How can I put into words how I feel about the BlackBerry Bold? In short: I love it and never ever want to let it go, ever. For any BlackBerry user/fan the Bold is everything you’ve wanted and expected from RIM. Sure, it took a little longer than we all expected, but it’s definitely worth the wait. It’s far superior in every respect from anything that RIM has put out on the market. Of course, those of you with a hankering for a touch-screen need not apply. The Bold is for the hardcore CrackBerry addict or is it? Let’s begin. → Read More
During a demonstration run of a Tesla Roadster in Southern France, the driver (who was demoing it for the passenger) attempted to take a wet corner a bit too fast and ended up going off the road, smashing the front left and rear right quarters of the car. The passenger was thrown clear, luckily not through the windshield, but miraculously neither party was seriously injured. What is it about this car that causes people to drive irresponsibly? One Tesla rear-ended a truck and this guy rammed another car at a stoplight. People don’t crash Porsches at this rate, do they? There are only fifty of these things and three are out of commission! At least it hasn’t been the car’s fault and no one’s been hurt. → Read More
http://www.theskyfactory.com/products/ceilings/SkyV/flash/skyv.swf TV on the ceiling! I’m going to have to respectfully disagree with Treehugger, who suggest you “say no to faux.” I humbly counter-suggest you say “yes” to Sky Factory’s SkyV, if only for the sake of all the tricks you could play on people who came to your place. You could anything on those screens. Space, an ant farm, or perhaps something more provocative… And after all, not everyone has the luxury of having real skylights for an option, or indeed, having anything worth looking at through one. Here in Seattle we hug trees perhaps more than anyone south of the Canadian border, but our sky is often featureless and empty, like your mom’s face. Plus, and I just thought of this right now — oh my god, I’m such a genius — are you ready for this? Full-spectrum TVs. Get your daily dose of sunlight from the tube! I can’t believe no one’s invented this yet. → Read More
I know this back end plumbing stuff is boring to most of you, but Gnip is worth the trouble to understand. The company, which helps ease the transportation of social content between services (like getting Twitter data to Plaxo, for example), took a new $3.5 million round of financing. Investors include Foundry Group, First Round Capital and SoftTech VC, and the company has raised a total of $4.6 million, all this year.
The company acts as a clearing house for social content, easing the load on content distributors like Digg, Twitter, Delicious and Six Apart. Content consumers like Plaxo and MyBloglog benefit from a single endpoint and a standardized way of accessing data. In short, it unclogs the plumbing.
TechCrunchIT spoke with the Gnip founders on video immediately after launch. In September they launched version 2.0 of the service, and discussed their business model. → Read More
ZDNet’s Michael Krigsman asked me to join a short podcast with Salesforce’s AppExchange Product Line Director Clare Shih and Facebook’s Senior Platform Manager Dave Morin. Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg took part in Marc Benioff’s DreamForce opening keynote as the Salesforce CEO announced a data sharing partnership with the social media giant. The podcast is available here, and the video version is below. http://qik.com/swfs/qik_player.swf?streamname=e97421be89184a5ea97533f6b1b6b106&vid=511224&playback=false&polling=false&user=SteveGillmor&displayname=SteveGillmor&safelink=SteveGillmor&userlock=true&islive=&username=anonymous → Read More
After months of watching from the sidelines, Sony seems to have come out with a winner in the console wars with this LittleBigPlanet. Aside from amazingly detailed gameplay, you can program your own minigames into the game like this odd mechano-Gradius that looks like a puppet show. → Read More
Juice, a Firefox browser sidebar developed by Linkool International, has launched to the public. The powerful plugin automatically culls information from around the web whenever you search for or highlight a term, making it a handy reference tool that I could quickly get used to. It also doubles as a media storage tool, allowing you to simply drag and drop videos and image files into the sidebar to save them for later.
Juice pulls from sources including Wikipedia, Google News, YouTube, and our own CrunchBase (through its API) to offer users a quick at-a-glance summary of many popular topics. The sidebar is very polished, allowing for in-line video playback and expandable text summaries, and the media storage function is intuitive. → Read More
Leave it to the Daily Mail to bring this controversy to light. What is it all about, you ask? A Brazilian designer has created lingerie that has built-in GPS. This has caused women’s rights groups to freak out, alleging that that the designer has created nothing more than a modern day chastity belt. Since it has built-in GPS, men—husbands and boyfriends—theoretically will know where you, the wearer, are at all times. → Read More
The next big thing in processors is hitting today — Intel’s Core i7, otherwise known as Nehalem, is finally hitting the ground. If you don’t know that it is, check out our past coverage. This first batch probably doesn’t have the processor you want to get (the more consumer-oriented ones be coming out a little later, good price comparison at the bottom of this page), but it’s a good preview of the performance we’ll all soon have in our desktops. Check out the coverage at: HardOCP Tom’s Hardware Anandtech Tech Radar Guru3D Or your favorite hardware review site. I can’t wait to get one of these for my PC, and I’m hoping Apple is looking at making them available as well. → Read More
IM+ is an application created by ShapeServices, which aims to replace the instant messaging application that comes out of the box with Android. Hoping that there were some differences between the 7-day trial and the paid version, we bit the bullet and plopped down the 20 dollars (well, $19.95) on this app to see how it really is, so you wouldn’t have to. The verdict? Save your cash. → Read More
The U.S. Election isn’t until tomorrow, but doesn’t it already seem like Obama has won? That is certainly the impression you get if you look at any of the polls, state-by-state electoral maps, or prediction markets out there. Even the latest Fox News poll has Obama leading McCain by 50 percent to 43 percent.
My favorite prediction tool, and the one with the best record of getting elections right, is the Iowa Electronic Markets. In its winner-take-all market for the U.S. Presidential election, it is predicting that Obama has an 89 percent chance of winning the majority of votes (see graph above). NewsFutures, similarly puts Obama’s chances of winning at 90 percent, and Intrade has his stock trading at 90.6. → Read More
I’m a little fuzzy on what exactly MinWin really is, but from what I’ve read it seems to be the nucleus around which the Windows UI, APIs, and everything else revolve. It’s not exactly the kernel because the kernel itself is not contained entirely within MinWin. Think of MinWin as the indivisible Windows: no dependencies, bootable, application-ready, and altogether about 25MB. That Windows 7 ASCII thing you’ve seen around? MinWin. What role it might play in Windows 7 is as yet unknown; after all 7, runs on the Vista kernel and although streamlining is a selling point of the new OS, nothing has been said about any ultimate stripped-down mode or what have you. Here’s my fantasy: remember when you could restart into DOS mode back in 95? What if you could restart into a mega-minimal mode that essentially runs a single app, with filesystem and device access but only as many bells and whistles as the application requires. Every one of your 256 cores dedicated to one thing, be it Crysis or HD video editing. I’m sure that’s not it, and I’m probably missing the point of MinWin, but wouldn’t that be awesome?! → Read More
Last week Google announced a new set of gadgets for Gmail Labs that offer integration with Docs and Google Calendar. But perhaps most exciting (and under-emphasized at the time) was the introduction of support for third party gadgets, giving users the chance to add features to Gmail beyond what Google offers.
One of the first developers to take advantage of the new feature is Remember The Milk (RTM), a popular To-Do list application that we reviewed back in 2005. The service allows users to access and input to-do items from a variety of locations, and offers its core service for free (you can pay $25 a year for support on extra mobile devices). While RTM offered support for Gmail before now, it was reliant on a Firefox extension, raising the barrier to entry and cutting out a large portion of the browser market. → Read More
I figured I was over-due with a heads-up on upcoming events that are of note, so here’s a brief run-down below. If you want to “get into” the UK tech scene then you would be well advised to go to as many of these events as you can. (At least, that’s what I usually say to people who ask me such questions). Also check out the TCUK group on Upcoming for the regular fixtures and add your events to the feed if relevant (here’s why we do this). PLEASE NOTE: TechCrunch UK will be running a “TechCrunchTalk” event on December 16th. Similar to the event we ran during Seedcamp week recently, we’ll be running some panels and startup pitches, as well as a networking party in the evening. If you are a startup and would like to pitch at the event then please contact editorial. Coverage of the event will appear on TechCrunch.com (which now has over a million daily readers) as well as TechCrunch UK. Startups pitches will be selected on an editorial basis only. If you are interested in hearing about sponsor packages, please contact our events and and sponsorship person Petra Johansson. • Secrets from Silicon Valley is a one-off fire-side chat with Sarah Lacy, author of “Once you’re lucky twice you’re good”. Well worth attending for an insider’s view of Silicon Valley. • Ultra Light Start-Ups London London is a brand new event inspired by a US event of the same name. • Mashup Demo is a pitch event for startups. You will only see pitches from startups who have paid £500 £200 (or £100 “for very early-stage startup”, thoguh that’s undefined) for a 5 min pitch. For what it’s worth, TechCrunch UK events will never run pay-to-pitch events and all startups are selected by TCUK editorial on merit only. Just so that’s clear. • Chinwag Live: MoSo Rising should be interesting on location based services. • Future of Mobile – and get the TechCrunch discount with the code TECHC20 If you want to check out some of the more regular UK networking events, try DrinkTank (filtered guest list), MiniBar (developers/startups), Open Coffee (entrepreneurs/investors), Bootlaw (for startup legal advice), Northern Startup 2.0 (northern UK startups, OpenSoho (for media/tech in Soho, London), Silicon Stilettos (excellent new event for business women in tech), Geek Dinners (what it says) and Girl Geek Dinners (what it says), Mobile Mondays (mobile 2.0), Swedish Beers → Read More
Hey there, BioShock-playing PS3 gamers. Take-Two has announced the DLC options for the game, which they call “Add-On Game Content,” no doubt just to be different from those jerks over at Xbox 360. (I kid, of course.) Starting November 20 you can download the pack for $9.99, which consists of three Challenge Room environments, whatever those are. Note that the game came out for the Xbox 360 and PC August, 2007, and DLC launched four months later. Admission: I never played the game. My war against samey shooters knows no bounds. → Read More
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