Facebook is pursuiting social networks it believes have copied their design or features by suing German social network StudiVZ. The Financial Times has reported that Facebook have filed a suit in the Californian Supreme Court against the German company for what it claims is an infringement of Facebooks “look, feel, features and services”. StudiVZ claims [...]

A few weeks back we launched Elevator Pitches, our community video project that allows entrepreneurs to pitch their startups through 60 second YouTube videos. Since then we’ve received a number of of pitches covering everything from a fandom portal to a site focusing on group based text messaging. Above, we’ve embedded the most popular of the [...]

Mint, the popular personal finance site that won TechCrunch 40, has further expanded its services by introducing support for mortgage and loan tracking. Users will now be able to keep tabs on their loans from over 1,000 supported institutions. In addition to the mortgage and loan tracking, Mint also monitors users’ savings [...]

The current iPhone App Store revenue share model - a 70/30 split for the sale of apps, generally in the $0.99-$9.99 range - doesn’t exactly reward developers for producing addictive games. Greystripe, an advertising network for mobile games, has stepped in to compensate developers for every time their games are played, not just for [...]

Twiddla, a free service that lets users draw and annotate webpages with their peers, has launched a new version of its site that introduces a number of new features. Compared to enterprise-grade collaboration software, Twiddla falls a little short - there’s no screen sharing or video chat, and the software seems a little buggy. [...]

A large portion of YouTube videos are watched on other sites in embeddable players (like the one below of Erepublik CEO Alexis Bonte giving us an Elevator Pitch). But if someone watches a YouTube video on a site other than YouTube, does it count towards the total views of that video? Apparently not, or [...]

Evite is getting long in the tooth. Every day it seems there is some new startup ready to take it down: Pingg, Socializr, Center’d, MyPunchbowl, Presdo. Well, today the IAC-owned invitation juggernaut is fighting back. Or at least, it’s stirring. Evite is launching a new design in beta today. (On a [...]

This isn’t enough data to declare Microsoft’s much derided Live Cashback search product a winner, but the first full month after it launched (June) shows a 15% gain in search volume v. the previous month, according to Comscore. This erases the previous month’s losses, bringing Microsoft up to 9.2% overall search share. Live Search CashBack gives [...]

Twitter is living up to its promise to open up its data stream as much as possible to developers. While I was negotiating with Twitter cofounder Evan Williams to sit down and do a video interview at Foo Camp last weekend, Gnip founder Eric Marcoullier was hitting him up to give Gnip, and therefore everyone, [...]

Next Wednesday is Facebook’s F8 developer conference, and speculation is swirling about what Facebok might announce at the event. Last year, CEO Mark Zuckerberg kicked off the Facebook Platform for Web app developers, which is now its own mini-industry. So what will Facebook announce this year? We’ve suggested that Facebook might take the [...]

Hype, hype, hype. Now that the iPhone 3G launch has blown over and I’ve been able to integrate the phone into my daily routine, I think we’re ready for an official CrunchGear review. Our advice? Wait. With 60% certainty I predict a minor hardware or, more likely, software update in the next month or so [...]

Yahoo is pulling out its biggest gun in the showdown with Carl Icahn: the Yahoo homepage itself. Right now on Yahoo.com, the single most-visited page on the Web (with 304 million unique visitors worldwide in May, according to comScore), there is a big purple button the third box down aimed squarely at Yahoo shareholders. [...]

To recap: Every week we’ll be giving away a cool Samsung phone culminating in the Samsung Instinct! This week gunning for the Samsung Ace. The haiku should focus on sight and must be tweeted to UseYourInstinct. We will close entries for this week at noon on Tuesday, July 22. If you entered the previous contest and [...]

With the highly successful launch seen by Pandora’s iPhone app, streaming digital radio seems ready to finally go mainstream. Unfortunately, as great as Pandora is, its music recommendations can shy towards music you already know - you may like the song that gets recommended, but there’s a good chance you’ve heard it before. [...]

BREAKING NOW: Google is buying Russian contextual advertising company ZAO Begun for $140 million from UK-registered Rambler Media (many Russian firms now base themselves in the UK). Rambler owns 50.1 percent of Begun, so to secure the deal it is buying the remaining 49.9 percent stake from owner Bannatyne Limited and then selling the [...]

Wuala, the innovative P2P social grid storage coming out of Switzerland, is doing a sneak preview of its public beta from now until Monday evening, after which it will close until the full launch on August 14. It’s worth checking this out before the window closes as I’m betting Wuala is pretty much unlike any [...]

It used to be that if a user posted a link on FriendFeed, they would get a few comments and likes and that would be it. If someone reposted that link, it would have its own set of comments for the user who reposted it. If that was a popular link, there could [...]

Over the course of the last year we’ve seen an explosion of startups looking to take streaming video to the mobile phone. Smartphones with high-speed data plans and video cameras are becoming increasingly commonplace, and many users are eager to turn their phones into handheld recording studios, even at the cost of video quality. Well-known [...]

Filtering through the noise to find news on discovery sites can be daunting. Social bookmarking sites like Digg and Reddit have been doing very well, and memetrackers, like Techmeme, are also growing in popularity. The newest trend in discovery tools, it seems, is semantic search engines, like Powerset (recently bought by Microsoft) and [...]

Earlier this week Crunchgear broke the news on two new upcoming Kindle models: a smaller form factor Kindle to be released this year ahead of the holidays, and a large screen (probably 8.5×11) to come sometime next year. A couple of commenters in that post have pointed out that the large screen Kindle is perfect to [...]

Does this picture remind you of your boss a little too much? It may be time to check out the latest job listings on CrunchBoard. Here’s a sample from the last week: Software DeveloperZillow - Seattle, WA Product ManagerInternet Start Up - Manhattan Beach, CA Web Client Software EngineerGotuit - Woburn, MA Senior Interactive Flash DesignerModea - [...]

Microsoft is testing a new pilot program that will let third party publishers add Microsoft’s contextual ads next to their content in a self-serve format. From what we can tell from the email below, it will be very similar to Google’ Adsense and Yahoo’s Publisher Network. Google dominates this space (and all other contextual advertising) [...]

Some Twitter users have encountered a new design while using the microblogging service today…only to see it disappear once they refresh. Below is a screenshot that Zain Memon managed to grab before it went away. Tabs like Recent, Replies, and Everyone have been moved to the right-hand column. Overall, nothing too major. Corvida from SheGeeks points [...]

Update: This release of tickets has sold out. Today, we are releasing the last 100 tickets to a roundtable debate I am hosting: Mobile Web Wars: Which Platform Will Win? To register for a ticket, sign up now. Our last release of tickets sold out in 5 minutes. The Roundtable will be a freewheeling [...]

Google announced their Q2 results today after the market had closed. Shares are down by as much as 12% as earnings growth reported was below analysts expectations. Net income for the quarter was $1.25B, up from $925M. The company reported a profit of $4.63 per share, which was slightly below the $4.72 average expectation from [...]