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Want To Get Your Arduino On, But Don't Want To Solder? Check Out Teagueduino | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 5 | 17 | [vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/23886594 w=640&h=360]
With Google’s rolling up Android and Arduino together, there’s a lot of attention being given to to the popular hacking engine. But unsurprisingly, such a powerful tool isn’t really able to be just picked up and played with. is a modification of the Arduino system that makes the platform a bit more accessible to newbies. No soldering is required, for one thing. I like solder in theory, but in practice it always freaks me out. What if I get molten metal on me. So that’s one barrier removed. It also has a sweet graphical feedback system for understanding your inputs, outputs, modules, and so on, making the language of hacking a little more accessible. It’s kind of like the Duplo to Arduino’s Lego. The same principles are in action, but in larger, more coarse form, and you can’t choke on them. And of course it’s all open source, so you can modify or remix as you please. . If I had space in my apartment for a workbench, I’d totally check out one of these kits. [via ] |
Casio "Diver-Inspired" Baby-G Watch Is A Jam For The Ladies | John Biggs | 2,011 | 5 | 17 | is perfectly content to rest on their laurels. Their G-Shock line is inexplicably popular, the ladies love them some Baby-G, and every year a new cohort of customers graduates into some of their nicer models. That’s why I’m pleased to see this cleverly designed and relatively cheap Baby-G. It costs $160 and will be available this June in time for “water sports” season, according to Shigenori Itoh, CEO of Casio America. Ahem. Available in June 2011, these boat-worthy watches are equipped with the always functional Baby-G staple characteristics. The model is fully equipped with shock resistance, 100M water resistance, LED Light, 48-city world time, 5 daily alarms, 1/100th second stopwatch, countdown timer and 12/24 hour formats. Make waves with the fashion and function of Baby-G! |
Tiny Artificial Eardrum Could Make Your Headphones Safer And Better | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 5 | 17 | One of the problems of in-ear headphones, though they often have excellent sound, is that they block all movement of air inside the ear canal, the better to control the sound environment — but potentially fatiguing or damaging to your eardrum. Audio researcher Stephen Ambrose has a solution that may improve the sound and protect your ears. It’s essentially a second eardrum, made of an incredibly thin polymer and placed inside the headphones (not in your ear canal, don’t worry). What it does is reduce “static” pressure (a result of the ear being sealed off) while dutifully transmitting the sound pressure. , though like any audio technology, it’s going to be a subjective experience. They would be purchasable separately from your headphones and installed at home, so you’re not getting roped into a whole new system here. Ambrose hopes to sell the in a few weeks, though if it works, we may see it licensed into new headphone designs after that. Lots more information at . has some hands-on pictures, as well. [image: Dan Bracaglia/Sound and Vision] |
Samsung Brings Its LED Lighting Line To The US | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 5 | 17 |
Your next light bulb may come from Samsung, according to this breathless press release, which announces that Samsung is fully committed to bringing LEDs to the common consumer. Samsung will apply its “deep marketing knowledge” to make their LED line popular here in the US. With luck that means they’re targeting a lower price point. We all know how great LEDs are for saving power and so on, but nobody wants to pay $40 for a bulb. Get on that, Samsung!
. Here’s the full press release: The World’s Largest Technology Company Focuses Its Consumer Electronics Proficiency at Rapidly Innovating the Lighting Industry; Aims to Take LED Lighting Solutions Beyond U.S. Early Adopters PHILADELPHIA, May 17, 2011 – Long recognized in the United States as a high-tech powerhouse, Samsung has set its sights on becoming a new leader in the U.S. lighting market as the industry shifts into the digital age. The company announced today it is making its first LED lamps available in the U.S. as the company couples its technological prowess in LED with its deep marketing knowledge in consumer electronics to launch LED lighting solutions into the mainstream professional and consumer market. Samsung LED Co., Ltd. www.samsungLED.com was established globally in April 2009, channeling the company’s proven expertise in the electronics and electro-mechanics fields into the production of cutting-edge LED lighting. As a leader in LED technology from chips to TV displays, Samsung already possesses some of the largest LED production facilities in the world, helping ensure quality and reliability across the entire line of products. An American center of operations has been established in Atlanta, Ga., to support the company’s expansion into the U.S. market. “The lighting industry has finally caught up with the digital revolution, with microchip technology powering lamps enabling longer lifetimes, more environmentally-friendly designs and less energy consumption,” says Philip Warner, Vice President of Samsung LED America. “The Samsung brand is practically synonymous with consumer electronics. As more and more people recognize the future of home and commercial lighting lies in this amazing digital technology, we are confident Samsung will take a leading position in the market.” Samsung’s initial line-up ranges from omni-directional incandescent replacements to fluorescent and PAR replacement lamps for homes and businesses. Samsung’s vertically integrated supply chain allows the company to produce all aspects of LED lights, including chips, PKGs, modules, light engines and lamps. The company is also a technology leader in areas of thermal management, optics, power supplies and lighting controls. Philip Warner, Vice President, added that Samsung will put its full research and design might into developing the next generation of LED lamps. “We will not dilute our offerings with high-efficiency incandescent or even CFLs, as these are yesterday’s technologies. Our focus is 100-percent on LED,” he said. LED lamps create light by running an electrical current through a microchip. They are increasingly replacing light bulbs in both indoor and outdoor settings due to their higher energy efficiency and longer lifespans compared to traditional incandescent or compact fluorescent bulbs, while providing warm pleasing light. Attendees of the International Light Fair Show in Philadelphia on May 17-21 may inquire for a private showing of Samsung’s LED lights by attending the Samsung hospitality booth at Light Fair. |
Sony Bringing Thunderbolt To Notebooks With USB-Style Connector? | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 5 | 17 |
When made its big debut back in February, we weren’t too surprised to find it take the shape of a DisplayPort connector. As Apple has been a big partner with Intel on the new interface and has always been a big promoter of DisplayPort, it made sense. But it was no guarantee that the rest of the industry would follow suit. And it seems Sony might be the first to change things up. The picture above is of , which was teased last month. But the PC has a dock that connects to a Thunderbolt port, and that there’s no DisplayPort style plug-in there. So it has to be a combo USB 3.0/Thunderbolt port, unless this design isn’t final and they switch things up. When Thunderbolt was Light Peak, it actually used a USB-style connector, so this isn’t unprecedented at all. But is it good for consumers? This combo port may be more practical, since it can be used with far more devices, but , the USB connector isn’t something you can just copy and paste. Sony may have worked something out with them, or the story could be even more complicated than that. We’ll have to wait for Sony to clear things up on this one. It’s all speculation for now, unless of course a few other companies show off some USB-style Thunderbolt ports, in which case it’s all confirmed and Apple is in the minority. Ah well, you didn’t really think this was the end of adapters and multiple port standards, did you? |
Happy Birthday, Color Photography! You're 150! | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 5 | 17 | What you see here is , though the process back then was slightly different from the methods to follow. It was presented at the Royal Institution on May 17th, 1861 by Clerk Maxwell, who worked with Thomas Sutton to produce this image of a ribbon. It was actually three black and white pictures, each taken through a different color filter, then recombined by layering projections. It’s actually more like our modern digital cameras than like the color techniques that ruled photography for decades. It’s been 150 long years since that presentation, and photography is still as fascinating and vital as it was then, if somewhat easier. Here’s to another century, photography. [via and ] |
Sony CEO Goes On The Defensive In Face Of PSN Outage Criticisms | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 5 | 17 | Howard Stringer, CEO and the most visible target for criticism regarding the recent PSN data breach, has gone on an interview rampage, speaking with major news outlets to get word out that no network is fully secure and Sony went above and beyond the call of duty in its response. I don’t think users will agree, and though it may not be fair… well, tough. The main issue seems to be in the first week, when it seems that Sony failed to notify its users that there was a serious breach and their data may be at risk. Stringer : We told people what we believed to have been lost and what we couldn’t rule out within a day of finding that out. That’s fast. That’s faster than what most companies have done. That’s faster than the law required and it was the responsible thing to do for our customers. You can’t find a company that acted any quicker once it found out. What you’re talking about is when we didn’t know anything you wanted us to reveal the information. That would have been irresponsible. If your house has been burglarized, you find out if you’ve lost something before you call the police. It’s true that once they knew for the extent of the breach for sure, they were quick about saying so, and that’s to their credit. But the burglar analogy misses the mark, because in this case it’s not Sony that’s at risk here, it’s the users. And Sony absolutely, positively should have taken the bull by the horns within a day or two of the breach (the extent of which must have been known early on) and said “We got hacked. It’s serious. We don’t know how serious just yet, but serious enough that you might have to get a new card and change your password. We’ll have more information soon, but keep an eye on your accounts and let us know immediately if you see anything suspicious. Sorry for etc. etc. etc.” Stringer was honest about Sony’s limited knowledge of the origins and intent of the hack, though he does put it at Anonymous’ door, which is playing with fire. But they have found no evidence of identity theft or credit card abuse, and are working closely with law enforcement, in addition to offering complimentary protection against those crimes. It’s up to posterity to judge, of course, but I think the general consensus on this will be that Sony acted quickly and authoritatively, but by not inoculating themselves against the worst by being up front with their consumers, they allowed the news to get out by other means, and appeared to be afraid of the truth. |
Wikio and Trigami: the 7th merger in the last 18 months… | roxannevarza | 2,011 | 5 | 17 | Recently, has been picking up the pace. The European media group with Nomao and Overblog in the fall of 2010 and hasn’t been been slowing down since. Rumors of a of funding are yet to be confirmed. And even though the company may’ve taken a hit from , it’s just announced yet another merger; is the latest addition to the Wikio family. Founded in 2007 in Switzerland, Trigami provides social media ad solutions for German-speaking markets. The company counts over 500 clients that are able to benefit from the network’s 15K bloggers for innovative ad solutions and seeded content. As a result of this merger, Trigami will be integrated into the platform, currently used by over 1500 companies. Prior to this deal, Ebuzzing was only present in France, Italy, Spain and the UK but will now include 2 German offices as well. Thus, this Wikio solution will now be available not only in Germany but also in Austria and Switzerland. Wikio’s rapid expansion is definitely unusual for Europe. This is the company’s 7th merger in the last 18 months. |
Car Makers Ponder What To Make Electric Vehicles Sound Like | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 5 | 17 |
In the run-up to the releases of the and the , there was some talk making the rounds that the designers were having some trouble deciding what noise these new cars should make. After all, they’re naturally almost silent, and this presents a serious risk not just to unwary pedestrians but to also to blind people, wildlife, and of course other cars. The question is whether you make EVs sound like other cars by simulating engine noise, or do you take this chance to give them an entirely new and perhaps more practical and customizable noise? Some cars, of course, have a distinctive noise that results naturally from the mechanics of the engine and exhaust. Car designers can make their own noise now, even make your Leaf sound like an old Mustang — but should this noise be regulated, and if so, on what level? Manufacturers and designers are testing out different sounds, from a UFO noise to the sound of a baseball card flapping against bike spokes, attempting to suss out which exactly produces the most awareness without becoming grating. with some of the noises being looked at by UK researchers. They’re even simulating intersections with dozens of such vehicles and seeing how certain sounds would interact. Hey, you don’t roll something out to ten thousand vehicles without doing a little checking around, right? I’m torn on the subject. Obviously there’s a line that needs to be walked between good taste and safety, but there are lots of unanswered questions as well. What about special sounds for certain types of vehicles, or user-selectable sounds? I want mine to sound like a Transformer transforming, all the time. |
Amazon Buys The A.Co, Z.Co, K.Co And Cloud.Co Domains | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 5 | 17 | Following in Twitter ( ) and Overstock’s ( s) footsteps, Amazon has picked up the domains A.Co, Z.Co, K.Co and interestingly enough Cloud.co in a deal made with Colombia-based domain registry .Co. While .Co originally gave Twitter the T.Co domain name for free in order to spread awareness about the brand, Amazon has actually purchased these from .Co for an undisclosed price. In comparison, Overstock’s O.Co rebranding was the first negotiated .Co purchase deal, for $350K ( Godaddy also owns the name X.Co, using it as a vanity link shortening service). The genesis of the .Co domain is through Colombia, and while country codes usually take a hit in Google rankings, .Co is part of a unique set of cclds (.tv .me .co) which are treated like gtlds or generic domains like .com .net .org. .Co is about to hit its 1 millionth domain registered in little under a year of service (.com is at over a hundred million) and is about to set up a stable pricing plan for one letter and two letter domains. Co representative Lori Anne Wardi tells me, “With every allocation of a single letter domain name the pool of these gets less and less, with every sale we do the resource becomes smaller. We have a very long list of people who want one letter and two letter domains and price will be set high enough that each person who buys one of these will use it.” While .Co wouldn’t tell me what Amazon will do with these domains it did emphasize that they will absolutely be utilized, “I’m confident that they’ll do something interesting, ” said Wardi. Cloud.Co will be particularly one to watch as Amazon is of the cloud based music wars among other things. K.Co? Well they’ve stumped me on that one. Unlike the Libyan-based .Ly domain, .Co (with Colombia’s full support) is doing a heavy marketing push towards appealing to startups and entrepreneurs, “We’re not looking for a major brand to switch over to .co, but every day new companies are starting and can’t get the domain name that they want,” says Wardi. “We want to be the domain of the next Twitter and the next Facebook.” As our commenters have pointed out below, it’s likely A.Co is for Amazon, Z.Co is for Zappos and K.Co is for Kindle. |
T-Mobile Trade-Ins: Go Green, Save Some Green | Jordan Crook | 2,011 | 5 | 17 | I can’t speak for everyone, but no matter how much I to become more earth-friendly, it never really happens. It’s always too expensive, or too inconvenient, or too much work, and I blow it off. Luckily for me (and other would-be-greeners), is giving you a way to go green and save a little green. If you’re with T-Mo and looking to upgrade your phone, the carrier has offered or any other throwback you have lying around for a chunk of change (to be used for a new phone, of course). So basically, you take your old phone into a T-Mobile store, at which point a T-Mo rep will decide how much its worth, but will apparently refrain from sharing that little detail with you. Instead, you’ll get the value of your phone through a mail-in rebate and have to make another trip to the store to cash it in for a new phone. Obviously, your pink Razr from 2006 isn’t going to pay for the Sensation 4G, but at least you’ll be earning yourself a little discount, and possibly some good Karma from Mother Earth. [via |
And Now To See If This Social Search Stuff Actually Works | Jason Kincaid | 2,011 | 5 | 17 | Yesterday, in a massively botched press launch, Bing released some new features that begin to really tap into the huge amount of social data exposed through its partnership with Facebook. The alliance isn’t a new one — the companies have had a friendly relationship ever since Microsoft made a investment in Facebook that valued the social network at $15 billion in 2007, and Bing launched Facebook’s Instant Personalization . But Bing’s Facebook integration up until now was a little superficial — if you ran a query relevant to something your friend had previously ‘Liked’ on Facebook, you’d see that in a special module embedded in the search results page. Beginning today, things are getting much more interesting: Bing will actually reorder search results based on friends’ Likes (in other words, your friend’s recommendations won’t just be relegated to a standalone widget, they’ll influence the Ten Blue Links). That isn’t all. If you run a query that matches information in a friend’s profile (but not necessarily their ‘Likes’) then Bing might show a link to their profile too (for example, run a query for “San Francisco” and you’ll see which of your friends live in SF). Sometimes Bing will show that a certain result has been liked number of times by other users, even people who aren’t your friends. Bing’s announcing the news outlines the features in more detail. And they look nifty. But there’s still a big question: will social search, a term that gets tossed around as if it’s some kind of Holy Grail, actually be useful? The average Facebook user has around 130 friends, which isn’t that many in the grand scheme of things, so you’ll be drawing from a limited amount of recommended content. And my hunch is that the majority of ‘Likes’ are concentrated around a few key areas that include movies, TV shows, breaking news, and humor — you know, the things you see popping up in your Facebook News Feed all the time. Obviously people search for those things on Bing, and when you’re looking for that awesome dancing Android you heard about but don’t know the name of, surfacing these water-cooler links can be invaluable. But people use search engines for a ton of other tasks too, and many of them aren’t involving the sort of content that people share to Facebook. How times have you actually ‘Liked’ the new shoes you just ordered? Or your favorite hotel in the Caribbean? Or the how-to guide on repairing your dishwasher? Everything you Like is shared with your friends via the News Feed, and when you share something they’re interested in — like breaking news, or something funny — there’s positive reinforcement as they interact with that shared story. But at the same time you’re probably going to be a little hesitant to start Liking things that are more mundane, even if you found them useful. And there’s also the question of whether people actually care what their friends think. Internally, Facebook has found that people aren’t necessarily motivated to click links because they share similar tastes with their friends — sometimes, people are interested in a piece of content it was shared by their friend. In other words, we care about our friends’ recommendations because we care about our friends, not necessarily because we like similar things. So do these ‘Liked’ pages become helpful for finding the information you’re searching for? I asked some of these questions to Stefan Weitz, director of Bing, who was unsurprisingly a bit more optimistic than I am. He says that the ‘new web’ is inherently social, and that for the first time in human history we can tap into the data that was previously stored in people’s heads. But that’s long-term. The features Bing launched yesterday, he says, are not ‘the ultimate social search’. He explains that we’re just at the tip of the iceberg, and that social search isn’t going to revolve exclusively around Facebook data. “It’s hard to predict where it’s going next,” Weitz says. “Facebook went from zero Likes to what they have now in one year. The challenge is to not get too locked into one signal — we have to pivot quickly around the current zeitgeist.” As for my concerns about the way people are ‘Liking’ content with Facebook and how that ties into search, Weitz says that it’s still up to the user to figure out which of their friends’ recommendations are relevant (e.g. if you see one of your gadget-savvy friends ‘Like’ a camera, that’s important; someone else’s recommendation may not be). And, regarding the scope of content that people are Liking, Weitz points out just how new the Like button is, and that it generally appears in inconsistent places on webpages. Bing launched a new browser toolbar as part of yesterday’s news that solves this issue, but this is only available to IE users. And I’m not convinced that people are having a hard time finding the buttons — I just don’t think they’re compelled to click them unless they really want to broadcast something to their friends. Of course, Facebook isn’t standing still either. It has every incentive to get you to Like a broader array of content online — after all, its ad platform revolves around showing your friends what you’ve Liked. And it also has a strong incentive to give partners like Bing a way to leverage that data in a useful way. |
This Chain Gun Does Not Want To Be Your Friend | John Biggs | 2,011 | 5 | 17 | It’s not every day you see a massive BAE Systems Mk 38 chain gun firing off the bow of a Naval vessel, but here you go. This thing is completely remote controlled and features infrared sights and laser aiming systems so you can pick off booby-trapped boats from miles away. |
Paul Graham To Hold Y Combinator "Office Hours" At TechCrunch Disrupt. Apply Now! | Michael Arrington | 2,011 | 5 | 17 | One of many things that make Y Combinator special: They hold regular “ ” with startups where entrepreneurs can get advice on any topic, from business strategy to design issues. What we talk about at office hours also depends on the startup and where we are in the cycle. Usually we talk about whatever is the most urgent question right now. Sometimes, especially early on, the most urgent question is to figure out what the most urgent question should be. That’s less trivial than it sounds; we spend a lot of time telling founders what not to worry about. (About 10% of the time we talk not about immediate problems but about the big vision for the company. You don’t have to be bound by this, but it’s good to have one. Some startups arrive with a big vision already, but most don’t. It’s a useful exercise to spend some time thinking about what the path would be from what a startup is doing now to a giant company, even if that’s not the current goal of the founders. Helping founders come up with these big visions is one of our strengths, because we’ve explored so much of the space of startup ideas that we know what’s over each hill.) If the startup either hasn’t decided what to work on or wants to change their idea, then we talk about what the company should do. That usually means satisfying two constraints: something (1) users would want, that (2) the founders of this startup would be good at building. We have these types of conversations surprisingly often. Startups modify or even replace their ideas much more than outsiders realize. By Demo Day perhaps 15% are working on new ideas that grew out of conversations during office hours. Some of the most successful startups we’ve funded have. If the question of what the company should do is settled, the most urgent question tends to be what to build first. Usually we advise startups to launch fast and iterate. This doesn’t apply to all startups (Clustrix, for example), but it works for most. The reason we advise startups to launch fast is that till you launch you’re designing for hypothetical or at best tame users, instead of actual ones. Once you launch you begin the conversation with real users, whose often surprising reactions to your product teach you what you should have been building.. These sessions are private, and for Y Combinator companies only. But partner , who will already be on stage at next week, has offered to host “office hours” for non-YC startups at the event. Six startups will be selected and will join Paul on stage on Tuesday at 11:45. Each startup will get 8.5 minutes on stage, enough for a couple of questions with meaningful feedback. If you are attending Disrupt and would like to be considered, please fill out the form below. We’ll work with Paul to narrow the applicants to those that will benefit the most, and provide insightful content. Then, at the start of the session, Paul will select six companies from those finalists. They need to be prepared and ready to walk on stage immediately. Y Combinator startups aren’t eligible (they can get office hours at any time). Startup Battlefield companies are also ineligible as they’re getting plenty of feedback and advice from our . Other conference attendees, and the Startup Alley startups, are welcome to apply. |
OMG/JK: Chromebooks And Droided Out Lightbulbs | Jason Kincaid | 2,011 | 5 | 17 | From Google I/O to Microsoft’s acquisition of Skype, last week was a huge one for tech news. In this episode of OMG/JK, my colleague MG Siegler and I do an in-depth look at what happened at Google’s annual developer conference, which saw the launch of Google Music Beta, Android’s @home project, and the first Chromebooks. Don’t worry, we’ll talk about the Skype acquisition next time, there was just too much material to pack into one show. And, yes, this episode is a bit retro — we shipped out the better cameras to New York in preparation for TC Disrupt next week, so we had to shoot this one in SD. |
Asus Transformer, Acer Iconia Tab A500 Getting Android 3.1 In June | Matt Burns | 2,011 | 5 | 17 | <quick story> Did you read the headline? Yep, that’s the story. The Asus Eee Pad Transformer and Acer Iconia Tab A500 next month via an OTA update. </quick story> |
Best Buy And Nintendo Teaming Up To Serve 3DS Games Via Wi-Fi | John Biggs | 2,011 | 5 | 17 |
Best Buy will open up their in-store wireless networks to allow kids (and kids at heart) to download games in their stores. They will also, obviously, sell the and will provide a “firsthand look at the platform with experts” in store. While it’s certainly magnanimous of Best Buy to open their Wi-Fi to the masses, I wonder how much of this will end up being an upsell? “Pair your 3DS with Wi-Fi for $15,” anyone? Nintendo and Best Buy to Bring Custom Downloadable Content to Nintendo 3DS Owners Nintendo 3DS Will Connect Automatically to Best Buy Wireless Hot Spots REDMOND, Wash. & MINNEAPOLIS–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Nintendo and retail partner Best Buy are collaborating to give Nintendo 3DS™ owners customized, automatic wireless access at some 1,000 select Best Buy store locations nationwide beginning June 7. Once connected, the service will provide access to a variety of fun content via the system’s built-in Wi-Fi functionality, including the new SpotPass™ feature. The Best Buy service will also include exclusive offers as well as additional entertainment content such as gaming extras and movie trailers. Nintendo 3DS, which lets people see 3D visuals without the need for special glasses, launched March 27 at a suggested retail price of $249.99. “Best Buy provides a firsthand look at the platform with experts to help people understand everything it offers.”
“Nintendo 3DS turns the page in portable gaming not just because of the stunning, glasses-free 3D visuals, but also in the way it keeps people connected to their friends, their games and their world,” said Nintendo of America President Reggie Fils-Aime. “Best Buy provides a firsthand look at the platform with experts to help people understand everything it offers.” “We want our customers to fully tap into the potential of their Nintendo 3DS device, so we’re pleased to offer free access to special Wi-Fi and SpotPass content in-store,” said Chris Homeister, senior vice president of entertainment for Best Buy. “As a retail partner for SpotPass, this is another way that we’re delivering best-in-class gaming experiences at our stores across the country.” Remember that Nintendo 3DS features parental controls that let adults manage the content their children can access. For more information about this and other features, visit http://www.nintendo3ds.com. |
Book A Cruise On Your Phone: Viator Wants To Be Your Realtime Travel Booking Solution | Rip Empson | 2,011 | 5 | 17 | When you plan a vacation, you likely have a destination in mind. Location plays a considerable role in our travel plans, but really what makes or breaks a good vacation is what you do when you get there. Your trip to Hawaii last summer was enjoyable simply because you were in Hawaii and not at the office, but really what you remember is the scuba diving — and backpacking through volcanoes. These “travel activities” are essential to every travel experience and, perhaps unsurprisingly, have become a sizable business. According to report “When They Get There (and Why They Go)”, the U.S. travel activities market totalled $27 billion in 2009. Not only that, but more than $7 billion in activities were booked online in 2009, and the study predicts that, by 2012, the percentage of activities that will be arranged online will double. Now, historically, the people and agencies that act as your travel concierge have been small operations, and few had websites — or rather, few had websites worth mentioning — nor were there global distribution systems that condensed all your globe-trotting discovery and booking options into a single resource. Thanks to companies like , a one-stop-shop for researching, planning and booking tours and activities all over the globe (and countless others), agents now have central resources to consult — bookings through their sites are commissionable. But the real game-changer for a travel business is not just having an online resource, it’s having an activities planner, with a serious mobile presence, that allows travel agents to upload itineraries instantly and enables users to book activities in realtime. That’s the golden ticket. Today, Viator is introducing two free apps for the iPad and iPhone that enable travelers to find and book activities anytime, anywhere — whether they’re planning ahead from their living room or standing in a hotel lobby just looking for something nearby to do for the next few hours. Each app gives the user access to Viator’s tour and activity portfolio, which lists activities like, for example, a private, after-hours tour of the Vatican and Sistine Chapel, or surfing lessons in Sydney, or a desert safari in Dubai, and so on. Users can check out Viator’s 260K traveler reviews and photos to get a little taste of some crowdsourced info so that they can better decide which scuba outlet to patronize. As part of the new Viator mobile experience, the company has developed a backend proprietary system (essentially an extranet) that enables tour operators to upload inventory in realtime. This means that vacationers can book 80 percent of the available activities within 48 hours and that you can check out what’s being listed now, tomorrow, or six months from now. The new backend also allows users’ search results to be filtered more easily, allowing you to search by activity category, such as ‘family friendly,’ ‘tours & sightseeing,’ and ‘shows, concerts & tickets’ or date, time and even by hotel pick-up locations. The company has also made an effort not to simply port its website directly into iPhone and iPad apps, which I like to hear. It’s important for companies to customize their services for the mobile experience — and for different devices. For example, while Viator’s iPhone app uses GPS to detect where you are and allows you to check out top destinations in your proximity, while booking in-app, the company’s iPad app is geared more towards inspiration. It’s designed for people who haven’t yet decided on a destination. As such, the iPad app allows users to navigate top destinations via a rotating a 3D globe and to browse city guides, which feature content from experts as well as related images. So, while Viator offers a bit of the mobile Foursquare experience with its realtime discovery of cool activities to pursue while in a new location, it’s also serving up a bit of Groupon by allowing users to scan exclusive deals in each local market. And, what’s more, prices are shown in the traveler’s currency choice and reveals percent savings off original price. All in all, using Viator can be faster and cheaper than booking travel activities through a concierge service or your hotel, and since users can pay from within iPhone using a credit card, it’s pretty convenient. Viator has raised more than $15 million to date and is currently profitable. The company currently provides the tours and activities for more than 2,000 affiliates, including major travel brands like Priceline, Virgin Blue, Lonely Planet, AAA, British Airways, Air France, American Airlines Vacations. Also worth noting: All mobile bookings through May 31st will be eligible for additional 10 percent discount. The company also tells me that Android apps are on the way. |
Swedish University Testing Wheelchair That Maps Its Surroundings | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 5 | 17 | Back in March, we saw a project using a to sense and alert the user to obstacles in their path. Researchers at Luleå University of Technology in Sweden are working on a similar system, It was tested this week by a grad student hopeful who is himself visually impaired, and he pronounced it solid. The system looks quite bulky, however, and is limited to detecting objects within a narrow plane, so it wouldn’t pick up, say, a curb or overhang. Still, it’s interesting research, and could be the start of a new kind of intelligent wheelchair that could let blind and partially sighted people get around their neighborhoods a bit easier. [via ] |
Android And Chrome: Anywhere And Everywhere | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 5 | 10 |
Google is approaching a watershed moment in its internal platform wars. The time is nearly at hand when they will have to decide once and for all what Android is, what Chrome OS is, and where they are both going. This is not to say it has not been internally decided and even worked out to the decimal for some years ahead — but they’re going to have to break it to the world sooner or later, and today’s I/O event may have been a powerful hint. The hint is in two announcements today: one expected and more or less standard for Google ( ), the other a surprise ( ). Google is laying the groundwork for a two-pronged OS assault a little ways down the road: Chrome OS , and Android . Why does it matter that Google has put out a little widget that will let people control fans and LEDs using Android? It matters because Google is positioning Android not as a phone OS, but as an all-purpose low-ceiling OS scalable at the very maximum to tablets (I doubt it will evolve much past what we see in Honeycomb, though it will certainly be made better), and at the very minimum to — what do you think? Anything. Microwaves, vehicles, media players, robots, watches, toys, tools, microscopes, x-ray machines, set-top boxes, cameras… you name it. Google wants it to be in any device that requires some kind of CPU and interface. Oh, and they’ll all talk to each other, in Googlese. Do you want to control Pandora from your fridge? Neither do I. But there are a hundred million people who do. Android could fork one more time, creating a version that’s as much smaller than “vanilla” Android as Honeycomb is larger. Reduce dependencies, buff up legacy and basic (maybe even Basic) code libraries, and fortify it in case of being chopped into little pieces to fit in 4MB of RAM and a 25MHz processor. It’ll blow up in embedded and invisible computing as quickly as it has blown up in mobile. Why? Because it’s well-documented, cheap (free, technically, but you have to make up the difference to fit it to your device), versatile, and will be built to work with all the off-the-shelf parts you’re already using. This little accessory testbed is a great way for Google to put a foot in the door and start working out the kinks. Rope in a powerful and well-loved hacking partner (Arduino) and you buy yourself not only a healthy platform but a healthy community. Rubin they don’t develop via the community, but it doesn’t matter when the community only needs to provide the last mile. And besides, if you give the community the right tools, sometimes what they can create is almost beyond belief. is a good example of this. Meanwhile, Chrome OS is , but it’s more like Android 1.0 “stable” than anything else. It won’t crash, but it’ll need a year or two before it shines. And what happens in a year or two? Google hopes that there will be some eighty to a hundred million tablets in active use, and while the mix of iOS, webOS, Android, Chrome OS, and to be announced can be argued all day long, the one thing they’ll all have in common is a powerful, HTML 5-compliant browser. Sure, you could get a Chrome OS machine, if you’re feeling daffy and want to limit yourself to just a browser. Or you could get any tablet at all, and still have access to 95% of Google’s services. They don’t care whether Chrome OS picks up or not — it’s a stable, low-profile OS that may or may not get a little traction in low-cost devices. But Chrome OS and Chrome the browser are going to share so many parts that to the end user, they may soon be indistinguishable. No matter your platform, every question will be answered with “in the browser.” Where’s your music? In the browser. How do I rent movies? In the browser. Where are my photos? Browser. Email? Browser. It’s the simplest way to create all the arrows in this little graphic: Such an ecosystem sounds a bit far out for consumers today, which is why Google is launching at I/O with no partners instead of at a Los Angeles Gala with musical guest Ke$ha. They’re looking down the road, past App Country and into Browserland. At least, that’s what I saw in a vision after hearing about the Arduino board. But it makes sense, I think, mostly because it pokes Apple in both eyes. Weak in the cloud and outside of mobile and apps (where they’re more or less unassailable, for good reason), they’re vulnerable to attack — first by competing in a category Apple can’t possibly get into (hackery and embedded computing), and second, by ensuring that every unit Apple sells is a potential platform for Google to invade. This Hannibal-esque pincer move will assail Apple on their services and product diversity flanks, while healthy growth of Android will prevent any upset on the central mobile front. How they’ll sell it to consumers is another matter. It’ll take time and Google isn’t the best at marketing — and their enemies won’t be standing still. Clearly Chrome OS isn’t ready to be the universal platform they want it to be just yet; but in a year Android will have solidified on the high end and spread out on the low end. The tablet wars will have heated up, and cloud services will be approaching the mainstream. There will be an iPhone 5, a Nexus X (or something), NFC, and a hundred other events and techs I can’t possibly foresee. In fact, and this is really the most likely outcome, so many crazy things will happen between now and then that this article will be rendered null. At the very least, though, it seems a plausible theory for the real intentions of these two chameleonic platforms. Google’s timing plan for Chrome just turned out to be a little optimistic. |
35-Year-Old Apple I Resuscitated At Italian University | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 5 | 10 |
Here’s a cheerful little item to help advance your week towards Friday. Technicians at the Politecnico de Torino (a university in Turin, Italy) have managed to . These extremely early examples of home computing are nearly impossible to find, and indeed this one was purchased by a wealthy collector for over $200,000. They cleaned the contacts, tested the capacitors, clock, and so on, and at last used a MacBook Pro to load a program onto the unit that excitedly repeated “Hello Polito” on the monitor. It’s aliiiive! [via ] |
Toshiba's Honeycomb Tablet Running Late For Launch Date | Jordan Crook | 2,011 | 5 | 10 |
Toshiba’s second venture into the tablet arena is off to a rough start, as reports have come in saying that the Toshiba slate will be delayed in the UK. Originally, Toshiba had promised that the 10.1-inch Android 3.0 Honeycomb tablet would arrive in the UK sometime during Q2. That’s turning out to be a bit of a fib, as Ken Chan, Senior Product Marketing Manager at , today told that the tablet won’t appear until “the very end of summer.” With specs similar to that of the , the Toshiba tablet touts a dual-core NVIDIA Tegra 2 processor under the hood, with a 5-megapixel rear camera and a 0.2-megapixel front-facing camera. Toshiba’s newest slate will also feature support for HDMI output, USB mini and USB port connectivity, and support for microSD cards. Mr. Chan never actually got around to explaining the delay, but some have already begun to speculate, perhaps too optimistically. Reg Hardware has high hopes that the company is simply waiting for NVIDIA’s next generation of Tegra processors, the highly-anticipated quad-core chip Of course, the recent disaster in Japan may have something to do with the delay, as well. [via ] |
Foxconn Denies "Anti-Suicide" Contracts | John Biggs | 2,011 | 5 | 10 | A few months ago the Internet was aflame with suicides at and then there were rumors that the massive manufacturing company was forcing its employees to sign “anti-suicide” pledges. Now, at least according to a Canadian news organization, Foxconn has confirmed that this is not true. “Foxconn does not ask its employees to sign any such documents, any reports to the contrary are inaccurate,” said Ellin Choy, a Foxconn spokesperson.
Seventeen employees have killed themselves by jumping off of Foxconn buildings since 2010. In a factory of 400,000 in Shenzhen alone, however, that’s a fairly small percentage but not an unimportant one. However, as I wrote , what in our current gadget culture is causing these suicides? Foxconn claims to offer a living wage to its over a million workers and I tend to believe them. However, I do worry that the suicide issue will be eventually swept under the rug and ultimately ignored. |
Sequel To COICA Bill, The PROTECT IP Act, May Be Even Worse | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 5 | 10 | , a piece of legislation that would eliminate a good deal of due process and free speech guarantees on the internet, is being succeeded by a new bill, the PROTECT IP Act. And yes, that’s an acronym. It stands for “Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property” — the most transparent attempt to whitewash a bill I’ve seen since PATRIOT. The act itself, rather than responding to concerns that it placed too much burden on the accused and added easily abusable controls on internet content, goes even further in allowing instant lockdown of “infringing” sites. Part of that is the ability of not just the government, but private entities such as rightsholders, to directly accuse a site and get it taken down with nothing more than a court’s approval. Even in a perfect world (such as the one obviously envisioned by this bill’s creators), there would be problems. The fact that a private rightsholder can bring an action against a site via a court, and the injunction can be issued without any notification of the site is extremely disturbing. It’s very much a shoot first, ask question later type setup, which is harmful everywhere, especially where there should be a presumption of innocence. It also requires that search engines censor their results, something I seriously doubt is going to happen in a hurry for every Joe Rightsholder who says this or that site is infringing their rights. , as well as the full text of the bill, if you’re interested. I’m sure we’ll be hearing more about this poor excuse for a law in the next few months. Copyright legislation is a real need, but this isn’t the right approach. This is legislation for the status quo, by the status quo, interested only in streamlining their legal process. |
Hands-On With Android 3.1 On The Motorola Xoom | Matt Burns | 2,011 | 5 | 10 |
Google announced Android 3.1 earlier today at I/O. More surprising than the OS itself (which was expected, really) was that it was rolling out to Verizon Xooms today. Google failed to announce when it was hitting other devices beside Google TV, which will get it this summer, and the Galaxy Tab 10.1, which will get it in the next few weeks. As announced, the UI is much the same. You can’t tell 3.0 from 3.1 visually. One of the only noticeable differences is that the widgets can be resized. Previously, widgets such as email and bookmarks had a preset size — now they can be stretched and morphed to better fit a user’s preferences. The home button also returns you to the previously selected homescreen rather than the main center one.
It seems many of 3.1’s changes are under the hood. The Xoom I’m using is noticeably faster. The app screen loads nearly instantly, as do many apps. I’m no longer looking at a black screen while switching between apps, either. But the Quadrant benchmarking app disagrees. My 3.0.1 Xoom scored 1824 while the 3.1 scored 1580. The easy answer is perhaps that Quadrant needs to be recompiled for 3.1. 3.1 also addressed many issues with the browser. It now supports HTML5 video, enhanced CSS 3D, as well as now being able to save pages for offline viewing. But I don’t really care about those features. All I care about is that it’s quicker, and pinch-to-zoom is as smooth as the iPad’s. Really, the browser is a star performer now. Previously, 3.0 supported USB keyboards; USB mice are now supported as well and work in single button mode. Scroll wheels are apparently supported as well but I have no way of testing that as the Xoom does not feature a USB host.
Google Videos was also one of the big announcements at I/O 2011, and comes preinstalled with 3.1 — it’s just called Videos, of course. The interface is sparse, with a two row interface. Up top are your rentals, with thumbnails occupying the bottom. You don’t actually rent anything directly from the app — it’s actually more of a management app. The thumbnails direct you to the Android Market app. It’s from there you click to rent with most titles costing $3.99. There are other small, honestly trivial changes in 3.1. The buttons now look a bit different and there are a few new baked-in wallpapers. It’s a bunch of small things that add up to a more pleasing experience. It actually feels more like a 3.0.x update than a whole new platform, but I’ll dig into the system and see if there is anything else new. Oh, and yeah, 3.1 still doesn’t bring microSD support to the Xoom. |
HP TouchPad, HP Pre 3 To Hit Shelves In June | Jordan Crook | 2,011 | 5 | 10 | It’s looking like the and aren’t too far away from release. Back at the Think Beyond event in February, the devices were promised to appear this “summer,” and since then, a more specific time frame has been laid out. According to , the HP TouchPad should show up in June. The HP Pre 3 is a bit more of a mystery, with no hard-and-fast leads about its availability dates, as of yet. However, when asked about the Pre 3’s forthcoming launch date, HP VP of developer relations Richard Kerris (who owns a Pre 3, by the way), said it’s TouchPad and then the Pre 3. With Touch-to-Share being one of the core features on the TouchPad, we’d have expected to see the Pre 3 show up sooner than the webOS-powered . In any case, June’s only 21 days away, so if your patience has already been sufficiently tested waiting on the arrival of either of these devices, now is the time to start crossing fingers and buying rabbits’ feet. [via ] |
PaaS PHP Fog Launches To The Public | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 5 | 10 | Like a Heroku for PHP, is launching to the public today in order to help PHP developers deploy and scale their applications in the cloud. in a round lead by Madrona and followed on by First Round, Founders Co-Op and others. PHP Fog launched in private beta in December and is now available for all members of the public. Aside from focusing solely on PHP, what PHP Fog does differently than Heroku (and all encompassing competitor dotCloud) is that it provides users with an PHP app store, which lets people build out Drupal and WordPress sites without needing to know how to code. The service starts out as free with shared hosting and then ranges from $29 – $249 depending on how many servers you want dedicated. Says founder Lucas Carlson, “When I started the company I thought, ‘Why isn’t anyone doing this for PHP, it’s a much bigger market?’ Out of the top one million webpages, 330K run PHP and and only 5K run Ruby. This is a much bigger opportunity, and I’ve been lucky because I’ve been able to cash in on this opportunity.” Since its funding in December, PHP Fog has hired a team of developers (8) and signed up 13,000 people on its beta list; “It took Heroku a year to sign up 10,000 people and it took us 6 months to sign up 13,000 people, so we’re going twice as fast.” In addition to hiring and building out more applications, Carlson admits that a name change is in the cards (PHP Fog is the pretty much most boring startup name I’ve ever written about, and I wrote about Shwowp). He has big plans and eventually wants the service to be the “Amazon of PaaS.” Rolling out to 1,000 people per day over the past week, PHP Fog is currently available for anyone who wants to sign up |
Disney Research Shows Pico Projector-Based Games With MotionBeam Prototype | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 5 | 10 |
We’ve seen some cool applications of in the last few years: the comes to mind, and… that other game gun as well. Disney (who, I guess unsurprisingly, maintains a whole research organization) is interested in the possible games and interactive experiences these cool little devices make possible. They’ve put together some prototypes, as you can see in the video above. The device, called , is a sort of tech sandwich: the projector is a , which we praised for its size but found a bit dim (Disney is actually using the old version, not the +). Then there’s an iPod touch providing the processing and application platform. Lastly there’s a little assembly of sensors, including an IR camera that can detect certain objects and patterns for your game to interact with. Obviously there are cool ideas flying around, but it’s all very preliminary still — and the devices themselves are expensive. But each generation of pico projector has brought the price down and the quality up, so it’s just a matter of time. [via ] |
null | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 5 | 17 | null |
Google Finally Delivers On Promise Of Admin-Free Chrome Frame Installs For IE | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 5 | 10 | Today at Google I/O in San Francisco, Google developers Amit Joshi and Alex Russell took the stage at a breakout session to announce an important milestone: a version of Chrome Frame that doesn’t require admin rights to install. While this might not jump out at you as a huge thing, it’s news for millions of users stuck working at offices or schools with older machines where admins won’t allow them to upgrade to newer, modern browsers. And some 30 percent of these users were not even able to install plug-ins for IE. Now there’s a way around that with the new dev build of Chrome Frame. You can install this within IE without needing admin access. Huge. Google has actually been . While Chrome Frame was always for helping the world ween itself off IE6, 7, and 8, the admin issue remained a large one as users couldn’t do much without this access to install the plug-in. Google has finally figured out a way around that. Russell was quick to note however that they also offer a range of tools for admins to use if they choose to, in order to set boundaries for Chrome Frame. But the admin issue was “a major roadblock” to the quick iterations that the entire Chrome team loves to do. So how did the team get around this problem? “Let’s talk backstage,” Joshi said with a big smile when asked this question. He said it’s a bit of a technical discussion. Russell said at a high level it was just about getting the technology to work in the browser itself rather than being seen as a traditional plug-in. When asked what Microsoft thought of this, neither Joshi nor Russell would comment. That probably says all you need to know right there. Again, this new feature is a part of the new dev build of Chrome Frame right now. It will be tested here and then roll out to the beta channel and then the stable channel eventually. |
Seventh-Gen Apple iPod Nano To Sport 1.3-Megapixel Camera? | Jordan Crook | 2,011 | 5 | 10 |
It looks as though the forthcoming seventh-generation iPod nano will undergo some hardware changes, specifically the addition of a 1.3 megapixel rear camera and the removal of the built-in clip. An alleged leaked picture of the next iPod nano showed up on Monday on the website . The report cites a source called “Ray” from California, so if you know any Rays, you might ask them if they know anything. This isn’t the first time we’ve gotten wind of a potential camera on the iPod nano. Back in April, an unverified photo made its way around the web, showing off the newest iPod nano with space in the back for a camera. Clearly, this has not been confirmed with Apple, but the Taiwanese tw.apple.pro blog correctly leaked the last six versions of the iPod nano. Still, that picture doesn’t really look convincing. [via ] |
Samsung Gives First 5000 Galaxy Tab 10.1s To Developers At Google I/O | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 5 | 10 |
The giveaways at Google I/O have become one of the most-publicized features of the conference; after all, the new features and frameworks matter to developers, but Oprah Moments tend to resonate on the internet. Previously it was handsets being given away, but this year, with blocking out the sun and tablets underdeveloped, it was Honeycomb that ended up in developers’ laps. Specifically, . Yep, 5000 of them are being distributed to Google’s dev base. This is pretty cool, since Samsung was previously a bit gun-shy about its new tablet, even publicly saying they had some work to do after the iPad launch. But the relaunch in March had them confident again, though the release was distant enough that we thought they might still have some work to do. I guess the developers at I/O will be able to tell us whether that’s true. If you’re looking to get your own, check eBay in a couple hours, or else wait until June 8, the planned release date for the 10.1. Personally I’m thinking about that 8.9 — a little smaller, but with mostly the same specs. The 10.1s given out at I/O won’t ship with , but will be getting it soon. |
Why Microsoft's Skype purchase means a Face-off with Apple's Facetime | Mike Butcher | 2,011 | 5 | 10 | Microsoft’s for is a massive bet for the tech giant. Although it look like it may well have , and bid against companies who weren’t seriously in the running (Google and Facebook), owning Skype means Microsoft has a much better positioning in mobile. But that’s not all. The implications of this deal for Facebook are actually far more interesting. Since Microsoft is an investor in Facebook, the latter will now have deep access to its investor’s assets. Being able to Skype from within Facebook means Mark Zuckerberg will not have to build his own VOIP communications platform – a seriously complex affair for 600 million users. Plus, the social network already has . But it also means both Microsoft and Facebook now have a stick with which to beat Apple and its emerging comms platform, Facetime. With Facebook integration Skype will not be so heavily linked to an actual device – as Facetime is with Apple devices. Note that Microsoft has pledged to “continue to invest in and support Skype clients on non-Microsoft platforms”. This means Apple is going to have to really pull of the stops on its communications strategy. Perhaps that’s what is for? |
Hi, I'm Jordan Crook, CrunchGear's Latest Gadget Writer | Jordan Crook | 2,011 | 5 | 10 | Hello there, world! The name’s Jordan Crook, and I thought I’d take a moment during my first day here at CrunchGear to introduce myself. Along with my passion for unicorns and long walks on the beach, most of my time is spent reading, reporting, and writing about technology, watching as much TV as possible, exploring the wonder that is New York City, and working on a “novel” that seems to be going nowhere as of late. After graduating with an English Literature degree from NYU, I dabbled in various walks of mobile, including but not limited to mobile marketing, mobile apps, and device reviews at publications like MobileMarketer and . My experience in other sectors of the technological world is limited, but I have long been fascinated with alternative forms of energy production, and other green-related technology. I’m still pretty green myself, but I’m learning as I go, and the more I learn, the more excited I am to be here writing for CrunchGear. Contact me at jordan at crunchgear dot com and follow me on Twitter @JordanRCrook ! |
Android Chief Rubin Hints At A New Nexus Device In Time For The Holidays | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 5 | 10 | Today at Google’s I/O conference in San Francisco, a group of executives sat down the with press to answer questions about the announcements made during the keynote earlier in the day. Much of the news revolved around Android, as did many of the questions. And since Android head was present, someone decided to ask about the future of Google’s own Nexus brand of devices. Google doesn’t actually manufacturer these devices but instead works closely with an OEM and carrier partner to produce a device that provides users with a clean and pure version of Android. Given that Google is now with carriers and OEMs to push up-to-date Android across the board, some wondered what this might mean for the Nexus devices? Not much, according to Rubin. And yes, you should expect a new one this year. “I think the Nexus has been the thing we use to set the bar,” Rubin said. “There will always be new ones coming out for the market,” he continued. So, when? “The cycles are holidays and the summer time,” he noted indicating that they’d be making an announcement at some point. Considering that we’re already creeping up on the summer, maybe Rubin meant that the new Nexus S 4G for Sprint was the summer device. That leaves the holiday device… So what will it be? A Nexus running Ice Cream Sandwich (the next version of Android that will unify the tablet Honeycomb OS with Android phones)? Perhaps. Rubin would only commit to the new OS launching “towards the end of the year”. |
Did Microsoft overpay for Skype? Hell yes — by $4.5 billion | Steve O'Hear | 2,011 | 5 | 10 | With Microsoft having , sources tell TechCrunch Europe that Redmond outbid its closest rival, Google, by almost two-to-one. Meanwhile, Facebook is said to have never been in the running. According to a source who claims knowledge of talks held between all parties, Google came in second at a price of $4B, while Microsoft will be paying $8.5B. This suggests that Redmond is for Skype, although only time will tell if it turns out to be a smart deal. What is known is that had Microsoft been aware of the price that Google was willing to pay it almost certainly would have come in lower. Meanwhile, according to our sources, Facebook was never actually in the running to buy Skype and may have simply been inadvertently used to turn up the heat on Microsoft to push through a deal. Facebook was never approached, says one source, but that this didn’t stop rumors that the social networking site was “sniffing around”, a tactic often employed to close a deal. The potential give-away is that the story circulating at the time put the emphasis on rather than Skype reaching out. Had the rumor been stronger, along the lines of “Skype is in talks with Facebook”, it could have caused a problem as the Microsoft discussions were far enough down the line, says our source, that Skype would have certainly have entered into a lockout, having accepted a deal in principal. In fact, GigaOm’s Om Malik , suggesting that Google wasn’t that serious either. “I also don’t believe that Facebook and Google were serious buyers”, he says, citing the existence of Google Voice. “In essence, I feel that Microsoft was bidding against itself.” |
Nuance Buys Enterprise Print Management Software Developer Equitrac For $157M In Cash | Leena Rao | 2,011 | 5 | 10 | a company that develops imaging and voice recognition technologies, has announced the of print management and cost recovery software developer Nuance is shelling out $157 million in cash for the company, and the deal is expected to close in September of this year. Equitrac’s software helps businesses effectively manage their printing environments, reduce printing costs, increase security and lessen their environmental impact. Users can print documents from their desktop as usual, then use card-swipe or log-in identification at a printer to view and select their documents for on-demand printing. In a hospital setting for example, care providers can securely access and print standardized forms or specific patient reports from printer. The company’s products seem to be complimentary and will be integrated into Nuance’s scanning software and other professional desktop applications. Many of Nuance’s resellers are also selling Equitrac’s software, including Canon, Xerox, Konica Minolta, Ricoh and HP. Nuance says that it expects the acquisition of Equitrac to add between $58 million and $60 million in non-GAAP revenue to the company. Of course, this acquisition is an additional sign that Nuance’s position with Apple is a partnership as opposed to full out acquisition. As we reported last week, Apple has been with Nuance for a likely partnership to license and use the company’s voice recognition technology. Yesterday, we that Apple may already be using Nuance technology in their new (but yet to be officially opened) massive data center in North Carolina. As we wrote then, Nuance is a massive company with a $6 billion market cap, meaning that Apple would have to shell out the big bucks to acquire it. With today’s news that Nuance is building out its own product portfolio with acquisitions, it seems more likely that Apple is partnering with Nuance. |
Sequoia And IDG Put $10 Million Into Mobile App Developer Sourcebits | Leena Rao | 2,011 | 5 | 10 | Startup has raised $10 million in Series A funding from and today. Sourcebits, which has operations in both India and Atlanta, creates apps for the iPhone, iPad, Android, BlackBerry, Palm Pre and Windows 7 mobile platforms. The company, whose client base includes companies ranging from Fortune 500 companies to small start-ups, has developed over 300 apps, 20 of which are in the top 100 in the Apple App Store, Android Market and other app stores. Some of startup’s more popular apps include Robokill, Knocking Live, Daily Deeds, Night Stand, Skyfire, Beast Farmer and more. For example, Night Stand, an app which converts the iPhone/iPad into an alarm clock, reached the number two spot for All Time Top Download on the iTunes App Store within four days of its release and has been downloaded more than 3 million times. Knocking Live, a live streaming app for iOS, has seen more than 2.3 million downloads. The new investment will be used to set up engineering and sales centers in the United States, as well as
augmenting a design engineering team in India and Europe. As mobile app usage and more pop up, developers with expertise in creating engaging apps for smartphone platforms will continue to be in demand. |
Google TV Finds New Friends And An Updated OS | Matt Burns | 2,011 | 5 | 10 |
Google’s mantra of launching products early and often didn’t exactly work with . It hit the ground with a gimped feature set and limited hardware options. The analogy of Android simply hasn’t held true as hardware makers and retail vendors alike simply haven’t picked up the devices. Today, at Google I/O, new hardware partners were announced as well as an updated OS. Google TV might finally be off the starting line. Samsung and Vizio are joining Logitech and Sony as hardware venders of Google TV. This announcement isn’t much of surprise, really. The two were rumored to have Google TV product announcements set for CES 2011 back in January, but nothing ever came of it. In fact another rumor told a tale of Google themselves delaying the product announcements. Google also announced that devs can start building apps for the platform using the normal Honeycomb SDK and that Google Market should hit the platform “soon.” Android 3.1 will hit Google TV this summer, but any changes were not announced. Still, we’re left wondering about Google TV’s future. It clearly looks more bright now than even at its much-hyped launch, but can Market access and 3.1 save one of Google’s more novel products? We’ll talk more once they hit. |
Apple Zeros In On Deals For Its Cloud Music Service | Erick Schonfeld | 2,011 | 5 | 19 | Apple is furiously negotiating with the record labels to finalize deals which will allow it to stream music from the Internet to mobile devices (iPhones, iPads, iPods) and computers. It just came to terms with Sony Music, according to a , which means that of the four major labels it’s got three down (EMI, Warner, and Sony), and one to go (Universal Music). Streaming rights are different than digital download rights so Apple had to renegotiate all of its music deals. A cloud music service would allow consumers to keep all of their music online and stream it to any device. Google and Amazon have both recently launched beta versions of cloud music services, but they are limited in features and functionality (watch our for more info). Both decided to push ahead with music lockers that do not require deals with the labels, and in so doing they may have . In any event, as soon as Universal gets on board, the last major barrier to Apple launching iTunes in the cloud will be removed. The question is: will iTunes remain a buy-to-own model, or will Apple start offering unlimited subscriptions? We can dream, but let’s take baby steps first. Simply getting all your music off your various devices and keeping them in one central location online will take away most of the hassles of managing your music collection on your own machine and syncing it to various mobile devices with limited storage capacity. |
Samsung Galaxy Tab 8.9 With TouchWiz Caught On Video (With Bonus Keyboard Dock) | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 5 | 19 | [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dp2kM5MLUio&w=640&h=390]
Samsung’s medium-size is my favorite of the upcoming Android tablets, just based on its form factor and pixel density. And after seeing it on video, I’m more convinced than ever that it’s a decent machine, though I’ll have to hold it in my hands before I’m sold on the TouchWiz UI, which looks a little bit laggy in this video. Also spotted was a new keyboard dock for the device, in shiny white and docking to the device in landscape mode: Nobody seems to have any idea what these Russian guys are saying, but if it’s anything like our own commentary, you may as well watch it on mute and provide your own. The tablet is the star of the show, so glean what you can of the new UI and watch out for interesting things like the install of Flash 10.3 they do. [via and ] |
HP TouchPad To Hit Wal-Mart For $599 | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 5 | 19 |
If this is legit, it looks like HP’s TouchPad will be coming to Wal-Mart for $599 for a 32GB model. We that it would be $699 earlier, and likely that price will still exist for the 64GB version. Will there be a cheapie one for $499? No word. , though, so stay tuned for further leaks as the launch date approaches. [via ] |
WorldTV sees full launch, flicks switch on in-app store for premium features | Steve O'Hear | 2,011 | 5 | 19 | After fours years of tweaking and pivoting, , which brings a TV channel-viewing experience to online video publishing, finally thinks it has the model right and is flicking the switch on an in-app store for à la carte premium features. The ‘friends and family’-funded company but after experimenting with an ad-supported model, which proved disappointing, and pitting this against selling add-on ‘subscription’ products, World TV has settled on the latter with the launch of its own custom-built store offering 33 subscription/add-ons available for instant purchase, some of which are available for a one-off payment while others produce recurring monthly revenue. These include various customisation to the look and feel of the video player, branding and EPG, along with the ability to run Google Adsense or other types of video advertising. This, says World TV, sets up the service to be more targeted at B2B, although a free basic version aimed at consumers will remain. In fact, the company already claims 1,000+ paying customers garnered through its testing period, while since launch in November 2007, World TV has amassed 100,000 active ‘Editor’ users and is seeing 1,000,000 active monthly viewers. In addition, more than 250,000 channels have been created, giving World TV the claim of being the “largest online TV network in the World”, although your definition of what constitutes an online TV network may vary. On that note, in the long term the service is targeting a new breed of Internet-connected televisions like those from Samsung, Sony and others, together with platforms such as Yahoo! ConnectedTV and Google TV. |
In The Future, The Robots Will Roll And Hover | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 5 | 19 | [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1JJzmfkufPE&w=640&h=390]
I’m not exactly enthused by the idea of these rolling/hovering hybrid crawling and zipping all over the earth. Sure, they could be useful in a military or rescue situation, able to conserve power by sitting comfortably on the ground but navigate freely in the air if necessary. But they could also be replicated at large by the machines when the comes, at which point they’ll roll over you and then hover over your lifeless body. For now I guess we should congratulate and his team at the University of Minnesota for creating a pretty cool little bot. Their design is solid, although right now there are two models, one that only flies and one that only rolls, since they haven’t worked out how to get the motor to power both drives. The next step is to make it simpler and lighter, and making the robot navigate autonomously instead of by remote. Isn’t it a little early for that, guys? Don’t need to bring down humankind any faster than necessary. [via ] |
Review: Blancier Desert Wolf | John Biggs | 2,011 | 5 | 19 | A lot of watchmaking is aspirational. Since the 1700s, watchmakers have wanted to create simulacrum of the items that explorers, engineers, and soldiers carried into their daily scrum for dandies on the boulevard who ascribed a sense of romance to their professions. That’s why watch collectors love war watches. They basically allow folks who may have never been to war to feel like they own something that could survive in the thick of things or, more valuable still, items that actually saw fighting. So when Butch went back to get his father’s war watch, it was because that cold hunk of metal meant something to him. It meant his father had fought for his freedom and then Christopher Walken did that thing that he did with the watch and then gave Butch his birthright, it was the passing of a physical object that signified something far more valuable than a case and some gears. It’s the way things have been for centuries. That’s why the Desert Wolf by Blancier is pretty cool. It’s a war watch designed for “desert environments” that honors our fighting men and women in the Middle East. The dial shows a map of the world and “of course” an American flag along with the Afghanistan’s coordinates. It has a double-sided non-reflecting sapphire crystal and has a bead plasted PVD coated steel case. As an added bonus they are donating $10 to the , a charity for soldiers. Is the dial a bit jingoistic? Yes. Is the watch generally cool? Absolutely. Is it worth $395? Sure. It contains a with date and 12 hour chronograph and it has a signed back and buckle. The buttons are at the top of the watch, in what is called a “bullhead” configuration, and it has a 45mm water resistant to 100 meters. To be clear, the is not a unique watch to Blancier. It is built around standard case that has been used in the past by <a HREF=" and, I suspect, other manufacturers. However, the folks at Blancier customized the dial and caseback and make a if this isn’t your style. The Blancier Desert Wolf is a bullhead chrono that, in the end, has a great provenance, is made by a great small manufacturer in Germany, and is cheap enough to warrant a second look. Is it perfect? No, some might find it goofy or garish but my wife, who likes big watches, along everyone who has seen it on her wrist think it’s quite cool and quite rugged. It’s a great beater watch and pays homage to soldiers. Who could hate that?
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The End Of Blippy As We Know It | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 5 | 19 | So it turns out that almost nobody wants people to check out their purchases. And also that just adding a social element to a feature isn’t enough to make it useful. The lessons of user adoption are sometimes learned the hard way. Thus is the story of the failure of a product that launched in private beta in December of 2009 and that we breathlessly fawned over , and , and and (and and …). “Imagine being able to see everything your friends buy with a credit card as they do it,” MG wrote. “This not only tells you what kind of things they’re actually into (rather than someone just saying they like something), but also other information like how cheap they are, as well as where they actually are at a given time.” What we failed to ask was, “Who cares?” Blippy raised almost $13 million in funding and at some point its valuation , with enviable investor posting his $8 million dollar purchase of Blippy stock on Blippy itself. Even Apple taking the concept of purchase sharing over to its (also failed) social music service Ping. But underneath all the sloppy kisses it seems like people were more in love with the Blippy concept (and the irony of its association with charismatic FuckedCompany founder Philip Kaplan) than the Blippy practice. According to CEO , and depending on what analytics service you’re using, Blippy traffic would spike whenever press would cover it and then subsequently die down to levels that showed no signs of steady growth. A trip to Blippy meant that you’d see your friends, but they were like bizarre versions of your friends that never did anything. I signed up for Blippy and didn’t share one teensy eensy purchase. But the site was innocuous enough. And then in April of last year Google Search results revealed that credit card numbers of a few Blippy users, and the resulting media spiral unsurprisingly caused a huge spike in Blippy traffic but tainted the service with an aura of mistrust. Despite Blippy’s sincere apology many rushed to delete their accounts. Things eventually quieted down as they are wont to do in media hype land. And then we kind of stopped writing about it, caught up in the hockey stick growth of Groupon and Facebook and Quora. We stopped writing about it so much so that we missed the fact that it pivoted from a purchase sharing site to a user reviews site, starting with the introduction of user reviews on July 23 2010 and then moving fully on to reviews by October of the same year. “One of the reasons we switched to reviews was to increase user engagement, but that hasn’t really increased either, “ Kumar told me resigned, revealing that Blippy has 100K registered users and that 30% have shared a purchase — Numbers that are not spectacular. The service never had a clear business model, just an attitude of “get user adoption and we’ll figure it out later.” But later never came. What did come was the sense (and the whispers and the TechCrunch tips) that Blippy was over and that it was time to move on. For co-founder Philip Kaplan this meant stepping down to go make a bunch of silly iPhone apps at the end of March, PE Hub’s Connie Loizos that Blippy was “doing better than most people could do … But it hasn’t, like, exploded into something huge yet.” Which basically meant that traffic had leveled off. And the loss of its figurehead left many, ourselves included, concerned about the service’s future. Well the truth is it doesn’t have much of one. While there are a few rays of hope (Blippy gets a lot of traffic from Google as it relates to mobile products) there was no clear direction to shine them in. Said Kumar, “The decision was whether to focus Blippy on mobile products or try something new and we made the decision that we wanted to try something new… Our key product metrics haven’t gone up, we iterated a lot but not enough to create significant user adoption, at least not enough to warrant us spending more time on it.” Ouch. Kumar also told me that the Blippy team has stopped innovating upon Blippy, and has moved on to other products in the social ecommerce space, but that it isn’t ready to reveal anything publicly yet, “We’re basically taking the things that we learned from Blippy and applying it to a new set of projects. All of them which are in the early stages,” Kumar said. The crazy connected investors behind the project are super supportive he said. “So should I put RIP Blippy in the headline of this post?” I asked Kumar “No. When people say Blippy I still associate Blippy with the company, and not the domain or the product that’s on the domain,” he replied, optimistic about the company’s new direction whatever it may be. For the record Kumar hasn’t shared a review on Blippy for . But hopefully he’s taken to heart the real reason Blippy didn’t work: Sharing purchases with friends doesn’t solve a problem. Challenge: Try to figure out what problem Blippy solves, or for that matter what Ping solves or what competitor Swipely solved (“We don’t think people want to share their purchases period,” CEO Angus Davis told me after his service had pivoted, “I don’t know how to be more emphatic than that. “) All three went up against the in the startup ecosystem, “Make something that people want.” And lost. |
Sheryl Sandberg: A Facebook IPO Is 'Inevitable' | Leena Rao | 2,011 | 5 | 19 | Today, LinkedIn its shares on the New York Stock Exchange, Facebook may not be too far behind in its own public offering. Facebook COO about the possibility of a Facebook IPO at Reuters Global Technology Summit today, saying that a public offering of Facebook shares is “inevitable.” Reuters reports that Sandberg declined to comment on when an IPO would take place. As stated in Sandberg said: “It’s a process that all companies go through. It’s an inevitable process for us, the next thing that happens…People used to ask us if we were going to get sold. People have stopped asking that question — we’re not … No one is buying us, we’re going public.” She also said that LinkedIn’s public offering “validated the importance” of the social networking business. Facebook is with bankers to discuss IPO size and time frame for an offering. It’s been thought that the social network will go public by but it could happen before this date. |
null | John Biggs | 2,011 | 5 | 10 | null |
Sony's New Color E-Paper Screen Shows That We're Not Quite There Yet | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 5 | 19 |
There’s no denying that the latest cool are making important advances. But that doesn’t mean they’re quite ready for prime time. Take the over at SID right now. Without a doubt it’s cool stuff, but be honest — would you buy something using it? Not just yet. This is the reason color are still LCD-based (and as a consequence, ) — the color e-paper is still extremely limited tonally. With a limited number of shades and generally washed out colors, even the cutting edge tech would be unimpressive to consumers. The benefits of bistable displays aren’t readily appreciated by people just looking for a cool e-reader or tablet, so for now they’ll be limited to trade shows like this one. Still, they’re getting these things mighty thin and light, and the flexibility is a plus, at least if it’s flexible enough to roll or fold. I’m sure as hell looking forward to that. I’d mention the specs but the report at seems to be talking about something different than the one they have a picture of, so you’ll have to figure that out on your own. |
Exclusive: London's Mayor holds first ever Twitter Q&A session | Mike Butcher | 2,011 | 5 | 19 | The Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, held his first ever interactive Q&A session with Twitter followers today, and TechCrunch Europe was the only external party allowed in to witness the event. To some extent I was also there actually happened! The session, which was not pre-announced, used the hashtag and quickly took off amongst the Mayor’s 152,000+ followers at 2pm today for a half an hour test session. The significance of the Mayor of London starting to use his Twitter account to interact with Londoners cannot be under-estimated. Despite having the account for over two years, it’s largely been used as a place to put broadcast-like PR statements and photos. Luckily, some smart people on the Mayor’s team have finally brought him around to the idea that Twitter is a two-way medium. And while there is no official confirmation yet that #AskBoris will become a regular event, on the encouraging evidence of today, it looks like it could well be. Meanwhile across the pond in New York, Mayor Bloomberg has successfully used both his and to get his message across. And #AskMike is a hashtag used in conjunction with a regular radio show. Indeed, the two Mayors share more than just Twitter habits. The two are both in the stages of trying to push their cities as to-ranked digital cities. Bloomberg to become America’s next, top digital city through with Facebook, Twitter, and NY-based startups Foursquare and Tumblr. Johnson, meanwhile now has the national UK government’s backing across East London in the lead-up to the Olympics and beyond, with the help Google, Facebook, Intel, Cisco and others. Here’s our exclusive interview with the Mayor, hastily recorded on an iPhone so apologies for sound quality: |
This Revolver Camera Shot A Picture And A Bullet Simultaneously | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 5 | 19 | I actually can think of good reasons for something like this to exist. Maybe for police pistols, for instance? Still, it’s a bit creepy, especially if those pictures on the side there were taken with live film live ammo. Hopefully they were just for demonstration. The camera is in the , but is given a “New York, 1938” locality. Maybe they tried them out for a little while, then? [via and ] |
1.6 Million Windows Phone 7 Handsets Were Sold Last Quarter | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 5 | 19 |
Gartner has just released some numbers describing the worldwide mobile market, and while these numbers haven’t been confirmed by the companies concerned, they still provide a valuable estimate of how things are going out there. Total handset sales grew nearly 20% over the same period last year, with smartphone sales nearly doubling. Android long ago passed up Symbian, and iOS showed huge sales gains but modest market share gains, being countered by Android’s explosive growth. One little blip worth noting is the modest but not insignificant 1.6 million Windows Phone 7 sales. For an OS in its infancy, from a company whose mobile strategy has been the subject of ridicule for years, 1.6 million is a perfectly strong start. If they keep that up and add a few on top, they could sell 10 million phones this year, which, while paling in comparison to the 50 million iPhones and 100 million Android phones (give or take a million score), is far from a failure. Whether it’s enough for Microsoft is something we’re unlikely to find out directly from them. But it’s no Kin, that’s for sure. Android had a slow start too, and WP7 is still undergoing serious changes. I’d like to see this interesting and different OS improve and sell more, though of course it depends on how hard Microsoft works to push out updates and the speed with which that Nokia partnership takes effect. Note that Microsoft hasn’t actually released this info, it’s an estimate by Gartner, presumably based on data from carriers, retail, and other trackers. |
Simplee Makes Your Medical Bills Understandable | Erick Schonfeld | 2,011 | 5 | 19 | Health care is a mess in this country, especially the payments and insurance side of the equation. But as I mentioned in my , a new group of startups are attacking the problem by giving consumers better information and tools to take control of their healthcare dollars. Let’s call it . Another startup launching today in private beta, , is very much part of this movement. Simplee is like Mint for your healthcare bills. (The first 500 readers to sign up to Simplee’s private beta with the invitation code TECHCRUNCH will get in). The time for this idea is definitely now
—just last week launched with a . Simplee has raised $1.5 million from Greylock Israel and a group of Israeli angels. CEO Tomer Shoval is Israeli, but the company is based in Palo Alto. Just like with Mint and your financial accounts, you give Simplee access to your medical insurance accounts. It then brings in all of your medical, dental, and pharmacy bills and presents them in an easy-to-understand dashboard. Simplee tells your total medical costs, how much you’ve paid out-of-pocket, your deductible, and how many doctor’s visits you and your family have had. This is all pretty basic information, but health insurance statements are so obtuse that most people have no idea how much they spend on health care. I know I don’t. Simplee does a good job of breaking it all down and showing you what you’ve spent, how much your insurance has paid, what you’ve paid, and how far along you are towards your deductible. It does this for every member of your family under the same insurance plans. Simplee lets you drill down to individual claims to see what your insurance paid, the negotiated discount, and what you owe. It’s like a statement of benefits that actually makes sense. Simplee currently supports eight of the largest health plans in the U.S (including Aetna, United Healthcare, Cigna, Empire BlueCross BlueShield, and BlueCross BlueShield of California), and is adding more every week. Shoval, who used to run Shopping.com in North America, says that his ultimate ambition is to “create a shopping engine for health.” But first he will go after low-hanging fruit, such as helping members pick a health plan based on their historical health expenses and doctors. The more data Simplee collects about your healthcare costs, the smarter it can become about suggesting alternatives or reminding you to take advantage of health perks you may have overlooked. Startups like Simplee aren’t going to solve the problems of the healthcare industry overnight. But if the first step to solving a problem is to measure it, then Simplee is a promising first step. |
Inside F1's 20-button Super Steering Wheel | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 5 | 19 | [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aphrHIAI1JY&w=640&h=390]
F1 racing has long been a technology battle, and while the driver is an important component, his role has been increasingly supplemented by computers and engineers. This is perhaps no more visible than on the steering wheel which, once just the way you changed the direction the tires pointed, has turned into an Xbox-esque controller for a huge variety of precision settings and high-tech abilities. This video from Mercedes does a good job showing off what the various dials, switches, and buttons do, but just for a more concise explanation. Not all steering wheels are the same, obviously, but all F1 cars must have this level of quick access and control in order to be competitive. This one is from Sauber. Just imagine trying to keep track of that while going 150 in the wet: Yeah, I’d probably have a heart attack. My respect for F1 drivers (already pretty high) just went up another notch. [via ] |
Cartridge Hack Creates Super Mario All-Stars… For NES | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 5 | 19 | [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jlYERtcknKc&w=640&h=390]
I’ve always been slightly bothered by the updated graphics in Super Mario All-Stars, but at the same time I can’t deny that it’s a fantastic cartridge to have around. Hacker Callan Brown apparently felt the same way, and decided to do a little investigation into perhaps remedying the situation. The result? A sweet megacartridge with an old-school way of selecting which game you want. Brown looked at the circuit layout and found that with a little work, he could wire it up so that the reset signal not only reset the console, but switched which part of the cartridge’s memory was being read. Normally it would just start from the beginning (that’s why it’s called, you know, ) but the memory-managed ROM he installed on the cartridge could tell it to start from a different point, so that every time you reset, it boots a different game. Excellent! The titles on board are Super Mario Bros 2, 3, Lost Levels, and a ROM hack of SMB3. No SMB1, for some reason. Still pretty sweet. You could even do one with all the Mega Man games, or… well, anything. Brown notes that the next thing he’s working on is an “arcade-quality” Arkanoid controller. [via ] |
New 360 Update Rolling Out, Old 360 Update Bricking Some Consoles | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 5 | 19 | Microsoft is rolling out a new update to the Xbox 360 which adds a few new features. Gamers in some countries can now link their PayPal accounts to their 360s and buy stuff that way, and standby mode has been tweaked. Coincident with this update (coming over the next two weeks) comes the news that a recent firmware update adding support for the new expanded disc capacity feature may not be playing nicely with some 360s. But don’t worry, Microsoft is on the case. In fact, you might wish was getting bricked. From Microsoft: Following a recent update to our system software, we have become aware of an issue that is preventing a very small number of Xbox 360 owners from playing retail game discs. This issue manifests itself a as a unique ‘disc unreadable’ or ‘disc unsupported’ error on the screen. We are also able to detect this issue over Xbox Live and are proactively reaching out to customers that may be impacted to replace their console. The unlucky/lucky few will receive a brand spanking new 250GB Xbox 360 S and a year of Xbox Live Gold access. If you’re having this problem, to start the process. Good on them for doing the right thing here, though apparently the bricking has been happening for a little while now. After the rocky launch (never forget) of the 360 and in the light of Sony’s continuing hacking troubles, Microsoft’s generous customer service is no surprise. |
From Business.com To Brighter, Jake Winebaum Introduces A DIY Dental Plan | Erick Schonfeld | 2,011 | 5 | 19 | It is no revelation that the healthcare payment system in America is broken. That includes dental plans, where an estimated 50 percent of the $110 billion Americans spend each year on dental bills is paid out of pocket. Jake Winebaum thinks there is a better way to reduce those out-of-pocket expenses, and he’s quietly launched to offer online marketplace for dental care with negotiated discounts. Brighter is part of a new class just now beginning to emerge. These work outside the traditional health insurance industry. “Our mission is to provide affordable dental care to people without dental insurance,” says Winebaum, who is best known for starting Business.com in 1999 and eventually selling it for . He founded Brighter last year, and raised $5 million from Mayfield in January. Brighter is a simple service. You put in your zipcode and the procedure you are looking for, and it returns all of the dentists nearby, along with the prices they charge for each procedure and any negotiated discount. Brighter already has negotiated discounts with 25,000 dentists in North America, about a quarter of the total. Brighter offers 20 to 30 percent discounts off the bat for free off of what you’d pay without insurance, and up to 60 percent off if you buy the $79/year plan. The first 500 TechCrunch readers to book a dental appointment through Brighter and use the code will get a free premium plan for a year. Brighter also offers plans for small businesses which cost $49 per employee—this one could become popular at all those startups without dental plans. Unlike insurance, there are no caps and no procedures are off limits. You can see exactly how much the procedure will cost online and even shop around. Compare that to the way it works today. Patients only find out, says Winebaum, “what something will cost them when they are sitting in the dentist chair—not a great place to have negotiating leverage.” Dentists like it because they get paid right away and don’t have to argue with insurance companies for services already rendered. When you do a search on Brighter, dentists come up based on rates, ratings, and proximity. It pulls in Yelp ratings and reviews, or you can add your own ratings on Brighter. You can even give your dentist a Facebook like. There are 40,000 a day about dentists. “Those are people in need,” notes Winebaum. |
Apple Patents A Streaming Music Service That Has A Key Advantage Over Current Providers | Matt Burns | 2,011 | 5 | 19 |
Streaming media is the future. You know this if you’ve used Netflix, Rdio, Grooveshark or any of the other popular music services. Apple is said to be getting into the game as well and from 2009 shows iTunes streaming will in fact offer something different from the rest of the players. As much as I love Rdio, and I do love Rdio, I can’t always guarantee that the mobile app will start playing music when I press play. There’s always this waiting game as my Droid X fights for enough Verizon bandwidth to start streaming. Once the little blue bar partially fills up, signifying that there’s enough of a buffer for seamless playback, the song starts. This is where Apple will offer something better and different. This patent describes a cloud music service that stores part of the media locally. This way there’s no waiting and when you press play and the device will start with just a sliver of the media, being a song, book, or movie, from a local source while keying up the rest from the cloud. Apple describes the service as being “seamless and invisible to the user,” and if it works as described, it probably will be. The patent also describes a scheme where chunks throughout the media file are stored locally rather than just the beginning, which could be more of a built-in security feature than a buffer for the stream.
According to a chart in the filing, it seems this will be optional as there’s a check box to “Sync partial music” noting that the minimum connection speed is 3G. Of course this would free up considerable amount of space, but would likely only work for music currently in a person’s iTune collection and not available for on-demand streaming like Rdio or Spotify is known for — perhaps once an on-demand song plays once, a portion is cached permanently though. Now this is just a patent, from 2009 no less, so the exact cloud music service Apple rolls out could be different, but we all know that it will likely be, as Apple says here, seamless and invisible to the user. (and locked down as tight as Jobs & Co. can manage) |
Supercell Raises $12m from Accel Partners to power social web games | Mike Butcher | 2,011 | 5 | 26 | The trend towards online browser-based games continues to attract the attention of VCs who recognise that this will be the platform of choice going forward. Thus it is that Finnish game developer has secured a large series A investment of $12 million from Accel Partners which has already invested in Rovio (maker of Angry Birds), Playfish, Gameforge and Mind Candy (Moshi Monsters). Such a large Series A Joining the round is Klaas Kersting, founder of German browser-game giant Gameforge and currently CEO of flaregames. London Venture Partners, one of Supercell’s previous investors, also participated. Previous investors include Initial Capital, Cerval Investments and Lifeline Ventures. Supercell’s has so far created 165 games across 12 platforms, aiming at a sweet spot in social games which are also easier to deal with than massively-multiplayer games like World of Warcraft. Founded in June 2010, it’s developed , typical of the approach in that it can be developed in an agile manner and roll out features in co-operation with its fan community, unlike MMOs which required regular software updates. The kinds of games Supercell wants to create sit between browser-based massively-multiplayer games and social games. Games are free to play and virtual goods are the main revenue source. Users can also sign in via Facebook and play games with friends. Accel partner Kevin Comolli revealed to me that the team is largely made up of people who are ex-Digital Cholocate, the legendary games house, including CEO Ilkka Paananen who worked there for about a decade. This goes some way to explaining why this team is producing such games at such a level. |
PayPal Lawsuit Against Google Reveals Recruiting Saga And A Deal Gone Sour | Erick Schonfeld | 2,011 | 5 | 26 | Google is making a to enter , and PayPal doesn’t like it one bit. Shortly after Google announced its new mobile wallet for Android phones today, Paypal against Google and two former PayPal executives who now are in charge of mobile payments at Google ( r and ). The complaint (embedded below) alleges “misappropriation of trade secrets, and “breach of fiduciary duty.” It revolves around Osama Bedier, who was the VP of Platform, Mobile, and New Ventures at PayPal before he was recruited to work at Google by Android chief Andy Rubin, Google co-founder Larry Page, and Bedier’s former PayPal colleague Stephanie Tilenius (who now heads up Commerce and Payments at Google, and I onstage at Disrupt NYC). The lawsuit reveals that Google was negotiatiating with PayPal for two years to power payments on mobile devices. But just as the deal was about to be signed, Google backed off and instead hired the PayPal executive negotiating the deal—Bedier. The lawsuit lays out the sequence of events: By 2010, the executive in charge of the negotiations for PayPal was Osama Bedier. The executive in charge of the negotiations for Google was Andy Rubin. PayPal and Google had a deal finalized and signature-ready on October 26, 2010. By that time, unknown to PayPal, Bedier had just finished a series of job interviews with Google senior executives, culminating with a meeting on October 21 between Bedier, Google Senior Vice President Jonathan Rosenberg, and then-President of Google Larry Page. Though Google’s leadership had directed negotiations toward the October 26 finalization months earlier, it now balked when presented with the very deal they had requested. The companies had a term sheet, a two phase roll-out with dates, and all other details nailed down. But, in the interim, Google’s leadership had interviewed Bedier, Rather than inking the October 26 deal, Google instead at the last minute professed a shift in mindset on the entire structure of the deal. Bedier was offered a job at Google on October 31. He didn’t take it immediately, but after a few months of back and forth, he finally accepted the job in January, 2011. All of this coincided with Larry Page taking over as CEO, and a shift in Google’s strategy to build instead of partner in mobile payments. The lawsuit notes that Bedier knew all of PayPal’s future plans for mobile payments, as well as an internal detailed analysis of Google’s weaknesses in the area. Not only that, it accuses him of storing “confidential eBay information in locations such as his non-PayPal computers, non-PayPal e-mail account, and an account on the remote computing service called ‘DropBox.'” What did Bedier do with all of these “trade secrets”? The implication is that he used his knowledge of PayPal’s strategy to craft Google’s (yup, the same one revealed today). He also used that knowledge to sell Google’s mobile wallet to big retailers: Bedier has also been part of a Google team making sales calls to major retailers, PayPal is informed and believes and on that basis alleges that during these sales efforts, Bedier has been and is improperly comparing Google’s products and services with PayPal’s products and services in discussions with customers that both PayPal and Google are courting. In particular, on information and belief, Bedier’s comparisons incorporate PayPal trade secrets, including PayPal’s schedule for deployment, anticipated features, and back-end approach to mobile payment, point of sale, and the benefits of a wallet in the cloud. And finally, he actively recruited other PayPal employees, just as Tilenius helped to recruit him (which is why she is named in the suit as well). Assuming this thing gets settled before it goes to court, how much is hiring Bedier going to end up costing Google? : I asked Google for a comment last night about this lawsuit. Today, a spokesperson gave me this statement: “Silicon Valley was built on the ability of individuals to use their knowledge and expertise to seek better employment opportunities, an idea recognized by both California law and public policy. We respect trade secrets, and will defend ourselves against these claims.” [scribd id=56427206 key=key-psdkjuarvwplalmg6x5 mode=list] [scribd id=56427206 key=key-psdkjuarvwplalmg6x5 mode=list] |
Cydle i30 Brings Live Television To The iPhone | Jordan Crook | 2,011 | 5 | 26 | I happen to be a huge fan of television on demand. Without cable, I guess I’d have to be. In fact, If I was better at keeping up with Foursquare check-ins, I’d probably be the Mayor of , and I’ve had bookmarked since its launch. But every so often, I get jealous of those who can watch “real” TV, with their commercial references and obscure made-for-television movies. But apparently, people like me won’t have to be jealous for long, as a new device has surfaced in filings that gives users the ability to watch live broadcast digital television straight from the . It’s called the Cydle i30, and it wraps around the back of the iPhone, sticking out past the bottom. The new device has an adjustable antenna to make sure you’ve got a strong signal, and then the antenna sends the video to the phone over Wi-Fi. Plus, for those of us who need every ounce of battery juice we can get, the Cydle i30 has its own integrated battery. Obviously, you won’t want this thing strapped on to your phone all the time, but for live sporting events or breaking news, it’ll definitely come in handy. As of now, broadcast networks have live events on lock for the most part, with the exception of a few live feeds on YouTube Live. [via ] |
Windows 8 For Tablets To Debut Next Week? | Jordan Crook | 2,011 | 5 | 26 | Rumors have been flying around the web lately about when we’ll get a chance to check out ’s forthcoming tablet software, and according to and , Windows chief Steve Sinofsky will unveil the latest tablet OS at the AllThingsDigital D:9 conference next week. Microsoft has yet to make a formal announcement about the highly anticipated preview, but Bloomberg confirmed the demo with three separate sources, so as far as rumors go, this one seems pretty true. According to the report, Sinofsky’s exhibition will show Windows 8 tablets using an Tegra chip, and Microsoft OEM chief Steve Guggenheimer will give a similar demo in Taiwan next week. We’ve seen some leaked photos of Windows tablets and a potentially new touch interface, but this will be the first time we get an official glimpse of Microsoft’s tablet plans. Hopefully these demos won’t include any false information, like that given earlier this week when Steve Ballmer promised a Windows 8 arrival next year. Microsoft retracted the statement on his behalf shortly thereafter. [ via ] |
Apple Sues NY Teenager For Selling $130,000 Worth Of White iPhone Conversion Kits | Jordan Crook | 2,011 | 5 | 26 | The level of controversy surrounding the beautiful, yet mystical, white may have reached critical mass today. First, the launch was delayed by ten months, which peeved quite a few fans, to say the least. Then, once the white iPhone finally reared its said-to-be fat head, reviewers had a field day claiming the smartphone was thicker than its black counterpart, which proved false. Today, almost a month after the phone launched, Apple sued a teenager from Queens, NY who had been selling white iPhone conversion kits. Fei Lam, who purchased white iPhone 4 conversion from Apple manufacturing partner , made a whopping $130,000 off the “entrepreneurial” project, selling his kits for $300 a pop. Interestingly enough, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak was one of many to place an order on Lam’s site, WhiteiPhone4now.com. The already-settled suit alleges that Lam engaged in deceptive practices, including trademark infringement and dilution, as well as compromising the company’s relationship with its customers by muddling their perception of the official white iPhone release date. “Defendant Lam willfully and without authorization has used Apple’s trademarks in connection with the sale of his ‘White iPhone 4 Conversion Kits’,” Apple said. “Among other things, Apple’s logo and ‘iPhone’ trademarks are used in connection with the promotion and sale of the iPhone 4.” But Lam wasn’t the only one stung by the suit, as his parents were also named in the complaint. According to Apple, Lam’s parents acted as partners in the sales, and pushed their son to create the business under their supervision. Apple has requested a permanent injunction to stop the Lams from any further white conversion kit sales, and asked the family to turn over any and all profits generated from their enterprise, along with legal expense reimbursement and additional financial retribution. [via ] |
Ebert Takes On The "Dim Movie Projection" Issue | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 5 | 26 |
You’ve probably read about how some theaters are neglecting to take off the lenses made for 3D films when showing other movies, and the result is a dim, muddy movie. There are a number of reasons for this, but the end is always the same, and Roger Ebert is fed up with it. He breaks down the issue and laments the state of theaters and projectors . The take-away? If the movie looks bad, ask them to fix it or get your money back. Only the customers can keep theaters honest. |
Alcatel OneTouch T60 Tablet Passes Through FCC | Jordan Crook | 2,011 | 5 | 26 | It seems that , budget-friendly feature phone and smartphone maker, has decided to enter the tablet race using its OneTouch brand name. We spotted the (approximately) 7-inch slate as it received from the earlier today, and as far as we can tell, the Alcatel OneTouch T60 is shaping up to be a smart-looking product for the first-time tablet maker. In terms of specs, the OneTouch T60 runs 2.2 Froyo, and features Wi-Fi and 3G connectivity (850 / 1900 MHz). The tablet comes with GPS support, Google Maps, a 3.5mm headphone jack, 3-megapixel rear camera, and a VGA front-facing camera for video chat. And if storage becomes a problem, the Alcatel OneTouch T60 supports microSD cards. Based on these specs, and Alcatel’s long-standing habit of selling affordable phones, we expect its first slate to be wallet friendly, too. No word yet on pricing or availability, but once we know, you will, too. [via ] |
Polaroid's New GL10 Instant Printer Is Available For Pre-Order, Ships In June | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 5 | 26 | While there’s no sign yet of the introduced by Lady Gaga at CES, the printer is actually nearing a shipping date. This little printer connects to your computer or smartphone and produces 3×4″ prints in about 45 seconds. The paper is probably going to be super expensive, but hey. It costs $169 and the website says it should ship in June. We’ll see what we can do about getting it reviewed before then. |
CrunchDeals: Free Shipping On Cable Orders | John Biggs | 2,011 | 5 | 26 | Do you need some freaking cable? Yeah you do, you know it! Where do you get it? Duh? Like the cable store! Like the cable store called CableSupply. So these dudes, in order to form a more perfect cable experience, are offering free shipping on orders of $99 or more. Bang. You’re like “Cables? Where do I go for cables?” and they’re like “Durrrrr… Here!” No coupon codes, but they’re one of the first cable sellers to pull the shipping charges. Also note that this doesn’t apply to bulk cable so your perversions will have to remain checked. |
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EcoMotors Chief Don Runkle: "Electric Vehicles Are Not 'Zero Emissions'" | Lora Kolodny | 2,011 | 5 | 26 | The chief executive officers of two very different clean tech startups, and , discussed the relative merits and limitations of clean vehicle technology at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York on Wednesday. designs and manufactures all-electric motorcycles and the battery technology and software that powers them, while designs and makes more efficient combustion engines. EcoMotors’ CEO Don Runkle roundly criticized clean tech advocates who say all-electric vehicles (EVs) are “zero emissions.” Causing a bit of a stir in the conference hall, Runkle, the former VP of engineering at GM, went on to claim that EcoMotors’ engine technology enables car companies to produce diesel-powered vehicles that have a lower, overall carbon footprint Given that electric vehicles don’t produce diesel exhaust, and don’t use fossil fuels, how can this be? Runkle explained: more than 50 percent of the world’s power is generated by the burning of coal, today, and that had to factor into the “carbon footprint” assessment of all-electric vehicles. Brammo CEO Craig Bramscher said that he refrains from calling his company’s plug-in, electric motorcycles — including the Enertia, Empulse, Engage and Encite (some models have yet to hit the road) – “zero emissions vehicles.” During a live broadcast backstage following the session, Bramscher noted that power generation is changing, and coal will become a smaller piece of the overall energy equation over time. He also said, “The argument you have to burn coal to generate electricity is true but [electric vehicles] still 92 percent more efficient [than combustion]…” On the main stage, Bramscher said that personally, he didn’t want his children fighting to defend an oil field as petroleum resources become strained. He would be much happier when they grow up if they could find work designing or making batteries, instead. Watch the video from the session on Disrupting Transportation (above) and the backstage interview with Craig Bramscher (below) to learn more about emerging clean vehicle technology from Ecomotors and Brammo. [Ed’s note: TechCrunch founder and editor Michael Arrington makes a cameo appearance with Craig Bramscher.]
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No Spotify inside Facebook, two record labels still needed for US launch | Mike Butcher | 2,011 | 5 | 26 | There has been some interesting speculation regarding the relationship between hot (at least in Europe) music streaming service and gargantuan social platform . Now Forbes is that Facebook has partnered with Spotify on a streaming service that “could be launched in as little as two weeks” via a Spotify icon in a user’s newsfeed. However, our sources are pouring ice cold water on the idea. The reasons are thus: Even through Spotify is doing very well on its home turf of Sweden… and has launched in Finland, France, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain and the UK – it has yet to launch in the US. And a launch in the next two weeks looks highly optimistic. Our sources say the reason is that Spotify has in fact secured two big unnamed record labels – but needs two more labels to come on board before it can launch in the US. Since those negotiations are ongoing and complex, to suggest that it might be two weeks away from launching a brand new service on the US-audience heavy Facebook would be highly premature. And the information I have is that they wouldn’t launch a service on Facebook at all unless it was global+US. It is far more likely that Spotify would first launch its US service – probably still several weeks or even months away – and only well after their traction data was gathered think about partnerships with the likes of Facebook or others. Part of the reason the media keep putting Facebook and Spotify in bed together is to do with the ability to share Spotify playlists with Facebook friends. This is not a complex integration and the kind of thing lots and lots of other startups do, to allow users to leverage their Facebook social graph within an application. But it is a way from saying Spotify is going to deeply integrate with Facebook. And although Facebook has made very nice noises about Spotify – including Mark Zuckerberg the platform – it’s unlikely that Spotify would run it’s full, premium service through Facebook. If they did anything it would be a taster service, along the lines of the , where the record labels effectively told Spotify that users should no longer have a free lunch. So, there you have it. There’s no sign – as far as we can see – of Spotify streaming inside Facebook in the next two weeks, because there is no sign of a US launch for the music startup until it has at least two more record labels on board. And even then, a Facebook deal would be some time after that, if at all. |
Gmail's 'People Widget' Takes On Rapportive, No Browser Plugin Required | Jason Kincaid | 2,011 | 5 | 26 |
It’s probably not a good sign that I’m this excited about an email widget, but there you go. Google has just that it’s rolling out a new feature over the next week called the People Widget — a small sidebar to the right of email messages that features contextual information about the people you’re interacting with in Gmail. I don’t have the feature active yet so I’m going by the screenshots provided, but it looks like the widget includes each person’s job title, recent email exchanges you’ve had with them, photo, calendar availability, and shared Google Docs. It also includes Buzz updates (hopefully Twitter integration is coming as well). If you only exchange a handful of messages a day then this probably isn’t a game changer for you, but if you’re constantly having to deal with a flurry of projects and hundreds of contacts, then it could be a godsend. Of course, Google actually isn’t the first company to offer contextually relevant information within Gmail (strange as that may sound). Startups like and have created browser widgets that offer similar functionality. Rapportive actually includes information from more sources, including LinkedIn, Skype and our own CrunchBase. But Gmail has a couple big advantages: first, it obviously doesn’t require a browser plugin, which is important from a user-acquisition standpoint. And, for those of us who are paranoid about our email, Gmail’s People Widget doesn’t require you to entrust any of your account information to a third-party. Rapportive only looks at the contacts you’re interacting with (and not your message content), but that’s still something. |
Now You Can See Twitter The Way I See Twitter | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 5 | 26 | Twitter has rolled out a nifty little feature. Now on anyone’s profile, when click on the “Following” link, you’ll be able to see exactly how they see Twitter. In other words, you can see the same timeline of tweets that they see when they’re looking at their main feed. It’s a cool feature that makes sense from a discovery standpoint. If you know I’m a power Twitter user that probably follows a bunch of good people, you can now quickly scan the tweets those people send out and see which ones you want to follow. This is a similar concept to what does for news stories. There, you look at a person’s profile and can see the shared links that they see in their Twitter stream. (It’s also worth noting that Twitter actually had this feature back in the day but shut it off a number of years ago.) The old “Following” option (a list of users another user follows) is still there under the “People” tab. Here, you’ll also find a “You Both Follow” area, which is nice. It’s important to note that you won’t be able to see protected tweets from users you don’t follow, obviously. Also worth noting: the feature doesn’t show you what I see since I see my own tweets, but Twitter removes those when you look my following stream (makes sense since I’m not actually following myself — though I would, if I could). The feature is still rolling out, so if you don’t see it just yet, don’t panic. Just wait longer. If you do see it, . : One more little discovery bonus. If you look at the upper right corner of the following page you’ll see a “shuffle” icon. Hovering over this reveals the option to “jump to someone you follow”. So you can jump between people you follow and find new people to follow from their streams. : |
Google Unveils Wallet And Offers: An Open Platform For Mobile Payments | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 5 | 26 | We’re here at Google’s massive HQ in New York City (they own an entire block) for what Google was calling a “partner event” but everyone knew was . Sure enough, Stephanie Tilenius, Google’s VP of Commerce, has taken the stage to announce Google Wallet and Google Offers. Right off the bat, Tilenius wanted to make it clear that this would be an open platform. She invited “payment networks, carriers, banks, join us in creating tomorrow’s shopping experience”. And some of those partners are already on board. Citi, Mastercard, FirstData, and Sprint are the initial partners. |
Fly Or Die: LiveScribe Connect And The T-Mobile G-Slate | John Biggs | 2,011 | 5 | 26 | Earlier this week we gave you a little sneak peek at the new Livescribe Connect service but we also looked a bit more closely at the T-Mobile G-Slate, Big Fuchsia’s wild 3D tablet. Erick was generally nonplussed with both products but this is the year of the Android tablet and this is one of the most unique devices we’ve seen this year. We ran a review of the a few weeks ago and talked about the on Monday. |
90% Of Users Join Tumblr From Blogs, 85% Of Those Users Are Still Blogging A Week Later | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 5 | 26 | Perhaps the service is demonstrating sustained success because of its organic user acquisition methods; 90% of Tumblr’s new registrations come through Tumblr blogs themselves. Says Karp on the new users, “90% come from the Join Tumblr button up in the corner of blogs, the Follow button on blogs, typing in Tumblr after you’ve visited a blog on Tumblr so you’re trying to investigate what this thing is that they’re using, or clicking the Powered by Tumblr link at the bottom of the screen.” This means that the other 10% are either typing in Tumblr.com directly or Googling. Once registered 85% of users are still posting a week after sign up. There are on Tumblr, and that number seems to be rapidly rising. “Frankly, [there’s] pretty little incentive to sign up,” says Karp. “It’s not like you have to register to comment on those blogs or to interact with them. But people see these things that people are doing with Tumblr and it inspires them to want to try that for themselves.” |
Startup Mantra: Hire Fast, Fire Fast | Mark Suster | 2,011 | 5 | 26 | I have often said that what separates real entrepreneurs from pundits and bystanders is a bias towards getting things done versus over analyzing things. My credo has always been . It’s the hardest thing to teach people who come out of big companies, out of conservative jobs. At the big consulting firms, investment banks and established large technology companies we’re taught to produce long reports, make sure that every document is perfect quality and that every possible bit of diligence has been done. Good enough isn’t. And so things operate on a CYA basis. That doesn’t work in a startup. There’s a certain cadence that you can feel when you spend time hanging any well-run startup company. The management team has to have a bias toward making decisions. They know that a 70% accurate decision made quickly and based on sound principles is better than a 90% decision made after careful consideration. The startup entrepreneur knows that they’re going to be wrong often. They’re flexible and willing to admit when they’re wrong. They don’t create a culture of punishment for mistakes. They live be the credo that if you’re never making mistakes you’re not trying hard enough. In my mind the sign of a great entrepreneur is the one that spots the 30% scenario quickly and adjusts but doesn’t get gun shy about rapid decision-making in the future. In fact, analysis paralysis drives me fucking bonkers. It is not uncommon in a meeting for me to say, “There are three choices: A, B, C. My gut tells me that we ought to do B. But let’s decide as a group. I don’t care if my view isn’t selected. Let’s make a decision and move on.” Many people find this uncomfortable. The world is filled with people who don’t like having to put their neck on the line and say what they think. I don’t really care if I’m wrong as long as I’m not dogmatic if evidence later shows we need to change course. So that was a long walk into the topic of recruiting. But given that I believe the success of startups is almost entirely correlated with having extra-ordinary talent, the ability to source, select and inspire new staff to join is one of the greatest early tests of entrepreneurs. There is an old management adage that says, “Hire slowly, fire fast.” The idea has become conventional wisdom. It says that you need to take due care in selecting team members. It also says that you need to act quickly when your instinct says somebody isn’t working out. Only half of this adage is accurate for startups.
This is the bit I have a problem with. I don’t think that recruiting is any different than any other decision process in a company. You’re never really going to know how somebody is going to perform in the role, how good of a cultural fit he or she is going to be and how motivated they’re going to become until they’re on the inside. I’m not arguing that no screening is required. There are obvious questions you have give staff to get a gut feel on cultural fit, intelligence, aptitude and the like. But here’s the thing. I see many teams that feel the need to interview another 3 candidates just to be sure. They suffer the decision on the way in. They over think the decision framework. I come from the “ ” school of recruiting and decision-making. If you haven’t read it, you should. As humans most of us are inherently good at reading people and our innate instincts for “fit” are much better than our ability to analyze humans on a spreadsheet. I also subscribe to the views that you should always be recruiting (ABR) and when great people pop up you hire them and then find a way to make the role fit. I’d much rather have the super bright, super ambitious, great cultural fit in my business now than look for the “perfect” person who’s done this job before and maybe find them in 3 months. 3 months is a lifetime in a startup. If you haven’t read it I’ve written before on these topics:
1.
2.
3. And just as my gut feel about the likely success of startups is often determined by looking at their velocity of product development and market progress of their product, so too is recruiting a factor in my assessment. Great leaders and great teams have the ability to find potential staff, evaluate their fit, inspire them to join and onboard them. They have good recruiting velocity. Any team that I work with that struggles to hire people quickly knows that I’m likely frustrated because I have many other companies that I work with that aren’t so slow. And when we didn’t ship product on time, didn’t get the biz dev deals we wanted competed, didn’t get our market messages out and the founder says, “sorry, I had too many other priorities – like fund raising” they know it will fall on deaf ears with me. Time spent onboarding new talented team members always yields more productivity than doing everything yourself. “But we don’t have budget!” Great entrepreneurs find a way. Recruiting cadence matters.
I’ve written in the past about changing jobs too frequently and I received a lot of blow-back from technical people who said, “I had asshole CEOs. When we hit a bump in the road he was very quick to slash-and-burn.” I was trying to argue that it’s OK to change jobs a few times when you’re young and that “things happen” but that if things happened 5-6 times there is probably a pattern that isn’t completely the fault of some asshole boss. But people don’t like to hear about firing or job cuts, so I was flamed. So I have been reluctant to weigh in again on the topic publicly. Brad Feld and I were discussing the topic at lunch at the most excellent this week in Boulder. He encouraged me to write this post and after I had no choice. ;-) Outed. So here goes. I have on many occasions regretted not firing somebody quickly enough. I don’t take any pride in letting somebody go. I recognize that it affects somebody economically, can affect somebody’s personal life and is one big blow to the ego. But if you’re afraid of firing people you shouldn’t be an entrepreneur. No startup company has any spare capacity for dead weight. I’ve made every excuse to myself in the past, “I can’t fire him now, he owns the customer relationships and it’s a crucial point in our sales process.” Or, “I haven’t given him a long-enough chance to prove himself – let me see how he develops” or even, “it will have a big impact on morale because she is well liked. I can’t afford that right now.” I’ve heard VCs use similar rationale, “We knew the CEO wasn’t working out but we couldn’t fire him because it would have made it too hard to get a fund raising round done” only to later regret not moving more quickly and reacting to the obvious discontent of the rest of the startup team. I’ve lived through every excuse. And for every firing procrastination I’ve made, one month afterwards I’ve always felt the exact same way, “Why didn’t I do this three months early?” Trust me: if you know, you know. If you know, do it now. Things don’t get better. Your “Blink” instincts are right. You won’t patch things up. Delaying the inevitable is not going to make things smoother with your investors, biz dev partners, customers or employees. There is only one answer: fire fast. Firing somebody is no different than the other 10,000 decisions you need to make in your company to survive. You free up much needed budget. You free up the org chart to bring in new blood. Almost universally your staff will come out of the wood-works and say, “thank you, he needed to go.” When people aren’t pulling their weight other members who are know it. And they’re grateful to work in an organization where they’re valued and slackers aren’t. When you have to fire somebody, don’t pussyfoot about. Don’t make up fake excuses about why they’re going or try to pretend it’s a redundancy or something. Tell them specifically what isn’t working. Don’t be mean for the sake of it. Give them suggestions of how they might think about the situation differently at the next company. Give them honest and constructive feedback. If the sacking is legitimate, chances are they knew in their gut it wasn’t working and will appreciate the candor. Obviously make sure that you’re following a legal process. In the US and UK if the termination comes reasonably quickly you’re almost always OK but please double-check with your legal advisors. To be clear – I’m not advocating creating a slash-and-burn employee culture where there is a constant revolving door. I do believe that you set the tone in your company that you as a founder work your arse off and expect it of others. You make sure people know it’s a meritocracy and the best staff will rise to the top. Age and experience are irrelevant. Good people get ahead, bad people get asked to leave. So there you have it. Most companies hire slowly and fire slowly – the exact opposite of best practice for startups. Pick up your recruiting cadence. Take a risk on people who you think will be a good fit. Don’t look for perfect resumes. Take some chances. Trust your gut feel. And when you got it wrong you move on. You’ll recover. Move fast. Don’t delay the inevitable. Check your legal framework. Get your papers in order. Treat people with respect and professionalism. Be open and productive. But honest with them about their shortcomings or why they aren’t working culturally. But fire them quickly. Flame away. |
A Year After Diaspora, Another "Facebook Alternative" Emerges: Altly | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 5 | 26 | It was almost exactly that started raising money on Kickstarter. A few weeks later, they had from nearly 6,500 backers. Why so much excitement? Because Diaspora was aiming to be a Facebook alternative. That hasn’t exactly worked out. At least not yet. But now another startup is about to give it a go, . So why will this one be any different than Diasopra? Well, for one thing, it’s being started by a pretty well-known entrepreneur. , the founder of Veoh, is also the one behind Altly. While Veoh didn’t end so well (a firesale acquisition after raising nearly $70 million), they were once a very hot property in the online video space. But even more notably, Shapiro was most recently an executive at Facebook rival MySpace (he worked on MySpace Music). So why is Shapiro now aiming head-first at Facebook? He outlines the decision in on Altly’s blog. The basic gist? Facebook’s privacy controls are too confusing. And their social graph is now a mess. Oh, and they’re way too big and powerful. Their “tentacles” are everywhere on the web, and this is a problem because our privacy is at risk. Our data is locked in. Etc. In other words, the usual critiques of Facebook. But my favorite reason is this: At this time there are no real alternatives to Facebook, as most people believe that no one can possibly create an alternative. Mind. Blown. Well, except for the aforementioned Diaspora. And MySpace, which was once king, and tried to compete with Facebook, but simply lost. And others. But Shapiro does have a point. As he writes: There are NO serious alternatives at this time. For every Coke there is a Pepsi, for every Ford there is a Chevy, for every PC there is a Mac and for every Facebook there is…. a void! Facebook has such overwhelming power that practically no one believes that trying to build an alternative is possible. But the problem is that this is not because of anything nefarious Facebook is doing. It’s simply because the rivals that have popped up haven’t been very good. And Facebook, for all its faults, is a very good, and very well-run product. So Altly will take on this monumental task. And they’ll apparently do so with . They seem to be saying the right things. But so did Diaspora. It’s all about the execution. We’ll be watching this one closely, obviously. |
Special Stickers Will Bring Google Wallet To Android Phones That Lack NFC | Jason Kincaid | 2,011 | 5 | 26 | We’re here at Google’s NFC , where the search giant has announced a new, important product called (see our comprehensive post on the announcement ). Google Wallet will be launching this summer — it’s currently in field testing — allowing users to tap their phones against NFC-enabled terminals to pay for goods, redeem offers, and use their loyalty cards in a single tap. Of course, the vast majority of phones out there do support NFC (the Nexus S is currently the only Android phone on the market that has the technology). Google and its partners reiterated that NFC will be surging in popularity over the next couple of years, and for the time being this is really a first step. But Google also has a plan to enable older devices to use a more limited version of the app: stickers that you can put on the back of your phone. Google’s Osama Bedier was intentionally vague about the details, but here’s what the plan seems to be: users will be able to obtain special NFC stickers with a single credit card associated with them (such stickers already exist, but these stickers will apparently be able to communicate with the Google Wallet app). It sounds like transactions made using the sticker will be relayed to the Wallet application on your Android device via the cloud. Bedier added that the experience would be limited compared to what you’d get on NFC-enabled phones, but it still sounds pretty nifty. It’s possible this functionality will be extended to other platforms as well, as Google says it’s willing to to help broaden support for Google Wallet. And, even if you don’t have the sticker, you’ll still be able to use the Wallet app to keep track of your offers, which you’ll be able to show to cashiers at participating retailers (SCVNGR and Groupon do similar things with their mobile apps).
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The Hack Is On At The Hackathon | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 5 | 21 |
The tables here at Pier 94 are full of enterprising hackers, swapping code and networking furiously. The Red Bull is flowing freely and snacks crunch underfoot — pigeons flit to and fro looking for crumbs and perhaps some seed funds. And it’s only just beginning. The hacking will continue all night, punctuated by API demonstrations by the likes of Twitter, Qualcomm, and Google, and at 9:30 tomorrow morning the projects will be submitted. There are way more teams and individuals than , which was already far larger than . Fortunately, our new venue is very spacious — cavernous, even. They’ll need the space after the pizza arrives and things start getting over-savory. Teams are still forming and projects coalescing, but the Hackathon lifestyle is already taking hold and the cans are piling up. Here are a few pictures from the early hours of the event, to be followed by interviews, demos, and the inevitable snoring hackers on air mattresses. You can add your own to the pool by tagging your tweets and photos with #tcdisrupt and #hackdisruptNYC2011, and you can always find more at the .
Tomorrow morning at 10:30 is when the teams do their rapid-fire presentations and attempt to impress the judges. We’ll we wrapping up around 2:45 or 3, at which point one lucky project (the last Hackathon’s winner was ) will get a chance to compete with our Startup Battlefield companies on stage during Disrupt proper. The presentations are always entertaining, so be sure to tune into our live broadcast. |
Mo' Money: Square Now Processing $3 Million A Day In Mobile Payments | Erick Schonfeld | 2,011 | 5 | 21 | That was fast. Just like that Square passed $3 million in transactions processed, on a Saturday no less, according to a an hour ago by CEO Jack Dorsey. The mobile payments startup is seeing an acceleration in transaction volume. It took about 10 months from its for Square to reach in payments going through its mobile app. Getting to only took about two months. And now, less than a month later, it is passing $3 million. Visa just , transaction volume is picking up—things are looking good for Square. COO Keith Rabois will be at Disrupt NYC. We’ll be sure to ask him what’s driving the surge in Square payments. http://twitter.com/#!/jack/status/72133847327838208 |
Hax0rz Advice: "Don't Listen To Me. Go Build Something." (TCTV) | Lora Kolodny | 2,011 | 5 | 21 | Talent scouting at the in New York today, TCTV caught up with three alumni hax0rz and one n00b, who gave us a sneak peek of their apps and ideas. The hax0rz in question hail from: the mobile startup ; , a collective of developers and designers; and Harvard. Following an afternoon of team forming, brainstorming, napkin doodling and the requisite pizza and caffeine uptake, their concepts include: A couple of dating sites, one with a hyper-local twist… Another that wants to be “the Groupon of dating and a SecondMarket for people” An app that gets the attention of that one colleague who’s always lost in their headphones A mobile web app that tells you where nearby job opportunities may be, based on data from you Foursquare network Cool ideas from the Disrupt Hackathon turn into lasting startups. They could also hit the deadpool before they gain any kind of traction, if teams don’t know how to work it through and after the event. So, TCTV asked Steve Martocci, a co-founder of , how to maximize the hackathon experience. GroupMe, a NYC mobile startup, celebrated the one year birthday of their app today. , they hatched it at the 2010 Disrupt Hackathon in New York, of course. Some of Martocci’s suggestions: “Don’t listen to me talk, go and build something… Focus on what you’re good at, and solve a real world problem. Do as little work as you can – it gets stressful – use the tools that you have (like Twilio) to make it happen.” And after Hackathon? First, “Sleep.” Then, use the tickets to TechCrunch Disrupt, to “Walk the floor, show people what you did…[and] get decent exposure to investors.” Watch the video for more (above) and check back for more photos and videos from Pier 94 where the hack is on. We’re also . |
The Roundabout Tapes – Squadify aims to be the Meetup for sports | Mike Butcher | 2,011 | 5 | 21 | is a stealth-mode startup planning to try and disrupt the world of casual team sports. We interviewed the company as part of our new video series, , documenting the startups in the area of East London that has come to be known as Silicon Roundabout. Squadify is a startup aiming to allow people to find sports teams they want to play in, or even form. Close to a kind of ‘Meetup for sport’, the site is still in pre-alpha, but is aiming for a launch in the crucial Summer sports season. In some sense it’s not unlike , which is already out the door. We met up with co-founder Andrew Davey to find out what the startup is planning. Like a lot of tiny, bootstrapped startups in the Silicon Roundabout area, Davey, along with cofounder Nick Casey, are banking that they can scale up on the back of social buzz and integration with Facebook. |
Gillmor Gang 5.21.11 (TCTV) | Steve Gillmor | 2,011 | 5 | 21 | The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, Dick Hardt, and Steve Gillmor — got all LinkedIn in the wake of the startup’s . Amid the fear mongering about another tech bubble, it seemed more likely that LinkedIn was the first of at least a trio of big social plays going public. Facebook and Twitter seem no brainers, each with their own dynamics in terms of revenue plus virality. And then there’s Groupon and maybe Zynga. But the real question was not whether hype trumps value, but what’s next as the intersection of technology and media accelerates. This year’s broadcast upfronts seemed primed for disruption, with most networks junking their entire drama debuts from a year ago in favor of big budget sci-fi and Sheenless comedies. Meanwhile Netflix continues to mushroom as it becomes the next HBO, or some supernode unlike anything since the agencies took over from the film studios in the ’50s. King Harvest will surely come. |
Make.Money.Slow : The Bitcoin Experiment | Jon Evans | 2,011 | 5 | 21 | . Oh, man, where to begin. Its Hype-O-Meter got cranked to 11 this week, and breathless histrionics are everywhere. called this new currency “ “; Adam Cohen says it’s nothing but ; Jason Calacanis calls it “ “; and they’re all completely wrong. It’s interesting, and innovative, and down the line it might even be important … but in many crucial ways, Bitcoin is nothing new. Matthew Ingram at GigaOM wrote a good piece, but a summary of that summary, for those too lazy to click: it’s an anonymous online currency whose transactions and monetary supply are verified by digital cryptography and maintained by an open-source peer-to-peer network. Computers on the Bitcoin network can also “mine” new bitcoins, which are generated at a fixed rate. And, crucially, no more than 21 million will ever exist. (~7 million are currently extant.) “So what?” you may ask, and not without reason—but Bitcoins are in fact worth something. Right now you can sell them for ~$7 a pop at any of several Bitcoin exchanges. The EFF . Creating a secure distributed currency infrastructure is no mean feat; creating one that people actually is more impressive still. I don’t want to understate that accomplishment. But, people, we have been here before, many times. In 1932, the town of Wörgl, Austria, introduced a new currency that was so successful that it is still referred to as the “ “, although the Austrian government soon shut it down for violating the government’s monopoly on printing money. Communities have been experimenting with local/community currencies ever since. (Not to be confused with “company scrip”, the Internet equivalent of which is Flooz, or Facebook Credits.) Bitcoin is little more than a reasonably well-designed local currency liberated from the shackles of geography. There is one key difference between Bitcoin and Wörgl; no government can shut down Bitcoin’s printing presses. (Which aren’t necessarily .) And that’s exactly why it’s been so successful so far—enough anarchists and libertarians, who have long hated fiat currencies and longed for the return of the gold standard, have flocked to it that it actually has value. But they’re a tiny minority, extremely unlikely to grow into a significant movement, and even if they do, it won’t much matter. Currencies, be they fiat, gold, or fixed-supply, are a collective fiction: they only have value if a critical mass of people believe they do. If the US and EU want to kill Bitcoin, they need only make it illegal, and that critical mass will vanish. But why would any American or European business adopt Bitcoin in the first place? It’s an elegant and disruptive solution desperately looking for a problem. There’s nothing wrong with the dollar, euro, or yuan. As Victor Grishchenko cogently points out in his , “Any competing e-money system needs to offer at least the same level of security, coverage, liquidity and privacy, which is hardly the case with Bitcoin at this moment.” In the developed world, Bitcoin is a non-starter. At best it might eke out an existence as a distributed local currency for hardcore libertarians. …but the world is another matter. Consider Zimbabwe, recently plagued by hyperinflation so rampant that prices doubled every few weeks and gasoline could only be purchased on the black market with hard currency. They’ve since given up and simply adopted foreign currency wholesale. Meanwhile, mobile electronic payments are taking off in a big way all over sub-Saharan Africa. It isn’t much of a stretch to imagine Zimbabwe in ten years’ time—or a whole group of developing nations with a history of crippling inflation—adopting a new currency that is independent, incorruptible, and anti-inflationary by design. In short, something a whole lot like Bitcoin. No, it isn’t the future, but it just may point the way. |
Daily Crunch: Invasion Edition | Bryce Durbin | 2,011 | 5 | 21 | |
Want To Get Rewards For Going Out? Good, Because LoSo Wants To Find You Free Drinks | Rip Empson | 2,011 | 5 | 21 | I’ll bet that got your attention. Finally, an app that wants to buy you a drink. Well, not exactly, but it’s the next best thing. is a location-based social media app for the iPhone that re-launches today to bring the best parts of Foursquare, Yelp, and OpenTable together in one app for your mobile phone. An ambitious goal, yes, but to counterbalance that, LoSo is targeting a very specific market: your local restaurants and bars. So, on the one hand, LoSo is addressing a problem cited by many small businesses in using Groupon: They’re happy to have a blast of new customers taking advantage of a big discount, but they want to see loyalty, not single-serving customers. And, on the other hand, LoSo wants you to be rewarded for doing just that: By being (or becoming) a loyal customer at your favorite local eatery or watering hole. While this may not be a “new” idea, it’s worth checking out. In a nutshell, LoSo is taking the better parts of the aforementioned services (and, maybe Citysearch) to create a realtime guide for going out on the town. Currently, the app offers 200K realtime feeds for 700K local bars and restaurants, allowing you to see happy hours, drink specials, dinner specials, what bands are playing, and more. LoSo ranks these eateries and bars according to total number of checkins, so you can get a sense of which place has the most activity. Taking a page from Foursquare, LoSo encourages users to checkin from their favorite spots, pooling these checkins in live Twitter and Facebook-like feeds, which you can get a sense of from the screenshots above. By clicking “IMHere”, you can show your friends where you are, as pins drop down on a Google Map to display your current location. You can navigate this interactive map of local venues and leave posts that tell your friends where you are. With each checkin, you earn a point. Earn ten points and you can redeem your points for free swag. You can make checkins private, or public. And, probably the coolest part, is that you can post videos you take while being over-served and post them to Facebook and Twitter. They show up on the business pages of the place where you’re eating, which is hopefully great for the local business. As long as the videos aren’t troll-ish, of course. As to the reward system, each time you checkin at a local spot, you earn a certain amount of points, most often 10 points. In the meantime, LoSo has encouraged the local business you’re patronizing to set up a rewards page, describing the types of rewards you can earn and how many checkins it takes to take advantage. Most frequently, it only takes one or two checkins, LoSo CEO Rich Rodgers tells me, before you might be throwing back a margarita gratis. LoSo will also be offering points of its own, so if a user starts checking in frequently (to any place), they will become eligible for LoSo rewards as well. Which could be anything from a cruise to 3 months of free HDTV, Rodgers says. But what’s to stop people from doing drive-by checkins to take advantage of deals? To discourage these miscreants, Rodgers says that part of the app’s secret sauce is that you will only be eligible if you’re within 100 feet of the establishment, and the reward will only become available after 10 minutes. So you can’t just throw back a quick one and then run, like a coward.. “We set out to create a mobile app that was built around the idea that mobile is a mentality of the here and now,” said Rodgers. “We started by building the largest social media connected database of any city guide”. While there are definitely game mechanics at play here, unlike FourSquare and other game-related retail “directories”, LoSo gives people more than just listings and status. LoSo’s Restaurant Rewards Points are good for free drinks, eats, and prizes, and each check in on LoSo also counts as a checkin on Foursquare and Facebook Places, so all checkins can be done from one app. So, users can not only become Mayor in Foursquare, but stay current on Facebook, earn restaurant rewards, and accrue LoSo Loyalty points. Rodgers also tells me that LoSo recently closed a $350K round of seed funding from various New York-based angels and VCs, allowing them to do some more iterating and a little bit of hiring. But, how is the free LoSo app going to make money, you ask (aside from seed funding)? Well, unfortunately, there may be some ads. Rodgers told me they won’t be obnoxious, but if they are, don’t shoot the messenger. LoSo is also offering local businesses the opportunity to let the startup take over all of their social media activities, email and SMS marketing, and all that good stuff. The subscription will cost $100 a month. The other bad news is that, though you can use the app anywhere (and they’ve already added 800K places), rewards are only available in Philadelphia. But, Rodgers says that if the experiment goes according to plan, they should be expanding to other U.S. cities within the year. With how expensive eating can be in the Bay Area, I hope LoSo makes it out to the West Coast before I’m bankrupt. |
The Tech Press: Screw Them All | Michael Arrington | 2,011 | 5 | 7 | Last week I wrote a post about my at TechCrunch, and pointing out already disclosed financial conflicts of interest. Our primary duty to readers, as I’ve said many times, is transparency. To that end we will (as we always have) be extremely careful in disclosing any investments I’ve made in startups or in venture funds. And these interests will be disclosed even when other TechCrunch writers are covering these companies. In that post I said that there would be a lot of criticism headed our way from our competitors. And that’s exactly what happened. AllThingsD calls me “vaguely icky.” The Atlantic Wire says what I’m doing “lowers the bar for journalistic independence.” And Tom Foremski says So, hold on a minute. We can argue all day about whether or not my policy is a good one. You’ll have your arguments, I’ll have mine. But the really important thing to remember, as a reader, is that there is . The guys that say they’re objective . Everyone is conflicted in different ways, and yet the “rules of journalism” don’t require any sort of transparency or disclosure unless it’s a direct financial conflict. I’m going to have to write a longer post about his . But when you read a tech blogger call a CEO “tough and misunderstood,” should you know that the CEO in question is social friends with that blogger, and leaks confidential information to her? The answer is yes. But you’ll never know. Or when the same CEO is called incompetent by another blogger who was just turned down by said CEO to speak at his conference. Disclosed? No. Conflicted? Yes. Like I said, that’s a different post. But in putting this current issue to rest, there are some things I’d like to point out. AllThingsD’s Kara Swisher, the chief whiner about our policy, is married to a Google executive. This is disclosed by her, but I certainly don’t see it as any less of a conflict than when I invest in a startup. And yet she whines. One of her writers, Liz Gannes, is married to a Facebook consultant. She covers the company and its competitors regularly. She it as well, but it isn’t clear whether or not her husband has stock in Facebook. That’s something as a reader I’d like to know. And regardless, it’s a huge conflict of interest. I think someone will think twice before slamming a company and then going to sleep next to an employee of that company. Certain adjectives, for example, might be softened in the hopes of marital harmony. Foremski, the other chief whiner, is a real piece of work. Despite railing against my policy, he has his own direct conflicts of interest. The man who said just a week ago how horrible I am for investing in startups has financial interests in a whole slew of tech companies – “Disclosure: Current and past consulting clients and sponsors of Silicon Valley Watcher: Pearltrees, Intel, Tibco Software, Edelman, Infineon Technologies, SAP.” And he isn’t so good about disclosing these interests. If one of our writers they’d be fired in a second. Why do the people who complain the most about TechCrunch have these vague conflicts of interest themselves? Why aren’t they more forthcoming in their disclosures? How do they justify their hypocrisy, even to themselves? Seriously, how? Look, I’m still new to this journalism thing. I treat our readers the same way I’d like to be treated. With full and complete disclosure. I’m really sorry if that upsets the old guard. But the reality is this. The people complaining the most are the people who are the most deeply conflicted. They’re the people who are, at best, vague about their own conflicts of interest. Right and wrong don’t seem to be concepts they worry about too much. Nor do they seem to be overly concerned with hypocrisy or even the basic underlying lack of logic in their rants. Really, it all came into focus for me this week. A major news publication asked for “my side” after all this complaining. I spent a half hour on the phone with him at his request. And he never wrote. Why? “My editors want to leave Arianna dangling in the wind,” he said, referring to the fact that Arianna Huffington, my boss, was taking heat for this situation. It never occurred to him that he just killed a story because that story might help a competitor (Huffington Post), and how screwed up that was. I have little hope for this industry until the last of the old guard have finally been put down. They do NOT control the news. They do NOT control opinion. They do NOT get to say who gets to write content and who doesn’t. And they do NOT get to rant about their ethics when they constantly fight against simple transparency. Swisher doesn’t get to complain about my investment policy when she is married to a Google executive, and when we can’t figure out whether or not one of her writers owns Facebook stock through her husband. And don’t even get me started on the time her employer, the WSJ, that was critical of its sister company MySpace, and then denied it. Foremski doesn’t get to tell me my policy is unethical when he has financial conflicts all over the place and seems unconcerned with proper disclosure and transparency. And major media doesn’t get to preach to me about their ethics policies when they kill stories because their editor wants to keep Arianna Huffington squirming. Before I started TechCrunch I never understood how screwed up this whole news world was. It’s ugly as hell out there, people. These people, the tech press, just disgust me. |
Games Are Now Officially Recognized As Art By The US Government | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 5 | 7 |
Here’s a nice little talking point for your dinner parties and bar chatter tonight: the has changed its “Arts On Radio And Television” category to a broader “Arts In Media,” adding web-based video (as opposed to broadcast) and “interactive games” as potential platforms for grants. That means that the feds officially consider games as art worthy of potential funding. Huzzah! While there are still precious few games that qualify as “high” art, and the debate over violence, ratings, etc will continue, this is an important symbolic step in gaming history. [via and ] |
OMG/JK: Can Google Correct Last Year's Big I/O Flops This Year? | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 5 | 7 | It’s just about that time again. is happening next week and just as in year’s past, the company is expected to announce some big things on stage during their two keynotes on Tuesday and Wednesday morning. But what will those things be? Jason and I delve into some predictions for the event, which we’ll both be covering. But first we take some time to look back at last year’s I/O which made a big splash at the time — and can now probably be best described as a big flop. Google TV, Google Music, Chrome OS. Etc, etc, etc… Will this year’s be more of the same? Or will Google’s mouth actually be able to write checks that their body can cash this time around? Stay tuned… Here are some articles that are relevant to this week’s episode:
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Amazon Cloud Player Quietly Begins Working On iOS Devices! | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 5 | 7 | Back in March, alongside the roll out of , we noted one glaring problem: . You might think this had to due with Flash or another technology that iOS wasn’t compatible with, but it wasn’t. It looked like something else was simply blocking it from working. Well, good news. That’s no longer the case. If you visit through the Safari web browser on an iOS device, you’ll see that it does in fact now work. You’ll first hit a warning page telling you that your browser is not supported, but just ignore that. Click into the music in your drive and it will begin playing. It works flawlessly — even to the point where if you get a Push Notification or incoming call, the music will be paused. Of course, this implementation is still not as good as it is on Android, where Cloud Player is part of a native app. But if Amazon just did a little web work and made the web-based player optimized for the iPhone and iPad, it would certainly be very useable on a regular basis. Uploading, however, still requires Flash. But I assume most people are doing that from their computers anyway. While this is great news, Apple is expected to announce their own similar service sooner rather than later. And that will be fully baked into iOS (and is expected to have full music label backing, unlike Amazon’s service — which is both ). So you Amazon cloud lovers, take the skies and get your music working on iOS now. |
null | Serkan Toto | 2,011 | 5 | 26 | null |
Soon, AOL's AIM Won't Require A Separate Login To Chat With Contacts In Gmail | Leena Rao | 2,011 | 5 | 7 | Since you’ve been able to sign in to your AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) account to chat with your AIM contacts directly You simply login with your AIM account in Gmail and your contacts will populate your gChat list, allowing you to chat with them just like you would your Google Talk contatcs. From , it looks like changes may be afoot to this feature. From AIM’s notice, It’s unclear what technology Google and AOL are working on that will allow users to integrate both services with Gmail; but AOL says it is working on an importer to add AIM contacts to your Gmail contacts list. AOL says in the notice: AOL says the change will take place in the next few days, but you can sign up to receive a notice when new importer is available. But honestly, who uses AIM anymore? TechCrunch is owned by AOL. |
Why The New Guy Can’t Code | Jon Evans | 2,011 | 5 | 7 | We’ve all lived the nightmare. A new developer shows up at work, and you try to be welcoming, but he can’t seem to get up to speed; the questions he asks reveal basic ignorance; and his work, when it finally emerges, is so kludgey that it ultimately must be rewritten from scratch by more competent people. And yet his interviewers—and/or the HR department, if your company has been infested by that bureaucratic parasite—swear that they only hire above-average/A-level/top-1% people. It’s a big problem, especially now. There’s a boom on. I get harassing emails from recruiters every day. Everyone’s desperate to hire developers…but developers are not fungible. A great coder can easily be 50 times more productive than a mediocre one, while bad ones ultimately have productivity. Hiring one is a terrible mistake for any organization; for a startup, it can be a catastrophic company-killer. So how can it happen so often? Like many of the hangovers that haunt modern software engineering, this is ultimately mostly Microsoft’s fault. Back when they were the evil empire where everyone secretly wanted to work, they were famous for their “brain-teaser” interview questions – Why are manhole covers round? – and, of course, they asked new university graduates about computer science theory; “Write me a .” Everyone wanted to be like Microsoft, even Google, until everyone wanted to be like Google (until recently); and so that interview meme persisted. Check out these two recent posts on the subject of interviewing, courtsey of Hacker News: one , one . A couple of illuminating quotes from the latter: “I’m not even necessarily saying that this is a good metric” and “If it’s any consolation, at least we don’t ask gotcha riddle questions anymore. Those were especially offensive.” It’s nice to see that Google have almost sort of realized that their recruiting algorithm is problematic. Too bad they haven’t fixed it. See also Jean Hsu’s “ ” The fundamental problem is that the skills required to pass today’s industry-standard software interview are not the skills required to be a good software developer. Oh, there’s correlation, but it’s like the Oakland Raiders , only to discover to their endless dismay that the NFL is not a foot race. Actually it’s worse than that. At least wide receivers have to run, whereas I can guarantee you, without fear of contradiction, that no software engineer will ever have to write a binary search after they are hired. It’s like choosing a contractor because they know how to forge and cast steel using coal, iron, an oven and a bellows, when they actually need to know a) the address of the nearest Home Depot b) what to do with the steel once they buy it. Joel Spolsky once correctly explained that you’re generally looking for two things in an employee: . (Academia is teeming with people who are the former but not the latter.) First, though, you have to establish something else: . You’d be amazed how many totally incompetent people show up for technical interviews. Google’s binary search is presumably intended as their “ ” – a low bar you have to hurdle just to get in the door. But a FizzBuzz should take all of five minutes, before the real interview begins. So what should a real interview consist of? Let me offer a humble proposal: Certificates and degrees are not accomplishments; I mean real-world projects with real-world users. There is for software developers who don’t have a site, app, or service they can point to and say, “I did this, all by myself!” in a world where Google App Engine and Amazon Web Services have free service tiers, and it costs to register as an Android developer and publish an app on the Android Market. The old system was based on limited information—all you knew about someone was their resume. But if you only interview people with accomplishments, then you have a much broader base to work from. Get the FizzBuzz out of the way, and then have the interviewee show and tell their code, and explain their design decisions and what they would do differently now. Have them implement a feature or two while you watch, so you can see how they actually work, and how they think while working. That’s what you want from a technical interview, not a measure of its subject’s grasp of some antiquated algorithm or data structure. The world has moved on. Yes, I am being deliberately sexist here, because in my experience those women who write code are consistently good at it. I don’t mind that Bill Gates is a megazillionaire; he’s done a lot of really interesting and innovative stuff. I do mind that a lot of unworthy people rode his coattails to minizillionaire status, eg the inventor of , probably the dumbest widely-promulgated idea in the history of the field. |
Weekend Giveaway: A 16GB BlackBerry Playbook | John Biggs | 2,011 | 5 | 7 | A few weeks ago we gave away a BlackBerry Playbook and, much to your disappointment, you didn’t win. In order to right that wrong, we present The Return Of The Attack Of The 16GB BlackBerry , Part II featuring a brand new BlackBerry Playbook with your name on it. How do you win? I think you know. Comment below. Comment once. Include your email address. I will pick one person at random on Monday at noon Eastern. Update – Congrats to Sancho17. |
Airbnb Cozies Up To Facebook To Help You Feel More At Home When Away From Home | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 5 | 9 | There are dozens of reasons why is awesome. Take its truly model, for instance. Or if that doesn’t do it for you, how about the fact that you can use it to ? But if there’s one weakness with the service, it’s that using it for the first time can be a bit unnerving. Who am I staying with? How do I know that their apartment isn’t really a dump? Reviews and ratings take care of some of this, of course. But a new feature should help users feel much more at home immediately: Social Connections. allow you to hook up the service to your social graph via Facebook Connect. Click one button, opt-in, and you’re good to go. In the listings for cities around the world you’ll now see an avatar if a Facebook friend of yours is friends with the host or has reviewed the host. It’s absolutely brilliant. And it goes even farther. Say you don’t necessarily care if someone you know is connected to the host, what if you just care that you have something in common? Like say, you have the same alma mater? Airbnb Social Connections surface that information too! Naturally, you can turn this filter off at any point to return regular Airbnb results. And it’s very easy to disable the feature in your account settings page for those paranoid about Facebook knowing too much about you. But Airbnb takes your privacy very seriously. As they note on their site: Privacy is Airbnb’s priority: personal and private information are protected at all times. Social Connections are only displayed to those already in your social network. Turn this feature on or off at anytime with a single click. “This has been one of our most requested features, particularly for people that want to have something in common with the people they are staying with,” co-founder tells us. “Social Connections helps you find places to stay with mutual friends, people from your school or university, or hosts that your friends stayed with and recommend,” he continues. Chesky quickly glanced at my account and noticed that I would have about 40 applicable connections already. When I turned it on just now, sure enough, there are places being rented out by people who know others that I know. Or there are others that went to the same school as me. Again, this is awesome. Chesky notes that there are already 16,516,967 such connections based on current members of the service. That will only grow as the Airbnb community does. There are already 5,229 colleges/universities with alumni listings on the service — the biggest schools in that regard so far are Columbia, Harvard, Berkeley, and Stanford, we’re told. Yet another reason to love Airbnb. |
Daily Crunch: Beuys Zone Edition | Bryce Durbin | 2,011 | 5 | 7 | |
3Crowd's CrowdCache: Reinventing The Content Delivery Network For The Masses | Jason Kincaid | 2,011 | 5 | 9 | Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) are not sexy. Most people have no idea they exist; those that do know that they make the web snappier by replicating content on multiple servers, typically in different locations. Big names in the space include Akamai and Limelight. Some CDNs offer APIs that make common tasks like video streaming easier. Not exactly the sort of thing people talk about around the water cooler. But CDNs may be about to get a lot more exciting. Today a startup called is launching a new technology called CrowdCache. The gist of it is pretty straightforward: CrowdCache looks to turn traditional commercial CDNs on their head by letting anyone create a CDN of their own using their own servers and PCs. Or, as founder puts it, it’s essentially allowing you to create your own (benevolent) botnet and use it to serve up content on the cheap. And if it works, it could have some major implications. The problem with current CDNs, Lyon says, is that none of them provide businesses with the software required to run a CDN on their own hardware — you have to pay them and use their infrastructure. 3Crowd is taking a completely different approach: you install a small, free Java client on any hardware you’d like to use as part of your CDN, then manage that hardware using 3Crowd’s web interface, which you can use to create complex rulesets (including load-balancing), keep an eye on stats, and more. Lyon knows this space — he previously co-founded BitGravity (itself a traditional CDN), which he left in 2009 to start 3Crowd. The company has raised $6.6 million from investors, who include Kevin Rose, Jay Adelson, Canaan Partners, and Storm Ventures. Initially, 3Crowd is catering primarily to an interesting mix of clients including carriers, hosting companies, businesses and universities. Using the software, Lyon says that a hosting company can now provide a streaming CDN service by simply throwing it on one of their servers (likewise, a customer of a hosting company could throw the software on their own instance and use that as their CDN). Big phone carriers who are frequently serving up content can now act as their own CDNs. And universities can take advantage of their excess bandwidth and use it to help distribute content and software they support. 3Crowd already has some very major clients, though it can’t disclose them yet. And its future plans are even more ambitious. For the time being Lyon expects most of the CrowdCache Java client installs to come from institutions and companies that are running it on hardware they control. But in the next release (around six months from now), software companies will be able to offer the CrowdCache client to their users, who will be able to allocate some of their excess bandwidth to serving content for that application. This isn’t a new idea — Joost something similar to this with its P2P video app — but Lyon says this 3Crowd is using HTTP rather than a proprietary protocol, and it has broader applications. Even further down the line, all of these CrowdCache client installs could eventually be used to serve content for a variety of websites, applications and services. Users will be able to sell their excess bandwidth, creating a federated CDN that could totally reinvent how content is distributed and lower bandwidth prices significantly. But that’s still a ways off. For the time being 3Crowd is still in Phase One, and it seems to be going very well for them. The company makes money based on how many requests a client uses (you can see a breakdown ), and there’s a free package for ‘Garage Startups’ just getting off the ground. CrowdCache is actually the second product 3Crowd has launched — it previously released CrowdDirector, a load-balancing service that can be used to manage content across more traditional CDNs. |
Capcom: PSN Outage "Costing Us Hundreds Of Thousands, If Not Millions" | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 5 | 9 | While gamers around the world are pining for their online play and PSN store access, the companies that rely on the service to sell games are really feeling it. Capcom is one of many PSN-reliant companies that’s losing a ton of money in lost sales. : “as an executive responsible for running a business, the resulting outage obviously costing us hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars in revenue that were planned for within our budget. These are funds we rely on to bring new games to market for our fans.” With the end of the outage in sight but several weeks out (by the ), it looks like they’re going to lose a lot more. |
Is Microsoft About To Overpay For Skype? | Erick Schonfeld | 2,011 | 5 | 9 | : , $8.5 billion in cash. The deal buzzards are swirling around Skype, and Microsoft may end up with the prize. Om the rumor, which is now getting major play by the WSJ. Microsoft is in final negotiations to buy Skype for $7 billion, according to the The final price might go closer to . ( : Actually, ). Google and Facebook were also sniffing around Skype, which earlier this year to buy more negotiating time. Microsoft will certainly be overpaying for Skype, which is a better fit for Google or Facebook. But Microsoft is desperate for a legitimate Internet business beyond Bing. https://twitter.com/#!/parislemon/status/67775046067814401 Skype would fit into Microsoft’s enterprise business as a communications hub for telephony, video conferencing, and online meetings. But is it worth 10 times revenue and 32 times operating profits (Skype’s was $860 million, adjusted EBITDA was $264 million, and it had no net income to speak—it $7 million)? Maybe, if Microsoft doesn’t screw it up. The chances that it does screw it up if the deal goes through, however, are large. To make Skype work financially, Microsoft would have to turn it into more of an enterprise play to go up against Cisco’s WebEx, for instance. Skype is already making money from businesses to some extent, but it’s roots are with consumers who want to bypass the traditional phone companies and their outrageous bills. When you think of Microsoft, you don’t exactly think about voice communications. You think about productivity, and to some extent collaboration (although I find its products to be designed more for solitary use). Skype is not a natural fit. Just like it wasn’t a natural fit for eBay, which bought it and then spun it off. But what about , Microsoft’s mobile OS? Well, that’s where it gets interesting. Skype baked into Windows Phone would be a powerful combination, exactly the type of tight integration that could give it a fighting chance. Except that Skype on iPhone and Android is already pretty good. So yes, there is logic to the deal. But $7 billion to $8 billion for a company still hasn’t figured out how to turn 663 million users into a profit machine is a stretch. But then, Microsoft was at making money on the Internet either. It feels like Skype really wanted to sell to another company like Google or Facebook, but when the bankers started to shop it around, Ballmer bit and now he won’t let go. Could Google or Facebook have done the deal for less? I think so. |
Retractable Cap For Olympus XZ-1 Looks Evil, Practical | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 5 | 9 |
competes with models like the Canon S95 and Panasonic LX-5 in the “primo point and shoot” market, and looks good doing it. But having a manual lens cap can sometimes be a pain: it’s either dangling from a lanyard, taking up space in your pocket, or getting lost somewhere. fits over the lens and splits apart to get out of the way when it’s shootin’ time. It’s from UN Ltd, and it looks to me like it costs ¥5800, though with shipping it comes to ¥7350 — so, $90 unless you want to go over to Japan and pick it up. [via ] |
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