Now we’ve learned a much more colorful part of Anderson’s history: In 1985, when he was fourteen and in high school in Escondido, California, Anderson was subject to one of the largest FBI raids in California history after hacking into a Chase Manhattan Bank computer system and subsequently showing his friends how to do it. He was never arrested because he was a minor, but the FBI confiscated all of his computer equipment and some newspaper accounts of the incident stated incorrectly (see image below) that he was “convicted in federal court of computer hacking and placed on probation” (the statements were corrected in subsequent articles). Anderson used the hacker name “Lord Flathead.”

MySpace and Anderson would not comment on this post. But most of the information is now available online as news articles from the 1980s (and earlier) have been added to Google and other search engines. We came across an initial article accidentally and started investigating from there. Some of the information in this post has been obtained by a source close to Anderson.

After missing a few weeks, Elevator Pitch Friday is back with a vengeance. This week’s featured video comes to us from a self-funded, young male oriented, yet-to-launch startup called BeTheBetterMan.com, with the pitch delivered by founder Eric Mayville. Source:TechCrunch

Six weeks ago we launched an API for our technology database, CrunchBase. The idea was to give away lots of clean, structured data about the companies we cover, data that could be used to build new services and improve upon existing ones.

Since then we’ve seen a number of impressive things built on top of the API. And the traffic has started to add up: between July 15th and August 15th we fulfilled nearly 800,000 API requests, compared to ~1.3m page views for the website itself.

We now have over 15 projects hooked up to CrunchBase with many others on the way. Developers interested in using CrunchBase data for their own projects should check out the API documentation.

Today we wanted to highlight a few of the more sophisticated product integrations to date. Source:TechCrunch

Apple’s App Store is quickly becoming a hotbed for elite developers looking to capitalize on the store’s easy distribution model and huge exposure opportunities. Since the store’s launch less than two months ago, we’ve seen reports of apps reaching massive user bases and and collecting millions of dollars. But while the store has seen its share of its successes, it also has its flaws - most notably in the way it exposes users to apps in the first place.

After missing a few weeks, Elevator Pitch Friday is back with a vengeance. This week’s featured video comes to us from a self-funded, young male oriented, yet-to-launch startup called BeTheBetterMan.com, with the pitch delivered by founder Eric Mayville. Source:TechCrunch

Six weeks ago we launched an API for our technology database, CrunchBase. The idea was to give away lots of clean, structured data about the companies we cover, data that could be used to build new services and improve upon existing ones.

Since then we’ve seen a number of impressive things built on top of the API. And the traffic has started to add up: between July 15th and August 15th we fulfilled nearly 800,000 API requests, compared to ~1.3m page views for the website itself.

We now have over 15 projects hooked up to CrunchBase with many others on the way. Developers interested in using CrunchBase data for their own projects should check out the API documentation.

Today we wanted to highlight a few of the more sophisticated product integrations to date.

After missing a few weeks, Elevator Pitch Friday is back with a vengeance. This week’s featured video comes to us from a self-funded, young male oriented, yet-to-launch startup called BeTheBetterMan.com, with the pitch delivered by founder Eric Mayville.

A rumor is circulating that the iPhone may be finally making its way to China. The original source of the rumor is China Communications, which has cited a China Mobile insider as its source. According to the source, China Mobile will be offering the iPhone at a heavily subsidized discount in order to court the massive Chinese population, many of whom would have trouble affording an unsubsidized phone.
Source:TechCrunch
A couple of days ago I posted an email that I received from Google letting me know that I wouldn’t be able to attend a Google/Vanity Fair party at the Democratic National Convention that I never knew about and didn’t ask to go to. Other people who also didn’t know about the party received the same email.

Today I get another email, also from Google, inviting me to attend the mirror party at the Republican Convention in Minneapolis next Thursday. Is this for real or are they just going to cancel on me again? Get out of my head, Google. I will not be fooled into RSVPing only to have you kick me out later. Email is below:

A rumor is circulating that the iPhone may be finally making its way to China. The original source of the rumor is China Communications, which has cited a China Mobile insider as its source. According to the source, China Mobile will be offering the iPhone at a heavily subsidized discount in order to court the massive Chinese population, many of whom would have trouble affording an unsubsidized phone.

Blogger has announced a new “following” feature that enables members to list themselves as fans of other members’ blogs.

By following a set of blogs, your username and avatar will not only show up among other followers in a MyBlogLog-like gadget that can be placed in the sidebars of these blogs. You can also view the latest posts from the blogs you follow in a special feed reader on the Blogger dashboard.

Microsoft has agreed to acquire a Connecticut-based research company called Greenfield Online, which runs both a website called Ciao for European comparison shoppers and an online survey system that helps businesses conduct market research.

The cash tender offer to buy out all of Greenfield’s outstanding shares amounts to roughly $486 million, about $60 million more than public equity firm Quadrangle recently offered to pay for Greenfield. Microsoft has already found an unnamed party to buy Greenfield’s surveys division from it, leaving the Redmond, WA-based company with the remaining Ciao subsidiary.

The Comcast move seems more focused on the politics of the FCC decision to rule out Comcast’s filtering of P2P traffic. But BitTorrent and other such traffic is all about downloading, not streaming, and the advent of new look-ahead streaming capabilities in Silverlight suggest that streaming can accommodate DVR-like functionality that makes the value proposition of “owning” the data on a local drive much less important.

Read the rest of this entry at TechCrunchIT.

(Photo by Quinn Dombrowski).

Install the application, browse of search the included companies, and select the one you want. Direct Line then calls the number and preselects the appropriate choices to get you to an actual person.

Last week, we wrote about LinkedIn’s recent issues with its Groups - as part of a new platform rollout, a number of management features were apparently buggy, while others had been removed entirely.

Tonight sees the release of a number of new features on the platform that should quell some of these concerns. Among the new features are a centralized hub page for every group, where group members can come together and converse with each other in one place. The release also introduces enhanced group and user management features, including a searchable roster.Source:TechCrunch

Scribd, the popular document sharing hub, has finally rolled out a much-needed redesign. The site has long been hampered by a messy homepage that wasn’t attractive for first-time visitors, displaying a list of its top features in lieu of a YouTube-esque stream of featured documents. The old design made it clear that Scribd worked well as a utility, but didn’t make it attractive as a destination site. Now, the new site highlights a sampling of its top documents and includes a number of UX changes that Scribd hopes will remedy this issue.