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"Crazy Bob" Gets A Big Promotion: Square's First CTO | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 3 | 28 | It was that we wrote about nabbing engineer . As we noted at the time, the man affectionately known on Twitter and elsewhere as “ ” was quite the catch — he had been leading the core library development of Android while at Google. But he clearly saw an even bigger opportunity with the mobile payment startup. And on Friday that vision was repaid as Lee was promoted to be the company’s first Chief Technology Officer. Lee was originally brought on board to lead the development of the at the time still-in-the-works Android app. That app came in May of last year, alongside the iPhone going live in the App Store. Communications Director Kay Luo also tells us that he’s been helping a lot with recruitment, hiring, server and API design, product design, security, business relations, and marketing. Now Lee will oversee all the technology that the company is working on. And Lee’s ascension as the company’s first CTO also marks its third C-level executive. Lee joins COO and CEO on that level. Dorsey has obviously been in the news a lot recently for his , the other company he helped found, but he is staying on and committed to Square as well. “ ,” Luo says, clearly in full-on recruitment mode. The company is growing quickly after kicking off the year with a big (at ) — . |
Minno Hopes There's A Place In This World For A Small, Simple E-Wallet | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 3 | 28 | We’re entering another round of testing in the paywall/microtransactions world, but it doesn’t look to be turning out any better than the last one. I that until payment methods are improved, everyone is just whistling in the dark, but that hasn’t stopped the from taking another shot at it, and y from trying a whole new format. The necessary precursor to any of these schemes, however, is a simple, easy, and generally agreed-upon payment system — an e-wallet. seems to feel this is true as well, and are hard at work making a payment tool they feel is as simple and powerful as cash, without the political and regulatory trappings of bank-related NFC schemes or credit card tie-ins. It’s simple, all right, but is it powerful enough? The idea is to remove as many obstacles as possible from between the user/buyer and the seller. Thus, Facebook connect is employed, no card or bank account need be tied to the account, and the payment plugin is just a line of javascript. It’s not aimed at real-life situations or point-of-service, as is, and it doesn’t have a “twist” like Flattr or Bitcoin. It’s not an alternate currency and it doesn’t come with a built-in community. I could do without the whimsical aquatic theme, but other than that: so far, in my opinion, so good. It’s built by a couple guys who left Google to pursue this project, and who think that there will be a place for this kind of payment system, mainly for purchasing online works like subscriptions, single articles, media and books (directly from the creators, for example ), and web app functionality (as demonstrated by the demo app). It’s fundamentally a different market than that for NFC and expedited credit and debit payments, and requires a less extensive (though no less secure) infrastructure. The plugin and system look good, and I think that for now there is definitely an emerging opportunity for point-to-point money transfers on the web. A sane monetization plan will help, too, and Minno wisely isn’t planning on draconian minimum fees or 30% transfer scrapes. But timing and placement matter, and I’m less confident that Minno will be in the right place with the right clout when this field really takes off. Maybe it’s looking too far out, but I think that a transfer of funds between two unique IDs on the internet is likely to be standardized into a fundamental protocol. Until that time, I find it unlikely that it’s going to be branded, or rather a brand that grows into prominence, as Facebook and PayPal have. It seems that whenever money is changing hands (even if it’s pennies), big interests tend to step in, and regulation gets involved as well. Not to mention that potential business models and the market they exist in are neither of them even close to solidified yet. We’re looking at changes to the way money and the web interact over the next few years. The bigger companies aren’t nearly agile enough to offer an actual product after just a few months of development, as Minno is doing, but they’re going to come to market with a product that is, if not actually superior, still carries more weight. Banks, VISA, Apple, Google, PayPal — every one of these monsters has good reason to be spending millions on a successor system to the holdover online payment methods we’ve had in place for 15 or 20 years now. It’s a David vs. Goliaths situation, and I’m not holding out much hope for David. To their credit, Minno has a system that plainly works; at the moment they’re short on partners (no one wants to go with a newcomer like this on faith) and the ability to scale and provide service, customization, and behind-the-scenes wirework to large and important customers (like if, say, a large blog network or media conglomerate were to use Minno) is by necessity unproven. The micropayments world going to be one of these billion-dollar businesses everyone likes to talk about (and get in at the ground floor of). But the battle will be hot amongst the heavyweights, and Minno may find themselves (as they seem to have inadvertently set themselves up to be) a small fish in a big pond. |
Everything's Amazing: Louis CK's ‘Louie’ Hits DVD, Blu-ray June 21 | Nicholas Deleon | 2,011 | 3 | 28 | Don’t have a Blu-ray player yet? You’re going to want to get one before June 21, for that’s when Louis CK’s “Louie” makes its way to the format. It’ll also be available on plain ol’ DVD if that’s your thing. Why is this appearing on CrunchGear? Because Louis CK is , and because his “ ” performance is a continual reminder to all tech fans: just because your 3G service cuts out here and there doesn’t mean you’re not living in an age where the average person is living a more luxuriously advanced life than the best kinds of Europe lived back in the day. You have the Internet in your hands, wherever you go! That’s genuinely remarkable. But nooooo! This phone doesn’t have Froyo, this laptop doesn’t have Tegra, this e-reader is only in monochrome, etc. The Blu-ray and DVD collection will come with a bunch of unaired material, including deleted scenes and unrated sets. And you probably already know this, but “Louie” has been picked up for a second season. Amazon as being a package DVD+Blu-ray combo, but I don’t see that information in the e-mail we just received, so it’s a bit of a mystery. |
MIT Scientist Claims To Have Created Practical "Artificial Leaf" | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 3 | 28 | One of the things green energy proponents eagerly look forward to is an “artificial leaf”: a truly small, portable, modular photosynthetic power plant. The ability to take a hundred or a thousand such units and plaster them on a wall, roof, tree, or whatever, and have them store power in a simple fuel cell all day long would be a great way to make power distribution less tricky in countries where there aren’t exactly power lines running everywhere. MIT’s Daniel Nocera has apparently , producing an artificial leaf that not only uses cheap materials, but is ten times as efficient as a real leaf at the photosynthesis process. The technology simulates photosynthesis by using sunlight to split water into hydrogen and oxygen; only a short while ago did Nocera manage to create a system, using a “proprietary solution of cobalt and phosphate,” that was able to convert sunlight at a better efficiency than solar cells. It can use dirty water, too, unlike some existing electrolysis/fuel cell solutions. His study has only just been submitted to Science, and has not been reviewed or replicated, but that didn’t seem to matter to Tata, the Indian industrial giant, who have — presumably to manufacture and distribute the system in India. With lots of sun and a huge population, it’s a natural fit. Of course right now there’s very little information, no paper, and no pictures, so let’s all just take this info with a grain of salt and wait until we hear more. [via and ] |
CrunchDeals: WD TV Live Plus Media Player | Matt Burns | 2,011 | 3 | 28 | This is a nice little sale on one of the best network media streamers. Newegg is selling the WD TV Live Plus for only $79.99 with the coupon code HARDOCPX323E. It’s a great little box with web apps and robust media format support including MKV containers and .avi. . [via ] |
Stealth Payment Startup Stripe Backed By PayPal Founders | Michael Arrington | 2,011 | 3 | 28 | There isn’t much information out there about , a new payments startup cofounded by brothers and (last seen selling their startup for $5 million). It’s an online business to business and business to consumer payments provider, we’ve confirmed. “How is it different than PayPal or Google Checkout?” I asked someone who’s seen the product. Their answer – Developers have a lot of trouble getting the various payments parts to work properly – from getting a merchant account to making the software work properly on your website. And then there is fee gouging. Stripe is said to make the process very, very easy for developers. Apparently Stripe really doesn’t suck, because the company has taken approximately $2 million in a venture round from PayPal founders and , as well as , and . Stripe was valued at around $20 million in the round, we’ve heard but haven’t confirmed. The company wouldn’t comment on whether or not the financing occurred at all. Sequoia partner is said to be personally involved in Stripe as well. He’s not known to on startups he doesn’t think will have huge exits. |
Panasonic And Partners Announce New M-3DI Active-Shutter 3D Standard | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 3 | 28 |
Because isn’t confusing enough already! Yes, a new standard is rising, led by Panasonic and joined by a number of partners. M-3DI is a new “can we all just agree on this” standard for active-shutter 3D systems. What differentiates it from the systems that don’t follow its standard? Nothing, it appears, except that M-3DI devices will all work with each other. I guess that’s something. So Panasonic and Xpand 3D are the leaders, and Hitachi, Mitsubishi, ViewSonic, and several other manufacturers are joining the fun. What about Sony, Samsung, LG, and the others, you ask? Not involved. You’ll have to use glasses. Of course, the active shutter generation of 3D is going to be obsolete in a year or two once polarized or glasses-free takes over. I’m glad Panny is trying to smooth out the active-shutter landscape, but I can’t get excited when I’ve never liked the technology and know it’s on its way out. Here’s the full press release: 3D PROJECTORS AND 3D CINEMAS Licensing of Cross-Industry 3D Active Shutter Eyewear Technology to Start Next Month New York, NY – Panasonic and XPAND 3D announced that they have formulated M-3DI, a new standard for 3D active-shutter eyewear products that will bring about compatibility among 3D TVs, computers, home projectors and cinema projection. Other leading 3D technology providers for televisions, projectors and cinemas have agreed to participate in supporting the new standard, including Changhong Electric Co., Ltd., FUNAI Electric Co., Ltd., Hisense Electric Co., Ltd., Hitachi Consumer Electronics Co., Ltd., Mitsubishi Electric Corporation, Seiko Epson Corporation, SIM2 Multimedia S.p.A. and ViewSonic Corporation. Licensing of the M-3DI technology will begin next month from M-3DI License Agent (e-mail: license@m-3di.com), providing a communication protocol between 3D active-shutter eyewear products and 3D-capable TVs, front projectors, computers and cinema systems (XPAND-compatible theaters). The technology will let consumers enjoy the immersive 3D experience across all types of compatible 3D displays as well as at movie theaters, with a single pair of 3D active-shutter eyewear. The M-3DI standard will also assure consumers of comprehensive quality control in the creation of their 3D eyewear; Participants in the standard-making will publish the specification of the standard and will organize quality control testing and approval procedures. A new era in home entertainment started last year when major television manufacturers released Full HD 3D TV sets to enable high quality 3D viewing in the comfort of consumers’ living rooms. While the popularity of 3D at home is projected to increase significantly, until now there has been limited compatibility among 3D glasses offered by various TV manufacturers, as they use different methods to communicate between the 3D active-shutter eyewear and the 3D display. With the M-3DI standard, the participants in the standards process aim to make the 3D viewing experience more enjoyable and convenient, and to enhance the appeal of 3D entertainment among a wider audience. The proponents of the M-3DI standard believe that this program, as an industry-wide initiative, will make a significant contribution to accelerate penetration of 3D TVs, computers and projectors. While the M-3DI standard to be licensed at this time uses infrared communication technology, radio communications will be considered for the next step. “Panasonic has led in Full HD 3D innovation through the development of technologies that enable consumers to have a truly immersive experience with our 3D VIERA HDTV’s and Blu-ray 3D players,” said Hirotoshi Uehara, director of the Television Business Unit, Visual Products and Display Devices Business Group of Panasonic’s AVC Networks Company. “Now, we are excited to be joining XPAND 3D and the other participants of the M-3DI initiative to make Full HD 3D TV even more widely accessible. Joining forces with other 3D product manufacturers to standardize active-shutter 3D eyewear will help ensure that consumers have a superlative 3D experience at home and in the movie theater. This is a major step toward creating truly universal 3D eyewear.” Commenting on the standard, XPAND 3D Chief Executive Officer Maria Costeira noted, “M-3DI eliminates confusion, provides a strong, uniform performance standard and ensures that manufacturers can concentrate on innovation and consumers can count on interoperability. Now, with M-3DI glasses, consumers can enjoy the most advanced, immersive 3D experience in XPAND 3D cinemas, on the laptop or in the workplace or school! We are pleased to join the other participants in M-3DI to ensure that the amazing potential of 3D is achieved in every imaginable 3D application.” *M-3DI standard: A standard for 3D active-shutter eyewear usable for viewing 3D theaters, TVs, computers and home projectors. Participants in the M-3DI standard: Changhong Electric Co., Ltd. FUNAI Electric Co., Ltd. Hisense Electric Co., Ltd. Hitachi Consumer Electronics Co., Ltd. Mitsubishi Electric Corporation Panasonic Corporation Seiko Epson Corporation SIM2 Multimedia S.p.A. ViewSonic Corporation X6D Limited (XPAND 3D) About Panasonic: Panasonic Corporation is a worldwide leader in the development and manufacture of electronic products for a wide range of consumer, business, and industrial needs. Based in Osaka, Japan, the company recorded consolidated net sales of 7.42 trillion yen (US$79.4 billion) for the year ended March 31, 2010. The company’s shares are listed on the Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya and New York (NYSE:PC) stock exchanges. For more information on the company and the Panasonic brand, visit the company’s website at http://panasonic.net/. About XPAND 3D: The global leader in the 3D market, XPAND Universal 3D Glasses are the only 3D glasses that can be programmed to work with all the 3DTV brands and models, 3D computers, 3D gaming consoles and cinema. Its 3D glasses are affordable for cinema owners and home users while providing 3D quality that was originally available only at a professional cost. XPAND has the extraordinary combination of experienced and visionary leadership, state-of-the-art technology, and economies of scale that will provide a backbone for the cinema and consumer electronics industries as they further transition into the 3D future. X6D Limited is a global company whose products and services are marketed under the XPAND 3D brand name. XPAND 3D was created by industry veterans in theatrical exhibition, entertainment, film production and distribution, and specialty film and digital technologies and is funded by a European investment fund. XPAND 3D technology is used by over 3,500 3D cinemas in more than 50 countries and is the 3D solution of choice for post-production houses, educational and professional 3D applications. XPAND 3D designs, manufactures and OEMs a range of consumer electronics 3D solutions that are driving the 3D revolution. |
SXSW: Sights and Sounds (TCTV) | Jon Orlin | 2,011 | 3 | 17 | The SXSW interactive and technology programming has just ended and the music festival is getting underway. The interactive portion featured hundreds of panels inside the convention center. But much of the action, networking and fun took place in the streets of Austin. As MG Siegler , maybe “people should just show up in Austin next year and not even go to the actual conference.” If you did that this year, here’s what you might have seen. In between our interviews, we sent our TechCrunch TV videographer and his Canon 7D out to capture the sights and sounds of SXSW – the food, beer, games, and parties. SXSWi was a very fragmented event. In many ways, it was an 100-ring circus, with each participant having a unique experience. Share you own experiences and links to your videos in the comments. In case you missed them, check out some of the interviews covered by TCTV: We’ll also be releasing several more in-depth interviews on our weekly show “Keen On.” |
iPhone-Controlled Kitchen Island Slides Up With A Slickness | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 3 | 17 | [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3nVeBMwkGY&w=640&h=390]
This is really cool. I’m sure those of us with stationary kitchen islands wish we could scoot it out of the way now and then, but even then, where would we put it? This guy, using an iPhone app I don’t recognize, is controlling a lift in a utility room downstairs that lifts that kitchen island right up. He appears to have some units covering it up, but I bet you could rig up a system that doesn’t… you know, fall away like that. The best thing? No need to scrape crumbs off the surface. Just lower the table and sweep the room. Or, since you’re obviously living in the future, activate your . [via ] |
PSA: RSA's SecurID Anti-Hacking Dongle Hacked By Hackers Unknown | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 3 | 17 |
Do you have one of these things? We got them with our free AOL CDs when that whole acquisition happened. The constantly changing code (and , it has changed since I took the picture) is used as a baffle for hackers who might otherwise acquire your username and password. Well, now they seem to have figured out the dongles as well. The extent of the hacking isn’t really known, but the tone of is one of caution. So IT guys and security heads, just take note and do what you feel is necessary. |
StumbleUpon's Garrett Camp On What It's Like To Buy Back Your Company | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 3 | 17 | There aren’t many startup founders that have done what has done. After selling content discovery service to eBay for $75 million in 2007, Camp and investors decided to for a reported in 2009. After the initial Series A that was folded back into the spinoff, Camp from August Capital, Accel, and others in a Series B just last week, making StumbleUpon the most rare of comeback success stories. Thus far buying yourself back after an acquisition is a feat that’s only been accomplished on a large scale by Webshots (which bought itself back from Excite@Home and resold itself to Cnet) and Skype, which also bought itself back from eBay. Andrew Dreskin, the founder of TicketFly, who sold his former company TicketWeb to TicketMaster and proceeded to directly compete with his former owner, also deserves an honorable mention here. I sat down with Camp during SXSW to talk about the process of reacquiring your company, what he plans on doing with the StumbleUpon’s rare second chance, and which startup he likes better, StumbleUpon or (of which he is a co-founder). On the motivation behind the acquisition:
On the advantages of being part of a larger company: On whether he’s more excited about StumbleUpon or Uber (the company he co-founded with : Advice to other founders that find themselves bored post acquisition: Pulling a phoenix from the ashes is that simple, except when it’s not. |
On Nuclear Power: Regulating Our Reaction | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 3 | 17 |
As a result of the ongoing tragedy in Japan, in particular the threat of meltdown or catastrophic radiation release from the Fukushima nuclear power plants, there has been a renewal of the discussion of nuclear power and its risks. As a tech site that occasionally covers in this area, and has dedicated to “green” technology, I thought we should at least touch on the subject, though of course to delve more deeply requires expertise we obviously lack. That said, I just want to put down a few words regarding the safety and development of nuclear power. I feel we must be careful to maintain in this area the most powerful weapon we have in the rest of the tech world: a strong disinclination to cleave to common wisdom. We’re a community of early adopters, entrepreneurs, and creatives — let’s not fall into the traps of fusty prejudice and common misconceptions. We don’t do it when we talk about the internet, so why should we when we talk about something as serious as the future of our power infrastructure? The Fukushima reactors were designed in the 1960s, and the six units located there were . This was, of course, prior to most of the highly-publicized nuclear events at non-experimental facilities like Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. And for the record, the facilities at Fukushima are already some distance outside their tolerance levels and as of this writing have not melted down, though that risk is far from over and the unparalleled courage of the and others is a powerful bulwark against it. These so-called “Generation II” facilities are about as closely related to current reactor technology, , as a Ford Model T is to a Volvo S80 or similarly modern car. They both have four wheels and an engine, but the comparison really dries up there. The dozen or so truly serious nuclear accidents in history have produced a tremendous amount of data, and in addition to the plain advancement of the technology that accompanies years of research, we have gained the wisdom that only results from failure. 40 years of research have completely obsoleted the reactors used in Japan and elsewhere in the world (the great majority of reactors were built on similar principles). Like in other industries (such as the rapidly-evolving mobile industry, where new and powerful technologies frequently vie with entrenched legacy systems), the old guard can only cling to power for so long, and sometimes it takes a disaster to prompt that advance. The question is, how will we respond to this disaster? If our country’s internet or cellular communication structure broke down, we wouldn’t all be demonstrating for a return to snail mail, or investment in telegraph companies. We’d look at why it broke and demand they build a better version, because the alternatives aren’t alternatives. It’s the same with nuclear power. I’m not saying we should all have nuclear plants in our back yards, but the Generation IV reactors being researched right now (and likely to begin construction over the next 15 years) require not misplaced skepticism based on the failures of a primitive implementation of technology, but hearty and creative support. Senators are already investigating the state of our own reactors, but hopefully our long-term plan doesn’t start only now, in the wake of a sudden disaster. The objections to nuclear are simple and undeniable: first, that nuclear fuel contains an immense amount of potential energy, and the process of extracting that energy is a complex and delicate one. Second, that spent nuclear fuel is extremely dangerous and no one can seem to agree on a storage technique. The argument for nuclear (objections notwithstanding) is also simple and undeniable: the world’s consumption of energy is increasing exponentially, and nuclear is the ready-to-deploy technology that can meet that demand for anything near a reasonable cost. It’s a substitution of one set of problems for another, but that’s generally how things work. And you make the substitution when one set will wait longer than the other. We should be embracing change in nuclear the way we embrace change in the industries of power and technology as a whole. We have a whole section of this site, and while that’s generally reserved for advances in truly alternative energy sources like solar, thermal, and wind, there is a very, very important role for the advancement of existing and maturing technologies like nuclear power. The total displacement of the old generation of fossil fuel-based power won’t happen without them. Mainly, it’s just a matter of making sure your opinion is an informed opinion, as with anything else. It’s our role as rational individuals to dismiss FUD when we hear it, and to gauge necessities like worldwide precautions against global warming as disinterestedly as we gauge the performance of a new smartphone or the metrics of a web service. We should be looking at this aging infrastructure as a world ready to accept and employ new ideas and solutions. And we should be (not to say you aren’t, dear reader) evangelizing these new solutions the way we evangelize the next generation of technologies closer to home like Twitter, Facebook, and Foursquare. Personally, I find it hard to get excited about the valuation of something so trivial and transient as Groupon when there are people toiling in relative obscurity and poverty trying to save the world as we know it. I know that’s a scale fallacy, but I can’t help it. Take a look at the , read up on and , stay curious, and encourage other people to do so as well. The BBC is maintaining including Fukushima, which we’ve found invaluable. Lastly: just a reminder that donations are still appreciated by your favorite charity; HuffPo has actually put together a solid list if you’re looking for something more specific or Japan-local than Red Cross or the like. [header image: Reuters/Digital Globe] |
Video: Q&A With Red Laser's Rob Veres and PayPal's Laura Chambers | Jay Donovan | 2,011 | 3 | 17 | Here in Austin, Texas the portion of , with the exception of the trade show, has come to an end. The conference rages on though as the music portion is really just getting underway. I can hear the music pumping outside my hotel room as I write this. But before the interactive side completed yesterday, I attended a fairly interesting panel called “What’s In Your Virtual Wallet” that featured Rob Veres and Laura Chambers. We spoke shortly afterward about how the two companies are using their apps and services in new ways for marketing, mobile payments and remote commerce. Video below. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8NpRi4q2QOM&w=640&h=360] |
CoolPlanetBiofuels Draws Google Ventures Investment To Make Gas From Grass | Lora Kolodny | 2,011 | 3 | 17 | CoolPlanetBiofuels — a company that converts grass, woodchips, and other non-food crops and farm residue into high-grade fuel — attracted a series B investment From , the companies revealed Thursday. Based in Camarillo, Calif. claims its biofuel products are not just net zero, but “negative carbon fuels,” because the byproducts from making and using them can sequester carbon, and therefore act as a soil conditioner. Converting cellulosic plant material into gasoline could help the agricultural sector by creating demand for non-food crops, and potentially new jobs in rural farming communities. The investment represents Google Ventures’ first foray into biofuels. CoolPlanet was previously backed by , and in an $8 million series B round. Google Ventures did not disclose the amount it invested into the round. (Company representatives did not respond to a TechCrunch query as to how much money went into their series B investment by the close of business on Thursday.) |
First Impressions Of The Nintendo 3DS: 3D Done Right | John Biggs | 2,011 | 3 | 17 | I’ll be the first to admit that I thought the 3DS would be a gimmicky also-ran. I followed the handheld console from E3 to a hands-on at CES and now with the device in my hands I can report that Nintendo will have a hit on their hands. The 3DS is the DSi grown up. The UI is highly polished and there are a number of interesting features including a “suspend mode” for games that allows you to drop into Nintendo’s communication and photo interface to take pictures and send notes. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say Nintendo was trying to create a lifestyle device a la the iPod Touch, a path they’ve hinted at in the past with the DSi.
The biggest question on everyone’s minds is obviously the quality and value of 3D play. The 3D play is immersive and exciting. It is, in short, revolutionary. To be able to “feel” you are in an environment – or at least that your little plane or Jedi is in an environment – makes my jaded old reviewer’s heart tremble. I played and and both titles were improved using 3D. , for example, really shone simply because you felt as if the little plane was “there” in 3D space. I’m reminded of Willam Gibson’s as the closest fictional analog, about a man who beats the reigning champion at a game of holographic bi-plane fighting : He could see a crowd of the local kickers clustered around a pool table.
Aimless, his boredom following him like a cloud, he stuck his head in. And saw a biplane, wings no longer than his thumb, blossom bright orange flame. Corkscrewing, trailing smoke, it vanished the instant it struck the green-felt field of the table. Other features include a pedometer as well as a unique StreetPass system that lets the 3DS interact with other consoles as you walk by them in the street. That’s right: the 3DS plays with other 3DSes. It also takes 3D photos thanks to the dual front cameras. My concern is that 3D may be too much for little eyes. My son turned the 3D all the way down immediately and played the games in 2D mode and I also worry about eye-strain related with the odd need to focus “inside” the game console. When I lift my head away from the 3DS I actually feel a bit of an blurring after effect when focusing on distant objects, something that may alarm optometrists down the road. I’m not one to make pronouncements of glorious fanboyery. However, given my experience over the past few days and barring some concerns about 3D for younger children, I think Nintendo has changed the landscape when it comes to handheld gaming. I rarely heap encomiums on any device but this one deserves all the praise we can muster for breaking the stale paradigms thus far foisted upon us by handheld console manufacturers.
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"Save Japan" Initiative At SXSW 2011 (And How You Can Help Without Being There) | Serkan Toto | 2,011 | 3 | 17 | I am currently in Austin at SXSW 2011, but mentally absent: I was at Tokyo airport on Friday to fly off to Texas, on my way to the gate, when the earthquake hit Japan (where I am based). As everybody knows by now, the quake marked the biggest disaster in Japan’s history after WWII, leaving thousands of people dead, wounded or homeless. After 6 years of living in Japan and being there when it happened, I, too, am devastated. The Japan delegation for SXSW Interactive consists of about 10 people, and in the light of what was and still is happening in their home country, everybody toughed it out, took part in their panels and did a great job. (I know because I got a ticket at a later date and luckily was able to moderate related to Japanese tech and speak at another . I was too late to attend the .) One of the speakers, from (the company behind ), says that the idea was to show the world that Japan won’t give up in the light of the disaster and to send a signal of encouragement back home. And what’s more, literally all of the speakers’ companies quickly reacted and started to collect donations for the victims of the disaster. Just a few examples:
Iguchi and another SXSW speaker, Ryo Shimizu (CEO of Tokyo-based tech company ) decided to not leave SXSW after their panels but rather cooperate with the event organizers to collect donations from attendees – who thankfully thousands of dollars so far ( is Shimizu’s very personal blog post about the earthquake and SXSW 2011 for the Japanese delegates). Eiji Araki from , Japan’s mobile social gaming juggernaut, says users of his platform donated over $2 million so far by buying special virtual items. That’s about the same number another SXSW panelist, Tak Miyata from (Japan’s largest real-identity social network) is reporting at this point. (More information on Japan’s SXSW delegation and their efforts to “save Japan” can be found in this in the New York Times). These are pretty impressive efforts, but if you now ask yourself how can help Japan, here is a quick list of links to make it easy: You can find a larger list of earthquake relief options . |
Not Even Kevin Rose Really Uses Digg Anymore | Michael Arrington | 2,011 | 3 | 17 | How bad are things at the once-mighty these days? Not so good. It’s been months since Digg in August in a quest for relevance. They had 18 million unique worldwide visitors that month according to Comscore. That dropped to just under 12 million in January, a 33% drop in just five months. Everything official coming out of Digg says things are great and that a the company will find a way to success. But everyone knows how unlikely that is. Even, it seems, founder . He’s barely even using the service anymore. There was one 22 day period in December that he didn’t submit, comment on or even “digg” a single story. Over the last 30 days, he’s only had seven actions on Digg, less than one action every 4 days. He hasn’t submitted a story in over a month, on February 13. You can see his account . It’s not much better with CEO Matt Williams, although he manages to Digg, comment or submit a story about on average. In stark contrast, Rose is very active on Twitter, running up 181 tweets in the last month. He’s 26x more active on Twitter than the company he founded. There isn’t much chance for Digg to ever turn things around if the senior team, particularly Rose, aren’t even using the service any more. A sad fate for a once mighty startup. |
Drill-Powered Motor-Tricyle Is Underpowered, Yet Terrifying | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 3 | 17 |
Power drills always seem overpowered to me, but in this case they seem to lack oomph. I mean, it’s one thing to put a hole in a plank — it’s another to propel a vehicle. These guys have made two 15-watt drills into an electric engine, and by god, they’re going almost 20MPH in this contraption. It’s a pretty simple setup, really, a few gears to make sure everything is in sync, and hand controls to control power going to each half of the power plant. In order to steer you have to “use your whole body to tilt and bend the vehicle,” which I don’t look forward to, considering its spindly nature. Safety and such aside, it’s a sweet little project. [via and ] |
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After A Series Of Big Time News Events, Ustream Hits 10M Broadcasters, 60M Monthly Unique Viewers | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 3 | 17 | Video service has seen an interesting six months, between broadcasting the , the news feeds of revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, the debut of the Charlie Sheen show and the news surrounding the Japanese Tsunami and earthquake last Friday. VP of Marketing and Communications Lynn Fox tells me that the service has seen unprecedented growth, and hit 10 million total broadcaster signups at the end of February, averaging a rounded 20% growth month over month since December. According to Quantcast, Ustream’s monthly unique viewers are 60 million across the entire network. Vistors to the Ustream site have grown from 18 million in January to 25 million in February, and are on a trajectory to grow 10% on the 25 million to 27.5 million in March. 174,000 broadcasters signed up in the past month alone. (I’m still waiting for word on how many of those are active users.) Fox also tells me that revenue was also at all time high and that Ustream has had nine straight quarters of growth — at 45% average growth month over month. Fox would not tell me whether the company had yet achieved profitability. Fox attributes the service’s upswing to combination of good content choices, product improvements and increased awareness. Future plans include, Ustream monetizes through a combination of advertising, pay per view, ad free and conference production services. Ustream, which has $87.8 million in funding, revamped its mobile app (combining both broadcasting and streaming capabilities). It also recently announced that all 4G Verizon Android phones will with Ustream as well, further increasing potential for mobile distribution which grew 77% from January to February. Most recently the news surrounding the Japan earthquake brought in record numbers of viewers, apparently Apple stores on the ground in order to watch the news on the service. On just the day of the quake Ustream hit 7.2 million views due to all of us who were glued to the stunning and terrifying imagery on the streams, an audience greater than Sheen’s antics and greater than those who watched the Chilean miner rescue. said Fox.
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The SXSWi Trade Show, Up Close, With Penguin | John Biggs | 2,011 | 3 | 17 | Watch me and my three chins walk through the SXSWi trade show talking to all sorts of exciting people including , and . Fast forward to 5:15 to see me talking to a giant, mute penguin! The tradeshow at SXSWi is always a bit small – the real action happens at the panels – but it’s an interesting collection of established brands and up-and-comers that made it worth a walk-through. It’s a bit long, be warned, but 17:00 brings us a cool technology from Japan and 20:00 in brings us Kinect Robot Boxing. Regardless, if you want to see, as Kyle said, “an old Michael Cera” walk the show floor, this is your video. |
Saying "SXSW Is Over" Is Over | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 3 | 17 | A lot of the talk surrounding SXSW this year has reminded me of from IFC’s show . It starts off with a guy peering into the window of a bar and telling the locals inside how much he loves the place. The next day, he comes back to the same bar and sees some new guy in a buttoned-up shirt sitting there. “ ,” he declares. Likewise, SXSW is over. Or is it? Depending on what you read or who you talk to, this was definitely the year that SXSW jumped the shark. In fact, I think before it even began. What was once a conference that was hip, now attracts the guy in the buttoned-up shirt — therefore, it’s over. The truth is that this is at least the third or fourth year in a row that someone has declared the conference to be “over.” But a funny thing keeps happening each subsequent year: SXSW keeps getting bigger. And even those that declare it over keep going back. And that has led to of backlash: backlash against backlash. A of over the few days have now declared that saying “SXSW is over”, is over. This was my fourth year in a row going to SXSW. I already outlined about this year’s conference yesterday — and yes, they were pretty cynical. We’re now seeing a of data to which of the group messaging services “won”. But those graphs, based on tweets and other transient forms of information, are a stretch at best. At worst, they’re simply promotional content for another breed of startups — the startups that track the chatter about startups on other startups. And that’s fitting because again, to me, there was no clear winner of anything at this year’s SXSW beyond the promotional stuff — and maybe the iPad 2. Believe me, I tried looking for more of a story than that. For that one big trend. I failed. But don’t mistake my cynical tone for a declaration of doom for SXSW. It might be “over” in the sense that I no longer get much out of it, but I’m no longer the key demographic. The truth is that the conference has simply . And the conference organizers need to tap into that evolution. The fact of the matter is that SXSW is now far too large for it to be an insidery show where a handful of tech hipsters (the people who already hang out with each other in San Francisco or New York City all the time anyway) decide what’s “cool”. It is no longer the “spring break for geeks” that it once was. SXSW is now a full-on trade show. There were something like 20,000 attendees at just the interactive portion of the show this year. That’s supposedly bigger than the music and film aspects — combined. And that shouldn’t be too surprising given that SXSW makes most of its money from the interactive portion and all the sponsorships and pass sales that come along with it. This year simply showcased that more than ever. The overall conference atmosphere is now more akin to a CES or a Comic-Con. But this was an awkward growth year for SXSW because unlike those larger trade shows, there wasn’t a lot of actual news coming out of Austin. Even the majority of the startups that chose to launch there did so the week leading up to the conference. SXSW is going to have to fix that going forward if they want to continue to enjoy the press coverage that they have in previous years. Or they won’t, if they don’t. (Which wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing in my view, by the way — but they love the outside promotion as much as they love the promotion going on inside.) Instead, this year you had us writing about how insane the marketing was. And we were interviewing people in an attempt to try and squeeze newsworthy out of them. It’s why the biggest story of the conference wasn’t actually a real story at all: Google’s “Circles” social network, which was but then was almost as quickly . We were all looking for something. Anything. The model that worked when the conference had 1,000 attendees is now stretched far too thin. Dozens of panels were added over all different parts of Austin because the enormous convention center isn’t quite enormous enough anymore. And instead of everyone staying at the Hilton or the Courtyard Marriott, many people were shacked up in places that were more than a drunken stumble away — in some cases miles away. Everything just felt fragmented — the apps that did try to launch there. There was simply too much going on for what was initially conceived as a smaller show. This year was like watching a mouse trying to give birth to an elephant. But then again, some people loved this new SXSW with 30 percent more of everything. I spoke with a number of attendees who couldn’t have been happier with the experience they had. The main takeaway there? The networking. Because there are so many like-minded people from all over the world hanging out in one city, connections were fast and furious. Oh, and the drinking was better than ever before. Last year, the economic downturn seemed to directly affect the beer taps in Austin. This year, the beer flowed like wine. But all of this doesn’t really speak to the conference itself, just the surrounding ecosystem. In an ecosystem, bigger is often better. But from a conference perspective, that’s not always the case. Sometimes bigger is just bigger. Maybe the takeaway is that people should just show up in Austin next year and not even go to the actual conference. After all, that’s what many people do for the music part of it. Or maybe SXSW should branch out to other cities at other times of the year — though, admittedly, the name would be pretty silly then. SXSW-W, anyone? Or maybe SXSW should change nothing at all. The current model is still clearly working for them. I’m sure this was the biggest money-making year yet. And I’m also sure that all of us who are now saying it is “over” will be back again next year — and back complaining about it being “over”. As has taught us, at some point, “everything’s over!” [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlGqN3AKOsA&w=640&h=390] |
The Engineer Guy Breaks Down An LCD Monitor, Informatively | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 3 | 17 | [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jiejNAUwcQ8&w=640&h=390]
We all know basically how an LCD works — there’s a backlight, there are pixels, sub-pixels, and so on. But I was unaware of the polarizing crystals and the reasoning behind top-down refreshes. Bill Hammack from the U of Illinois (and one of my right now) shows us what’s what in this great video. One thing that was not made clear: what about the difference between IPS and lower-grade monitors, offset sub-pixel layouts, or superior methods of backlighting? Guess we’ll have to find out on our own. |
Gobbler Puts The Fun Back Into Collaborative Media Projects | Michael Arrington | 2,011 | 3 | 17 | If you’ve ever worked on a big music or video project you’ll probably love immediately. Just don’t get too excited – it’s still in early beta and for now all they’ve released is their audio product. The company first debuted publicly at the Launch conference last month, but seems to have attracted almost zero notice from the press until now. But users have definitely noticed Gobbler. Feedback on their first project is so intensely positive, says CEO (who cofounded Gobbler with his sister, former MySpace exec ), that the company is accelerating plans to support video. It should be here by summer. So what is Gobbler? First it’s desktop software that keeps your media projects organized. Gobbler will locate all of your projects across your various internal and external hard drives, and then keep track of them. Even when you disconnect that external drive, Gobbler knows the project is there and keeps showing it in the file system. That alone makes Gobbler incredibly useful for people who keep grabbing new hard drives to store their terabytes of photo, video and audio projects. Do you even know where all your photos are? I don’t. A lot of them used to be on Flickr, but my pro account lapsed and Yahoo is holding them hostage until I pay up. But that’s another story. Second, Gobbler will back up your projects to their cloud, powered by Amazon Web Services. And it’s also hyper intelligent. When a new version of a project is created, for example, Gobbler knows it only has to upload, and restore, the tiny number of files that were changed. In a multi-gigabyte project (as we regularly see for TechCrunch video projects), that’s a really big deal. Finally, Gobbler lets people collaborate on project much more easily than before. FTP just isn’t a good solution for sending 5 gigabytes back and forth. It and other online solutions are so cumbersome that people often just fedex actual hard drives. It’s easier, and quicker. But the way Gobbler manages and stores data makes it all a lot simpler, at least after the first upload/download. In fact, the more people are collaborating and sending files back and forth, the quicker Gobbler becomes because most of the files are already on all the various user computers and in the cloud. Chris explains: When whole projects have to be sent back and forth between collaborators the only thing being sent are new and updated files. How does this work? If you and are are working together and i have shared the my project with you. you have downloaded it you make a bunch of data and want to send it back to me. There is a high likelihood the other thing that has changed is data in the source project file. When you go to send the project back to me we will upload the new or changed data only. The efficiency is the cloud sits in the middle and knows what is contained in each project AND Gobbler knows what is being stored locally. So it can reassemble projects via data which is found locally and in the cloud. Here is where it gets really neat. Let’s say had a bunch of files from a previous project you were using with a whole new project you incorporate those old files in the project and add a bunch of new ones… when you go to send this project all you will be sending is the new stuff, gobbler will see the fils as having already been in the system and will note that they are associated with the new projects as well. It all seems like common sense, of course, and startups like DropBox have been smart about not re-uploading redundant files for online storage for some time. But as far as I can tell, no one has been so intelligent about file management on both the upload and download side. The fact that Gobbler is desktop software makes all this possible. The company also (carefully) compresses audio files to ease bandwidth issues. They use open source for compression, and have added their own metadata layer that follows projects/files around the Gobbler ecosystem. They plan to expand the types of metadata they’re storing to include deeper information about the project for long term archiving, says the company, using standards like the . All in all this is a really useful and tidy product that may become indispensable to the 6 million music makers, 12 million pro and prosumer photographers and 3 million videographers out there in the world. We’ll almost certainly be using Gobbler as soon as the video product comes out, and I may use it personally for photo management. The company quietly raised, but never announced, from Dave Goldberg, Sky Dayton and Tim Wyatt in January. They’re raising a new round immediately to help deal with all the user demand, they say, and to speed development of the video product. As an aside, this is just another example of how amazingly efficient platforms like Amazon Web Services are. Once you’ve properly built your product it just scales effortlessly as users flock to the service. In the old days it would have taken tens of millions of dollars on the operations side and many months to scale quickly. I wonder how Friendster would have turned out if they hadn’t crashed and burned as they tried to deal with too many users. |
News Corp: WSJ Tablet Subscriptions Are Blowing Up | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 3 | 10 | I think we are all still pretty skeptical of the -based newspapers right now — nothing against them, it’s just a question of scale and pricing. With surprisingly low pricing like the Daily’s, or (relatively) high pricing like the WSJ’s, can they get enough people to subscribe to make turn a dollar? As it turns out: yes, at least on the Wall Street Journal’s part. The paper’s publisher, Les Hinton, says r, and is now hovering around 200,000. The paper itself has a circulation of about 1.6 million, so that’s not bad at all. Then there’s , which is a different value proposition, being only on the tablet. My guess is they’re struggling for subscribers right now, but they probably expected that to happen. They’re among the first to go all-tablet, and that’s risky. But if they’re willing to spend the money at the beginning, they can work out the process, squash the bugs, and be at 100% when the others launch their inevitable competitors. Two sure things: the market growing and people are willing to pay, so it’s too early to call it one thing or another. |
Nikon May Have Leaked Their Own D5100 DSLR | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 3 | 10 |
may have just accidentally revealed the successor to their D5000 consumer DSLR. shows various cameras in the Nikon family, but that when it shows the D5000, the LCD is shown swiveled to the left side. The Problem? The D5000 LCD only swivels . Not much revealed other than that, but a good catch by NR. If the release is soon, it could steal the swivel-thunder. We’ll keep you posted. |
Video: Bytejacker At GDC | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 3 | 10 |
Bytejacker is a good “layman’s” resource for the indie gaming world: up to date but not esoteric, enthusiastic but not fanboyish, and generally bite-sized, although this week’s episode, in which they hit up GDC, is longer than usual. There’s lots of good stuff, including a few previews of games you know are going to be big, some random good stuff, and even a brief interview with Pixel, who pretty much singlehandedly created Cave Story. They’ll be adding more stuff to their YouTube channel later, in case you’re wondering what they couldn’t pack into this jumbo episode. |
Posterous Joins The SXSW Pile On With Posterous Events For iPhone | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 3 | 10 |
Because you ain’t nobody unless you have of your app for SXSW, has today released its own effort with Posterous Events, a which allows people at a massive event like SXSW or even something as humble as a family picnic to create a simple site around that event using their iPhone apps. All users who want to create a Posterous site around an event have to do is open up their iPhones and create a .posterous address for a specific location and post (the site you most recently posted to will stay on top of your events). Posterous is incorporating SimpleGeo location data into the app, so that anyone with the Posterous iPhone app also in the vicinity of a given event will be able to see that event and post photos and media which are then presented on the site in slideshow format (above). Says head of marketing Rich Pearson, Posterous is also planning event notification, private event capability in a later build, but for now, enjoy SXSW Posterousers. You can find the app in the app store
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x-Ar Exoskeleton Arm Lets You Lift Like a Robot: Indefatigably | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 3 | 10 |
We see here on CrunchGear every once in a while, though most of them are pretty specific in their applications. : it’s not for making you into a superhuman, but just making people whose work involves constant extension of the arm and heavy lifting be a little less fatiguing. I mean, think about it: your arm weighs quite a bit, though it’s not something you notice until you have to keep it extended for more than a couple minutes. Imagine if your job involved having your arms out with heavy tools in them for most of the day. hands get tired just there. The x-Ar is intended to make your arm and whatever you’re carrying feel like they have zero weight. It attaches to your wrist via a cuff and by using technology inspired by steadicams, lets you move freely while still supporting lots of weight. Equipois’ previous robo-arm let you mount a heavy tool to the end, so this would be more for tasks where the delicacy of a human hand is still required. Sounds good to me. Now if only they’d release one that types for me. |
Canon Throws Its Weight Behind Intel's Thunderbolt | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 3 | 10 |
There are no products to announce or anything, but has with , Intel’s new high-speed interface. It’s doubtful that it will be integrated into cameras being released this year, since like most companies it , but you can expect the next generation of DSLRs and maybe even point-and-shoots to sport little lightning bolts. It’s a great match for cameras, I think, since it does double duty as a display and data pipe. |
Video: Ivan Cobenk on Kevin Bacon – Extended Cut | Matt Burns | 2,011 | 3 | 10 | [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPC7qzwxOMg&w=640&h=390] The extended cut of . Yep, 3:33 minutes of Kevin Bacon hawking Google TV. Enjoy. It’s my gift to you. |
Loosecubes Wants To Change The Way You Co-Work, Launches SXSW Micro App | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 3 | 10 | Seed funded by Accel and Battery Ventures, is a workplace sharing community with a focus on co-working. Unlike which primarily with work spaces, founder Campbell McKellar tells me she wants to move beyond providing an area with wifi and match people with people. Loosecubes will be launching a redesigned site and product next week and but wants to help people come together in advance, and thus is holding a Co-Working Un-Conference in Austin tonight until 11pm at 301 Colorado (Colorado and 4th). To further drive this “bringing people together” thing home, LooseCubes built the HTML 5 app especially for the SXSW occasion. Taking off of Amit Gupta’s idea of a (a formalized work-together) Instant Jelly in an HTML5 mobile web app which allows you to create spontaneous co-working events by opening in your smart phone browser, plugging in your Twitter handle and the When, Where and Theme of your event. Aside from the events being from the account, you can also tweet them out yourself using a unique RSVP link. The app then allows other people to request invites to your Jelly, which you can then deny or approve. Continuing on the Jelly theme, Campbell eventually wants to make LooseCubes more like a social network for co-working than a real estate listing service like eVenues.com, and hopes to keeping adding social features after her services relaunch next week, so people can check out the social aspects of a space before you sign up. For example, people with industry designations could fan a page and people could evaluate the site based on the profiles of the people who friended it like, “Oh these people are like me they’re all writers.” “Finding a place to work in a hotel lobby is a lot different than having someone work with you for the day,” says McKeller.
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Movie Gossip: Doom Re-Boot In The Works, To Be Shot In 3D | Nicholas Deleon | 2,011 | 3 | 10 | Here’s a fun one for your Thursday afternoon enjoyment. It looks like Universal Studios is currently shopping around a script , only this time it will be shot in 3D. Will Dwayne “ ” Johnson return? (That’s him to the left, cutting a promo on John Cena, as you do.) Unknown. Will the movie be nothing more than empty action? Almost certainly. The movie, What’s Playing’s Hollywood Insider, will “entirely [skip] over the events of the insipid 2005 film ,” which is slightly unfair. The movie was based on a game that, nearest I can tell, had no plot whatsoever. Something about Hell monsters on Mars. The game wasn’t trying to be anything more than “ahh, monsters, shoot!” so to pan the movie for not being, I don’t know, a Terrence Malick work of art seems slightly unfair. Dare to dream, friends. |
Instapaper Goes Social With Sharing, Likes, And Friends | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 3 | 10 | I remember when I first fell in love with . It was a few years ago, and most people were still using Delicious or worse, their browsers, to bookmark things on the web. Delicious was still solid at the time, but it was also pretty slow. Instapaper was wonderful because it was fast. You hit one button (a bookmarklet) and it saved an article to read later. The reality is that the service hasn’t changed all that much over the years. But the iPhone and now iPad have transformed it from being a useful service into an essential one. And it has grown into a big enough business where creator was able to leave his job as CTO of Tumblr to focus on it full time. And now we’re seeing the fruits of that. Instapaper 3.0 is a . The iPhone, iPad, and web interfaces have all been updated to include the big new aspect of the service: social. You can now easily share things you Instapaper to Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinboard, and Evernote. Once you link up your Instapaper account to each, you’ll see an option to automatically share stories you “like”. And that another big new feature: Likes. It used to be that you could “star” stories you have saved to further mark them as important. But it was never really clear how useful that feature actually was. But now “likes” are directly tied to the sharing aspect — not only sharing to other networks, but also within Instapaper itself. The service now has a social layer that allows you to subscribe to Likes shared by other users you know (you find them via your contact list or the other social networks). Previously, there was a way to subscribe to other users’ Instapaper feeds if they were public, but it wasn’t very obvious how you did that. Now there’s a nice big “Friends” button at the top of the app. There’s also a new “Editors” button which allows you to find new curated content from the likes of Longreads, Longform.org, and Instapaper’s own “Editor’s Picks”. And finally, there’s also a new “Web” button along the top of the app to allow you to browse websites you like and mark things to read later. In his post on the new release, Arment also notes a half dozen other upgrades in Instapaper 3.0. Image quality is better, downloads happen faster, and other settings have been tweaked. The biggest of these other changes is the ability to search the content of downloaded articles. Arment notes that this isn’t website-enabled yet for the entire archive of content you’ve saved, but he hints that that may well be coming. You can find Instapaper . 3.0 is a free upgrade for existing users of the Pro version, otherwise it’s $4.99 — well worth it. |
null | Erick Schonfeld | 2,011 | 3 | 17 | null |
Non-Toxic, Ethical Bike Care Products From Orontas | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 3 | 10 |
If you’re like me, you cringe a little whenever you put a little synthetic oil on your chain or send some toxic cleaning fluid down the drain. Seems to me that people with bikes are more likely to care about their environmental impact, and also more likely to pay more for quality gear and accessories. let you and your bike feel good.
There’s cleaner, lube, grease, and… more lube. They’re all non-toxic, plant-based, and biodegradable, so you don’t need to worry about slathering it on. You can where they sell it nearby you (there aren’t too many in the US, unfortunately), or buy them online; the bottles run for about $13 each, which is more than you’d pay for a bottle of Brand X, but that’s the price of righteousness. [via ] |
Groupola gets its wrist slapped by OFT as 192 iPhones go missing | Steve O'Hear | 2,011 | 3 | 10 | , which originally in the UK but has to become a daily deal aggregator, has been found by the UK’s Office of Fair Trading of operating ‘bait pricing’ in its held last year. At the time, Groupola’s biggest crime was that its website crashed throughout much of the day of the group buying promotion, leading some consumers to suggest it was a scam. How many iPhones were actually on sale was what most hopeful punters wanted to know, so we asked. Two hundred handsets was the official answer – also repeated on Groupola’s Facebook page – when in actual fact, says the OFT, it was just . Oh dear. Specifically, the OFT’s investigation Markco Media (which operates the Groupola website along with MyVoucherCodes.co.uk) used ‘bait pricing’ – having only a small proportion of stock available at the advertised offer price – to promote a sale of iPhone 4s at £99 (normal retail price was £499) to entice consumers to join Groupola and sign up to receive daily email alerts from the company. The OFT was “also concerned about misleading comments made by one Groupola employee on the company’s Facebook page at the time of the sale. The employee represented himself as an ordinary consumer and made positive comments about the company.” Good old ‘astroturfing’, eh. But that’s what we have regulators like the OFT for, right? You’d think so but in this case Groupola’s punishment is to sign a letter saying they won’t do it again. That’s alright then. Here’s the official statement on today’s ruling from Mark Pearson, Chairman of Markco Media: “We would of course like to apologise to anyone who was disappointed with the promotion that we ran in July 2010. We worked closely with the Office of Fair Trading during their enquiries to ensure that nothing like this happens again. When the issue first arose, nearly 9 months ago, we immediately carried out our own internal investigation as to the cause of the problems and the members of the team responsible for the promotion are no longer with the company.” |
PS3 To Be Re-Secured by 3.60 Firmware | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 3 | 10 |
The of PS3 security discovered by hackers in January and pried open further by Geohot (who is now being ) may be fixed with the latest patch to the PS3. This is the natural way of things, of course. Hack developer Youness Alaoui has that “For now, it looks to me (at first glance) that the ps3 has been resecured, but it doesn’t mean it can’t be broken again from scratch..” Though he hastily added that he doesn’t plan to work on a 3.60 crack, and that noobs should stop @ing him. In the meantime, if you’re running a hacked OS or homebrew stuff, you should probably stay with the version you’re currently using, and avoid a net connection, since you know how serious Sony can be about pushing updates. [via ] |
Take This Camera With A Grain Of Salt – Literally | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 3 | 10 |
is the work of the Fraunhofer Institute and image sensor company Awaiba. It’s essentially a tiny 1mm square substrate with a layer of image sensors and then a lens layer on top of that — giving this camera a total size of 1x1x1mm. Yeah, it’s pretty much the smallest camera ever. The resolution is 250×250, and it sends its signal over an electrical wire instead of a fiber optic cable. The camera unit is so cheap to make that they consider them disposable — making them ideal for use in the medical world for things like endoscopy. The extremely small size also makes them good for embedded applications like motion detection, security, or eliminating driver blind spots and such. , the image quality is suspect, but in this case it’s not a consumer application and they’re not marketing it as a replacement for a point-and-shoot or anything. They hope to bring them to market in 2012. It does make the world a creepier place — there could be cameras the size of salt grains and I wouldn’t know. Scary. |
Analyst: Non-iPad Tablets Will Be Collecting Dust On Store Shelves | Nicholas Deleon | 2,011 | 3 | 10 | The immense popularity of the , and now the iPad 2 (recently by The Daily’s Peter Ha), has Apple’s competitors, in the words of Steve Jobs, flummoxed. What to do? According to a J.P. Morgan Research analyst, it may well be that all of these competitor tablets as folks decide en masse that the iPad is the way to go. In other words, competitors trying to convince people that their tablet is “better” than the iPad could well be wasting their time. And money, of course. The report, which was obtained by Cnet, was presented by one Mark Moskowitz and says that competitors trying to play catch-up are going to have a “tough” time, and that the effort to flood the market with tablets could result in a severe over-saturation. Nothing’s quite worse than sinking a bunch of money into a product’s R&D, manufacturing too many of them, then having them sit on store shelves—next to signs that say, “Sorry, we’re out of iPads. Check back later!” The report also mentions that, because so many manufactures are jumping aboard the tablet bandwagon we might start to see relevant supplies—glass, processors, flash chips, etc.—become stretched, making these tablets even more expensive to produce. Meaning, of course, that every unsold tablet will hurt just that little bit extra. The report also says that it’s expected that many consumers will be “underwhelmed” by the many iPad alternatives out there, such as the and other -wielding models. |
Social Retargeting Ad Network RadiumOne Raises $21M At A $200M Valuation | Leena Rao | 2,011 | 3 | 10 | , an online ad network that aims to combine social and intent data to serve ads, has raised in Series B funding led by l, with , and participating in the round. This latest round brings RadiumOne’s total funding to Although the company declined to name the valuation in the round, we heard from industry sources that the network’s valuation was roughly $200 million (we heard one online company tried to buy RadiumOne for $250 million). RadiumOne was founded by serial entrepreneur and founder Chahal sold his ad network for $300 million in 2007 and at the time, Chahal’s company was the fifth largest ad network in the United States and the second largest in the United Kingdom. Chahal’s non-compete contract with Yahoo ended in October 2010, and he got back into RadiumOne mines social data and use this information to identify relevant consumers for brands. Through what Chahal calls “social retargeting,” RadiumOne analyzes how users interact with one another on social networks to find the consumers that identify with a brand’s current customer base, and then serves advertisements to this audience across the company’s network of publishers. RadiumOne gets this data directly from social networks (which sell anonymous user behavior data to advertisers), its own gWallet offer platform, blogging platforms, microblogging platforms (i.e. Twitter), URL shorteners, photosharing websites and other applications. As social media users share information like links, blog posts, videos and more, RadiumOne will analyze this data to place the consumers on a social graph that will accurately describe their “behavior.” RadiumOne will also take the social data and form “social clusters” of people who know each other and share common interests. RadiumOne will target these new groups based on their interactions.The startup with likes and shares, that promise to increase engagement. The latest funding round will be used for international expansion and acquisitions, which Chahal says will center around talent and technology. Specfically he says that there are a number of interesting companies who are mined social data that are currently targets for RadiumOne. In terms of revenue, Chahal says that RadiumOne saw revenue in the double digit millions in 2010 and reached profitability in Q4 of the year. He says RadiumOne is on track to post four to five times 2010 revenue in 2011. We sat down with Chahal for a video interview about the funding, RadiumOne’s future and more. |
VigLink Raises Another $5.4 Million To Help Publishers Monetize Outbound Clicks | Jason Kincaid | 2,011 | 3 | 10 | , a startup that helps publishers and bloggers monetize their outbound traffic, has closed a $5.4 million Series B funding round led by Emergence Capital, with participation from existing investors Google Ventures and First Round Capital. The company raised $800,000 in and has now raised a total of $7.3 million. The company is also revealing that SoftTech VC took part in an earlier round (their participation was not previously disclosed). VigLink’s goal is to help publishers monetize their content more effectively and without much effort. After installing a small snippet of code on your site, VigLink will detect whenever you create an outbound link to any of 12,500 merchant sites. It will then automatically convert this link to an link, which means that you get a kickback whenever someone clicks it and eventually completes a purchase on the linked merchant site. VigLink generally takes 25% of this cut, but given that many publishers don’t monetize their outbound traffic at all, it’s a lot better than nothing. Of course, you could always sign up for an affiliate program yourself, but VigLink is more convenient. In addition to converting these links, VigLink is also gradually rolling out a new product that automatically affiliate links whenever a relevant keyword is mentioned (for example, if you mentioned Nike shoes in a blog post, the site might automatically add a link to that text). This is a more aggressive feature, but CEO Oliver Roup says that the company’s goal is to make their links unobtrusive. They’re totally optional for publishers, and the service will also cap the number of links in any given article at four. Since launching in February 2010 the service has been embedded on 15,000 sites, which serve some 2 billion pageviews per month. The company isn’t talking about how much revenue it’s generated for publishers, other than to say it’s been “meaningful” to their bottom lines. VigLink acquired one of its competitors, DrivingRevenue, in August. Other competitors include UK-based startup Skimlinks. |
UberGenius: Uber Is Taking Control of SXSW Pedicabs | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 3 | 10 | San Francisco is a ghost town right now. It seems as if the entire city has packed up and headed to Austin, Texas for SXSW. The conference was too big two years ago. Then it got bigger last year. And this year it’s expected to be significantly bigger once again. I’m leaving tomorrow, and I’m scared. But the good news is that an old trusty friend will be on hand to help us navigate the insane crowds: . Yes, mobile app-controlled car service is heading to Austin as well for SXSW. But they’re doing it with a true Austin twist: pedicabs. Anyone who has been to SXSW before will know how handy the pedicabs can be when you find yourself at one party either too tired or too inebriated to get across the city to another party. Now, if you have the Uber app on your iPhone or Android phone (you can use text messages also), you can simply request a pick up that way — it’s the same general process as hailing a regular Uber. But there is one big difference: you negotiate the price you want to pay with the pedicab driver (well, technically, “biker”, I suppose). Obviously, it will depend on distance, etc. This is an absolutely brilliant move by Uber. There will be 100 or so pedicabs flying around Austin with their branding on the side, we’re told. (There will also be a few regular Uber cars as well, we hear.) And Uber is taking it one step further by donating 20 percent of each fare taken in during SXSW to . This move into Austin follows the news just a few days ago that Uber was also coming to New York City. |
Gillmor Gang 3.19.11 (TCTV) | Steve Gillmor | 2,011 | 3 | 19 | The Gillmor Gang — John Taschek, Danny Sullivan, Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — or at lest 4/5ths of them were decked out with iPad 2s. That didn’t prevent the usual argument from breaking out about the New York Times’ pay wall. The Grey Lady announced a social plus subscription model, and @dannysullivan was having none of it. It’s 2011 but the battle lines continue to be drawn over publishing v. the Web. Many believe the subscription wall will destroy what’s left of the print business model without replacing it with an iPad alternative. Others (me) think the Times has got it just about right, leaving a gaping hole through social media (Facebook and Twitter) to consume the newspaper as before while creating a pool of found money around the iPad version. As social @mentioners create an authoritative stream of Times citations that do not trigger a sub request, the resulting high-value audience will migrate to a reasonable iPad based environment where those social signals can be harnessed through realtime chat, video, and other engaged value adds and attendant revenue opportunities. Whether it will take 15 years or is already a formidable tipping point will be left to the viewer to decide. |
Wanita Power: What Women in the US Could Learn from Indonesians | Sarah Lacy | 2,011 | 3 | 19 | JAKARTA– I’m mid-way through a trip to Indonesia at the request of the State Department, and I’m finding a hard time putting the experience into words. You’d think after two years of writing about other countries it’d be easy. I can’t remember if it was always this hard, or there’s just something different about this trip. Maybe it’s the added surreal layer that this time, I’m flying around between seven far-flung cities in the world’s largest Muslim country talking about the importance of more Indonesian women starting companies. Most people know the topic of “WHY AREN’T THERE MORE WOMEN IN SILICON VALLEY?” isn’t my favorite. Far too often the debate degenerates into grandstanding, whining and pointing fingers at all those evil male gatekeepers like, you know, TechCrunch. Never mind our company is run by a woman, our editorial group reports to another woman and more than half our senior staff are women. But even worse, the debate has degenerated into pure linkbait. I rarely read anything new or thought-provoking on it. People glorify the need to RAISE AWARENESS, but who isn’t aware? Do you have eyes, and have you ever been to a tech conference? Then you’re plenty aware. We all are. Still hasn’t fixed the problem. So while a lot of the women I’m talking to are expecting the fancy US expert to come in and tell them all how we’ve figured it out and what they should learn from us– I’m doing the opposite. I’m telling them how messed up it is in the world’s great meritocracy of Silicon Valley. I’m telling them that only about 20% of tech workers are women, despite more women graduating with math and science degrees than ever before. I’m telling them that only 15 Fortune500 companies have woman CEOs despite there being gender parity in terms of management jobs in the US, according to the World Economic Forum. I’m telling them that even though 40% of small businesses are women owned, only 8% of the venture funded startups are. And then I’m telling them that for all the talk and handwringing about it, the smartest people I know can’t for the life of them figure out why that is. We have no idea why immigrants in Silicon Valley can do so much better in our country than American women can, and we have less of an idea how to fix it. I tell them all the reasons people come up with and ask them if they face those things here in Indonesia. I tell them why I think some of those reasons are cop-outs and why some– like work-life balance– are legitimate issues that do keep women from starting businesses. I tell them how many professional women– me included–get trapped in feeling like pregnancy is a disability, rather than proof of how strong we are. And we talk about some solutions to make things better. Most of all, I’m telling them the easiest way to break a glass ceiling is to never create one, and urging groups to work hard to include women in Indonesia’s burgeoning private sector and entrepreneurial ecosystem now, while it’s just getting started. It’s surreal for me, an American woman, to be telling audience after audience of women dressed in traditional Muslim headscarves that we don’t have gender equality figured out. But it’s more surreal for them to hear it. More than a few women have told me they were shocked. That they’d assumed women could do whatever they wanted in the US. A few have said that after my talk, they think starting a company sounds easier in Indonesia. Sure, a few times a male in the audience has . One fervently disagreed with my entire keynote saying that it was morally wrong for women to be out of the home and that if the government did anything to advocate this, it would be a nightmare for Indonesian society, birth rates would go into free-fall and all hell would break loose. It was a long diatribe, and my translator clearly gave me the nice version of his comments. Whether it was stated or not, the implication was there: Another time, a man suggested that the US statistics proved that women start businesses. Turning my argument on its head, he suggested that the US economy doesn’t seem to be missing the participation of more women, and that it’d clearly been a positive for us. I pointed out that studies have shown that women-owned businesses become profitable faster and generate more revenue, and that the US economy isn’t exactly a global role model these days. There’s also the obvious retort– we have no idea what the opportunity cost from more women not participating in Silicon Valley’s economy has been. “Sorry, pal, but the facts just aren’t on your side,” I said, and the predominantly female audience laughed. These are obviously viewpoints too un-PC to voice in the US, even if many people still believe them. But when each guy made these arguments, the women in the audience didn’t seem cowed or even too concerned. There was definitely some knowing-looks and eye rolling exchanged. The attitude wasn’t preventing women from attending these events or the entrepreneurship colleges I’ve spoken at, where more than half of the audience have typically been women. I’ve known from my previous trips to this country that Muslim Indonesians are very moderate and not at all like the stereotype many Americans would expect, particularly in more cosmopolitan urban areas. But during this trip, I’ve frequently been speaking at Muslim schools in more remote cities. My first talk was in a school so known for demonstrations that last week several classrooms were set on fire. And yet, even there the women don’t fit the meek-and-submissive stereotype as much as a few of the men would clearly like them to. The brutality of Indonesian life– whether it’s 350 years of colonial domination, dictators, poverty or a never-ending assault of natural disasters– have forged these women into pure steel. Friends in the US have remarked at how intense it is that I’m here traveling city-to-city, lugging suitcases up and down jetway stairs in the tropical heat, delivering keynotes for more than three hours per day. Indeed, for an American pregnant woman, it is a pretty intense schedule. My ankles have morphed into thick, bloated stumps. Last week a clerk at a maternity store refused to let me carry a small bag of clothes to my car, I haven’t washed a dirty dish or stitch of laundry since my husband found out the news, and Paul Carr regularly takes my backpack from me when I try to leave the TechCrunch offices every night. And yet, I met a woman the other day who runs a company delivering goods and services to remote villages. She has seven kids. When she was nine-months pregnant with number seven she was loading up her motorbike with supplies and winding around Indonesia’s crazy highways and dirt roads to continue her work. That, ladies and gentlemen, is intense. Is that woman going to be stopped by a man telling her she’s not strong enough to run a company? The idea made her laugh. She was sitting in the front row of one of my keynotes, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a woman so confident and self-possessed. She was not only badass, she was well aware of just how badass she was. Unlike shrill women advocates in the US, these women don’t care whether male gatekeepers try to keep them down; it doesn’t seem to affect them. They shrug and go after what they want anyway. That’s stunning because generally Indonesia is a culture that looks to the government to solve most of their problems for them. I spent the afternoon in Jakarta the other day with a group called IWAPI– which translated stands for the Indonesian Businesswoman’s Association. The woman who runs it commanded the room with intense features, a bright red headscarf and an elaborate green silk dress. (She’s center in the picture to the left.) Throughout the meeting she snapped at her assistant– a man– to bring the water, fetch her bag, bring more chairs. My male state department guide looked a little scared. Before I could say anything she started to grill me on my qualifications. I knew one thing immediately: I never want this woman on my bad side. But she uses that intensity to create opportunities for the 40,000 members of this organization that was started the year I was born. For instance, while some entrepreneurs in the country are complaining that new Asian trade agreements will flood the domestic market with cheaper Chinese goods, IWAPI is organizing its own collective trade missions to surrounding South East Asian countries, looking for new markets to offset the risk. The woman in green told me what she tells young women in Indonesia: The literal translation for the Bahasa word for entrepreneur is “a person who makes things happen.” “If you want things to be done for you, you’re not an entrepreneur,” she said. “You work for the entrepreneur.” Many of the women I’ve met– including those at IWAPI– appear to do a much better job at the thing we fail at most: Women helping lift one another up. Last week, I visited a co-op in Surabaya, where women jointly run a hotel, a grocery store (below) and a sort of local Indonesian street vendor food court. They pool that money– and money from outside investors– to grant more than $1 billion rupiahs (or more than $100,000) in monthly microloans to their 12,000 women members. Operating well before microloans were trendy, this co-op has been in business 30 years. It was a hub of activity– women working at the various businesses, women helping watch one another’s kids, women in the computer lab learning how the Internet could help fuel their businesses, women in line to make payments on their loans. No one is worrying too much about work-life balance, because it’s a given many of them will have half-a-softball-team of kids. If they want to work, those issues are just reality. One of the many challenges of Indonesian life. One woman (pictured at the top of the post, waiting to make her monthly loan payment) had been a member for 20 years. She owns her own businesses and has seven kids and was welling up in tears telling me about the impact the co-op had made. That without it, she simply wouldn’t have been able to start a company. With it, her business had thrived and she’d never missed a payment. The co-op’s board member opened my talk with a cross between a cheer and call-and-response prayer. Roughly it translated to: How are your businesses doing? “AWESOME!” The women yelled back raising fists in the air. Are you paying your loans back? “YOU BETTER BELIEVE IT!” they yelled. Are you going to default? “NO WAY!” they yelled, together dismissing the thought physically with an emphatic wave of their hands. As each of them told me their stories, the women clapped at every success milestone– nevermind they’d heard these stories all before. Back at IWAPI, four of the women told me that not only were their husbands supportive of their companies– they’d done so well that their husbands had quit their jobs and were now working on the wives’ entrepreneurial dreams. Even my Indonesian state department translator was stunned to hear it. “There are two types of IWAPI husbands,” the uber-intense woman in green told me. “Those who are silent partners and support their wives, and those who become actual partners in the business.” Another woman in the group was living the harsh flipside of this statement. Her husband left her a single mother, because she refused to give up her fashion design company and sit at home while he worked. Her life isn’t easy, but she has no doubt she made the right choice. I don’t mean to paint the picture of some gender utopia. In each case, these were women that opted to attend a talk about entrepreneurship, so it may not be a relative sample of the population. And to be sure, questions come up about pressure from society to raise kids and men not taking them seriously; the same issues women talk about in the US. When I’ve brought up some of the issues we face, there’s a lot of head nodding in the audience and commiserating laughter. Some of this is just international, it seems. But the difference among the women I’ve met so far in Indonesia is they just don’t seem to dwell on it. They’ve got more important things to do. |
OMG/JK: Storming The Paywall | Jason Kincaid | 2,011 | 3 | 19 | We both just got back from South By Southwest, and we have plenty to say about the promotions, product launches, and other news (or lack thereof) that came out of one of year’s biggest tech events. We also take a look at the new paywall that will soon be implemented by The New York Times — a move that many other publishers are watching closely as they look for new revenue streams. Finally, we talk about Twitter’s move to discourage the development of more third-party Twitter clients, which has led to significant backlash from the developer community. Here are some recent stories relevant to this week’s episode:
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Another Netflix Content Idea: Saving Cancelled Cult Hits | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 3 | 19 | Yesterday, I laid out why the new in terms of television content and the ultimate disruption of cable. But it still all depends on if the show(s) they pick end up being hits. It appears that Netflix’s first bet, , is just about as good of a bet as you could make — but it’s still no guarantee. Here’s an idea that could be much more of a guarantee: saving cult hits. Each year, dozens of shows on network and cable television get cancelled. Most of these cancellations are for good reason. But every once in a while the hammer comes down on a show that’s considered to be a cult hit — or one that could turn out to be a real hit, if given more time. The problem, of course, is that these shows often don’t have the massive viewership numbers to sell a large amount of advertising against. But that model doesn’t apply to Netflix. While shows that are called “cult hits” are often thought of as mainstream flops, the reality is that they still have of people who watch them. And the “cult” aspect implies that a large percentage of those viewers are insanely loyal to the show. Again, that doesn’t mean much to the networks where more is better (for advertising), but for Netflix, if they could convert a significant percentage of those loyalists in to paying customers, it works. The perfect example of how this could work is probably the old Joss Whedon cult hit, . lasted only 11 episodes — not even one full season — in 2002 on Fox. The network cancelled it before all 14 produced episodes were even shown. Why? Low ratings. But in the years following the cancellation, the show has seen new life on SciFi, DVD, and especially the Internet (including Hulu and yes, Netflix). The cult status got so big, so quickly that Universal decided to make a feature film, , in an attempt to cash in where Fox could not. Of course, that didn’t work out as well as hoped either. But again, it was the wrong idea. A Netflix distribution model would be the right idea. There has been talk for years now of a show revival given the cult status and the fact that Whedon had originally intended the series to run for seven years. But that would still mean dealing with one of the networks once again. Until now. A production company would still need to back and ultimately pay for new episodes, but Netflix could now step in and produce millions of dollars for the first window distribution rights. It would be pretty attractive to all sides — though it may also involve buying rights back from Fox. Would the economics ultimately work out? It’s hard to say for sure. Even the bet is still very much a bet for Netflix as well. But I do think that a proven cult hit like would be much less of a gamble (and could likely be secured for cheaper than was). And that’s just one example. . . . These are all things that could succeed where they failed on television because it’s an entirely different model. You’ll note that many cult hits are often science fiction shows, which are also often the most DVR’d shows on television. This also plays into the low ratings and advertising woes. But again, DVR does not matter in the Netflix universe. Firefly averaged about 4.5 million viewers when it was on the air in 2002. Let’s say that Netflix could convert just 500,000 of those to paying customers (who weren’t previously) in order to continue watching the show. That would be a half million people paying at least $8 a month. That’s $4 million a month in revenue. And $48 million a year. And you can assume most would end up as multi-year subscribers. I smell a comeback. Or several. |
Fly or Die: The Nintendo 3DS, Rockmelt, And Mobile Wallets | Erick Schonfeld | 2,011 | 3 | 19 | Is the new Nintendo 3DS all that? Does have a chance? Will mobile wallets ever be adopted by real people in real stores? CrunchGear editor John Biggs and I tackle these questions in this week’s edition of . Watch the video to find out who our surprise guest is this time after we give our verdicts on his company’s product. The Nintendo 3DS uses simple stereoscopic 3D graphics that really pop out and combined with a gyroscope effect creates an incredibly immersive experience. You might look like an idiot playing it because you move your whole body around unnecessarily, but it is very addictive. Biggs wrote up his initial impressions . Remember Rockmelt, the Chromium-based browser startup backed by Marc Andreessen? When it launched in private invite-only beta last November, the press it received was . But by the time it about a week ago with only a few hundred thousand active users, fewer people noticed. Meanwhile, the team has been working away and the social browser is pretty solid. Biggs and I argue whether it can make a comeback. And finally, there’s all the recent hubbub about mobile wallets and how NFC chips in phones will make them a reality. Some Android phones already have NFC chips. Some people think the iPhone 5 will come with an NFC chip and some people don’t. But they should find their way into an iPhone at some point in the future. Does that make NFC-powered mobile wallets the next great feature? I don’t think so and have laid out elsewhere. Biggs is ready to toss his fat wallet for wave-and-pay freedom. |
RIP Digg. | Sarah Lacy | 2,011 | 3 | 19 | Startups in Silicon Valley are like old generals. They don’t die anymore, buoyed on life-rafts of lingering venture capital and modest revenues. They just fade away, eventually purchased for assets that are a shadow of their former promise. It’s pretty clear that Digg is on that path. The company isn’t dead, but it’s been fading away for a while, and its soul is all but gone. The company can spin it however it wants– the final nail in the coffin is news that founder Kevin Rose– long Digg’s greatest asset– is leaving. I’m traveling in Indonesia, so the news will be old by the time you read this, but you’ll have to forgive sentimental post. Digg has always represented to me. Facebook has never been the emblematic company of the Web’s mid-2000 resurgence, because it has always been such an outlier from the pack. But Digg– like Delicious, Six Apart, Flickr, YouTube and others– was one of those messy, risky companies founded at a time when no one was ready to believe in the Web again. The scars from the 2000 bust were too deep. These companies weren’t celebrated like Web startups today– they were mocked. People thought the founders were delusional. The entrepreneurs were the exact opposite of the kids today seduced by the promises of Y Combinator, easy cash of super angels and lure of TechCrunch headlines. They were doing something that still stank of broken dreams and evaporated billions. And they were doing it for one simple reason: they couldn’t stop themselves. And Digg was one of the first to prove you could take advantage of a decade of open source development to start a company for dirt cheap, one of the first to prove you didn’t have to be a technical genius to build a great product, and one of the first to prove a rabid community could make a site explode very, very quickly. Digg was never the biggest company of the movement, but it was bigger than many, and it stood for something. It was the everyman. This is why I put Kevin Rose on the cover of BusinessWeek in 2006. It was his first cover, my first cover, and one of the first national magazine covers about the Web 2.0 movement, period. That cover– with provocative cover language cooked up by my wily New York editors to move copies– sparked a lot of hatred. It was my first brush with controversy, and one of BusinessWeek’s first big blog scandals as well. But that cover also sparked inspiration, and the credit for that doesn’t go to BusinessWeek or me, it goes to Digg, Jay Adelson and Rose. It was the first time I saw young people reading BusinessWeek around San Francisco. On magazine racks it wasn’t put back with business publications, it was put back next to copies of FHM and Maxim. And recently BleacherReport founder Bryan Goldberg told me that when he read that cover back in 2006 he felt something he’d never felt reading a business magazine or even watching athletes and rockstars–sheer, consuming envy. If this kid– not a genius like Bill Gates, just a kid with an idea– could build Digg, why couldn’t he build what would later become BleacherReport? It was something that pushed him to quit his job and follow his own dream. Fair disclosure: That cover probably helped me more than anyone. It landed me a book deal that changed my career. And I first met Michael Arrington right after it ran. He introduced himself to me just outside the Web 2.0 conference, and said he liked the story. That friendship changed my career too, and it was the first of many times he’d defend me against haters. What Arrington got that others didn’t was that these companies and the Web 2.0 movement were only getting started. Among the article’s “outrageously overstated claims” was that YouTube could sell for $500 million. It sold for three times that a month or so later. The article argued Facebook could be worth more than MySpace. Again, that soon proved understated too. And Digg? Well we got Digg exactly right. We said it could sell for between $150 million and $200 million, and over the next few months and years there were several negotiations and at least one solid offer in that exact range. But Digg — unlike peers like Flickr and Delicious– said no, and its best days seemed ahead of it. So what happened? In my view, Digg had a lot of things right. More than a million people loved its product– loved it. They loved it in a way we’d rarely seen until that point. Digg had top investors. And it had the vision part, too. Rose’s mission has played out. Digg helped transform how we consume media. While media properties balked at the idea in 2006, share buttons litter the Web today. We no longer rely on media gatekeepers for news. No one tells us what the front page should be– we create our own with the help of our friends. Unfortunately Twitter is the one that’s pulled the bulk of his vision off, not Digg. It’s another example of what I’ve argued before– that it’s frequently not the company that comes up with something first that nails the execution. (And it might explain why Rose on Twitter.) The lesson from Digg is crucial as Silicon Valley’s ecosystem has made it easier and easier to start a company. It’s that a great product is necessary but not nearly enough. Building a real company is harder, and it takes execution and leadership. Things like a New York-based CEO and a sometimes-distracted co-founder took a toll on Digg in its most pivotal days. As I wrote in my book a year after that cover, startups reflect their founders’ personalities. Back then, Slide was characterized by silent intensity, Facebook was like a messy, pizza-stained dorm room, and Digg? Well, Digg’s offices were empty most evenings. I have no doubt that Rose and Adelson are stronger after Digg than they were before. After all, few people remember that before Zynga, Mark Pincus’ Tribe didn’t live up to high expectations either. Like Pincus, I believe they both Rose and Adelson still have their biggest successes ahead of them. Adelson has already moved on with SimpleGeo, and Rose is moving on with a new mystery project. There will be haters on this post. And that’s fine. But the people who write checks in the Valley have respect for what Digg built, whether the founders fell short or not. Smart people will always want to back these guys– as on Ask a VC last week– and people like Arrington and me will root for them again. That’s what makes the Valley such a unique place. (Photo by .) |
PayPal And eBay Users Raise $1M Towards Japan Earthquake And Tsunami Relief | Leena Rao | 2,011 | 3 | 19 | Similar to the relief efforts surrounding the last year, technology companies are actively encouraging their users to donate to campaigns coordinating relief efforts in Japan, which suffered a massive earthquake and tsunami a little over a week ago. As we learned this past week, Zynga’s gamers have raised , and Facebook app Causes has from tens of thousands of donors to the Japan relief effort. And today, PayPal and parent company eBay are announcing $1 million raised by users towards the the Japan earthquake and tsunami relief campaigns. PayPal users have donated $793,000 via the payments giant’s web campaign, Users can donate funds towards the American Red Cross, GlobalGiving, HandsOn Tokyo and a number of other organizations helping with the relief efforts in the country. Sellers and shoppers on eBay.com have raised $207,000 by donating proceeds of their eBay sales and by giving a donation at checkout. And PayPal is now crediting transactional fees incurred from March 11 to April 10, 2011, to any US 501(c)(3) organization or Canada Revenue Agency registered charity fundraising to aid Japan relief. This also includes donations made via mobile phone. PayPal’s act of waiving its fees is notable considering that many credit card companies have yet to do so when it concerns donations. , including AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, and T-Mobile, have all eliminating texting fees for SMS messages sent for donation purposes towards the earthquake and tsunami relief. |
Listen Closely: Broadcastr Brings You An Audio Guide To The Whole Wide World | Jon Evans | 2,011 | 3 | 19 | I’m a huge fan, not least for the ideas with which his books overflow. One such in was location-based virtual art: images that can only be seen at specific real-world places. As is often the case with Gibson, I read that and wondered, “How long?” Well, we’re halfway there. I give you , a new platform that allows anyone to record or upload audio, and then “pin” it to physical locations. Broadcastr then indexes and curates that audio for playback via Web or smartphone, where it can be filtered and shared in the usual ways. Think of it as a crowdsourced audioguide to anywhere and everywhere, as if the whole world was a museum: restaurant reviews straight from diners’ mouths, mix tapes for memorial sites, citizen journalism, etc. It also provides the infrastructure for a whole new era of collective oral history; if Broadcastr takes off, its big data will be . And it just might. “Mobile is where audio has always worked,” founder Andy Hunter points out – car radios, Walkmans, iPods – “because it has this ability of enhancing your experience without pulling you out of the world.” Today you can use Broadcastr to listen to New York City travel information from Fodor’s as you roam, or walk through Brooklyn and hear the latest local crime blotter, or wander from Houston to 30th Street and hear a different micro-targeted theatrical experience on every block. Think of it as audio-channel augmented reality. They’ve connected with everyone from the Shoah Foundation, who are pinning survivor stories at Auschwitz, to champion storytellers from ; and in the two weeks since their launch, user-generated content has already doubled the size of their library. (Crucially, contributors retain all rights.) For my highly idiosyncratic money, the most interesting thing about Broadcastr is its ability to tie to a place. So I’m glad to see that its co-founders Hunter and Scott Lindenbaum, who previously launched the e-magazine , view Broadcastr as another way of “bringing narrative to the digital age.” But I do wish that it allowed contributors to restrict their audio so they can only be heard by people who are actually the tagged places. Restriction breeds creativity. Imagine an audiobook that can only be heard as you walk through its real-world setting: that would be up there with Gibson’s , or Geoff Ryman’s , or ‘s poems , in terms of tech-enabled experimental storytelling. (Margaret Atwood once said that the one thing Canadian writers have in common is a strong sense of place. She might have been on to something: Ryman, Bök, and Gibson are all Canadian.) OK, so the rest of you are more interested in their crowdsourced worldwide audioguide, and its obvious advertising and museum/festival/tourism markets. Broadcastr are angel-funded, and they plan to start charging for premium content (on an app-store model) later this year, and then incorporate advertising sometime next year. Their and apps are available now, their Android app should emerge this month, and they intend to release an API in July. NYC and the Bay Area seem the most densely packed with material so far, but I quickly found an entry for High Park in Toronto, only a stone’s throw away from me. Go give it a listen; you too might hear something interesting just around the corner. |
(Founder Stories) Foodspotting's Soraya Darabi On Women In Tech | Erick Schonfeld | 2,011 | 3 | 19 | Let’s face it, the tech industry is dominated by male geeks and alpha dog VCs. It’s not easy being a female founder in that environment. But as co-founder Soraya Darabi tells Chris Dixon in Part II of her interview, “If you are smart and articulate and know your product, nobody can argue with that.” And, she adds in the video above, “It’s probably a lot easier . . . now than it was ten years ago.” Dixon thinks the problem is that VCs keep looking for the same patterns, They think the next Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg will be a young, male, alpha geek. He also notes that pitching your startup idea in the country-club atmosphere of many VC firms can be both intimidating and counterproductive. “I am not sure presenting well to 40 grumpy people correlates to building a great product,” he quips. But gender issues is not all the two talked about. In the first video below, Dixon puts Darabi through a rapid-fire Q&A, asking her what she would do if her company folded (“I’d go to culinary school”), what advice she has for other startup founders, who are her female mentors, and—my favorite question—”Can you beat people up?” (It turns out she can). And Dixon let’s loose that he was actually a philosophy major in college, which he describes as “the best seven years of my life.” (Insert your own joke here). Be sure to watch of this interview, where Darabi discusses how Foodspotting began and her previous job as social media manager of the New York Times. The full interview is also in the second video below, and you can catch up with more episodes of Founder Stories on . |
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iOS 5 Likely Pushed To The Fall After A Cloud Unveiling At WWDC | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 3 | 26 | Many people (including ) were a bit disappointed that Apple didn’t devote any time during the iPad 2 unveiling to talking about iOS 5, the next major revamp of the software. But there may be a very good reason for that: it’s not coming anytime soon. In fact, the plan right now is to wait to launch iOS 5 until the fall, we’ve heard from two solid sources. If our sources are right, this would break the pattern of Apple unveiling the latest iOS iteration in the early spring, leading up to a summer launch alongside new iPhone hardware. The spring timetable usually reserved for an iOS roadmap event is why some were hoping Apple may just rope the details into the iPad 2 event. When that didn’t happen, quickly spread that there may be another event in April to talk iOS 5 (and MobileMe). But it’s looking like that will not be the case this year. But it’s not all bad news. Here’s what we’re hearing right now: So the next obvious question is where does this leave the iPhone 5? Again, the standard model for Apple has been to release a new iPhone alongside the new iOS version. We haven’t heard anything specifically about the iPhone with this news, but . : Strike that on the iPhone 5. Jim Dalrymple is WWDC will be a software-only and will not include an unveiling of new hardware. We’ve just heard the same thing as well. This morning, Apple formally the dates of WWDC and the release also points to software being the key. I suspect an iPhone 5 will have to wait until the fall as well, which will keep the hardware and software in line. That’s all for now, more to come in the coming weeks, I’m sure. |
Daily Crunch: Rocket Ski Edition | Bryce Durbin | 2,011 | 3 | 19 | |
Gillmor Gang 3.26.11 (TCTV) | Steve Gillmor | 2,011 | 3 | 26 | This week’s Gillmor Gang started off with a bunch of no-shows from Mike Arrington and Robert Scoble. Don’t know what happened to Mike, but @scobleizer was sandbagged by a rehearsal request for Ted X, whatever that is. So we hunkered down with Danny Sullivan, Kevin Marks, and John Taschek for a rousing trouncing of the vanishing television windowing system, as performed by NetFlix, Showtime, and various Mad Men. Showtime is mad because Netflix is closing in on its 20 million subscribers. Mad Men are mad because AMC can’t close a deal for a fifth season without promising a sixth. Android is mad because it can’t get no respect from anyone but @kevinmarks, and I’m mad about the iPad 2. As in nuts. Ce n’est pas un app. |
"Open" | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 3 | 26 | Open. Open. Open. Open. Open. Open. Open. Closed. I’ve never liked Google’s use of the word “open” to describe the Android operating system. On one hand, the “openness” has led to situations where . On the other hand, their system is really only “open” when it’s convenient to be. Wanna include Google’s services on your Android device? Sure, sign this partnership agreement. Wanna check in code for Android? Do you work at Google? No. Well then you’ll have to wait. Open. But still, every chance they get, we hear from Google how open Android is, as if it’s the perfect answer to every question. How are you going to compete with Apple? Open. How are you going to keep the carriers in check? Open. How are you going to make money from Android? Open. Why is the Android experience sub-par? Open. And then there’s the news that broke this week. Google, of “open” fame, is delaying the release of the source code for the latest version of Android, Honeycomb, . Why? So they can work on it and refine it. Behind closed doors. Open. First of all, the fact that code has to be released at all says just about all you need to know about Google’s “open” claim. Facebook developer Joe Hewitt (formerly of Mozilla — an actual proponent of open) for this and other bastardizations of the word “open” last year. His point wasn’t that Google’s model for Android is bad — it’s simply that the use of the term “open” is BS. And this latest development further emphasizes that. The real value of “open” to Google is as a marketing term. Is Android more “open” than iOS is? Yes. But the way Google has been throwing around the word is in absolute terms. It has been “open” (them) versus “closed” (Apple). That’s simply not true. And in that context, being “more” open is like being “kind of ” pregnant. That’s not to say there aren’t benefits of being more open — there absolutely are. But as Google will have to admit now, there are also clearly benefits to being more closed as well. As is the case with nearly everything, the situation is not so black and white. So how long will Android be closed for? That’s not clear. Bloomberg cites Google as saying “at least for the foreseeable future” — which sounds sort of promising. But later in the article they note: “The delay will probably be several months.” Ugh. It’s important to note that this won’t have an impact on some of the Android Honeycomb tablets already in the pipeline. Obviously, the first of those, the Xoom, is already out there in the wild. And more are coming shortly. But these will only be from Google partners, the big guys like HTC, Samsung, and Motorola. Anyone else hoping to tinker with Honeycomb and build their own tablets will have to wait. Again, likely for months. In announcing the delays, Google is also admitting that they took a “shortcut” as Android lead Andy Rubin puts it. “ ,” he tells Bloomberg. Why such a tight schedule? Well it’s never specifically mentioned, but you should be able to — “two” being the keyword: iPad 2. Google clearly wanted to get the first Honeycomb tablet out before the iPad 2 came along and took over the tablet party once again. So was it worth the rush? If you read the initial reviews or talk to people who have used the Xoom extensively ( ), the answer is pretty clearly “no”. And given the backlash Google is now facing over the closing of their “open” platform, the answer is even more clearly “no”. But again, this is actually the right thing to do. If Google doesn’t lock down the Android source code and refine it, the end result is likely to be pretty messy. It would lead to a bunch of products that range from mediocre to bad to awful. And if Google really hopes for Android to compete with the iPad, they can’t have that. I just hope we aren’t sitting in the audience at Google I/O this coming May hearing all about the epic battle of “open” versus “closed” once again. It sounds good — until you have to contradict yourself. Case in point: http://twitter.com/#!/Arubin/status/27808662429 |
Google Doing Some Profile Unification Leading Up To… Well, Something. | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 3 | 26 | Google is still hard at work on their social strategy. You know it, I know it, we all know it. What it will actually be, remains to be seen. But there are clues related to it that have started to appear. The first was the . While Google claimed it doesn’t directly point to the social strategy (even though it looks exactly like the we’ve seen), it is a first step. The second was the . Also nothing particularly social about it, but again, related to the overall strategy. And now we’re seeing something else: a unification of profiles across Google properties. And a big push for all of them to be public. As The Next Web a couple weeks ago, Google quietly announced that it would be deleting Google Profiles that weren’t public starting in July. Here’s the : The purpose of Google Profiles is to enable you to manage your online identity. Today, nearly all Google Profiles are public. We believe that using Google Profiles to help people find and connect with you online is how the product is best used. Private profiles don’t allow this, so we have decided to require all profiles to be public. Keep in mind that your full name is the only required information that will be displayed on your profile; you’ll be able to edit or remove any other information that you don’t want to share. If you currently have a private profile but you do not wish to make your profile public, you can delete your profile. Or, you can simply do nothing. All private profiles will be deleted after July 31, 2011. And that’s important because other Google properties are also being woven into these profiles. Yesterday, was left in the Google Groups message board: Google Groups-specific profiles will no longer be supported. Instead, you will be able to use the new Google Groups to (optionally) link your new and improved Google profile with your groups. Starting July 1st 2011, you will not be able to make changes to your Groups profile. Your profile information will be available for export from your profile page until November 1st 2011. This change will not affect the nicknames you might have chosen for yourself to participate in groups. It will only affect the custom profile fields, such as your photo, location, and occupation. This type of unification will also take place across other Google properties as well, we hear. It’s a part of a broader effort to bring Google’s properties closer together, and allow for more social activities, is our understanding. But as we laid out a couple weeks ago, of something being billed as a “Facebook-killer” (not that anyone besides the press would label it as such anyway). Instead, expect smaller social features across Google properties to appear once the unification is more complete. Judging from the timelines of the changes above, this could be late summer or even later. |
Review: The Nintendo 3DS, The Next Step In Portable Gaming Evolution | John Biggs | 2,011 | 3 | 26 |
Nintendo has long defined the rules of childhood. In Nintendo’s world, logic and whimsy are intermixed and there is always a bigger boss and another castle. We learned from Nintendo that you can always turn your enemy’s weapons against them and that evolution is a fact. We learned that the best stories are played out in your head and even when you don’t have a lot of friends you at least always have Mario. Nintendo also defined video gameplay. Their NES console, while seemingly underpowered, sat under millions of Christmas trees and at millions of birthday party tables for almost a decade. Their audience grew up, new members joined, and the SNES, Nintendo 64, GameCube, and Wii pushed the envelope ever so slightly with each generation. The Game Boy grew up too, morphing into the GBA, the DS, and now something else entirely. The Nintendo 3DS isn’t hard to love. It’s a cute little handheld aimed at an interesting demographic. Because children under 7 shouldn’t use the 3D feature, it seems Nintendo has made this for tweens and, more important, early adopters in the 18-36 market.
Many of the devices’ unique features place it closer to a smartphone than a game console, and the new UI and home screen point to a richer experience outside of the game system. I worried, initially, that Nintendo was trying to do too much with these changes – and we’ll assess that later on – but in all it is a solid (if slightly flawed) device that will change the way you and your kids think about 3D. The 3DS costs $250 in the United States and is currently sold out in Amazon pre-sales. It comes with a 2GB SD card, AR gaming cards, a stylus, a charging dock, and a power cable. It is available in black – really a sort of grey/black mix – and blue. IGN is running two 266MHz ARM11 CPUs and a 133MHz GPU. It’s powerful enough to drive Nintendo-style graphics on the special screen, a deceptively demanding task as there are in fact twice as many pixels to render as it “looks” like. The two most interesting features, however, are the two front cameras and the 3D screen. We’ll discuss the screen shortly, but if you’ve never seen the 3DS’ screen in 3D mode, imagine that you’re looking a little box containing the action. Planes fly around in 3D space while Monkeys in their Balls roll backwards and forwards amid realistic ancient ruins. Also hidden inside the case is a gyroscope and accelerometer that allows you to tilt and move the 3DS in supported games. The 3DS plays older DS games, but does not play GBA games. The 2GB card is for media and save-game storage. You cannot play 3DS games on a DS – they don’t fit – but it is compatible with the DS for all wireless multiplayer titles like .
The 3DS has two controls on the left side – an analog stick/pad like the PSP’s (or really like the NES Max controller) and the D-pad that’s been present since the original NES, which I rarely used. There are also the traditional four buttons in a diamond configuration on the right side (X,Y,A, and B) as well as Select, Home, and Start buttons along the bottom. The lower screen is touch sensitive and there is a sliding volume switch on the left side along with the SD slot. On the right side is a physical Wi-Fi control. There are two shoulder buttons as well as a small, collapsible stylus near the cartridge slot.
The home screen is a bit complicated. The top screen, when not playing a game, displays the current Internet status (on or off), the number of StreetPass coins collected, as well as the number of steps taken during that period. That’s right – this thing includes a pedometer. Presumably Nintendo is feeling a karmic debt for all the obesity it caused and therefore is encouraging 3DS players to, you know, go outside. Built-in apps and games include Nintendo 3DS Sound, a simple sound recorder (this one is in 3D but is little different from the DS version), a Mii-maker that actually allows you to design a Mii based on your own face (it didn’t work well for me), as well as an Activity Log that tells you (or your parents) how much you’ve played the 3DS. I, for example, played 17 titles (including DS games) and took 7,435 steps with the 3DS. You can view a calendar of steps as well as current play time, thereby allowing granular assessment your child’s play. Speaking of granularity, the 3DS also has parental controls built-in allowing you to set a maximum software rating, control over the Internet browser and shopping services, and, most important, control over 3D image viewing. Because kids under 7 aren’t supposed to use the 3D features (more on that shortly), Nintendo has made it dead easy to cut off 3D controls entirely. They’ve also place an ostentatious “warning” app (after an update the warning app is replaced by a 3D version of by OK GO, a fairly fun bit of piffery) on the home screen to ensure they aren’t sued if a generation of kids goes blind playing this. The 3DS also includes AR Games and Face Raiders, two augmented reality silly games that demonstrate the 3DS’ 3D camera. AR Games is a card-based AR title that lets you shoot things the seem to crawl out of the cards sitting on a table while Face Raiders lets you take pictures of friend’s faces and then shoot them with balls as they fly around your environment. They are time-wasters, although does have a very clever age detection system that tells you the sex and age of the faces. The 3DS also has a “suspend” feature that only works with new games. The suspend system allows you to drop to the Home screen to access your Friends list, notifications, and the web browser (not yet enabled on this build.) The Friends interface allows you to show which games you’re playing now and, potentially, begin wireless Internet gameplay with connected friends. Most of this I was unable to test simply because I had no friends to play with. There is also a clever feature called Game Notes that allows you to take notes while playing games. Sadly, because you can’t drop into suspend mode on DS games, this does not help with more complex, older games. However, you can scribble a note or two on the games that do work with the 3DS. On the whole, the new 3DS is a massive step up for the portable console. It is very small – about five inches on the long edge – and the screen is quite nice and bright. Resolution, in some cases, could be improved but it is a step up from the DSi the various controls and home screen features improve and, in fact, mature the DS experience. The 3DS is the DS grown up, and that could put off younger players. However, in the extensive testing I performed with a 5 year old and his 2 year old sister, kids are just as fine with this device as they are with any other.
Now to discuss the elephant in the room: . There are two ways to use the 3D feature on the 3DS – in gameplay and with the camera. You can turn 3D off entirely with a slider or you can lock it so younger children can’t activate it.
The camera takes 3D pictures an also allows you to add wild 3D effects – 3D hearts, bumps, and even deep holes – to 3D images. The images themselves are recorded at 640×480 and are stored on the SD card as JPGs and MPO files ( ). The image, when decoded, looks something like this, provided you have anaglypic glasses: Or this if you have an old-timey stereo pair viewer (or just cross your eyes). If you have neither, believe me when I say that this is an interesting – if not deep – 3D effect. Greg made this, an animated GIF of the two images that just barely shows the 3D effect but is fun, nonetheless.
As for gaming, the 3D is hit or miss. Occasionally I will notice that the 3D is engrossing and rich and sometimes it causes almost constant focus problems, resulting in a doubled image. I have noticed some very minor after-effects from 3D gameplay, most notably a sort of “blurring” in the center of my vision when I lift my head away from the game and look into the distance. I spoke to optometrist Dr. Justin Bazan about the potential problems associated with 3D viewing and he stated, with no uncertainty, that you can’t permanently damage your eyes by viewing the 3DS for extensive periods. He recommends a 20/20/20 habit – lifting your eyes and focusing somewhere 20 feet away every twenty minutes for 20 seconds. However, you will not go blind or suffer long-term damage. “Moderation is beneficial,” he said. “Some people will feel sick or nauseous and in some cases the 3D could point to an underlying binocular vision disorder.” He said that 3D images require both “sides” of the image to be perfectly clear. If one side of the image is blurry – meaning one of your eyes is seeing it incorrectly – this could mean a more pressing vision issue. He recommended that parents visit an optometrist if children cannot see the 3DS’ 3D features. “If there’s a problem, go in for an eye exam, don’t just take the game away,” Bazan recommended. The 3D is not a gimmick. It is a significant step in a fascinating direction for game play and I can only imagine how amazing some of the more popular franchises – not to mention a true FPS – would be in 3D. Playing a 3D game, as mentioned, is sometimes hit or miss experience but as manufacturers get things right ( is an excellent example of a fairly staid game brought to life with 3D) the platform and, dare I say, genre will improve immensely. Interestingly, the situation 3D is in right now on the 3DS is not akin to the situation motion control was in during the first months of the Wii. On the Wii, motion controls were gimmicky and, in a word, broken. 3D interaction on this device is far more fluid and seamless. I also wonder what will happen once we start familiarizing ourselves with 3D photography. Like the hacks we so often cover here, 3D photography could open new vistas for artists and creators. Like so many ostensibly kiddie devices (the , most notably), I believe it will come into its own once it becomes more familiar to non-gamers, and will end up being much more than it is now at launch. Gameplay is smooth and the improved brightness and resolution makes games pop. The perceived clarity takes a slight hit in 3D mode. The lenticular grill display shows two images at once (400×240 each, a total of 800×240 pixels), one to each eye, and so any movement outside of the 3D sweet-spot (in some games) can gravely effect gameplay. Otherwise, this is just a Nintendo DSi with 3D features. The games play extremely well, even older games, and the launch titles, described below, are all middling to strong. Even if you turn off the 3D function you’re still getting a device similar in size to the DSi with a few interesting upgrades. The full list of potential titles is but the games I was able to play should be all available at launch. These include:
– One of the worst launch titles. The 3D is difficult to focus on and the gameplay is gimmicky. Stay away.
– This one will frustrate fans of run and gun shooters. Made by the creator of , this is a turn-based title that requires quite a bit of ramp-up before you get into it. Sadly, the back box copy is severely misleading and if you go into this expecting something like an FPS you will be sorely disappointed. I believe this change in the Ghost Recon cannon will polarize fans but the isometric, -like 3D was excellent and very viewable.
– I’m not a big fan but the 3D and controls are well done enough to amuse die-hards. Like , the 3D is a little hard to focus on, at least for my aged eyes. You can control it using the joystick or by tilting the 3DS. It’s fun, if that’s what you want to hear.
– Essentially a racing game, Asphalt 5 features a set of cars racing each other to the finish line in three laps. There is a fairly unrealistic damage and power-up system but it’s fun enough. Some of the animations are bit jerky but the cars themselves are darling. In fact, you can “see” inside the rear windows into what looks like a little 3D Matchbox car. It’s a clever and compelling effect.
– The other “adult” game available for the 3DS, is a submarine sim that displays two views of your submarine. One is through the periscope and the other is a sideways view of what looks like a little sub in a fish tank. Because of the size of the sprites on screen, everything in 3DS games looks “cute” and the submarines are no exception. This is another game that really showcases the 3DS’ interface.
– One of the most interesting games on the console, this is exactly what you would expect: a Lego version of Star Wars in 3D. The game play is very fluid and smooth and very fun. Puzzles, fighting, space warfare, and platform play make it an excellent launch choice. Some I talked to have complained about lag but I didn’t experience any in the levels I played.
– The premiere launch title. If you get anything, get this. As I mentioned in my , is the definitive 3DS title. Gameplay is simple but addicting and the 3D is almost perfect. The three vehicles you fly – a plane, a jetpack, and a glider – move realistically and couple with the 3D effects you actually feel like you’re breaking the surly bonds of earth. Excellent stuff. I saw about five hours of continuous use out of the 3DS and I was, once, able to leave it in sleep mode overnight and still have about ten minutes of juice left. The battery is the 3DS’s Achilles heel but I suspect that aftermarket battery packs should improve things slightly. As I mentioned before, there are some lingering after-effects when using the 3D mode. I only noticed this with my eyes and, as Dr. Bazan pointed out, they could point to an optical abnormality rather than a -like Opti-Grab situation. The battery is also going to be a big deal, especially if you drop the 3DS into sleep mode often instead of turning it off. Although StreetPass functionality – the ability to “fight” or play with other 3DS owners when you walk past them in the street – is not yet fully-baked, I suspect leaving a device like the 3DS constantly polling for players is a drain on the battery. That said, those are the only two complaints I have about the console as a whole. The 3D is exciting, the launch titles, while not earth-shattering, definitely showcase the 3DS’ talents, and the console itself is compact, portable, and quite fun. I’ve tried to offer a through overview of the 3DS in this review in an attempt to explain the console could become one of the most interesting developments out of any electronics company in this decade. Like it or not, the 3DS normalizes 3D gaming and will make children accept and even embrace 3D as an interactive medium, be it games, photography, or movies. Rather than an general improvement, Nintendo has decided to build the 3DS as an evolutionary successor to its previous handhelds. The 3DS is an entirely new way to think about portable gaming and I believe it will change our perception of the value of 3D content. It’s hard to tell where the 3DS is headed right now but this is definitely not a Virtual Boy. Imagine the 3DS as an initial step to a holographic future. As Wintermute said in , “The holographic paradigm is the closest thing you’ve worked out to a representation of human memory, is all. But you’ve never done anything about it. People, I mean.” The 3DS is one step on the road to that paradigm change and it’s aimed at those most willing to embrace it: our children.
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After The Quake: Japanese Rescue Robot Scopes Out Damage In Collapsed Building (Video) | Serkan Toto | 2,011 | 3 | 26 | Why risk human lives when we have that could do the job just as well? That’s what a team of researchers at Kyoto University thought when it sent a mini to investigate the inside of a partially collapsed building in Hachinohe, a small city in North Eastern Japan. Parts of the gymnasium’s ceiling fell down following the earthquake, making it too dangerous for humans to enter the building themselves. Instead, the roboticists on site decided to use KOHGA3, a rescue robot first publicly shown [JP]. The 40kg KOHGA3 can climb up stairs and move over rubble and other objects at an angle of up to 45 degrees. It comes with three CCD cameras, sensors for gas/carbon-dioxide and attitude, an LED light, a thermal camera and an LED light. In the gymnasium, KOHGA3 was sent into the building and remote-controlled to scope out what damage was caused by the earthquake, for example in the roof and stage of the building. Here is a video that shows how KOHGA3 was used (in English): Via (Thanks, Erico!) |
RIM Buys Developer Of HTML5 Mobile App Testing Platform TinyHippos | Leena Rao | 2,011 | 3 | 26 | Research In Motion has made another acquisition-mobile development company . In an announcement on both and , the BlackBerry manufacturer said that it bought the Waterloo-based development team (RIM is also based in Waterloo) for their extensive experience in web and mobile widget/web development. Terms of the deal are not disclosed. TinyHippos develops Ripple, a multi-platform mobile environment emulator that runs in a web browser and is custom-tailored to HTML5 mobile application testing (we’ve embedded a demo video below). It essentially allows developers to “look under the hood” of mobile applications to see how the apps are performing in a variety of mobile environments. Ripple, which was launched in 2009, also offers the ability to test and debug HTML5 mobile apps and offers multiple device and screen resolution emulation in real-time without having to redeploy the mobile application or restart the emulator. Ripple is actually built as a Chrome extension, running as part of the Chrome browser. RIM says it will use the technology to offer a mobile environment simulator to the developers building apps for the BlackBerry platform. Apparently, Ripple will continue to be offered for download to the public as well. And the TinyHippos team will be working to bring BlackBerry support to the Ripple product. RIM also recently purchased and UI development team [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V97j188X8Wg&w=640&h=390] |
Daily Crunch: Walking Through The Sleepy City Edition | Bryce Durbin | 2,011 | 3 | 26 | |
What do sites that sell customized products do with returned items anyway? | roxannevarza | 2,011 | 3 | 26 | Seems you can customize just about any item you want on the web these days. And a number of these sites are popping-up throughout Europe, including for customized knitwear, for furniture, (coming soon) for dishes, for women’s footwear, for hats …you get the picture. Normally, customers can personalize items online and see what they look like before ordering. But while these sites are becoming more and more popular, there is still one big issue that remains: what if customers are unsatisfied with their personalized product ? What should be done with returns and how do these types of companies minimize them? is a French equivalent of for customized jewelry. The company launched its site in September, has had several hundred orders and not one single return. So, what’s the secret? Well, according to BySydney’s founder, Sydney Palti, sites that sell customized products can mimize returns by offering visuals that closely match the actual product. That way, the product delivered is more or less exactly the same as the product the customer saw on the site prior to purchasing. But this isn’t really that different from traditional e-commerce. Then again, it may be easier to get away with crappy visuals when selling certain products rather than others; for example, when it comes to jewelry, the product is rather simple and everyone already knows what gold and silver look like. But once you get into more exotic colors and shapes, having good quality visuals really becomes a neccesity. French startup L’Usine à Design uses Adobe’s for its real-time furniture customization platform, believing that it provides the most accurate images possible. Still, if clients are hesitant regardless, L’Usine à Design offers to send various matieral and color samples in the mail. However, once the purchase is made, clients only have 7 days to opt-out. L’Usine à Design does not offer returns or exhanges once the product is made – unless it’s faulty. But it’s not just good quality images that make personalized products easier to sell but certain products themselves. For example, products where the form is simple and size is not really an issue. Think of products where the customer is already familiar with the model (like a specific pair of athletic shoes or a car) or where size and shape are not really big of an issue (like scarves, socks, etc.). The risk of being unsatisfied with a purchase is naturally reduced. But still, this isn’t really different from traditional e-commerce sites. Than again, – a platform for custom-made mens dress shirts, has had fewer returns than one may expect: only 2-3% of all shirts sold within the last year were returned. The team claims that this is because of their very rigorous quality-control system. Despite whatever efforts these companies may put into place to minimize returns, customers may still end-up returning customized items. Even if BySydney hasn’t had any returns to date, the company is still preparing for the possibility of returned custom-made jewelry. Obviously the company could stock all returned items and then wait for a customer to finally choose the right customization criteria in order to re-sell it. But rather than going the in-efficient route, the company has decided to open a physical boutique where all returned jewelry will be sold in a separate shop. Even Gemvara had been considering the possibility of developing in-store kiosks to help minimize returns. But fortunately the company the idea to focus all its attention online and has been doing since ! |
T-Mobile Makes G2x Official, Announces 42Mbps 4G In NY, Orlando, Vegas | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 3 | 21 |
T-Mobile kicked off CTIA with a few announcements today, first confirming the G2x, a Optimus 2X with the specs we heard about . You can check out our hands-on with the LG original , but of course the new device will be slightly more T-Mobileish. It’s running 2.2, no word on 2.3. They’re leaning on 4G pretty hard: new 42Mbps networks will go live in New York, Orlando, and Las Vegas… well, soon. And they’ll expand to Chicago, Long Island, and Jersey later on. The only time frame given was 25 markets by mid-year, which leaves them plenty of wiggle room. I’d expect smaller announcements in the coming weeks, or perhaps friendly text messages to T-Mobile customers. They also announced some new 4G mobile broadband hardware: a 4G Mobile Hotspot and a few new laptop sticks. The Rocket 3.0 will be taking advantage of the new 42Mbps service (wherever it’s offered), and the Rocket 4G and Jet 2.0 will top out at 21Mbps. That last one will be “free” with mail-in rebate and a two-year contract, which is to say Lastly, the will be hitting for $100 with contract and mail-in rebate. So there’s that. No more or availability for the other gear was announced, though we’ve April 20th for the G2x and the press release says Spring. |
Fils-Aime: Nintendo Not Interested In "Garage Developers" | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 3 | 21 | In stark contrast to the Apple Store’s bottom-up model for mobilizing games and apps, Nintendo’s Reggie Fils-Aime has said that his company isn’t really interested in that kind of model right now. discussing indie game development, Fils-Aime said: I would separate out the true independent developer vs. the hobbyist. We are absolutely reaching out to the independent developer. Where we’ve drawn the line is we are not looking to do business today with the garage developer. In our view, that’s not a business we want to pursue. Although I’m a big fan of so-called “garage developers” (love the indie gaming scene), I can’t say I disagree with Nintendo here. The Wii in particular has been marred by “shovelware,” reducing the perceived value of a game on the system. They want to avoid that, and part of that is establishing certain standards for production values. Setting the bar high means they won’t be a platform for new, experimental games that may find distribution on XBLA or PC, but it also means they maintain a high level of control and their platform will be seen as one where you can trust every release. At least that’s the idea. I’m not sure it works in practice, considering the amount of crapware on the Wii. But maybe he was just speaking hypothetically. Among other things, Fils-Aime also addressed ; we’ve heard from a few sources (none inside) that this E3 may see Nintendo breaking out its next-generation console, but Reggie dealt with that in a professional and non-coy manner: “The Wii has a long life in front of it. We’re still sitting at $199.” Yes you are, Reggie. But your sales aren’t sitting — . [via ] |
Happy Birthday Twitter. Yes, You're Awesome. Now Back To Work (On Search And Archives) | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 3 | 21 | I woke up this morning and my Twitter stream looked like a Facebook Wall on a teenager’s birthday. “Happy birthday, Twitter!” “Twitter, you’re the best, happy bday!” “Can’t believe you’re five Twitter!” These messages came in fast and furious from folks in the tech sphere, folks not in the tech sphere, celebrities, Twitter employees. On and on and on. And that’s great. Twitter is awesome. Even if you’re unwilling to admit that it has changed the world, there’s no denying that it has drastically changed the tech landscape and the way information is created and consumed. And it continues to do so. So yes, . And now it’s time to get back to work. A couple self-congratulatory posts on Twitter’s main blog and the engineering blog today made it very clear that Twitter is now at the point architecturally where it’s full-steam ahead time. Twitter co-founder Biz Stone : There are now more than 400 full time employees working at Twitter. In the last year alone we have made huge progress towards stability and performance. This work sets us up to continue innovating but it also allows us to build a profitable business on a strong foundation. We are in a position now which allows us to continue serving and delighting everyone who relies on Twitter to connect them to that which is meaningful for another five years and beyond. Head of engineering Michael Abbott : Last September, we began executing on this plan and undertook the most significant engineering challenge in the history of Twitter. We hope it will have a significant impact the service’s success for many years to come. During this time, the engineers and operations teams moved Twitter’s infrastructure to a new home while making changes to our infrastructure and our organization that will ensure that we can constantly stay abreast of our capacity needs; give users and developers greater reliability; and, allow for new product offerings. Abbott goes on to detail how they executed their plan, including the need to move all of Twitter — 20 terabytes of tweets — two different times. He promises that they’re now in their “final nesting grounds”. That’s great news, because it’s time now once again to focus on a couple core assets of the product that have long been neglected: search and the tweet archives. It may be hard to believe now, but back in they day, Twitter had no search capabilities. Instead, a startup named Summize rose out of Betaworks and was in the summer of 2008 and turned into Twitter Search. As a 1.0 product, it was great. But the problem is that Twitter Search hasn’t changed all that much since then. It’s still basically just a keyword search that lists items in reverse chronological order. Sure, they’ve added top retweeted items to the top of results. But as Twitter has grown, searching for anything beyond the most topical level is basically worthless. In fact, FriendFeed, which was in 2009 and basically hasn’t been touched since, is still a much better Twitter search tool. At least it lets you search your own tweets and/or limit search to groups. Twitter does have , but they’re buried on the stand-alone Twitter Search site that basically no one uses any more. And even those aren’t really any more powerful than they were a couple years ago. Worse, . Let me repeat that: you can only search for tweets as far back as five days ago. That’s ridiculous. Twitter’s stated reason for that is because they’re focusing on “real-time relevant” tweets. That reasoning makes some sense given Twitter’s nature, but it was also undoubtedly an engineering decision. Now that things seem good on that end, it’s time to expand. We’ve been writing about the dream of since 2009. But on that side of the product ever since. We’ve had that things . But so far, not much to show for it. It’s time. Another untapped treasure trove is tweet archives. Face it, a part of Twitter is about vanity. And that’s why it’s kind of insane that you can’t see what you’ve tweeted or what others have tweeted at you beyond a few days in the past. Just imagine if you had full access to your tweet archives. Better: imagine if Twitter organized your tweet archives in a way that was useful. What if you could see what you talked about most often during a set period of time? Or if you could see your tweets in a calendar view as a ready-made diary of sorts? Sure, some third-party services do some of this, but Twitter, with full access to all of the data, could presumably do it better. One of my favorite features of Foursquare is . And the latest version of the service is finally taking advantage of it, telling you things such as the last time you checked-in to a particular venue. Imagine if Twitter could tell you the same types of things about your tweets? Twitter has saved all of the tweets ever sent (again, some 20 terabytes worth), but the vast majority are just sitting there, dormant. There are a number of ways to make them useful again. If nothing else, for nostalgia purposes and pure vanity. Whether or not Twitter will start focusing on either of those elements is anyone’s guess. Certainly, the drive to start generating revenue is well underway, and you’d think that search is a natural expansion area for that. So far, it has already been a key area with Promoted Trends and Tweets. But again, it could go deeper. Tweet archives area a less obvious monetizable area. But search monetization might work there as well. Or I’d gladly pay something like $20 a year to be able to access my entire archive of tweets in an interesting way. There are other things to focus on as well. One is geo. What on Earth is happening there? It in 2009 with much fanfare, now there’s talk that the team has been disbanded and assigned to other projects. And what about annotations? Few Twitter products have generated as much and , only to see nothing come of it. Last we heard, they were officially put on hold indefinitely. Is now the right time to bring that project back as well? Again, happy birthday Twitter. It has been a great five years, and I’m really happy for all your success. It sounds like you’re now in a good place — time to finish up the cake and get back to work. |
Wenger Titanium Tool Is Titanium | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 3 | 21 |
We had a nice little over the holidays, but there are way more than we could ever review, not to mention new ones coming out all the time. : it’s designed to the spec of mountaineer Ueli Steck, and it’s made of lightweight titanium. Who can say no to a titanium steck-knife? It’s not the most original piece of all time, but it looks like a practical quick-grab tool for snipping, tightening, or adjusting this and that on short notice. The blades are all 50% thicker than normal steel blades, which doesn’t amount to much as far as millimeters and what not go, but probably contributes significantly to the stiffness. Solid-looking little knife — a bit expensive at $200, though of course you don’t want to skimp on tools like this, and Titanium is naturally expensive (as is the endorsement of a famous mountaineer). There are cheaper versions with less doodads for a bit less if you don’t need the accessories. [via ] |
Local E-Bike Start-Up Clean Republic Makes Good In Seattle | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 3 | 21 | We cover every now and then at CrunchGear, but while millions are sold in Asia and Europe, they remain a rarity here in the US, even on the mean cycling streets of Seattle. Certainly the convenience of cars and our highway-orientated infrastructure is partially to blame for the lack of interest in these extremely effective transportation tools, but I also think that accessibility has been an issue. The I rode last year at CES, for instance, I have never seen nor heard of since, and the major conversion kits and full bikes seem like too great of an investment for the chary, green-curious consumer. Clean Republic, a local Seattle start-up literally run out of a garage, seems to be of the opinion that what matters is simplicity, modesty in design, and of course low cost. and although they’re not bucking to be a billion-dollar company, they building a sustainable business and could be trading in millions pretty soon. Michael Shope is the CEO, a local and a fellow graduate of mine from Garfield High School here in Seattle. He came into the scene with the simple intention of building a better electric bike for the American market. Part of the issue is commitment: many bike makers are selling models with motors and battery integrated, with 500 watts or more of power. At between $1000 and $3000, they tend to be almost as much of a consumer commitment as a motorcyle or scooter. I considered one myself when I was driving two miles to work back in 2006, since really I just needed a hand on the hills here in Seattle, which anyone will tell you are murder (especially with the rain and the drivers here). But $2000 was rent money, and I already had a car and a regular bike. Shope was counting on people like me, who would love to quit petrol but didn’t want to buy a whole electric bike platform. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSonugqhYuE&w=640&h=390] The Hill Topper is an original design on an established e-bike principle: the front wheel of your bike is replaced by one with a hub-mounted motor, the battery clips to your frame, and there’s a single button remote for spinning it up. Like other electric bikes, it’ll maintain your speed, boost your pedaling, or propel the bike itself if you need to take a break. Unlike other electric bikes, it can be installed in a couple minutes with no expertise at all, and the whole setup only weighs six pounds. It costs ~$750 for the light, Li-ion 20-mile battery and $400 for a heavier, 10-mile battery. They’ve sold over a thousand kits to date and are selling them as fast as the co-founder can put them together in North Dakota. Who would have thought Americans would want something cheap and easy? Shope notes: “You already have a bike that you like and is perfectly adjusted and measured for you, just how you like it, and is made of much higher quality components that the expensive full electric bikes are. It just doesn’t make sense to spend $2k on an e-bike when you can just pop our wheel on your own.” That said, they face tough competition; major bike companies like Trek and Giant, as well as electronics and battery players like Sanyo, are already established and have sold millions in other markets. The pricing is volatile and new battery tech will probably be adopted or developed by the big guys first. However, the ability to turn your ten-year-old junker into a viable commuter vehicle is a serious draw, and although they’re not the only ones offering this type of device, they’re doing it their own way with their own design and that’s worth acknowledgment. , or if you’re in Seattle, drop by to pick one up in person. If you’re feeling extra-green, try picking up some as well. [image credit: ] |
NYTimes Paywall Limit To Extend Beyond Google To "All Major Search Engines" | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 3 | 21 | When the details of the paywall/fence were on Thursday, PR representatives that it would be placing a five article a day limit on Google referrals, and This policy has somehow changed over the weekend, as the Communications Manager Kristin Mason tells me that the five article limit will now extend to “all major search engines.” Apparently the Google-only clause was only specific to the Canadian roll out and will be lifted during when the paywall launches worldwide on March 28th. From Mason: ? Does this mean that it changed its mind? Did someone at Google make hay about being singled out? For now the isn’t releasing any more information on what it categorizes as a “major” search engine (Bing? Blekko? DuckDuckGo? Nobody?), but the above statement brings up a lot of other questions, namely, Unfortunately the response to all of my subsequent asking was, We’ve contacted Bing, Google and Blekko about their paywall plans and I’ll update this post if they’re any more responsive. But ultimately this news also begs another question, Meanwhile, someone’s already figured out how to tear down the wall, using Danny Sullivan has some ideas on how this policy might come to fruition. |
More Patent Trolling, This Time Against Every Major Mobile Manufacturer | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 3 | 21 | We just heard about a against Barnes & Noble (to be fair, not trolling, but bordering on it), and , directed at pretty much every major manufacturer of mobile hardware. The patents allegedly infringed upon are related to the cameras used in the phones. And yes, it’s sketchy. The company suing is one “Imperium Holdings,” based in the Cayman Islands. Yeah, that sounds legitimate! The patents are perfectly legitimate engineering implementations within image sensors, and are certainly not at fault. One, for instance, describes a simple and specific system for saving power by turning off unnecessary analog-to-digital converters when using low framerates. So why are they suing Apple and Kyocera instead of Omnivision or Kodak, creators and sellers of image sensors used in such phones? After all, these phone makers just bought products that were being sold legally, and which Imperium Holdings did not object to directly. If someone made a knockoff Tabasco sauce, and hot dog vendors started carrying it, would Tabasco go around suing hot dog carts one by one? No, they would sue the knockoff company. I sincerely doubt that all, if any, of these companies was responsible for designing or manufacturing the imagers used in their products. Sounds to me like a money grab. Somehow I doubt we’ll be hearing about this particular lawsuit again. |
Prism-Lens Microscope Captures Nine Images At Once For Multi-Angle Stereoscopic Viewing | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 3 | 21 |
So you’re thinking of getting a , huh? Or maybe that , or the ? That’s cool. Oh wait, no it’s not. Because the two-lens thing is . Ever since researchers at Ohio State for taking stereoscopic pictures, I can’t even think about regular-style stereoscopy. Yes: tired of the necessity of using expensive, cumbersome tools to get 3D perspectives on tiny objects like medical probes and micrometer-level tools, Allen Yi and some grad students at Ohio decided to take matters into their own precision-mill calipers. They created this lens, which has the appearance of a sort of rough brilliant gem cut, but in fact is precision milled down to a 10-nanometer level, letting each facet provide a slightly different, optimized view. It’s made out of polymethyl methacrylate, and once mated properly to a normal microscope, provides an excellent way to get a relatively precise 3D image quickly and easily. And this 9-facet version isn’t the only one; they’ve tested versions with as many as 1000 facets. They hope to develop the idea further and sell it among the medical tech community, where something like this may prove to be an invaluable tool. It’ll probably be a while before it trickles down to iPhone camera accessories, though. [via ; images: J. Kevin Fitzsimons for Ohio State] |
Is Your 2011 MacBook Pro Freezing Up? You're Not The Only One | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 3 | 21 |
: Looks like Apple was telling the truth! Just a short time after I posted this, it was reported by people with the issue that the 10.6.7 update fixes everything. Good work, Apple. It appears that the new MacBook Pros ( ) aren’t fully baked. Or rather, they’re a bit overdone: there seems to be a related to the new discrete Radeon GPUs. The crash occurring during times of high heat and CPU load, when the GPU is switched on to handle graphics that are just too much for the CPU alone. The computers are freezing up quite completely, and a hard reboot seems the only universal cure. One person suffering from this issue even reproduced it in every susceptible model , baffling (and hopefully disillusioning) one of the “geniuses.” Apple has noted the issue and claims it is a software problem, fixable via updated drivers. Of course, they say that about everything, and of course if you severely limit use of the GPU and blast the fan at all times, technically that is a software solution. But iFixit pointed out in that the thermal situation of the processing units isn’t exactly the neatest (above), and suggested this sloppy slathering might cause issues down the road. It’s too early to tell whether that’s the case, but it’ll sure be embarrassing if it is. [via ] |
Who Says Tablets Are Useless? This One's Running A Minecraft Server | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 3 | 21 | [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N68NsX3Qlp0&w=640&h=390]
Now, this isn’t exactly groundbreaking stuff, but it does really demonstrate the fact that all tablets (especially the more recent and hackable ones) are just small computers. Anything’s possible — convenient, perhaps not, but if you’re looking to of the hardware you’ve just bought, there are definitely ways to go about doing that. In this case, you’ve got Ubuntu running in a virtual machine, and the server software running inside it. I know, it’s kind of cheating, but that’s the point, isn’t it? Tracking the world is a bit buggy (player tracking also, I’m guessing), perhaps due to the caching of the worldstate in the VM and serving up outdated block data, but that’s, you know, just an engineering problem. It’d be nice to be able to carry around a little Minecraft world with you, especially if you could set it up in an ad-hoc network with a few friends at a park. Wait, why wouldn’t you just throw a around or something? |
Amazon Gives Kindle Book-Swapping Service Lendle The Axe | Jason Kincaid | 2,011 | 3 | 21 | It was an idea as brilliant as it was shortlived: let people swap their eBooks with strangers free of charge using Kindle’s new ‘lending’ feature. And now, after around two months in operation, Amazon has given the boot. A little background: earlier this year Amazon a new lending feature that will let you give an ebook you own to a friend for 14 days (Barnes and Noble has offered a similar feature on the Nook since 2009). The feature will only let you lend each book once, and only certain books even support lending in the first place. But it’s still a great feature for bookworms who have grown accustomed to swapping their favorite new reads with friends. Of course, plenty of books go un-lent, gathering digital dust on our Kindles. Which is where Lendle came in. After signing up, the service prompted users to link their Lendle and Kindle accounts, which built a list of books that each user had available. Next, you’d search for whatever book you were looking for — the service would send a notification to a user that had that book available for loan, and they’d choose whether to give it to you for 14 days. According to their tweet stream, Lendle was told by Amazon that the service was shut down because it doesn’t “serve the principal purpose of driving sales of products and services on the Amazon site.” It isn’t terribly surprising that Amazon is shutting Lendle down as it could conceivably lead to people buying fewer books, but it’s another reminder of the frustrations associated with DRM-laden content — you may have just paid $10 for a novel, but you don’t really it. Lendle fans are up in arms, taking to Twitter to vent their frustrations (Lendle’s official Twitter account is many of them). Many of these users are actually complaining that Lendle led them to buy books (or to purchase a Kindle in the first place). We’ve reached out to Amazon for an official response. Via . |
Sendoid: Finally, Sharing Big Files Isn’t A Huge Pain | Rip Empson | 2,011 | 3 | 21 | When it comes to files, we love to share. No, we to share. Thanks to the massive capacities of Gmail and other email services, it’s become remarkably easy to share files. Of course, most email services limit the size of the file you can share. Gmail’s, for example, is 25 megabytes. But if you want to share a larger file or multiple files — and even want a little privacy in doing so — you have to go elsewhere. As a result of these limitations, many peer-to-peer file-sharing services have popped up in an effort to fill the demand for transferring those hulking files you’ve got lying around. Unfortunately, most file transfer services tend not to be particularly user friendly. They have awful UIs that can be difficult for the uninitiated to maneuver, test your patience with wait times, employ captcha guards, and can require sender and receiver to download the same software. There are that work towards finding a way around these problems and sites like and offer the ability to share big files easily without the hassle and clunky interface — for free. But even these services have size limits and haven’t really put all questions of security to rest. So, launching today, is , a Y Combinator-backed startup that is aiming to become the last file transfer service you’ll ever use. Besides BitTorrent, of course. Sendoid is a peer-to-peer and browser-based service, so the startup is betting that peer-to-peer sharing will mean faster transfer times than if you were to use a service that transfers via a central server — and that being browser-based will make you happy because there’s no software to install. The in-browser sharing works by opening a 128-bit Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) encrypted pipe directly between the sending and receiving machines. Sendoid handles the connection to a peer introduction service, but all the data flows direct. When it comes to sharing videos, music files, or photos, many people simply take to sharing links. Sendoid recognizes this trend and makes it so that, if you want to send a file, all you have to do is go to sendoid.com and select the file you want to transfer from your computer. It will then provide you with a URL, which you can send to the recipient to download. As long as the recipient is online, he or she can then open the link and begin download. Bada bing, bada boom. Now, when I said that Sendoid doesn’t require you to download any software, that’s not totally true. Within the in-browser experience, Sendoid limits file size based on system resources (generally somewhere between 600MB to 1GB depending on the user’s configuration). If you exceed these limits, you will be prompted to download and use its desktop app. Sendoid remains free and speedy once you download the app, and you no longer have any limitations on the size of file you can transfer. Most of the file transfer services out there are cloud-storage sites being used for file transfer or web-based bit torrent clients — and they don’t always require a password — so your files are stored on external servers. Because Sendoid is a link-based service, your files are only passed directly between parties, so you won’t have to worry about who’s touching the data on its way. So, if you’re sending a large file to someone on a machine 5 feet away from you on the same network, you’re going to get much faster transfer speeds. According to Sendoid Co-Founder John Egan, Sendoid can transfer a 100MB file in approximately 35 seconds, versus the 25 to 30 minutes it might take a server-based service. Partial uploads presently work desktop to desktop only, which includes a resume and restart function, regardless of which side disconnects. Adding this functionality for the web-based version is coming soon, Egan said. Egan and his partner, Zac Morris, are both engineers and have been working on Sendoid for the last year. They created Sendoid, he said, because they were living on opposite coasts, working on a few other projects (Morris is a former Apple engineer), and had to constantly move large sensitive data back and forth (files larger than 500MB). They were unable to find any other services that opened an instant, direct connection and didn’t want to pay $10 to transfer a single file larger than 100MB. The earliest prototype of Sendoid, Egan told me, was a site called iSendr that they created in May of last year to test out the p2p technology. The prototype drew nearly 20K visitors on the first day and pushed them to apply to Y Combinator. So how will Sendoid make money? Egan said that the business model will supplement free, unlimited transfers with premium services. Since you can send files “out-of-network” with Sendoid, Egan sees the service being particularly useful to film studios, enabling them to move raw media to post production, or to pharmaceutical companies to transfer confidential data within the company. Of course, these companies would require additional security controls and auditing beyond what Sendoid currently offers, so they would be required to pay for these added features. Egan also said that they are looking to build a “premium groups” feature for intra-group sharing, where users can browse live shares from others in a realtime, collaborative environment. Sendoid is currently in the midst of raising its first angel round and is working on apps for both iOS and Android. It’s a cool service and, from my experience thus far, is quick and easy. So check it out. I think it’s worth pointing out that I am by no means familiar with every file-sharing service out there and no doubt have missed a few, so please chime in via the comment section to share what service you use and find to be the speediest. Commenters also noted that I did not mention , , or . All three of these companies offer fantastic services and, of the three I personally use Dropbox all the time — for work and personal file sharing. But, rather than debate which is the service to end all services, it’s probably best to see Sendoid as a complement to these file sharing tools. Each of them are, really, cloud-enabled file hosting services that offer sharing, and sync. Sendoid differs in that it is peer-to-peer direct, so there’s no cloud and no size limit. So, if you take the example of Dropbox, you have a 2GB limitation (for starters), whereas Sendoid allows you to transfer those big 100MB+ files you have on Dropbox directly to another party’s hard drive. Though Dropbox is pretty reliable, services like Sendoid allow you avoid having to rely on the provider to always have their cloud up and running. The person receiving the file can start downloading without having to wait for you to upload and, in terms of transfer speed, it’s really as fast as your and your recipient’s network connections. If you’re working with fast networks, it’s a breeze. So if you need to transfer a big file to a colleague who lives across the country, and need to do it fast and securely, I’d say Sendoid is worth trying. |
Brits Believe They'll Soon Be On The Moon | John Biggs | 2,011 | 3 | 21 | [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PAMfCG6nn1w&w=640&h=510] One in ten Englishmen and Women believe that one day Brits will routinely vacation on the moon, bringing their Carling beers and jolly demeanors to the verdant plains of that satellites’ firmament by at least 2020. 40% of them believe, also, that there will be a tunnel between the US and the UK. And they say that ecstasy doesn’t damage the brain.
The percentages, gathered by a UK vacation firm, point to a glorious future for Mother England and a pressing need to open more chip shops along the Atlantic coast for the hordes of Britons who will soon saunter over on foot. |
Microsoft Alleges Patent Infringement On Barnes & Noble E-Reader Devices | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 3 | 21 |
Microsoft has against Barnes & Noble, creators of the and , as well as the manufacturers of those devices. The companies allegedly infringe on a number of patents filed between 1998 and 2005, generally applying to UI elements associated with browsing and downloading information. Like many patents from that period (for example those ) these are quite broad in their specificity, claiming methods that seem now to be no-brainer approaches to the task described. The larger question is, as before, is whether these patents are legitimately unique intellectual property — but as before, the larger question is being deferred for now, and in the mean time, we’re suing each other over the placement of download status bars. Microsoft’s line is that Barnes & Noble, unlike game HTC, Amazon, and others, has failed to license these methods (yet uses them anyway, bold as brass), and now faces stern reprimand. For your convenience, I’ve collected the patents here: Interestingly, Microsoft isn’t just suing Barnes & Noble, captain of the great ship Nook, but also Foxconn and Inventec, which comprise the engine room — and have as little to do with UI optimization as a engine stoker does with the captain’s table (and with that, the nautical metaphor overstays its welcome). It may be just to make those huge manufacturing entities aware of who they are dealing with, and make sure they are working to, legally speaking, a high standard. I’m not going to bother taking a close look at the patents; I’m not a lawyer, for one thing, but also, the patent world isn’t really something navigable by common sense alone. Like copyright, privacy, and every other area being reinvented by the internet, it has long become a playground for lawyers, who build strange labyrinths for themselves, as oblivious to users as users are to them. It’s doubtful that the Nook devices will be pulled from shelves any time soon, if at all; Microsoft has a lot of explaining to do before any judge (excepting the disturbingly permissive one in charge of Sony’s case against Geohot) will grant a major step like that. Let’s hope those Nook Colors have been selling as well as some have said, because whether B&N fights it or not, this looks like it could get expensive. , and there’s . : Google, who is threatened indirectly by these patents, has this to say regarding the action: “Sweeping software patent claims like Microsoft’s threaten innovation. While we are not a party to this lawsuit, we stand behind the Android platform and the partners who have helped us to develop it.” |
Drunk On Licensing Fees And Patents, Microsoft Has Become A Joke | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 3 | 21 | Earlier today, it was revealed that Microsoft was suing yet another company for infringing on their patents. The target this time? Barnes & Noble. Yes, Microsoft is suing a book chain. Why? Because they claim the Nook e-reader (which runs Google’s Android OS) copies status bars from Windows CE. Or something. If you’ll excuse my bluntness, it’s all a bunch of bullshit. on CrunchGear of what the patents in question actually are. The whole thing is laughable. And everyone knows that except one party: Microsoft. The company has become completely drunk on their patents and subsequent lame lawsuits. And as a result, they’re quickly losing the hearts and minds of just about everyone that doesn’t work in Redmond. So what is behind all of this? Is Microsoft really trying to stop Barnes & Noble from selling the Nook? No. Instead, they’re trying to force them to license the use of the patents from them so Microsoft can get a piece of the action for each Nook sold. How do I know? Well first of all, it’s a tactic Microsoft has been using for a while now. In October of last year, over their Android-powered phones. What was odd was that they weren’t suing HTC for the same thing — because they with HTC for that very reason. Microsoft’s maneuver was simply trying to get Motorola in line to do the same. And now they’re doing the same thing with Barnes & Noble. At least today they’re not beating around the bush anymore. Microsoft’s own General Counsel, Horacio Gutierrez, has put up a post on the issue with a title containing the words “ .” And to pre-empt posts like this one, Gutierrez notes, “ .” Okay, let’s examine that “scope and scale” in Microsoft’s own words. In the post, Microsoft notes the following infringements by the Nook: “Easily select text”? “Navigate through information”? “Annotate text”? I mean, it reads like a joke, but it’s not. Next up, Microsoft is going to sue over the ability to type, look, and maybe even breathe. I’m sure they patented those things at some point over the past 30 years. They have something ridiculous like 20,000 patents. And again, the worst part is that the suits are hollow. Microsoft really does not care about Nook sales being stopped because they’re copying their “innovation” — they’re happy to have them keep selling, just as long as Barnes & Noble pays them for each one sold. Other companies, like Apple, for instance, may be no more in the right over these bogus software patents. But at least they really believe that companies like Google ( ) have copied their intellectual property and want them to stop doing it. For Microsoft, this is a business model. The truth is that this laughable model is just an extension of the one that made Microsoft, Microsoft: licensing. Microsoft grew to where it is today because computer makers licensed Windows and Office. But as we dive into the mobile age, that model is not only broken, it has been destroyed. Google is licensing Android — but they’re doing it for free. It’s exactly why they were so easily able to kill off Windows Mobile. Of course, Microsoft doesn’t understand that this model no longer works and they’re still trying to get OEMs to pay for their new Windows Phone OS. In fact, they’re even making new buddy Nokia pay them a licensing fee per phone! (While at the same time paying them back in billions of dollars in marketing and development costs.) It will not work. And now we’re on to licensing fees 2.0: patents. How long until Microsoft is making more money on patent licensing than from their mobile unit? Serious question. Maybe they already are. Even worse is the way Microsoft is going about all of this: straight-up bullying. That’s the only reason they’ve included Foxconn and Inventec in the most recent suit. Those guys have nothing to do with the infringements in question, but Microsoft is trying to apply pressure from all sides. And as more companies build products using Android, they’ll keep doing the same thing. “ ,” Gutierrez writes. How swell. What great guys. “ ,” he continues. If your friends jump off a bridge… The bottom line is that this needs to be stopped. Microsoft is threatening innovation across a range of industries with their attempt to instill their next great business model. The most bullshit business model of all time. This is the future of Microsoft, people. Is it any wonder why they’ve fallen out of favor with the general public? No one likes rooting for a jackass. My favorite part of all of this is just how oblivious Microsoft is. Not only do they have Gutierrez writing ridiculous posts like the one today. They have their PR company, Waggener Edstrom, sending out emails to the press trumpeting the lawsuit! Hip hip hooray! Microsoft still has many talented people doing great things. Kinect and even Windows Phone ( , not the strategy) jump to mind. But the suits and lawyers are burying all of that under 700 metric tons of bullshit. : And remember, according to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, . |
UK's Digital Economy Act Delayed Until 2012 As ISPs Vow Courtroom Battle | Nicholas Deleon | 2,011 | 3 | 21 | The UK’s Digital Economy Act, designed to, among other things, stomp out Internet piracy once and for all, . Two of the country’s ISPs, BT and TalkTalk, will argue on Wednesday that the law is basically an unenforceable load of nonsense, and that it should be torn up and completely forgotten about. We’ll see. The law, which was initially passed last year, had already been delayed by various hiccups (including the fact the legislation didn’t quite gel with certain EU requirements), but this courtroom battle will be a more direct challenge on the law itself. Expect the ISPs to argue, once again, that the law simply won’t work from a practical point of view. In any event, the UK Government now says that it will probably be spring, 2012 at the earliest before the law goes into effect, and that’s assuming everything goes its way at the High Court. You’ll recall that the law would require ISPs to monitor all traffic traveling over their pipes, and any example of copyright infringement would have to be followed up with a . The ISP has to identify IP addresses to subscribers, then send these subscribers the letter. One of the problems is that constantly patrolling their connections for infringing content would require quite a bit of effort, and a bit of money, too. (Of course the counter-argument to that is that ISPs make money off subscriber fees from people who infringe copyright all day long.) There’s also the small but about people’s privacy rights being trampled all over. , then. |
VeriFone Keeps Up FUD Campaign Against Square With Pathetic Facebook Ads | Erick Schonfeld | 2,011 | 3 | 21 | A couple weeks ago, VeriFone went after a much smaller competitor in a very public way. It Square, Jack Dorsey’s mobile payments startup, of a serious security hole which turned out to be not particularly serious at all. VeriFone was trying to spread (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt) and use it to promote its own competing, product. and there was a huge backlash against VeriFone on Twitter, obviously, and elsewhere. Well, apparently the backlash wasn’t so bad because VeriFone is still trying to market PAYware by bashing Square. An reads: Be Secure. Not Square. Trade in your Square credit card reader for a free, SECURE device from VeriFone. Free Trade-in offer! This is nothing more than FUD marketing. Square is no less secure than handing your credit card to a waiter or a merchant who could theoretically steal your credit card number. And it is the credit card companies who are on the hook for fraud, not the consumer or the merchant. If anything, the fact that VeriFone—a huge, publicly-traded company with $1 billion in annual revenues—is basing the marketing for a new product on trying to discredit Square rather than on the advantages of its own offering tells you more about VeriFone’s desperation than Square’s failings. When they start fighting you tooth and nail, that’s when you know you’ve won. (Hat tip to ). |
The Facebook Bureau | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 3 | 7 | This past weekend, I saw the film . It’s an entertaining movie — not great, but sort of fun and interesting. The plot (and I’m not giving anything away that the trailer doesn’t) involves a man who stumbles upon a shocking reality: he’s not in control of his destiny. Instead, there’s actually a secret group, the Adjustment Bureau, that runs the show behind the scenes. The story is actually a somewhat rehashed one in movie lore ( , , etc). And it’s even older in the science fiction realm (this one is loosely based on a short story by Philip K. Dick). But reading over the blogosphere the past couple of days, I feel like I’m still watching the movie. It’s as if some people on the web truly believe that Facebook is this Adjustment Bureau. Increasingly, they control the network, and thus, our lives, and maybe even our fate. So while we’re all having this discussion about Facebook Comments, let’s be clear what this is really about: Facebook. It has very little to do with the actual commenting side of things. That’s becoming more and more apparent. (For a good discussion on the actual commenting angle, see . She makes several excellent points, many of which I agree with — though maybe not for TechCrunch, specifically.) The fact is that Facebook Comments are just the latest extension of the fear of the growing power of Facebook. This backlash seems particularly heated because the comments are seen as spreading over parts of the web previously free of the Facebook Bureau’s reach, like TechCrunch. The reality, of course, is that this is bogus. Facebook sharing buttons have been on this site for years, just like everywhere else on the web. (If we sold out, we did it years ago.) This commenting situation is perceived as different because it’s more directly being tied to visible identity and is being forced upon the very, very small percentage of TechCrunch readers who ever actually leave a comment. The truth is that there’s a lot going on behind the scenes here. Some people hate the commenting system because they don’t use Facebook and prefer to login through another method (they apparently don’t use Yahoo either). Others hate the system for deeply conflicted reasons related to who they work for or who they invest in. And still others hate the system because they alter the time-honored tradition of (perceived) anonymous commenting on the web. Yadda, yadda. The common thread shared by every one of these groups is the same: they’re all scared shitless of Facebook. Again, the underlying notion is that Facebook is the Adjustment Bureau and out to get us. This is nothing new, every few months there’s some level of Facebook backlash during which dozens of very loud people threaten to quit the social network — and . This undercurrent of paranoia is hardly exclusive to Facebook: Microsoft, Google, Apple — they’re all evil and out to screw you depending on what day it is and what article you read. But the sentiment seems the strongest with Facebook. And it’s clear why: . At first, I too thought this latest episode was simply about to log in with Twitter or Google. But now I’m really not so sure. Those were going to be offered by Facebook, but I suspect that wouldn’t have been good enough. People still would have been because it’s Facebook. It’s fascinating. People really are afraid of them. As frequent TechCrunch contributor Steve Cheney wrote on the matter: And forcing people to comment – and more broadly speaking to log-on – with one identity puts a massive stranglehold on our very nature. I’m not too worried about FB Comments in isolation, but the writing is on the wall: all of this off-site encroachment of the Facebook graph portends where FB is really going in pushing one identity. And a uniform identity defies us. What Cheney leaves out is that this is also exactly what Google and just about every other tech company large enough hopes to do. How do I know? Google CEO Eric Schmidt has matter-of-factly said it numerous . In fact, his vision may even be a bit more than Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s. But the cold hard truth is that Facebook is getting all the attention because they’re they ones in the best position to make this actually happen. And again, that scares the crap out of some people. My immediate reaction is that this is sort of silly — especially because (if not sooner). And if Facebook were to do something to screw their users over, those users would just leave. Facebook is not actually the Adjustment Bureau. But hey, who am I to tell people what to be paranoid about? While we’re on the subject, I thought it would be fun to also address some of the other conspiracy theories about the Facebook comments on TechCrunch. I’ve already seen to this being a decision made to bolster traffic. Here’s more or less the way this decision was actually made (which I know, because I was there): MG: Facebook has been talking to us about maybe being a launch partner for their new commenting system. Mike: Oh really? Will it be hard to implement Vineet? [our lead engineer] Vineet: Nope, it will just take a few minutes. Mike. Cool, let’s do it. Yep, it really is that simple. No layers of AOL bureaucracy. No TPS reports. No extensive testing. We do it live. And, as we’ve said from day one, that may mean switching things up again. We’ll see. It’s just fascinating to watch into over small thing. Right now, if you want to comment on TechCrunch, you can to log-in with Facebook. Or if you don’t like/have Facebook, you can use Yahoo. That’s it. No biggie. But it’s very clear it’s not a small thing to at least .5 percent of you reading this right now. And certainly not to those that see the Facebook Bureau approaching in matching fedoras. |
I’m Already Sick Of SXSW | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 3 | 7 | [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hx3FC_DWsGQ&w=630] I had a conversation today with a colleague to discuss our strategy. My coworker figured, , that SXSW would be a shitshow and that maybe we should use apps to stay in touch. I only “use” one group texting app, one that I covered for TechCrunch, and thus suggested . My colleague said that he liked better and that we should use Beluga. And then he hesitated, !!! This is the hyper-techy microcosm that we live in, where you’re scared to use a budding app to communicate with co-workers during a conference lest a company “do something” to it. And what? You end up looking uncool? While there’s no way I’m going to ever be the ideal use case for Group Texting ( ), because it necessitates having more than one friend, I can’t really see the big problem it solves. Or rather, I have no idea why there are tens of tens of apps in the space. Also, I have no idea why a SXSW breakfast with is presented as , but the email promoting it has miraculously found its way to my inbox, along with a bunch of nonsense “VIP” events sponsored by non-tech companies and a ton of pitches from a bunch of startups that just confuse me by their reluctance to say what it is they actually do, lest someone out there clones their killer app before their plane hits Austin-Bergstrom. A follow through on one of these pitches leads you down an inbox rabbit hole where seven emails later you figure out it’s a Group Texting app but the founders don’t want to reveal that just yet because they don’t want anyone to copy them. Geez. Geez. While I wouldn’t miss it for the world ( and I are moderating an incredibly core conversation here), SXSW creeps me out, if simply because it makes otherwise sane people act so silly. But this a mashup of and some shady thing called Socmetrics, is the epitome of why I’m already sick of SXSW four days before it’s even started. Mainly because it reminds me that we’re now viewing each other as “influencers” and have somehow stopped looking at each other as “people” — I didn’t study so hard to get out of high school just to be faced with a whole ‘nother high school as an adult. And I just RSVP’d in a panic to some super-duper VIP thing while writing this, so trust me, I understand the allure of hobnobbing with the tech snobs and am not immune. But at the drunken end of the SXSW day proceed with caution: You almost never want to be a part of the cool kids, because they’re not the ones actually getting anything done. I promise. http://twitter.com/#!/tempo/status/45018205802078208 http://twitter.com/#!/Gartenberg/status/44968535277056000 http://twitter.com/#!/dannysullivan/status/45011977818476544 |
Best Buy: Yes, Floor Staff Get Tablets, But Not Necessarily iPads | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 3 | 7 | We’ve heard some that Best Buy would be providing its staff members with for work — that is to say, as tools to carry while on the job, looking up prices on the internal website, doing price comparisons, and so on. that it it is indeed thinking about handing out tablets — but that it hasn’t actually decided on the iPad. Reasons for this may be a reluctance to look like an Apple outlet or support that brand too much, or perhaps it’s simply a cost consideration, and they plan to opt for a cheaper device. Either way, it seems likely that pretty soon, tablets will be a mainstay at retail: you can swipe credit cards, display license agreements, scan coupons, and all that stuff. Best Buy isn’t the first to do this sort of thing; Apple decentralized their checkout a long time ago, and many other companies have moved info and point-of-service away from the front-of-store checkout area. Why do I get the feeling that, even with an army of employees helping and cashing out shoppers, we’re still all going to be stopped by “security” on the way out? |
Nyoombl Slips Back Into Stealth To Create A Hybrid Of Skype And YouTube | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 3 | 7 | If you’ve seen the name before, it’s for one of two reasons. First, it’s a really weird way to spell a word that sounds like “Nimble”. Or second, they at DEMO last spring as one of the 65 startups. At the time, they were working on a dead-simple solution for videoconferencing on your television. But that space is both tricky and now crowded with the likes of Cisco. So about five months ago, founder decided it was time for a don’t-call-it-a-pivot-pivot. He decided to take what he had learned about the video conferencing space and transfer it over to a new, unexplored area. And his team has been working hard on this new Nyoombl ever since. But it’s not ready yet. And Olagunju is reluctant to share much about their plans until it’s ready. But here’s what we do know: it’s going to be a completely new service that’s a sort of hybrid of Skype and YouTube. In other words, it will allow any two people to take a video conversation and share it with the world, for all to see on the web. But think: debates and interviews, rather than straight up chats. “ ,” Olagunju says. Bigger picture, Olagunju says that the aim is to breakdown the walls that you see around the majority of important conversations being had today on places like cable television. “ ,” he says. And he has some good people advising him on how to do that, including entrepreneur , Sun Microsystems co-founder , and venture capitalist . Nyoombl has also received funding from one ex-Facebook executive, though Olagunju declines to say who just yet as the round isn’t fully closed. Nyoombl plans to start inviting a very limited amount of people to try out their service shortly, . Olagunju says that they’re going to take the roll-out slow so they don’t overwhelm the servers with all the video streaming required to make this work. . Nyoombl is currently a team of three people working out of Palo Alto. |
Excuse Generator Built From 14.4K Modem | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 3 | 7 |
Not too quick on the draw when it comes to fabricating excuses as to why you missed that meeting? Install next to your phone and you’ll be fooling The Man with solid gold automatically generated content in no time. Wait a second, “My bike ran out of coolant”? That won’t do. Ah, here’s a good one. “The CEO tried to drown me.” Much more likely in a fast-paced startup environment. The project is built out of an old 14.4Kbps modem (remember how fast those were?), with a nice little processor and board inside just begging for repurposing. A couple holes on the front for display and buttons, a natural-speech engine with a dictionary of words, and you’re good to go! Not the simplest build, actually, and you can get the same excuses from , but I like the idea of hitting the red button in a panic and just stammering out whatever shows up on the screen. “Sorry, Mr. Biggs, but…” [via ] |
Peel: A Bridge Between Your iPhone And Home Entertainment System (Video) | Jason Kincaid | 2,011 | 3 | 7 | It’s a problem as common as it is ugly: between your television, Blu-Ray player, surround sound tuner, cable box, and DVR, you probably have at least three remotes sitting on your coffee table. And then there’s the elaborate list of steps required to get each component working properly (don’t forget to set the tuner to HDMI2 before firing up the Blu-Ray!) The associated headaches have spawned an entire industry of super-remotes like Logitech’s Harmony devices. But what about the mobile powerhouses we’ve already dropped hundreds of dollars on — shouldn’t our smart phones be able to control our home entertainment systems? That’s the promise of , a Santa Clara-based startup that is looking to help you take control over your entertainment system using your iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad, or (soon) Android device. The company has just launched its first product — the — that retails online and in the Apple store for $99. Check out the videos below for an interview with the startup’s founders. The plastic ‘fruit’ essentially acts as a middleman between your phone/tablet and your television components — Peel uses a Wifi connection to relay commands from your phone to the ‘fruit’, which then blasts the appropriate infrared signals to all of your hardware devices. You control everything — be it a channel change, or swapping between different content sources — using a free Peel application for your phone. The application includes a visual guide of the shows that are available (you see thumbnails with each show’s logo), and you can customize the app so that it only recommends shows you’re interested in.
Because of the way Peel works you’ll need to position the fruit device in a place where it can ‘see’ all of your components, which means you’ll have to place it several feet in front of your TV set (and possibly in plain view). It’s not exactly inconspicuous, but it could probably pass as some sort of tribal maraca. As with similar universal remotes, setup isn’t painless (you can watch a demo of the process in the video below). After firing up the app and connecting the device you’ll be walked through a wizard designed to automatically figure out the remote codes for all of your components. But there’s some trial-and-error involved, and if you have numerous components, the process will likely take at least ten minutes. That said, there really isn’t a whole lot Peel could do to make it easier. Peel has promise, but the mobile application itself is still pretty early. It currently allows you to browse your shows using a slick, visual interface that lets you flick between show listings on your phone or iPad, but only when you’re watching live cable — it doesn’t have deep integration with your DVR or media streaming devices. It still control these components, but it switches to a generic browsing mode that relies on gestures: instead of showing thumbnails of available content, you essentially navigate through menus the way you would using the arrow buttons on your remote. However, Peel has some deals in the works that will improve the situation for some users. It has signed a partnership with TiVo that will allow the app to visually navigate through shows you’ve recorded to your DVR, and it plans to launch Netflix integration in Q3 2011. The application will also gradually add more social features, like the ability to tell friends what you’re currently watching. Here, it will face plenty of competition: , , Comcast’s and others are all trying to add a social layer to the TV experience.
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Brainspark buys 30% stake in Italian Loopt competitor Mobnotes | Steve O'Hear | 2,011 | 3 | 7 | The AIM-listed investment company has acquired a 30% stake in the Italian location-based social network . The deal will see Brainspark equally split between cash and stock. Similar to Loopt and other location-based social networks, Mobnotes (‘mobile notes’) lets users locate nearby friends, shops and restaurants etc. and send location notifications. It has mobile apps for iPhone, Nokia (Symbian), Android and Vodafone 360 as well as a generic mobile site, and claims 150,000 registered users in Italy, “working in conjunction with the major mobile handset manufacturers and networks.” It terms of revenue stream, Mobnotes utilises mobile advertising as well as offering custom co-branded versions of the service. It says it expects revenues of €590,000 in 2011, which is expected to rise to over €2.5 million by 2012, and says it should become profitable in 2012. In 2008, the company was a TechCrunch50 finalist. |
Apple To Shed Some Retail Games And Peripherals, Focus On Selling Macs | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 3 | 7 |
Apple’s retail stores are well-known for their clean layout, product-first mentality, and obsequious staff. Though they stock things like iPod cases, printers, and so on, the focus has always been on Apple’s devices, and may soon be even more so, as it appears a fair amount of software and peripherals will be taken off the shelves to make room for more Mac-focused space. It’s an interesting indicator of the Apple ecosystem endgame. After all, Apple is positioning itself as not just a maker of quality computing goods, but the gatekeeper and distributor for everything you purchase, be it media, software, or accessory — even in the “real world.” The iPad is a magic window into an Apple-controlled marketplace; why shouldn’t Apple stores be the same way? , most games being sold at the Apple Store will no longer be available there, or at least not on shelves. Ditto printers, hard drives, scanners, and potentially any other low-volume sales that are likely to be made online anyway. Many of the devices will be available to buy at the store, just not stacked on shelves and hung from pegs for the customer to grab. In a way, it makes accessory buying like the App Store. Click with your finger on the hard drive “icon” in the accessory case, and a dozen employees will scramble to retrieve it from the back. The vanishing point for this philosophy is essentially an iPad that sells iPads. Apple’s certainly in a unique in its position of power; it would be impossible for Microsoft or HP to do something like this. The supreme control Apple has over its software and hardware contributors added to the extremely strong, device-first branding make the Apple store a natural place to show off the next generation of electronics retail. I have problems with the stranglehold they exert on their ecosystem, but I can’t deny its effectiveness and wisdom given the limitations of retail. It’s one of those things they got right early on, and has only been refined since then — a rather different story than some Apple productions I could mention. Of course it’s not newsworthy every time Apple tweaks the layout of their stores, but I thought this particular move to be portentous. |
YC-Backed Like.fm Is A Social Network For Tracking Songs | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 3 | 7 | Recently funded by , is a way to keep track of and share what music you’re playing. Right now the service uses a , Firefox and extension to automatically track what you’re listening to on YouTube, Pandora, Rdio, Meemix, Grooveshark and Earbits and a desktop client to track what you’re listening to on Winamp, iTunes, MediaMonkey or Windows Media Player. Founder says that its emphasis on song tracking is what separates the Like.fm from streaming services like Last.fm and music buying networks like Apple’s Ping (which he describes as says Chen At the moment very barebones and work-in-progress (there’s a lot of “Coming Soon” on the site) Like.fm uses Facebook Connect to automatically follow your Facebook friends on the service. Through the Top Played chart on your Dashboard the service allows you to track the songs most played by people you followed and lets you play songs by linking to the corresponding video on YouTube (if it exists). On a Like.fm profile you can view a Summary of the top songs a user has listened to, their entire song History or the songs they’ve set up to listen to in the Queue. Users can also easily download all their play history. Aside from letting you comment on songs and manually share/recommend links, the service also lets you set up Auto-Share to Facebook, Twitter and Last.fm for songs that you rate at four or five stars on iTunes or Windows Media Player (Chen says that in-app rating should be coming in the next couple of weeks). Chen hopes to eventually add more robust recommendation features like Songs You May Like, based on stuff your friends have listened to that you haven’t heard. He also hopes to build a mobile version soon and add better data visualizations like custom charts of your chronological music listening history, That sounds about right.
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Prototype 64GB And White iPhones Surface In Hong Kong | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 3 | 7 |
It looks like although Apple couldn’t make these special iPhones a market reality for a number of reasons, they did make at least a few, for testing purposes and the like, and they (or devilish good imitations) have . A 64GB version of the iPhone would have simply been too expensive: flash memory hasn’t really gone down enough in price, though that may change for the iPhone 5, which may include cost- measures as well as cost-increasing ones. As for the , well, that’s a whole ‘nother story, ain’t it? [via and ] |
Put Some Of The Slime On My Lips, Rob: A Review Of CyberClean | John Biggs | 2,011 | 3 | 7 | [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0qCv6pHvQRQ&hl=en_US&feature=player_embedded&version=3] It’s quite rare to find a video about a strange, glowing ooze that is designed to clean your gadgets but instead makes weird noises when you rub it on your keyboard. Thankfully Rob Beschizza has our backs. His video review of is cinematic in a way very few video reviews are these days and his word choice shows his predilection towards Burroughsism. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dMhqygKNI3E&w=640&h=510] |
null | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 3 | 21 | null |
Beat that! Google acquires the UK’s BeatThatQuote.com for £37.7m | Steve O'Hear | 2,011 | 3 | 7 | Google has acquired the financial product comparison site for £37.7m. The news was first outed by the blog but has since been made official. Writing on the UK company’s site, BeatThatQuote Managing Director, John Paleomylites, says that the acquisition offers the opportunity to “develop new and innovative options for personal finance in the UK” by making use of Google’s engineering muscle. Of course, like almost any Google purchase these days, the deal could raise the eyebrows of regulators, especially in regards to how it places the comparison site’s content in its search index. With that in mind, perhaps, Paleomylites talks up the possibility to “offer more transparency and better pricing information than existing online offerings.” Full statement after the jump… BeatThatQuote.com today was sold to Google for GBP37.7 million. We think this deal is a tremendous opportunity for our company to develop new and innovative options for personal finance in the UK. Our team is excited about becoming a part of Google. We look forward to working with their engineers to create new tools making it easier for consumers to choose the right financial products. We think we can offer more transparency and better pricing information than existing online offerings. We are confident that by combining BeatThatQuote.com’s expertise in UK financial products with Google’s technology, we’ll accelerate innovation in this field, benefiting consumers and the companies offering these products. We plan to keep working with our current partners and look forward to working with new ones, too. John Paleomylites
Managing Director |
Look, A Fujifilm X100 Next To A Leica M3 | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 3 | 7 |
While it’s not the carbon copy some seem to think it is, the does take a lot of design cues from Leica and this generation of cameras in general. I’m dying to get my hands on one of these, though that $1200 price tag is a little intimidating. Lots more comparison pics and other X100 porn . [via and ] |
Qriously raises $1.6m to let brands replace mobile ads with questions | Steve O'Hear | 2,011 | 3 | 7 | , a service that lets brands measure location-based public opinion, has raised $1.6m in a new funding round led by . also participated, while the London-based startup is originally backed by Pacific Tiger Group. Through its SDK offered to mobile app developers, Qriously lets advertisers display questions instead of traditional mobile ads so that they can measure sentiment in realtime but also based on a user’s location. Those advertisers could be ad agencies, marketers, research companies and eventually small businesses – Qriously wants to “democratize mass insight”, says Christopher Kahler, CEO and co-founder – while app developers get a kick back via a pay-per-answer model rather than pay-per-click or transaction. It’s hoped, therefore, that Qriously will give developers another revenue stream to enable them to offer their mobile app or service for free. The User Experience employed by Qriously is also key; the widget provides onscreen controls to measure a participant’s sentiment on a particular issue on a sliding scale rather than a more rigid yes or no or multiple choice. Additionally, users can see how their opinion differs from the sample overall. But perhaps most crucially, all of this takes place without users leaving each app in which Qriously is deployed – kind of similar to Apple’s iAds concept – which should increase take-up and engagement significantly. Until this week, Qriously has been operating in ‘stealth’ mode although the startup is already claiming a network of 9 million installs and is testing with “some of the leading market research companies”. |
Hitachi GST Sold To Western Digital For $4.3 Billion | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 3 | 7 |
The storage arm of Hitachi, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, has been for a combination of cash and shares totaling $4.3 billion. It was just last year that WD in terms of hard drives shipped, but both companies are facing a challenge as consumer and local storage trends more towards high-speed flash, leaving spinning drives in their dust. There’s also cloud storage, but of course that relies on traditional spinning drives as well, since they still provide an excellent value for bulk storage. I don’t think they’re in danger there just yet. What does this mean for consumers? Not a lot for now, but if all WD wanted to do was keep building big 3.5″ HDDs all year round, they would use that money to build factories. By acquiring Hitachi GST they’re also acquiring a lot of R&D and facilities. The next fight is probably creating a new standard for affordable bulk storage that doesn’t rely on a tech like spinning platters, something approaching endgame research-wise. At all events nothing will happen for a year or two at least as the two companies learn to love one another, work out redundancies and hires, combine facilities, etc. |
New System Counts, Measures Nanoparticles | John Biggs | 2,011 | 3 | 7 | I’m a big fan of nanoparticles. Anything I can’t see but could potentially eat millions of in a second is alright in my book. That’s why this little counter is so cool: it allows you to count and measure items in the range of 100 nanometers and smaller. The system runs a fluid containing the particles past a counter at speeds as high as half-a-million particles per second. It’s described as a “turnstile” for nanoparticles. The instrument measures the volume of each nanoparticle, allowing for very rapid and precise size analysis of complex mixtures. Additionally, the researchers showed that the instrument could detect bacterial virus particles, both in saline solution as well as in mouse blood plasma.
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Square's Jack Dorsey: VeriFone's Security Hole Allegation "Is Not A Fair Or Accurate Claim" | Leena Rao | 2,011 | 3 | 9 | As we heard this morning, VeriFone CEO Doug Bergeron to consumers and the industry, warning users of a in mobile payments startup (and competitor) Square’s hardware. Bergeron actually went so far as to ask Square to recall all of its card readers and even contacted all of the major credit card companies, including Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Discover and JP Morgan Chase to alert them about the potential issue. Tonight, Square’s CEO Jack Dorsey has to VeriFone’s claims with a letter of his own (we’ve embedded the note below). Dorsey says that VeriFone’s accusation is not an accurate or fair claim, as any encrypted card reader, phone camera, pen and paper can be used to copy or catch numbers from a credit card. He adds that Square is “designed to be used without worry” for consumers. As he writes, “Our partner bank, JPMorgan Chase, continually reviews, verifies, and stands behind every aspect of our service, including our Square card reader. And we are constantly improving the payment experience to enhance security.” Dorsey also highlights some of the security measures the startup already implements, including the ability to request an SMS message or email receipt from Square after every transaction with your card. Earlier, Bergeron claimed that anyone can “skim” or steal personal information off of a credit card’s magnetic strip using the Square card reader with a hacked app and to illustrate the vulnerability, VeriFone even wrote a test app that can “skim” to prove their assertions. VeriFone says the flaw is in Square’s hardware, which the company says lacks the ability to encrypt credit card data, making it easy to steal. Many on VeriFone’s “open letter” for a a number of reasons. First, Square is a threat to VeriFone’s , so its intentions aren’t so pure when exposing this potential issue. Second, as Dorsey points out, credit card fraud is not new. Every single time you hand over your credit card to someone (whether it is a merchant using Square, or any one of the dozens of other credit card input methods) you are trusting them not to steal it. Criminals steal credit card numbers all the time, both online and offline. But it happens, and when it does, consumers are not liable for fraudulent charges, the credit card companies are. There are a number of flaws in VeriFone’s accusations, and as you can see from the on Twitter most people are on this one. What clearly was a targeted attack (and perhaps a little bit of a smear campaign) on a competitor turned into a negative PR situation for VeriFone. If anything, most people were left with the feeling that VeriFone is very afraid of Square (the startup is ) and used an underhanded tactic to bring down a competitor. As we wrote in our earlier coverage, the gloves are off and this little incident shows that mobile payments are a highly competitive, and somewhat ruthless, space. Welcome to the jungle. You can read the entirety of Dorsey’s note below: A letter on credit card security and Square Today one of our competitors alleged that the Square card reader is insecure. This is not a fair or accurate claim and it overlooks all of the protections already built into your credit card. Any technology—an encrypted card reader, phone camera, or plain old pen and paper—can be used to “skim” or copy numbers from a credit card. The waiter you hand your credit card to at a restaurant, for example, could easily steal your card details if he wanted to—no technology required. If you provide your credit card to someone who intends to steal from you, they already have everything they need: the information on the front of your card. The bank that issues your credit card recognizes this and does not hold you responsible for fraudulent charges. When they are alerted to odd activity, they simply give you a call and will reverse the transaction. With Square, your credit card is designed to be used without worry, in more places than ever before. Our partner bank, JPMorgan Chase, continually reviews, verifies, and stands behind every aspect of our service, including our Square card reader. And we are constantly improving the payment experience to enhance security. For instance, you can request an instant text message or email receipt delivered from our secure squareup.com server after every transaction. At Square we work tirelessly to remove all complexity from accepting credit cards. That includes removing every concern around security. We thank you for your increasing support to make Square the leading way to pay with a credit card, safely. Jack Dorsey
CEO, Square |
The iPad 2: Yeah, You're Gonna Want One. | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 3 | 9 | In January 2010, shortly after its unveiling, I first got my hands on an iPad. My initial reaction? “ .” And that’s funny because here we are, just a little over a year into that future, and something new has come along that makes holding the iPad 1 feel like holding the past: the iPad 2. A week ago, after its unveiling, I got some hands on time with the new hardware and was that it pushed a device that already had no true competition even farther ahead. But now I’ve had the chance to actually use the thing non-stop for a week. Is my feeling the same? Actually, it’s even stronger. |
Burton Makes A Serious Camera Backpack: The F-Stop | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 3 | 9 |
You don’t have to only make photo gear in order to make decent photo gear, it looks like. would be great for the sports photographers and documentary filmmakers who spend a lot of time on the mountain. It’s got a compartmentalized main cargo area, with room for a large SLR camera, a few lenses, and a few filters, batteries, and so on. There are the usual big-backpack luxuries, like load-balancing straps and a padded back, and this one, being a Burton bag, actually has a big strap system for mounting your board as well. Looks solid to me. Costs $225, but they’re out of stock now. Check back later. [via ] |
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