Since launching its first product in 2008, Beats has gone from an obscure niche headphone brand to a multi-million dollar business with plenty of star power (Dr. Dre, Lady Gaga, Justin Bieber, etc.) catapulting the brand into the mainstream spawning several celebrity and musician endorsed rival brands. Now it’s going after an older crowd...
When you use Shazam, you’re probably identifying a song on the car radio, in a coffee shop, or anywhere else. Recently, however, the company has been expanding into the world of TV, thanks to partnerships with shows like American Idol, and also with brands, including nearly half of the advertisers during the Super Bowl....
We’re super excited to officially announce our second annual RoadMap conference, which will take place on November 5 in San Francisco, and is focused on design in the age of connectedness (get tickets here). Here is the big idea: with the data explosion and always-on connectedness, the world has become so complex, and design...
Bookmarking things is one of those quiet, thoughtless interactions with content that probably peppers your days without you even being aware of it. Did you just discover an awesome recipe for tabbouleh? Cmd (or Ctrl) + D that thing. Does some newly-found bit of literary criticism seem tailor-made for your English Lit class? You...
The great thing about Hardware Alley at TechCrunch Disrupt is – apart from the fact that it seems to grow bigger at event event – is the sheer variety of companies exhibiting. There’s pretty much anything you can imagine, and only two feet can separate a robotics company from a mobile gadget. But it’s...
Welcome to the latest instalment of Last Week in Asia, our roundup of the key stories and developments from across Asia’s growing technology and Internet spaces. China Top story: Google forced Android partner Acer to cancel joint smartphone launch, Alibaba claims It was never likely to be a globally impacting phone, but the cancellation of the launch...
Visua Musio is a new iPad app, surfaced by Creative Applications Network, which lets you make “visual music animations” by adding shapes to an empty canvas. That canvas becomes your song. Following along quite nicely with a few of the other experimental music apps TNW has covered in the past (like Orphion and iORGEL), this openFrameworks-built app wasn’t made...
Anyone who’s tried their hand at designing a typeface will know that it’s a wildly difficult process, and to actually come out at the end with something beautiful takes an extreme amount of skill, taste and patience. Type design isn’t meant for everyone, but typography is, and nearly every designer works with it every day. This...
When Ning co-founder and former CEO Gina Bianchini launched Mightybell a year ago, a startup aimed at helping you accomplish things in small, incremental steps and show others how to do the same, it essentially allowed you to create step-by-step private guides for anything. But the startup is shifting its focus slightly away from...
Social enterprise acquisitions have been the all the rage in the last year. But if you want to find the next big acquisition target, consider gamification startups. Bunchball founder and Chief Product Officer Rajat Paharia told me he expects it won’t be long before gamification companies will be buyout targets soon by the SAPs, Oracles, Microsofts...