The rumors are true, RIM does have a clamshell BlackBerry and it’s said to be coming soon. Most likely by the end of the year. The Kickstart as it’s being dubbed at the moment has a SureType keyboard, external LCD and has the same trackball we’ve all come to love or loathe. I don’t know about this one. I’m not that big a fan of clamshells, but it is a BlackBerry. → Read More
document.write(”); http://documents.scribd.com/ScribdViewer.swf?document_id=2763891&access_key=key-qccx84bmybapelweq62&page=1&version=1 Read this doc on Scribd: eBay Craiglist Complaint var scribd_doc = new scribd.Document(2763891, ‘key-qccx84bmybapelweq62′); scribd_doc.addParam(‘height’, 500); scribd_doc.addParam(‘width’, 560); scribd_doc.addParam(‘page’, 1); scribd_doc.addParam(‘mode’, ‘list’); scribd_doc.write(‘embedded_flash_2763891_15rwhl’); eBay has released a copy of its complaint against Craigslist (document above). eBay lodged the lawsuit last week in the Delaware Court of Chancery claiming that Craigslist executives took actions that unfairly diluted eBay’s economic interest. From the document itself, the tipping point would appear to be eBay’s move to offer Kijiji, its classifieds service in the United States. Craigslist viewed Kijiji as a competitive activity that canceled some shareholder rights held by eBay since it became a Criagslist shareholder in 2004. The short story is that eBay believes Craigslist went to far when enacting the competitive activity clause. CrunchBase Information Craigslist eBay Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
This isn’t as weird as the girl who got a cryptic, anti-capitalist note instead of her iPod, but it’s potentially far more damaging. This guy bought a refurbished iPod Touch through Buy.com for $99 — what a deal, right? As it turns out, not so much. It was infected/infested with a trojan that quietly installs a backdoor on your Windows system. Nasty. He contacted Buy.com and they quickly sent him a brand new one, then Buy.com contacted the factory where it had been recertified. They concluded that it was “not a significant problem that is happening with any frequency at all.” Reassuring. Personally, I’ll be reformatting every piece of used hardware that comes my way from now on. → Read More
Are we as citizens ready for icons from our 8-bit pasts to make their way into our kitchens? Yes, yes we are. Take this Triforce cutting board. It’s fully usable and will remind you of your quest against Gannon every time you dice onlines. It’s sold out, but you can get your hands on a Space Invaders villian for only $125. If I was really into cutting boards, I’d get one. → Read More
/ I’ll admit it, I was in a laptop pop band in the 90s called ABC/DefG. We used the keyboards on our laptops to play music live shows. We were laughed at, but the guys in this video make me feel better. That being said, the truly geek half of me thinks this is badass cool. Could you imagine doing this with an Optimus keyboard? via Make → Read More
New Relic is looking to capitalize on the growing number of Ruby on Rails application deployments, having recently raised $3.5M from Benchmark Capital for their Rails Performance Management (RPM) product. RPM is a combination of installed software and cloud services that helps developers understand performance problems in their RoR applications. A Rails developer first installs a standard plugin that continuously sends performance data to New Relic’s servers. He or she can then use an RPM dashboard to identify the specific points in their code that are causing bottlenecks. Several brand name Rails developers are already using a beta version of the RPM service, including Rails core developer Rick Olson. While the company is reluctant to disclose its current enterprise-size clients, they are obviously going after the several billion-dollar-plus businesses already using Rails in production. New Relic was founded by Lewis Cirne, who in 1998 started a company that offered similar monitoring software for the then-young Java application industry. Cirne successfully sold that company and has brought several of his old colleagues with him to this new Rails venture. Other startups working to make Rails deployment less painful include Heroku, which offers online development and one-click cloud deployment, and Engine Yard, which offers managed Rails service infrastructure. CrunchBase Information RPM Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Adobe is making a big play to make Flash the de facto viewing environment not only for Web apps on your PC, but also on your mobile phone, your TV, and any other screen you can think of. It is announcing the Open Screen Project to make it easier to develop applications across devices—using Flash, of course. David Wadhwani, general manager of Adobe’s platform business (which includes Flash/Flex, AIR, and Cold Fusion), says: We believe it is time for an industry-wide movement for a consistent way to develop across the Web for PCs, mobile devices, and TVs. To help the project along, Adobe is: 1. Opening up the runtime to its Flash player for the first time so that anybody can create their own customized player. Specifically, it is going to open up the SWF and FLV/F4V specifications. In the past, developers had to sign agreements not to create derivative Flash players because Adobe wanted to avoid the fragmentation that Java experienced during its early years. But now it feels that Flash is a strong enough standard to withstand the introduction of some new evolutionary branches. 2. Removing licensing fees for Flash on mobile devices. While Flash is free on PCs, cell phone makers and other device manufacturers must pay a royalty fee. This was a $52 million business for Adobe last year. (Versions of Flash are on 500 million mobile devices already, and that is expected to grow to one billion over the next 12 months). That business (which represents only 2 percent of Adobes overall revenues) is going away. Starting with the next major release of Flash (and AIR) for devices in 2009, it will be free to device manufacturers. That should help Flash spread even more. 3. Publishing the APIs for porting Flash to other devices. This currently also incurs a royalty fee. By opening it up, there is no reason why every device shouldn’t come with Flash pre-installed. 4. Publishing Adobe protocols for pushing content to devices like Flash Cast and AMF. Adobe will also work with wireless carriers on protocols for over-the-air software updating. (This is actually a hard problem because most software downloaded to a mobile phone gets stored in read-only-memory, where it pretty much stays until the device is replaced. Getting mobile software to update as easily as desktop software is the key to making sure mobile apps keep up with the times. → Read More
Update on our post from earlier today – Meebo is now confirming that they have raised a $25 million third round of financing from Jafco Ventures, Time Warner Investments and KTB Ventures. Previous investors Sequoia Capital and Draper Fisher Jurvetson also participated. Meebo was looking for a buyer through their investment bank, Montgomery & Co., but moved to a fundraising round earlier this month when there were no takers at the price they wanted. The rumored valuation on the financing was $200 million. Meebo was pitching strategic partners hard to join the round, including eBay, Fox/MySpace and AOL. Time Warner/AOL obviously sees something they like. Last month the two companies started working more closely with the release of Open AIM 2.0. This round also signals that Meebo will be looking to Asian expansion. Jafco is a Japanese based fund; KTB is Korean. CrunchBase Information Meebo Montgomery & Co Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Chinese social networking site Xiaonei has raised $430 million in funding from Softbank, according to a report from VentureBeat. Xiaonei was founded in December 2005 by Qinghua University graduates Wang Xing, Wang Huiwen, Lai Binqiang and Jacky, then was acquired by Oak Pacific Interactive in 2006 for an undisclosed sum. As of November 2007, the site was said to be the most popular social networking site among university students in China, with 15 million registered users and 8.8 million active users. The company likes to call itself the Facebook of China, and we’d never guess why (note, shot as run through Google Translate, they don’t offer an English version from what I could see): CrunchBase Information Xiaonei Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Why even bother rolling something out when its primary purpose is not present? It’s be like releasing a car without wheels, or a console without games (oh wait, Sony did that). But that is exactly what T-Mobile is doing: the first phase of the rollout, however long it may be, will only be using the 3G network for voice. You’re stuck with EDGE for data. Well, if you’re lucky enough to be getting this “update,” let us know if anything at all changes. Maybe your mom will sound better now — she always sounds so raspy! I’ll call her later and let you know. → Read More
In an earnings call today Time Warner reported that it was planning to spin off its Cable holdings, “under the right circumstances.” No specifics were noted but Time Warner Cable is obviously bolted on to the weak AOL and TW media holdings and not quite the best fit for a media company in the first place, synergy be damned. TWC had a $771 million in profit last quarter, which is pretty nice. Let’s see who picks them up. Hopefully not ComCast. → Read More
Two ladies lookin’ to get their charge on. Samsung is pleased to announce the addition of charging stations in the LaGuardia and Orlando Airports and what better way to show off their huge, penis-shaped chargers than by featuring underaged girls and their grandmother rocking out to some free power, straight outta Seoul. “At Orlando International Airport we continue to look for ways to meet the diverse needs of our passengers. The complimentary charging stations are an expected customer service amenity for today’s travelers with personal electronics,” said Renee Spann, Director of Concessions, for the Greater Orlando Aviation Authority. Amen, Renee. After you anally rape us at the TSA checkpoint and charge us $5 for bottled water at the gate it’s nice to know we get a little free juice. → Read More
In an interview with PC Play Magazine, when asked about the current state of PC gaming, Crytek president Cevat Terli said: “We are suffering currently from the huge piracy that is encompassing Crysis. We seem to lead the charts in piracy by a large margin, a chart leading that is not desirable. I believe that’s the core problem of PC Gaming, piracy. To the degree PC Gamers that pirate games inherently destroy the platform. Similar games on consoles sell factors of 4-5 more. It was a big lesson for us and I believe we wont have PC exclusives as we did with Crysis in future. We are going to support PC, but not exclusive anymore.” Plenty of other PC game developers have raised the same complaint about piracy. You’ll recall that THQ chimed in a couple months ago and Gears of War developer Epic Games announced that it’ll be going console-only from now on. via ALBOTAS → Read More
We talked back in March about how all of you nerds spending your time on GTA IV could mean a lull in sales for the opening weekend of Iron Man. Besides spending your weekly allowance on a $60 DVD, you’ll also likely be holed up without food or water, to engrossed in virtual drunk driving to go out and see a movie. This weekend we’ll find out. Iron Man opens on Friday nationwide, and by that time most people will be four days deep in GTA IV. The film and the game have the same basic target audience, but will they be able to split their time this weekend? Of course, if you’re in San Francisco you can go watch it today courtesy of us at the Crunch Network, no matter what Marvel says. → Read More
After negotiating over the past few weeks with Microsoft and signing a letter of intent to be acquired, e-mail startup Xobni has walked from the deal, according to a source close to the negotiations. The deal would have been a natural for Microsoft, which was offering to buy the two-year old startup for somewhere in the $20-million range. (The company has raised less than $5 million so far in venture capital from Khosla Ventures, Atomico, First Round Capital, Ron Conway, and Y Combinator). But the deeper that Xobni got into the discussions, the less comfortable it felt about its eventual fate inside the Microsoft machine. The fear was that Xobni would end up nothing more than a feature of Outlook. Microsoft wanted the entire team to move up to Redmond, and was vague in its answers about what it had planned for that team, or the product. In the end, the body language just wasn’t there. Xobni offers a plug-in for Outlook that makes it smarter and easier to use by giving you handy stats in a sidebar and showing you how your contacts are connected to each other. But the company has greater aspirations than to become a feature of Outlook, as its internal integration with Yahoo Mail suggests. The service is still in private beta, and is approaching 50,000 registered users. Was Xobni crazy to walk away, or did it make the right move in the long run? Should Xobni Have Sold Itself to Microsoft For $20 Million? Hell, yes! Are they crazy? 228953% of all votes No, they will be worth a lot more a year from now. 202447% of all votes Total Votes: 4313 Started: April 30, 2008 CrunchBase Information Xobni Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
There’s a company in the UK called SuperMario Plumbing and Heating. The owner, Mariusz “Mario” Gruzka, though likely not Italian, could perhaps pass as a real life version of the Mario that most of us know and love. He’s no Captain Lou Albano from The Super Mario Bros. Super Show (remember Zelda Fridays?), but he’ll do. There’s some loose talk going around the ‘net as to the legalities of a company called SuperMario Plumbing and Heating, but here’s to hoping that everyone can just have a nice, healthy chuckle and move forward without too much trouble. via Geekologie → Read More
Microsoft is leaking that they are willing to increase their Yahoo bid to as much as $33 per share, up from the original $31/share offer. That original offer, which included payment in Microsoft stock, has fallen in value to just $29.12/share. This is a surprise since Microsoft has previously stated they wouldn’t increase their bid. Analysts largely expected them to either walk from the deal or go hostile. $33 may not be enough to get Yahoo to move the knife away from their nose, however. The WSJ says they want $35 – $37. The people say that it’s unclear what final approach Microsoft will take, but that discussions between the two companies have been stymied by a stark divide on price. Microsoft has said privately in recent days that it’s willing to offer as much as $32 or $33 a share, well above the $29.12-a-share value of its original cash-and-stock offer as of Tuesday’s market close, these people say. But major Yahoo shareholders have signaled they want in the range of $35 to $37 a share, with Yahoo’s management and board similarly shooting for an offer in the upper $30s, they add. → Read More
STYLE AND SOPHISTICATION. That’s one way to describe Sony’s new Bravia home theater setup, the DAV-F200. Another, less boisterous way to describe it is by calling it what it is: a virtual surround sound, um, home theater setup. While “virtual” surround setups have gotten better over the years (so says one of the guys who calls into Leo Laporte’s radio show occasionally), I personally would break the bank, spend the dollars while they’re still worth something and get an all-out surround sound system. But maybe you don’t have the space, I don’t know. If so, hear me out for a second. In addition to supplying virtual surround sound, the DAV-F200 receiver upconverts content to 1080p, delivered via an HDMI connection. There’s a USB port on the little guy, too, so you can connect your PMPs and have Men Without Hats blast out of the speakers. Yes, I’d have to actually “hear” the unit in action to say whether or not it’s worth plopping down cash for, but it certainly looks aesthetically attractive. Look for it in June. → Read More
I’m all in favor of far-reaching, ambitious projects like the colonization of Mars and stuff, but covering the Moon with mirrors to increase the chances of aliens seeing us? I’m more than a little skeptical. Aside from the very idea being totally insane, it’s a ridiculous notion that it would help aliens find us. Any alien race that has the power to contact or visit us almost certainly has the power to find us without us flashing prime numbers at them via the Moon. The secondary benefit of collecting solar energy and beaming it back to Earth is kind of weak too. First, the amount of energy created would be relatively small. Second, have you seen how much dust there is on the moon? And how many meteoroids hit the sucker? The solar array would be down before you could charge up your cell phone. On the Moon, readers, scientists like this have their pants pulled down and they are spanked with moon rocks. → Read More
