Katie Geminder , MySpace’s SVP of User Experience and Design who was brought on board last summer , is leaving the company at the end of the week. Her departure doesn’t come as a big surprise — Geminder was invited to join the company by recently ousted CEO Owen Van Natta, who had previously...

This is a guest post by Tiffany Philippou who started the Secret London Facebook Group. Two weeks after launch the group had amassed over 180,000 members, propelling its 21 year old creator into her first startup – see our previous coverage . The website build weekend drew to a close two days...

During Apple’s iPad event in January, CEO Steve Jobs announced that Apple now had over 140,000 apps in the App Store (along with over 3 billion downloads). If the numbers by app analytics company Distimo are correct, that number is now past 150,000. But the App Store is growing so big, so quickly...

By Evan Ackerman As if having to wave your arms around while playing Nintendo Wii games wasn’t hard enough, those Riiflex Wii weights that we heard about nearly a year ago are finally up for sale. Each weight adds two pounds to the already hefty burdens of the Wiimote and nunchuk, which last time...

Blippy , the Twitter-like service that lets users publish the details of all their purchases, is just a couple of months old. But it already got Stephen Colbert’s attention (thumbs up). And now it has Amazon’s too (thumbs down). Cofounder Philip Kaplan first mentioned that Amazon had turned...

Stealth startup Makara is launching publicly tonight with its cloud-based application deployment and management platform. Formerly known as WebappVM, Makara has raised angel funding from Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. The startup also raised $6 million last year from Shasta Ventures and Sierra Ventures....

Beyond the Rack, a private sample sale site, has raised $2 million in funding from Oleg Tscheltzoff and Oliver Jung, and Montreal Start Up. This brings the startup’s total funding to $4.5 million. Similar to Gilt, HauteLook and Ideeli, Beyond the Rack is a members-only shopping site that offers...

The FCC has just sent letters inquiring about Early Termination Fees to each of the major wireless carriers in the United States — AT&T, Sprint Nextel, T-Mobile, and Verizon Wireless — and one outlier: Google. We’ve embedded all five letters below. The inquiry is the first action taken...

A lot of readers noticed that we’ve been running advertisements for BigDeal , a website that lets users pay to bid on low priced items. In addition to running the ads, BigDeal also created a special cobranded version of their service at techcrunch.bigdeal.com . That page used our logo (with the...

Amazon.com this morning announced that it is expanding its self-service Kindle Digital Text Platform worldwide, giving more authors and publishers the chance to upload and sell books in English, German and French to customers around the world in the Kindle Store . Until today, DTP was only available...

“So that’s your advice is it? As my agent? On the week my book comes out in paperback, I should produce my own pirated version and give it away free? Why don’t I just punch my publisher in the face? That would be less work.” My agent rocked back in his chair (a chair bought with...

The scrabble to dominate the ebook and digital content space continues, with Sony apparently clinching a deal with The Wall Street Journal and the New York Post for digital subscriptions on their Reader series of ebook devices.  MarketWatch subscriptions will also be available, and Sony expect monthly...