The iPhone will come out on June 11. Someone over at CNET had the bright of calling Cingular (well, AT&T) to ask them when the phone would come out, and the voice on the other end of the line revealed the June 11 date. The date makes sense: Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference begins that same day and, well, we (save for Dvorak) know it’s coming out in June at some point. So this date, if true, leaves us just 10 weeks away from the in-demand phone’s release. Look at that excitement grow. Apple’s iPhone will be released on June 11 [CNET] → Read More
When some companies produce a music player, they continually look to add features based on consumer feedback. Consider Cowon and Archos as two prime examples; they are constantly tweaking the firmware, and both have active online communities that actually seem to influence the future of the product. So WTF with Apple? The company has gotten so focused on taking someone’s great idea and running with it innovating that they wind up virtually abandoning the idea of improving — not just fixing — their products in between major launches. → Read More
Statsaholic (formerly Alexaholic) launched a year ago and provided much easier access to Alexa traffic data than the Alexa site itself. Statsaholic also had other features Alexa didn’t offer, like embeddable graphs and data smoothing. Others agreed, and soon started linking to Statsaholic instead of Alexa when doing traffic comparisons. At one point, Alexa was the no. 3 search result on Google for “Alexa.” Statsaholic was not using the Alexa web service to get the data, because Alexa doesn’t offer the graph data via their web service. Amazon, which owns Alexa, could have complained or simply shut them down when it launched, but they didn’t. They actually complimented the service in a post on the Alexa blog last April. But somewhere along the line Amazon decided they didn’t like Statsaholic and got their lawyers involved. They filed a domain name dispute earlier this year to get ownership over the Alexaholic domain name. Ron Hornbaker, the owner of the service, stopped using the alexaholic domain name and moved the service over to Statsaholic.com while the dispute was ongoing. That didn’t appease Amazon, which then took the step of blocking Statsaholic from accessing Alexa graphs, although they left other sites doing the same thing intact. Statsaholic started getting data in other ways, and eventually Amazon just turned off all ability to hot link to their graphs from any outside site. Meanwhile, Amazon implemented many of the Statsaholic features and pushed the graphing function to the home page of the Alexa site. The Statsaholic side of the story is here. I’ve been playing phone tag with Amazon PR to talk about this for over a week but have been unable to do anything other than swap emails and voicemails to try to schedule a time to talk. In their defense, they say they tried to work with Statsaholic, even going so far as to “explored an acquisition” before shutting them down. What bothers me about the situation is that Amazon sat on it for a year, complimenting the service along the way (and copying it). Then, just when the service started getting really popular, they took drastic measures to shut it down. I’ll continue to try to talk to Amazon about the situation, and there very well could be additional facts that put this in a different light. But for now we are left without a service that many of us used regularly → Read More
Schuberth J1 Super Helmet Star Wars Postal Stamps On The Way Nokia 7088: L’amour Luxury, or Simple Slider? CrunchGear Boooring Edition: MOTOTRBO 2-Way Radios Battletest: Vyper exo by Booq → Read More
Yesterday I sat down with Sean Parker at his offices at the Founders Fund in San Francisco to see a demo of his new and yet-to-be-named startup (the working name for the project is Project Agape). Parker is a larger-than-life twenty seven year old who co-founded Napster and Plaxo and was the founding president of Facebook. He’s been working full time on Project Agape for the last eight months, while still putting in the hours at Founders Fund as a Managing Partner. Parker knows about how to apply viral principles to ideas. Half of our 1.5 hour meeting was spent discussing these principles and how to fine tune ideas to the point where they can grow exponentially. The only thing that can stop a good viral idea is when it runs out of population, he says. If Napster, Plaxo and Facebook are any example, he just might be right. Project Agape is still under a heavy cloak of secrecy (Om Malik first got wind of the new venture a week and a half ago), although I was able to see a demo and some additional conceptual work. Parker’s goal, he says, is to apply the same ideas around virality that worked so well on his previous projects to the idea of altruism and activism. Charities, political parties and affinity groups all rely on participation from people who share the same beliefs and ideals. But recruiting and fundraising are largely stuck in the pre-Internet era: social pressure and guilt are applied to get others to donate to that marathon for the Leukemia society, or donate time working with the homeless. Parker wants to harness those proven incentive structures use his new startup to increase their effectiveness. New sites like Change.org and dotherightthing and Six Degrees help people talk about issues online, but they don’t go far enough in using virality to get new users and get them actually doing things. Parker wants the kind of activity around these organizations that Facebook sees – tens of thousands of new daily users and hours and hours of social interactions. The result, he says, will be a much more efficient engine for organizations to get volunteers and raise money. The company is based in Berkeley and will make some announcements in the coming weeks, and a beta product will be available in a couple of months. Stay tuned for more. → Read More
The “enhancement” that Newsvine CEO Mike Davidson made to Presidential Candidate John McCain’s website was mentioned on the Daily Show Thursday evening. Lots of other mainstream press attention, too. Davidson’s shareholders should be happy – this was a major guerrilla marketing event for Newsvine. Screenshots and video are below. http://www.comedycentral.com/motherload/syndicated_player/index.jhtml → Read More
Marshall Kirkpatrick wrote about German startup SellABand when it launched last August. Like Amie Street, SellABand has an innovative way for struggling new artists to get their music heard, and make some money as well. Artists sign up and upload some of their music. Users listen to it. If they like it, they pay $10. If a band reaches $50,000 in donations, SellABand helps them record an album with a studio and expert producer. It’s great in theory. At the time of our original post there wasn’t much data – 130 bands had signed up in the first couple of weeks, and had raised a few hundred dollars each. But a few months later, wow. 2700 bands from all over the world have signed up, and four have already reached the $50,000 mark and have recorded albums (Nemesea, Cubworld, Second Person and Clemence, and more are on the way. Mandyleigh, one of our readers, is currently no. 4 on the top list and looks to be headed to the studio soon. Listeners who donate to an artist get a free CD when the goal is reached – and are refunded their money if it isn’t. Artists get 1/3 of all advertising revenue from their profile, and 60% of proceeds from eventual album sales. They also get all rights back to their music a year after the album comes out. → Read More
Fresh off the assembly line comes the brand new Vyper exo briefcase from Booq, a company whose motto reads, “Empowering the next generation of creative performance.” It’s an ambitious and open-ended goal, that is most appreciated by a very specific demographic (you). In the interest of full-disclosure, my current day pack is a Vyper XM, so it’s possible that I’m predisposed to a bias toward Booq due to my good fortune with its previous products. The flip-side of that tale is that I’m more critical, because I know its capable of great things. I’m in the manner of thinking the latter is closer to accurate. So with that in mind, let’s take a look at how the Booq Vyper exo held up during my tests. → Read More
Dell announced today that it would begin offering Linux on its systems. “Dell has heard you. Our first step in this effort is offering Linux preinstalled on select desktop and notebook systems,” said a statement on its website. The company currently offers Linux on its servers, but the option has been unavailable on consumer oriented systems. No information is available as to which desktops and notebooks will feature the OS-alternative, but more specific data is expected in the coming weeks. Dell gives the go-ahead for Linux [BBC] → Read More
Out of curiosity, I just popped over to Amazon.com to search for a pre-order page for the Xbox 360 Elite. Lo and behold there are nine up for sale (or pre-order depending on which seller you go with; none of them are Amazon, though) with prices of either $1,199.99 or $2,474.99. Am I missing something here? The system isn’t due in U.S. stores till April 29 with an estimated retail price of $479.99. So who in the hell is going to drop $1,200 to nearly $2,500 for it now? Again, maybe I’m missing something and if so, please straighten me out. Amazon.com Xbox 360 Elite Page → Read More
FCC filing. In a statement issued from the manufacturer to Kotaku, Sony said: As mentioned when we made the product announcement for PS3, the system will have different configurations (thus, 60GB HDD with memory card slots and Wi-Fi and 20GB HDD without memory card slots or Wi-Fi both exists). Application to the FCC has been made with various possibilities in mind, however, it does not lead to a new product announcement at this time. There is no denial of a PS3 update. I’d go so far as to say the reply even anticipates one. But it’s safe to say that the 80GB model carries no expansions beyond storage capacity. Oh well. Sony Responds to PS3 Elite Rumor [Kotaku] → Read More
The Schuberth J1 Helmet looks so cool that it kind of makes me want to get a bike just so I can use one. Beneath that distinctive futuristic styling is a collection of advanced features designed to protect your noggin’. The helmet has a removable chin guard, an Optical Class 1 distortion-free visor, integrated sun shade and a ventilation system that’ll prevent you brain from boiling — I’ve seen it happen, it’s horrible. It might cost $660, but that investment doesn’t seem too bad compared to the alternative of having your head splattered into the pavement. Just a thought. Schuberth J1 Helmet [via Uncrate] → Read More
One of the big whining talking points about Microsoft Windows Vista when it rolled out was the system requirements to run the OS effectively. The Systemax Pursuit 4155 notebook is proof that all the fuss was a little unwarranted. I recently did a full roundup of four notebooks that were less than $1,000 and all were running Vista Home Premium, which is the step-down from the Ultimate Edition the Pursuit is running on. None of the notebooks had a problem running Premium and the Pursuit, with its 1.73GHz Core 2 Duo T2250 processor, 1GB of memory, and integrated Intel graphics likely won’t have trouble with Ultimate, either. The other specs in the 4155 are simply average: 60GB hard drive, DVD/CD-RW combo drive, 15.4-inch widescreen LCD, and a built-in 1.3-megapixel Webcam. Now, I’m not saying you won’t have to replace your three-year-old Pentium 4/Athlon 64 desktop/laptop to run the OS, but the hardware requirements are not so prohibitive that you can’t buy a budget system and still enjoy the fancy Vista features. Lots more photos of the Pursuit 4155 after the jump. → Read More
http://www.veoh.com/videodetails.swf?player=videodetails&type=v&permalinkId=v285398RAPPaKER&id=1Online Videos by Veoh.com Prom Queen is coming, and it will be distributed on MySpace. Is the future of new media going to be a world where stories are told over eighty episodes that are each ninety seconds long? And advertising galore – pre rolls, post rolls, and product placements. This may be the highest advertising to content ratio ever seen. The budget for the show is just $100k, which is nothing more than a rounding error in Hollywood. If enough MySpacers put up with the ads and watch Prom Queen, there will be literally thousands of these shows hitting the web. And all the big portals will gleefully pushing them to us, because they’ll get a revenue share from all those ads. And if there’s a show that’s any good, users will strip out all those ads, mash those eighty episodes together into one 700 MB file and put it on bittorent. Then the lawsuits will start. In an interview with NewTeeVee, ex-Disney Chief Michael Eisner (the guy behind Prom Queen, through his startup Vuguru) talks a lot about protection of intellectual property (“I think the Viacom lawsuit [against Google/YouTube] is very promising”) and how people must get paid for their work. Those are important messages, but as I said with a post about Clown Co., save it for the shareholders. Users want a compelling product, with as few ads as possible mucking things up. He never talks about the user experience, of the rise of the cream from the chaotic cesspool of user generated content as a real threat to Hollywood’s professionals. He thinks new media is nothing more than “technological advancement and expertise in distribution and exhibition.” “Old media, where he lumps “Greek mythology and Shakespeare and Eugene O’Neill and Happy Days” together, is where the creativity is. He says old media types “understand motivation, and character, and where the denouement goes, and how to develop interests between characters, and make people laugh, and cry” It’s good to see the Shakespeare and Happy Days guys trying new things. But I think he’s underestimating the seismic shift that’s occurring right now around content creation and distribution. Unlike before, the audience can easily create their own content and distribute it to millions on YouTube. Some of that content will be better than anything Hollywood produces. And it won’t cost even $100k to create. → Read More
That John C. Dvorak is up to it again. Making radical claims year after year until one of them actually hits and then he claims credit – real classy. Dvorak’s latest claim is that Apple should pull the plug on the iPhone before it’s too late. He goes on to say that Apple is merely an advertising company and the iPhone is way over-hyped. Says the silly goose: What Apple risks here is its reputation as a hot company that can do no wrong. If it’s smart it will call the iPhone a “reference design” and pass it to some suckers to build with someone else’s marketing budget. Then it can wash its hands of any marketplace failures. So if the iPhone fails, Apple is no longer a hot company? Dream on old man, dream on. However I will give props to Dvorak for what he said about this year’s CES. Read the full article only if you can handle the Apple-bashing, ’cause there’s a plenty. Apple should pull the plug on the iPhone [Marketwatch] → Read More
Scrapbook maker Scrapblog strutted its stuff at the We Media conference last month, went off the grid, and finally came back online today. Scrapblogs are Flash-based slide shows made up of pages of photo or video layouts you can jazz up with a myriad of designs and effects. Transitions can be added between each page and you can set the mood with some background music as your show plays. You can publish a Scrapblog publicly or by invite only and embed it as well. If you choose, viewers can leave Flickr like embedded comments on key spots of the show. Scrapblog’s editor is a flash application, which may make a lot of you cringe, but not for good cause. Scrapblog, as we’ve mentioned before, has one of the most natural feels of any online application out there. It’s full screen and closely mimics the design of a Windows desktop application. Creating a Scrapblog starts with a creation wizard that lets you pick one of 19 different design themes to frame your pages of photos. You can then cover this canvas with by dragging and dropping in photos, clipart, shapes, text, and even videos. Each of these media objects can be hyperlinked, overlayed, resized, rotated, and edited along several parameters. Photos are given special treatment and support frames, shadows, as well as that quintessential web 2.0 effect, reflections. Photos can be pulled from your computer, Photobucket, Yahoo Photos, Flickr, and WebShots. Video, on the other hand, is drawn solely from YouTube. After you’ve laid out the pages, you can choose from 12 different transitions between them and from 22 different songs to play along with the show. Photo slide shows are a crowded space which includes the 38 million user giant, Photobucket, along with two newer players, RockYou and Slide, bringing in tens of millions in financing. Like FlipTrack, however, Scrapblog keeps a distinct niche by offering a more richly designed presentation less like a series photos and more like a hipper version of Powerpoint. http://www.scrapblog.com/viewer/viewer_embed.swf?embed=1&scrapblogID=297 → Read More
Though this technically isn’t a gadget, we know every geek loves some Star Wars news! This summer, you’ll be able to pick up Yoda, Luke, and Leia all in the form of postal stamps. To celebrate the countless years of Star Wars in pop-culture, the US Postal Service will be issuing 15 unique stamps that feature different Star Wars characters. The set will go on sale May 25th and each stamp will cost 41 cents a piece (yes, they’re raising prices again). Says David Failor of the USPS: “Because of the movies’ popularity, we believe these stamps have the potential of reaching the blockbuster status of the Elvis stamp, a milestone only the Force could attempt to surpass,” Special sheets featuring all the stamps will be available, as well as pre-paid Express Mail packaging that will feature popular Wars characters. You can even vote for your favorite stamp at this USPS website! Talk about Star Wars excitement. If only we had the power of the force to skip those long lines whenever we visit our Post Office. US to issue Star Wars stamps [The Register] → Read More
Ricoh’s newest digital-camera packs a wallop in a teeny package. The GX100 has a 24-to-72mm-equivalent high-powered wide-zoom lens that goes super-duper wide-angle to 19mm with an optional wide conversion lens. That’s not even the best part! The Ricoh can claim a first in the world of digital-camera’s with its removable electronic viewfinder. The viewfinder tilts, so it’s easier to shoot in bright outdoor environments and offers 100-percent coverage without parallax and full setting information as it would appear on an LCD. The 10-megapixel camera will make all your friends think you’re the next Ansel Adams. OK, not really, but it might take some fantastic photos if you know what you’re doing. Images taken with the GX100 come in a wide variety of resolution and compression combos including RAW with JPEG for highest quality. The included rechargeable battery will get you somewhere around 380 exposures or 35 (?) with AAA batteries. Ricoh’s latest drops in April with a £399.99 ($785) price tag. Ricoh Caplio GX100 with Removable Electronic Viewfinder [Far East Gizmos] → Read More
No screen, low cost, and a 50-percent manufacturing savings for Apple. Is it a dream? No! It’s the iPhone Shuffle, an exciting new phone that’s loaded with absolutely no-features and comes with a coupon redeemable for a free sundae at Dairy Queen (aka CrunchGear HQ). It’s due out Q4 and sports some of today’s leading technologies like crushed walnuts and whipped cream. Mmmmm Apples…whipped cream… Apple announces iPhone Shuffle [64bit headlines] → Read More
If you’re planning on hacking your Apple TV, if you haven’t already, I wouldn’t bother because Apple is only going to hack your hack. I suppose there is always a downside to the Internet. Apple caught wind of all the hackity hacks going around regarding the Apple TV and they’re taking appropriate steps to rectify the situation. According to IPP over at Tutorial Ninja, his hacked box, along with others, has mysteriously been reset. They’re quick to point the finger at Apple and say they’re coming in at night to reset everything, but others have pointed to ‘chronojob,’ a scheduled reset tool. Nevertheless, if you think Apple is hacking your hack then change your password, deny any Internet access to it or else you’ll incur a breach of network and/or $300 paperweight. You can’t call yourself a ninja when you’re being ninja’d, ironic isn’t it? Tutorial Ninjas [via T3] → Read More
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