There are many, many crazy alarm clocks available, all designed to rouse you from the sweet embrace of the sandman. Some make you run around the room chasing some rolling or flying component, some make you assemble puzzle pieces, and some just plain annoy the hell out of you. I can’t wait until the Smash Clock comes to market, so that we can finally beat the crap out of an alarm clock. → Read More
Attention morons who didn’t like UAC in Windows Vista, that thing that turns everything off whenever you make a change to Windows and asks for your password, Long Zheng would like to have a word with you. Because of a change in Windows 7, you can basically write a script that turns the function off completely, thereby creating gaping security holes similar to those found in every previous Microsoft product ever made. → Read More
Today at Davos, Mike just finished moderating a panel on the Next Digital Experience with Chad Hurley (YouTube), Craig Mundie (Microsoft), Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), Shananu Narayen (Adobe), Hamid Akhvan (T-Mobile) and Eric Clemons (Wharton). I will put up the video as soon as it is available. (Updated with video).
The wide-ranging discussion focused on how the mobile Web is becoming increasingly important, and in many countries, the primary way people connect to the Internet. A good chunk of the panel was spent talking about the implications of sharing where you are and what you are doing all the time because mobile phones make it easier to do so. Chad Hurley noted that the rate at which YouTube is serving videos to mobile devices is growing at a faster rate than the site as a whole. Mike asked Chad Hurley how long would it be before people started using their mobile phones to upload videos to YouTube in a serious way. Hurley’s response: → Read More
It’s Take Two on the bill the DTV Transition bill that would postpone the analog switch-off until June 12. The House of Representatives shot down the first one after a unanimous Senate vote, but this this revised bill might make it to Obama’s desk. → Read More
Nippon is (rightfully) known as the country of politeness. In order to uphold that status through scientific means, Japanese tech powerhouse Omron has developed the Smile Scan [JP].
Video after the jump. → Read More
Last (and first) time we wrote about Finnish stealth startup Fruugo, we feared that they might be stumbling right before their expected launch at the upcoming SIME conference. The company was rumored to be burning heaps of cash and laying off staff at a rapid pace before an actual product was ever released to the public.
That on itself is extraordinary, considering that Fruugo is assumed to be backed by tens of millions of euros, employs a workforce of around 100 people (they all sign NDAs when they get on board) and its board of directors has been joined by people like Nokia’s former CEO Jorma Ollila, and F-Secure Founder/Chairman Risto Siilasmaa. But Fruugo ended up not launching anything at SIME, building up even more anticipation (or hype, whichever) for their imminent social shopping platform / virtual marketplace. → Read More
When we talk about cloud computing, we often talk about a monolithic cloud in the sky. But in fact there are many clouds. There is the Salesforce cloud, the Google cloud, the Amazon cloud, the Microsoft cloud, the Facebook cloud, and so on. For the most part, businesses still need to pick a cloud and stick with it. But that is changing as new applications are developed to combine clouds together. A new Facebook app from Appirio called ReferMyFriends does just that. (Yes, Salesforce and Facebook can be combined). ReferMyFriends essentially uses Facebook as a front-end for Salesforce. It allows a company’s employees, associates, or even customers to refer their friends on Facebook for open job positions or marketing campaigns. The way that Appirio does this is by mapping the company’s contact database on Salesforce to each employee’s contact list of friends on Facebook. As marketing campaigns are created in Salesforce, there is an option to make them visible in Facebook. (Being selective is the key here). Then it will use the keywords associated with the marketing campaign to see if there are any matches with your friends. When you go to the ReferMyFriends app page in Facebook, you are presented with a list of campaigns and friends that might be good leads. So if your company is presenting a seminar on cloud computing, for example, all your friends that have expressed interest in cloud computing would show up. Then you can choose to send them a personal note with a link with more information. Nothing is sent to them unless you explicitly refer them. This also works for job referrals, which I think is the killer app here. Since all of this is managed by Salesforce on the back-end, if any of your friends follow up and become a customer or go for a job interview, you are notified through Facebook. So when someone in your social sphere interacts with your company, you are alerted and can intervene or make yourself available if appropriate. ReferMyFriends is actually an update to Appirio’s existing MyFriends@Work app, which will switch over on Monday. It is not cheap either. Appirio, which makes some of the top apps on the Salesforce App Exchange, is selling two different extensions from $10,000 to $25,000 a year. That is the cost to the company to hook the app into Salesforce. The Facebook part is free. Appirio is → Read More
Another “green” product from Japan that might one day hit other markets as well. Panasonic announced a new home-use fluorescent lamp [JP] that is able to automatically adjust the brightness depending on the luminance in the room it’s installed in. → Read More
Denon announced the DVD-A1UDCI, a universal player that supports Blu-ray discs, SACDs, CDs, DVD-Audio and DVD-Video, back in December for the Japanese market. The company today announced [JP] it will release the player, which was scheduled for release in Nippon this month, in March 2009. → Read More
If you’ve ever wondered exactly what UHF, VHF, UV, LFO, gamma rays, cosmic rays and so on are and what exactly it is they do, this awesome old chart should do you right. Among other things, it has frequencies of quartz transparancy, FCC-allocated RF bands, the range of the human eye (distressingly small, top right), absorption rates by air, water, aluminum, copper, and lead, and about a billion other awesome things. → Read More
Aaron Patzer is the CEO and founder of Mint.com, a personal finance site that helps 900,000 consumers keep track of their spending. Mint’s data is a snapshot of the consumer economy. In the guest post below, Aaron parses the data to tell us what the economy looks like from consumer’s eyes.
Consumers are hurting, but if Mint’s data is indicative of the economy as a whole, it is not as bad as you might think.
(Mint was the the winner of our first TechCrunch40 conference, an experience Aaron wrote about in another guest post ).
At the World Economic Forum in Davos Switzerland this week, it’s a somber environment. Nearly every session – at least every session that’s full – is about the global economic crisis. While there is much rhetoric and shifting of blame, there is little mention of hard data beyond stock market declines and the price of bailouts.
As an engineer, and founder of a company where one of our core values is “quantify everything”, lack of numbers bothers me. How bad are things really? Answers like “really bad” or “worst since the Great Depression” just don’t do it for me. What does it mean in dollars and cents? → Read More
What is it with TVs these days? Billion-to-one contrast ratios. 600Hz refresh rates. And now: begun, the aspect ratio wars have. 21:9 may be more familiar to you as something like 2.35:1 or Anamorphic widescreen. The widest of the common aspect ratios, the size has been around for a long time and many films will now be viewable without letterboxing on this 56-inch TV. But is it worth it?
Head on through for video of this ridiculous machine. → Read More
Need some toys to spruce up your desk? What better way to kill a little time on the weekend, show off your nerddom, and fancy things up a bit than papercraft? → Read More
Not satisfied with simply having better and more capable mobiles than us, Japan has decided that they will no longer have their cellular communications bound by two dimensions. The Ketai H001 sports a 3.1-inch 3D-capable screen, although how much use you’ll get out of the 3D part of it is anyone’s guess. → Read More
DUDE, YOU’RE GETTING A DELL SMARTPHONE! Maybe. If they’re real. And, you know, any good. It’s definitely not the first time we’ve heard this one before, but word around Rumormill Way is again indicating that Dell’s dabbling with the idea of getting into the battle for smartphone supreme. According to the WSJ’s sources, they’re tinkering with more than one concept – a little bit of Android here, a bit of WinMo there, and maybe a pinch of touchscreen thrown in for taste. None of the involved parties are admitting anything, of course. Dell’s past attempts at branching out of the computer building biz haven’t been mindbogglingly successful, and with next month’s Mobile World Congress looking to be packed to the brim with Android (thereby crowding up the smartphone market for 2009) don’t be too shocked if these mobile experiments don’t make it out of the lab. → Read More
MAINGEAR, a boutique PC builder that makes machines targeted at creative professionals has just announced their newest creation, the Remix Cretaive workstation PC. This is one beast of a machine. → Read More
Way back at the Intel Developer’s Forum in August, Intel mentioned that they are working on a technology which would allow them to harvest radio frequency power wirelessly. It was still a concept back then, but recently they were able to demonstrate it in the wild. → Read More
Samsung has developed the first 4Gb DRAM chip in the world using the 50nm process. These 4Gb DDR3 chips will use 40 precent less power than previous 2Gb chips. Sure, it’s not exciting, but you want more RAM, don’t you? Here’s where it comes from! → Read More
Australian start-up VisualPin allows users to “geocode” their videos by adding a Google Map to each different location in a video, with the map appearing to the side of the video. Here’s one of the best examples on the site.
To be honest, I find the map somewhat distracting from watching the video but I think it could be useful when it comes to documenting travel, news or current events. The technology creates a virtual location table of contents, allowing the user to click on a marked location to find the corresponding video content. → Read More
