Nearly a year after it was bought by Google for $100 million, FeedBurner is finally going to roll out Google’s AdSense as an advertising option for blogs and Websites that use its service to publish their feeds. FeedBurner will start with a few select publishers next week, and then expand the option to all of its customers soon afterwards. What took them so long? That seemed to be the whole point of the acquisition. FeedBurner intersperses ads in blog feeds between every few posts. Integrating with AdSense will allow for publishers to tap into contextual ads for their feeds, in addition to the ads that FeedBurner already sells. Hopefully, Google also found the time to integrate its automated back-end payment system into all FeedBurner accounts. Until recently, FeedBurner was still sends out paper checks to publishers participating in its ad network. At least, that’s how TechCrunch gets paid. CrunchBase Information FeedBurner Google Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
We know that Apple will add an app store to iTunes very soon so that people can buy and download new applications for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Google’s going with a similar solution for Android, and is said that it will create a central storefront for commercial apps for handsets running the search giant’s new Linuxy OS. More interestingly, Google has said that handset makers using Android will have full access to the guts of the OS, meaning they can pull stuff they don’t want out or put stuff that’s not there in. That means that phone makers can customize every part of their phones while keeping interoperability. That compromise is what gives Android an edge, and what makes it a real threat to Apple and the iPhone. → Read More
Space beer. It’s right up there with space wrestling as something that’s long overdue, but the wait will soon be over. Sapporo will launch a beer in November that’s brewed from International Space Station-grown barley. Initially, only 100 bottles of the space brew will be made, and none of them released commercially, and it’s unlikely that the beer will taste any different. But that’s irrelevant. Sapporo could slap a “SPACE BEER” label on a bottle and it’ll sell out everywhere. There’s a scientific reason for the beer, and it’s to determine the effects of space on growing edible plants. Not that you care. via Popular Science → Read More
The company placed “cushions” under the HDD and cooling fan in the main unit. Onkyo claims this “floating technology” significantly reduces vibrations and noise . User can record music on the the hard disc drive in linear PCM/ATRAC/MP3 formats. The BR-NX10A is equipped with a USB port and Ethernet connection for CDDB. The two speakers feature an output power of 26W each. → Read More
I don’t use a mouse. I use the trackpad on my MacBook or a trackball when I’m at the desktop, but Bill Gates thinks all these things are going they way of DOS. He sees a future where waving ones hands over a sensor is the way to interface with your computer. He stops short of saying the keyboard is going away — that’s a Jobs thing — but he claims the days of the mouse are numbered. And he’s probably right. With multitouch going everywhere, and devices like the touchwall and Surface are about to explode into the mainstream. Computers will still have use for mouses, though. Gamers in particular are fans, some spending real money for precision mouses for precision sniping in their virtual worlds. For the rest of us, though, you might start seeing them disappear sooner than you’d think. → Read More
Could “Mobile Me” be the new name for .Mac? That’s what it looks like, at least according to what Blogging Robots (is that name a social statement?) has discovered. Strings in the iPhone 2.0 SDK reveal the name “Mobile Me” left, right and center, as pictured here. More evidence: Apple trademarked the name in 2006. So reasonable minds have concluded that, yes, Mobile Me is the new .Mac. Dotmac is fairly opaque and doesn’t really convey what it does, while Mobile Me, I think, is a little more descriptive. via TUAW → Read More
A former OiNK user was arrested last week, TorrentFreak has learnt. The user, who was not identified, was later released on bail. More arrests are expected. This news should concern a lot of us here, I’m going to assume. For one, if the police are involved, and not some anti-piracy watchdog like MediaDefender, it suggests that the post-OiNK investigations are criminal in nature (as opposed to civil). Just as troubling, the arrested user’s crime was the seeding of a single album. A show of hands: how many of you are seeding at least one album right now? Would now be the time to shutter Azureus for good? It would be prudent to wait for more information before taking any drastic measures, I think. → Read More
You can chat with us during the show via AIM by pinging username “crunchtips” or call into the show at (646) 200-4163 should the mood strike you. Here’s the link for today’s show… → Read More
Walmart has added a classified listings service to their site. Silicon Valley startup Oodle, which was founded in 2004, is powering the service. The listings are free, which means Walmart is likely doing the deal to generate page views and advertising impressions. They also now compete with both Craigslist and eBay-owned Kijiji. Walmart has a mixed history of success with Web businesses, but Walmart.com attracts 26 million visitors a month in the.U.S., according to comScore. Amazon attracts 47 million. The classifieds listing’s went up quietly last week on Walmart’s site. The deal should help Oodle compeet against eBay’s Kijiji, which recently passed it in in the U.S., with 2 million unique visitors in April, versus 1.3 million for Oodle. Both trail way behind Craigslist, which has 30 million uniques, and is currently embroiled in a nasty lawsuit with eBay over Kijiji’s market entry into the U.S. CrunchBase Information Oodle Kijiji Craigslist Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
It’s Friday, so expect one or two silly, time-killing videos throughout the day. This first one shows a man controlling a PSP with a DualShock controller. If you’re interested in putting something like this together, there’s a thread on Acid Mods that explains some of the more technical matters, matters that I won’t even pretend to understand. via PSP-Hacks → Read More
The ASUS Essentio CS5110, which we’ve covered in fair-to-middling detail, will be offered with an optional Blu-ray burner. Pricing will run between $657 and $1,642, with the Blu-ray equipped version of the PC starting at just over $1,300. These prices, by the way, are being converted from New Taiwan dollars, so they’re not necessarily set in stone. Still no official launch date and we’re not even sure if we’ll see these things stateside yet, but more details are expected next week at Computex. Full specs in a previous post here. via IDG/Yahoo! News → Read More
Check this: %@ is the new name of Apple’s online service (was .Mac) This string, found deep within the code for iCal, makes it pretty clear that Apple plans to make some changes to .Mac, its online service, um, service. The $99/year service gives people e-mail, an easy way to share content, sync information between computers, etc. It’s sorta outdated, especially in today’s environment where Google Apps can some of the same stuff for free. Some ideas that have been thrown around: over-the-air calendar, email and contact syncing; an all-around less expensive .Mac service, possibly with the purchase of an iPhone. Personally, I never saw much use for .Mac, but maybe this new version will change my mind. We’ll find out for sure by WWDC. → Read More
It’s nice to see blogs growing up, even if they are about babies. People.com has bought Celebrity Baby Blog, a fast-growing blog started four years ago by Danielle Friedland. She confirmed the deal earlier this week, after MediaWeek broke the story. The site has an editorial staff of 17 editors, contributors, writers, and reviewers (presumably, not all full time). The blog is an obvious fit for People, which knows that stories about pregnant celebrities and their babies sell. (Doesn’t it seem like pregnant celebrities are on the cover of People more than anything else?). The price was not disclosed, but Friedland and staff will stay on to grow the site. But People.com’s gain is Federated Media Publishing’s loss. With this acquisition, FM Publishing is losing yet another anchor blog from its advertising network. Last year, it lost Digg to Microsoft, and earlier this month it lost Ars Technica to Condé Nast. Now, Time Inc. (my former employer) has snapped up Celebrity Baby Blog. Celebrity Baby is FM Publishing’s top parenting blog, and has recently started to pull in more pageviews (and thus advertising impressions) than FM stalwart BoingBoing. Since February its traffic has shot up—to 6.9 million pageviews and 720,000 unique visitors in April, according to comScore. That month, BoingBoing had more unique visitors (2 million), but fewer pageviews (3.7 million). See the chart below. Deals like this point to the fundamental weakness of FM’s business model. When a blog in FM Publishing’s network gets big enough or gets bought, FM loses all or part of their advertising inventory. The more profitable a blog is for FM, the more likely it is to try to sell ads on its own or be taken away by a larger media company with its own ad sales force. (Disclosure: TechCrunch is also an FM partner site. They sell a portion of our ads, but we also sell our own). That said, we hear that FM was actually very helpful in getting this deal done. It knows that its blogs can walk away at any moment (As publisher Chas Edwards told me when FM raised $50 million last month), and the only way to keep them is to deliver higher CPMs than they could otherwise get. FM also wants to be seen as the best partner for up-and-coming blogs. Generating goodwill is always a smart business practice, even if it means having to let → Read More
The upcoming 2.40 firmware update for the PS3 should bring in-game XMB and trophies (like the 360′s achievements) to you gamers. Exactly when the firmware update will be released is still unknown, though more than a few people are predicting it’ll happen before the launch of MGS 4. That way, you know, you can bask in the glory of your trophies as soon as you get them. Wow, a post that had nothing to do with the iPhone. That’s rare these days. → Read More
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