Mark Suster of Los Angeles' GRP Partners is known for his unique insights on the tech and digital media worlds, having famously had success on "both sides of the table" as a repeat entrepreneur turned investor over nearly two decades in the industry. And he hit headlines several times this week, with his viewpoints on acqui-hires (he says they're often very bad) and founders stepping down from the CEO role (he says sometimes, it's the best thing that can happen.)

Editor's note: Richard Bennett is a Senior Fellow with the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation and co-author of ITIF’s 2013 report, "The Whole Picture: Where America’s Broadband Networks Really Stand." We’ve all heard the story: America’s broadband networks are second-rate. We pay exorbitant prices for shoddy service because broadband providers print money and hold innovation in a death grip. While America languishes, our competitors in Europe and Asia are racing ahead to a user-generated content utopia. The only way forward is a government takeover, or, failing that, a massive dose of regulation.

Does Tumblr host a lot of pictures of naked people? Yep. But they've got an ad plan that deals with that.

Editor's note:  Keith Teare is the founder of just.me and a partner at Archimedes Labs. He is also the co-founder of TechCrunch. This was a momentous week for those of us who are watching the rapid transition that is taking place from desktop computing to mobile., and particularly for those focused on mobile-social as I am due to my job at just.me. Here is my take on what we just witnessed.

We’ve all by now heard about how Yahoo is trying to get some “cool” with a supposed $1 billion purchase of hip blogging platform Tumblr, but it may be a moot point if Tumblr’s users fail to stick around post-sale. Microsoft and Facebook may be trying to make a move ahead of Yahoo, Tumblr may be inching ever closer to running out of cash, and (despite that) may not be afraid to play a little hardball. But here’s something you’re not hearing much about: Tumblr’s users are almost universally unhappy with the news that the site might get sold to Yahoo. And they may let their fingers do the talking, and the walking. Do a search on Tumblr for “yahoo” and you get a stream of distress, interspersed with the occasional bit of helpless resignation, and

With Xbox 360 having started well but ended in a very confused state, I worry that Microsoft is about to carry over much of its baggage to the new console. Will the company make the same mistake of not listening to the market that it has often made in recent years? Will it continue to believe that there is a burgeoning market for an everything box? Or will it refocus on what matters?

The idea of a VC having its own news aggregator was a bit outlandish in 2007. But Y Combinator was in an unusual position in those days anyway. Startup accelerators had been a highly visible part of the dot-com crash, and Silicon Valley was still skeptical of the concept nearly a decade later. So YC set out to be something different -- a community of hackers building companies on their own terms. Hacker News was initially built by YC co-founder Paul Graham as a demonstration of Arc, a new programming language he'd been working on. He quickly realized that it could help bring together the companies he was supporting and the rest of the folks who wanted in. With 1.6 million page views and 200,000 unique visitors on a given weekday, it's now a key part

It's that time of the week for CrunchWeek, the show where a few of us writers chat up the most interesting stories from the past seven days. Ryan Lawler, Drew Olanoff (clad in his Google Glass), and I discussed all things Google I/O, including Larry Page's keynote, Google+'s new photo features, and the latest Google Glass apps and more. We also chatted about Square's new hardware, Stand, which is a $299 card swiper and stand for iPad registers.

Did Google's conference succeed? It launched dozens of products in its 205-minute keynote, but did the world understand them? I saw some of the smartest journalists in technology struggling to handle the information density. But what's the alternative? Break it up across multiple days, or even multiple conferences? Google's breadth presents it with a challenge unique among the tech giants.

It’s still practically a newborn but Indian mobile messaging app Hike is already channelling almost a billion messages a month between its 5m registered users. Those numbers sound insignificant when you stack them up against the big beasts of the messaging space – WhatsApp claims 200m+ monthly active users, and 600bn messages – but Hike’s growth is impressive when you consider it's 4 months old.

This Gillmor Gang was recorded live at betaday, the betaworks annual gathering in New York. The Gillmor Gang included John Borthwick, Robert Scoble, Douglas Rushkoff, Paul Davison, and Steve Gillmor. Enjoy.

Google is prepping... something. An announced Google media streamer was recently found in the FCC's testing database. Details are nearly nonexistent as most are held under a confidentiality agreement for the next 45 days. However, the documents released to the public call the device several times a "media player" and that it features WiFi connectivity.

Editor's note: Tolga Ozuygur is the co-founder of Overdose Caffeine, an indie game-development company from Turkey that develops cross-platform, real-time multiplayer games. Follow him on Twitter @tolgaozuygur. We at Overdose Caffeine had previously announced that Pocket Fleet, a real-time multiplayer space dogfight game developed for mobile devices, would be available soon on OUYA. Our players were looking forward to it. Even we were excited about the prospect of bringing the game to the platform, as we loved the device and thought TV was a great medium for fast-paced multiplayer gaming.

You won't see many of these people on TV or in movies (yet). But on the world's biggest video site, they're giant.

I’ve spent the last two weeks wandering around London, Paris, and Istanbul (not Constantinople.) As an experiment, I left my trusty MacBook Pro behind and brought only the $199 Chromebook on which I type this. And to my considerable surprise it has served admirably. So admirably, in fact, that I believe ChromeOS is only one or two iterations away from being the right choice for many-if not most--homes.

Facebook ads rely on the image to grab attention. When Facebook members are reading status updates, they’re focused on that small, narrow “active window” of the Facebook newsfeed that they are reading, and are therefore blind to your ad.   …

Good Saturday morning to you! As summer approaches, we all tend to get a little more of an itch to go outside at the weekend, travel to the beach, or simply enjoy the lazy days of summer. With that in mind, The Beal Deal will be taking a summer break and will return in the [...]

Google is facing another competition investigation, according to the Financial Post. The Canadian Competition Bureau has informed Mountain View of its plans to launch a formal investigation of its Canadian operations. It has not yet requested any information or documents from Google but has informed the search giant of its intention to launch a probe.

Sources close to to acquisition talks between Yahoo and Tumblr say the blogging platform feels that Yahoo's $1.1 billion offer as "too low" and view it as "only a first offer". Yahoo may have to significantly increase the offer to close the deal. An acquisition by some tech giant is likely in the cards for Tumblr, though, as sources say the company only has a couple of months of cash runway left.

Today, thanks to the maturation of the web, digital tech, and smartphones now in seemingly every pocket, startups are finding it easier than ever before to build scalable solutions to finally address the many inefficiencies in our food manufacturing, production and distribution systems. As interest in food tech balloons, one area in particular appears to already be at the tipping point: Online and mobile food delivery. Over the last few days, we've hearing about a merger between two of the largest companies in the space. Rumor has it that "arch rivals" GrubHub and Seamless are in talks which could see them join forces as part of a merger. While our sources tell us that the talks are serious, the terms of the merger are not yet clear and, of

Today, thanks to the maturation of the web, digital tech, and smartphones now in seemingly every pocket, startups are finding it easier than ever before to build scalable solutions to finally address the many inefficiencies in our food manufacturing, production and distribution systems. As interest in food tech balloons, one area in particular appears to already be at the tipping point: Online and mobile food delivery. Over the last few days, we've hearing about a merger between two of the largest companies in the space. Rumor has it that "arch rivals" GrubHub and Seamless are in talks which could see them join forces as part of a merger. While our sources tell us that the talks are serious, the terms of the merger are not yet clear and, of

Today, thanks to the maturation of the web, digital tech, and smartphones now in seemingly every pocket, startups are finding it easier than ever before to build scalable solutions to finally address the many inefficiencies in our food manufacturing, production and distribution systems. As interest in food tech balloons, one area in particular appears to already be at the tipping point: Online and mobile food delivery. Over the last few days, we've hearing about a merger between two of the largest companies in the space. Rumor has it that "arch rivals" GrubHub and Seamless are in talks which could see them join forces as part of a merger. While our sources tell us that the talks are serious, the terms of the merger are not yet clear and, of

Oh HTC. You've produced one of the finest Android smartphones ever (seriously, just look at all these reviews), but you've faced more than your share of challenges when it came to actually pumping your top-tier One smartphone. As it happens, that may all soon change. FocusTaiwan reported earlier today that HTC is preparing to pump out more of its wonderful Ones in short order -- Jack Tong, the company's North Asia president, noted that this month's production capacity for the flagship device is twice that of April, and that surge will only continue into June.

Google made a relatively quiet announcement today regarding how it's pushing the developer ecosystem forward around Google Now, its intelligent personal assistant for Android devices. The company has begun extending mark up tools for emails from select partners, which help highlight flight schedules, hotel bookings and various types of reservations, to make sure that Gmail can spot that information and use it to auto-generate helpful reminders in Google Now.

Just about six months ago, Uber won a big battle with D.C. regulators to have its on-demand car service approved for operation within the nation's capital. But new regulations from the D.C. Taxi Commission could severely hamper the company's ability to offer low-cost services in the nation's capital.

Zynga has apparently told the makers of the dating website CupidWithFriends that they need to change the site's name, because it allegedly infringes on Zynga's trademarks. CupidWithFriends was built by the startup Apartment 7 (which also released the dating apps Flock and Wednesday Night). The site launched a couple of months ago, allowing users to build and edit dating profiles for their friends.

Mozilla today bumped up Firefox Aurora, the pre-beta release channel of the popular browser, to version 23. With this, it is introducing a number of new tools for developers that will now slowly make their way into the stable release channel over the next few months. Sadly (or maybe not), this is also the first version of Firefox that does away with the good old blink element, a former staple of the horrid GeoCities websites of the 90s.

Google's Vikram Aggarwal, a software engineer working on the Android platform, revealed today that Gmail and Email, the native Android client that still ships on Android devices as well, now has a combined user base of over 100 million across the Android install base. It's an interesting stat, because although Gmail and Email only represent two of a multitude of email clients available on Android, it's likely that those two represent the email clients of choice for a wide swath of Android users.

Back when he was 21, had 75,000 users and was raising $750,000.

Uh oh. Less than ten days after Bang With Friends made its mobile debut on the iOS App Store, Apple has seemingly changed its mind and given it the boot.