With right around a week to go before WWDC, the iPhone rumor mill is churnin’ like its never churned before. In the name of science, we’ve pushed all of the rumors through our FCF (Fanboy Crap Filter), and rated the more likely rumors on the PKL (Pre-keynote Legitometer) scale. Will it ship the day it’s announced? Will it have a front facing camera? Slap on your speculation caps, and head on over to MobileCrunch for the big list >> → Read More
Are they selling something? Making a comment on male-female relations? Hiring for an a cappella group? All we do know is that this is a non-US cartoon made for the Samsung F480, a phone we all want but will never, ever own because it’s Asia-only. → Read More
TechCrunch UK is taking the TechCrunch brand on a little road-trip (OK, plane trip) around Europe this summer and afterwards, making face-to-face contact with Europe’s best and brightest startups. We just held a great meetup in Barcelona for instance. Where possible I’ll be holding a TechCrunch meetup in the cities I visit (keep track via Dopplr), usually with a local partner. So here’s where I’ll be going next: Paris Seedcamp Paris June 6th Come and say hi as I’ll be at this influential competition for French startups. Berlin June 11th Berlin TechCrunch Meetup! It’s gonna be huge… stay tuned for an update shortly on this. Warsaw June 12th TMT.communities’08 A great new event in New Europe. I’ll be speaking at the conference. Rome June 20th TechGarage Come and say hi, as I’ll be at this cool new event for startups and VCs in Rome. Dublin Techcrunch / TechLudd Mashup June 26th A TechCrunch meetup held in conjunction with TechLudd (the Irish startup networking event). Watch TechCrunch UK & Ireland for details of the event, to be announced soon. Save the date! (A little more info is here). Istanbul June 28th TechCrunch and Webrazzi, Turkey’s leading Web 2.0 blog, are co-organising a Meetup, featuring demos from Turkey’s best and brightest startups. Please contact Webrazzi’s Arda Kutsal for more information. Athens July 1st Athens TechCrunch meetups co-organised with George Tziralis and Open Coffee Greece. Please get in touch about sponsorship. Barcelona July 4th Mobile 2.0 Europe TechCrunch UK is supporting the after-party for Europe’s hottest mobile 2.0 startups. Zürich July 17th TechCrunch Meetup Co-organised with Zurich’s Wuala and Doodle, and supported by Geneva’s Newscred. Yes, we want to mash-up startups from both those cities! Please get in touch about sponsorship. Oslo September 4th Proposed TechCrunch Meetup Co-organised with Secondbrain. Please get in touch about sponsorship. Stockholm September 11th Proposed TechCrunch Meetup Co-organised with Twingly. Please get in touch about sponsorship. Hamburg September 25th Proposed TechCrunch Meetup Co-organised with Jimdo. Please get in touch about sponsorship. Other TechCrunch Events in Europe: And TechCrunch UK has started organising other events, including a recent London Meetup TechCrunch Dinners (our first was with Scott Rafer here). We are looking for other notable speakers for panels and events, so please get in contact if you are going to be in London at some point and we’ll schedule you in. We are also planning a major TechCrunch event → Read More
PageOnce, the personalized homepage for account management that I put up against more traditional homepages like Netvibes and PageFlakes in February, has opened its doors to the public. Its launch comes after a private beta period where it collected 20,000 registered users and built up support for more than 60,000 account types. These range from bank accounts to flight itineraries to social network profiles. The idea is that you can monitor and manage all of your online services in one place. Since our last look at PageOnce, it has added a news feed-like feature that gives you an overview of all the changes that have taken place across your accounts. See when your checking account runs out, your flight gets delayed, you get sent a message on MySpace, etc. PageOnce has also rolled out a series of improvements to particular account types. For example, the box for a cell phone account will estimate your wireless usage and predict whether you’re likely to go over your minutes. Accounts with customer support numbers can be called with one click from PageOnce itself, and many services can be signed into with just one click as well. Email support has also been further developed so it’s more like a proper webmail interface. Top providers currently include Gmail, Facebook, Yahoo Mail, LinkedIn, MySpace, Hotmail, Amazon, AT&T, Netflix, Flickr, Skype, American Express, and Ebay. I’m told that 50% percent of people have set up financial accounts, despite the security concerns that many commenters expressed on my first post (PageOnce assures us that it actively monitors against ID theft and fraud, and uses military level security standards). CrunchBase Information Pageonce Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
A couple weeks ago we reported a rumor that Google was going to replace its Mini search appliance with a new hosted solution for indexing content found behind the firewall and on corporate websites. Turns out the rumor was just half correct. Google is not ditching the Mini but it is launching a new service called Google Site Search, which is basically a rebranding and enhancement of the existing Google Custom Search Business Edition. Google Site Search is intended for organizations that want to add Google search functionality to their websites. It has three main improvements over the former custom search offering: it allows for synonym matching, results tweaking, and indexing of so-called “dark web” content. If you a run a site that often refers to terms by their acronyms, or commonly uses different phrases to describe things, you can upload a list of synonyms to Google and it will treat them the same when a user searches within your site. If you’re a news site (like TechCrunch) that tends to place a premium on newer content, you can bias content based on its date, forcing the newest results to the top. Similarly, if you’re an online retailer or provider of some other type of content, you can give preference to results for that content (in the online retailer’s case, any product pages where visitors might go on to buy things). Google Site Search mainly relies on the standard Google crawler when scouring your site. But you can also hand it special sitemaps so that it recognizes areas of your website that might typically be overlooked by the crawler. These are results like those hidden behind forms or available only through intricate database queries. Perhaps most compellingly, Google Site Search can be visually customized to match the look and feel of your website. This isn’t a new feature (it existed in the previous business edition) but something perhaps overlooked by most site owners. When you implement site search, you can customize the appearance with a WYSIWYG editor, or even request a raw XML file that can be parsed and displayed anyway you want (you don’t even have to include Google branding on your results pages). On the other side of the firewall, the Mini is “alive and well” and has even received a recent set of upgrades. Google says that it expects organizations to increasingly use the Mini for only → Read More
Naked, the UK-based social messaging startup which closed last week mere months after launch and days before it released a beta after a failed attempt to raise more financing, may yet be revived. Sources are telling me the startup is trying to re-animate in Belgium, home to at least two of its co-founders. One of them, Belgium-based Tom Casaer, has put an advert on LinkedIn for a: “Software and Infrastructure lead at Naked preferably Belgium; not a must” I’m sure plenty of software and Infrastructure leads out there would be gagging to join a liquidated startup, however, Naked still has fans out there willing to give it a go. Perhaps there is life after death afterall. Perhaps they have secured new financing? I have emailed Tom to find out. Naked ran out of money at the end of April and an administrator was appointed in May to wind it up and liquidate the assets. All 12 employees were made redundant. However, it’s not yet clear if the code for the Naked application – which mashes up Twitter and email functions – is an asset which has been bought cheap by the former founders, or if they are re-starting the project under a totally new guise. If you have some inside information on this, you know where to find me. Meanwhile here’s one of their former employees on the whole Naked experience: “It was great fun working there, but the way it imploded, my word, incredible.” → Read More
Todays Top Posts: CrunchGear Week in Review: Rather Shocking Edition Ubisoft has gone insane, wants to be Pixar Kindle turns heads, upsets industry execs at book show Intel shows off Centrino 2 in Asus laptop, but you can’t have it yet HP set to launch something big on June 10 Rumor: Apple’s Back to School promotion to include free 8GB iPod Touch Learn just how insecure locks are at 2600′s Last HOPE this summer 3G iPhone to be thinner, subsidized in the UK Wheelchair throws flames, scares everyone Kevin Rose, iPhone prognosteekater → Read More
What were you expecting, a labradoodle? No. It’s actually called the Reactor. If you’re not familiar with the Ultimate Game Chair (of olde), it’s essentially a really nice chair with built-in ports, speakers, and motors to bump you, punch you, and vibrate you as you play your favorite games. Capcom is working with them to make a new, more Capcom-y chair with the same sort of specifications. The picture above is what I could find, but if it’s real it looks mighty different from the original. At $180, bundled with a game, it’s actually not a bad deal as long as it’s, you know, comfortable and stuff. → Read More
Facebook certainly chose a peculiar time to announce the imminent death of a platform (and dare I say, operating system) staple: the installation screen. In the late afternoon of last Friday, Pete Bratach penned a post called “Streamlining Application Authorization” that went virtually unnoticed by the press at the time, even by Facebook-focused blogs. And when they did finally cover Bratach’s post, they chose to focus on less important matters concerning user metrics. Was Facebook trying to pull a fast one on us? That wouldn’t be surprising, given the potential of fundamental platform changes to upset a large number of developers. And what it did announce consisted of quite a fundamental change. Starting July 15 (and perhaps coinciding with the rollout of Facebook’s new site design), users will no longer see an installation screen (see below) when they access an application for the first time. Rather, they will see a new “login” screen that simply asks them whether they want to permit the application access to their information. This simply grants the application temporary access to your data so it can operate, without establishing any real footprint on your Facebook experience. The new screen has been designed to make application adoption less intimidating for users. They will no longer have to worry about installing (and later uninstalling) applications – and their associated profile boxes, left-hand nav buttons, profile links, and email lists – just to try them out. But the change should also slow viral growth patterns – especially for newer, smaller apps. Gone is the ability to put profile boxes (which give apps considerable visibility) on users’ pages upon first access. To add a box (on a special apps tab no less), users must later decide that they like it well enough to click on a special canvas page button. The same goes for email notifications and news feed items larger than one line; users must opt into these through the canvas page as an afterthought. The new design will also forgo app links in the left-hand column (the column is going away in its present form), as well as app links under profile pictures. All in all, these changes mean that applications will struggle to obtain the same visibility and user access that they can instantly achieve now upon installation. The move to get rid of installations is the latest in a line of decisions meant to clamp → Read More
The Filter, the media recommendation engine that we covered last April, has opened its doors to the public. The Peter Gabriel-backed company offers an entertainment start page that provides recommendations on movies, music, and online video (it is mostly focused on perfecting its music recommendations for the time being). In the following video Peter Gabriel explains why we need sites like The Filter to reduce the overwhelming abundance of information available online down to a manageable level. http://blip.tv/scripts/flash/showplayer.swf?enablejs=true&feedurl=http%3A%2F%2Ftechcrunch%2Eblip%2Etv%2Frss&file=http%3A%2F%2Fblip%2Etv%2Frss%2Fflash%2F963966%3Freferrer%3Dblip%2Etv%26source%3D1&showplayerpath=http%3A%2F%2Fblip%2Etv%2Fscripts%2Fflash%2Fshowplayer%2Eswf CrunchBase Information The Filter Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
So you’ve got your fancy HDTV, surround system, and high-end speakers, but you have no idea how it all fits together. If you’re lucky, you’ve got a friend like me to help you out. Sadly, there’s just not enough of me to go around. Zip Installation is a service that doesn’t just know where your HDMI goes, but makes it look good. They run the wires, mount the screens, and configure it all to sound good and look good. The prices aren’t cheap, but they seem to be better quality than you’d get from your friend Eddie’s cousin Stu, and they’re available nation wide. While we think it’s best that you learn to do it yourself — that way you can do self-repair if something goes wrong — these services are a decent alternative for the clueless or lazy. → Read More
As if we don’t like hacks and Rock Band enough as is, here comes a heartwarming mod that hacks a Rock Band drum kit to allow those who can’t use their legs to still hit the kick pedal for the Monsters of Rock score. They disassembled the kick trigger and rewired it to a standard doorbell which was mounted to the drumsticks. It’s not just a concept, it’s specifically made for a woman who’s sadly wheelchair bound but, like us, loves Rock Band. Now she can tour with her entourage as if she was Tommy Lee and score the points. We like it for so many reasons, mostly because it brings more people to the arena. → Read More
Wanna see Iron Man physically abuse Kung Fu Panda? Wanna see Jack Black’s head blow up? Wanna see the best spoof of the viral video craze I’ve ever seen? Ben Stiller made it to promote Tropic Thunder — one of the funniest films we’ll see this year — at the MTV Movie awards this last weekend. It’s awesome, and makes me want to see Black’s Kung Fu Panda, Tropic Thunder, and Iron Man again. → Read More
I have an upconverting DVD player that I love. I can watch my SD copy of Transformers at 720p on my Olevia HDTV. While it looks great, it’s still not true HD, it’s interpolated. But that’s not stopping Toshiba from embracing the technology, and doing so in spite of the victory against it in the next-gen format war by Sony’s Blu-ray. It’s not saying that it won’t ever break down and create Blu-ray players, but it’s notable that Toshiba would rather upgrade ten-year-old technology than embrace the new hotness. We’re hoping Toshiba swallows its pride and changes its mind. We love Toshi products and would love a Toshiba Blu-ray player for our system, but we’re not going to hold our breath. → Read More
When I first saw the information on AMD’s “Changing the Game” effort, I thought it was just another kind of pandering. But then I caught myself in the act of not taking games seriously — something the mainstream media is too often guilty of, resulting in people like Jack Thompson and Kevin McCullough. The fact is, if the AMD Foundation were helping kids make their own movies about current issues, no one would think twice about it. But since it’s games, suddenly people will find it suspect. And that’s ridiculous. There is an entire generation growing up now where games play as large a role in their life as movies, TV, books, and everything else. The false dichotomy between the old media and the new is harming them as they see works of art like Bioshock, Half-Life 2, and Final Fantasy XII dismissed by 90% of the world as mindless entertainment. These kids deserve to have their interests taken seriously, and I think this program, in which grants will be given to nonprofits that provide game-making opportunities to kids, is an unabashed good thing. → Read More
With seven days to go before WWDC, the 3G iPhone rumor mill is pretty much on fire. Some of the rumors are pretty bonkers, but most of the more popular ones are pretty darn reasonable. In the name of science, we’ve pushed all of the rumors through our FCF (Fanboy Crap Filter), and rated the more likely rumors on the PKL (Pre-keynote Legitometer) scale. Lets take a look: Rumor: It’ll be announced during the WWDC keynote PKL Rating: 10/10 – With just about everyone expecting the announcement, Apple’s gotta do it. Not doing so would be a bad move for their stock. Rumor: It’ll ship on the same day as the announcement PKL Rating: 5/10 – As nice as this would be, I can’t imagine how they’d manage to keep the secret. Maybe if it were limited to Apple stores on launch day, but it’s crazy to think that the employees at some of the one-or-two-people-per-shift AT&T shops could fight the temptation to crack open the boxes and fire off pictures to everybody they know. People regularly risk being fired to leak info on much smaller news items. Giving it a full week to get shipped all over the country, I’d expect it to hit around June 16th. More after the jump.. → Read More
Not only do we bring you a video of a Roomba that’s been converted into a Bluetooth-controlled real-life Pacman, but we bring you a video of how it was done and it munching dirt in action. This is, of course, a hack, not something you can pick up yourself. And it’s in Japanese. But it’s still cool. We’re still trying to find the Donkey Kong-mod for throwing barrels at Italian plumbers. → Read More
If you didn’t know about our excellent contest to win these cool DVDs, now is your chance to, well, find out who won it. There are four winners and I’m sending out emails right after I type this. I disqualified one guy for including the Power Glove on his list. Actually, I didn’t, but I did scowl at the screen for a little while. I love the Power Glove. It’s so bad. Your lists were all pretty awesome, but we chose randomly because that’s the American way. So congratulations to Brian, Tereasa, JWJ, and diem! Hope you used real e-mail addresses! And for everyone else, I’m submitting your name and address to SpamCorp as a consolation prize. Hope you like BonziBuddies! Just kidding. Seriously. Don’t hurt me. → Read More
EA claims that FIFA 09 contains some 250 improvements over last year’s game. These include improved responsiveness, changes to the collision system and a new jostle system that takes into account players’ strength when calculating collision. Presumably, that means that strikers like Drogba and Villa will have an easier time running through defenders than Eto’ or Messi. Of course, Messi would just dance around the defenders, so that point is moot. Or, we can sum all that up, and say that FIFA is just playing catch-up with PES. And EA knows all it has to do is update the rosters, include the new kits, and tweak a setting or two, and people will still buy the game in droves. Also, who’s gonna win the Euro? → Read More
We make fun of Uwe Boll quite a bit on here, mostly because he’s a horrible director who seems to specialize in destroying would-be cool films based on video games. Not only is he bad at making movies based on popular video games, but also movies of games that make you question why they’re made at all. If any proof was ever needed of the suckitude that Boll puts out, one needs only look at last weekend’s free screening of Boll’s latest, a film adaptation of Postal. So bad was this movie, especially a scene spoofing the 9/11 attacks, that 150 of the 200 attendees walked out. I’ve seen very few films bad enough that I’d walk out of — Spy Kids 3 and Speed Racer come to mind — but the idea that 150 people would walk out of a free screening is telling. Please stop letting this man make movies, waste money, and ruin video games. → Read More
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