It’s a familiar story in the tech world: A company wants to build a consumer product, finds that the necessary tools aren’t available, creates its own tools, then realizes it has created a broader platform. David Bennahum offers some examples: Zip2. Vignette. TypePad. And yes, his startup Punch!, where Bennahum is co-founder and CEO, and which is launching its publishing platform at. 

What if you couldn’t just share your Internet connection with the few WiFi devices tethered to your phone or hotspot, but with pretty much everybody around you? Open Garden, which is launching at TechCrunch Disrupt today, lets you create a mesh network that ties together all the Open Garden-enabled devices around you into one large network that then automatically shares Internet access. 

Redditors currently serving in the U.S. armed forces are about to get a big thank you from the Reddit community. The social news site aims to pair users in the U.S. with members serving abroad in an offical Reddit gift exchange for the troops. The initiative is part of a larger ongoing project, “redditgifts.” This secret-santa style gift exchange allows users to swap goods. 

One of my least favorite moments of the day comes when my iPhone rings and the number isn’t in my contact book. Is it an important call from an entrepreneur? A random PR person pitching me? Or just a telemarketer? I won’t know until I pick up. CallApp, a startup launching today at Disrupt, wants to eliminate those awkward moments, for starters. It’s creating what CEO and co-founder. 

Imagine for a moment that you are sitting in your front yard in a lawn chair, sipping lemonade while attempting to read the latest news on your WiFi-only iPad. You’re just out of range of your WiFi signal. Your neighbor’s signal is super strong, but that selfish hooligan didn’t leave it wide open for you to leach onto. Relax. Depending on where you live and who your service provider. 

Josh Lafazan, an 18-year-old high school senior from Syosset, New York, shattered all kinds of records when he was elected to his school district’s board last week. He became the youngest-ever elected official in New York state, and voter turnout was well above normal. How did Lafazan make such an achievement possible? In part, thanks to smart use of the web and social media. While. 

We all hate conference calls — having to dial in, manually enter a room code and sometimes having to enter a passcode on top of that. Once you’ve actually logged in, there’s a whole lot of talking on top of one another, and a lot of re-introducing yourself so that everyone knows who’s talking at any given time. UberConference, which was created by Firespotter Labs and is being launched. 

1. Steve Jobs, Stanford 2005 “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So, you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever — because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow. 

Well folks, while you may think all the action is on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt, the flip side of the coin is the enormous amount of buzz, energy and networking that happens in Startup Alley. Today there are 44 companies exhibiting in the Alley itself, not to mention the 20+ companies in the Israeli pavilion which makes its second appearance at Disrupt. We’ll have another brand new 47. 

Well folks, while you think all the action is on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt, the flip side of the coin is the enormous amount of buzz, energy and networking that happens in Startup Alley. Today there are 44 companies exhibiting in the Alley itself, not to mention the 20+ companies in the Israeli pavilion which makes its second appearance at a Disrupt. We’ll have another brand new 47 companies. 

Nothing is more important than that great photo you took at the concert you went to last night, but the thing that’s almost as important is the data that goes with it. Sure, apps let you attach a general location to your photos, but to fully chronicle your experience at a live event, you can’t pin a photo to a specific spot at the venue. A new iOS app called Picket lets you tag event. 

You know that bit in The Avengers where Tony Stark spreads his fingers apart in mid-air and the stuff on the screen in front of him instantly appears on displays throughout the room? A company called Leap Motion wants to make that kind of gesture control a reality, and it hopes to take the first step with a new type of motion controller. The Leap is a simple motion controller that you can. 

Panic, the maker of the popular web editing app Coda, announced that Coda 2 would be available on May 24th for the desktop. Along with that release, an app called Diet Coda will come to the iPad. Nearly two years ago we wondered if we’d be able to use our iPad as our main workstation, but the fact that editing web documents on the fly wasn’t an easy process, it made this nearly impossible. With. 

More than 40,000 of New York’s ultra-Orthodox Jewish men gathered at Queens’ Citi Field and another nearby stadium Sunday evening to discuss the danger the Internet can pose to the moral fabric of their community if it’s used in thoughtless or religiously deviant ways. Inside the stadium, rabbis led the sold-out crowd in evening prayers and warned of the Internet’s ability. 

The web is a vast, mostly useless, wasteland with bits of information held in random silos scattered about. Cyfeon Solutions’ Answer Factory attempts to unite these locations in the spirit of increased productivity. As I was told by founder Brandon Smith, its goal is to provide business users a solution that allows them to make business decisions by pulling in data from multiple sources. 

On Friday May 18th, Apple filed a motion for a U.S. preliminary injunction against Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 10.1. This follows a ruling by the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (Northern District of California), siding with Apple on the question of whether Samsung is in violation of an iPad-related design patent (U.S. Patent No. D504,889). According to Foss Patents, the source of this. 

What if you couldn’t just read an article on your favorite blog or news site, but also listen to it being read out aloud by the author or professional voice talent? That’s what SpokenLayer, which is launching its public beta today at TechCrunch Disrupt, is working on. The New York-based startup is partnering with a number of well-known publishers, including The Atlantic, National Journal,. 

Google has today announced that it will be giving you an improved autocomplete experience in Gmail by custom tailoring the predictions in the search box using your email. This means, basically, that Google will scan your inbox to provide you with more accurate autocomplete suggestions. Google famously already uses the contents of your inbox to deliver personalized advertising while you view. 

When you think entrepreneurial ecosystems, you probably think Silicon Valley (and the Bay Area), New York, and London. But Canada has something to say about that. In Startup Genome’s list, one finds three Canadian cities in the top 25. Naturally, startup accelerators have been taking off in Canada of late, with FounderFuel and Year One Labs opening their doors in Montreal, Extreme Startups. 

Google’s acquisition of Motorola Mobility will finally close this week and some of Moto’s staff could be axed in the process, according to a TechCrunch report. Chinese antitrust authorities approved the $12.5 billion deal Saturday, clearing the final hurdle for the deal to go through. In February, both European Commission and U.S. Department of Justice cleared the deal, even though.