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
On Friday, during a Congressional hearing on the Obama Administration’s proposal for a cap-and-trade system to curb greenhouse gases, Al Gore had to defend his honor. Marsha Blackburn, the Republican Congresswoman from Gore’s home state of Tennessee, questioned his motivations behind supporting the proposal because of his investments in green startups through his role at Kleiner Perkins, where he is a partner. (Watch the video after the jump).
She didn’t seem to know too much about Kleiner Perkins other than that it is a “capital firm” and that it has invested “$1 billion in 40 companies that are going to benefit from cap-and-trade legislation,” or at least that is what she gathered from an old New York Times Magazine article. “Are you aware of that company?” she asked him.
Then she asked Gore if he stood to personally benefit financially from these investments, and that set him off: → Read More
Earlier today, the U.S. declared a public health emergency over the Swine Flu, after confirming 20 cases of the flu spreading to humans in New York, Ohio, Kansas, Texas and California. More than 80 people have died in Mexico from the disease, which has potentially spread to other countries, including Canada and France. Although Federal officials are urging Americans not to panic about the disease, fear of contracting the potentially deadly flu is quickly spreading over Twitter, Google, and blogs across the web.
Swine Flu is the top trending topic on Twitter at the moment, with users rapidly tweeting about the latest news about the disease, including whether it has spread to other states, the Center for Disease Control’s announcement, etc. → Read More
A spam-less Twitter feed might just be too good to be true. Spam is becoming an increasing problem on Twitter and something has to be done to separate the wheat from the chaff. Spammers are using Twitter as a tool by replying to your @username, which then causes the Tweets to show up in your timeline. There isn’t really a way to filter Twitter spam directly from a Twitter client. But there may be soon.
Loic Le Meur has proposed to add a “report as spam” button to the Twitter desktop clients his company has created, Twhirl and Seesmic Desktop. This button would flag the spammer to Twitter (or to a separate database of users) and Seesmic or Twhirl could then exclude the spammer from its client apps after a sufficient number of users report them as spam. Le Meur also says that the clients would manually check the potential spammers to ensure that they are actually spammers. → Read More
The Cloud is looming large, offering us ways to store and share our data in ways that were never before possible. We can effortlessly share our documents and photos with our families and friends, while maintaining control over their spread using powerful granular privacy controls. But it’s quickly becoming clear that the cloud isn’t ready for us. Because the services we rely on are letting us down with a frequency that is simply unacceptable.
I’ve been putting this post off for a while, mostly because I didn’t want to point to a single breach and call it a trend. But in only the last two months, we’ve covered at least three major web services that suffered security lapses tied to software bugs or scaling issues. In our posts covering these problems, one of our commentors will inevitably say something along the lines of, “that’s what you get for uploading your data to X service“. And the more problems I see, the more I’m beginning to agree with them.
For a recap, let’s revisit some of the problems we’ve recently seen.
In March I wrote about a bug in Google Docs that would share your files with people whom you’d never given access to. Granted, it would only share these files with contacts you’d previously interacted with, and not the entire world, but this did little to ameliorate the issue – in some cases it would be better to share a supposedly private document with a stranger than a coworker. → Read More
The idea behind Google Earth has always been a powerful one: It allows users to explore places that they either can’t or won’t go. But with its vast amount of maps and topographical data, it also is a very powerful tool for combing the Earth — and that can be very useful when you’re searching for something. Which is exactly how it helped a grieving family find a plane that crashed, and took the lives of loved ones, that had been missing for over two years.
Despite countless time spent searching all the areas in Arizona that authorities and the family thought the plane might have gone down, there had been no luck all this time in finding the plane. Then, something rather incredible happened. A person who had also been involved in the attempts to find millionaire adventurer Steve Fossett, found a picture of a forest fire that had been taken the same day as the crash and in what was thought to be a similar area. He alerted the family, which had set up a website to aid in the search. Remarkably, they were able to find the exact area in the picture using the different viewing angles and topographical data of Google Earth. → Read More
For the retro gaming fans out there, these clone systems are making a lot of dreams come true. The FC3 system, for example, plays NES, SNES, and Genesis games, for only like $60. And this sweet portable NES, which uses actual NES cartridges, has the added bonus of wireless controllers and a Zapper as accessories. Of course it’s got a TV-out; you’d look pretty silly aiming a light gun at this little thing. → Read More
The web is filled with video content, but there are different formats that don’t always play nicely with all players. The most obvious example of this is the hugely popular Flash format, which does not work on the hugely popular iPhone. EQ Network has an answer for that and other format issues, and wants to offers content owners a way to serve up ads in those video post-conversion.
The company’s Media Delivery Bar can be embedded on a page below any video player. This gives viewers an easy-to-understand option for converting and sending a video to a specific type of device they may want to watch the video on — like an iPhone. You simply enter an email address or cellphone number that you want to send the video to, fill out some quick demographic information, and within a few minutes, the video will arrive in a format tailored to your needs. → Read More
Well, we had a good run. The Renaissance, going to the Moon, inventing the Snuggie… but all that’s done now. World of Warcraft is no longer restricted to home and laptop use. Its grip on humanity will be total. Penny Arcade was remarkably prescient in this case; I wonder who Satan (who is the devil) is working for right now? Could Apple, could be Blizzard, or maybe he’s just freelancing. Now there will be no reason to log off for the poor souls whose evenings are already consumed in questing and raiding. → Read More
