Breitling announced their latest addition to their product line today, the Navitimer 125e Aniversaire. Based on their standard Navitimer, the 125e is limited to a run of 2,009 pieces, so make sure you get your order in fast if you want one. → Read More
This gadget (or gag item or whatever you may call it) of a very special kind comes directly from John Biggs’ favorite country of Japan: a pillow that looks like a pair of legs [JP]. The weird thing reminds me of the mouse pad for perverts and leaves me lost for words. → Read More
First, let’s get this out of the way: Tried this bugger on both myself and my good lady wife. So this is a hands-on review. Back in Columbus, Ohio the local adult shop was called the Lion’s Den. It was a chain – there were a few in Columbus and I guess they were all over Ohio. They have a NSFW website now. This place was chock-full of porn and cheap sex toys. I’ll call them “sex toys” because that’s what they were – they were toys that you brought out when you intended to have sex alone or with friends and then didn’t use. I’m talking about edible panties and blow-up dolls and vibrators that looked like tent stakes. → Read More
What’s that? Come here, sweetie. They didn’t mean it. What did they say exactly? Come here. Stop crying. Ok. Count to ten. Deep breath. They called you “fattie?” You’re just bigger than the other sports watches, sweetie. Look at Suunto. Or look at Casio’s Pathfinder line. You’re about the same size but you have more features! What? The T-Touch said that? Well the T-Touch doesn’t have a huge, extremely readable digital face with plenty of at-a-glance information. I mean look at you: you can tell if it will rain just by checking your wrist. And your compass is better than the T-Touch’s. → Read More
The iPhone is like the bacon-wrapped scallop of the mobile world. Both are quite visually pleasing relative to their peers, easy to use, and generally liked by the masses. Spend a little too much time with either, however, and you start to see the flaws. With the scallops, the grease and animal fat that was oh-so delicious on the way down begins to clog your arteries and slow your saunter. With the iPhone, the interface that seemed oh-so-polished when it first met your fingertips begins to show signs of oversight and imperfection. We’ve been using the iPhone for just a few months shy of two years now, and a few things that once seemed trivial have come to drive us up the wall. You’ll find no mention of the glaring faults (The lack of MMS, Copy and Paste, etc) in this list – we’re talking about the stuff that we just can’t believe made it through Apple’s user experience team. → Read More
Carrying around a little screen at all times means — what else? — that you can read comics all over the place while looking as if you’re checking your email. The iVerse app, for both iPhone and Android, lets you read comics that have been customized for viewing on a small screen. Instead of having you zoom around a full-sized page, they’ve cut the pages into smaller, screen-size chunks. Not the best for full-page art and the like, but much more convenient and natural to read. → Read More
Internet security experts, and the people who pretend to be them, often only track hacks and the like when there’s money or personal information involved. You know, stolen credit card numbers, eBay phishing scams, etc. That’s all well and good—“I just want to make sure my money is safe!”—but a study detailing a sample of last year’s Internet hacks, and found that 24 percent of them had nothing at all to do with stealing money or personal information, but were rather carried out for no reason other than to deface and disrupt . Or, as Ars Technica so artfully put it, sometimes hackers just hate you. Or, as Nicholas Deleon will put it, sometimes hackers are just big stupid heads. → Read More
Apparently Bill Clinton was mere moments away from picking up chicks experiencing the finest in green transportation all over Burbank, California in a Telsa Roadster. Jeremy Snyder, general manager of the Los Angeles Tesla Store, handed a set of keys to Mr. Clinton at the end of a President’s Day luncheon after the former president expressed interest in driving a Roadster. → Read More
Good afternoon, PlayStation Owners-
Just wanted to keep you abreast of some happenings that will go down on Home in the coming months. Nothing that’s going to knock you on your buttocks, but there’s a handful of things worth mentioning. Hit the jump to see what’s going down. → Read More
We’ve had OpenId to make the transport of your ID easier between Web sites. We’ve had initiatives on Data Portability to make it easier for you to move your data around between social networks and other apps. But what we haven’t had yet is a way to allow you to share your location between different platforms. That’s something that a new, largely European-inspired, initiative hopes to address. The alliance, called OSLO (Open Sharing of Location-based Objects) includes many of the players in mobile social networking and location-based social software. Twelve startups, all of whom serve their users with location-based services, have signed an agreement to enable their combined 30 million users to share location information and interact between networks. Currently users are unable to do so as location-based systems operate in a similar fashion to instant messaging systems like AOL and MSN which don’t work with eachother. So for example, you can set your location on Brightkite for instance, but your friends on Rummble wouldn’t see you – but they would if Brightkite joined the initiative. While Ronan Higgins, CEO, Locle and Andrew Scott, Founder/CEO, Rummble are acting as spokes people, the other companies in the initiative are: www.aka-aki.com, belysio, Buddycloud, Mobiluck, Moximity, Nulaz, Palringo, Rummble, Service2Media, Skout, Tooio and WAYN. OSLO has been in discussion with Google and Yahoo! about joining the alliance. Google of course recently launched it’s Latitude product, while Yahoo! has been working on FireEagle. However, Oslo is not a competitor to Google’s Latitude as they’ve spoken to Google, Yahoo! and Vodafone and, according to Higgins, they all want to get on board. Some of the theoretical benefits to OSLO are: – Mobile advertisers would benefit from the combined volumes and an ability to better target their campaigns based on location, improving click through rate, ROI and user satisfaction. – Connecting to people on other networks gives mobile social networking users a more exciting experience. – Application builders can create better products on top of shared location information. – Member companies can focus on differentiation and adding value to users rather than bothering with re-building another location system, which is a commodity anyway. The alternative is a fragmentation of technologies. However, OSLO says, end user privacy and security remains not just a priority “but a pre-requisite”. So OSLO currently mandates that member companies should be able to query the location of users, as long as that → Read More
News broke yesterday that LG was investigating quitting the plasma biz, but now George Mead, the Marketing Manager for Digital Displays at LG Electronics UK, is denying these claims. He told T3 that “LG Electronics UK has no intention to withdraw from the Plasma TV market.” Oh, see what he did there? LG Electronics UK. Nice, but what ’bout us Americans? → Read More
Here’s the live stream of our Could Computing Roundtable, which kicks off at 2:30 PST with product demos from a handful of early-stage cloud-focused start-ups, with commentary from a panel of experts. Shortly thereafter our roundtable discussion will bring together a dozen panelists from some of Silicon Valley’s most acclaimed companies who will discuss the future of cloud-based services. Thank you to Sun Microsystems for sponsoring the roundtable stream (powered by ustream and camera work by FutureWorks.)
Twitter Hash Tag: #tccloud
http://www.ustream.tv/flash/live/1/531724Live Videos by Ustream → Read More
Our Cloud Computing Roundtable just saw the launch of FathomDB, a new Y Combinator startup that offers database administration as a service. The startup manages many of the tasks that database administrators typically have to deal with, like database backups, monitoring, and launching replacement servers in the event of a crash. The service is primarily operating with MySQL databases hosted on Amazon’s EC2, but will expand to support other cloud-based computing services as they become available. And because it uses industry-standard systems, developers won’t have to modify their code to make it work with FathomDB, and they aren’t locked into the service.
Aside from routine maintenance tasks, FathomDB also offers an array of analytics tools that help developers track the status of their servers and identify where their performance bottlenecks are. CEO Justin Santa Barbara says that the system isn’t necessarily meant to actually replace database administrators, but instead to take care of low-level tasks so that they can focus on more complex and important issues.
Final pricing for the service is still being determined, but the company plans to charge a small (~10-20%) markup over standard EC2 prices.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=As1jZZnHMr4&hl=en&fs=1]
→ Read More
BG just dropped a bomb about the 8230 that’s actually the 9630, but has the codename Niagara. It’s still going to be a World Edition, which means it will support CDMA 1x, EV-DO Rev. A, GSM, GPRS, EDGE and UMTS. No Wi-Fi, but that’s what you should expect from Verizon by now. The 9630 may or may not have a camera, but if it does it’ll be a 3.2-megapixel shooter. And the browser will support JavaScript 1.6. There’s no launch date, but BG thinks May or June. via BG → Read More
At today’s TechCrunch Cloud Computing Roundtable event, a new storage company called Diomede launched in private beta with the goal of offering low cost cloud-based storage that is also very energy efficient. The basic premise behind the service is that not all data in the cloud needs to be immediately available, but that most people still pay for the immediate access anyway. While most data centers have their servers and disk drives operating 24/7 with near-immediate access, Diomede allows customers to designate files that they don’t need instant access to, and places them either as ‘nearline’ or ‘offline’. These files have an access time of five minutes or four hours, respectively, but cost only 1/12 as much as standard cloud providers to store and take as little as 1/60th the amount of energy. If you’d like to try it out, go to this page and enter the invite code ‘tcrunch’.
The service offers a full API to developers, and also allows them to view metrics like the power consumption of each individual file. Possible applications include allowing developers to set their redundant file backups (which rarely need to be quickly accessed) to ‘offline’, where they can be stored at only a fraction of the normal cost. → Read More
To me, the ongoing Pirate Bay trial is utterly boring: courtroom machinations, childish snickering (tee-hee, this random record industry CEO doesn’t understand the technical underpinnings of the BitTorrent protocol… do you?), etc. Wake me when there’s a verdict! One thing that did catch my eye this morning was this hot little item regarding one of The Pirate Bay’s financial backers, who, by some accounts owns around 40 percent of the site. Turns out the man, one Carl Lundström (who’s a foods company heir), has been involved in the nasty world of extreme right-wing Swedish politics. In and of itself, who cares? That this guy wants to keep Sweden for Swedes is none of my business, but it adds an extra layer of hilarity to the whole Pirate Bay soup. TPB, supposedly on the vanguard of people’s rights vis-à-vis copyright, fair use, etc. is supported by quite a shady character. → Read More
Flying Coach stinks something awful and the few times that I’ve flown Business or First Class in the last year have made my 12+ hour flights bearable. London-based Priestmangoode is responsible for the overhaul of Swiss’s First Class cabin on Airbus A330-300s and I must say they did an impeccable job. Just look at the photos. Each seat has ample room for an adult and the amenities are top notch. You get what appears to be a 22-inch flat panel screen, fully reclining seat, and mood lighting. → Read More
In what may qualify as nostalgia overload, an enterprising Canadian has replaced the insides of an old all-in-one iMac with a Sega Dreamcast console. The end result is the iCast. → Read More
One of the most requested features for Twitter is the ability to create groups. While users wait (and wait and wait) for Twitter to add this feature, a number of startups are going ahead and showing how it should be done. The latest of these is a LaunchBox Digital startup called Buzzable which just launched today. Buzzable lets you create Twitter groups around RSS feeds, and does so in a very compelling way.
Right now anyone can browse public groups, but you need an invite code to create a new group. Anyone with a twitter account, however, can join a public group and post a message. We have 500 invites. Just use the promo code: techcrunch.
You sign in using your Twitter ID, which lets you join and create both public and private groups centered around different topics. Some of the public groups right now include Android, Kindle, the New York Knicks, and the White House. There is even one for TechCrunch.
Groups are built around RSS feeds. So the TechCrunch group is simply our feed. But you can set up topic-specific groups which pull from a number of feeds, including Google News, Eventful, Digg, Yahoo Finance, Twitter itself, blogs, and so on. You can set it up so that the feeds are filtered by keyword (such as “Android,” Kindle,” “Knicks,” etc.). Members of the group can then discuss any headline by commenting in-line. Each comment can be pushed out to Twitter proper as well. The result is a combination of RSS content and Twitter conversation, all in the same stream. → Read More
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