If you somehow managed to avoid all the hype, you might not know that the Academy Awards were handed out this weekend. There were preview shows, review shows, and Oscar-related goings-on all over television all weekend long. The Free Art and Technology Lab threw their own little Academy Award party this weekend by making all the nominated films available to anyone with a USB drive. → Read More
Attention fans of the website CrunchGear. I have two Spotlight Flashlights to give away to two lucky commenters. From now until noon Eastern tomorrow you, too, can try to win one of these teeny-tiny flashlights. → Read More
Apologies for the bad pun in the title of this post, but QuickPod, makers of camera extension arms, have added a couple new products to their portfolio: the QuickPod Explorer and the QuickPod Pro+ Precision. In case you weren’t previously familiar with QuickPods, they’re telescoping poles to which you attach your camera, to allow you to take a better picture of yourself than you could otherwise do just holding the camera at arm’s reach. → Read More
An experiment, if you will. Place two sets of headphones in opposite corners of an empty room and leave for 15 minutes. When you return, you’ll find them both in the middle of the room, tangled together into a knotted mess. For extra fun, try this experiment when you’re running late for an important meeting. You’ll find that they’ve doubled the knots and tied them extra tight! If you’ve got an old contact lens case, though, you may be able to avoid this problem. → Read More
It’s no secret that the iPhone is one of gaming’s hottest new platforms, and while many of the games on the App Store leave something to be desired, every once in awhile we stumble across a game sporting very high production values that rival dedicated videogame systems. This weekend, Resolution Interactive unveiled a new game called Aqua Moto that is strongly reminiscent of Nintendo’s classic game Wave Race 64, allowing gamers to race Jet Skis through a variety of 3D environments. You can grab a free ‘Lite’ version of the game here, but at only $3 the full version (which includes far more tracks) is a bargain. → Read More
This week TechFluff TV has “Mike Arrington”, although he looks a little different to when I last saw him… amongst other fluffy news. TechCrunch Europe is a media pimper sponsor of TechFluff.TV. Hell, we just think it’s kinda fun. That is all. → Read More
Here’s some consumer electronics heartache for you. A couple in Boston bought an $1100 Samsung TV from Circuit City’s liquidation sale, only to find out that, once they got home and opened it up, it was shattered. Why didn’t they inspect it at the store, you ask? Well, apparently the signs in the store say “DO NOT OPEN THE MERCHANDISE” alongside other signs that say “ALL SALES FINAL” and “CHECK YOUR PURCHASES,” among others. → Read More
Photo on screen by Emrank We didn’t like the AT&T Quickfire when we first saw it, and we didn’t really like it once we’d given it a full review, either. Turns out, AT&T doesn’t like it too much, either. We’re not sure if some horrible flaw was discovered or if they’re just not selling well enough, but AT&T has killed the product indefinitely citing failure to meet “performance expectations”. With dealers being told to “quarantine all existing inventory” and customers requiring exchanges being offered alternative products, we’re guessing it’s the first one. Check out the full email sent to AT&T internalites after the jump. → Read More
This guest post is written by Kevin Marks, Developer Advocate for OpenSocial at Google. Over the last 20 years he has alternated between giant companies and founding startups – BBC, The UK MultiMedia Corporation, Apple QuickTime, Technorati and now Google. He is one of the driving forces behind microformats.org and advisor to the Open Rights Group. He wants you to remember that URLs are people too, and his URL is http://epeus.blogspot.com. In this Q&A-style post, Kevin delves into the standards that make up the emerging open social stack (OpenID, OAuth, Portable Contacts, and OpenSocial), looking at the infrastructure problems they address, and exploring some of the live implementations, including Plaxo and Google Friend Connect. Q: We keep hearing that “Google wants to make the web more social.” What does that mean? Everything on the web is more interesting when it takes place with friends. Today’s social networking sites, are the online contexts where you and your friends go to be social, and the time we spend on them shows the attraction. But the model of going to a single website to interact with other people is changing. In the future, we expect everything on the web will become more social, augmenting the many things you already do on the web. Whether you’re shopping, deciding what to read, or researching a topic, knowing what your friends, or family, or the people you respect think about that product, book, or source of information is a vital part of the web. I call this the “social cloud,” meaning that “social” will be integrated with the web so that you don’t think about it anymore. Charlene Li calls this same idea “social networks become like air.” The web itself is like this — following links seems like second nature to us because we know a URL can take us anywhere. Social isn’t there yet, but that’s the highest level goal of the OpenSocial project — to make interacting with people a natural part of how we use the web Q: What are the hurdles to the web becoming more social today? For every website to become social, each site needs to know something about you and who your friends are. How do they solve this now? By asking you to fill out a form and by spamming all your friends. For many people, that’s enough of a deterrent that they will simply leave the → Read More
Social travel match engine Gekko has yet to even launch. But it’s seeding it’s emergence with a viral video which leaves absolutely nothing to the imagination. Gekko’s “Findyourgspots.com” promo says the service will match you with hotels and restaurants based on your profile and like minded people. So far, so similar. There are almost certainly a number of other sites that claim to do the same thing, to a greater or lesser extent. However, will we actually remember what Gekko does after seeing its ads? I rather doubt it. If they are going to head down this route then they should at least have a version with a guy in it as well, to balance things out, right? → Read More
When I was looking at traffic numbers for the top photo sites this weekend, another stat caught my eye. Online photo editing site Picnik is also quickly climbing the ranks of photo sites from seemingly nowhere.
In January, according to comScore, the site attracted 6.6 million unique visitors worldwide, a tenfold increase from the year before. On comScore’s list of the largest photo sites, Picnik ranks No. 14, above Shutterfly and AOL Pictures, and just below Snapfish. Unlike those services, however, Picnik is not really a place people store their photos. Rather, it is a place where they touch them up and manipulate them before they post them on MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, Smugmug, or somewhere else.
Picnik is a powerful, cloud-based photo editor that is integrated directly into Flickr, SmugMug and other photo repositories. Competing online photo editors such as Fotoflexer and Photoshop.com (formerly and Photoshop Express) attract only a fraction as many users (1.4 million uniques for Fotoflexer and 760,000 for Photoshop.com. → Read More
This ain’t your daddy’s Casio. The Cachalot, the latest solar radio watch from Casio’s high-end brand, Oceanus, is inching into high end territory and I’m pleased to report that you get quite a bit of watch for the $1,200 ($900 retail, from what I’ve seen) or so you’ll spend on this beast.
First off, the Cachalot looks great. I’ve seen a few Casios in my day and they’ve finally nailed it on this version. The outer timing bezel clicks with a satisfying majesty and the face is readable – except in certain situations, which I’ll describe below. This model is also made of titanium making it the lightest man-watch I’ve seen in a while. It’s water resistant to 20 BAR and features 5 band radio auto-setting, solar powered batteries, world time settings, as well as a countdown timer and stopwatch. → Read More
Sega hasn’t given up yet on the arcade business but isn’t really investing a lot of resources into their gaming machines either. During the AOU, an arcade exhibition that took place in Tokyo last week, the company presented two new pieces of arcade game hardware that both are PC-based. Both RingEdge and RingWide use Microsoft Windows Embedded Standard 2009 as the OS. → Read More
Last time HTC used Twitter to confirm something, it was to let everyone know that the HTC Touch HD wouldn’t be coming stateside. This time, they bring good news! → Read More
Ever since hot streaming music startup Spotify hired a director of “portable solutions” you just knew they were going to do something cool in mobile. And frankly there is no cooler place to do it right now than on the iPhone. There have been rumblings of an iPhone app for the service especially on Swedish blogs. Spotify is based in Stockholm. News that they are hiring a Symbian S60 specialist also indicates that Symbian will join the platform. The rumours are that the iPhone app will initially be available only to premium users, but will offer over-the-air streaming of the entire library, plus access to playlists. The ability to cache playlists will mean you can save tracks and albums temporarily to your iPhone to access when out of range of wifi or a mobile network. This video demo shows an amazing app which, frankly, could even give the iTunes store a run for it’s money given that it provides instant access to millions of tracks, assuming Apple lets it into the App Store of course. UPDATE: Someone has removed the video so contact us if you have a copy and we’ll re-post it. UPDATE II: Thanks to TechDigest for grabbing the video, below. → Read More
Welcome to the jungle!
Late last week, Capcom teased us all on Xbox Live that they would be announcing a new game on the 23rd, today, and they certainly didn’t disappoint. In a video only released to the Xbox Live community, RE5 producer Jun Takeuchi introduced the game with a subsequent Q&A with the game’s director Kenji Oguro. What happens in between can only be seen after the jump. → Read More
We love the iPhone’s ultra simple homescreen user interface – as long as we’re not trying to change anything. Once we get tired of the old arrangement of icons, moving them all around to match our new mood is like eating rice with a tool big enough for only one grain at a time. After about 5 grains, you decide you weren’t hungry in the first place. Want to organize 5 pages of apps alphabetically? Hah! See you next week. → Read More
The notoriously liberal, as if that’s a bad thing in and of itself, Ninth US Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that that California law restricting the sale of so-called violent video games to minors violates “free speech guarantees.” The ruling upholds a lower courts finding and, naturally, has upset those who have made a career out of trumping up the video game violence debate. → Read More
@webmarketingguruUK What’s really going to shake things up for this new line of netbooks?
@sonymarcomdude Viral videos. Like dudes in pajamas like doing doing dude things.
@webmarketingguruUK like what → Read More
Back in December, the Kogan Agora was revealed and caused all kinds of excitement amongst mobile geeks. Not only was it going to be dirt cheap (around $250 bucks, unsubsidized), and not only was it being pushed out by what was about as close as you can get to a mom-and-pop electronics manufacturer, but it looked like they were going to beat just about everyone besides HTC to getting an Android product on the shelf. Then it got canned. → Read More
