You hear about 3D printing here and there, but for the most part it's a bit irrelevant to the average person because fabrication is messy, difficult, and prohibitively expensive. Even dedicated DIYers have to get their stuff custom made. Hopefully th...

For those Web companies that comply by it, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act is turning out to be their best friend. Last week, Universal Music Group (UMG) was denied a summary judgment by a Los Angeles court in its copyright infringement case ag...

Picasa, the popular free photo management software made by Google, has finally made its way to the Mac. The application has long been noticeably absent on the Macintosh - especially given the fact that it has been available for Linux (which typicall...

After picking the wrong horse in the Presidential Election (where she might have become Secretary of the Treasury if John McCain had won), former eBay CEO Meg Whitman now looks to be laying the groundwork for a run at the governorship in California i...

The iPhone is the hottest platform around, leading some small-time developers to overnight riches and spawning over ten thousand apps in only a few months. But without knowledge of Objective-C or the intricacies of the iPhone SDK, many talented desi...

Phishing attacks, which hit Twitter over the weekend, are a sign a service has arrived (Facebook has the same problem). But someone hacking into Twitter's internal admin tools and compromising 33 high profile accounts, including President Elect Barac...

The Crunchies ceremony and party in San Francisco is just four days away. Who's going to win best startup of 2008? It's up to you. Just make sure you vote by Wednesday (we've extended the voting deadline by two days). We've got an awesome evening pl...

Just a friendly reminder that CrunchGear will be at Moscone tomorrow (1/6) for Phillip W. Schiller's very first keynote speech. Wait. MacWorld keynote? What? Isn't Jobs dead? Who the hell is Schiller? Where am I?!

Smarter-email startup Xobni has raised $7 million in a B round of financing from Cisco Systems and existing investors Khosla Ventures, First Round Capital, Baseline Ventures, and Atomico. Three of the four existing investors increased their ownership...

Two notes from Wall Street analysts came to my inbox today with top-ten predictions for what 2009 holds in store for the technology industry. J.P. Morgan's Imran Khan, for instance, predicts Yahoo and Microsoft will finally strike a search deal, vid...

JPG magazine, which was declared dead less than a week ago, is most definitely for sale and it looks like a transaction will close shortly. Twenty or so potential buyers have expressed interest, say our sources, including Flickr (a natural fit beca...

Three years ago when Web 2.0 began proliferating, Israeli startups used eSnips as the poster child for their case that a successful social network could be founded in Israel. Based on the criteria in those days, eSnips was in fact delivering: It was...

Not much else to add but the Roku Netflix box will soon be able to stream 40,000 Amazon titles on demand, "enabling Roku customers for the first time to watch new release movies titles instantly." The movies cost as much as the do on Amazon and the b...

My guess is this has nothing to do with the phishing attacks that started on Twitter a couple of days ago. But a few minutes ago the official Fox News Twitter account posted "Breaking: Bill O Riley is gay" (referring to the host of the popular Fox sh...

After Steve Jobs pulled out of giving the keynote at this year's Macworld, there was rampant speculation once again about his health. The shares took a hit as investors began to worry about whether Jobs would be able to remain at the helm of the com...

At the beginning of each year I traditionally publish a list of my favorite startups and products. This is the fourth year I've done this - previous lists: 2006, 2007, 2008. You guys get to pick the winners of the Crunchies - this list is all mine....

We have information from a trusted source that the latest Palm smartphone running the Nova operating system will be launched Thursday. The new phone will have a full QWERTY keyboard that will slide down under a portrait-oriented touchscreen. This onl...

Me2, a new app that just went live on the App Store, allows users to transfer their contact information in a way that is sure to stir up some familiar (and perhaps not so fond) memories for any computer user over the age of 12. Using similar technol...

If you're a regular IM user with an iPhone, chances are you've heard of BeeJiveIM. Long established as a top choice IM app for BlackBerry, the iPhone release rocketed up to the #2 best selling application in the iTunes Social Networking category for...

When AppLoop launched its self-service platform for tracking and advertising on mobile applications last July, we were quite impressed. Leveraging the iPhone 3G’s native GPS capabilities, AppLoop's geo-aware mobile ad network was able to tell when...

We got a tip that Facebook Polls, the social networking service's business tool that enabled anyone to create a paid poll targetting a pre-defined group of users, is no longer available. The link that used to redirect to the service is now effectivel...

New York/Silicon Valley based SkyGrid offers users who are willing to pay a per seat license of $500/month a browser based premium real time news service that competes with super-profitable Bloomberg terminals and other services. The service first la...

Version 1.0 of Power Twitter, an add-on for Firefox created by Narendra Rocherolle at 83 Degrees, was just released. If you use Twitter and were excited about services like Tweetree, this is something you'll want to add immediately. Power Twitter mo...

New European streaming music service Spotify, which TechCrunch UK has been tracking since October, is getting increasingly good reviews. Spotify is a downloadable client for Windows and Mac users that lets you search, browse and stream a deep collec...

Blogging platform JournalSpace (which I'd never heard of to date) has ceased to be, following a wipe-out of the main database for which there was no back-up in place. According to the JournalSpace blog, the database was overwritten as a result of a m...