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Jordan Crook studied English Literature at New York University before entering the tech space. Prior to joining TechCrunch, Crook dabbled in mobile marketing and mobile apps as well as doing device reviews for MobileMarketer and MobileBurn. Crook is fascinated with alternative energy production and greentech. She is now a writer for CrunchGear. ? Learn More You’re heading off to college. You have no idea that the next four years of fun will fly by, likely leaving you jobless and in debt. You’re unconcerned with nonsense like that — you’re ready to achieve your dreams! You’re ready to party! You’re ready to meet your mate in life! But before you pack up the family van full of clothes, collapsible IKEA furniture and school supplies, there’s one thing you can’t forget to pack: your trusty smartphone. It’s the one thing that no college student — not a drama geek nor homecoming queen, not a stoner nor a virgin — can live without. And as we all know, apps are the life blood of a smartphone...

Jordan Crook studied English Literature at New York University before entering the tech space. Prior to joining TechCrunch, Crook dabbled in mobile marketing and mobile apps as well as doing device reviews for MobileMarketer and MobileBurn. Crook is fascinated with alternative energy production and greentech. She is now a writer for CrunchGear. ? Learn More Services like Uber, Taxi Magic, Cabulous, and SideCar are completely disrupting the way we get around our cities. But almost all of them use private services, excluding the city’s public transportation. But a new startup has joined the pack of transportationally gifted companies, and (wait for it) with New York’s infamous yellow cabs. No joke. It’s called ZabKab. It works almost identically to Uber, except that the broadcast you send out when you hail a taxi appears on the yellow cab driver’s smartphone or tablet. You tap a button, and then watch all the cabs in your area move on the map in real time. Yellow cabs are available, gr...

Ever wonder what those mysterious government service fees on your cell phone bill go to fund? Part of it goes toward a newly launched $415 million plan to provide 400,000 rural netizens with some broadband goodness. The Connect America Fund, a Obama administration-supported plan for universal broadband, is part of a larger $4.5 billion mission to connect 19 million homes to bit-torrent streaming speeds by 2020. As with any major government rollout, the project is dogged by bureaucracy and industry backlash, but is nonetheless moving forward. Broadband has gone from being a luxury to a necessity for full participation in our economy and society,” writes the FCC, arguing that public money will go toward expanding an essential part of the economy, ultimately resulting in more revenue for the federal government. Not everyone is thrilled with the plan: South Dakota Public Utilities Commission Chairman Chris Nelson says the government’s project has halted private sector plans for his state,...

Editor’s note: Rebekah Cox is a product designer at Quora and previously a product design lead at Facebook. This post is a followup to a recent tweet, and first appeared on Quora. It’s important to understand what identity isn’t: Identity is not a password, it’s not root access, it’s not your calendar, it’s not your email, it’s not a technical achievement, it’s not your location, it’s not a user account in a system, it’s not your contacts and it’s not a feature. So, what is identity? I think in its most basic form, your identity is the product of how you manage your attention and others’ access to that attention. Those areas where your attention is focused assemble to form a set of experiences that shape and influence where you’ll direct future attention. But that attention is interrupted all the time by people, events, things, desires, boredom, weather, etc. and that process of interruption is, largely, contained to physical space because that is a natural gate on access. Then ther...

Colleen Taylor is based in San Francisco where she is a reporter for TechCrunch TV. Previously she worked for GigaOM, where she reported on startups and Silicon Valley. Earlier, Colleen reported for Mergermarket, an online newswire and subsidiary of the Financial Times focused on M&A. Before that, she was a contributing editor for Electronic News, the semiconductor industry trade newsletter. Colleen... ? Learn More Anyone who has used Facebook on a smartphone or tablet knows that the social network still has a ways to go when it comes to nailing the mobile experience. Turns out that Mark Zuckerberg is well aware of this — and on the company’s Q2 2012 earnings call with investors and analysts this afternoon, he vowed that his team is on it. Zuckerberg said: “Facebook is the most used app on basically every mobile platform. So when we think about what we want to do right now, we want to increase the depth of experience in addition to just growing users. We want to not just have app...

Jordan Crook studied English Literature at New York University before entering the tech space. Prior to joining TechCrunch, Crook dabbled in mobile marketing and mobile apps as well as doing device reviews for MobileMarketer and MobileBurn. Crook is fascinated with alternative energy production and greentech. She is now a writer for CrunchGear. ? Learn More LG has been turning a corner of late, getting its mobile division out of a six-quarter-long rut. Today’s Q2 report outlines a 46 percent increase in net profits year-over-year at $138 million, though phone sales continue to be an obstacle. Overall revenues went up from last quarter, but are still down from a year ago. The handset division in particular had an operating loss of $49.5 million, which has a lot to do with the decline in feature phone sales. Smartphone sales, on the other hand, rose to 44 percent of all units sold, which is up from Q1's 36 percent. It’s not expected that LG compete directly with the iPhone, but the...

Ingrid is a reporter for TechCrunch, joining February 2012, based out of London. She comes from paidContent.org, where she was a staff writer, and has in the past also written freelance regularly for other publications such as the Financial Times. Ingrid covers mobile, digital media, advertising and the spaces where these intersect. When it comes to work, she feels most... ? Learn More You know a brand is doing something right when people go a little crazy for its products even before they’ve been announced. A new survey out from 451 Research/ChangeWave on consumer smartphone sentiment found that Apple’s iPhone 5 — whatever that may turn out to be — is seeing an “unprecedented” wave of advance demand — higher than any other iPhone model has had before, with 14 percent of respondents saying they were “very likely” to buy the iPhone 5. In contrast, the S3 from Samsung, got a 2 percent “very likely” response from users planning to buy a smartphone in the next 90 days. The news comes one...