Remember Carrier iQ? In the years before Edward Snowden’s revelations about the NSA, the name and its software became synonymous with creepy, unseen monitoring of everything that you do on a smartphone on behalf of carriers and phone makers — allegedly in the name of better user experience. Now the company appears …

 As the latest year of the future folds into the next, the most bombastic/annoying/entertaining of CEOs sets his gaze on the technologies that will define the wireless space and the company he is at the helm of. Just as he did last year, T-Mobile CEO John Legere published his list …

 If I told you that the hottest person on social media right now is a rap producer telling fans that eating egg whites and drinking a gallon of water a day is the key to success, would you believe me? What if I told you that the same person regularly …

 Clinkle imploded after employees quit en masse in May, protesting how its young CEO Lucas Duplan was mismanaging the $ 30 million-funded payments startup. But Duplan won’t quit. TechCrunch has attained emails showing Duplan is pivoting Clinkle away from its former ultrasound payments and loyalty debit card products. Now Clinkle is an SDK …

 More consumers were unwrapping new “phablet” devices this holiday season, according to a report out this afternoon from Flurry. The big-screened form factor, whose name is a mashup of “phone” and “tablet,” accounted for 27 percent of a new device activations in the week leading up to Christmas – a …

 China may be the world’s largest app market when it comes to downloads, but new data indicates that those download numbers aren’t translating into loyal users who return to apps on regular basis. According to a report released this morning from eMarketer, citing data from Alibaba-owned analytics platform Umeng, the …

 The subject of contention is Free Basics, Facebook and Internet.org‘s app that offers free data access but only to a limited section of the Internet. Free Basics is available in roughly 35 countries through Facebook’s partnerships with mobile carriers who see it as a way to persuade people to buy data …

 Meet Alive, a Swiss army knife for live photos on the iPhone 6s. There are many live photo editing apps out there, but this one is particularly well designed. Alive lets you turn your live photos into gifs, make animated collages with multiple live photos and clean up your live …

 On Christmas day, the world was given a gift by Oculus, Samsung, UNINTERRUPTED, and LeBron James during the Warriors and Cavaliers game. The two companies who paired up for Samsung’s Gear VR, a hot ticket item this holiday season, launched a LeBron James experience in VR called “Striving for Greatness” …

 We Heart It, an image bookmarking service popular with teenaged girls, is out now with its second mobile application called Easel. The new app is designed to complement We Heart It’s main app, as it serves as a way to quickly create images using quotes that can be shared on We …