Techcrunch News & Articles

Over the weekend, AOL (news, site) picked up Huffington Post for US$ 315 million, bringing some firepower to its web strategy.

Some seem to hope that it's an early April Fool's Joke, but the truth came out on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt today: AOL is acquiring TechCrunch.

Today at the LeWeb conference here in Paris, Ryan Sarver, Twitter's Director of Platform made a series of four announcements, including the unveiling of Chirp -- a developer focused conference that will take place in San Francisco in Spring 2010.

Not a lot of details were provided, but there is a festive event page up, which is similarly scant on the finer points. A hard date has not yet been announced, but from comments over at TechCrunch Ryan Carson of Casonified is said to be producing the event. Ryan is also behind the Future of Web Apps and the Future of Web Design events.

The other 3 announcements made by Sarver include:

• The real time "fire hose" of data will be made available for all developer partners, not just the big boys like Google and Microsoft. This is a 2010 item.
• Twitter developers will get a new, cozy home on the web. The new dev website will be designed to better facilitate individual productivity, company transparency and collaboration.
• Developers using oAuth for access will soon get a 10x increase in the cap of requests per hour that they can make. Those using Basic Auth will need to move on as support for this will be phased out over the next 6 months.

What can we in the content and collaboration industry read from these and other themes at LeWeb?

I see two obvious items. First, the real time data expectations are going to affect what customers expect of content and collaboration technologies -- non-real time is going to start appearing dated. Second, integration of data, sentiment and identity from services such as Twitter, Facebook and MySpace is going to become increasingly seen as a standard requirement. Products which claim to be marketing suites will need to be pushing and pulling data in and out of the social fire hoses.

Social Media moves so fast, it's hard to keep up. Here's the week's top stories, in scan-friendly format.

This week:

• TechCrunch's Arrington Loses It With PR Firms
• StockTwits Raises Funding
• Macworld Sans Steve
• Facebook Developers Grumble, but FB Platform 'Still Most Attractive Option'
• Read Write Web's Best Apps of 2008
• Random Scandal of the Week -- Slave Labor at HuffPost

TechCrunch's Arrington Loses It With PR Firms

In a wild, Chris-Crocker-style rant which had everyone asking "who spiked his non-foam double-latte?", Michael Arrington declared war on the PR firms that dare to ask TechCrunch to hold off on breaking news until they say so. Scared children cried and hid behind their mothers' petticoats, grown men slunk away.

Said an anonymous 'insider': "Yes, Arrington's done himself no favors with this tirade. Just in case he's damaged his reputation, perhaps he should look into hiring in some PR."

Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb meanwhile wasted no time in telling Arrington he was wrong. He immediately reposted an older article on How and Why  Embargoes Work.

Social Media moves so fast, it’s hard to keep up. Here are the week’s top stories, in scan-friendly format.

This Week:

• How Obama Won the Online War
• Web 2.0 Summit Updates: Zuckerburg and Yang
• Happy 5th Birthday Delicious!
• Health 2.0 You Say?
• How Will Twitter Make Money #1,000,123
• Following the Election on Twitter Sucked

How Barack Obama Won the Online War

We all know that the President-elect has changed the game in terms of how elections are run, embracing the youth vote through the social tools which they use to communicate and raising millions in campaign funds through omnipresent widgets. No serious electoral candidate in future will go to war without having a serious social media strategy, and without thinking seriously about how to coin it from online contributions.

In case you missed it, someone died and made the Associate Press King of How Bloggers Can Use AP Content. Or so it would seem since the AP has released its own rules about how bloggers are allowed to use content written by the AP.

Apparently, they had their fill of being generously quoted and having their content graciously linked from blogs audaciously talking about the topics covered in their original articles. It’s clear that something had to be done.

TechCrunch UK has crunched the numbers on venture capital (VC) in Mediatech in Europe, identifying the biggest deals, the most prolific investors and VC trends in new media in the region. TC’s report is backed up by figures released by the Library House research group.