Larry Ellison Has Learned To Embrace Cloud Computing, Not Convinced It’s An “Incredible New Thing” | TechCrunch

Larry Ellison Has Learned To Embrace Cloud Computing, Not Convinced It’s An “Incredible New Thing” | TechCrunch: "Oracle’s Larry Ellison has acquired a reputation as a cloud computing opponent — after all, he famously called the term “complete gibberish” a few years ago. Today, however, he said, “I’m no longer resisting the name. Call it what you want.”

In fact, Ellison made it sound like he doesn’t get enough credit for starting the trend: “NetSuite was my idea. I called up Evan Goldberg and said, ‘We’re going to do ERP on the Internet.’” That, he said, was an early example of software-as-a-service, and Salesforce.com co-founder Marc Benioff (who has worked to tie his company’s identity to the cloud) copied the idea a few months later, but “in a narrow way.” (Apparently this got a smirk out of Benioff, who was in the audience.)

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Want To Be Like Steve Jobs? Well It’s Probably Not Going To Happen, Says BFF Larry Ellison | TechCrunch

Want To Be Like Steve Jobs? Well It’s Probably Not Going To Happen, Says BFF Larry Ellison | TechCrunch: "Because Steve Jobs had visited the AllThingsD D conference stage so many times over the course of the past decade, organizers Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher decided to pay him tribute by inviting two of his friends for 25 years, Dr. Ed Catmull and Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, to talk for the closing hour about “The Lessons of Steve Jobs.”

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Here Are The Five Startups In i/o Ventures’ Spring 2012 Class | TechCrunch

Here Are The Five Startups In i/o Ventures’ Spring 2012 Class | TechCrunch: "i/o Ventures, the incubator and co-working space located in San Francisco’s Mission District, just held the demo day for its latest batch of startups. All of them have been working out of the i/o offices for the past three months, and have also received a $25,000 investment.

It’s pretty hard to judge someone based on a short presentation, but if nothing else, all of the ideas sound pretty cool or at least interesting, and there’s a nice mix of consumer and business products. Here’s the list of companies:

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Ford Opens Motor City Innovation Exchange, A Showroom For Detroit Startups | TechCrunch

Ford Opens Motor City Innovation Exchange, A Showroom For Detroit Startups | TechCrunch: "The economic downturn of the last few years hit few cities as hard as Detroit. Still, the city has recently become somewhat of a startup hub in its own right and today Ford Global Technologies, a wholly owned subsidiary of Ford Motor Company that manages Ford’s intellectual property portfolio, announced that it is opening a showroom for “innovators to show off their creations to peers and potential customers.” This Motor City Innovation Exchange will be open to anyone, as a Ford spokesperson told us earlier today. The goal here is to build a marketplace for licensing technological innovation from local startups across and beyond the auto industry. The public will be able to visit and browse the technologies on display and anyone who participates (including startups, established companies, universities and individuals) can license their inventions.

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BlackBerry maker to study options, warns of loss | Inquirer Technology

BlackBerry maker to study options, warns of loss | Inquirer Technology: "NEW YORK—BlackBerry maker Research In Motion warned Tuesday it could report a loss in the current quarter and said it had hired investment firms to study its strategic options.

The move comes with the BlackBerry, which pioneered the smartphone, rapidly losing market share to Apple’s iPhones and devices powered by Google’s Android operating system.
Chief executive Thorsten Heins said RIM “is going through a significant transformation” as it moved towards the launch later this year of the BlackBerry 10, the new platform aimed at competing with Apple and Google.
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Babelverse Is Out To Democratize Translation | TechCrunch

Babelverse Is Out To Democratize Translation | TechCrunch: "Babelverse won the opportunity to appear at TechCrunch Disrupt from the Startup Alley and with little notice ended up giving a slick pitch. Essentially this is a solution for universal speech translation, powered by a global community of human interpreters: it means anyone can be an interpreter. We covered it’s launch back in January but here’s a quick rundown.

Machine translation, as we know, is not reliable. So what we’re looking here is a marketplace for translation.

People practice to interpret and move up through the system, towards being more professional interpreters. Think of it as a sort of Demand Media platform for interpreting languages.

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Disrupt NYC Day 1: Your Startup Battlefield Companies | TechCrunch

Disrupt NYC Day 1: Your Startup Battlefield Companies | TechCrunch: "Our very first day of Disrupt NYC is over and the conference started off with a bang. We had memorable chats, dove into fashion for a bit, hung out with the Startup Alley companies and witnessed 15 startups launch their products in our first day of the Startup Battlefield.

Even though we will have brand-new companies launching tomorrow while fighting for the ultimate prize of $50,000 and the Disrupt Cup, we wanted to take a moment to highlight all that we saw today. There were some brilliant companies, so be sure to check all of them out below. The Internet was buzzing with positive words about each. This is going to be a tough battle. Which company was your favorite?

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