Made you look! The folks at Scramby offered us three free copies of Scramby as well as its suite of audio applications. The first three people who email me at contest at crunchgear dot com with the subject “SCRAMBY” get the download key. Previously: Let Out The Voices In Your Head With Scramby UPDATE – All three are gone. Thanks for entering! → Read More
Reebok: Voltron Edition Blink Shot Saves Photos from Chronic Blinkers Vacuums that Really Suck! GDC 2007 — The Keynote: Sony Gets Its Groove On Alarm Clock, Piggy Bank Hybrid → Read More
A friend of mine at AOL emailed today to suggest I take a look at the new AOL email beta, called Cayman. An overview of the new features was published in late February on the AOL email blog, and the product itself was released last Friday. New and existing users can sign up for the beta at beta.webmail.aol.com. Cayman is admittedly a huge step up from the previous (effectively unusable) AOL webmail product (click on the image below for a larger view). The interface has been redesigned, and includes useful Ajax components that significantly reduce the frequency of page refreshes. But drag and drop webmail applications have been around for years, now it is a far cry from being even remotely cutting edge compared to Gmail and Yahoo’s competing offerings. To be more specific, AOL is effectively last in every category we used in our recent comparison of the Yahoo, Gmail and Live.com webmail clients. AOL does offer 2 GB of free storage, more than Yahoo and equal to Live Hotmail, but less than Gmail’s current 2.6 GB. Also, AOL does not support email tagging, does not integrate RSS feeds or IM, does not allow for message forwarding, or POP/IMAP of email into the service (although they do provide IMAP out). Search is so/so, and speed and reliability were very poor in my testing, with a service collapse at one point. Readers of this blog will not be impressed. And while existing AOL webmail users will certainly be happy with the changes, I wonder why the team that built this didn’t try to create something a little more special than this. → Read More
CoRank launches out of private beta this evening. It’s best described as a cross between Digg and Bluedot. It has a Digg-like user interface where users view stories, but by default you are only shown stories bookmarked by other users you’ve added as friends. To see the whole feature list, watch the tour, here. I like keeping track of stories bookmarked by my friends (which is why I prefer Bluedot over Del.icio.us), and this may appeal to some users. For others, they’ll be just fine sticking with the services they’re already using. It’s going to be very tough for services like CoRank to get the foothold they need to grow. Before you count CoRank out, though, it’s worth noting that the founder, Rogelio Bernal Andreo, is both a former manager/engineer at eBay and Netscape and, more importantly, is the founder of eListas and eGrupos, one of the largest social networking site for Spanish speakers. Andreo says that he plans on introducing CoRank to the eListas audience, which is 20 million strong. → Read More
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