If you love the regular iPod but hate the color selection, then perhaps you should consider Colorware’s latest iPod release. A limited edition pink 30GB iPod will come in four different designs, which include a rose, hearts, cherries, and a butterfly. The earbuds will even match. But limited edition stuff, as always, never comes cheap. $350 is how much this beauty will set you back when your girlfriend starts bugging you for one come her birthday. Colorware dresses up 5G iPod in limited edition pink [iLounge] → Read More
Though Vista is great and all and quite the improvement over XP, it still has a lot of issues with certain programs and hardware. Hence why Microsoft is taking awhile to roll out its Games For Windows Live service. Luckily, the time is almost upon us. Microsoft will be releasing Games For Windows Live for Vista owners come May 8th. The service will allow gamers to easily play against each other on certain games. Plus with the ability to hook up a 360 controller to Vista, plenty of people are going to be giving it a whirl. And that’s not all. Halo 2 comes out the same day, allowing tons of 14 year olds to call each other “Gay” and “Lame” regardless if they’re playing on an Xbox or a PC. Either way, cross-platform gaming actually looks like it has a shot for once. Kudos to you Microsoft for doing something awesome with the gaming world. Games for Windows Live and Halo 2 hit Vista May 8th [Joystiq] → Read More
Thanko’s Vonia headband has really good intentions, but, seriously, you’ve got to be kidding me. The iPod Shuffle is no bigger than a book of matches, apparently, that’s too big for some people. If you’re one of those then the Vonia is just right for you, if of course, you enjoy looking like a douche. Your Shuffle tucks in the back of the headband and plugs into some good ‘ole fashioned Bone Conduction Tech. The only real redeeming quality is the ability to use it underwater. Go ahead, look like el Douche. Product Page [via Akihabara News] → Read More
The Sony Ericsson W660 represents the latest fusion between a digital audio player and a cellphone, which seems to be all the rage nowadays. The 3G candybar has a 2-megapixel camera, FM radio support, Java 2.0 (hello, third-party apps!) and a battery life that’s rated to last 25 hours while listening to music. It also has a music identification feature, which attempts to identify a song’s name by analyzing just a few seconds of it. Hmm, the BlackJack couldn’t do this very well, so I have my doubts. The W660 will be available in certain markets Q2 of this year in two colors, black and red. This might be the first time that I actually like the design of a Sony Ericsson cellphone. The Rapture must be near. Press Release [Sony Ericsson via SlashPhone.com] → Read More
TMNT on XBox Live MP3 Player Vest: Eliminate Those Pesky Wires While On-The-Go Twirl-a-Squirrel Columino Almost Floaty Speakers World’s Most Expensive Shift Knob → Read More
I sometimes say regretful things when speaking off the cuff at conferences. Last month at The Future of Web Apps conference in London I (jokingly) called for the dissolution of the BBC because some of their online ventures are, in my opinion, stifling private sector startup initiatives in the UK and Europe. As a publicly funded entity with near limitless financial resources, I think the BBC needs to be careful about what businesses they dip their toes into. I mentioned a new BBC virtual world product as an example. Did I mean it literally? No. The BBC sends us far too much traffic for me to want it to dissolve (and I think it’s a brilliant, well run company as well). But the whole thing was caught on video and, as you can imagine, I was roundly (and I believe properly) criticized (although see this comment). At best this is none of my business, although I lived in the UK for many years and well remember the dreaded BBC television tax. But it appears that some European startups do consider this their business, and have complained to the European Commission about the BBC’s Jam project, “an online learning resource for children, designed to be used at home to support key areas of the school curriculum across the UK.” The service went live a year ago, and the BBC said they plan on investing £150m on the project over five years. Half of that has already been spent, 190 people work on the project and 170,000 users have registered for the service. The BBC says they will suspend the service based on these complaints. “Commercial people in the education sector are claiming the BBC is damaging their business; it is seen as a state subsidy,” said BBC Media Correspondent Torin Douglas. I don’t know the nature of the complaints, and I don’t have an opinion on this other than to say that it’s clear that the BBC is struggling with it’s boundaries and what types of services it can offer, particularly online. Those of you in the UK – please let me know what you think about all of this. → Read More
The founding team of new music service Slacker, which launched this morning, includes three former music startup CEOs (Dennis Mudd, Musicmatch, acquired by Yahoo), Jim Cady (Rio) and Jonathan Sasse (iRiver). And they’re going to need these guys and their connections, because Slacker isn’t just some new music service. They have broad reaching goals that bring them face to face with iTunes/iPod and Sirius/XM, as well as startups like Last.fm, Pandora, and every one of these services. The basic music service is very similar to Pandora (see screen shot at bottom of post). It’s a web based music player that customizes stations based on whether you like or dislike specific tracks. Like Pandora, you can’t play specific tracks on request, but you can certainly listen to a certain genre of music. Slacker is also trying to connect related songs, and in my limited testing it does a good job, although not as well as Pandora. This basic service is free and ad-supported (visual ads on screen only). Here’s where things get interesting. Although Slacker is only launching its web based music player today, they have PC based, iTunes-like software coming that will organize the music on your computer as well as play the same radio stations as the web based version. If you pay a $7.50/month fee, all “favorited” songs that you hear on the radio stations will be saved to your computer, and the ads will be removed from the service. And that’s not all, folks. Slacker also has hardware ambitions. They have a portable, iPod-like wifi enabled device coming, with a very large 4 inch color screen. The device will automatically sync with the Slacker PC software via wifi and will also cache songs to be played on saved radio stations. The device will range from $150 to $300 based on storage capacity. Finally, they also have a satellite car kit in the works that will ensure that wherever you are, Slacker is with you. Since the only service available now is the web player, there isn’t a whole lot to review. But Slacker just picked a fight with just about every major online music company I can think of. Like the Zune and (I assume) future versions of the iPod (and don’t forget Music Gremlin), the portable device is wifi enabled. Their PC based software is a direct competitor to iTunes, and the service as a whole → Read More
Publishing your location-based wireless applications to your handset just got a whole lot easier. That’s because of location-enabled mobile applications developer uLocate Communications’ new mobile GPS widget platform, WHERE. Now available on several Sprint phones as of today, WHERE works with GPS location technology to enable WHERE Widgets to be placed on these handsets. The process is easy: users add WHERE Widgets to their WHERE handset application in one of two ways: by selecting from menus that live on the handset, or by dragging and dropping them from the Where.com directly to the phone. Developers wishing to write WHERE Widgets would use the PHP and Ruby-complaint.WHERE mark-up language and scripting utilities- which makes it possible to create WHERE apps on J2ME and BREW handsets. → Read More
Some venture capitalists are known for making speedy decisions, communicating clearly, treating portfolio companies fairly, and guiding their startups to a win for all stakeholders. Others, not so much. Some even lob the odd (friendly) jab or two at bloggers. A new site called TheFunded hopes to even the odds a little by getting the information out about how VCs treat entrepreneurs. They have a good database of venture firms (6,559 contacts from 3,529 funds), and invite members to rate and review funds after dealing with them first hand. Others can agree or disagree with these comments, and/or leave their own. The end result is a list of happy and horror stories, as well as an overall 1-5 rating for each fund, on five different categories. There isn’t much feedback yet, as the site is still under the radar with just 39 members. An example of feedback – Menlo Ventures has an overall rating of 2.8/5. There are two comments, one positive and one negative (the positive comment came from someone who was turned down). You have to apply to be a member, which allows you to leave your own reviews and ratings, and read much of the feedback (only some reviews are made public). In the future they will only allow people who’ve been invited by other members. They also go to some length to make you prove who you say you are. VCs are not allowed in as members, and applicants have to say what company they are with and point to a bio page about themselves. While I think this is a great service, I have a couple of problems with TheFunded. First, since most startups are turned down for funding, there will be a tendency for people to leave negative comments, and readers need to take that into account. How well a fund treats the many entrepreneurs they turn away, of course, matters too, and that feedback is valuable. I think a good addition to the feedback form is a simple box to check if you were funded or rejected to help give readers context. Also, the face that this is a bit of a private club, and non-anonymous, should help mitigate many of the issues we mentioned with another feedback site, Gorb. A bigger problem I have with TheFunded is that they distribute contact information about VCs, including email addresses and telephone numbers. This brings → Read More
http://www.mytoons.com/flash/MyToons_RemotePlayer.swf It is our luck to have two excellent user generated animated video sites now live – Israel-based Aniboom and, starting today, MyToons, which just came out of private beta. MyToons certainly has the edge over Aniboom on design and overall usability, although I found site navigation to be slow this morning. With both sites, users upload short animated films that they’ve created, or have copyright permission to use. Videos are organized by tag, user, most watched, most highly rated, etc. I love this stuff, and I spent quite a bit of time browsing videos before choosing the one embedded above (although I’m not too sure that particular video complies with MyToon’s copyright policy). MyToons is also trying to be family friendly, and says they’ll censor out content that would constitute a NC-17 rating in the U.S. If we’re talking about pornographic content, it will be a clear enough line. But if they start to censor out swearing and other fuzzily inappropriate content, the site will suffer. → Read More
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