TechCrunch

SAN FRANCISCO--Facebook took the stage on Tuesday afternoon at the TechCrunch50 conference for a "Developer Garage" event, to highlight just how important its team of engineers is to the company--and to unveil a new feature to let users play around with what they're up to.

Facebook engineering lead Aditya Agarwal unveiled a new offering called "Prototypes," which makes internal projects on the site accessible as applications on its developer platform. "Some of them are going to be buggy," Agarwal said. "Some of them are going to be super polished."

Prototypes, which … Read more

Another one from Facebook: The company announced Tuesday, just as it was about to take the stage in a "developer garage" event at the TechCrunch50 conference, that it has reached 300 million active users around the world.

Also: It's cash flow-positive.

"As of today, Facebook now serves 300 million people across the world. It's a large number, but the way we think about this is that we're just getting started on our goal of connecting everyone," a blog post from CEO Mark Zuckerberg read. "We're also succeeding at building Facebook in … Read more

It looks as if Facebook was a little premature in using its Twitter account to announce "Prototypes," a Google Labs-like operation that lets members beta-test new features for the social network and offer feedback.

The tweet offering a screenshot of Prototypes was swiftly deleted--but props to The Next Web for snagging it before it was pulled.

So what are the "prototypes" in question? Facebook seems to be experimenting with desktop notifications, content discovery, and upgrades to its Events invitation service. Next to each test feature is a star-based rating system through which, presumably, users can … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--Let's not kid ourselves. Nobody was expecting the audience at the TechCrunch 50 event to be full of women. That's just the reality of Silicon Valley, notorious for its boys-club culture (and plethora of complaints about how hard it is to find a girlfriend).

So it was undoubtedly a challenge for two of the start-ups pitching to TechCrunch50's all-male panel of industry insiders in Tuesday morning's "Subscription & Commerce Marketplaces" category. They were offering the first look at companies that are geared toward a demographic that's just about the opposite of the … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--A handful of products at the TechCrunch50 conference are working on better ways to help people get business done. Many are new plays on old ideas, while a few offer a new approach for existing systems.

Clientshow

Clientshow is the latest collaborative tool pitched at creative professionals. Like ProofHQ and Conceptshare it's designed to let designers get together with clients and share works in progress, as well as get sign-offs on projects.

The service is split up into different modules. One lets you upload all your work, while the other lets users go through and leave notes on it, including comments and sign-offs. The third module is a presentation mode that lets you do a live demo of the files to clients.

Its big difference from some of the existing services is that it's an Adobe AIR application, and that it offers a ready-to-print version of a project's entire history so that attendees or project coordinators can print it out and get a quick heads up on what's changed.

Metricly

Metricly is a free tool that lets users create their own analytics dashboard from a number of sources. It hooks into Google Analytics, QuickBooks, and Salesforce and can grab similar numbers from each and slap them onto one graph. It also plugs into Twitter and Facebook and can show you graphs of how many tweets or followers you've accumulated, as well as fans on Facebook. Services that aren't on its list of presets, but that have API keys, can be plugged in too.

Metricly got hounded on by the judges for not having enough depth to fulfill the needs of hardcore users as well as it not launching with a price tag. The initial offering is free of charge, but its creators are planning to launch a paid premium version that adds extra API connections and data tracking features that will run somewhere between $10 to $100 a month when it's launched.

Crowdflower

Crowdflower is a new service from Dolores Labs that aims to make outsourced Web labor a more… Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--It's about time people got excited over here.

It's not that the smattering of fresh new companies presenting at the annual TechCrunch50 start-up launch conference was boring, per se. Most of them, in fact, had an extremely practical slant to them, like the array of job- and car-hunting sites that take something Craigslist does and make it way less sketchy. And therein lies the problem: Sometimes, those sorts of productivity and next-gen enterprise start-ups simply aren't that cool and shiny when you stick them into a PowerPoint demo.

But it was on the morning of the … Read more

AOL's instant messenger, AIM, becomes on Tuesday the AIM Lifestream and gets support for modern social services Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Flickr, and Delicious.

A multiple-platform suite of products being announced at the TechCrunch50 event will support the service.

In addition to instant messaging, AIM Lifestream will display updates from the social feeds mentioned above and, likewise, enable people to post back to the services. The suite of products, including mobile clients, Mac and Windows desktop apps, and a Web client, will launch on September 22. The current Lifestream Web site shows the development of the project so far. The … Read more

Google on Monday released an experimental new content browser called Fast Flip that makes it possible to see a curated set of content sites using a physical "turn the pages" metaphor. Fast Flip pages are cached by Google and load very quickly, which is cool. And if your brain is stuck in 1969 and you want to pretend that new-fangled computer in front of you is a microfilm reader, it'll feel natural to use.

Fast Flip is a good solution for putting a magazine or newspaper online, and it makes scanning even a more modern Web feed … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--At the TechCrunch50 conference (coverage), I'm a little surprised we haven't seen any dating sites yet. After all, the economy may be in shambles, but the Internet never ceases to come up with new ways to help people meet. Matchmaking is still in the air though--and this time there's money involved.

Local Bacon, Red Beacon, and Mota Motors, three newly announced start-ups have a very similar aim: doing something better than Craigslist, and making money off it. In Local Bacon's case, it's helping job seekers and employees find each other by simplifying data. For … Read more