If you’ve seen “Godzilla”, “Independence Day” or the latest addition to the “Die Hard” franchise then you’re familiar with what Wiseman is capable of and now he’s been confirmed as New Line’s man to helm the adaption of GoW. Chris Morgan is taking over the duties as head writer. Cliffy B. will act as executive producer to ensure they don’t screw it up. It was originally slated for a summer 2009 release, but that likely won’t happen. “It’s like with our games, you can have it right or have it right now,” said Epic Games topper Mark Rein. “We want to get it right. There’s no timetable for us. We just want to make as good a movie as we can, and we think (Wiseman’s) the guy who will do it.” Wiseman is also producing the third “Underworld” flick, which is why I included the above image because he’s a lucky enough to see Kate Beckinsale in skin tight pleather. → Read More
By taking an open-source approach to mobile mail and contact syncing, Funambol is cracking the problem of creating applications across 850 different mobile handsets. The company raised $12.5million in a series B financing led by Nexit Ventures. Castile Ventures and existing investors Walden International and H.I.G Ventures also participated. Funambol previously raised $5 million in a series A in August, 2005, and then a previously undisclosed follow-on of $5.5 million in December, 2006. The company is also in the process of raising another $2 million in venture debt to bring the total capital raised to $25 million. The company is based in Redwood City, California, with most of its employees and development engineers located south of Milan, Italy. (Of the company’s 75 employees, 45 are in Italy). It is behind one of the largest mobile open-source projects. Its syncing engine has been downloaded more than two million times by developers. Funambol’s syncing software works on phones running Symbian, Windows Mobile, OS X (the iPhone), Jave ME, Mobile Linux, Blackberry, and Android. The community edition that Funambol supports works with Exchange, Domino, POP and IMAP email servers. CEO Fabrizio Capobianco explains: There are three billion phones you need to make work. It is very complicated. You’d need thousands of employees. We solve this with open source. We have 1,000 people per country make our application work. He is even creating an iPhone app that will essentially offer a free version that partly replicates some of the main features of Apple’s new MobileMe service. How does he plan to make money? Selling the community edition of his syncing server to ISPs and email providers like AOL, which will be using Funambol to synchronize mobile and online messages. He thinks a messaging app, not a mobile Web browser, is the best place to show mobile ads to consumers. Capobianco says: The real focus is ad-based mobile messaging. It is an untapped market. It is huge. The mobile messaging client is the most used client on the device. It is a communications device—you either talk or you message. So that is the best conduit for advertising. He figures that with as little as ten emails a day, that generates 30 impressions a day, or about 1,000 a month, which is a CPM (cost per thousand—the metric used to measure online ads) Each mobile subscriber in his eyes is a CPM, and he says he → Read More
If you caught last week’s Los Angeles Times coverage of the TechCrunch Primaries, you know we’ve tried to underline the increasingly important relationship between technology and politics – we have to know the candidates’ positions on tech issues. That’s why I’m happy to announce our support for this year’s Personal Democracy Forum event in New York next week, which will bring together a large panel of experts to explore these issues. This year’s slate includes talks from Vint Cerf of Google, Joe Green of Causes, Craig Newmark, Lawrence Lessig, Clay Shirky, the internet directors of the Obama, Clinton, McCain campaigns and the Republican National Committee, and the CTOs of the biggest voter file companies. The conference will also feature top political bloggers on the left and right, some guys named Calacanis and Scoble, and a strong TechCrunch presence. The conference is doubly important given this year’s upcoming election. Political agendas have begun to encroach on the technological freedoms we take for granted: As I wrote earlier this month, America is falling behind in broadband penetration and data speeds, due to the lack of serious competition in the marketplace. We need to push the presidential candidates (and congressional candidates) to spell out, as clearly as possible, what they’re going to do about this – something we’ve been trying to do here at TechCrunch with our Tech President primary and podcasts, and something the folks at Personal Democracy Forum, Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifry (Dave Sifry’s older brother) have also been talking about for a long time as well. It’s also time for more industry leaders to push politicians to take a more forward-thinking approach to how government distributes public information. We hear a lot these days about how the internet is affecting the election, which PdF will cover from every conceivable angle, but in some ways it’s far more important to look at how we can start rethinking how government works, and how it can more effectively connect with American citizens to help solve problems. PdF is expanding to two days this year to devote a whole day to this issue, and my guess is that come 2009, we’re going to have an administration (either Obama or McCain) that is more open to trying to use the tools of the social web–blogs, wikis, crowd sourcing, etc–to open up governance. We’ve got five tickets to PdF to give away. Add a comment → Read More
Googled Image result The Google Internet search experience you’ve all grown to love is coming to your PSP’s XMB, says Eric Lempel, the Director of PlayStation Network Operations. The search history for the upcoming app will cache the previous 20 entries. Also included in v4.0 of the PSP software upgrade will be: the ability to change viewing speed during playback of videos stored on your Memory Stick PRO Duo, so you can speed through or slow down what you’re watching. To do this simply press the up or down directional buttons while playing a video. Enjoy! → Read More
Not a week after we derided Brightcove for its difficult user interface in a story about newly emerged competitor Delve Networks, the Cambridge-based video hosting company is releasing a completely rebuilt version of its service into private beta. Existing SaaS customers now have the opportunity to try out Brightcove 3 Beta, which will be made available to new customers sometime in the Fall. Development on Brightcove 3 began about nine months ago and has focused on three primary areas: a new publishing model, support for long-form video and, last but not least, an improved user interface. → Read More
DocSyncer, the service that allowed users to sync their desktop documents with Google Docs, has closed its doors. At first glance, the move seems surprising. DocSyncer had established a strong user base, having accumulated over 6 million documents since its launch last October. A mere six months ago we reported that the company was “going gangbusters”, and was the web’s largest contributor to Google Docs. So what happened? DocSyncer CEO Cliff Shaw says that the company simply couldn’t find a viable business model. The team decided that despite DocSyncer’s steady growth, it wasn’t going anywhere fast (the company also faced the looming threat of Google creating its own syncing service). Rather than dwindle more money and time on the service, Shaw and company have decided to move on. The team has begun work on a new photo site called picstreem, and are currently seeking funding. Last December Shaw’s photo backup company ProtectMyPhotos shut down after losing out to competitors like Mozy and Carbonite. DocSyncer was that product’s successor, leveraging much of ProtectMyPhotos’s technology. DocSyncer has been added to the Deadpool. CrunchBase Information DocSyncer Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
When the 9800GX2 cropped up, I thought, “That’s ridiculous. Who could possibly need that much power?” Yet now NVIDIA has eclipsed its dual-card beast with a single next-generation wonder, and people are already asking for two of those. HP’s Blackbird 02 gaming computer recently got refreshed, but no one saw this coming. Configurate here. [via UberGizmo] → Read More
Today at the Supernova conference there was a Techcrunch panel on the next great ideas in Mobile. The panelists were Michael Arrington, Kevin Werbach, Roelof Botha and Andreas Kluth. The companies that presented focused on important themes to advance innovation in the mobile environment including mobile goods, avatars, games and interfaces. For more information on the technology some of these companies will be using, check out our Location Technologies Primer. MobileLab MobileLab is a hub for mobile phone research and innovation at the University of Texas at Dallas. The lab has support from Ericsson, TI, Apple and Samsung Mobile. Their technology overlaps persistent 3D images over the real world on your mobile phone screen. One of the initial applications is a “mobile avatar” that appears on a person’s shoulder. CrunchBase Information MobileLab Information provided by CrunchBase Mobile Dead Mobile Dead is a location-based mobile zombie game. It uses GPS or other location data to find your position and the position of other players. Players choose to be on either the blue team, which is the human team, or the green team, which is the zombie team. Users can message each other with twitter-like short messages. Each player has a health and experience level, and a short profile. The game is played by picking up virtual items, which can then be used as part of the game. Those items, can also be traded with other items (such as trading a soda can for a crow bar). Players pick up weapons (such as chain saws) to fight against the opposing team, with weapons having varying levels of strength and damage. The game play is like other turn-based MMORPG’s where players take turns to hit each other until one wins. When you win fights you gain experience points. The game seems interesting, but it will require a critical mass of players to be viable (unless you want to walk around and just pick up items). The game is going to be in beta in the New York City area in July, and you can signup today if you are interested in trying it out. CrunchBase Information Mobile Dead Information provided by CrunchBase FrontlineSMS Using a a laptop and a mobile phone FrontlineSMS allows users to send and receive text messages with large groups of people. It can be used in a number of ways including disaster relief coordination, field data collection, conducting public → Read More
Starting today new T-Mobile customers or existing folk with an expired contract can get the Samsung SGH-t229 for only $29.99 with a two-year agreement. It’s not the flashiest phone out there, but Samsungs in this form factor are as reliable as they get. The new phone has a simple flip phone design with an active red finish with gray accents. It includes a built-in camera with 4x zoom, Bluetooth, and a speakerphone. You can also take advantage of T-Mobile’s myFaves service. It comes with a Lithium Ion Battery offering six hours of usage and eight days standby time. Sounds like a good one for beginners. → Read More
InstantAction is a GarageGames project focused on bringing free high-quality games to the browser. Like Kongregate, InstantAction is highly social and quickly accessible. Both sites appeal to casual gamers who don’t want to install software or learn complex user controls before competing with friends or strangers in short rounds of play. InstantAction, however, differentiates itself from Kongregate and other casual gaming sites by delivering impressive 3D graphics with a proprietary plugin. Ever since we first covered InstantAction in March, that plugin (and therefore its three available games) has only been available to Windows users. But GarageGames has been hard at work on a Mac plugin, and it’s almost ready for release to the public. Until then, the first 100 Mac readers to email this address will gain access to the Mac private beta so they can play Marble Blast, Think Tanks, and Rokkit Ball (all involving the firing, rolling, or passing of balls in some manner) against PC and Mac users alike. CrunchBase Information InstantAction Kongregate Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
For all of Apple’s huffing and puffing (wow I use that phrase a lot), there still seems to be some resistance to incorporating the iPhone 3G into corporate and enterprise environments. And it looks like iTunes may have something to do with it. → Read More
When we reported last week that Apple and AT&T would require iPhone 3Gs to be activated in-store or else no dice, the Internet let out a collective sigh. There are many who want to use the handset on non-AT&T networks, like T-Mobile. Being that they’re subsidized heavily, AT&T doesn’t like that idea at all, thus the policy. But there comes word today that the notion of in-store only activations might not be necessarily so. Rumors from Apple Insider point to the idea that home activation may be possible if customers sign up online, making the in-store process smoother and shorter. While our AT&T rep can’t confirm or deny anything we haven’t already published, we think both companies would be foolish to put up extra hurdles for potential customers to jump through. And if there’s one thing the iPhone has shown us, people will find a way to unlock them and use them as they want, no matter what AT&T — or Apple — do. → Read More
If you’re like me, you spend a lot of time on the road, and a laptop and cellphone are vital to your work. I’m fortunate enough to have a job that takes care of the hardware issue, but many aren’t so lucky. Some people who travel have to buy their own equipment, and some people aren’t happy about it. But there’s a question there. What should an employee reasonably be expected to own on their own? If you’re in certain industries, you’re to wear a suit to work, but the company doesn’t buy your suits for you. So why would a laptop be any different? I’m not saying it’s right, I think an employer has a responsibility to provide everything an employee needs to do his or her job, especially hardware, but the argument that certain things are expected — a telephone, a computer — in this modern time is a good one. → Read More
Google’s Director of Product Management Joe Kraus (the guy behind Open Social and other Google products) is talking today at the Supernova Conference in San Francisco on the topic of “social computing” and the how Google Friend Connect fits into the ecosystem with OpenID, OAuth, etc. The live stream is below. Note: The video halts around the 9:23 mark because of bad reception. You’ll need to manually seek past that point to continue watching until the end. http://qik.com/player.swf?streamname=0ca62d77eb4d45f88389467b5b56f8d8&vid=104843&playback=false&polling=false&user=techcrunch&userlock=true&islive=&username=anonymous Kraus talks about how social networking may be the “new black”, but connecting people on the web is not a new idea. A shift is occurring, however, from sharing information actively (emailing photos to friends directly) to sharing it passively (uploading those photos to Facebook where they will show up in friends’ news feeds). The “publish, then filter” mentality leads to more sharing because people don’t worry as much about appearing self-important. He sees the web as evolving to a point where it’s entirely social. Just as user generated content can be distributed across websites now, users’ social connections will span sites in the future. Google Friend Connect is meant to facilitate this evolution by tackling three main problems: establishing identity, authorizing sites, and distributing social applications. The three standards at the core of this project are OpenID, OAuth, and OpenSocial, which respectively address each of those problems. CrunchBase Information Joe Kraus Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Oh, that’s unfortunate. I’ve been eyeing this device since it was announced and have always thought the keyboard looked phenomenal. BGR is reporting, however, that the keyboard on the XPERIA X1 device is a “major flaw” – that’d definitely be a deal-breaker for more than a few people, myself included. Not to say that this keyboard is absolutely terrible, but it’s one of the worst. Think Sony UX computer, for those of you that have one or have used one. The sliding mechanism comes right on top of the keys, and thus, the keys don’t travel a lot when pressed. They give little to no feedback despite having a cool triangular design. Aside from the keyboard, everything else appears to be pretty delightful. The 800×480 screen would make surfing the web and watching movies on this thing much more palatable. The device that BGR got ahold of is only a pre-production unit, so “the software runs a little slow,” but the XPERIA still seems to perform admirably and should only improve with the final version. I don’t suppose that Sony-Ericsson is going to revamp the keyboard before the rumored September launch, though. → Read More
I could tell you about the list of improvements as long as my arm, including vastly increased memory bandwidth, 65nm fabrication, and huge increases in shader and thread counts. I could bore you with more technical specs and statistics. But I think what you really need to know is that it runs Bioshock at 2560×1600 with 4x anti-aliasing and 8x anisotropic filtering at nearly 60fps. If you’re rich enough to have a monitor that supports that resolution (or a couple), you may just be interested in shelling out the $650 for this titan of a card. Look at it. It looks like science fiction. And yes, it runs Daikatana. → Read More
I actually could have used one of these last night when I was swapping and backing up my internal HDDs and didn’t have enough space in my case to hold ‘em all. This multi-hard drive enclosure is not really a new kind of product, but it is by far the simplest (and the price is right). They’ve essentially just ripped the HDD cage out of a computer case and are selling it as a separate product, but that’s actually kind of attractive to me. Essentially the only difference is the fan. You plug everything straight into your SATA ports and PSU. Very hacker-ish, and not conducive to reducing cable clutter. This is pretty much the extreme opposite end of the spectrum from, say, a Drobo or rack-mount hard-drive product, and the price (and functionality) reflects that. You could go in between the two poles with something like this, which is pretty sweet actually, but I can’t say I trust it. This enclosure is basically just a stand for your hard drives, but if you’re out of cage space (as I am) and think exposed computer stuff looks awesome (as I do) then this is a good buy. → Read More
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