The hackers of 4Chan have succeeded in completely gaming Time Magazine’s online poll for its Time 100 list of the most influential people on the planet. At the top of the list is Christopher Poole, aka Moot, the founder of the 4Chan online forum, whose members used some coding to get his name to the top of the list. Not only did they help moot win the poll, but they also arranged the next 20 names to spell out “Marblecake, also the game.” Marblecake is a lewd sexual reference, but is also supposedly the name of the chat room where one of 4Chan’s online collective actions, Project Chanology, originated.
This is just the “people’s choice” list, not the official list picked by Time’s editors, but still it makes you wonder whether the editors at Time bother to read anything on the Internet. It is pretty well-documented that the 4Chan community was trying to manipulate the poll results. Nevertheless, Time just threw up its hands and named Moot the winner. → Read More
Seeqpod, the ill-fated startup behind the kick-ass media search technology used by many music streaming and playlist services and social networking applications, appears to have cracked under the weight of litigation. At the end of last month, we broke the news that the Emeryville, CA-based company filed a petition for Chapter 11 with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court of the Northern District of California. Now it looks like the service, which many third-party developers use as the underlying foundation for their own offerings, has gone completely dark for the past couple of days.
Update: site just went back up with a maintenance notice, about 5 minutes ago (10 AM EST)
Apparently, Seeqpod at one point claimed on its website that it was having server issues and that the service would be restored once the technical problems were solved, but the site went down again after 45 minutes and has been unavailable since 10:30 PM EST Saturday night. → Read More
Walden International, an international venture capital firm headquarted in San Francisco but with a strong foothold in Asia, has invested S$2 million – Singapore Dollars – (approx. US$1.35 million) in Brandtology. The company, which has its headquarters in Singapore but boasts more offices in China, Malaysia and Australia, provides business and brand online intelligence services out of specialist-manned ‘Command Centres’.
Despite its military-sounding name, these centres actually help Brandtology customers make ‘timely and informed strategic decisions’ based on an advanced online conversation tracking system, which mines blogs, forums, micro-blogging services etc. for opinions, aided by specialists who monitor the system for clients around the clock. → Read More
Samsung finally went ahead and did what we’ve expected them to do today with the announcement of their first Android powered handset, the I7500. Better late than ever, I say. The I7500 is no slouch in the feature department with a 3.2-inch AMOLED touch-screen, GPS, Wi-Fi, and 8GB of internal memory. It’s also an HSDPA capable device with a 5-megapixel AF camera with Power LED (no clue what that is but I assume it’s flash), Bluetooth 2.0, USB 2.0, MicroSD (up to 32GB support) and a 3.5mm earphone jack. It’s also pretty thin at 0.47 inches. → Read More
A recent poll by the Australian Communications and Media Authority found that 90% of Australian children aged 15 and older own a mobile phone. This number could be higher or lower in other countries, but I suspect it’s on par with what you’d expect in the U.S. as well. → Read More
When it comes to startups in the online personal finance sphere, most people think of Mint. But another player in the space, Wesabe, has been holding its own as well, seeing some nice growth in the past year. Which one you use is probably a matter of personal taste, but perhaps you were mesmerized by Mint’s slick iPhone app. Well, now Wesabe has one as well.
So how do the apps stack up? Well, there are two key differences: Mint’s looks nicer, but Wesabe’s is more dynamic. What I mean by that is, with Mint’s iPhone app you can only see an overview of your finances, and look at things like the budget you set up online. With Wesabe’s iPhone app, everything is editable. And that’s a nice feature because more than a few times with Mint, I have seen a transaction categorized wrong, but had to login on my computer to edit it. → Read More
Only a few devices really redefined my life: that stent, a fire truck, the Ford Fairmont, and the PlayStation are a few that come to mind right now. Edge Magazine has a great look at the history of the PlayStation, from its humble beginnings as a SNES with a CD drive to the device that changed the gaming market forever. → Read More
We’ve confirmed our story from the weekend that former AOL exec Mike Jones will become the COO of MySpace. This makes him the number 2 executive of the reorganized News Corp. subsidiary under new CEO Owen Van Natta. A third new executive may also be announced later today.
An announcement will be made later this morning. Jones and Van Natta will join Jonathan Miller, the CEO Digital Media, at MySpace’s Los Angeles offices today to address employees.
Jones is a well respected entrepreneur who founded Userplane, a video chat service that added social features to dating and other sites. Userplane was bought by AOL in 2006 for around $40 million. The acquisition was made at the time that Jonathan Miller was the CEO of AOL, and Jones knows Miller well.
As we said in an earlier post about the changing of the guard at MySpace, News Corp. is making a clean sweep of the top executives. Cofounder and CEO Chris DeWolfe is out. Cofounder and President Tom Anderson is is having “discussions” about “assuming a new role in the organization.” Our guess is that the final Cofounder, CTO Aber Whitcomb, is next to go. → Read More
Cease and desist letter be damned! Your woman is cheating on you with that Blood Efl!! Put a spy ear in her room! She talks to him! You hear! You go crazy! You go to jail! 65 dollars! Jail is fun because you’ll have time to read! → Read More
I’ll be in Helsinki next week and I’d like to plan a very informal meet-up on Tuesday, April 28 at 8pm. All those attending, please email me at john@crunchgear.com with the subject line “RSVP HELSINKI.” NOTE – The new start time is now 8pm. We’ve decided to have the meet-up at A21 on Annankatu 21 [Google Map]. PLEASE RSVP ASAP so I can offer them a head count. N.B. If you have a start-up to discuss, please have some information handy, preferably in electronic form. It will probably be hard to do demos unless they’re on a mobile phone, but if you contact me beforehand we can probably sit down to look at your product on a laptop. Best of all, F-Secure, the anti-virus people, will be sponsoring an hour of drinks from about 7pm-8pm. Anyone wishing sponsor another few hours should email me. UPDATE – Nokia is chipping in from 8pm-9pm! For last minute changes follow me on Twitter. See you in Helsinki! → Read More
I used to think the Kindle was stupid. Then I bought one and realized I was wrong. It’s still way too expensive, but it’s great at what it does. And what it does keeps on expanding. Now, it takes a step into the up-to-date travel guide market, with a partnership with the customizable travel guide service, Offbeat Guides.
Starting tomorrow, you’ll be able to find 500 of the company’s newest guides in the Kindle store at prices ranging from $3.99 for smaller cities to $7.99 for larger ones. Here’s why these are great. Just like the Offbeat Guides regular guidebook products, its Kindle-ready guidebooks are way more up-to-date than traditional guidebooks. While there have been some guidebooks available on the Kindle in the past, most are only updated once a year. Offbeat Guides are updated every month. → Read More
AOL is adding a twist to old-fashioned political journalism with the launch of its new political news and blog site, PoliticsDaily.com. The site, which will primarily focus on in-depth political commentary as opposed to breaking news, will only provide original content, from long-form analysis to blog posts on issues in the U.S. political landscape. Led by former New York Times Washington Correspondent, Melinda Henneberger, PoliticsDaily wants to tie the old media’s in-depth political analysis with a sustainable digital medium
PoliticsDaily is the brainchild of Martin Moe, senior vice president at AOL and is built under Bill Wilson’s new MediaGlow division, which is building new content brands distinct from AOL itself. MediaGlow, which recently launched topic directory Love.com, runs AOL News, Engadget and TMZ.com, among other properties. PoliticsDaily is part of the AOL News network, which received more than 27 million unique visitors in March, according to comScore stats. New York Times Digital by comparison had close to 46 million unique visitors in March. → Read More
At the risk of repeating myself for the millionth time, in many peoples’ minds, the Achilles’ heel of the iPhone is the network it’s on in the US: AT&T. Since the day it was announced as being exclusive to that provider, people have been wondering one thing: How long until it’s on Verizon? Rumors have surfaced time and again about the possibility, but today brings perhaps the most concrete news yet that the two sides are talking.
The two sides are discussing the possibility of getting Verizon version of the iPhone ready for 2010, sources tell USA Today. There are likely two reasons it would take until next year. The first, is that Apple’s exclusive contract with AT&T runs through next year. The second is that a Verizon version would presumably have to be CDMA-ready, which means the innards of the iPhone would have to be slightly tweaked, as the current iPhone is GSM-only (which AT&T, and most other cell networks run on). → Read More
The first real casualty of the economic crisis has emerged, and it’s a lovable robotic dinosaur. Decreased demand for expensive toys has left Pleo’s creator, Ugobe, wallowing in debt. As a last ditch effort to remain solvent, they’re going to try to auction off the rights to Pleo, but there’s no guarantee that the poor critter will ever be made again.
Pleo has always been a favorite over here at CrunchGear, so we put together a little goodbye tribute video in case the adorable robosaurus is indeed extinct. → Read More
Seeing the explosion in growth of Twitter right now, it’s pretty clear that the hot trend on the web is to have a service which acts as a central hub for information, and allows third-party sites and services to built on top of it. For most of its life, Facebook has been almost the exact opposite, insisting that developers work from within its walls to keep much of the data — and the users — there. Tomorrow, it looks like Facebook may be knocking down its dam to let its streams of data flow more freely.
Facebook is expected to announce that third-parties will now have access to data from the site that was previously unavailable, before an event set to take place at 4PM PST tomorrow. The Wall Street Journal has a few of the details, including that developers should be able to access the all-important photos and videos that users upload. Apparently, these third-party developers, assuming they get users’ permission to use this data, could build their own sites and services with some of it. → Read More
The Wall Street Journal is reporting Facebook will open up most if not all of their user-contributed data to developers at a developer event tomorrow. This has been long expected and will likely trigger a wave of third-party integration of Facebook streams with other popular feeds, most notably that of Twitter. Should players such as Seesmic Desktop and FriendFeed roll out an integrated service, we will be a major step closer to a single stream of realtime events. This in turn will rapidly accelerate a convergence around micromessaging similar to the one around email when it achieved a critical mass following AOL’s opening up of the limited educational and government mail systems to average users. Already the emotional reaction to the possibility of a swine flu pandemic has pushed Facebook back into the spotlight as people contact their family and friends over the private/public channel. While trying to track down a friend I missed chatting with this weekend at a live performance, someone used Facebook chat to ask what I thought about a Flu Emergency preparation list he’d compiled. Events were moving so fast that he published it before I could respond, but the tools will prove superior to Twitter direct messages, which have been intermittent in recent days according to some reports. While Twitter has tremendous advantages for newbies, the depth of Facebook and FriendFeed is more and more valuable as we rely on these networks for fail-over instant communications. FriendFeed’s realtime direct messages will likely be duplicated in short order by Facebook, and the opportunity for meshing Facebook and Twitter together will prove irresistible to the hot Twitter client market, what with Tweetie for the Mac synchronizing with its leading iPhone app. The debate on the network is between Dave WIner, who sees a thousand Twitters, and Jason Calacanis who says Twitter is dialtone. Tomorrow’s announcement suggests something between those two views, with a single aggregated feed managed by two or more of the players in a distributed cross-licensing model. Twitter will continue to own the celebrity growth, but those who look to harness this realtime platform for business and personal networking will quickly adopt the more powerful tools now available at FriendFeed and coming online from Facebook and perhaps Google. → Read More
Flip, makers of the Mino line of portable digital camcorders, have released the slightly less portable, but more capable Ultra HD. It’s chunkier than the Mino and has enough built-in storage that it can record a total of 2 hours of footage — the MinoHD records an hour of 720p to 4GB, so it’s a fair bet that the Ultra HD has 8GB inside. There aren’t any real specs available just yet, but I think we can suppose with some confidence that they’ll have updated the internal components to bring them up to level of the MinoHD. New video engine, possibly a better sensor, and all the other little tweaks. As for price, I’d put it at around $250, but that’s pure guesswork. → Read More
Remember that cool-looking little Android netbook-tablet we reported last week? Well, at the time, the only thing that seemed fishy about it was the price, and lo and behold that part has now changed. The $100 price point quoted was the wildest speculation, apparently, and the real cost will be a much more believable $250. → Read More
We hear of so many frivolous and petty lawsuits against (and from) Apple, it’s a bit weird to see one actually connect like this. A serious technical suit filed in 2007 alleged that Apple willfully violated a patent owned by Opti Inc. Apple did it’s darnedest, but in the end got their buns handed to them. → Read More
