TechCrunch

Sometimes it's the quiet ones who end up doing the most damage. I always thought of Larry Downes, the co-author of the mega-selling Unleashing the Killer App, as an unusually gentle and wise soul. But this was before Downes unleashed his all-too-critical powers on Best Buy, transforming himself from a cerebral author into a bomb throwing critic of America's leading consumer electronics retailer. In Why Best Buy is Going out of Business...Gradually, a brilliant article he published at Forbes last month, Downes finally told the truth about the terrible customer service at Best Buy. And the article went viral, of course, amassing close to 3 million page views and even forcing Best Buy CEO, Brian Dunn, to issue a response.

Exclusive: WibiData, the big data management startup co-founded by Cloudera founder Christophe Bisciglia and Aaron Kimball, is announcing $5 million in new funding from NEA and Google Chairman Eric Schmidt. Past investors in the company include Cloudera CEO Mike Olson, and SV Angel. As we've written in the past, WibiData wants to help companies manage and analyze complex business data about users so you can predict how they are going to interact with the product in the future. Data such as email records, web histories and other interactions cannot be easily analyzed together, but WibiData aims to solve this problem. Specifically, the technology can be used for personalization for a number of web companies, including consumer web, e-commerce and gaming companies.

Flush with new capital, Klout, the startup that measures influence on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Foursquare, Google+ and other social apps, is making its first acquisition. Klout is purchasing mobile and local neighborhood app Blockboard. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Blockboard develops a neighborhood app through which neighbors can interact with one another. They can report potholes and graffiti directly to the city, alert each other about crime and vandalism through a Blockwatch, post general observations about the neighborhood, ask their neighbors questions, and post pictures of lost and found items. Basically, the app is focused on creating a community within real neighborhood.

One of the more annoying aspects of starting a new jobs recently was switching email accounts — I tried figure out an easy way to transfer messages and contacts, but after a few minutes of fumbling around with my email client, I gave up, forwarded a few key messages, and then set to work rebuilding my contact list (mostly) from scratch. In other words, I could really have used something like YippieMove, a product from startup WireLoad that promises to make the email migration process as easy as possible. You just enter your account details (the company supports more than 100 email providers — co-founder and CEO Viktor Petersson says it should work with pretty much any email service that uses IMAP) and YippieMove handles the rest of the process, no software installation or constant babysitting required.

If you have one of the few Android devices currently running Ice Cream Sandwich, then you're going to love this post. The rest of you, including those of you on iOS, will have to gaze longingly for a while. Because Chrome just landed on Android. It's faster. It syncs everything (provided you want it to). It has nifty transition effects and a more intuitive system for jumping between tabs. And it's also loaded with potential. Google's Chrome browser, which has skyrocketed to popularity since its debut in 2008 and consistently gets top marks for being the fastest browser in town, has long been strangely absent from Android. To be clear, Android has always shipped with a browser of its own — and it actually shares much of the same codebase with Chrome, including the V8 JavaScript engine. But next to the real Chrome, it's a clear wannabe. After using it for a day, I really have no intention of using the older browser again.