The 50 startup presentations are over, the judges votes are in, Michael and Jason chewed over the top contenders, and the winner of this year’s TechCrunch50 is RedBeacon. The startup aims to help consumers find local service providers such as plumbers, bakers, and contractors. As we described in our initial write-up:… Tweet This Post

Intuit will acquire the free online personal finance service Mint, we’ve confirmed from a source close to the deal, for around $170 million. The deal should be announced in the next few days… Tweet This Post

I’ve had a couple of conversations with Skype exec Jonathan Christensen over the last few days to get a better understanding of just what directions the company plans to go with regard to third party developers. The recent announcement of the closing of the Skype Extras program seems to suggest Skype is heading exactly in [...]

It’s less than a day before the third annual (and third sold out) TechCrunch50 launch event in San Francisco. Fifty startups are preparing to launch their new products on stage in front of thousands of people. Are they nervous? Yep. But its all part of a rite of passage into the wonderfully chaotic world of [...]

There’s been a big brouhaha over comments Steve Jobs made to NYT’s David Pogue in an interview following Apple’s event on Wednesday. Basically, most people are interpreting what Jobs said about eBook readers to mean that Apple plans to completely stay away from the market. But that’s not actually what Jobs said at all… Tweet [...]

Skype, which was recently sold by eBay to VC firms Silver Lake Partners, Andreessen Horowitz and Index Ventures, has announced that it is killing its Developer Program. The program, called “Extras,” allows third-party developers to build applications, both hardware and software, on top of Skype… Tweet This Post

A few minutes ago we published a post about Facebook’s new Desktop Notifications app for Mac — a very slick desktop client that lets you monitor your Facebook notifications from your Mac desktop. We’ve been poking around the app’s page a bit more, and we may have stumbled upon something even more exciting: a directory of [...]

Aviv Refuah, the young CEO of the public Israeli company Netex Corporation, has managed to score a US patent on an internet search option developed by the company he founded that could well force major Internet search players like Google, Microsoft and Yahoo to cough up royalties for future use of the technology… Tweet This [...]

In the first week after its release and after many favorable reviews – including our own – Opera Software has announced that its revamped desktop browser has been downloaded 10 million times and is now in use by millions of users around the world. For Opera, this is a record achievement… Tweet This Post

Despite having one of the most popular online photo services in the world, Flickr has done things the hard way on the iPhone. That is to say, for browsing photos they’ve made you go through their optimized website, and for uploading you had to do it through email. Both worked fine, but were not as [...]

AOL, under new management and with a spinoff IPO on the horizon, continues to fill out its executive ranks. The newest hire: former Yahoo exec Brad Garlinghouse will join AOL as President of Internet and Mobile Communications. Garlinghouse will report directly to CEO Tim Armstrong. Tweet This Post

Kai-Fu Lee has confirmed reports that he’s leaving his post as head of Google China to start something called Innovation Works, a mix between an incubator, a development lab and an angel investing firm. The plan is to hire 100-150 smart young Chinese engineers, help nurture their ideas, then spin off 50-75 of them a [...]