http://qik.com/swfs/qik_player.swf?streamname=63fbce42ead343288d04f6bc07d59d51&vid=470493&playback=false&polling=false&user=SteveGillmor&displayname=SteveGillmor&safelink=SteveGillmor&userlock=true&islive=&username=anonymous David Treadwell moves up the stack as Microsoft releases Live Framework to the developer community. With Mesh now clear as a… → Read More
Why is it that the BlackBerry Storm doesn’t have Wi-Fi? If you believe BoyGenius—and how could you not!—it’s because Verizon Wireless doesn’t want it to have Wi-Fi. That’s a fine conspiracy theory, yes, but consider the following: • Name one CDMA BlackBerry with built-in Wi-Fi. You can’t. • Doesn’t VZW require you to have a BlackBerry data… → Read More
I’d imagine things are a bit awkward at the Sprint/Nextel camp today. After spending the last few months fielding offers for Nextel, Sprint has announced that they’ve decided to hang on to it. Not only are they no longer planning on offloading it, but they’re also reupping their commitment to the iDEN network by promising all around improvements. Beyond expanding the iDEN network… → Read More
The PSP-3000 screen has earned both criticism and praise. It’s brighter, crisper but has interlacing issues that display horizontal lines when viewed closely. When the PSP screen is viewed extremely closely though, say under a 40x microscope, the issue’s source is apparent. The new screen has lays out the pixels horizontally, verses the old… → Read More
Australia looks set to join China as a state-mandated Internet censor. The measure is primarily aimed at combating online child pornography, but an open-ended statement from the government’s communications minister sounds ominous: …we are talking about mandatory blocking, where possible, of illegal material. “Where possible”? That seems pretty capricious. The government must have… → Read More
In case you didn’t know, today is Halloween and Amazon is celebrating the holiday with the complete Addams Family series for $26.99 shipped. You get 9 discs, a total of 1638 minutes of Addams family bliss for that price. To bad the collection isn’t available on Blu-ray though. → Read More
Enter now for your chance to win a Penguin United Quad charger for the Wii. Contest details and a review of the PU charging station can be found here. E-mail your entries to contest at crunchgear dot com or you will not be qualified to win. → Read More
Asus plans to release a $200 Eee PC sometime in 2009, according to Jerry Shen, the company’s president. That’s on top of the company’s plans to release a touchscreen Eee PC in 2009. Might we be looking at, finally, the year of the netbook? One can only dream. While I’m quick to discount netbooks as hallow attempts to bilk you good people out of your money, thereby shoring… → Read More
Just a heads up that there are a handful of potentially dangerous laptop batteries floating around out there. These ones are made by Sony but are found in certain models of HP, Toshiba, and Dell notebooks. The HP notebooks are the most at risk with about 32,000 affected batteries. According to the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, “There have been 19 reports of the batteries overheating… → Read More
The latest video market share figures for September from Nielsen Online’s VideoCensus have been leaked to Beet.TV, and they show a huge 56 percent jump from Yahoo to 264 million videos streamed during the month. Yahoo’s share still pales next to YouTube’s 5.3 billion streams. But it pumped out 95 million more streams than in August, when Yahoo was trailing Fox (i.e., MySpace), MSN, and… → Read More
A quick recap for those who haven’t been following the mobile browser scene for a while: Skyfire, currently available for Windows Mobile 5/6 and S60, is the only mobile browser supporting full Adobe Flash, Microsoft Silverlight, Quicktime, and other processor intensive multimedia formats. It pulls this off where others fail through a bit of proxy voodoo; rather than forcing your handset to… → Read More
On the game console superhighway, if there is such a thing, the Nintendo Wii just blasted past the Nintendo 64, stuck its left arm out the driver’s side window, and rigidly shot its index finger into the air to let the N64 know that the Wii, in fact, is now number one. Well, not number one, but it passed the Nintendo 64 in lifetime sales. To date, Nintendo has sold almost 35 million Wii… → Read More
A high-def picture is nothing without high-quality audio and a French TV station is the world’s first to broadcast a Dolby Digital Plus track over a terrestrial signal. The Dolby system is ideal for limited bandwidth applications like terrestrial broadcasts, as the original Dolby Digital bitstreams are maintained and can still be decoded. The French TV station, TNT, is broadcasting three… → Read More
http://media.mtvnservices.com/mgid:uma:video:mtvmusic.com:108884 Weird Al Yankovic |MTV Music I can’t figure this out. This video, from MTV’s video site, has been bleeped by MTV in an effort to hide file sharing system names in Weird Al Yankovic “Don’t Download This Song.” The original lyrics: Once in a while maybe you will feel the urge To break international… → Read More
The Bits blog is running a small profile of Opera right now. For the most part it’s fairly boring: Opera is a bit player (we know) that is making inroads in the mobile space with Opera Mini (again, we know). Here’s something you may not know: Apple is blocking Opera from releasing the iPhone version of Opera Mini. So claims Opera’s CEO, Jon Stephenson von Tetzchner. While that in… → Read More
As my brother said, “this is an tendinitis nightmare” or something like that. It’s quite addicting but it takes a bit of effort to actually get the fake bubbles to pop. I don’t see little kids over the age of 8 having the finger strength to play with this for very long. The texture of the bubbles is surprisingly similar to that of bubble wrap, though. And who doesn’t… → Read More
The ever-sassy Adrian Kingsley-Hughes is pointing out that Apple is essentially lying like Satan lied to man about the cancer-causing potency of high-fructose corn syrup. In “Bean Counter,” for example, Apple suggests that Microsoft spends more on advertising than on “fixing Vista.” Adrian tells the honest truth: For each $1 of sales Apple spends: – 1.9 cents on… → Read More
Holy crap, you could drive a truck under that thing. That’s a nine cell battery for the MSI Wind netbook, which is available on Ebay’s UK site according to a post in the MsiWind.net forums. The item ships from China for a grand total of around £70 – roughly $115 in US dollars. Owners of this gigantic lump are reporting over 6.5 hours of battery life. When I tested the six-cell MSI Wind, I… → Read More
There is something sexy about the Marantz M-CR502 mini audio system. It could be the sleek, executive feel. Or that the amp outputs 25Wx4 channels or 50Wx2 channels with a THD of .10% and a frequency response of 5Hz-20kH. Or it could be that it supports CD playback even though I don’t know the last time I even held a music CD but also sports a USB port for MP3 playback. I’m… → Read More
Given that we are now in a major economic down-cycle (to put it mildly), raising money for a startup is likely to get a lot harder. But the broad consensus I am picking up on is that private seed investors will become more important for early stage startups. Why? Because if your are an individual with a pot of cash, you are not going to look to the stock market to bring you high returns any more. → Read More
There is nothing like a downturn to force a company focus on the bottom line, even a company like Google whose bottom line is still growing at a healthy pace. Continuing its recent efforts to juice advertising revenues wherever it can, Google is changing the way ads are placed on its search results pages.
One of the two biggest determinants of where an ad ranks compared to other ads on the same… → Read More
http://www.g4tv.com/lv3/34590 The upcoming downloadable content (DLC) for Mercenaries 2 has two special characters that you’ll no doubt recognize. Yes, that’s Barack Obama and Sarah Palin running around the game’s battlefields with grenades, machine guns and rocket launchers. In some of the more violent moments, Obama throws a grenade into a tank, killing a man inside and Sarah… → Read More
Nintendo is looking to cash-in with early holiday sales by launching the DSi in Japan tomorrow, November 1, 2008. The tech giant still hasn’t announced a US release date but at least narrowed the launch down to the summer season. Japanese gamers can pick up their DSi tomorrow though for ¥18,900 ($192 USD). Supposable, Nintendo has shipped 200,000 gaming handhelds to Japanese markets and… → Read More
http://www.comedycentral.com/sitewide/video_player/view/default/swf.jhtml Apple, and a lot of you, have already voiced your thoughts on Cali’s Prop 8, and now Mr. Stephen Colbert sounds-off on the controversial subject. → Read More
Today Japanese telecommunications giant SoftBank unveiled their cell phone line-up for winter 2008. Starting this month, the company will roll out a total of 14 new handsets in Japan. And since a number of Japanese phone makers announced plans to drastically expand internationalization, it’s not unthinkable to see one or the other of the Japanese models in the US or Europe sometime soon. → Read More
Yoono, the slick browser plugin that serves as both a social network aggregator and media hub, has announced its impending support for Internet Explorer which will be available on November 7th. In conjunction with the the new version, Yoono is also announcing integration with both imeem and MySpace, as well as a powerful new widget that will help the plugin monetize.
Yoono has existed for a… → Read More
We don’t see it in our Gmail settings (yet), but Webmonkey reports that Gmail Labs has added a feature for sending text / SMS messages using the built-in Chat functionality.
Turning the option on in your Gmail account settings apparently enables you to send an SMS as soon as you start typing a phone number into Chat’s search box. We haven’t been able to try this out ourselves yet, but Google… → Read More
Legendary Japanese camera maker made a comeback (at least in Nippon) last month, only to present two rather dull digital cameras. The EZF924 [JP], however, can at least impress with its price tag: The 9.1-megapixel camera just costs $100. Other specs include: 2.4-inch TFT display, ISO range from 100 to 800, 43mm/F3.25 lens, 8x digital zoom, 16MB of internal memory, support of SD/SDHC cards (up to… → Read More
Any holiday is an excuse to be a little creative. Today, Halloween, is no exception.
Google, Yahoo, MSN and FriendFeed have special logos (who else?). Microsoft needs a little more inspiration in my opinion:
And Twitter went one step further, allowing users to add special Halloween themed Tweets using special character combinations. Just try >o< or `O` and see what happens. → Read More
What better way to toughen up the Wii than with a Nerf game? NASCAR and LittleBigPlanet team up Homestar Extra: Sega Toys’ Homestar Planetarium gets an upgrade Princess Leia pumpkin idea for last-minute carvers Blockbuster’s Top 10 Nightmare-Maker Movies list, do you agree? → Read More
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