Business

Billy Gallagher is a writer for TechCrunch. He is also the president and editor in chief of The Stanford Daily. Billy previously worked at The Stanford Daily for two volumes as a managing editor of news. He has also worked in sports and staff development at The Daily. In March of 2012 the Friends of The Stanford Daily awarded him... ? Learn More Users are complaining that Twoo, a social networking service, is sending unwanted messages to their contacts. Co-founder and CEO Lorenz Bogaert counters that this is a misunderstanding and the company is working to fix it. Users, both those who have emailed me and who have posted public reviews in the app store, say that the mobile app is intentionally designed to be tricky and cause the user to invite their entire address book. The app auto-selects all of the user’s friends with no unselect all button, meaning the user must manually unselect every friend. While the “connect” button fairly obviously pings all of the user’s contacts, the “next...

Eric Eldon is the Co-Editor of TechCrunch. He was previously the cofounder and editor of Inside Network, where he managed publications including Inside Facebook, Inside Social Games and Inside Mobile Apps. Before that, he spent a couple years covering technology and finance at VentureBeat, a leading Silicon Valley publication where he was the first employee. While Inside Network sold... ? Learn More Mobile usage is upending web empires, as Silicon Valley has come to realize over the last few years. And we’ll have two companies smack in the middle of the shift present at our Facebook Ecosystem CrunchUp this Friday in Redwood City, Calif., sharing how they’re surviving in this new world. Get your CrunchUp tickets here. Zynga, the dominant social game developer on Facebook, has been both building and buying its way into mobile gaming to adapt for this change. It’s had a few wins, like the growth of its “With Friends” franchise, and some losses, like the decline of Draw Something’s traff...

That was fast. Just a few days ago, Google officially opened registration for the 1 gigabit fiber network it is launching on both the Kansas and Missouri sides of Kansas City. Within just two days, more than 20% of the eligible neighborhoods on the Missouri side have already reached Google’s thresholds for bringing its super-fast fiber network to their “fiberhoods” and quite a few others are just a few signups away from reaching their goals. Things aren’t moving quite as fast in Kansas City, Kansas, though, where the median household income is significantly lower than on the other side of the city. There, only three neighborhoods have met Google’s goals so far and many are still hundreds of signups away from meeting Google’s thresholds for bringing fiber to their houses. When Google officially launched Google Fiber last week, it set up an unusual system for deciding where to roll it out first: the company separated the metropolitan area into “fiberhoods” with 250-1,500 households and...

Ryan has spent more than five years covering business, technology, and telecom-related subjects for a variety of publications based in New York and San Francisco. Ryan currently works as a writer for TechCrunch. ? Learn More VidCaster was founded in 2010 to make creating video sites easier than ever, and has signed up a number of customers who use it to deliver free, or ad-supported videos online. Now it’s adding the ability for its clients to charge for access to their library of content, with the launch of VidCaster Paywall. Other online video platforms like Brightcove or Ooyala only provide a video player to their clients, which requires them to build out their own sites, which videos can then be published into. VidCaster, by contrast, provides a full-service solution, enabling users to quickly create a fully customizable site for their content, without having to go through the work of hiring an outside design firm or whatever. It’s also cheap, relative to other solutions out ther...