Nintendo’s president acknowledged that it didn’t accurately predict the demand for the Wii and is now prepared to ramp up production. Starting next month, Nintendo will increase production of the Wii, though the company didn’t say exactly how many more units per month it will produce. Fair enough, since any increase at all is good news for lots of you out there, my family included. (Wii’s scarcity destroyed my little brother’s Christmas and birthday, which is three months later in March.) I guess there’s more casual gamers out there than Nintendo anticipated, which must have totally ruined its calculus. So when can we declare Wii the winner of this war? Iwata confirms plans to increase Wii production [GameIndustry.biz] → Read More
We all have that one friend who was really cool, but, ya know, changed. They were reliable, solid, always there for you, in good times and bad. You thought you knew them, but then out of nowhere, you blink, and they’re entirely different. For some of us, it’s an ex. For others, a childhood playmate. For me, it’s Sony-Ericsson. SE is about as good as cellphones get to Yours Truly. The company makes solid phones with a great interface that are sturdy, bug-free, and just plain there when you need them. But SE, dude, you’ve changed. Friends, Sony-Ericsson has gone Ferrari. Red does not translate well to SE, nor does the yellow shield. Ferraris are cars, friends. They’re not phones. We’re sad that SE has bought into this crap. It’s not the phone company we’ve known through six handsets. Mine were black, black, charcoal, silver, black, and grey. There was no red, nor should there have been. You’ve changed, Sony-Ericsson, and I don’t like the new you. Yet another Ferrari phone (sony-freakin’-ericsson) [Textually] → Read More
Sony’s once again late to the party, having just launched in Japan a video-sharing Web site à la YouTube called eyeVio. Users upload their videos, which can be, among others, in MPEG-4, Flash and Quicktime formats. Sony says that it’ll closely monitor the site for copyright-violating videos, but exactly how they plan on doing this is unknown. To top it off, the eyeVio servers are swamped. Fantastic. This latest Sony endeavor is just another example of Sony releasing a product that may end up being too little, too late. (Keeping in mind that I have no idea how Japanese users have taken to YouTube.) Walkman, PSP and to some extent the PS3. Looks to me like they cold use a shot of creativity over there. eyeVio [Sony via Macworld] → Read More
We like GPS, mostly because we get lost a lot. For reals, when you’re stumbling home from Seattle’s The Rosebud, it seems like a straight line, but it’s not. It’s whirley and thorny, like, ya know, a rosebud. GPS in cellphones is helping, but we’re not there yet. Blue Sky, out of Europe, has an idea that could put a GPS in every phone. Unless, of course, you’re on a pesky CDMA network still. The idea is to embed the GPS receiver into a GSM SIM card. The SIM is the Subscriber Identification Module, the heart of your phone that connects it to the network, manages your phonebook, acts as a defibrillator in case of emergency, and has the recipe for the most amazing chicken cordon bleu EVAR. This means that even the cheapest Handset Of The Future will be able to track your every move via the GPS network of satellites. Good news if, like me, you’re bad with directions and klutzy. Yay, future! Blue Sky squeezes GPS into a SIM [The Reg!] → Read More
Today is a great day for America. Not because it’s Friday, but that’s still a legitimate reason. Today marks the first day that the US has a 3G handset from Nokia and it’s about darn time. The Nokia N75 has shown up on the AT&T website and, maybe, now folks will be able to utilize that highly touted 3G network. The N75 is being marketed as a convergence device that will eliminate your PMP and camera, but I doubt most people are willing to give up those gadgets for a 3G phone. Regardless, here’s a run down of features for the lil guy. A 2-megapixel camera with 10x zoom and video are slapped onto the rig. Users can access high speed data over UMTS…awesome. The integrated video recorder has 8x zoom, which kicks mucho butt. Dual speakers make for some killer 3D surround sound. You have the standard suite of IM, which include AIM, Yahoo and MSN. An HTML browser is included so you can really test out the speed. With a 2-year contract and a mail-in rebate this 3G handset can be yours for only $199.99. Product Page → Read More
Holy cripes. I’ve got pretty good broadband at home. I get 6Mb up and 6Mb down. I thought I had it good until I read that researchers in Koreadiaburgtonville, Asia, have figured out a way to combine downstream broadband channels into a single 144Mb connection. That’s about 20x faster than your home connection, homes. Don’t go calling your Comcast/Cox/Time-Warner/RipOffCo yet, as the breakthrough cable modems are only for customers of a specific Korean cable ISP. That’s ok, though, as we all know that much of the tech that they shrug about over there, we’ll get here, it just takes a few years to cross the ocean. But, then again, so did the Apple TV. Channel Bonding Cable Modem to provide speeds up to 144Mbps [SlashGear] → Read More
EMI won’t be the only record label to offer higher quality, DRM-free music on iTunes. Apple sent out a little note yesterday to its music partners saying that they, too, would be able to offer DRM-free music and videos on its iTunes store. If the deal is anything like the EMI one, music fans can expect to pay slightly more for the DRM-free music. → Read More
Truth be told, robots have never really revved my engine so to speak, but the Daily Mail (where else am I going to get my EPL news?) has a fine piece on just what the human-robot relationship might end up becoming. It touches on recent proposed legislation that would grant robots “human rights” (which is insane), nursing home robots and whether or not they’ll go Cuckoo’s Nest crazy and how they’ll perform on the battlefield: will they refuse orders? how can they follow orders that make them cause harm to humans, breaking Asimov’s cardinal rule? Considering that most robots we have nowadays can only clean around the house—Asimo notwithstanding—This is a debate that’s years in the future. Here’s hoping robots still want to be our friends. What would happen if the robots turned against us? [Daily Mail] → Read More
Sharp’s latest edition to the AQUOS line of products brings back some old school that might not have a place in the home anymore, but some people still live in the past. The DC-ACV52 is a 3-in-1 media recorder that includes VHS, DVD and a 250GB HDD for video recording. Just like other AQUOS media recorders the DC-ACV52 records HD programming and works perfectly with other AQUOS products. There’s no official price, but it will go on sale May 21 with 5,000 units being produced a month. Press Release → Read More
Red Swoosh (acquired by Akamai for $15 million earlier this month) released v1.0 of FoxTorrent today. This is a fully functional BitTorrent client for Firefox that works cross platform (Windows, Mac, Linux) and has a very cool additional feature – the ability to stream files as they are downloading. This is no Azureus (my BitTorrent client of choice), but it does the job and saves time by allowing you to manage torrents directly from the browser. I tested it on a few (non-copyright infringing, of course) files and it worked great on the standard BitTorrent functionality. Streaming just didn’t work, although with the way the BitTorrent protocol breaks files into pieces and reconstructs them in a non linear way means you may have to wait until the file is mostly complete to even begin streaming. I’ll try it again once the files are nearly complete. A good early review is here. → Read More
Take The Grill on the Road My Lap! My Lap! My Lap Is On Fire! Sony Unveils PS3 Eye, World Keeps Spinning These Gamer Babes Will Curb Stomp You Samsung and US Army Team Up For Mobile WiMAX Tomfoolery → Read More
A new service called ScratchYourself came to our attention today. It’s a fairly simple Flash application that lets users upload an image and build a lottery-style scratch card from it. During the beta period people have a chance to win some very limited cash prizes that total $90 or so per day across all winners. Once a scratch card has been created, users can email it to friends or embed it on their site. I created a quick scratch card with our logo and have embedded it below. http://www.scratchyourself.com/SWF/Card.swf?cardID=506463172105c666 What interests me more than the front end, which would easily be duplicated, is the business model and payments infrastructure they’ve put in place. Users have an incentive to create and embed these on their blogs, MySpace page, etc.: if you create a scratchcard and someone wins a prize, you get the same prize as the creator of the card. Prizes are awarded, at the winner’s choice, via paypal, mailed check or amazon gift certificate. The company’s business model is to attract advertisers to sponsor prizes (cash, products, coupons). If ScratchYourself turns out to be trustworthy and can circumnavigate the rather complicated federal and state regulations governing sweepstakes, brands could be attracted to this. You get a good long look at the image underneath the scratch area, which is more than can be said for most banner advertising. And publishers will like the ability to win the same prizes as their readers. Shycast and Bix (acquired by Yahoo) are also experimenting with brand based contests, albeit through video (and Shycast is also a social network). Note: If you make a goatse scratchcard, please do not share it with me (yes, I thought about all kinds of things that you people will want to try out). → Read More
I’ve become a bit of a twitterholic over the last month or so, and update my twitter page frequently with updates that don’t belong here or on Crunchnotes. I’ve suffered through a slow and sometimes down site without complaint – they’re growing like a weed and need some time to stabilize. But then my account was deleted. My last post before the deletion was directed at Twitter co-founder Evan Williams – “@ev never, never, never say that. never.” I was responding to a jab he was taking at Apple products. I noticed that I couldn’t log in and assumed the service was simply down. But it went on for days and no one else was complaining. So I emailed to ask what the issue was, and they were able to restore the account. no data seems to be lost. Twitter co-founder Biz Stone says they haven’t received any other messages about deleted accounts. He alse says It appears that during a routine backup, your index was somehow misplaced or not copied correctly which is why it resulted in a “404 – Not Found” error. Once you emailed me, we found your updates in the database right where they should be and corrected the error. There were zero reports of 404 pages like this aside from yours so while we’re not 100% certain it looks to have been just the sort of error 404 pages were born to handle. Upgrades and/or maintenance we were doing on the same day was thought to be unrelated when I asked the rest of the team about this. So there’s no conspiracy, it’s just the growing pains of a very popular service. I’m not saying a word about scalability and Ruby On Rails, either. But as one of (or the) largest Ruby on Rails applications on the web, a lot of people are keeping an eye on how it scales. → Read More
Apple’s Steve Jobs, perhaps the most important person in the music industry today, says again that Apple is not planning on selling music via a subscription model like many of his competitors. The strategy certainly makes sense as long as as Jobs continues to win territory in his war against DRM, and the subscription music services fail to lure a critical mass of consumers. More than 2.5 billion songs have now been purchased from iTunes and they control 85% or so of the download music market. DRM free songs on iTunes cost 30 cents more, almost certainly creating greater margin for Apple per song. The subscription music services are highly competitive, leaving little profit for the providers. As long as Apple can keep selling tracks for a dollar or more per track, they’ll resist entering this market. → Read More
Samsung and the US Army Communications Electronics Research & Development Engineering Center have announced their joint venture to test some Mobile WiMAX technology over the next few months. The experimentation will take place at Ft. Dix in New Jersey by the Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance On-The-Move team (seriously, that’s a long @ss name and I think I have carpel tunnel now). → Read More
<img src="http://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2007/01/Nextel has discounted the phone by 33% to $100 (with a 2-year deal), meaning you get one of the most lusted-after music phones on the market for a song (see what we did there?). → Read More
TechSelector is a new service for gadget newbies. You basically answer a few questions, run down a list of suggestions, and check out through any number of retail websites. For example, when you look for an MP3 player, it asks you what type you’re looking for — hard drive, flash, or CD (!!) — and then run downs the list of options until it brings up a few possibilities. When I ran through it a few times, it gave quite a few obvious choices and seemed to be a valuable suggestion engine. Will it replace a quick call to your geek friends? Nope. However, if you are that geek friend of which we speak, you might want to send folks over to check it out. Website → Read More
For those who’ve sent in pics and stories, keep it up. You’re all horrible human beings who deserve to win. For the rest of you, you should know that we’re having another one of our contests. What you see to the left is a limited edition pink Zune. We’re giving a brand new one away to one of your mother’s. Mom’s like things, and since Mother’s day is approaching, why not give her a thing she’ll like? You win this contest, this Zune is yours. Whoever has the geekiest mom wins. We want a photo and a reason why she’s geeky enough to enjoy something like a full-featured media player. The best three entries will be put up for vote by the CrunchGear readers. C’mon, mugs, it’s better than that Paris Hilton-branded perfume you got her last year. What’s hit called, Rich Slutbag? Send your entries to contest at crunchgear dot com with the subject “My Mamma Wants a Zune!” The contest goes through May 1st, when we’ll post the top 3 for 3 days of voting. Then we’ll announce the winner, and there will be much rejoicing. Good luck! → Read More
It’s been almost a year since CrunchGear opened floodgates of snark and treachery onto the masses and thus far we’ve been called fanboys, shills, and morons. We can take it. However, we want to know what you really think. Give us a few pithy comments or send an email to john at crunchgear dot com if you have something private to say. What are we missing? What are you looking for? Why do you read us over all 50,000 other tech websites? It’s time for soul-searching here in the dark halls of CG headquarters, and we want to make year two an even bigger success. → Read More
I told you last month that Sony would be opening up a closed Beta trial of Playstation Home this month and it’s finally here! 15,000+ lucky users started getting emails last night that read, “Home is ramping up for its debut, and we’re inviting you to sign up for a very special beta test. Space is extremely limited.” Did any CG readers get one? The only downside is that you aren’t guaranteed a spot even if you received the email, which is a huge bummer. I just checked the Beta homepage and nothing has changed. Keep your fingers crossed and if you get in, let us know how it is! Regardless, the schedule is on point, so you won’t have to wait that long if you aren’t one of the lucky few (thousand). Sony sends out PS3 Home Beta trial e-mails [TG Daily] → Read More
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