The advent of the touchscreen era is good news for many, but for the blind it has to be a pretty difficult transition. Slick interfaces like wall-mounted touch kiosks are practically impossible to adapt for usage by blind people since, obviously, there is nowhere to put Braille keys. One company thinks they may have something that works for some devices, but it’s far from a universal solution. → Read More
We’re in good ol’ Sin City, fresh out of a pre-CTIA 2009 meeting with HTC. While most of the hardware they brought to the party were things we’d seen at Mobile World Congress last month, they had one thing on the software end that was just out of the oven: the latest build of the Android “Cupcake” release. The firmware build number we were playing with was 1.5/CRA79. We didn’t spot any major new features in this build – but we did see a good number of things we’d heard about previously get their first implementations. Oddly, we also noticed at least one thing missing since last time. → Read More
Congratulations, America, you’ve finally designed a product that looks dumber than both the Snuggie and Smittens, combined. It’s called the Peekaru Original Fleece Baby Carrier Cover, and it’s ridiculous. → Read More
Twitter co-founder Biz Stone sent out an Email earlier this afternoon to a number of users who had previously enabled ‘autofollowing’, stating that the company is planning to shut the feature down. ‘Autofollowing’ allows users to automatically reciprocate whenever another Twitter user follows them. The feature has never been widely available to the public (at least not through Twitter’s site), and was only enabled by sending a request to Twitter support.
While Stone ackowledges that the autofollow feature does have some uses (such as for applications built on the Twitter API or simply to be polite), generally speaking most of these autofollows are disingenuous. Many of the more popular Twitter users who have autofollow enabled are now following tweets from thousands of people at a time, the vast majority of which they clearly aren’t paying attention to. → Read More
A patent just came across the tubes a moment ago for a treadmill with “a simulated cobblestone running surface,” the idea supposedly being that running on a flat, smooth treadmill belt doesn’t simulate the harsh old-timey cobblestone streets of Anytown, USA. → Read More
Odds are you’ve already played Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars. Perhaps you haven’t opened the box, popped out the game card and moved your Nintendo DS’ Power switch to “on,” per se, but trust me: you’ve played the game. And depending on your point of view, your attitude toward the GTA franchise, that may or may not be a bad thing. → Read More
Music used to be so simple. You listened to it on the radio for free, but you didn’t get to say what would be played, and there were lots of commercials. If you went to a concert, you paid. And if you bought a record, tape or CD, you paid. People copied CDs to cassette tapes and passed them on to friends. That was just about as far as P2P music piracy got. Stealing music was when you shoplifted a CD or cassette from the record store, and it was pretty clearly understood that it was “wrong.”
Maybe that’s why so many people who are older than say 30 think that downloading music is ethically wrong. They remember that music is something that you pay for. They still download the music, of course. But they know they’re doing something they shouldn’t be doing.
But if you’ve discovered and come to love music in the last decade, I don’t see how you can be expected to know when listening to recorded music is ok, and when it’s wrong.
Let’s put the law aside for a moment – this post is about doing the right thing. We’ve been hammered with messaging from the government and the music labels that downloading or listening to music on the Internet is stealing, unless you pay for it. We see the video clips before movies at the cinema saying its wrong. We read about lawsuits against twelve year olds for downloading music from BitTorrent. Our government is even willing to threaten other sovereign nations over music piracy. → Read More
This fun little video demonstrates how to become an evil, bitter human being and take it out on the world. An interesting alternative to the Terminator-style robocalypse, and possibly worse, since you can’t shoot nanobots. They’d just eat the bullets. → Read More
NextStart is the latest Y Combinator-esque startup incubator to emerge to support young entrepreneurs and their ideas. The Greenville, South Carolina-based organization is offering a summer immersion entrepreneur development program to attract promising entrepreneurs to the Carolina region.
The program works similarly to other incubators like Y Combinator and TechStars in providing seed money, VC connections, and mentoring to company founders to develop their ideas, incorporate their companies, and then help find funding for their startups. NextStart will give startups $5,000 to $10,000 in return for “founders stock” of 5 to 10 percent. The twelve week program will run during the summer in Greenville and will give entrepreneurs office space, internet access and other professional services. Startup teams will be immersed in a business planning program, FastTrac by the Kauffman Foundation, to develop a solid business plan and will also work with the Spiro Institute for Entrepreneurial Leadership at Clemson University. → Read More
So there’s a longish—the better ones are always longish—post over at Fast Company that details the perils of using Google to find tax documents. (International readers: April 15 is Tax Day in the U.S. It’s a time that drives normally serene men, if I may, batshit crazy.) If you’re pinched for time, the moral of the story is to actually go to www.irs.gov for all tax forms and whatnot, and not to rely upon Google to steer you in the right direction. → Read More
Genius announced today that they are releasing a new, reasonably priced, noise cancelling headphone. The GHP-04NC (say that three times fast) launched today, and promises to cancel out background noise using a “superposition principle”. Priced at just $49.99, if they work as advertised they would be ideal for the person flying coach. → Read More
Let’s just cut to the chase, folks. T-Mobile’s first USB dongle is a welcome addition to the big magenta, but it has its flaws. However, as a long time T-Mobile customer I’m just happy to have a broadband dongle at all. My speed tests in the Bay Area (CA) were quite good both in San Francisco and around the Bay. I was averaging between 700 and 800kbps down and around 300kbps up throughout the area. During the Kojima keynote at GDC I suffered multiple disconnects, but I figured that was a result of being deep inside Moscone’s South hall — although my T-Mobile BlackBerry 8900 had a strong EDGE connection. That’s all well and good but I don’t live in the Bay Area anymore. Manhattan is home these days. → Read More
WinMo 6.5′s Marketplace, basically a Microsoft App Store, is getting lots of ink this week at CTIA. 1800PocketPC has some interesting news including the addition of a 24-hour “return period,” carrier-based billing, and carrier specific stores. → Read More
Facebook will soon have its third chief financial officer in less than two years, the company announced today via a leak to the Wall Street Journal. Gideon Yu, the man who came back from Dubai empty handed, is out. The hunt for his successor is starting now.
Facebook says this is about getting a CFO with public company experience (“We have retained Spencer Stuart to lead our search for a new CFO and will be looking for someone with public company experience.”). Which is complete nonsense (and poorly thought out nonsense at that), because Yu, after a short stint at YouTube and an even shorter stint at Sequoia Capital, was the treasurer and SVP Finance at Yahoo. Which is very much a public company.
So why is he leaving? We have to speculate for now, but perhaps he’s not convinced the company can get another round of financing at the valuation the board wants to see. Or it could be any of a thousand other things. But it most certainly isn’t because he doesn’t have public company experience.
Less than two years ago Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said of Yu “I consider it kind of a coup that we were able to recruit him here…He’s just excellent.”
I wonder why he didn’t add “I just hope for his sake that Facebook isn’t too successful, because if we IPO at some point, he’s out.” → Read More
A man near Columbus, Ohio got charged with drunk driving after he crashed a lawnmower with a bar stool attached to it. Kyle Wygle told police officers that he drank 15 beers and that his motorized bar stool had a top speed of 38 miles per hour. He was taken to a nearby hospital for minor injuries and has pleaded not guilty to the charge of driving while intoxicated. → Read More
We’ve confirmed that hi5, the third largest social network in the world, is laying off employees today. hi5′s VP of Marketing, Mike Trigg, wouldn’t say how many employees were being let go but we’ve received multiple independent tips that the social network laid off 50% of its staff. Previous to this round of layoffs, hi5 employed around 100 people. Trigg said the layoffs were due to a “realignment of the company” and that it was also a cost-cutting measure. Obviously, revenues were not keeping up with costs.
The social network recently went through a previous round of layoffs last October, letting go 10 to 15% of its staff due to another “restructuring.” hi5 gets about 63 million monthly unique visits worldwide but only 3.7 million of those are from the U.S., according to ComScore’s February stats. The site boasts close to 80 million registered users but apparently many of these users are just not in markets that advertisers find particularly appealing. → Read More
In news that seems to indicate that Blackberry’s App World is indeed launching tomorrow, we’ve learned that Networks In Motion (NIM) will be releasing a GPS application for the BlackBerry on Wednesday, which would make it the first (or at least, tied for first) GPS app available on the new storefront.
NIM has built a number of applications and services for its partners, including Verizon Navigator, but this is the first time it has sold an application carrying its label to end-users. The new GPS application takes advantage of technology built by TrafficGuage, which NIM acquired earlier this month. TrafficGuage’s technology will be used to offer users real-time traffic updates on the application. Other features in the app include the ability to locate nearby points of interest (like gas stations) and multiple viewing angles. NIM has not yet released exact pricing, but the application will be available on a subscription basis. → Read More
New Ericsson-brand mobile 3G data modules apparently have something called a “kill pill” that’s capable of disabling a computer remotely in the instance that a customer doesn’t pay his or her bill or cancels a credit card used to pay on-contract monthly charges. → Read More
Facebook is losing its CFO Gideon Yu. The Wall Street Journal broke the news earlier today, and speculated that the reason could be that Facebook might want to make an early bid for an IPO and wants a CFO with public company experience (which is complete nonsense). Yu was previously the CFO of YouTube. At Facebook, he was key to raising money from Microsoft at the famous $15 billion valuation, but as the economy soured he was not able to find as many takers at that same price, despite Facebook’s voracious need for capital to keep up with its growth.
A Facebook spokesperson has confirmed Yu’s departure to us, providing the following statement. → Read More
A “shock jock” by the name of Howard Stern is getting a Palm Pre before you will. Before us, even. Palm is going to give Sirius’ $500 million man an in-person hands-on, before whisking the phone away, back to Palm’s lair. → Read More
