The trick to any good humor or hoax site is an attention to detail and a seriousness about your work. Useless Account is the best recent example I’ve seen. It’s clear, for example, that more work has gone into this joke than many of the startups we see every day. The site has a single function – to create a new account. “Open ID is a pipe dream” the site argues, which also has a fake quote from “TechLunch” that says “Slightly more useful than Twitter.” Once you’ve created your account, you can log in, and edit your account. That’s it. The reason this is really, really funny (for us) is because that’s what we do all day – create new account after new account at every new Internet startup that comes along. I am a seriously huge expert on account creation. The best part of the site are the FAQs. Note the email for customer complaints and their plans to give away “free pro accounts.” Useless Account was a fun diversion for a few minutes, and for that we are sharing it with our readers. It was created by Jim Whimpey and the Brisbane Creative team. Other recent humor stories on TechCrunch: Google TV – An Elaborate Hoax Make Your Own iPhone (does not actually function) Forget Second Life. Get a First Life. Social Network Backlash bullshitr → Read More
This has been sitting in my mail box for a couple of days and it sort of slipped my mind, which is unfortunate because it’s really cool. The router is equipped with a PCMCIA slot and comes in EV-DO (DIR-250) and UMTS/HSDPA (DIR-451) versions. Simply plug your wireless broadband card into the router and get a quick broadband network in your building. The routers also features a USB port so you can hookup a compatible phone and use it as a DUN modem if you don’t have a wireless card. In addition to its 3G connectivity, it features all the typicalrouter functions like firewalls and security and the other standard effects.The DIR-450 is available now for $300. Product Page → Read More
Not the coolest thing ever, but worth a mention nonetheless. One industrious modder managed to imbue his Xbox 360 with a 5.8-inch widescreen LCD. Like most things of this nature I’m left wondering, “Why?” But I suppose, where there’s a will…. Divineo offers up LCD-infused Xbox 360, practicality in doubt [Engadget via Xbox 360 Fanboy] → Read More
Tired of people making fun of its incredibly functional, yet aesthetically barren devices, RIM last year released the Blackberry Pearl, a stylish candy bar that didn’t sacrifice power—I reviewed it favorably last week. This week comes news that RIM is seeking a patent for a newfangled rotating keypad. From the looks of it, the rotation would give the pad dual functionality as a phone keypad and a keyboard. The addition would allow the device to maintain smartphone-like functionality with a significantly reduced size. What’s next for your Blackberry [Unwired View] → Read More
Cell phones design is going to keep getting crazier and crazier. It’s inevitable. And in the pursuit to create something groundbreaking-and-original, companies are designing devices that are looking less-and-less like actual phones. Take for example these concept devices from Benq-Siemens. They do undoubtedly look cool, but it’s hard to tell whether they’re actually phones—I’m really just taking their word for it here. → Read More
Keeping with the theme of Mike’s Online Photo Editing Overview, I wanted to cover some of the entrants into social music. Music was probably the first type of rich media to really go “Web 2.0″ and it’s become a pretty popular place for startups. As a result, there are some great Rich Internet Applications built around social music. Anyone who makes music a part of their daily lives has no shortage of options when it comes to finding new music and sharing with friends. FineTune Finetune is a relatively new application written in Flash. It’s my favorite out of the bunch and I covered it on my ZDNet blog. What makes Finetune stand out is that in addition to the standard “artist radio”, it allows users to build playlists of specific songs. The minimum playlist is 45 songs and you can have up to three songs per artist. With custom playlists, you can make sure you’re only listening to songs you want. Finetune also gets points because in addition to the web version, it runs on the Wii and there is an Apollo-based desktop client. Pandora Pandora is the granddaddy of the bunch and it’s one of the Web 2.0 applications that Mike can’t live without. It is built using OpenLaszlo and provides the cleanest experience out of all the applications on the list. Pandora uses the Music Genome Project to generate a stream of songs that you’ll like based on how you rate previous tracks. You create stations around artists, songs or albums and you can provide feedback (thumbs up or thumbs down) on the songs Pandora chooses. Tech Crunch’s coverage of Pandora is here. Last.Fm last.fm is another Web 2.0 veteran and is more socially-slanted than the others. Tagging is a big part of the last.fm experience and you can tag any song that comes along in addition to being able to listen to “user tag radio” which is based on tracks that users have tagged with a specific genera. last.fm has a separate desktop application that “scrobbles” the songs you listen to and generates a music profile that you can share with friends. See Tech Crunch’s coverage of last.fm here. MOG MOG is all about a music community. It’s very blog-centric and revolves around user pages, or “Mogs”. You build your Mog around songs you’re listening too and artists you like. That builds something like a profile → Read More
Norwegian enterprise search provider, Fast, released its AdMomentum product today. The new product is private-label contextual advertising platform similar to Google’s Adsense and Adwords platforms paid for by a software licensing fee instead of a revenue split. The product is aimed at high traffic sites taking part in the $6.7 billion search advertising market (PDF download). The product was born out of market research and their WebAds and Platefood Performance products. AdMomentum provides publishers with a GUI to manage their site’s ad zones from purchase to delivery with tracking analytics. The system supports a variety of familiar advertising models that can be applied to the different ad zones: keyword auction, CPM, CPC, CPA, and flat rates. Ad zones can host ads based contextually on user input and page content in various formats such as videos, banners, and text links on the web and optimized mobile sites. Context can be determined based on keywords, geography, content, and a users click stream data. Having your own ad system also allows for finer grained tweaks to the system, such as how often the ad bot crawls pages to determine the advertising context. Australian search engine Sensis and US local search engine Local.com have been trialling the product for a while now. The sites have been selling ad inventory through their own marketing departments and through branded self-serve platforms. Sensis’ Bidsmart ad market allows anyone to bid on keywords or buy spaces in ad zones which can then be placed in an approval queue. Fast’s AdMomentum fits in a niche between contextual ad networks like Quigo, Miva, and DoubleClick and third party advertising engines like those offered by Google, Yahoo! Publisher Network, and MSN adcenter. Dylan Fuller, a Senior Director of Product at Fast told me sites with as many as 5 million impressions a day have turned a profit on the platform. ContextWeb is another end-to-end solution in this space, but only supports text link ads. Andy Beal at Marketing Pilgrim is skeptical about AdMomentum. Rob Hof believes publishers will welcome the change. → Read More
“Are You Watching This” (RUWT?) is a new sports fan site you can use to follow the most popular sports games on TV based on votes from the community and the real-time score of the game. It’s meant keep people from missing the really spectacular sports games as they develop. The main page consists of a TV schedule listing all the sports events across the different TV networks that you use to vote on upcoming games. The default feed is based on east coast time, but you can customize by postal code and cable provider within the US and Canada. Each game in the TV schedule tells you where and when it will be aired, a written preview of the match, lets you vote, and lets you “shout” your opinion to a comment thread. The site also tracks news, standings, and teams across 15 sports. The other major way to follow games on the site is through their sport specific scoreboard page where they list the votes for each game in real time by sport or team. As games get closer or work their way into overtime, the scoreboard automatically adds points to reflect a more entertaining matches. The NCAA Basketball board has been pretty active today and the NHL board includes game highlights pulled from YouTube. It’s a good application of the community voting model that benefits greatly from the automated analysis of scores to determine interestingness. They also tie it all together by letting you track your watchlist by RSS and iCal feeds, check if your friends are getting a game you aren’t. Via TechCrunch Forums Company Reviews → Read More
Umbrella tech hasn’t matured much in the last, I don’t know, ever, so it’s nice to see someone advancing the science. When it’s wet and drizzly, umbrellas are handy, to be sure. But if it’s blustery or stormy, they become useless, broken, and sometimes projectiles. This is no good. Senz has addressed the problem and constructed an umbrella that is meant to withstand the inevitable onslaught of pain that is a windstorm using clever aerodynamics to not only keep you dry, but keep your bumbershoot from flying down the road. But don’t take our word for it, watch the deliciously Dutch video after the jump, then make up your own mind. → Read More
So you’ve done it. You’ve consulted with your spouse, your lawyer, your priest, and your therapist and you’ve decided to ditch XP for the wide open fields and OSXivity that is Windows Vista. And you’ve even chosen which flavor you want. But when upgrading one Windows OS to another, the nagging question has always been: clean install or upgrade the current install? In the past, a clean install always made for a more stable, faster system with less legacy bloat. A clean install, however, would also mean re-downloading and re-configuring all of your favorite applications, if they even worked with the new OS. It’s not an easy choice to make, but fortunately the people at Extreme Tech have done some of your homework and put together a shoot-out between Vista as an upgrade or Vista as a clean install, and the results are surprising. → Read More
We do not condone piracy or theft here at CrunchGear. That does not mean we won’t show you cool gear that facilitates such treachery, like the WiFi Liberator, a work of Robin Hood-esque genius. A glorified USB WiFI dongle, the Liberator acts as a relay that makes a private network public. Say, for example, you’re at your local Starbucks and you have a T-Mobile HotSpot data plan (which you can hack for free), you can use the Liberator to share your Internet connection to the other users in the area. You’re logged on, surfing away on your legit account, and so are your neighbors. A very practical way to altruism. The legality of such devices is up in the air, but then again, so is the WiFi, and the philosophy goes that from there it should be shared. WiFi Liberator [Coin Operated Dot Com, via Boing Boing] → Read More
Telecom Italia and Polymer Vision will demonstrate at 3GSM a rollable cellular device the pair recently agreed to manufacture together. Based on Polymer Vision’s Readius Concept, the device is mainly intended for reading newspapers, books and other data of similar ilk. Measuring under the size of the standard mobile, the device features a 5-inch display that rolls out. It project 16 levels of gray on a high contrast reflective light paper display. No word on price or anything, but Biggs will be on the floor at 3GSM and will be sure to get the rundown on this little oddity. Product Page [via Mobile Mag] → Read More
isn’t catching. Considering it’s caught 95,790 spam comments so far, we can’t complain but there are still some that slip through. Anyway, don’t double post. Just be patient. If it doesn’t go through immediately, it’s probably in the queue and one of us will get to it soon. → Read More
As if there already weren’t a ton of premium headphone options on the market, home-theater and audio-electronics maker Denon introduced five new models. Priced from $50 to $700, they are the first consumer-oriented headphones from the company. Styles include canal phones like the $200 AH-C700 (pictured, available in black or silver) and high-end over-the-ear models, such as the $700 AH-D5000. → Read More
<img src="http://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2007/01/Beatles. Apple Inc., makers of the ubiquitous iPod, and Apple Corps, guardians of Beatles' material, today settled their longstanding trademark feud. The companies have been embroiled in litigation over rights to the name for roughly 20 years. While there was no official announcement of Beatles availability on iTunes, the end to this debate will no doubt accelerate the procedure. In fact, I'm sure the companies probably settled their differences just to get The Beatles on iTunes. It's the bigger picture or something. Anyway, we'll keep you posted as this story develops. Apple, Beatles settle trademark dispute [MSNBC] → Read More
To be quite honest, I’ve been looking for a bag like this for a while now. I no longer have a working laptop, but I have plenty of gadgets and gizmos I tote around that are usually thrown inside some random North Face bag. Proporta’s take on a gadget bag includes thick padding to protect devices, plenty of individual compartments, and even has a spot to run your headphones through to your iPod/MP3 player. It’ll set you back about $50 and is available right now. Product Page → Read More
Speak, memory, in the form of a rambling, ostentatious review of the Nokia N93. Sing, muses, of her great beauty and zoom features. Resound, harp, on her moblogging software and how good she made you feel in France. Prance, Brian Lam, in adulation of this 4000 word pean to free Nokia cellphones. Puke, readers, at reviews that are too long by half. I was very self conscious of the weight of it in my pocket, and I found I babied it a bit. If I owned it I’d have to get something to carry it in, a case. As an exercise for the reader, please write a glowing, overwrought, Proustian paragraph about your favorite gadget in the comments. The winner, chosen by poll, will get a Gyration cordless Gyrotransport presenter. Clack, keyboards, in sweet surrender! The Riddle of Convergence, or: The Seductive Nokia N93 [Meerkat via Gizmodo] → Read More
Prior to sitting down to view that yearly bacchanal of violence and beer last night, the SAG Awards (I TiVo-ed it, natch), I decided to whip out the SpyderTV by Datacolor to calibrate my 56-inch JVC DLP. One of the major issues I’ve always had with this HD TV is that standard definition TV always looks washed out and messy, especially when running through the TiVo. In order to at least fix some of the color errors, I went into the set-up menu and proceeded to ruin the color even more. Thankfully, SpyderTV was able to steer me back to an acceptable mix of brightness, contrast, and tint. → Read More
Back in the 1980s and early 1990s, you just weren’t cool if you didn’t possess a Trapper Keeper. The Trapper Keeper turned Mead into an iconic name that every kid in a school would instantly recognize. Now Mead is looking to break new ground again by introducing a binder with integrated speakers under it’s Five Star line of products. The binder comes with a built-in audio-jack to hook your iPod/Discman/Radio Disney toy up to and two small speakers to pump out your tunes. The binders aren’t due out until the next school year in September, but my guess is that one year of these and teachers will be banning them in every school around the country. What self-respecting teacher allows crap-tastic kids music to be belted out into their classroom? Surely if they had any common sense, they’d confiscate it and as punishment would blast Foreigner: Greatest Hits. Mead develops binder with built-in speakers [Electronista] → Read More
San Francisco, CA
