Did Microsoft Just Kick Apple Out of the Living Room?

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If you want to see what the Apple TV will look like, I hope you were tuned to Spike at about 1 p.m. Eastern today, because we got a pretty solid picture of the rumored device: a powerful all-in-one entertainment hub with a hands-free interface that smartly integrates live TV with a wealth of streaming and downloadable media. I'm speaking, of course, of the Xbox One , Microsoft's freshly unveiled new game console. Except it's so much more than a game console. The Xbox One is intended to be the command center for any and all media you experience through a TV screen. Sure, the Xbox 360 already had that job, but the One is a considerable upgrade. Read more... More about Microsoft , Apple , Itv , Apple Tv , and Xbox Read more »

Laptop Week Review: The 13-Inch MacBook Pro With Retina Display

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Features: Ships with OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion 2560 x 1600 13.3-inch at 227 PPI 128GB SSD 2.5GHz Intel Core i5 Processor MSRP: $1,499 Pros: Portability combined with high-quality display Super speedy sleep and resume Good battery life Cons: Just two USB ports Non-upgradeable RAM If I could only have one MacBook (which is usually the case for your average laptop-buyer), this is the one I’d pick without hesitation. Fewer issues than its 15-inch cousin, which pioneered the Retina line, combined with a much lighter design with a smaller desktop footprint for a display that can still give you crazy amounts of screen real estate all add up to a sure-fire winner. The Most Flexible Mac I’ve owned a lot of Macs. To find myself so ready to claim any single one a clear “winner” seems crazy, but the 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina Display is it. The smaller Retina notebook has proven itself through trial by fire and continues to be the Mac I pick for nearly every situation. For example it’s my constant companion at every travel event I ever go to. The 15-inch is just a hair too heavy and unwieldy, but the 13-inch Retina hits the sweet spot Read more »

Last Call For Pitch Applications To The Austin Meetup + Pitch-Off. Also, Get Tickets Here!

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10 days, people! TechCrunch invades Austin in just ten days from now, with our legendary Meetup + Pitch-off series. The magic started in New York this year, with a hugely successful pitch-off, an amazing turn-out and lots of fun memories. So we’re heading out on the open road with the event, which includes a networking meetup as well as a 60-second pitch-off competition with awesome prizes. Over the course of the year, we’ll be hitting up Boston, San Diego, and Seattle, but the first stop on our journey is in the great state of Texas. Austin, are you ready? The Austin Meetup + Pitch-Off will be held at The Stage On Sixth promptly at 6pm on May 30, and will come to a close around 10pm Read more »

How Hike, India’s Fast Growing Mobile Messaging App, Is Banking On SMS & Local Diversity To Beat The Big Boys

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It’s still practically a newborn but Indian mobile messaging app Hike is already channelling almost a billion messages a month between its five million registered users. Those numbers sound insignificant when you stack them up against the big beasts of the messaging space – WhatsApp claims 200 million+ monthly active users , and some 600 billion in and outbound messages – but Hike’s growth is  impressive when you consider it’s only just over four months old. WhatsApp, of course, has been around for almost four years. Mobile messaging is hot property right now, with tech giants like Facebook  and most recently Google  bent on owning the messaging space. The reason for all this interest in cross-platform chit-chat is that mobile messaging looks poised to steal social networking’s crown jewels: aka the cool factor, and thus the user engagement (Hike incorporates social status updates and emoji-based moods into its messaging app, to hang on the social chain). But the idea that there can be one ultimate mobile messaging winner — or one player as dominant as Facebook in the full-fat social networking space — seems unlikely. And that’s what Hike is banking on to disrupt WhatsApp and keep Facebook Messenger and its ilk from crashing its just-getting-started party. There’s no doubt that local market realities intercede much more on mobile than on the traditional social networking playground of the desktop, especially in emerging markets where device, network and carrier variations influence how people communicate based on how they can afford to communicate. Read more »

Google Says Its Chrome Browser Now Has Over 750 Million Monthly Active Users

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Sundar Pichai, Google’s senior vice president for Chrome and Android today announced that the company’s Chrome browser now has more than 750 million monthly active users. That’s up from 450 million users Google announced at last year’s I/O. This number, as far as we can see, includes both desktop and mobile users. Google launched Chrome in 2008 and since then, as Google proudly noted in today’s keynote, it has become the most popular browser in the world. It is also now, as Pichai noted early on in the keynote, a very important platform for Google that stands side-by-side with Android. Just recently, Google also decided to take more of the development process of Chrome in its own hands when it dropped WebKit and decided to start developing its own Blink rendering engine based on WebKit Read more »

Google I/O: Watch The Live Video Stream Here

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Google’s annual I/O conference  in San Francisco kicks off this morning at 9am PT/noon ET and, as usual, the good folks from Mountain View are making a live video stream of the event available for all of you who can’t be there in person. Unlike other years, when Google ran two separate keynotes on the first two days of I/O, the company is only running a single keynote this time around. Last year’s skydiving antics definitely set the bar very high for this year’s event and so far, we haven’t heard how Google plans to top this today. We do expect to hear quite a bit about Google+, however, and the rumor mill also predicts the launch of the next version of Google Talk/Hangouts, some news about Compute Engine and, of course, Google Glass – the star of last year’s event. The keynote is scheduled to last for a whopping three hours, so grab your coffee, donuts or popcorn, kick back, and enjoy the show. If you can’t watch the video, you can also find our play-by-play live blog here . Read more »

Angry Birds Maker Rovio Will Now Publish And Market Select Third-Party Games

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Rovio Entertainment, maker of the popular line of “Angry Birds” games, announced today that its expanding its business to include third-party titles, which it will publish, distribute and market to consumers. The new program is being called “Rovio Stars,” and makes available the company’s expertise as well as its marketing teams to other publishers. The first title to be released under the new effort is “Icebreaker: A Viking Voyage,” by Nitrome Ltd. The Icebreaker game, which follows the adventures of a lone Viking, will be followed by medieval adventure and puzzle game “Tiny Thief,” made by 5 Ants. This is the first time Rovio has included third-party titles in its lineup, the company announced this morning via a blog post and press release. “We want to help the developers to give these games that last coat of polish, publish the games and find their audience,” said Rovio’s Director of Development Kalle Kaivola. “We’re focusing on a small, select number of games, and each Rovio Stars launch will be an event of its own.” That “last coat of polish” means Rovio will actually assist its partners in finalizing game production and with post-production, the company explains. Read more »

How A Car Crash Changed Vishal Sikka And The Direction Of SAP

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It’s a rare fall rainy day in Palo Alto and SAP Executive Board Member Dr. Vishal Sikka is as sick as a dog. It’s less than a week until SAP Sapphire in Madrid and the community around him are like a worrying family. I had told them that it is okay. I could make the trip another time. But they were insistent I make the trip. Fast forward to May. Read more »

From The Garage To 200 Employees In 3 Years: How Nest Thermostats Were Born

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Editor’s note:  Derek Andersen  is the founder of  Startup Grind , a 40-city community bringing the global startup world together while educating, inspiring, and connecting entrepreneurs . I remember when the press first hit about Nest Labs, the guys behind the iPod/iPhone were taking on thermostats everywhere! A collective “huh?” went through the tech industry. It felt like the tech version of the Avengers got together to build an office park, not save the world. After sitting down with Nest co-founder Matt Rogers at Google For Entrepreneurs ‘ office a few weeks ago, I learned the backstory and vision of a company on a mission to build one of the world’s only great hardware/software companies in the world. There are hard workers, there are really hard workers, and then there are the Matt Rogers of the world. If you think you work hard, please read/watch our  entire interview  then reevaluate. He had a quick start with his first Mac product interactions being at age three. As a child growing up in Gainesville Florida, when asked what he wanted to be someday, Matt would respond “I want to work at Apple.” At 16 he was building robots and entering them into competitions with his classmates. As a sophomore at Carnegie Mellon, he agreed to basically do anything (anything being to help draw bones in CAD for a robotics hand project) to get a chance to work with with the robotics lab. His Junior year he applied via Monster.com, and pestered employees until he got accepted for an internship at Apple. That summer he took on the worst grunt work project imaginable (he rewrote all the software for manufacturing for iPod), and had three months for what he described as a “one year project” — seven days a week, 20-hour days, and “basically not sleeping.” How did it pay off? Read more »

Google Translate For Android Can Now Interpret 16 Additional Languages By Camera, Adds Phrasebook Support

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One of the coolest features of the Google Translate for Android app is that you can just point your camera at a text, tap the word you want to translate and get a translation back. Starting today , this feature supports 16 additional languages. Those are Bulgarian, Catalan, Danish, Estonian, Finnish, Croatian, Hungarian, Indonesian, Icelandic, Lithuanian, Latvian, Norwegian, Romanian, Slovak, Slovenian and Swedish. That’s in addition to Czech, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish, which the app already supported in its first release . Google uses optical character recognition and its machine translation tools to make all of this work. Read more »