Warning: some people may find some of the content in this post offensive. If you are a fan of The Onion and can never seem to find just the right ecard to send to friends and family, you’re going to love Someecards. The company is announcing a seed round financing today – more details below. The company was founded by former Onion writer Brook Lundy and Duncan Mitchell, and quietly launched in April 2007. It’s fairly straightforward – they create simple ecards like the one above with Onion-style humor, and let people email them to each other. Without any launch notice, press or marketing, the site has grown virally to 1.5 million unique monthly visitors, who are pretty passionate about the site. A few recent emails that the team have received: “I think you guys should come stay at my sorority house and do a presentation or something. If you guys are located anywhere near San Francisco by September, let me know and I will work for you guys for free.” “your website has got me laughing out loud and getting wet at the same time. i think you should make an ecard that says: this website has got me laughing out loud and getting wet at the same time.” “I really believe your site is of some sociological importance. Someecards lifts the veil of political correctness, denial and social mores.” “I would just like to thank you for providing what I consider to be one of the best websites of all time. Not only do you have a card tailored to everyone I know (and wish I did not know), but my productivity at work has dropped to a mere 30% during the day which is always a plus as I am constantly looking for something new to distract me. Thank you, thank you, a million times, thank you.” “I just found someecards today. My life is a better place to be. If this site closes down anytime in the next 50 years (before I die) I will shoot myself. Please let me live.” To date, the team, which includes six part time writers, has created 1,900 cards. The most popular are here, but, really, you could spend a happy afternoon reading all of them. I’ve put three of them in this post. The site was a part time project for the two founders, but the unexpected popularity of → Read More
Slashphone.com has found a watch-phone doodad that you could almost wear without setting off the nearest Nerd Alert. Almost. It’s called the G108 (from China) and it’s got an impressive list of features crammed into its tiny body. → Read More
http://update.videoegg.com/flash/proxy.swf?jsver=1.4 Finally, a game Zero likes and I’m happy to report I kind of enjoyed it as well, making me not as lame as you all think. I personally prefer to masturbate with my own Wiimote, however, but if you’re into the things Zero mentions, feel free to pick it up. → Read More
Flickr’d Rock Band‘s creators say Nintendo goofed by not including a hard drive in the Wii. Without the drive, Harmonix argues, there’s no way it can offer downloadable content, or DLC in the vernacular. DLC for Rock Band usually chimes in at around 30MB per song; the Wii only has 512MB of internal storage. What hath God wrought? Not much, apparetly. → Read More
http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=-6483543718966313073&hl=en On your lunch break? Not on your lunch break? Don’t have a lunch break? Good! Then block off 40 minutes for this absolutely riveting discussion on piracy, and what media companies can do to combat it. (Hint: Compete against it. Smart!) Some guy named Matt Mason gave a Speech (I meant to capitalize that, Doug) last month at The Medici Summit (WHERE BUSINESS & INNOVATION INTERSECT) telling companies that piracy isn’t going to magically disappear, nor can you sue it out of existence. He goes through a mini-history of the subject, from pirate radio stations to BBS’s filled with software to modern-day BitTorrent sites. The long and short of it is that companies need to go the iTunes route and compete against piracy on a value level. (iTunes gave consumers a fast and convenient way to buy music from a Trusted Source.) I don’t know, interesting in the “hey, I’ve got nothing better to do” sense. One hour till Champions League. Looking forward to a Liverpool/Chelsea and ManU/Barça semifinals. → Read More
In what can only be interpreted as a move in its extended chess match with Microsoft, Yahoo has decided to run a two-week-long trial of Google’s AdSense for Search. The limited test will see Google placing ads alongside no more than 3% of Yahoo’s search result pages in the US. While Yahoo claims to be simply “exploring strategic alternatives to maximize stockholder value”, the company is obviously trying to convince shareholders that a merger with Microsoft would be sub-optimal by showing how well an alternative partnership with Google monetizes. Yahoo is eager to point out that the trial will not necessarily blossom into a long-term relationship with Google. And so the pushing continues… CrunchBase Information Yahoo! Google Microsoft Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
I don’t know what the feeling is that I get from this keyboard. I feel like it’s a bad guys keyboard. Like how in the first season of 24 all the bad guys used PCs? I feel like they should also have been using these keyboards. Functional and attractive, yet stark and somehow menacing, this is the keyboard which which an arch-villain might stock his evil HQ. I want one. → Read More
Have you switched over to digital TV yet? Well, you probably did, since you read tech blogs, but the average American? Not so much. Since the government started offering vouchers for analog-to-digital TV signals, about 5.3 million households have received at least one. The main bottleneck seems to be that manufacturers and retailers like Best But have been slow to roll out the actual converter boxes. One of Alaska’s senators is losing sleep (read: not really) over the issue, concerned that his constituents aren’t up to speed with the whole analog-to-digital transition, especially since so many of them rely on over-the-air TV signals. So, have you done the honorable thing and told all your friends and family about the transition? I haven’t! → Read More
Billshrink, the new startup that aspires to simplify the often painful process of choosing and comparing mobile plans (and eventually other services), has launched in beta. While promising, it still needs a lot of work. The site offers an ostensibly impressive feature-set. Upon entering a cell number and the password associated with a mobile account, the user is presented with a comprehensive usage analysis, including a listing of the user’s most-called contacts and networks. Those wary of sharing their personal information can manually enter data such as “minutes used”, though this is a somewhat more tedious process. Data is compiled and analyzed, at which point a list of comparable (and hopefully less expensive) plans is presented. Billshrink also offers maps with visual representations of each carrier’s cell phone strength. Users can even enter their home and work locations to determine a “Commute Rating”, which analyzes connection strength over a route calculated by Google Maps. Unfortunately, many of these features are still buggy. While the usage graphs presented after entering our bill information were impressive, the resulting phone plan comparison was anything but. Our top suggestion featured a T-mobile plan with a data charge of over $185M (obviously in error). The signal-strength map never seemed to materialize over the standard Google Maps view, though the “Commute Rating” feature worked fine. (Update: We’ve tried the phone plan comparison again and it works well now) Despite these shortcomings, the site is still useful and allows the average beta tester to save $225 annually according to company statistics. Billshrink is headed by CEO Peter Pham, a former Photobucket executive who joined the company in February. CrunchBase Information BillShrink Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Those sports at Amazon understand “new technologies don’t always work out as planned.” Or rather, they don’t work out as Toshiba planned. I have a feeling this is how Sony planned it all along. In any case, if you bought one of those bargain HD-DVD players after February 23rd, help yourself to $50 worth of stuff from Amazon. Personally, I’d be buying the Planet Earth box set. Hell yes. → Read More
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22425001/vp/24020044#24020044 In order to save American lives, which I’m all for, the Pentagon will employ a hand-held lie detector in Afghanistan. The device, which was developed by a team at Johns Hopkins (the algorithm, at least) and sold by Lafayette Instrument, Co., costs $7,500 a pop and goes by the name Preliminary Credibility Assessment Screening System. Even though traditional polygraphs aren’t exactly reliable, the PCASS is even less reliable since it doesn’t take into account certain parameters like breathing rate. The Pentagon says it’s just one more tool in the soldier’s arsenal, not meant to convict men on the spot. To tie this into Dr. Kaku, he said on that same episode of Opie and Anthony two days ago that it’s totally possible to create a highly accurate lie detector. Since lying requires knowledge of the truth, of the constructed lie, and of the consequences of telling a lie, you could, theoretically, measure the brain activity of an individual. I want to interview Kaku, not even for CrunchGear, but for my own selfish benefit. via Drudge Report → Read More
The ease of comparing prices on the Internet has done a lot to do away with major price differences between individual items at retailers, whether online or off. But where they still get you is when you buy many items from the same store and you throw in the high-margin coffee with the cut-rate shampoo. Higher-priced single items, such as a digital camera or an MP3 player, lend themselves more to online research. Finding the best deal is just a matter of selecting your preferred comparison shopping site (Shopping.com, mySimon, etc.). But what happens when you want to compare an entire cart of groceries across several merchants? Put simply, you are out of luck. Unless of course you happen to be living in the UK and making good use of mySupermarket. mySupermarket, which has been around since 2006, claims to be the first comparison service that allows users to compare a cart of multiple items across retailers—in its case, groceries, across British supermarket chains Tesco, Sainsbury’s Ocado & ASDA. It can compare not only identical items (a one-liter bottle of Coke), but also similar non-identical items, such one-liter bottles of mineral water from two separate brands. To accomplish this, mySupermarket classified 100,000 grocery products sold online in the UK according to multiple criteria and sub-criteria. The rules, weightings and relationships between different sub-criteria are incorporated into the company’s algorithms. Up-to-date pricing is achieved using a combination of proprietary crawlers and manual validation processes to access real time prices from the supermarkets’ own sites. MySupermarket marries those prices with its own image database. It obtains products from the manufacturers and retailers and then uses in-house image production combined with post-processing facilities in Thailand. The company claims an average online grocery cart includes approximately 50 items, with a total cost of 80-110 English pounds ($160-$220). By finding savings for consumers that average 20 percent per cart, and consumers accepting about half those recommendations, the actual savings average around 10 pounds ($20) per cart. The way mySupermarket works is that users login to mySupermarket and fill-up a “trolley” (British for “shopping cart”). They are then presented with three types of recommendations: 1. Potential savings from switching the entire cart to another supermarket. 2. Potential savings from swapping items in the cart to alternatives from within the same supermarket. 3. Health conscious recommendations (calories, saturates, fat, salt, sugar) for swapping items to healthier alternatives. → Read More
A rather self-serving ENDORSEMENT for your reading misery today. I don’t know what I was doing last week, but records indicate I didn’t ENDORSE anything! At all! I don’t know how you all survived, or why Drudge didn’t put the siren up announcing my oversight, but here we are. Right. So today I’m ENDORSING applications like TvAnts, TVU Player, PPMate and Sopcast. They’re all Windows apps, which, when properly configured (read: opened), allow you to watch streaming live TV. Nearest I can tell, it’s primarily used for sports that aren’t popular in the United States of America, meaning you’ll find plenty of soccer on there. Hence, my interest in it. In fact, if you’re in the mood to be completely annoyed, follow me on Twitter on Champions League days. There you’ll find plenty of mindless updates like “Fernando Torres~!” and “Ronaldo’s a wanker.” It’s all very classy and all very exciting. → Read More
Do a search for “ASUS Essentio CS5110″ on Google and look what pops up first. That’s right — John Biggs, ladies and gentlemen. John Biggs. Anywho, back in early March there weren’t too many details on the luscious Essentio, but ASUS has furnished us all with more information in the form of a press release. Still notably missing, however, is a launch date and a price tag. → Read More
Google is obviously making big moves into the enterprise. In February, it relaunched JotSpot as Google Sites under the enterprise group, and next week it is expected to announce deeper integration of Google Apps with Salesforce.com, which should help it introduce Google Apps to more business customers. But today, it is taking a page from Salesforce.com by launching its own marketplace for third-party applications and consulting services that enhance Google’s enterprise offerings (mainly Google Apps and enterprise search). Salesforce, of course, has its AppExchange where smaller companies can sell on-demand software to Salesforce customers (and have Salesforce host the apps). Google is calling its exchange the Google Solutions Marketplace. It replaces a simpler Enterprise Solutions Gallery that Google had before. While Google won’t be hosting the apps (it is just a free listings service), companies can create their own product profiles. Customers can search for Google-related enterprise apps all in one place and rate them. Google needs to create momentum around its enterprise products so that smaller companies will want to develop add-ons and create businesses around them. Right now the offerings seem pretty thin. There are a bunch of syncing tools, identity management offerings, add-on gadgets, and integration with other enterprise apps. But what is lacking is an economic model that would really motivate developers to build on top of Google’s Enterprise apps. The free exposure, though, is a start. → Read More
I’m not quite sure what to make of this so I’ll see if I can’t get my hands on a review unit to take it for a spin. The IOGEAR Portable Media Player is 3.2-inches wide by 5.25-inches long by .75-inches thick and contains a 120GB hard drive. You hook the device up to your computer via USB, dump videos and photos onto it, and then hook it up to your TV via composite or component cables. No HDMI, though, which is kind of an odd choice considering that IOGEAR says that it “enhances standard definition video playback viewing up to 720p resolution on an HDTV” and is pushing this as a portable device. There’s nothing all that portable about the five different connectors that come along with component cables. → Read More
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