It’s hard to exaggerate just how much EA’s CEO, John Riccitiello, misses the point here. I personally don’t like DRM. It interrupts the user experience. We would like to get around that. But there is this problem called piracy out there. That’s what he said at some hoity-toity media conference, referencing the Spore-DRM brouhaha. First, the pedantic… → Read More
http://friendfeed.com/rooms/2008-debates/realtime?embed=1
What you see above is an embed of a special page on FriendFeed tracking discussion of tonight’s presidential debate. The page updates dynamically, meaning no page refreshes are necessary, using similar “long polling” code that makes instant messaging on web pages (see Meebo, eBuddy) work properly.
Facebook implemented the new feature… → Read More
If you’re wondering about those new MacBooks and what exactly it is that NVIDIA contributed, they’ve got you covered. There’s not a lot of testing yet (we’ll cover it as soon as it happens), but it’s enough for them to say that the 9400M is a huge improvement over the last generation MacBooks’ integrated graphics. “Industry-Changing” is, I think… → Read More
Carbon Motors, never heard of ‘em either, is working on a custom police car to catch all of Gotham’s baddies. It kind of looks as if K.I.T.T. and Robocop breed a Transformer offspring meant just for police duty. It’s dubbed the E7 and specific details about all the gadgets haven’t been released, but this short video shows off it’s bad-ass styling. Allegedly, the car… → Read More
Here’s a way to control the temperature in your house from far, far away. The Ecobee “Smart Thermostat” has all the stuff you’d expect with a standard digital thermostat and adds a pretty nice-looking touchscreen interface and – gasp! – a wireless connection, allowing you to log in and control it via the web. It’s not super-duper expensive either, at $385. The company claims you’ll… → Read More
We’re being told to be afraid of hackers again, only now they’re targeting our cellphones. But we use our cellphones! Security experts at Georgia Tech said that hackers, those faceless but utterly contemptible malcontents, could soon turn their attention toward creating botnets out of cellphones. These botnets wouldn’t then be used to send e-mail and so forth, but rather would be… → Read More
Sometime in the near future, Samsung TVs are going to have DivX playback capabilities built-in. This should allow playback of the video format from a connected USB mass storage device or Ethernet connection. The certification will probably start with the top-tier models and eventually work itself down market. A handy-dandy front DivX logo should reveal wether the set is equipped with the video… → Read More
We’ve received confirmation that Microsoft is handing over the reins to its MSN Groups property to the social network Multiply. Microsoft is planning to release a new service called Windows Live Groups in November, and apparently doesn’t want to compete with itself. Oddly enough, Microsoft has chosen not to allow groups to transition between the two services, and instead is going to offer a… → Read More
Doug Beaver over at a Facebook Engineering blog casually mentions that they have just had their ten billionth photo uploaded. Not only that, but since they keep 4 copies of each in different sizes, that’s 40 billion files just for the photos. Then he drops these little nuggets: 2-3 Terabytes of photos are being uploaded to the site every day They have just over one petabyte of photo storage… → Read More
Got a B-Day coming up? Have your girl – or mom – make one of these 20 cakes and show off your true geek inner-self. I’m not a WoW fan, but even I can appreciate that cake. → Read More
Apple introduced the iPod in 2001. That means it took seven years for someone, here, Fusion, to make an aftermarket in-car dealie (“radio”) with a built-in iPod dock. Wake up, people! The CA-IP1500, Fusion claims, is the first iPod dock that works inside a car’s head unit. Then you’d be able to control the iPod by using the knobs and dials on the front. It sounds borderline… → Read More
Although eBay beat its downwardly-revised earnings numbers today, its earnings call was filled with glum news for investors. (Full earnings slides embedded below). After three flat quarters, revenues declined 3.6 percent from the second quarter to $2.2 billion. Free cash flow has been going down each of the last four quarters, and so has the total value of goods traded over the auction and… → Read More
Automattic, the company behind WordPress, has acquired Irish startup Polldaddy for an undisclosed sum. The purchase gives WordPress an infusion of polling technology and seems to be justified simply on the basis that bloggers love polls (we use PollDaddy here at TechCrunch for many of our posts). → Read More
Disclaimer: Your computer may not look this tight. If it hadn’t years ago, Alienware would have lost its credibility today. What used to be a boutique, custom, super-high-performance PC company has simply become the high-end house brand at Dell. When they’re selling “exclusive” ho-hum fixed configurations on the shelf at Best Buy, you know they’re no longer at the… → Read More
Well, well. Seems Iomega’s put out a pretty affordable NAS hard drive in the $299 StorCenter ix2. There’s even a 2TB version for $479 if you’re really adventurous. This is a hopefully a good sign of things to come after Iomega’s merger with EMC earlier this year. Iomega promises an easy “four-click set-up” with the ix2 line and the drives include EMC’s Retrospect Express backup… → Read More
Ignighter, the group dating site that is part of the TechStars class of 2008, has closed a $1.2 million angel funding round. CEO Adam Sachs says that the money will be used to expand its team (particularly its development staff), and will also be used for a marketing push to increase awareness.
Ignighter allows small groups of friends to collaborate on a group profile, where they can include… → Read More
Blizzard named yesterday’s gigantic World of Warcraft patch “Echoes of Doom.” How prescient. Right, so Blizzard “dropped” patch 3.0.2 yesterday. Servers were done for a good 24 hours while the company’s elves did their magic. The full patch notes, as always, are available online. Among other things, Stormwind now has a harbor and my Hunter, Fredfresno, has a new hair cut; hints… → 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
Hey! What are you waiting for? This was one hell of a deal when it was $249, and now you can get Samsung’s BD-P1500 Blu-ray player and the Blu-ray Matrix Collection for $214.44 with free shipping from Amazon. Who cares what the price is speculated to be on Black Friday, you get a 10-disc Matrix Collection and you don’t have to fight my mother-in-law’s psycho shopping… → Read More
Best Buy is set to take over your local mall with small stores designed for your “life on the go”. These locations are going to be stocked with not only cell phones, but also ultra-portable notebook computers, PMPs, and of course, accessories. The upgraded Best Buy Mobile stores build on the cell-phone only model that the company started rolling out last year but will now include… → Read More
This site Dream Arcades has a huge range of arcade machines to put together or order pre-built, from cocktail tables to stand-ups to sit-down racers. Great, right? Well, their latest model, the Octane 120, has a extra perk, and it’s not exactly — well, appropriate. It’s got a kegerator. Now before you blast me as a teetotaler, you should realize that this arcade machine is… → Read More
A quickie for those of you who own, or are about to own, a phone with a touchscreen. You know, iPhone, G1, et cetera. The guy who founded Cool Hunting—an online version of the “strange but true” section of your local newspaper—started Freehands, a company that creates gloves with removable fingertips. The idea here is that whenever you need to call someone, answer a text message or… → Read More
Developing countries might look towards this $2 contraption to help safe lives. From what we can gather, it’s simply a piece of tubing attached to the end of a manual egg-beater and spins fast enough to separate the blood enough for Hepatitis B and cysticercosis tests. A user can even do multiple blood tests by taping more tubes to the beater. It just goes to show that a… → Read More
Facebook has just announced 25 winners of cash grants from the fbFund. These grants are given to the Facebook developers that are creating some of the most promising apps on Facebook. The fbFund is a $10 million fund announced a year ago by Facebook, Accel Partners, and the Founders Fund.
Below is a list of the 25 winners, out of 600 applicants. They each received about $25,000 and will be… → Read More
My good friend Peter Ha isn’t sold on the Sandisk SlotMusic hoopla (see his post here). I think it’ll work, though. You have to approach it from the mindset of the casual consumer for it to make sense. Think of the player like a Walkman or a Discman and MicroSD cards as blank tapes or CDs. Then remember that entire albums used to be sold on tapes and CDs and that for many people, there’s a… → Read More
Three years ago today, Rupert Murdoch bought MySpace and its parent company Intermix for $580 million. That turned out to be money well spent. The last time we ran the numbers, we figured that MySpace alone is worth between $3 billion and $20 billion, depending on how much you value each user. Fox Interactive Media (which is mostly MySpace) accounted for about $850 million in revenues last… → Read More
When Fuzz launched a microblogging service for music aficionados called Blip.fm last May, no one in the company expected it to rise above the status of an experiment. But before long, Blip.fm’s traffic began to eclipse that of Fuzz’s main site, which provides an altogether different service for bands that want to cultivate their fan base.
Fuzz’s attention has now turned primarily to Blip.fm as… → Read More
Hey, I’m stuck! HELP! ‘martyr‘ lamp by the play coalition → Read More
First NEC’s supercute (and very pink) Hello Kitty laptop, now this: A portable DVD player shaped like Hello Kitty’s head [JP], this time sold by Sanrio itself (the company behind the brand). The player comes with a 7-Inch LCD screen (resolution: 480×234), a built-in battery with a life span of 2.5 hours (an AC adaptor is included in the package) and an extracute remote control. → Read More
The Nokia N79, which is essentially a 5 megapixel N78 revised with a keypad that doesn’t make your thumbs cry, has toughed its way through the FCC’s testing chambers. Toting North American 3G, GPS, WiFi, and Carl-Zeiss optics, the N79 is one nice little candybar. With the FCC hurdles out of the way and the handset prepped on the radio front, it’s not too hard to imagine a North… → Read More
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