web 2.0

Alexa junkies have been using Alexaholic for over a year now. It’s a much better and faster way of accessing Alexa site traffic data and trends than Alexa itself, and is an example of a small startup using Amazon’s own web service in a much better way than they do themselves. Alexaholic is now the [...]

The Internet has made identity theft trivially easy - a new report from Symantec says that for $14 you can obtain someone’s name, date of birth, mother’s maiden name, social security number, bank account (with password), and credit card information (with security code). At any given time, nearly 150,000 credit card numbers can be purchased [...]

If you’ve been waiting to see the new Scrapblog, demo’d last month at the We Media Conference in Miami, you only have to wait another day or so. The site is offline, and users have been emailed to expect the new version soon. This application hasn’t twittered yet, but it has a hardcore base of [...]

Now that South by Southwest 2007 has come to a close I finally have some minutes to write about the two most vaunted services of the show: Twitter and Dodgeball. With both services, users establish a friends list to whom messages are broadcast. Twitter allows you to update your status through IM, SMS or a [...]

Two years ago Y Combinator invested in Justin Kan and Emmett Shear’s calendaring company, Kiko, which eventually folded after Google Calendar launched in 2006. The Kiko guys have returned to the startup scene since their acquisition on eBay with two new partners and a new quirky live blogging startup, Justin.TV, also funded by Y Combinator. [...]

Mark this one down as a fairly obvious opportunity, and I’m surprised it’s taken this long for someone to build it. Sammy Villarreal, an active duty U.S. Marine for the last 11 years, has seen his share of foreign deployments. He’s been to Iraq, Okinawa and the Philippines. He missed Craigslist back home during [...]

Adobe just announced that it’s much anticipated Apollo platform is now available for developers. The software developers kit can be downloaded at adobe.com/go/apollo.Although this is the official release of the SDK, many developers have been working with Apollo for quite some time. Ryan Stewart recently covered the some of the better Apollo demos from an [...]

When I first reviewed GotVoice in June 2005, I thought it was an awesome, if rough-around-the-edges, application. Gotvoice’s goal is to bring sanity to your voicemail inbox, and it does that well. Tonight they are relaunching with a much cooler interface and a whole bunch of new functionality.Previously GotVoice was a simple service that used [...]

Los Angeles based TutorLinker just relaunched with a new design and functionality. They’ve created a marketplace to find tutors based on geography (including a Google maps mashup), subject matter and pricing.This is the kind of site that I really like to review. The creators are two UCLA college students. No venture financing or big team [...]

I have the pleasure of confirming the rumors: Heather Harde, currently the SVP of Mergers and Acquisitions at Fox Interactive Media, will start her new job as the CEO of the TechCrunch Network (and my boss) by the end of the month. This isn’t the way I hoped to announce this news, but Om Malik [...]