Tamir Khason wrote an article about four years ago theorizing that there’s a direct correlation between the modern-day popularity of a particular programming language and how much facial hair the inventor of that language has. He’s now revisited the subject in a new post called Computer Languages and Facial Hair — Take Two. The inventors of the following languages have (or had) no facial hair at all; Fortran, F#, Prolog, Objective-C, Java+, C#, RubyCLR, WPF, Silverlight, and IronPython. → Read More
Drama over. The CrunchGear/TechCrunch Iron Man screening, which Marvel tried to shut down yesterday for no good reason whatsoever (more on that below), is back on. We are adding another 30 spots on the wait list. At least most of the people on the wait list will get in, so if you’re willing to risk being turned away at the last minute, sign up there. Showing is at 7:15 tonight at the AMC Metreon in San Francisco. We’re still trying to figure out exactly what happened, but Marvel is now saying that Oracle, which is promoting the movie, complained about the event. From our attorney: “He said this all arose from a misunderstanding. Paramount had not informed Marvel about your deal. Oracle had booked the theatre for a different screening at the same time. People at Oracle were upset thinking that their event was turning into a TechCrunch event and that there would be too many people, conflicts over who would get in, etc.” I was already slightly annoyed at Oracle for spamming comments on our original post (see comment 50 here). But to try to derail the event is just…villainous. Marvel also apologized, and we accept. I’m not annoyed at all that we incurred an extra $2,000 in legal expense on top of the ticket price. See you tonight! Update: Just got a call from Ira Rubenstein apologizing. He also confirms that he left this comment. All is forgiven at Marvel, even the legal fees. It’s Oracle I’m aiming at now. → Read More
A little NSFW near the middle. Be warned. It’s business time, TC readers. Tomorrow we welcome those with emailed invites to Red Sky at 47 E. 29th Street between Park and Madison. We’d like to thank our sponsors again. If you got an email for the wait list spots, congratulations. If you didn’t, there’s always next time. See you tomorrow! Hopefully Marvel doesn’t shut us down. After all, Matt Hickey is coming dressed as No-Pants Spiderman. Gold Sponsors → Read More
The DC800 from SeaLife is an 8-megapixel digital camera that works underwater in that housing apparatus on the left and then works on land as that little guy on the right. Perfect for taking photos of majestic sea creatures during the day and exotic cougars at night. It’s got five special underwater modes to adjust to the color of water that you’re diving in, plus a continuous picture feature that automatically snaps photos in five second to five minute increments. It’s waterproof up to 200 feet, has a 2.7-inch display, 4x optical zoom (plus 5x digital), 32MB of on-board memory, plus an SD card slot. It’s $549.95 from SeaLife Cameras. Press Release → Read More
I just got around to watching last Wednesday’s Cranky Geeks video podcast starring John C. Dvorak and Sebastian Rupley (plus a panel of guests that rotate each week) and found this bit to be kind of funny. Dvorak’s step-son apparently set up a Twitter account under “SRupley” and posted updates as Rupley, like: I belched….mmm…peanut butter. Yum After 7, no wait, 8 hours, I got tired of watching TV. Going to check out Digg stories and drink wine coolers. Reading the news while I drink my mocha frappuccino. Apparently this sort of thing happens all the time until the fake accounts get shut down by the “real” people. Jonathan Ive, Leo Laporte, and Woz, to name a few. In this case, Rupley decided to bite the bullet and just take over the Twitter account for real after Dvorak gave him the password. Others aren’t quite so lucky, though. → Read More
Apparently you simply drop an SD card into this bugger, press a button, and take pictures. It’s designed to fit almost anywhere — they recommend the eyeball of a mannequin — and records up to six hours of video on a 2GB card. Sadly it lasts only 3 hours on battery but that’s enough to roll it through the bus station for some hot upskirt action. Wait… hot upskirt action at the bus station? $299.95 gets you this ball delivered. Extra points for watching the entire video without turning down the sound. → Read More
AOL may have the widest-reaching advertising network in Platform A, but it is not seeing the financial rewards of that reach. In fact, Time Warner today announced that during the first quarter, AOL’s overall advertising revenues grew just 1 percent. Total revenues at AOL slid 23 percent because the access business continues to go away, but everybody knows that and the focus now is on whether AOL can reinvent itself as a pure Internet advertising company. AOL spent about $1 billion over the past year on companies like Tacoda and Quigo to buy its ad network market share. Those businesses aren’t quite kicking in yet partly because of delays in integrating their sales forces But the bigger problem was that gains in third-party ads sold on other sites were almost completely offset last quarter by an 18 percent drop in display ads on AOL-owned properties. AOL makes a lot more margin on ads it sells on its own sites than on ads it sells on other sites. That is why it is trying to boost its own pageviews by upgrading its sites and is the reason why it bought Bebo for $850 million earlier this year. The more ad inventory AOL can sell on its own sites, the better its margins will be. AOL’s deal with Google on paid search advertising, like IAC’s. is also helping to shore up its overall advertising sales. Although, it is not clear what the exact impact was because the company did not break out the numbers. CrunchBase Information AOL Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
http://blip.tv/scripts/flash/showplayer.swf?enablejs=true&file=http%3A//blip.tv/rss/flash/873730&feedurl=http%3A//crunchgear.blip.tv/rss/&autostart=false&brandname=CrunchGear&brandlink=http%3A//crunchgear.blip.tv/ Tune in every Friday at 1PM EST to listen to CrunchGear Talk Radio. → Read More
A lot of notebook manufacturers will take photos of their products being used in locations that most normal people would never dream of taking such delicate and expensive devices. Case in point, the first iteration of the Asus Eee PC with the girl on the beach. Everyone knows that the beach is the absolute LAST place to take a laptop. There are too many people having “fun” — blissfully unaware that they might be kicking sand up all over your computer while you’re trying to work. The beach is just too dangerous. So it’s great to see that Asus has shifted gears with its Eee PC 900 series and taken some photos of the device next to a plate of gutted fish with the protective covering still affixed to the trackpad (although that soy sauce is dangerously close). While I don’t condone eating next to your laptop, it has to be done unless you “take breaks” and eat in a “kitchen” with your “family” instead of at your desk. Basically what I’m saying is that the new Eee 900 will be available in black and it’ll have somewhat more realistic product photos. via SlashGear → Read More
Alcatel-Lucent, a telecommunications equipment maker, announced today that it posted its fifth straight quarterly loss. The company lost 181 million euros ($282 million) compared to a loss of 8 million euros a year earlier, when profits were boosted by the sale of businesses to Thales SA. Revenues were down 3.86 billion euros ($6.02 billion) compared with 3.88 billion euros from last year. Alcatel-Lucent expects overall revenue for 2008 to decline by 2% to 5%. The company blames the loss on a weak dollar and lower spending by operators. The first-quarter numbers sent shares of the company down 6.5% to sell at 4.2 euros ($6.5). Alcatel-Lucent predicts that global communications equipment and related services will be flat in 2008. Chief Financial Officer Hubert de Pesquidous blames the worsening economic climate. “While the long-term prospects for the industry are positive, the current macroeconomic environment remains uncertain, leading the company to continue to be prudent in its market assumptions,” Alcatel-Lucent said in a statement. Alcatel-Lucent is in the middle of a company restructuring that may cut up to 12,500 jobs. The company cut 6,700 jobs in 2007. Alcatel-Lucent shares have lost about 10% of their value this year, after losing more than half their value in 2007. → Read More
I can’t quite put my finger on it (pun intended) but this interface looks similar to something I’ve seen before. The “Smart Touch” UI by Gigabyte for its line of GSmart phones will be available in Europe “after May,” so there’s no telling if we’ll see something like this here in the US. Actually, we’ll see a lot of stuff like this if we haven’t already, as most major mobile device manufacturers and software developers work to replicate the UI of a wildly popular phone that’s been on the market for a while. via the::unwired → Read More
Microsoft already makes so-called senior PCs here in the U.S., computers that are aimed at older folk, but it announced in London at some conference that it plans to bring senior PCs over to the UK as well. Whether or not these UK senior PC are the same as the ones we have here is unclear, but Redmond says the PCs will help bring seniors into the digital world. A simple interface allows users to, among other things, manage photos and prescriptions. (Maybe they’ll want to incorporate that necklace?) So, yeah, a computer for older people. I swear, the day I have to buy products designed for old people is the day I want my relatives to pull the plug. → Read More
Marchex, a company that delivers local online advertising and local content, announced today that it has extended its advertising strategy to the mobile market. Marchex has entered into agreements with mobile advertising providers AdMob, Ringleader Digital and 4INFO. Marchex’s VoiceStar subsidiary will deliver call tracking services to all three companies. VoiceStar will enable the advertiser providers to validate the effectiveness and return on investment of their mobile advertising networks and provide their advertisers with analytics to help them optimize their mobile advertising campaigns. Marchex’s call tracking enables mobile advertising providers to: (i) track the calls generated by advertisements on their network, (ii) determine exactly which advertisements delivered the calls, (iii) track and report key information including the duration, time of day and geographic location of callers, and (iv) record the calls. Marchex makes this information available to the mobile advertising provider through its reporting interface. “Marchex is focused on partnerships with leading aggregators of local advertisers across all channels: online, offline, and mobile,” said John Keister, Marchex President and COO. “We believe that the mobile advertising opportunity is significant and is poised to realize tremendous growth over the next five years. Our call tracking and pay-per-phone-call capabilities provide a significant advantage for Marchex in the mobile search advertising market.” “We are excited to bring new tools and technologies that will provide our advertising customers with results-focused advertising solutions,” said Omar Hamoui, Founder and CEO AdMob. “By linking the browsing experience of the mobile web with the communications capabilities of mobile phones, AdMob continues to deliver a powerful new tool for advertisers. Marchex’s call-based advertising services and suite of analytic tools enable us to better monetize our inventory and enable our advertisers to maximize the return on investment for their mobile advertising campaigns.” VoiceStar Marchex → Read More
The thing about this concept lamp is that you get to show your own design chops. Designer Michail Komarov made it so that a series of interlocking tubes (that sounds familiar) can be arranged in any number of shapes and styles to suit your discerning taste. The way it’s arranged in this picture, I’d have no qualms putting that in my absolutely wonderful apartment. I swear, all these designs are so much better than the real junk we put up with. → Read More
Time Warner Cable in New York adds a bunch of HD channels to its lineup today, chief among them Fox Business Channel HD and Disney HD. The e-mail it sent me this morning touts the fact that all TWC customers can now enjoy 100 free (for some reason “free” is capitalized in the e-mail, like it’s a proper noun) HD channels, never mind that lots of those channels are junk (like Fox Business… pretty sure if I wanted business news I’d read the Financial Times). Still, it’s nice to wake up with a few extra HD channels. I hear that many of these so-called HD channels, like History Channel HD, are simply upconverted versions of the standard-def channel and not real HD. → Read More
The most publicized improvements to email in recent memory haven’t been browser-based, they’ve been extensions like Xobni and Xoopit that latch onto your existing mail client and provide auxiliary services. This tactic makes good business sense – who wants to try convincing Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, and Gmail users to take a leap of faith and walk away from these BigCo solutions for an unproven startup? As things stand, that migration is necessary without a way to integrate 3rd-party technologies into those popular webmail services. Zenbe is one company willing to go out on a limb, build a completely stand-alone webmail solution, and push the envelope on what’s possible with email. The service, which is currently in private beta but available to the first 500 readers who sign up here, makes advances in a number of areas. It also provides a glimpse at what “email as a platform” really means. The app’s most superficial improvement is a beautiful user interface. Spend a few minutes clicking around Zenbe and you’ll find that it really does deserve the “zen” moniker. But good looks are far from its only selling point. You also get fully integrated calendar, task list, and address book capabilities, easily accessible through an ever-present sidebar. There’s a Xoopit-like tab with which you can browse all the files contained across your emails. These files are viewable by type: images, documents, spreadsheets, audio/video files, and events. As with emails, you can star files to indicate their importance; you can also hover over them to see previews. And there’s a Facebook tab in the sidebar that lets you see your friends’ most recent updates. Zenbe’s big idea, however, consists of a feature called “ZenPages” that are intended to help you organize your email into projects or topics. Instead of just putting messages into folders (which Zenbe doesn’t have anyway; it’s a tag-based system like Gmail), you can assign messages to ZenPages with specially designated tags. For example, I can assign all messages tagged with “techcrunch50″ to a TechCrunch50 conference ZenPage. Once there, I can do a lot of useful things with them. First off, I can invite others (whether Zenbe users or not) to my ZenPage and they can view all my relevant emails. If they so choose, they can also share relevant messages using the same ZenPage. This lets groups collaborate around email without having to CC each other on every single → Read More
IAC reported first quarter earnings this morning, and broke out the financials of what the new IAC would like after the pending five-way breakup of the company is completed. (A March court victory against dissenting shareholder Liberty Media clears the way for the spin offs). What’s clear from the financial statements is that the new IAC very much owes its 22 percent jump in revenues and 15 percent jump in operating income to the $3.5 billion, five-year deal it struck with Google last fall to hand over all search advertising on Ask.com and other sites to the search overlord. In the Media & Advertising division—the new IAC’ largest and most profitable unit which includes Ask.com, Citysearch, and Evite—revenues increased 28 percent to $216 million and operating income skyrocketed 192 percent to $31 million. This was largely due to better revenues per search query due to the Google relationship, and a slashing of marketing costs. (Those annoying and expensive TV commercials finally got canned). Ask has been able to hang on to iits No. 5 spot in search market share (4.7 percent in March, according to comScore) and showed the biggest percentage gain (12 percent) in search queries of any search engine These numbers show the benefits, at least in the short term, of handing your search advertising over to Google—something Yahoo is learning itself through its limited test with Google to do the same thing. The question is what happens in the long term when market share erodes and Google does not have to pay so much for the privilege of taking away the search advertising business from its fading competitors. IAC’s other businesses did not do so well on their own. Match.com saw a 10 percent jump in revenues, but a 13 percent decline in operating profits. And the other businesses are just a mish-mash of underperforming assets. CrunchBase Information IAC Google Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Mobile phone ad platform provider AdMob has launched AdMob Mobile Analytics, a Google Analytics style service for mobile advertising. AdMob Mobile Analytics offers businesses a free solution to maximize commerce, advertising and content on the mobile Internet. AdMob Mobile Analytics helps mobile site owners understand their audience, optimize their content and improve usability. The suite allows users to track site performance metrics such as unique visitors, duration of visit, page performance, as well as user details including geography, operator and device specifics. This information helps mobile site owners tune their sites to the specific consumers visiting their mobile Web presence. Notably, the service is ad provider agnostic: users can track campaigns by any provider as well as ad campaigns from AdMob. CrunchBase Information AdMob Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
