ITWeek are reporting that BT Business has launched a new blog to give firms information and advice on how to build their online presence, and provide a channel for feedback and interaction with its experts. Three experts from BT together with blogging expert Ian Fenn will contribute regularly to the blog, which aims to cover topics including web site design, how to reach customers online, and network security. “To date all the content on our portal has been one way – BT to its customers,” said David Morgan, head of online business services. “Whilst we did have a feedback mechanism we wanted to get much more of a conversation going with our customers so we could really understand what’s important to them.” Hard hats on and thick skins at the ready then chaps! → Read More
The supermarket giant Tesco, today announced it was launching on the 6th September, a non-food home shopping service called Tesco direct, which it promises will end the misery of waiting in for deliveries all-day. The supermarket giant promised quicker delivery and shorter and more reliable slots than are currently provided by other high street retailers. It’s other direct-to-home food shopping business has already become one of its most successful ventures in recent years, with Tesco.com making profits of £56.2 million last year. One report, earlier this month, forecast that Tesco would become Britain’s biggest nonfood retailer in 2006, over taking the owner of Argos and Homebase, ARG. I suppose every little bit helps the bottom-line. → Read More
Bristol based Coull have two very ”cool” applications to help brand owners create their own user generated video portals and interactive video content. Coull vlogger is the first application which is their unique all-in-one video blogging solution. It provides end users with a basic video editing capability in conjunction with a video uploading option to a hosted whitelabel UGC portal. In addition, branded vlogs can also be sent directly from mobile phones to the brand owners UGC portal. This solution is very good for brands looking to take advantage of the current trend in user generated content creation. Coull vlogger has already attracted brand clients including Lycos, TEAMtalk, ITV and most recently My Sportal. To see how vlogger really works have a look at this demo or visit one of their branded partner sites. Coull interact is the second product which is a powerful and free interactive video production tool. Coullinteract is a simple to use application enabling content owners and end users to create genuinely interactive online videos by embedding tags and hyperlinks into objects within a video. This then turns the video into clickable regions which are linked directly to web pages, surrounding the video, containing further information. Coull interact has already attracted clients including Rolls Royce, Girls Aloud and the British Army. Once again the best way to see how interact really works is to have a look at this demo and click on some of the embedded objects when prompted. When I first saw this product I was amazed because I could see how it might give website and content owners the opportunity to sell products online based on the video content. A company like VideoJug, with their how to … videos, would certainly make a perfect partner for this product. Coull have recently added in support for Google’s Adwords, so now when users click on video objects they get contextually paid for search results relevent to the video content. In June 2006 Rupert Hambro and Partners recently acquired a controlling stake in Coull in order to help the company to expand. → Read More
Fedafi is a Glasgow based, UK company - pronounced fee·da·fi (‘fi’ as in hifi) – aims to democratize RSS by making it possible for anyone to create, manage, market and track valid RSS and Podcast feeds, as part of their business strategy. Fedafi is a self-funded startup with just two people right now. Fedafi hope to grow their business by providing the basic tools that every business needs to adopt RSS as a viable marketing and communication channel. Currently a lot of companies still send out emails as part of their marketing campaign. I have a couple of issues with email marketing. Firstly it’s very web 1.0, it’s often costly to buy in email listings, more often than not they are out of date and thirdly if its unsolicited it’s illegal spam. Often marketers will happily report they have sent out thousands of bulk emails but how many are actually read by the intended recipient? My anti-spam filter thankfully traps most of them at the server level and my desktop email filter has a second go by dumping them into my junk folder. Even assuming that I do get the spam email newsletter in my inbox, then my human filter does the rest and just deletes it. On the other hand RSS is a much better way of marketing communication. As the customer, I choose to receive the information I want, so it is not treated as spam by me. The information is delivered where I want it and when I want it, either in my integrated email reader or browser reader or standalone RSS reader and if I don’t like it I can simple unsubscribe from the feed. From a marketers perspective reporting the number active subscribers is a better metric of success. Fedafi offer two versions of their product that differ slightly as the table below shows. → Read More
Faces.com is a social networking site from Australia with an emphasis on multimedia sharing. The site has been up for several years but has recently undergone a relaunch. Faces allows users to create their own site (like Myspace) or “widgetize” the data (photos, music, etc.) for placement on other sites. Uploaded audio files are placed in playlists called TuneFeeds that can be shared with others or played in your profile page. There’s a browser toolbar for adding URLs to your favorites list and otherwise working with your account from off site. Desktop applications are also available for drag and drop bulk uploading and for automatically synching files from selected files with your Faces account. All the desktop apps are Windows only. What’s most interesting about Faces, beyond its feature set, is the business model. It’s big on multimedia sharing and users are encouraged to upload a lot of pictures and music. Users seeking to exceed the monthly limits on upload (500 MB) and bandwidth (10 GB) can purchase a pro account for $25 per year. And then there are no limits to how much media you can put in your account or your visitors can play from your profile page. There will be advertising placed on profile pages and by audio in between every 4 songs played on free account user pages. The company says it will split graphic ad revenue with pro users and remove audio ads from their playlists. They say they plan on paying royalties to rights holders of the music – though I question how that’s going to happen if I’ve uploaded files myself! The offending music player is pictured here, complete with a title URL (tunefeed.com) that’s just a 404. Update: It turns out that the company is paying a licensing fee to act as a streaming internet radio station and no matter where a music file you uploaded to your profile comes from, they count each time anyone plays it as an instance of that license being used. They are also working on adding a music store that will let listeners purchase songs through Faces. The seven person company has received a little over $2 million US dollars in private funding to date. Initial funding plus pro accounts plus graphic and audio advertising are where the money is coming from. Photo editing and mobile upload are said to be pending, both of which would → Read More
The oldest form of data entry on the planet is handwriting. We learn it before we learn to type. It’s not as efficient as a keyboard, but it can be done anywhere on about anything. (Don’t believe me? Check out any alley in Midtown, NYC.) Handwriting has become a viable option with PDAs and tablet PCs using virtual ink and handwriting recognition to transcribe what you’re scribbling into legible, pixelated ideas. But nothing really compares to a real pen and paper combo. Enter the Aiptek MyNote. It’s a standard letter-sized folio that uses regular paper. But using it’s battery-powered pen/stylus combo, and it’s own handwriting tracking system, it makes 1000-lpi digital copies of each page. It stores them in it’s built-in 32MB flash RAM (expandable via an SD slot), so you can later upload them to your Windows XP or 2000 machine via USB. From there, you can replace that doodle of your boss in the shark’s mouth with a multi-million dollar idea. See, we’re making you money already. MyNote [Aiptek] → Read More
A manager I once knew had an axiom: if it’s got a cable, it’s not really a gadget. As our portable devices get more and more powerful, the consume more and more energy. And technical advances have made formerly usable levels of power performance unacceptable–my first Powerbook, for instance, got around forty-five minutes of usage on a full charge… when it was brand new. Now, anything less than three hours is cause for a riot. The real problem this kind of advance induces is that as batteries reach higher capacities and performance metrics, they get more dangerous. Last week’s recalls of millions of exploding Sony laptop batteries is a blistering, literally in some case, reminder of what happens when the envelope is pushed beyond reason simply to satiate business models. Yet-Ming Chiang, an MIT scientist and the brains behind a new battery startup, says in this interview with Technology Review that the future has non-exploding laptop batteries for us. It’s a great read for information about the high-tech batteries of tomorrow. Because with great power comes the great responsibility of not burning people’s pants. How Future Batteries Will Be Longer-Lasting and Safer [Technology Review] → Read More
Located in Berlin, The Table of Free Voices is the fastest, most high-tech table in human history. The table jas a camera and a microphone built into each of its 112 places, allowing the responses of each individual to be recorded and saved as an individually searchable audiovisual portrait. The Table of Free Voices is 124 feet in diameter and is basically a big supercomputer. The lead programmer of Dropping Knowledge describes the table’s specs: In terms of computing power, the Table delivers a peak performance of around 230 GFLOPS, which means that it can calculate 230,000,000,000 floating point operations per second. Packed with technology, the table features 112 Mini-DV Cameras, 112 Mac Minis with 224 Intel Core CPU cores running at 1.66 GHz, more than 36 terabytes of storage space spread over 224 individual hard drives and miles of cabling. While in recording mode, the table records 112 DV audio-video streams with a total bandwidth of over 3.8 Gigabits per second and performs a real-time h.264 compression on all 112 video streams.By the evening of September 9th, the Table will have recorded, compressed and stored almost 700 hours of video footage, as both high-quality material and in compressed, ready for streaming formats. On top of all that, Free Voices will be transcribed and translated into numerous languages and made freely accessible to all in a variety of digital formats. On September 9, 2006, 112 scientists, social entrepreneurs, philosophers, writers, artists and activists from around the world will come together in Berlin, Germany, as guests of dropping knowledge. They will engage with 100 questions from the global public. The questions will reflect the topics of greatest concern to the global public, emphasize under-reported issues and engage key themes endorsed by dropping knowledge in 2006. So mark your calendars, you know, if you’re into that sort of thing. <a href=" [Dropping Knowldge] → Read More
Sony Ericsson plans to further develop its PlayNow service, which is currently only used to listen to and download ringtones. The spokesman from the Japenese-Swedish group did not give any details on how the service will be changed, or when the changes will occour, saying simply: We are developing the PlayNow service further, it is part of our bigger music strategy. As the prices of phones are droping as consumers demand cheaper phones, digital music is currently a key feature driving more expensive phones for manufacturers. Personally, I’m curious to see what Sony Ericsson comes up with. Maybe they’ll develop something that will finally eliminate carrying around my iPod everywhere I go. PlayNow Development [Reuters] → Read More
The HORNMASSIVE sound system can project sound from up to 1km away, making it a great addition to musical festivals around the globe. The mobile sound system is made up of a gigantic 2000-watt steel and aluminum horn, and weighs in at a massive 2-tons, all powered from a commercial 12” speaker driver. The sound system functions as an audio input station, where users can plug-in and project, and designed to be a monophonic sound projector cleary intended for outdoor events. There you have it, a way to blast Iron Maiden for all to hear, at least in monophonic sound. HORNMASSIVE [the cool hunter] → Read More
<img src="http://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2007/01/VGA inputs. The audio system is SRS TruSurround XT, with a pair of hidden speakers along the edges. This unit will be coming later this fall, but if the specs really are to be believed, LCDs may finally be catching up to the old CRTs in terms of image quality and black-levels. 52-inch samsung lcd flat hdtv due within a month [Technabob via Gizmodo] → Read More
Gamers and performance enthusiasts balk at the mere mention of “integrated graphics”, and rightfully so. But the Radeon Xpress 1250 is “Vista Ready” and will handle Vista’s Aero Glass GUI features with no problem, meaning it should be powerful enough to run your games at least at a playable framerate. Radeon Xpress 1250 is the first Intel-based chipset to support ATI’s revolutionary Avivo™ display and video architecture. This technology produces vibrant images and smooth video playback, and true-to-life images for all types of multimedia, including high-definition content. Yeah, that doesn’t really mean much in layman’s terms, but we thought you’d like to know anyway. Get ready for some decently speedy graphics performance in your laptops. Are you excited?! Press Release [Marketwire via The Inquirer] → Read More
Consumerist has a great exchange between the owner of a broken RAZR v3i and the Argentinean tech support team shuts her down immediately, offering to only replace it for the low-low fee of $175 – until she takes her case to the FCC, the FTC, and the Florida Attorney General’s office. The result? A new phone at no extra charge and a great AIM conversation with Consumerist’s Ben Popken. Motorola V3i Stops Working For No Good Reason, Wants To Charge $175 [Consumerist] → Read More
makes a lot of sense. . The site then crawls the web – namely a few major review sites – and grabs the pertinent scores and information. → Read More
<img src="http://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2007/01/FM Tuner, stereo speakers, large LCD, speakerphone and even an iPod dock. The dock fits every dockable iPod (surprise), and allows you to set your iPod songs as an alarm to wake up to in the morning. There's also a wireless remote, caller ID, and additional handsets to extend the functionality of this unit. Even better, this unit actually looks good on your nightstand. This is one product we'd recommend to people with landlines and iPods. NW402 – Bedside Phone Center with Dock for iPod® [Sharper Image Best via Slash Gear] → Read More
John Biggs over at CrunchGear wrote about an Israeli startup called Viewscore that aggregates product reviews of gadgets from around the web. He says it’s like the metacritic.com of gadgets. The cool technology here though is that the site normalizes numeric ratings across sites that use different scales (a number out of ten or up to five stars are converted to a score out of 100) and uses semantic analysis to determine a number for reviews that don’t use numeric ratings. All the reviews are averaged and viewable individually. You can compare prices and rate the quality of the reviews. There’s also basic information displayed about each product and a product comparison page for many gadgets. Biggs, the CrunchGear editor, says the database of gadgets is pretty good so far. The company has told me that it intends to take its technology beyond gadgets but that this was the best place to start because there are already so many gadget reviews online. In related meta-review site news, the multi-topic review search engine iNods (see Mike’s review) released their 1.0 version today. There’s so much content available online these days that quality aggregation of it with some good added value on top is an important service to provide. I think there’s a lot of room for more entries into this space. → Read More
<img src="http://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2007/01/boom mic, this X-Sport BTH-11 gets more range than most Bluetooth headsets, but make you look even more like a spaceman. The headset's other features are Bluetooth V1.2 support, 15 hours of talk time, Nokia AC adapter compatibility, and weighs 8.8 grams. The range, which is the selling point, is only useful if you're walking about your house with this on your ear. Otherwise, as far as I know, no automobile is 20 to 30 meters long. Product Page [i-Tech via Blue Tomorrow via Oh Gizmo] → Read More
We thank you, oh Verizon overlords, for finally releasing a software update for the Motorola Q. Your generous endowments of which we are not worthy will add the Microsoft Messaging and Security Feature Pack, which gives push email to our bedeviled Q’s. Your generosity in allowing us to now tether our smartphones to our laptops so we can use thy fast EVDO internet for laptop browsing will not be taken in vain. Update Page [Motorola via Phonescoop] → Read More
. The actual XNA will be $99 per year when it’s released, but you can try the XNA Express to get a taste of what you’ll get in the final version. Maybe you can make the next Geometry Wars! Sorry about that. Looks like this is only for Windows XP gaming. The Xbox 360 support will come later this year when the full version is released. Download Page [Microsoft via Major Nelson] → Read More
Video site Guba, one of the most interesting players in the space, has released an affiliate program that will pay you 25 cents for every new free (US based) account resulting from a clickthrough of an embedded video on your site. The video doesn’t have to be your own, it just has to be embedded on your web page or blog. Registering for an account lets users upload video, leave comments and subscribe to videos by tag. It’s an intriguing move because account signups themselves make Guba no money. The free video pages don’t have ads on them but are set up to drive people to the low cost premium videos for download to rent or buy. Guba previously made the news for offering video downloads at a much lower price than competitors, creating a product that hunts copyrighted video online and landing some of the first online distribution deals with major movie studios. Other startups paying users in the online video space include Revvr and Flixya, though both of those companies are offering 50/50 revenue splits of the AdSense revenue generated from their video pages. That model has its charm and could work well for sites with big stars (like some of the users on YouTube) but seems less appealing for most users and in Flixya it could encourage people to upload video they don’t own so they can profit from AdSense around it. In one sense I’m not sure how different this is than paying people for referrals via embedded video they don’t own (Guba), but that seems more legitimate than wrapping AdSense around someone else’s YouTube video on Flixya. Guba’s move is a real gamble though. As long as there is no advertising on the video pages, free accounts will not directly generate any money. The site’s business model seems to be based on driving people to the premium downloads section of the site. One day rentals cost between 49 and 99 cents, purchase from five dollars to ten. Will the revenue generated from sales and rentals alone make up for the free accounts that Guba pays affiliates for? Is it a desperate move to generate publicity in the face of YouTube’s huge mindshare in the market? I think it might work. I think people will display Guba videos and their viewers will sign up for free accounts. I think people want video on demand and a → Read More
New York City
New York City
San Francisco, CA
