The summer may be officially over, but the temperatures are still warm enough to cook an egg on the sidewalk and there’s enough time to hit the beach and soak up the sun. I like to frolic in the ocean and often times I wish I had a waterproof digital point-and-shoot to capture all my shenanigans while surfing. I’ve tried the disposables and the surf-specific cameras, but they’re awkward to use and picture quality is nothing to boast about. Is it too much to ask that someone manufacture a decent underwater digi that’s still worth using on dry land? Seriously, though, it can’t be that hard. There’s a bevy of very good point-and-shoots available on the market, but only a few underwater cameras and of those only one or two are worth the money. Many would argue that it’s better to spend a little extra and get a housing rather than wasting your money on an ok camera. The Pentax Optio W30 is the latest addition to the waterproof line and I’ve spent more than enough time to realize it’s any waterman’s dream come true. We’ll take a quick look at the W30’s features before moving onto the goods. The W30 is encased in a full aluminum alloy shell that’s tough enough to withstand most of the abuse you can throw it into. Surfers won’t have to worry much unless they’re in shallow waters with a reef or rocky floor. Kayakers might want to steer clear of boulders and free divers probably shouldn’t take it any deeper than 10 feet and they’ll want to surface around the two-hour mark. But if you’re using the underwater mode to capture photos of mermaids and fishies then you’ll only be able to stay submerged for half an hour in 5 feet of h2o. There’s a bit more so keep reading to get the scoop on the W30. → Read More
Of all the gadgets I own, one I absolutely cannot live without is my George Foreman Lean Green Fat-Reducing Grilling Machine, aka the George Foreman Grill. It’s the butt of many jokes, sure, but ask anyone who’s got one, and they’ll agree that they love theirs. It’s been a huge success and made Foreman a ton of dough. One of Foreman’s old opponents is entering the ring as a challenger to the champ (I know, I know). Evander “The Real Deal” Holyfield is set to launch his own competing grill. No, really, Holyfield is really putting together a copycat grill to compete blow-by-blow with Foreman’s (I know, I’m sorry). It’s set to launch this week, and look for ads in your Black Friday circulars. I wish this was a joke, but alas, it’s not. Holyfield vs. Foreman II: Battle of the grills [MSNBC] → Read More
I shed a tear while watching the video after the jump. Watch ^ first then the subsequent one. Awesome. → Read More
The conceptual P’gasus wheelchair provides a cool look into what the future of personal transportation for people with disabilities will be like. It it based on technology similar to that of the Segway as movement is controlled by shifting the riders weight. Best of all, the chair can be adjusted into an upright position which would help the rider accomplish every day tasks. There are still a few problems to work out such as effectively balancing the chair in the extended position. A similar chair is already available but it doesn’t look nearly as cool. Pegasus WheelChair Concept [tuvie] → Read More
I came home from my week in Washington, DC to find a new DVD player waiting for me, a Pioneer DV-400V. DVD players usually aren’t the kinds of things that we jump up and down about, but the DV-400V features the ability to upconvert your regular DVDs to HD resolutions. We’ve heard of this before, it’s nothing new, and I’ve been actually avoiding the upconverting world because I sort of thought it cheating. It’s not, the video off this thing looks great. While it’s not true HD, the 720p output of the DVD player looks much better on my HDTV than the 480p my old progressive scan put out. I don’t notice any flutter in pans, which can happen with some upconverting players. What’s more, the DVD player has extenstive controls for customizing itself to look great with your TV. Right now, I’m watching Ghostbusters, and it’s never looked better. → Read More
Could it be? Were the rumors true? Has the Falcon Xbox 360 landed? It appears so. According to the blokes over at Xbox Forums, the Halo 3 edition is juiced with the 65nm CPUs that are purported to run cooler, which in turn would reduce any further RROD units. Pretty sure those price cuts were a direct result of the switch. 65nm (Falcon), BenQ, Heatsink Discussion [Xbox Forums] → Read More
Update: The leaderboard has launched. See it here. Blog search engine Technorati’s founding CEO is gone, its traffic party has ended and its core search functionality is under long term fire from competitors like Google Blog Search, Ask.com and Sphere (among others). Constant strategic shifts haven’t helped much either. But Technorati still has one stronghold left – it controls the definitive, editorially unbiased list of top blogs. The list is based on unique incoming blog links over the previous six months. More links = a higher position on the list. To get a top 100 spot, a blog currently needs about 3,700 unique links. But links from other blogs may no longer be the best indicator of the popularity of a blog, particularly today when blog links can be obtained by simply opening up the checkbook and paying. Also, Technorati clearly counts spam and other blogs, which can have a significant impact on rankings. That’s a statement that will be hotly debated. But tomorrow bloggers will have a new top 100 list to aim for – the Techmeme Leaderboard. The list will be created based on the blogs that created the most headlines on Techmeme over the previous thirty days (so it will change frequently). TechMeme has become the definitive site for tech blogging news, and its sister sites Memeorandum (political news), WeSmirch (celebrity gossip) and BallBug (baseball news) hold a similar esteem in their markets. It’s about time founder Gabe Rivera started to release some of the great statistical data he’s been collecting since launching the original site in 2005. To be exact, top blogs will be ranked on presence – “the percentage of headline space a source occupies over the 30-day period.” Discussion links are not taken into consideration – only full headlines are counted. I think this is a much better way of ranking the very top blogs than the Technorati approach. Technorati has deep flaws, for reasons stated above. Techmeme, by contrast, has zero spam and tends to mirror what the tech blogosphere is writing about perfectly. I am somewhat biased, however, as TechCrunch is currently in the no. 1 spot, whereas Technorati only ranks it no. 4. Also, our sister site CrunchGear is ranked no. 28 on the Techmeme Leaderboard list. Look for this sometime tomorrow, and hopefully we’ll see leaderboards for the other Techmeme sites soon, too. Until then, check out the screen shot → Read More
The list of companies offering free, Web-based word processors just got longer. Today, Adobe is entering the Webtop game (watch out, Microsoft Office) with its announcement that it will purchase Boston-based startup Virtual Ubiquity, the company behind Buzzword. Terms were not disclosed, but Adobe had previously invested in the startup through its $100 million venture fund. Adobe’s new browser-based word processor (Buzzword is currently in open beta) joins a crowded field that already includes Google Docs, Zoho Writer, Glide Write, ajaxWrite, ThinkFree, and . . . well, you get the picture. But all that competition is not deterring Adobe. “The current Web 2.0 apps leave a lot to be desired,” sniffs Adobe product manager Erik Larson. “They do not live up to desktop apps.” Neither yet does Buzzword. But it does take several new steps toward closing that gap. Built on Adobe’s Flex development platform (which takes advantage of the ubiquitous Flash player), it’s fonts and typography easily match the fidelity of Microsoft Word. (Altough you don’t get as wide a choice of fonts right now in the beta, Adobe should be able to fix that). An Adobe AIR version that will operate offline is also in the works for sometime next year. (Google Docs will have similar offline capabilities when it is integrated with Google Gears, while Zoho has already done so). “This is not an HTML editor,” points out Rick Treitman, Virtual Ubiquity’s CEO and a former exec at Lotus. “It is the first paginating editor that lives on the web. It is laying out the page and figuring out line breaks.” Buzzword also lets you insert tables and images, see every historical revision of a document, and share it with others. You can invite others to read it, to leave comments, or to edit the document. And, yes, it does have spell-check. Buzzword’s drawbacks are that it is still slower than a full-fledged desktop application (not so much when typing, but when doing things like cutting and pasting); it doesn’t support hyperlinks (unconscionable for a Web-based app, though this is on Treitman’s to-do list); and there is no easy way to export a document to a blog or other Web publishing system other than cut-and-paste. Soon, though, Buzzword will be integrated with another Adobe service launched in limited beta today called Adobe Share. This is a file-sharing app that is geared towards document sharing. You get one → Read More
Bay Partners and Bessemer Venture Partners have teamed up with Salesforce to invest $25 million in businesses building on the recently announced Force.com application platform over the next three years. Investments will be around $500,000 each (some convertible notes). However, others may go as high as $2 million depending on the company’s stage and needs. The investments are a boon to the evolving Force platform and sure to lessen the appeal for a host of other database-driven application platforms. The partnership will provide Bay and Bessemer early leads to new companies and Saleforce’s assistance during due dillegence. Bay and Bessemer were attracted to the platform due to Salesforce’s existing 35,000 customer base and 50,000 developers. Force.com already has 350 partners with 725 applications as well. Bay looks to be taking the lead in the program and will be leveraging their significant experience SaaS investments. They have already invested in many Appexchange integrated companies (Xactly, Eloqua, Cornerstone, eProject) and are looking to get in earlier this time around. Notably, Bay has also invested in Facebook’s platform by setting aside funds for 50 investments (they’ve closed three). The investment program has been underway over the past couple of months. Bay has been looking at 12 deals and already committed to one. The deals are judged on a case by case basis. Although, they will be looking for fully developed products, with strong metrics (revenue, customer stickiness). The Force.com venture program is being led by Neil Sadaranganey and Salil Deshpande from Bay Parntners and Byron Deeter from Bessemer Venture Partners. Companies interesting in learning more about the program can send inquires to saas@baypartners.com. → Read More
Burlingame based BitGravity officially launches their website and content delivery network (CDN) this evening, although the company has been busy working with nearly fifty existing customers for months to work through any last minute issues. We first covered the company when one of its employees sent a live video stream from his car (using BitGravity) during a drive from San Francisco to Los Angeles. They are focused on delivering high volume rich media (streaming video and audio files) and large software downloads with a near zero buffer time and very low lag time. Their flagship customer is Revision3, which has a number of popular high definition video shows (such as Diggnation and The GigaOm Show) that a lot of people watch right when a new show becomes available. Given how well those shows tend to stream, it’s the best endorsement BitGravity can get. An example GigaOm Show episode (recorded during the TechCrunch40 conference) is embedded below. http://bitcast-a.bitgravity.com/revision3/swf/rev3_player.swf?AutoPlay=off&Buffer=120&File=http://bitcast-a.bitgravity.com/revision3/flv/gigaom/0010/gigaom–0010–ning–400kbps.flv&ScrubMode=advanced&Thumb=http://bitcast-a.bitgravity.com/revision3/thumbs/gigaom–0010–ning–thumb.jpg&DefaultRatio=0.56&AutoSize=off&allowFullScreen=true CEO Perry Wu says the company has a lot more planned in the near future. They say they’ll be working specifically with big networks to stream live events and other popular content, and to look for bandwidth-heavy streams that include, for example, 360 degree views of concerts and sporting events. The company has raised a seed round of capital but will not yet disclose investors or the size of the round. CrunchBase Information BitGravity Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Random spam is never welcome. But when it comes from a company that I co-founded, I think it’s worth criticizing in writing. Edgeio’s classified listing platform has been doing well. We use it for our CrunchBoard job board, and many other blogs and websites have begun to use it, too. The company recently started reaching out to bloggers to discuss business development deals. Which is fine. But what isn’t fine is random mass emails out to top bloggers (including our own Duncan Riley) to pitch the product. I emailed Keith Teare, my co-founder and the company’s CEO, who says this was a simple mistake and was only meant to be sent to people they’ve already had direct contact with. That’s fine, but as I said I’m going to call them on this since I’m a stockholder and my name is associated with the company. Part of my promise to readers is to call things like I see them. Conflicts of interest are disclosed on our about page. And when a company I’m involved with does something I think is particularly smart or not so smart, I will point it out here on TechCrunch. File this one under “not so smart.” → Read More
There was a time in college that I wanted to buy a Golden Tee arcade machine because…well…it’s just about the coolest game ever. I also hated going to Clodfelters and paying up to $20 to play the damn thing when I was getting crunk. So my roommates and I had it all planned out. We were going to get one off of eBay and to recoup our costs we’d hold tournaments and leave it coin-operated for everyone to use. It was a brilliant plan, but no one wanted to front the money for it. We were, after all, poor college students who spent money on booze, bud, and boobies. But don’t get me wrong. I enjoy playing other arcade games like Mortal Kombat and Pac Man, but Golden Tee was the bomb and something I was good at. So you can imagine the tingling sensation I felt in my pants when the X-Arcade Tankstick arrived at my doorstep. I knew exactly what I wanted to play the moment I unboxed it. Even now I won’t play anything other than Golden Tee. Even though I can purchase adapters for use on any game console, I still haven’t done so, but maybe you will. In case you didn’t know X-Arcade is a gawd among retro-arcade enthusiasts. The level of accuracy the sticks and trackball provide are phenomenal. Not to mention the fact that combo moves are way easier on an arcade machine than any game console controller. But the fact that I can play thousands of classic arcade games has me tickled pink. There are also four pinball flipper buttons in case you’re into that sort of thing. → Read More
Buddystumbler is a newly launched (out of beta) social networking site that focuses on Instant Messaging (IM) contacts. Users create profiles that include the typical social networking features of photos, descriptions, and interests. Buddystumbler then offers an interface that enables searching of user profiles, interests and location, sort of part Meetro, part Facebook. The search option itself feels more like a dating site, asking whether you’re a guy or gal looking to hook up with a guy or gal (their choice of words), although keyword and tag searches are also available. Once connecting with someone on Buddystumbler, users can contact their new found friends via a supported chat platform, by leaving a message or giving them a “High 5.” Platforms supported include AOL, Yahoo, MSN and Google. Sunnyvale based founder Han-Shen Yuan created Buddystumbler to allow “more people to interact with each other, in communicating online,” by which I presume he meant IM. If you’re heavily into instant messaging (and generally speaking that will mean you’re more likely younger than me) Buddystumber may be worth a look. → Read More
Backpacks are like shoes, you can never have too many of them. At least that’s my logic. Backpacks are one of those things that I always seem to keep buying not matter how many I have. But this time around I decided to pick up one that offered something special. There are a number of MP3 player specific bags with built-in speakers, but I’ve found that most of them sound like garbage. I was skeptical when the Spyder Groove arrived at my doorstep. What is NXT? Is this even going to sound decent? We’ll start with NXT and figure out what that’s all about. The Groove features an NXT flat panel loudspeaker that’s built from EVA foam, which is pretty durable. The EVA panel is coated in jersey and comes with two 25mm exciters that are powered by a stereo amplifier. You can connect to virtually any portable music device so long as it has accepts a 3.5mm jack. I’m inclined to believe that the front panel is durable and rugged enough a day on the slopes or venturing through the streets of Manhattan. It’s even water resistant! Now that we’ve covered what NXT is and how it’s involved in the Groove lets move onto the functionality of the backpack itself. Don’t worry, I haven’t forgotten about sound quality, but I’m not a cheap slut, either. Keep reading to find out. → Read More
iWon, the site owned by IAC that attracts people with the promises of instant prizes, is revamping it’s look, going from a very 1.0 portal to a Flashy, casual-games site, complete with spinning wheels, slots, and lots of bright colors. The games are also now going to become widgetizable so they can live on people’s Facebook or MySpace pages. (And you thought you could avoid the shrill marketing come-ons just by avoiding the site). iWon’s business model is to lure people in with cash prizes, get them to play online games like Sudoku, Slots, or Solitaire, and show them ads. Games can also be created specifically for ad sponsors. This was iWon 1.0: and here’s iWon 2.0: I can’t decide which one’s lamer. Still, iWon needed to do something. According to comScore, its monthly unique visitors dropped from 5.2 million last year to 2.2 million in August. Although average time spent on the site shot up from 33 minutes a month to 53 minutes, that’s what you’d expect as the casual visitors tired of the offerings and the only ones left were the hardcore iWannaBeWinners. In beta testing, the new site has already proved to keep people playing five times longer than before. But is it the same people over and over again, or will the makeover be able to attract enough new visitors to turn things around? → Read More
The following is a concept video produced by LonelySandwich.com demonstrating cut and paste on the iPhone. It’s a feature that’s sorely lacking on the phone; it can do so much but without copy and paste it can never really be a 100% computer replacement (although for me it’s a 75% of the time laptop replacement.) It’s a old mockup so I don’t think it will be coming soon, but the video itself is worth watching http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=266383&server=vimeo.com&fullscreen=1&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=1&color=00ADEF Thanks to Matt Milosavljevic for the tip. → Read More
http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=362421849901825950&hl=en Computer Science Professor Randy Pausch, who has been diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer (see his blog for details), gave his last lecture at Carnegie Mellon University last week. He gives excellent advice on how to live your life and achieve your most outrageous dreams. It’s a must see for entrepreneurs, and really anyone looking for a refresher course on living life to achieve your maximum creative potential. My favorite quote from the video is when he talks about brick walls impeding your march towards goals. They’re to stop other people, he says, and overcoming them just proves to you how much you want something. Thanks to Paul Bragiel, the founder of Meetro, for sending this to me and a recommendation to spend an hour and a half watching it. I’ve now seen it twice, and think it is worth sharing with our readers. → Read More
After getting three dodgy iMacs in a row, some guy decided to email the big man himself: Steve Jobs. Obviously the CEO of a multimillion dollar hardware company has nothing better to do than sit in his basement and respond to random guys who feel that they are important enough to contact him, but I digress. He reached one of Steve’s minions who seemed extremely concerned about the issue and even offered him a free iPod in exchange for his soul. This is pretty cool on Apple’s side considering that lately they haven’t been doing a lot of nice things for their customers. What with locking them out of their own hardware and all. The office of Steve Jobs called me today… → Read More
The irony here is extraordinary, check out this pic captured just moments after a giant Razr 2 crashed through a Benz on a busy corner in Moscow. Looks like Putin didn’t see this coming when he began enforcing strict cellphone use laws. We have to admit the marketing here turned out awesome, who wouldn’t want a car crushing phone? For those of you who haven’t figured it out yet, this is a marketing stunt. Don’t feel bad though I had it confused at first too. RAZR 2 cuts off the mighty Merc [TechTicker] → Read More
LivePetitions, an Italian startup, just launched with Italian, British and U.S. localized websites. It’s meant to be a much cleaner and functional online petition service than PetitionOnline, the big player in online petitions. Users can quickly create an online petition, set an optional end date and enter categories and tags. Various required and optional fields can be added (email, name and zip code are default settings, along with a comment field), but those can be removed and anything else added. The creator and any signers can also choose to import their Gmail or Yahoo address books and notify their contacts of the existence of the petition. The company makes money by placing ads on the petition pages, although those can be removed by paying a fee, which also allows customization of the petition page with a logo and other stylistic changes. A domain name for the petition can also be purchased so that the petition does not point to a livepetitions.com sub domain. One of the better features – a couple of options to embed a widget promoting the petition on third party blogs and other websites It’s a good service with lots of flexibility and an easy to use interface. It does suffer from a few translation snafus (a lot of the English content is improperly translated, or not translated), but it is certainly better than existing options. Like other services, signatures must be from unique email addresses, which allows for a lot of fraud. It probably won’t become a big business, but it will be useful for the proactive types who like to stir the pot and get people behind whatever causes they are currently promoting. I expect the inevitable Facebook application to be released shortly. → Read More
San Francisco, CA
