As expected , Google is calling new feature that blocked users from exporting their Orkut contacts a “bug.” An update today on the Data Liberation Blog (the group we specifically called out last night when wondering what was going on) notes that while Google was in the process of “adding additional security measures to Orkut Friends Export” it inadvertently broke the entire functionality. If that’s actually the case, here’s what I love about this: 1) Google says it was trying to add security features to improve Okrut Friends Export, yet it apparently didn’t bother to test the functionality after adding said feature.
So, Justin Timberlake was supposed to be at a party tomorrow night in San Francisco. The “special, private celebration” was in honor of the company Particle (which counts Timberlake as its lead investor), which recently launched its Robo.to service
Just like Web 2.0 start-ups have been spending much of 2009 trying to figure out how to turn users and community into revenues, so too have the last few years’ crop of Internet celebrities been trying to figure out how to make a business out of those over-used buzz words “their personal brands.” Think of all the online fame that’s been created in the last few years amid this hype of the Web democratizing celebrity. Now try to name how many of them crossed over to mainstream popularity
TC50 DemoPit company AskYourTargetMarket is hoping to simplify market research for businesses and solutions by offering a comprehensive platform where businesses can both create and deploy surveys. Since the site is in closed beta, AskYourTargetMarket has offered 500 invites for TechCrunch readers. Each invite comes with a free survey package for up to 50 respondents; enter the beta code “TC50-2009″ here.
While writing my previous pos t and looking over comments from earlier today on other posts, I started thinking about bias. For just about every story we write, it seems someone always has either a comment or an email for us ranging from suggestions that we should also write about such and such company that is a competitor to the one we wrote about, to outrage that we didn’t mention the other said company. So why don’t we?
The LRO has already provided us with a lot of fascinating high-res photos of the Moon’s surface.
This guest post was written by Meebo CEO Seth Sternberg . It is the first in a series of posts he’s writing about the decisions a young entrepreneur needs to make when she/he is first starting a business
