Three months ago Steve Case’s Revolution Health sold for $100 million or so to Waterfront Media (after raising $200 million in venture capital). Consolidation continues today with the HealthCentral acquisition of Wellsphere, which we first covered in early 2007. The deal should be announced on Wednesday.
Wellsphere brings its 4 million or so monthly unique visitors to the table. The site also has 300,000 health‐related articles, over 250,000 health‐related images, and nearly 20,000 health and healthy living videos.
The size of the deal is not being disclosed. Wellsphere has raised $3 million in funding from Gemini Israel Funds and Woodrow Myers. HealthCentral has raised a whopping $50 million in capital from Sequoia Capital, Polaris Venture Partners, IAC and Carlyle Group. → Read More
You may have noticed a few changes ’round here. Our own web heroes at TC HQ wanted to fix a few things to make the site look a bit less whitespacey. There are few features we’ll be trying tomorrow but until then, what thinks thee? → Read More
I would expect to find Starcraft courses in Korea, but here in the States it comes as a surprise — a pleasant surprise, but a surprise nonetheless. UC Berkeley is offering a Starcraft course that sounds like a pretty serious class. → Read More
17.1% of all clickthroughs on web advertising are the result of click fraud – the act of clicking on a web ad to artificially increase its click-through rate – according to the latest report from Click Forensics, a company that specializes in monitoring and preventing internet crime. The level of clickfraud is the highest the company has seen since it started monitoring for it in 2006, dashing our hopes that it might hold steady in 2008. The company recorded a rate of 16.3% in Q1 2008.
Also alarming is the fact that over 30% of click fraud is now coming from automated bots – a 14% increase from last quarter and the highest rate Click Forensics has seen since it started collecting data. Click fraud for ads on content networks like Google AdSense and Yahoo Publisher Network was up to 28.2% from 27.1% last quarter, though that figure has decreased since Q4 2007, when it was at 28.3%. Outside of the US, Click Forensics reports that the most click fraud came from Canada (which contributed 7.4%), Germany (3%), and China (2.3%). → Read More
Leapfrog makes some great educational toys, no doubt about it. In fact, my son uses the LeapPad system to read books. Once he was old enough to use it on his own, he spends hours listening and repeating the words to learn them. Now it looks like LeapFrog is going after the younger audience. → Read More
This cuddly destroyer of mankind from Be@rBrick features light-up eyes and probably won’t help your kid sleep at night. I’ve always had a fondness for tin-toy-looking things, but I want them to be kitschy-looking, not terrifying. → Read More
In the face of a 54 percent revenue drop last quarter, there’s been a lot of speculation going around (myself included) as to what’s going to happen with the Microsoft Zune. Microsoft has now come out and said that it has no plans to deep six the hardware or the software and that there will indeed be a new Zune lineup later this year. → Read More
In case you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to take the cart from Central Hall to North Hall (I think that’s where I was going), now you have a chance.
Click on for the speed and the glory of the CES golf ride. For the extremely lazy or fatigued only. → Read More
As 2008 came to a close, we saw the first hints of a new developmental branch of Android called “Cupcake”. Promising video recording, copy and paste, stereo bluetooth and more, an endless clamor has rang from the userbase ever since. There’s still no word as to when we can expect it to drop onto devices, nor are they making promises that any specific feature will make it on to any given handset (be it the G1 or a future release) – but with the Cupcake branch at a reasonably stable point and beginning to show some of its new tricks, we thought we’d do a video run-through of what has made it in so far. → Read More
Ever wonder whether you could just intercept that Live View stream and save it? Well, you can. It’s just no one thought to actually try… until now.
Click for video and an explanation of the hack. → Read More
Breasts and the iPhone have had a tumultuous relationship. Last month, an application that allowed users to shake a pair (possibly NSFW) of 3D breasts was banned from the App Store for being apparently too risque for its audience.
A few weeks later an application called Wobble made it into the App Store using something of a loophole – instead of offering pre-rendered mammary shaking, it allowed users to add their own ‘wobble points’ to any picture, which could conceivably have more tame applications (of course, the site made the designed purpose very clear in its demo video, which can be seen below).
Now it looks like Apple is having second thoughts. After hitting the top spot on the Japanese App Store and seeing 20,000 downloads over ten days, Wobble has been asked by Apple to remove anything having to do with ‘Boobs’ and ‘Booty’ from their marketing text. → Read More
This is by no means a real Apple product, nor are we trying to pass it off as one. The notebook above is simply a clever mock-up of what a an Apple MacBook Mini (read: netbook) could look like. The touchpad/wrist rest folds on top of the keyboard and then the screen folds down. Plausible? Sure, but it’s also plausible that Microsoft will upgrade Windows Vista suckers for free to Windows 7; extremely unlikely, but still plausible. → Read More
Short Version: We take a close look at four NAVIGON GPS units that are overpriced but still capable PND. Click on for a review of the 2000S, 2200T, 7200T and 8100T personal navigation devices. → Read More
iLife ’09 is finally available on store shelves, and while most of the attention will probably go to iPhoto’s spiffy new face-recognition, there’s a feature tucked into GarageBand that might be making headlines very soon: premium lessons for piano and guitar, presented by the artists themselves. Dubbed ‘Lesson Store’, Apple’s online marketplace for music lessons has all the makings of a revolution in music learning that could prove to be incredibly popular and lucrative. We’ve known about it since its unveiling at Macworld, but only after trying it out can I confirm what many initially suspected: this thing is going to rock. → Read More
After not being acquired by Google last year and announcing some cutbacks last week, Digg is rolling up its sleeves and getting to work. The company has hired Tom Shin as its new head of sales from Yahoo, where he was one of the top sales people and head of the Northwest sales region. His job is to build a sales team at Digg go after advertising dollars more directly., something CEO Jay Adelson recently underscored as a big goal of the company in 2009.
Shin will also be in charge of overall advertising strategy and managing the relationship with Microsoft, which serves the bulk of the ads on Digg. At Yahoo, Shin was also a director of product marketing for Yahoo Mail. According to his bio, Yahoo Mail grew from $20 million in revenues to $300 million during his seven-year tenure. → Read More
Well, it’s not that mysterious. Like the 1D Mark II N, this will probably be a minor update: increase in megapixels, maybe a better LCD screen, a better cache for burst shots, etc. It was probably to be a surprise at PMA, but now everyone will have to just pretend like they didn’t know. Awkward! → Read More
We don’t often review books on CrunchGear, mainly because books tend to lack that ever important “Gear” aspect that our readers expect of our posts. We strayed from that path a bit by publishing one book review back in October, which apparently was a sufficient signal to book publishers that CrunchGear is getting totally-super-serious about book reviews, and that they should bombard our inboxes every time they bind a few pieces of paper together. Tucked away within the mammoth pile of mundane crap was a handful of worthwhile reads – including a few that we figure might be of interest to our audience. Amongst this latter, elite group of CrunchGear-approved texts is WTF? How to Survive 101 of Life’s Worst F*#!-ing Situations by Gregory Bergman and Anthony W. Haddad. → Read More
This morning Google opened up registration for its annual Google I/O conference, a two-day event focused on developer topics that will feature Android, App Engine, Chrome, GWT, and AJAX APIs. According to Tom Stocky, Director of Product Management at Google, the event has a broad appeal for both small startups and large, established companies. He says that this year’s event will emphasize demonstrations from companies that have successfully implemented some of Google’s technology.
Last year’s event saw one of the first demonstrations of Google’s Android mobile phone OS, as well as the public launch of App Engine. Google also handed out T-shirts cleverly meant to spell out “Google IO” in binary, except they actually said Google KO. → Read More
Until today, one of the biggest drawbacks of Gmail is that you could not go through your emails when you were offline. Today, that changes. Gmail is finally going offline. Google is rolling out a Google Gears version of Gmail that will be available to users starting today in Gmail Labs. (If you don’t see it, keep checking, the rollout to all users should be complete by the end of the week).
After installing the Google Gears plug-in to your browser, Gmail detects when you are offline. It caches your e-mail so that you can read it, respond to it, search it, star it, or label it. When you are connected to the Internet again, it sends all the messages. You can even open attachments. This is exactly the way Gmail already works on mobile phones such as the Android and those that support Gears. In fact, according to Gmail product manager Todd Jackson, who briefed me earlier today: → Read More
If you’re looking to upgrade your computer’s case one of these days, consider moving into a nice spacious one like the Whisper. These full-tower things are perfect for expanding your system into and avoiding unsightly external storage. Plus, the Whisper has sound-deadening foam along the inside to hide the noise of your dual Radeon 4870s.
Click on through for a video adventure through the Whisper’s many features. → Read More
