TechCrunch
The fiercely independent site was a huge success story until founder Michael Arrington walked off in a huff—that is, he clashed with AOL’s Arianna Huffington after selling TechCrunch to the once-mighty online firm. She understandably objected to Arrington’s decision to launch a fund to invest with some of the start-up companies that TechCrunch was covering.
So what’s it look like today? Some of the stories are so inside-baseball that you would care only if you were a Silicon Valley VC (“Cloudera Founder’s Big Data Management Startup Wibidata Raises $5 Million from NEA and Eric Schmidt”) or technophile (“Yippiemove Wants to Become the Twilio of Email Migration.”).
But keep scrolling: there are some goodies embedded here. A post on a new site called Speesky describes how to look for dates “without over-exposing yourself to creeps, trolls and spammers.” Did you know there were 10,000 tweets per second in the final three minutes of the Super Bowl? TechCrunch is on the case. Plus, columnist Andrew Keen is a provocative video host, interviewing, for instance, a Forbes columnist on why Best Buy is gradually self-destructing.
The irreverent tone is refreshing, but the focus is so heavily on being the website of record for startup companies that the consumer-oriented stuff feels secondary.
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