OMGOMGOMGOMGOMGOMGOMG… buy one, fake activate it, put in your T-Mo simcard. Me so happy! Eng has the full scoop and I’m happy to send you over their way. Ryan Block even shows video. Product Page iPhone unlocked: AT&T loses iPhone exclusivity, August 24, 2007, 12:00PM EDT A Free, But Complex, Alternative Method → Read More
Way back in the day, when Linux wasn’t much of a desktop threat, Microsoft launched a site called “Get the Facts” that featured a 2002 study comparing the cost of ownership of Linux versus Windows. The new site, which is a bit less combative, compares Windows Server to Linux and Unix and offers a few case studies — nothing as nasty as hiring analysts to shill for the big M$. → Read More
Nik and Mike did a cool podcast with Joe Hewitt, the crack programmer of the mobile Facebook app for the iPhone. Joe is the creator of iUI, the most complete Safari Mobile programming kit out there. It’s a great listen. Listen Now: http://www.talkcrunch.com/wp-content/plugins/podpress/player.swf Direct Link → Read More
What if you could plug your klunky, rented Comcast DVR box into your home network and stream its recorded and on-demand content to the computer in the other room? Well you’ll soon be able to do that thanks to a new standard called DTCP-IP. It’s hardly a revolutionary idea, but better late than never. → Read More
Note: Fish is not real Kiplinger, the personal finance magazine, just dropped a red-hot review of the Apple “iPhone,” a new phone from an up-and-coming hardware company. It might be Asia-only, but they pulled a Fat Joe on this thing, saying it’s the best phone money can buy. → Read More
The TravelSound iS0 is an odd Shuffle speaker dock that basically makes the Shuffle into a something as big as an iPod. Why? I don’t know but does seem to offer us a nice tall glass of WTF. It’s Asia-only right now — about $69 — and probably won’t hit our shores for a long, long time, if ever. Creative Travelsound i50 speaker for the iPod Shuffle [Newlaunches] → Read More
Matt Richtel wrote a quick piece on Sony’s crowing — then cowering — this week as the NPD sales numbers placed the PS3 far below 360 and Wii. Dave Karraker, the Sony spokesman who predicted the PS3 would overtake the 360, told me that: (1) He was only wrong by a bit, and (2) NPD doesn’t provide an exact count but estimates some portions of the market and (3) No, he would not care to make a prediction about August’s sales figures. As we keep saying, the software will make or break the PS3 and with GoW and Bioshock bouying up the 360, it will take Metal Gear Solid 5: Lots of Girls Naked in HD to get the slow moving PS3 up to 360 numbers. In all fairness, however, June PS3 sales were strong, about 100,000 units, and the 360 is already long in the tooth. However, they’d better get something good out before Halo 3 drops or those NPD improvement numbers are going to be in the single digits. Both companies, however, definitely didn’t see the Wii coming. Sony Defeats Truman [Bits] → Read More
Just because 10 Days of CrunchGear is over doesn’t mean we don’t want you to win something great. Your goal is create a cake wishing CG a happy first birthday. I don’t care if it’s a Twinkie with a candle in it — it has to say “Happy Birthday, CG” on it. Heck, throw a little party and take pictures. We love seeing you all in action. You’ll have until Friday to send in your pictures and we’ll pick a few winners at random. But what can you win? Hmmm… let’s see. → Read More
Alright people — Siecinski, sit down in back there — people this is a drill press. All the bits are over here in this box — dammit, Siecinski, sit down — goggles are a must. I want you guys to run a few pieces through and then we’re going to work on building giant Creative Zen Stones with 4 gigabytes of flash memory which we’ll make ourselves next week. Goddamn it Siecinski, no you can’t go to the bathroom. Project Page → Read More
Prodigious iPhone users have been receiving itemized bills from AT&T that can number hundreds of pages long. And every thing is itemized. Even a small 1K text message shows up. Some bills are so large they had to be sent in boxes. The size of the bills have enraged some customers, and not just because of their cost. Paper producing trees take years to grow and if this trend continues, Americans may be forced to limiting toilet paper use to one square per visit. AT&T doesn’t want to cause a national inconvenience in paper consumption, so yesterday the telecommunications company sent text messages to iPhone users that itemized bills will only be sent upon request. There is a charge of $1.99 for each itemized paper bill mailed out in the future. As of September 28, all of AT&T’s new wireless customers will be sent a summary bill. Any current subscriber who makes a change to an existing account will also receive a summary bill. This is good news to trees around the world. Places like YouTube have posted some funny videos on the subject. The one posted below has had over three million hits. Now AT&T has a Website you can go to for billing information. This fiasco is a lesson to all: the new information business requires new thinking. YouTube: Justine’s Phone Bill AT&T → Read More
In what appears to be an amalgam of rumor, innuendo, and just making shit up, Rediff India Abroad is saying that Google will launch something sometime — perhaps a fortnight from now? — in India and is in talks with Bharti Airtel and Vodafone Essar, two of India’s most popular carriers. In what sounds like Nigerian phishing scam, it appears that Google may or may not be provide a mobile something in India and it might not or might be a handset, a small computer, or a cybernetic turtle with a TRS-80 embedded where its digestive systems should be. → Read More
Last week I got a 16GB Creative Zen V Plus, the first flash-based MP3 player to move past the 8GB mark (aside from players with microSD card slots). And we’ll be seeing a 16GB iPod nano before the holidays. Aside from simply holding more songs, more flash means those tiny players can hold bigger and better-sounding digital files, which is right on time for the glut of DRM-free 256Kbps digital downloads from online sources like Wal-Mart and iTunes — and now Universal and Google’s brainchild gBox — not to mention the increasing popularity of lossless compression formats. Signs are pointing to mainstream listeners’ demand for better sound, so why are music player makers still cheaping out on critical sound quality helpers like headphone jacks and lossless compression codecs? A few companies were on the right track in the past — Apple even once proved that better audio quality doesn’t cut into profit margins much. What gives? → Read More
New research from Bango shows that consumers who buy content on the mobile web buy more content, and require less support and fewer refunds than users who buy content through Premium SMS. The mobile web also has three times as many add-on sales. This gives marketers a greater return for advertising costs. “The mobile web gives consumers a payment experience they are already familiar with on the PC web,” said Martin Harris, Senior VP of Sales at Bango. “Because they can see the price and conditions of purchase before they click to pay and are billed, they feel much more comfortable with the whole experience.” When text buyers purchase things like ringtones, games and wallpapers only 18% buy more than one download. Bango research claims that 46% of buyers who visit a browser and buy through a mobile website purchase more than one item. Mobile web customers also appear to be more happy with their purchases, asking for refunds in less than 1% of transactions. SMS text buyers ask for refunds in 10-20% of all sales. Caveat: Bango is a company that provides mobile phone web base services to entities that want to sell digital applications. Those who sell services over an SMS system may disagree with Bango’s research. Bango → Read More
SNL Kagan, a company that provides revenue projections for various communication outlets, predicts that in the next 10 years 84% of Americans will have a mobile phone. Mobile subscriptions are supposed to grow at a rate of 3% despite the fact that the American population is only projected to grow at a modest 1% rate. This growth rate is attributed to an increase in mobile data use, including Web, text and video services. Multimedia services partially or wholly paid for by advertising play a large part in the projected increase. SNL Kagan projects total industry average revenue per user (ARPU) to grow at an inflation-paces compound annual growth rate of 1.5% over the next decade. This means the ARPU should increase from today’s $52.38 to $61.09 by 2017. Data ARPU is projected to be even stronger, with an increase from $5.92 to $8.58 by 2017. “If carriers can hold onto their position in the revenue chain, data is poised to give them a second growth spurt,” says SNL Kagan senior analyst Sharton Armbrust. “While subscriber units and voice revenue will inch along, we expect data revenue to grow at a compound annual 14% rate over the next 10 years, rising to at least 22% of service revenue, compared to under 10% today.” If data revenue is to grow, the American public is going to have to be sold the proposition that such mobile phone services are required. Mobile data is going to have to be sold as something practical, necessary and inexpensive. There will always be people who are interested in the latest gadget and application, but the majority of people want practicality. What is the advantage to me in watching video on my phone? Why do I want to text message someone when I can just call them? If I can use the Web on my PC, what is the point of doing so on my phone? If these and similar questions can be answered by manufactures and mobile service providers, SNL Kagan’s predictions may be on the mark. But projecting a rosy future based on what’s trendy today is bound to be disappointing. SNL Kagan → Read More
Forget watching the big social networks slug it out for market share. People want to take their social networks with them when they step away from the computer. That means applications have to be mobile friendly. Most of the big networks have mobile versions of their site, with stripped down functionality. Facebook has, hands down, the best mobile application if you happen to own an iPhone. But for the most part, competition in the desktop arena has limited the amount of attention any of the big networks are giving to the mobile world. That might just give some runway to new startups focused solely on mobile. We recently covered ZYB, a Danish startup that just launched a mobile social network on the back of it’s mobile address book backup service. The specifics of their service largely limit them to Europe, where users have more freedom to add applications to their mobile devices. In the U.S., one of the stronger contenders is MocoSpace, a Boston based startup that launched a mobile-only social network last year (see coverage at MobileCrunch from April 2006). The service is very easy to use from a mobile phone. Registration is dead simple – it took about 20 seconds on my iPhone earlier today. Right away MocoSpace starts to suggest possible friends based on proximity, online status or random selections. You can then add photos and video from your phone (or upload them from a desktop/laptop computer), chat with friends, and create a stripped down “blog” which is similar to Twitter in functionality. MocoSpace says they are serving close to 500 million monthly page views – which is pretty impressive since “almost all” of those page views are from mobile devices. They are also approaching 1 million registered users, and 6,000 new users sign up daily. MocoSpace raised a $3 million in a Series A financing in January 2007. Investors included General Catalyst, Pilot Group and Michael Deering. The company has 15 employees (half in Boston, half in Israel). If you are a startup targeting the mobile social networking space, we want to hear from you. → Read More
Sony’s Sugar Fuel Cell: Tasty, Big Electricity Reebok Wants You To Get Ready For The Fit, Ride Of Your Life Scientists Find Way To Trigger Out-of-Body Experiences The Futurist: Why Vizio Is Now The #1 Flat Panel Maker In The US VIA Announces New 1-Watt, 500MHz Processor → Read More
The upcoming Orkut redesign prompted us to check out Orkut’s page view numbers according to Comscore. U.S. Comscore data shows, as expected, barely a blip from Orkut (Facebook shown for comparison). Orkut has 425 million monthly page views compared to 15 billion for Facebook: But, wow, take a look at the worldwide Comscore numbers – Facebook doubles to 31 billion monthly page views, but Orkut jumps all the way up to 38 billion (we’ve also included some of the other big social networks for comparison in this chart): Not that it adds much to the conversation, but Alexa agrees Orkut is bigger than Facebook in terms of page views. Is this accurate? I don’t know. Compete barely shows Orkut as existing, let alone anywhere near Facebook’s traffic. But Orkut is famously popular in Brazil and other Non-U.S. countries. Perhaps, somehow, it is actually a social networking heavyweight. → Read More
Todays completely unsubstantiated rumor comes from Rediff News, a usually well respected source of news based in India. Rediff is reporting that the Google Phone is set to be launched in 2 weeks time! The GPhone is said to simultaneously launch in both Europe and the United States, with the only thing standing in Google’s way being US regulatory approval. The report goes on to claim that Google is believed to be in talks with a number of Indian telcos. If speculation is any guidance, the certainty of there being some sort of Google mobile device in development is a given. The Register reported in March that a European Google executive confirmed the existence of the GPhone and other reports go back to 2006; Om Malik reporting in December that a Google phone was being developed for release in 2008. Engadget posted alleged pictures of the GPhone in January 07 (see pic) with notes claiming that the device was a button-less touchscreen phone that came with GPS built-in for pinpoint navigation around Google Maps. ZDNet wrote that the phone was said to be 3G with built in Wifi and was designed by Samsung. The Register again reported in early August that the GPhone would include 3G, Wifi and GPS, and that UK mobile operator Orange was in talks with Google to carry the device. Google has continued to deny rumors of the phones existence, but has taken a more public interest lately in the mobile phone sector, confirming that it was likely to bid for a slice of the soon to be released 700mhz spectrum in the United States. Google as a mobile phone operator would make a lot more sense if Google were also preparing a GPhone that was automatically fine tuned to work with Google’s variety of applicable services, including Gmail, Maps and Google Docs. Any Google phone will also be immediately compared to Apple’s iPhone. Whilst the iPhone provides an attractive package, it has so far only taken a small marketshare in the US cellular market, and is yet to have been released anywhere else in the world. A 3G (and therefore quicker) internet focused GPhone with a broad release worldwide could well present a strong competitor to Apple. → Read More
We rarely mention Google’s three year old social network Orkut these days. Except to point out down time or flawed Alexa stats that suggest it is bigger than MySpace. But now some real news. Take a good look at that screen shot because Google is promising an “updated look” for the site. They are staging this to users in batches, so it may take a while to make its way to you. Damn, I guess I need to add a friend or two. I sure hope they create a Facebook application. I can’t keep track of all of these social networks. Update: Check out the surprising Comscore analysis of Orkut. Update 2: New look is out. zzzzzzzzz → Read More
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