It’s spring, which means many of you will be begrudgingly scrubbing your homes from top-to-bottom as part of your yearly spring cleaning ritual. As gearheads, many of you will also be searching for the surest ways to maximize your cleaning efforts — the search will undoubtedly lead many of you to the same destination: Dyson. The DC18 is the newest product to emerge from the labs of cyclonic vacuum superstar Dyson. Dubbed the Slim, this model offers a major reduction in size while still maintaining many of the features that set a Dyson apart from its competitors. My first impression of Dyson was one of cautious intrigue, it was after all a product for doing chores — something I attempt to avoid at all costs. But gradually over the course of a few years the apparent engineering marvel won my attention mainly through attrition. And so, when I heard about the Slim I decided that it was finally time to put Dyson to the test. I mean it’s just a vacuum after all, right? → Read More
Update (April 2, 2007): For those of you still sending in emails pleading with me not to stop writing about startups – this was an April Fools joke. I do not in fact believe that there “just isn’t anything left to invent.” Thank you. Tomorrow we will announce that we have acquired Philip “Pud” Kaplan’s FuckedCompany.com in a stock for assets transaction. The basic details of the transaction are included in a press release that will go out around 9 pm PST tonight, and Pud has also mentioned this on his personal blog. We weren’t going to announce this for another week or so (even though I hinted at it on CrunchNotes), but too many people know about it already and news of it was starting to leak (see Wired and CNET as well). I don’t want to be in a position again where other sites are breaking our news, so we’re announcing officially this weekend. We’ve been working on this deal for months, it is good that we are finally able to close and announce it. FuckedCompany first went live in 2000, chronicling failing and troubled companies in its unique and abrasive style after the dot com bust. Within a year it had a massive audience and was getting serious mainstream press attention. As the startup economy became better in 2004, much of the attention the site received went away. But a large and loyal audience remains at the site, coming back day after day for its unique slant on the news. At its peak, FC had 4 million unique monthly visitors. Since FC focuses on the negative news coming out of startups, and TechCrunch tends to focus on the positive, this combination may seem odd. But the sites are in fact extremely complementary. For example, the audiences are about equal in size and have very little overlap. So from day one we will double our reach and traffic. Reasons For The Merger The market moves in cycles, and its clear that we are at the tail end of the current boom (disregard recent statements I’ve made to the contrary). Thousands of startups launched in the last year and a half, and well over a billion dollars was invested in them. Even in good times, 90% of startups fail. But recent events make me believe that even a 10% success rate might be optimistic going forward. Some recent trends → Read More
Magnify.net is a new video startup that is different from the rest of the crowd. Unlike YouTube and dozens of others, it isn’t focused on building a portal around user-uploaded videos. Instead, they are allowing website publishers to create their own video channels, and populate it with videos from other sites (like YouTube, Revver, Yahoo Videos, etc.) that allow embedding. The result is a highly targeted niche video site that integrates very well into existing content websites. To see it in action, see this channel that they created for TechCrunch. There are a ton of publisher settings to allow customization, but the general idea is that we would add this to the site, and allow readers to add their own videos that they think will be interesting to this audience. I’ve set the TechCrunch page up so that any reader can add video (direct from their computer, via a search feature or by pasting the actual video URL from a video site), and it will go into the collection after at least three others have reviewed it and it has at least a 5/10 rating on average (or an admin approves it). Videos that are approved can be rated, commented, tagged, shared, etc. Magnify.net also offers a RSS feed of all videos on the site, so readers can subscribe and stay up to speed on new videos. Here’s an example of deeper integration with TechCrunch: One of our recent posts showed a Joost commercial. This video has also been added to the video site where others can interact with it as well. This is actually perfect for the new CenterNetworks experiment where Allen Stern is calling for companies to send in demo videos of their products. They should set up a Magnify.net channel to organize these – the ratings feature is already built in. I’d like to get these videos onto TechCrunch as well, and readers can simply add them. I’ve also been adding startup demos from ScobleShow. If startups have demo videos that they’d like to have this audience see, this would be a good place to add it. There are other features as well that I haven’t mentioned (playlists, widgets, etc). The site is still very much in beta and needs some work on flow and the user interface (some features are hard to find). I’ve also noticed it runs very slow. Magnify.net was founded by Steve Rosenbaum → Read More
Swiss Bikeboard For Those That Like Going Down Fast Belkin Makes Those Desk Grommet Holes Useful JVC’s Bathtub Floating AW33 DAP Relaxes You While You Bathe Daylight Savings Aftermath Could Continue Apple TV’s USB Port Now Hacked and (Almost) Fully Functional → Read More
Whos.Amung.us is a neat widget we came across tonight that some websites will want to add. It shows the number of concurrent users on a site at any given time. Clicking on the widget also gives good stats on the recent URLs people visited as well as popular pages. Like Sitemeter (which we also have in the bottom right of the sidebar), it doesn’t do anything Google Analytics or other stats services don’t do – but it is an easy way to share more data about your site with your readers. There is also a firefox extension that shows the total number of readers on your site at the bottom of the browser at all times. We’ll keep it on TechCrunch until it manages to take the site down for the first time (every widget we add seems to do this eventually). → Read More
The world’s first open-source car was unveiled this week at the AutoRAI show in Amsterdam. The c,mm,n (or “common”) was developed by three Dutch technical universities: Delft, Eindhoven and Enschede. The current model features a zero emission hydrogen-powered motor and it seats four (little people by the looks of it). All of the vehicle’s technical data and blueprints are available freely on the Web and anyone is welcome contribute to the design as long as the ideas are openly available. So if you’re proficient in Dutch and automotive engineering mosey on over to the c,mm,n website and take a gander at the specs. c,mm,n, the world’s first open-source car [Core77] → Read More
When I was at SXSW a few weeks back, the new daylight savings time took place. My Blackjack failed to recognize new switch and I was stuck with the wrong time for the entire week. It was a pain in the ass, but I finally got it fixed when I returned home and patched Windows Mobile. Well according to some speculation, many older devices could spring forward this Sunday when we reach the old DST date. So if you set your device clocks forward manually or have some old device that automatically recognized DST, you might want to check it to make sure it’s not going to leap another hour into the future. Daylight saving again? Older devices may spring forward [USA Today] → Read More
I have to say that I expected something a little more exciting. Our previous Joost coverage is here, and we have a long post on them coming up. Thanks Orli. → Read More
Robots and the Nintendo Wii make for a fine Friday afternoon. A robot—the WiigoBot—playing the Nintendo Wii, on the other hand, is amazing. Here, the folks from BattleBricks assembled a robot made from legos that bowls a perfect game in Wii Sports. A video of the robot in action is after this here jump. → Read More
If you’ve applied for a job before, you’ve probably fretted over how to answer questions like “are you inclined to rely more on improvisation than on careful planning?” or “do you like to create challenges for yourself when you take on a new project?”. Companies commonly use personality tests filled with questions like these to assess the fit of a potential employees with the company. There’s a whole laundry list of these personality tests here. Some companies, like Google, have even developed their own. All of these tests are sets of written questions meant to poke and prod at a candidates mind to get a real sense of their ability and personality. However, the meaning behind these questions is relatively transparent, motivating candidates to give the answers they think their employer wants to hear. Startup Pairwise is taking a different approach to personality tests. Instead of words, Pairwise will use images to test a candidates mentality using data gleaned from their LikeBetter picture game. LikeBetter is a flash based game that shows you a series of pairs of images uploaded by users. For each pair, you pick which image you prefer. Based on the choices you make, LikeBetter makes a guess about your personal traits, which you then confirm or correct. As more people use the system, LikeBetter discovers the strong correlations between the choices people make and the attributes they express. Based on this data, Pairwise creates a quiz using some of the most highly discriminating pairs, chosen to have the strongest and most confident predictive power across the broadest spectrum of personality traits. They can then track a candidate’s behavior through the test and make an educated guess about their personality based on the correlations they made in LikeBetter. Pairwise does their best to make the test harder to read into by being a completely image based test and using non-obvious pairs (no GI Joe vs. Barbie). Under the hood, LikeBetter is using an iterative application of Bayes rule called Naive Bayesian inference. The method uses a lot of dense statistics involving proposing hypotheses and dependent probabilities. If you really want to learn about it, check out the Wikipedia entry. On the other hand, the employment quiz is not making and testing hypotheses, but comparing the user’s behavior with the statistics they collected through LikeBetter and determining the the applicants tendency toward either extreme of an attribute (i.e → Read More
Like I mentioned, Panasonic visited Gotham yesterday to show off its plasma TV lineup for the year, including its first 42-inch 1080p model that’ll be available in June for $2,500. (Wow, run-on sentence alert.) Panasonic displayed many of these plasmas at CES earlier in the year, but it doesn’t hurt to get some one-on-one time with them without throngs of people pushing up against me. → Read More
Well, we showed you the first picture of the Sidekick ID and it was pretty fugly to begin with, but we didn’t expect it to be this bad. Leaked on the T-Mo Website is a rebate form with some official photos of the ID and it makes me want to purge. There’s a $50 rebate and a supposed April 18 launch. Colorful Sidekick ID spotted in its full glory: a rebate form [Engadget] → Read More
Pioneer is all over plasma TV, and it looks like it’s going to launch its 8th-gen plasmas at an event in Rome this May. Pioneer kept going on and on at CES about how it wanted to make plasma the premier TV technology and this announcement should finally reveal what it’s been up to. It used to be that I was sorta down on plasma, but companies like Pioneer and Panasonic, which showed off its new line of plasmas yesterday here in New York, have improved the technology to the point where I would buy one. That is, if I had any money to do so. (Plasma is still on the expensive side, you see.) Incoming: 8th-gen Pioneer plasma TV [Tech.co.uk] → Read More
Didn’t get enough time on the slopes this winter and still feel the need to go downhill at breakneck speeds? Well the Swiss are one step ahead of you. Behold the Bikeboard! The original Swiss Bikeboard — a cross between a scooter and a snowboard — was developed for use on snow (check the picture after the jump), but the makers designed it so the boards can be easily switched out for other attachments. Well those attachments are coming in May for street, offroad, and water. → Read More
Up till now, the Apple TV’s USB port has been like your appendix: there, but not really doing anything. Incorrigible hackers have now figured out a way to unlock the port, letting the Apple TV use any number of different USB devices (think mice, keyboards, hard drives, etc.) On the other side is a video of Nicholas from The Last King of Scotland playing around with a newly hacked USB port. → Read More
Belkin has finally made those lame grommet holes in our desks useful with a trio of In-Desk products. Two are USB 2.0 hubs with 4 ports that are either angled or flush depending on your preference. The third In-Desk is an iPod dock that charges and syncs to your PC/Mac and it includes a stereo-in jack. All three grommet hole conversion hubs retail for $39.99 and will be available soon. Product Page [via Everything USB] → Read More
LG has dropped an external DVD writer with LightScribe that burns at 18x in Europe — of course. The LG GSA-E40N is powered by USB and the external Super-multi drive burns DVD±R media at 18x, DVD±R DL at 10x and DVD-RAM at 12x, CD-Rs at 48x and CD-RWs at super fast 32x. LG’s newest drive is Windows compatible and its tough outer shell allows you to place it vertically or horizontally. It’s priced at $92 in Europe. LG GSA-E40L 18X External DVD Writer with LightScribe [Far East Gizmos] → Read More
Microsoft has revealed what sort of goods (content) we can expect in the 120GB HDD that will be standard on the Elite and as a stand alone add-on. The list is quite extensive and very exciting. Both Elite and stand alone HDD will have a full version of Hexic HD, a slew of dashboard themes and some gamer pics (hopefully they’re cooler). A few other goodies are included as well so hit the jump and find out. → Read More
OK, so the Y-E-Data YD-300 WUSB hub isn’t fully Wi-Fi hence the WUSB tag, which stands for Ultra-Wideband Wireless Hub. In any case the four-port USB hub will “wirelessly” transfer to any dongle plugged into your PC up to 10m away. Transfer speeds are said to be similar to USB 2.0, so it only makes sense to go “wireless.” The question is: would you pay $350 for it? Product Page [via Digital World Tokyo] → Read More
JVC has perhaps the strangest digital audio player right now and it’s currently floating around Japanese bathtubs. The XA-AW33 is a waterproof DAP that’s supposed to cause you to relax. When music bellows out of its mono speaker, it generates water ripples; a blue LED is also said to enhance the calming effect of the DAP. It’s got 265MB of flash and plays MP3s and WMAs. I predict this will do well in the crazy person market, ’cause only such a person would want to soak in a tub with a DAP floating around like an iceberg. At least it’ll calm them down. Product Page [JVC via Fareastgizmos.com] → Read More
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