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You know the ultra-useful Shazam and SoundHound apps that let you hold your cellphone up to a speaker to instantly identify the song title and artist? A new app released Wednesday is doing exactly the same thing -- but for political ads instead of music. Called "Super PAC App," the app uses audio recognition technology to identify political advertisements. Then, it provides users with a wealth of

T-Mobile has announced what it calls a "truly unlimited" 4G data plan, with "no data caps, speed limits or bill shock." The new plan costs $20 when added to a "Value" voice and text plan or $30 per month when added to a "Classic" voice and text plan. This means that a truly unlimited plan -- we're talking unlimited voice, text and 4G data -- costs $89.99. For comparison, AT&T's most generous data

Where Do Twitter F-Bombs Come From? Heat Map Shows Rudest Places A new project called "Twitter Heatmap" shows where the U.S.'s most polite and rudest Twitter users are, by mapping Good Mornings and F*** Yous. The team at Vertaline, who created the map, scanned tweets in 462 specific U.S. locations. The phrase "Good Morning" was tracked between June 20 and July 1 and "F*** You" was tracked between

Facebook App Wants to Share Your Last Words With the World After You Die If I Die 1st, a just-launched campaign from Facebook app If I Die, is offering its users a chance at world fame. Here's the condition: You must be the app's first user to die. The app's first participant to die after a buffer period of a few months will have their message shared with the If I Die app community and media outle

Opera Q2: Sales Up 32% To $52.1M; Mobile Surges, Desktop Flat, Google Deal Stays Put Opera Software, the Norway-based Internet browser company, today reported Q2 2012 earnings that solidified the company’s strength in mobile, and ongoing weakness in desktop usage in the face of competition from Google’s Chrome and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browsers: revenues were $52.1 million, up 32% on Q1 20

Joel has decided to chase venture capital for StackOverflow, but I can’t exactly figure out why. He lists six benefits that just don’t compute under even light scrutiny: 1. The Answers market is in a land grab mode Unlike eBay, where there’s a general market for goods and you get huge network effects from having a critical mass of buyers and sellers, StackOverflow is all about niches. People who a

Enter Logitech's Washable Keyboard K310, unveiled on Wednesday. It has the familiar layout of the Logitech keyboards you may already use, but this one can take a dip in water. You can rinse it in the kitchen sink or wipe it with a wet cloth. Not only can the keyboard be submerged up to 11 inches, it dries easily, too. The keyboard can handle plenty of washing and use, according to Logitech. Charac

Songs from Russian punk band Pussy Riot are now streaming on Slacker Radio's "Protest" station amid public outcry -- online and offline -- around the world for their imprisonment. A judge in Moscow last week convicted three Pussy Riot members for hooliganism after staging an anti-Vladimir Putin performance inside an Orthodox cathedral. They were sentenced to two years in prison. One of four Pussy

TechCrunch’s Picks: The 10 Best Startups From Y Combinator’s S12 Demo Day 75 startups pitched their hearts out today at Y Combinator’s 15th Demo Day. We saw surefire small businesses to risky big bets but after collecting opinions from their YCS12 classmates and top VCs, these are TechCrunch’s top 10 picks. [Chosen and compiled in random order by TechCrunch writers Josh Constine, Anthony Ha, Colle

Y Combinator S12 Demo Day Batch 4: Meet Vayable, Light Table, viaCycle, and Others We just wrapped up the fourth session at Y Combinator Demo Day. This will be the last batch of startups we can cover today, because the final group is all off-the-record (i.e., they haven’t launched yet). You can read our coverage of the previous sessions here, here, and here. At this point in the day, I think every

Y Combinator S12 Demo Day, Batch Three: Dreamforge, BigCalc, Tracks.by, And More We’re still here at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California watching Demo Dayfor Y Combinator’s Summer 2012 class, the storied incubator’s biggest yet. Today’s 75 presentations have been broken up into five batches, with the fifth being off-the-record. The third round of startups just presented their

Intuit reported fourth-quarter earnings today, with Q4 revenue increasing by 14 percent to $651 million. The company missed analyst expectations, with $0.03 in Non-GAAP earnings. Analysts expected $0.06 cents a share on revenue of $652.6 million. Net income came in at $4 million for the quarter. “Fiscal 2012 was another strong year for Intuit, with 10 percent revenue growth and earnings per share

Online Banking Startup Simple Unveils Goals, To Help Users Save Up For Whatever Simple was launched with a pretty brilliant idea: Make banking easy. Uh, simple, even. To date, the startup has been doing that by allowing users to keep track of where their money is going, with a no-fee banking system, an intuitive iPhone app, pretty neat data visualization tools, and the ability to keep track of how

Being a mobile application developer is a lot like being a writer. It could make you a millionaire, or it could leave you in a basement apartment eating Top Ramen. But an Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator company, TapFame, is ready to make things a bit easier on both the developer and the brands that are looking to build apps. TapFame allows any developer to easily build a beautiful and engagin

From Toilet Seats to $1 Billion: Lessons from Airbnb’s Brian Chesky by Jared Tame on May 30, 2011 You may have just read the news that Airbnb raised $100 million at a $1 billion valuation, but what you may not know is what happened before all of that. When I read that story, I wasn’t too surprised having interviewed Brian Chesky and seeing how his mind works in Startups Open Sourced. You may not r

Verizon Vacation Blackout Reveals The New iPhone Will Launch On Friday, September 21 A trusted Verizon employee has just confirmed to TechCrunch that the carrier is having an all-staff vacation blackout from the dates of Friday, September 21 to September 30. You know what that means, right? The next iPhone, whether it’s called the iPhone 5 or simply the new iPhone, will almost certainly be availab

New Models In Venture: Betaworks, Y Combinator Share What Works At Disrupt There are a number of forces that led to the disruption of traditional venture capital, including new models like Betaworks, and startup incubator Y Combinator. So who better to help lead the discussion on how the venture industry has been innovated upon than John Borthwick, CEO of Betaworks; and Harjeet Taggar, Partner at