Microsoft just announced that the Windows 8 Release Preview, the company’s final pre-release version of Windows 8, is now available for download. With this release, Microsoft is also making new versions of its Windows 8 apps for Hotmail, SkyDrive an Messenger available, as well as hundre… Read full post »

Businesses struggle to come up with what to post to their Facebook Page each day, and making those posts actually get seen is a difficult as the dark arts. That’s why PostRocket has raised $610,000 to help businesses blow up on Facebook thanks to news feed optimization. PostRocket analyz… Read full post »

OnSwipe’s been around for a little over a year, and since raised $1 million in funding and launched content recommendations within its HTML5 tablet publishing network. But just as tablets are entering into mainstream territory, people are now entirely comfortable consuming long-form cont… Read full post »

Editor’s Note: TechCrunch columnist Semil Shah is based in Palo Alto. You can follow him on Twitter @semil

“In the Studio” begins the summer by welcoming an entrepreneur from Austin who worked in various roles at different startups before she tried to return a cable bo… Read full post »

Privacy guidelines such as the “Do Not Track” option proposed by the Federal Trade Commission does not necessarily mean the end of the kind of targeted online ads that have brought such riches to web companies over the past decade. In fact, FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz says, more pri… Read full post »

Quite a bit hangs on the horizon in the world of gadgets. E3 is right around the corner, as is WWDC (Apple’s Developer conference), and while hardware gets cooler and cooler, the spec does not.

John, Matt and I discuss this and more in this week’s TC/Gadgets webcast.

As… Read full post »

Today, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) closed its window for new generic top-level domain name applications. ICANN will publish a list of all the applied-for strings in two weeks, but Google today already announced some of the names it applied for. Among these a… Read full post »

Until now, online and mobile video dating has mostly been about looking at video clips. Flikdate for iOS, however, is all about live video calls, making it feels more like a mix of Chatroulette and Match.com than the current crop of video dating services.

The Flikdate team gave me a demo… Read full post »

Banjo, the slightly creepy social discovery app that shows you who’s doing what nearby, has been updated today with a handful of new tweaks for its iOS version. Sorry Android folks — you’ll have to sit this one out for the time being.

Here’s a quick recap if you’v… Read full post »

Those who don’t live or haven’t recently traveled to China may not have experienced this first hand, but Google Search has been known to be “inconsistent and unreliable” in mainland China — to use Google’s words. Error messages like “This webpage is no… Read full post »

What once you had to use or pay for outside software to do, Facebook now offers for free. Facebook today rolled out Page administrator permissions and post scheduling. The two critical marketing features were previously only available in third-party Page management products like Buddy Media… Read full post »

Megan Quinn, the web exec who most recently served as the Director of Products at credit card processing tech firm Square, has joined Sand Hill Road venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers as an investment partner. The hire was announced by KPCB in a press release today.

Quin… Read full post »

Startup Bizo tries to help advertisers reach a business audience using methods like retargeting. Now it’s making those retargeting capabilities available in a self-serve product.

For anyone who needs a refresher on the nomenclature, if you visit a website but failed to sign up or buy any… Read full post »

Mobile video is taking off, especially due to high-quality video streams available over increasingly fast LTE mobile networks. The only problem is that most users have wireless plans that include a limited amount of data usage — usually just 2GB or 5GB per month. Since movies can quickly… Read full post »

Hipstamatic has made a successful business out of its popular (and paid) iPhone camera appand the many features it has incorporated to enhance that photo experience: four million active monthly users and 50 million photos snapped through it each month. Now the company behind it, Synthetic, is… Read full post »

The microphone in the iPhone 4S is pretty good — I have found it to capture excellent quality on all my consumer-ish recordings and videos. Of course, that is not to say it could not be improved.

When the iRig MIC Cast was announced at CES this year, I was pretty… Read full post »

Popular blogging platform Tumblr has quietly introduced a minor, but notable new feature: a better way to find contacts through your other social networking services or Gmail. On the page available at Tumblr.com/lookup you can now connect your Gmail, Twitter and/or Facebook accounts to find a… Read full post »

It’s nice to check-in to battle to be the mayor of your favorite burger joint, or to get 30 percent off a purchase, but it’s much more satisfying to check-in and feel as if you’ve actually done some good in the world. That’s because the AIDS battling organization (RED)… Read full post »

We’re living in a post-PC era, which means you likely have a few laptops/netbooks you’re looking to toss out in exchange for a shiny new mobile device. That said, Amazon’s trade-in program has recently included laptops, notebooks, and netbooks to its eligibility list.

The pro… Read full post »

Exec, which is kind of like Uber-meets-Taskrabbit, is overhauling its product today. It’s adding iMessages-like functionality to the app that makes it easier for customers to sync up with the people running their errands.

The app, which comes from a veteran team of Y Combinator alums inc… Read full post »

The team at AnchorFree have been rather busy lately — not only have they just recently closed a $52 million funding round, they’ve also gotten around to releasing an Android version of their popular HotSpot Shield mobile security app.

“We want to be the default app that users… Read full post »

Data visualization isn’t always easy, especially if your data is coming from a wide variety of sources. Datahero, which is launching its private alpha today, wants to make it easier for individuals, small companies and even enterprises to visualize and understand their data without havin… Read full post »

At first glance, you might mistake Clipboard, the impressively-backed web clipping service, for yet another Pinterest clone. But any similarities are only skin deep. Clipboard’s real rivals are things like Evernote’s web clipper, SpringPad, Delicious, Dropbox and Microsoft’s… Read full post »

LeWeb has just published its agenda for its new June 19-20 event in London and it’s looking good. The theme this year is “Faster Than Real Time” and will feature a host of big names from the world of tech as well as a Startup Competition. Amongst the names will be… Read full post »

It feels like it was just yesterday that I was downloading Fruit Ninja on a review unit of the iPad, swiping away at juicy watermelons and nearly-invisible kiwis.

But the app has been around for a while — two years to be exact. And over the span of 24 months,… Read full post »