Bad enough when some scrappy little startup comes to town and disrupts your profit margins into oblivion. Even worse–to any right-thinking capitalist–when a motley crew of idealistic do-gooders sneaks into your barn and sets one of your cash cows free. But what can companies do when faced with this sad and eternal truth: why buy your cow when they can get its SSL certificates for free? Read More

 Session lengths started to be counted not in hours or even minutes, but in seconds. Software had to blend into our life, augmenting it rather than supplanting it. Speed and simplicity became the keys to success. And it all came down to nailing something specific. The shift to mobile was a philosophical one, not just a matter of shrinking functionality to fit a smaller screen. The tech… Read More

 The smoke had barely begun to clear from the horrific attacks in Paris, in a neighborhood where I used to live, before the usual suspects started trying to twist the facts to fit their authoritarian agenda. CIA director John Brennan was only one of many posturing grandstanders hoping to use the slaughter as a political tool to attack secure encryption. Read More

 Good Lord. I have been a TechCrunch columnist for five years now, filing a piece every week, rain or shine or hail or flu, for 260 consecutive weeks. (Well–I might have missed one week when I was in Myanmar.) Can you believe it? Me neither. And so it is time, once again, for my annual self-flagellation column, wherein I itemize all the mistakes I made over the last year. Read More

 “There is something more powerful than the brute force of bayonets: it is the idea whose time has come.” And so last weekend I visited the Basic Income Createathon–held, appropriately enough, at Brigade in San Francisco–to witness the early stirrings of a movement whose central goal may seem strange and radical … but which I expect to eventually transform the life… Read More

 There are many visions of what our hyper-connected future might look like. We’re packaged countless variants on the shiny-techie-future vision theme every day as marketing departments lay it on thick to try to put gloss on their latest product and restless grease on the wheels of consumption… Read More

 I don’t care about valuations. But I do care about the tech industry as the most powerful means for the promulgation of new / cool / interesting / important technology; and the tremors running through the industry of late, as the so-called “unicorns” begin to tremble and quake, are hard to ignore. Evernote. Dropbox. Square. Theranos. Snapchat. IPO down rounds. Read More

 The long arm of the law wants ever more eyes, if you’ll pardon the gruesome metaphor. The UK government recently unveiled an attempt to legalize “draconian state surveillance powers.” US voices keep calling for a mythical “secure golden key” for government access to encrypted messages. Canadian police describe encryption plus legal decisions favoring online privacy… Read More

 Happy Halloween! Let’s talk about the scariest thing in the tech world today. No, no, not bubbles, drones, or unicorns: Bitcoin. Seriously. (Mostly.) Whether you think it’s a boondoggle scam, a libertarian Trojan horse that threatens governments, the scourge of Wall Street, or the thin edge of the post-capitalist wedge, you face two scary prospects: what if you’re right?… Read More

 To Be Useful, Or Interesting Google has a big head start, as it launched Now back in 2012. Now has tons of functionality, mostly surrounding objective data. It can pull relevant info like flight times and changes from your email, display breaking world news updates, or give you a heads up about traffic between your home and office. Its latest trick, Google Now On Tap, can surface… Read More

 Every time you log in to Facebook, every time you click on your News Feed, every time you Like a photo, every time you send anything via Messenger, you add another data point to the galaxy they already have regarding you and your behavior. That, in turn, is a tiny, insignificant dot within their vast universe of information about their billion-plus users. Read More

 YouTube made its top video creators an offer they literally couldn’t refuse, or they’d have their content disappear. Today YouTube confirmed that any “partner” creator who earns a cut of ad revenue but doesn’t agree to sign its revenue share deal for its new YouTube Red $9.99 ad-free subscription will have their videos hidden from public view on both the… Read More