Sir Richard Branson has announced on the Google Blog Virgle, a joint Google/ Virgin project to establish permanent human settlement on Mars. Sir Richard writes: Larry Page, Sergey Brin and I feel strongly that contemporary technology is sufficiently advanced to make such an effort both successful and economical, and that it’s high time that humanity moved beyond Earth and began our great, long journey to explore the stars and establish our first lasting foothold on another world…In the years to come, we’ll be sending up a series of spaceships carrying (along with the supplies and tools needed to build the new colony) what eventually will be hundreds of Mars colonists, or Virgle Pioneers — myself among them. Virgle is currently taking applications on its site here. The official site also includes a 100 year plan for Mars Settlement and a statement explaining the benefits of the project being Open Source. Update: there’s also a YouTube competition and official video channel. Page and Brin explain: → Read More
http://blip.tv/scripts/flash/showplayer.swf?enablejs=true&feedurl=http%3A%2F%2Fcrunchgear%2Eblip%2Etv%2Frss&file=http%3A%2F%2Fblip%2Etv%2Frss%2Fflash%2F795528&showplayerpath=http%3A%2F%2Fblip%2Etv%2Fscripts%2Fflash%2Fshowplayer%2Eswf David Zatz of Zatz Not Funny was kind enough to show me his AT&T BB 8820 running Slingplayer Mobile. There’s no launch date at the moment. → Read More
I think some LEDs decided to die on my new MBP. I haven’t restarted as I’m trying to get some work done, but anyone else experience this? → Read More
Right on schedule: Google is releasing their April Fools jokes onto us as the calendars hit April 1 on the east coast (here’s last year’s efforts). Google Australia got a head start earlier today with the very funny Future Search. Gmail’s effort this year isn’t in my opinion as funny. Gmail Custom Time lets users send emails with a custom date in the past, putting it in the recipients inbox at the old date: How do I use it? Just click “Set custom time” from the Compose view. Any email you send to the past appears in the proper chronological order in your recipient’s inbox. You can opt for it to show up read or unread by selecting the appropriate option. Is there a limit to how far back I can send email? Yes. You’ll only be able to send email back until April 1, 2004, the day we launched Gmail. If we were to let you send an email from Gmail before Gmail existed, well, that would be like hanging out with your parents before you were born — crazy talk. Funny? You decide. The team did better last year in my opinion. But the joke has started a minor Wikipedia war, which makes it more interesting. In describing the technology Google says “Gmail utilizes an e-flux capacitor to resolve issues of causality (see Grandfather Paradox)” and links to the Grandfather Paradox on Wikipedia. Someone changed the words “time travel” to “gmail” in a revision, along with the comment “Gmail starts a wiki-war by linking directly to this article on April 1st…” The change was quickly put down by the Wikipedia police, of course. And then changed back. And then reversed. You can watch the drama in real time on the article’s revision history page (or feel free to participate with your own flourishes). I wonder who’ll get tired first. → Read More
Tom’s Hardware has been doing a feature for the last week comparing the performance of six systems: budget (sub-$1000), mid-range (sub-$2000), and high-end (sub-$4000) PCs and then the same PCs overclocked as far as they’d go. The object was to find what offers the best value for the dollar. They ran about five billion tests, but I’ve got the Cliff’s Notes here. And the survey says: The low end machine wins — sort of by default. Because most games were basically playable on <$1000 of hardware, that's what really matters and then what you start paying for is rapidly diminishing returns. In the end, they determined that to double the performance of the budget PC, you triple the price, or more. Fortunately, you're not bound by the rules of their experiment, and you can spend however much you want. I'd say the real winner is the mid-range overclock, since that’s what I’m running. You can still get a lot more performance and OC potential up to about $1500, I’m thinking, but after that you’re moving into the ridiculous zone. → Read More
Jetpack Brontosaurus Visual Technology from Matthew Wegner on Vimeo The creators of the insane Velociraptor Off-Road Safari Rampage are well on their way to creating a new opus, which they call Jetpack Brontosaurus. Doubtless it will have the same nuanced plot and fascinating characters as their last game. Actually, it just looks like it’s going to be a ton of fun piloting your dinosaur around Tribes-style. Indie developers are going all-out with great stuff like this, and they’re the ones who will make the awesomest games for your iPod Touch or GP2X — not EA or something. [via TIGSource] → Read More
Well it only took ChaCha fourteen months to figure out what everyone except ChaCha (and these guys) knew when it launched – search with a human guide as a business idea is ridiculously stupid. The idea is that you do a search on ChaCha and a real person works with you via a chat interface to give you results. In theory those results would be better than Google. In reality, they weren’t (see image to right), and ChaCha still had to pay all those guides. Today, according to an email sent to ChaCha’s guides titled “The Future Is Here,” they announced that guided search will be discontinued in favor of the one product they offer that isn’t monumentally dumb – mobile search. They claim that “new users are growing at a staggering rate every day” (most likely due to cell phone spamming). So what happens to all the guides who worked on desktop search? Some of them, at least, can now apply for new positions on the mobile product. The full email is below, and details of the company and their funding are here. Thanks Luke Kling for the tip. → Read More
That Centro smartphone from Palm? The one now in Obsidian Black? The one I told you about this weekend that you could pick up for a measly $39 on sale at Best Buy? They just sold a million of them. That’s one million people in America walking around with the small yet powerful devices for AT&T or Sprint. I’ve been a fan of the Centro since it was leaked. I said it was the perfect gateway device, as it retains a phone-like form factor while granting smartphone functionality. And it’s easy for first timers to use. I love being right all the time. → Read More
It wouldn’t be right of me to know about this excessively creepy 3D mouse-following Flash lady and not share it with all of you. If I must suffer, you must suffer. That is the price you pay for my genius. This will sort of blow your mind a little bit. You’re welcome. → Read More
We’re thinking the Vu is the first real post-iPhone cellphone, using a haptic-feedback touchscreen, a fluid UI, and multimedia features in a phone that should cost less than the iPhone but still be cool enough to induce lust. Laptop caught up with the phone on the floor of the CTIA Emerging Tech Awards pavilion, snapped a few shots, and did a pretty good hands-on. John Biggs here and I got to play with an early version of the phone at CES and it’s good to see Laptop has about the same impressions we did then. We’re looking carefully at this phone as it supports AT&T’s MediaFLOW live TV service launching next month, and because it might siphon sales away from AT&T’s own iPhone. Is AT&T spoiling its own game? We’ll have to see how popular the TV application really is before we’ll know, but likely not. → Read More
If you aren’t familiar with RickRolling – it’s when someone puts a link on website to something, but it actually takes you to a music video of Rick Astley’s “hit” song Never Gonna Give You Up. YouTube is RickRolling its own users on April 1. All of the featured videos for YouTube UK and YouTube Australia actually link to the Rick Astley video. We’ll see if YouTube.com does the same at midnight EST tonight, too. This is ok, but not nearly as funny as it would be if the YouTube team broke into the Google search servers and simply redirected Google.com to the video. Now that would be funny. More coverage of this here. → Read More
I’ve been meaning to post about Whisher for a few months now but life has always gotten in the way. The company is based in Barcelona and they showed me their beta code back in February. Now, however, they’re ready to go live. Whisher is essentially a metered hotspot system. You use their plug-in and see various hotspots on the screen. Instead of seeing an encrypted hotspot called “FARGLEBOXR” you will see a useful name and a price per minute or hour. As a consumer, you know exactly what you’re paying and as a Wi-Fi provider you’ve got an easy-to-use system for allowing folks to hop on without buying secret code numbers at the counter. Read more… → Read More
While I tend to agree that RIM’s OS is definitely showing its age, Henry Blodget is totally down on the new 9000 interface with its iPhon-esque UI and, well, Blackberry-esque keyboard and lack of touchscreen. Again, this phone is not for skinny-jeans wearing hipsters. It’s for straight-leg khaki-wearing business guys who won’t shut up about cars and golf. Therefore, they’re perfectly happy upgrading incrementally every few months just to spend a little of that IT budget. We’re glad to see RIM respond to the iPhone, even if it means we may actually have a choice to make when we finally trade in our battered Curve. (Until we saw the 9000 pics, we were just nursing the Curve along until the 3G iPhone came out. Now, we’ll at least take the 9000 for a test-drive. Who knows–we may even stick with the keyboard.) Given the rate at which business folks are setting aside keyboard concerns and snapping up iPhones, however, the days in which RIM had the corporate market to itself are gone. I personally think Henry has a worse problem. His tendency to use the Royal We is unnerving. → Read More
I hate, hate spam and fully agree that spammers should, after being convicted, be torn apart by a pack of BigDogs, drawn-and-quartered style. Spam is now 15 years old, and over 90% of communications on the Internet are spam. Mark Sunner, chief analyst at online security firm Message Labs, likens fighting spam to an arms race, and in a sense he’s right: every time the spam fighters make an advance, the spammers make an advancement beyond that. Likely this war of attrition will never end, but thankfully modern spam filters kill most of what comes in. Many people think that spam kills some parts of the Internet, but if those people had adequate filters, they problem wouldn’t be there at all. → Read More
Since January 1st you’ve been able to request your free $40 voucher for a digital-to-analog converter for grandma’s old CRT TV. Well, Crave is saying don’t act so fast. You still have plenty of time and market logic states that you’ll get a better converter for a lower price over the next year or so. Right now the choice is rather limited — I’ve seen a few models from Zenith but that’s about it — and you could conceivably pay a bit over that $40 if you’re not a particularly savvy shopper. Personally, I’d just get grandma a new plasma and leave it at that. You’ll never get to see In Treatment in HD on an on Trinitron from 1988. → Read More
I drive a Kia Spectra that I just love. I bought it brand new 2004 and one of the first things I did was have an iPod adapter kit installed for the car stereo. I’m an iPod guy, and I want to take my songs with me always. I took it to Circuit City and while the install was fast, they messed up the facing on my dashboard, so now it just sort of hangs there. They told me there was nothing they could do about it, and that I should talk to their insurers, who cover the repairs but have a $500 deductible. The damage estimate was $350. Sucks to be me. But not as much as it sucks to be VTECnical, a poster on Consumerist, who’s 2007 Honda Civic was destroyed by the install techs at Circuit City, leaving it “unsafe to drive” in Honda’s opinion, rendering it uninsurable and thereby undrivable. Circuit’s only willing to refund $3,190 to VTECnical, despite the total bill to fix it coming to $12,119. For everything else, he has to turn to the same insurers I did, and we know how well that went for me. Here’s hoping he has better luck. → Read More
For as long as ninjas have existed, kids (and secretly adults) have been pretending to be them. I personally was a ninja for Halloween three years running. But because not all of us are sneaky and murderous, sometimes the only way to get that ninja feeling was to grab a controller and get shuriken-ing. Bear in mind this is not a list of the top ten ninja games, but a list of the killer ninjas within. These were the guys you always wanted to be. And it’s not too late to join in the fun even if you, like John, are a 30-year-old balding raver with a paunch. So without further ado I present to you the top 10 video game ninjas of all time. Note: We have ranked them based on their ability to kill Snake Eyes in real life. → Read More
When I started TechCrunch nearly three years ago it was meant to be little more than a hobby. I love startups, and writing about them was fun, not work. But since then this hobby has grown into a real business. We have a number of full and part time employees that need to get paid every two weeks, and advertisers/sponsors that we owe a certain level of professionalism towards. We’ve also acquired a number of other startups (plus this one, just announced). TechCrunch is a serious thing, and needs to be treated seriously by others. We demand some respect around here. My own personal brand has risen over the years as well to the point where I believe I can say without hubris that I am a very important person. Forbes recently named me No. 2 on their list of web celebrities, for example, and Business Week says I’m one of the 25 most influential people on the web. I’ve also appeared in numerous JibJab videos. More details, if you care to read them, are on our about page. My agent has told me numerous times that I need to be more careful with how I leverage my personal brand, and to be aware of others who are using/abusing it for commercial reasons. So we’ve been increasingly concerned about developments at Facebook over the last few months that allow advertisers to post ads using my picture and name to endorse their products without my explicit permission. I’ve received literally dozens of emails from readers asking me if I’m associated with Blockbuster’s Movie Clique application, or the new Jackass movie (no to both). These ads appear in both the sidebar and in my friends’ news feeds. See examples below: Our attorneys believe that the use of my image and name in third party advertising is a violation of my statutory and common law publicity rights (we’ve written explicitly about this issue before). Specifically, this leads to user confusion as to whether or not I am actually endorsing these products. The key factor in determining whether a use is permitted or not in California (where I live) is Civil Code Section 3344, which was first enacted in 1971. California is perhaps more aggressive than any other state in protecting publicity rights because of the number of people engaged in the entertainment business. The law allows for recuperation of damages, attorney’s fees and → Read More
