Yahoo begins the rollout of the new user profile today, which marks the first tangible product release for the social part of Yahoo Open Strategy, or YOS. The profile is one of the anchors (mail is the other) to Yahoo’s strategy of turning the site into one big social network.
It’s been a long haul for the company, which first talked about the new strategy almost a year ago. More details, and a… → Read More
Once Monday rolls around you’ll be able to cruise around San Andreas on your Xbox 360, for Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas has showed up on Xbox.com. The game, which will cost the usual 1,100 Microsoft Points ($14.99), isn’t too bad; in truth, I prefer it to the gritty realism of Grand Theft Auto IV. Plus it has that Marshall Jefferson song on one of the radio stations, embedded here for… → Read More
In the gadget blogging business there is something we call the SkyMall Effect. This is the constant sense that after rewriting 50 press releases in a single day we begin to sound like copywriters for SkyMall, the magazine you find in airline seatbacks from here to Djibouti. When words like “ground-breaking,” “svelte,” and “sleek” enter your vocabulary, you know… → Read More
It’s not a happy day at San Francisco-based Adbrite this morning. The company is laying off 40 employees, which is 40% of total staff. Among those that are leaving are VP Marketing Paul Levine and VP Finance Bob Feller.
This is the second Sequoia-backed startup to report significant layoffs after last week’s meeting where Sequoia warned the CEOs of their portfolio companies of the long lasting… → Read More
Sure, it’s not the most unique looking handset ever (most passersby would probably just assume its an LG Chocolate), but for $119.99, the new LG Rhythm for Alltel packs a bit of punch on the music phone front. In addition to the always-welcome 3.5mm headset jack, they’ve packed an FM transmitter into the handset for pushin’ your tunes to your car radio without a mess of adapters. → Read More
If you like the idea of netbooks in theory but get unnecessarily agitated at the thought of having all that pesky "portability," then maybe you’d be a good candidate for the small form-factor Asus Eee Box PC. It’s specs are as follows: 1.6GHz Atom CPU, 1GB RAM, 80GB SATA hard drive, built-in Wi-Fi, DVI out, and Windows XP Home. Buy.com currently has it for $290.99 with free… → Read More
Just a week after ReFrame It launched its service that lets people annotate Web pages, another startup that’s been doing pretty much the same thing since 2006, Fleck, is putting itself up for sale. Fleck is a Dutch company founded by Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten and Patrick de Laive, the famous white-suited entrepreneurs who woke up Mike once at his house to pitch their startup. The duo also… → Read More
It’s Takara Tomy again. Following “the world’s smallest walking robot”, the Japanese toy maker today announced the “Setsuyaku Senshi Osaifu Seibaa” (Stingy Soldier Wallet Savior) [JP], a mix of electronic household account book and RPG (seriously). Users will be able to register household expenses with a data pen and collect printed receipts at the back of the… → Read More
Looks like Dell is getting ready to release the Mini 12, a netbook in the Mini 9 mold, but, you know, with a 12-inch screen. CMS Report speculates that the netbook could be released as early as this week or next. Dell.com already has a few references to the Mini 12, including a non-functioning link to its user manual. Considering the Mini 9 was well-received, there’s no reason not to think… → Read More
Warner Chappell, Radiohead’s distributor, is announcing that the band “sold” 3 million copies of In Rainbows, the album that they essentially gave away online in a pay-what-you-want scheme. The reports are that they made more on the album than they did on their previous dumpling, Hail to the Thief. Previous sales numbers were in the high hundred thousands, which makes this move… → Read More
An off the cuff remark by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer this morning set Yahoo’s stock soaring more than 15% to $13.73, adding well over $3 billion in market cap to the struggling company.
Speaking at the Gartner ITXpo, Ballmer reportedly said a Microsoft acquisition of Yahoo (presumably he’s talking about a full buyout, not the repeatedly rejected search deal) would still “make sense economically”… → Read More
In case you need a lot – I mean a lot – of torrent storage, the latest Buffalo TeraStation Pro is for you with its 6TB of storage capacity. Four 1.5TB HDDs provide the storage through either RAID 0, 1, 5, or 1+0 and gigabit Ethernet, of course, provides connectivity. This TeraStation Pro incarnation has all the standard NAS features like Active Directory support, built-in FTP server… → Read More
Engadget seems to be rocking along even after the departure last month of editor-in-chief Ryan Block.
According to an internal AOL email that was forwarded to us, the blog had 14 million page views from 1.3 million unique visitors on Tuesday, when Apple made new Macbook announcements. 6.4 million of those page views were served in one hour. This was the highest traffic day ever for the site.
The… → Read More
Prosper and other peer-to-peer lenders like Zopa and Lending Club may turn out to be collateral damage from the credit crisis. Yesterday, Prosper suspended new lending in order to register with the S.E.C to create a secondary marketplace for the loans on its site. As recently as Monday, Prosper didn’t think it would have to register as a seller of securities. But the new climate of heightened… → Read More
Graspr, the instructional video syndication network run by an ex-Yahoo exec, has released an advanced video player with a featured called the “gCard” that carries the identity of a video creator wherever his or her video gets embedded across the net.
If you create an instructional video and upload it to YouTube, you may lose credit for your work when it gets embedded off-site since many of your… → Read More
From this guy The blogs vilified Apple over the “kill switch” found in the iPhone; let’s see those blogs tear into Google for the very same thing. Found nestled deep in the G1‘s “About” menu is this notice: Google may discover a product that violates the developer distribution agreement… in such an instance, Google retains the right to remotely remove those applications… → Read More
Tokyo-based Toyo Trading [JP] is selling an alarm clock in the shape of a helicopter, which wakes up users with a tricky mechanism. Unfortunately, the device is Japan-only at this point. At the preset time, the clock launches a rotor up in the air that keeps on flying around while making an extra-annoying engine sound (see Toyo Trading’s promo video below). The battery-powered clock can only… → Read More
Yup, that’s cleavage at 9 in the morning. Backwards compatibility, schmackwards compatibility. If we’re to believe this hot little number, Microsoft may well be working on future compatibility. It would work like this: the next generation Xbox, which current projections and speculation put somewhere in a 2010-2012 launch window, would be able to play and improve Xbox 360 games. This… → Read More
It’s just tradition that when a new, hot gadget launches, someone has to tear the sucker apart thus producing what is affectionately called circuit board pr0n. Besides the pretty pictures though, sometimes hidden details are uncovered as is the case with these new Apple notebooks. → Read More
Japan gets a portable Hello Kitty DVD player, the rest of the world doesn’t The Martyr nightlight will give your kids nightmares & voices in their heads Sit-down arcade driving sim with built-in kegerator – wait, what? An egg-beater turned centrifuge can save lives Facebook hits 10,000,000,000 photos, good LORD → Read More
YouTube Cofounder Chad Hurley spoke at the MIPCOM Conference in Cannes, France yesterday.
In the talk, which is transcribed below, Hurley compares the current state of online video to the nascent years of television. In 1941, he says, “CBS has just launched its new television network amidst cries that it means the death of radio.” Advertisers were hard to come by. Content owners were afraid of… → Read More
I will keep this review short and straight to the point, folks. You know how Google likes to keep things in Beta for years and years? Well, Android is no different. Like many of you I was excited at the prospect of a new OS to muscle it’s way in and take down the iPhone, but I’m afraid Android is not it – at least not yet. The OS actually isn’t that bad, but it does have its… → Read More
The T-Mobile G1, or the Google phone to you and I, will go on sale on 30 October in the UK. The Android open source-powered mobile has attracted 25,000 UK consumers to pre-register for the device. The tarrif will be £40 a month with “unlimited” data for all that Google Maps, Google Talk IM and Google Mail you’ll be using. Problem though: It has no in-built video recording… → Read More
Facing rising ink and paper costs and a declining demand for physical discs, the world’s most recognizable skin rag — I mean, adult entertainment periodical — is getting out of the DVD business. Their online distribution system will be their primary method of content distribution, and other cost-cutting measures will be taken in order to return the company to profitability. → Read More
Startups across the globe are knuckling down and concentrating on what works right now, for a lot of very obvious reasons. Included in this is Bragster, the UK-based startup we described as Jackass meets Facebok when they won a $3.5 million Series A in February. They are now stepping away from betting and focusing on “dares” as, says co-founder Wim Vernaeve says “they were 70% of… → Read More
By now, all the first full reviews of the Android G1 phone have come out. This isn’t one of them. You can read CrunchGear’s in-depth review or my initial impressions of the G1 in an earlier post. And there are plenty of other places where you can (re)read about the specs, the slide-out keyboard, and the $179 price.
But I did get my Android loaner from T-Mobile last Friday and have been carrying… → Read More
I will keep this review short and straight to the point, folks. You know how Google likes to keep things in Beta for years and years? Well, Android is no different. Like many of you I was excited at the prospect of a new OS to muscle it’s way in and take down the iPhone, but I’m afraid Android is not it – at least not yet. The OS actually isn’t that bad, but it does have its… → Read More
Death is an unfortunate consequence of life, at least until science can prove otherwise. And while most of us would rather just avoid the subject entirely, the thought of having a sappy, cheesy funeral weighs heavy on some people. MyWonderfulLife, a Minnesota-based startup that launched earlier this month, is going to help you make sure that doesn’t happen.
You’re first asked to create… → Read More
I’m not the type of person who puts stuff in protective cases. I feel it’s like putting one of those leather bra things on the hood of your car; sure, it’ll protect the front of your car from rocks on the freeway, keeping it in perfect shape for when you sell it – but in the meantime, you’ve still got a funky looking leather bra thing on the hood of your car. That… → Read More
SGN is definitely on to something with these Wii-like iPhone games. They’ve had over 2 million downloads of iGolf and iBowl. And tonight they’ve released the next game in the series, iBaseball (iTunes link).
Like the other games it’s free, and you use the accelerometer in your iPhone to control game play. The application includes applause and game sounds, vibrates when a hit is made, and supports… → Read More
Seattle, WA
San Diego, CA
Menlo Park, CA
San Francisco, CA
Berlin, Germany
Boston, MA
