Yelp’s CEO Jeremy Stoppelman deserves credit for trying to play nice with Google, even appearing onstage at the Social Currency CrunchUp with John Hanke , a Google VP of Product Management. As expected the tension was palpable, as Hanke and Stoppelman discussed Google Places and the goliath’s heavy reliance on Yelp’s content . As an increasingly robust aggregator of local reviews, Google Places is turning into a formidable opponent.

Well this is interesting. One of the key points at Apple’s recent press conference to discuss the iPhone 4′s antenna , was that the problem (called “attenuation”) is not unique to the iPhone 4.

Let’s call this a single source rumor. But the source is Paul Carr’s camera, so we feel pretty good about it. The picture was taken last night at the TechCrunch summer party at August Capital

The Magic Trackpad (if I must call it that) has generated some controversy on the TC network. MG thinks it signals the end of the mouse era . I think it’s a great tool but is being lauded by a group of people unfamiliar with decent mice (read: Mac users).

You Americans have all the good stuff. Stuff like BP pumping oil in the Ocean and guns, lots of guns. And then you have Netflix and we people outside the U.S.

Earlier this month, I attended OpenWebAsia – South East Asia in Kuala Lumpur/Malaysia, a two-day tech and web industry event that attracted over 350 international attendees. The event shined a spotlight on a market that’s still largely overlooked: a whopping 600 million people live in South East Asia , which boasts a rapidly growing web and mobile population

One thing you can say about the Flickr team – there’s some fight in ‘em.

With more than 200 deals since 2005, Y Combinator’s Paul Graham knows how to size up a young team of entrepreneurs. However, he didn’t get it right from day one. On Friday, we got a chance to talk to Graham after his morning panel with SV Angel’s Ron Conway

Grammy award winning artist Chamillionaire (a.k.a Hakeem Seriki) has become a regular at tech conferences, perhaps because the hustle and flow culture of the rap business and the hustle and flow culture of the tech business are surprisingly similar. His stories of struggles between artists and music labels are resonant to anyone who’s experienced the relationship intricacies of startups and VCs

Perhaps you’ve heard: social games maker Playdom was acquired by Disney a few days ago for a deal potentially worth north of $750 million . Playdom CEO John Pleasants took the stage today at our Social Currency CrunchUp in Palo Alto, to talk a bit about the deal and the future. Pleasants says that he’s not exactly sure what his title at Disney will be yet, but he thinks he’ll be the General Manager of Playdom