Even if you don’t own a PlayStation 3 , Heavy Rain is a game you should know because it re-imagines both videogames and movies, combining them into a new genre of Choose Your Own Adventure digital narrative. (Very minor spoilers ahead.) This is not to say Heavy Rain is perfect…

If you’re in the market for a netbook—the gimpy kittens of the laptop jungle—know this first: on the inside, they’re all basically the same. Making the little differences all the more important! And yes, they do add up. For our Battlemodo, we decided to look only at netbooks…

So the Le Web Startup Competition is over for another year. Instead of sitting on the sidelines reporting the event, as I was last year, this year TechCrunch Europe was asked to co-organize it with Le Web. So, together with Loic Le Meur, Ben Metcalfe and Geraldine Le Meur we filtered down…

December has been a busy month for Boxee , the media center with a social twist. Last week, the company partnered with Sony to bring Crackle.com content to Boxee users, and tonight the company is showing off the first beta version of Boxee at an event in New York City. At the event…

Ever since FriendFeed was sold to Facebook, we’ve been told over and over again that the company and its community were toast. And as if to underline the fact, FriendFeed’s access to the Twitter firehose was terminated and vaguely replaced with a slow version that is currently delivering Twitter posts between…

RSS, short for Really Simple Syndication, helps you stream all of your news and blog sources into an easy-to-manage RSS reader such as Google Reader . Millions of people use RSS to keep up with Mashable, The New York Times, and even LOLcats. However, it does have its limitations…

From keeping track of grades to sharing lesson plans, from helping students collaborate to communicating with parents, teachers now have a host of web-based tools at their disposal to help them stay organized and make their jobs easier. Teachers have one of the most difficult and least appreciated jobs in …

Sandwiched neatly between the RealTime is God and RealTime Who Needs It crowds is a new group that embraces both positions while moving forward rapidly. These folks include Brett Slatkin of the PubSubHubub effort and Dave Winer of rssCloud.org. Slatkin and fellow conspirator Brad Fitzpatrick demoed the PSHBB architecture at the RealTime Stream …

One of the best and most popular 3rd party apps for Twitter is TwitPic , the top service for sharing pictures via Twitter and Twitter apps such as Tweetie . Twitpic and its competitors (most notably Yfrog ) have created a new photography-sharing ecosystem that connects friends and shares our best moments visually. You haven’t…