Is Google getting into the credit card business? A report in Android Police outlines the possible existence of a physical credit card issued by Google. The Google Wallet card, as it's known, will supplement the Google Wallet mobile payment system. The card, which would look and operate like other credit cards, is designed to sync with whatever credit card you've selected for payment on Google Wall

Semantics can say a lot about technology. You can tell a tech term has reached elite status when people begin to appropriate it as a verb. Need to answer a question? Google it. Did you just take a cliché picture of your breakfast? Instagram it. What's the name of this song again? Shazam it. Everyone assumes that an airbrushed picture has probably been "Photoshopped." While Adobe's iconic photo edi

The battle between the city of Chicago and Uber, a startup seeking to disrupt the taxi and limo industries, heated up this week. Uber has already faced unwanted attention because its pricing model for taxis conflicted with Chicago regulations. Now the city is introducing new regulations for Uber's separate sedan service that the company says could force it out of the Chicago market. Uber sedans ch

Nearly 3 years old, the cat was diagnosed with Feline Infectious Peritonitis (FIP), a fatal, incurable disease. Marty's owner, and Nyan Cat creator, Chris Torres adopted Marty in 2010 -- along with another cat, Buster, who died of FIP soon afterwards. Torres tweeted that Marty began acting strange last week, so he immediately took him to the vet. "Even with the medical treatment he received he sti

Are you looking to showcase your brand in front of the gaming industry’s top leaders? Learn more about GamesBeat Summit sponsorship opportunities here. The latest IDC numbers are out, and Android is by far the undisputed heavyweight champion of the smartphone world. If Android was Mike Tyson, iOS would be Peewee Herman, and everything else is dust on the floor. That is, if shipping numbers are all

Startups In A Bid To Enter The Japanese Market, Kids’ Tablet Maker Fuhu Raises $5M From Telecom KDDI Japanese telecom KDDI just announced the first U.S. deal for its Open Innovation Fund — a $5 million investment in Fuhu. The Los Angeles-headquartered startup offers a number of products and services (when Fuhu raised its Series B from Acer, we described it as an “avatar startup”), but the one that

[brightcove video="1939423913001" /] Researchers at MIT say they've created an algorithm for Twitter that predicts trending topics better than the site's existing equation. Associate Professor Devavrat Shah and student Stanislav Nikolov say their new algorithm predicts trending topics with 95% accuracy an average of 90 minutes faster than Twitter -- sometimes, as early as five hours before. The al

After a brief hiatus from any official tech role, former Tumblr president John Maloney will be joining the board of custom store platform Storenvy this week. A combination of a custom storefront builder and an eCommerce discovery platform like Wanelo or TheFancy, Storenvy allows sellers to build their own custom marketplaces and scale those marketplaces as part of the Storenvy network, like this a

Media & Entertainment “In the Studio,” Bump’s David Lieb Discusses Flock And A Shift To Background Services Editor’s Note: Semil Shah is an EIR with Javelin Venture Partners and has been a contributor to TechCrunch since January 2011. You can follow him on Twitter at @semil. “In the Studio” this week hosts a first-time founder and entrepreneur who began his career as an engineering student at two

Apple released an update to iOS 6.0, a fix that quashes a few bugs and gives the iPhone 5 the ability to receive wireless software updates. To install the update to iOS 6.0.1, you can either launch iTunes and update your iPhone there, or update wirelessly. To do that, go to the Settings menu and tap "Software Update," where iPhone 5 users will first be asked to download an updater for iPhone 5. Th