Oh, cats. Will you ever cease being entertaining? Your feline antics are irresistible. Here we have a common house cat that seems perplexed and/or horrified by the noises its owner’s printer is making. I’ve never liked that little eet-eet noise either, but at least it doesn’t make me convulse. That would have been embarrassing in middle school. → Read More
Last month, Douglas Bowman, the design lead at Google, left to become the creative director at Twitter. Today, a former co-worker joins him. Dustin Diaz, who was an engineer working on Gmail, resigned from Google and announced he was taking a job at Twitter, on Twitter.
“It’s kind of shocking we couldn’t keep him,” another Googler tells us, calling Diaz “one of the best frontend developers around.” But of course, Twitter is the hot new company, just like Facebook was months back when it was stealing employees left and right from larger companies — like Google. → Read More
Dropbox, the Y Combinator and Sequoia-funded file synchronization startup that makes it easy to share files across multiple computers at once, just hit a major milestone: it now has over 1 million members. And as the graph below shows, much of that growth has come in the last few months, with over 900,000 signups since the product’s public debut at TechCrunch50 last September.
We don’t hear about Dropbox too often (it seems that they’re a bit too secretive for their own good at times), but their product rocks, and is gaining fans quickly. We’ve been using it around the TechCrunch office for over a year now to collaborate on group projects and keep key files handy regardless of which computer we’re using. And we’re not alone – I often hear about other startups that are using Dropbox for their own projects, including Facebook’s Dave Morin. → Read More
Why are you still here? Are you insane? You read the headline! Get over to Steam and buy, buy, buy! Half-Life 2 and its two episodes so far, the Lost Coast, Portal, and Team Fortress 2 for ten freaking dollars, are you kidding me? Come on! → Read More
If you’ve traveled enough, there’s a good chance you’ve lost your luggage before. Sure, it’s annoying as hell, but most people get it back within a few days. However, some people, for whatever reason, never claim their lost luggage, and the airlines then auction it off for charity. That’s where isthisyourluggage.com comes in.
The site, run by some anonymous person, collects this auctioned off luggage, and takes pictures of it to put on the site. Yes, this person opens the lugguage, takes out all of the items, and photographs them. Yes, this is creepy. → Read More
Here’s an interesting debate that’ll help kill the remaining Friday hours. When you take an old game, upgrade its textures, increase its resolution, and, generally speaking, make it look “better,” do you lose something in the process? Is the game that you played, (presumably) that you enjoyed, now worse for wear? → Read More
digg_url = ‘http://digg.com/apple/Show_Your_Best_Talent_Win_a_Ton_of_iPhone_Apps’; Last week, we held an absolutely massive iPhone App Giveaway spree. Over a span of about 12 hours, we gave away hundreds and hundreds of promo codes across 50+ different iPhone applications. It was a blast, but all good things must come to an end – but it’s not over just yet. Throughout the competition, we hung on to one promo code for each app. We’ve taken all of these promo codes and put them together, forming one ridiculously huge omega-prize. One lucky person is going to take home a copy of every application we gave away that day – plus more. That’s dozens upon dozens of applications, worth hundreds of dollars in all. → Read More
Last month, the social network hi5 cut a large percentage of its staff following a new round of funding that didn’t materialized. Now, the self-dubbed “world’s leading social entertainment web site” is getting a new leader at the top. Bill Gossman, formerly the CEO of the online advertising service Audience Science, is taking over as CEO of Hi5. Grossman was brought in by Hi5′s largest shareholder Mohr Davidow Ventures, where Grossman was a former partner and is a current executive in residence.
In the release (below) you can read between the lines to see where Hi5 is looking to head as it continues on at a smaller size. The site, is now focusing on forms of entertainment like casual gaming and micro-payments. Hi5 also recently partnered with Paymo to power mobile payments for virtual goods. Gossman, who obviously has experience in monetization, will now try to monetize hi5. The company’s former CEO, founder Ramu Yalamanchi, will stay on and take the roll of Chief Product Officer. → Read More
Quick Version: In short, the FreeAgent Theater HD Media Player Solution from Seagate was made for a caveman if cavemen been around in 1999 when people actually used the DivX codec and only used Windows machines. Not to be completely unfair, but if you’re an avid reader of CrunchGear or a savvy BitTorrenter then this definitely isn’t what you’re looking for. → Read More
When it was first unveiled in March, Wolfram Alpha, a new type of search engine created by computer scientist Stephen Wolfram, got a lot of buzz. Naturally, some people threw out the “Google killer” title — but it seems to be a different beast, as it’s all about knowledge search. That is to say, you ask a question, and you get an answer — with Google, you ask a question and you get a link to a bunch of documents. That may sound a bit bland, and simplistic, but the select few who have seen it, seem to think it works really well and could be a game changer.
The rest of us won’t know for sure until May, when it’s scheduled to launch. But if you want to catch a glimpse of how it will work, the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard is hosting a webcast on Tuesday of an event with Wolfram and Jonathan Zittrain, a law professor at Harvard. The sold-out event will be streamed live on the web at 3PM EST this coming Tuesday on this page. → Read More
AOL has a new content site in open beta called Love.com – it’s been live since early this month but hasn’t attracted any press attention to date. AOL hasn’t announced it, and it isn’t linked to from any other AOL properties. But it’s already a vast site covering 350,000 topics that attracts 100,000 unique visitors a week through search engine links and word of mouth on Twitter, Facebook and other sites.
The site has a home directory at love.com, and topic sites are organized under subdomains. Current content on literally anything you can think of (or at least that I could think of) is there: dogs, The Beatles, sex, money, rock and roll. Hamsters. Barack Obama. You get the picture. Search engines love this stuff.
The site is built under Bill Wilson’s new MediaGlow division, which is building new content brands distinct from AOL itself. The content is all automated, with main articles pulled from third party sources via Relegence, videos from YouTube, Twitter messages linking back to individual pages, and links to major news sites. All of this is automated and requires very little human involvement. → Read More
Remember modems? No, not cable modems or DSL modems, which are more technically network bridges. I’m talking real, honest-to-goodness analog modems, the kind that actually made noise. The kind where, if you picked up the phone while you were connected to The Internet!, you’d hear warbling screeches and that nude picture of Samantha Fox that you were downloading would be ruined! Modem stands for “modulate / demodulate”, a name that perfectly describes how the modem works: the sending modem modulates data into sound for transmission over the phone, and the receiving modem demodulates that sound back into data. Guess what: you can use the same principles to transfer files between PCs using nothing more than a soundcard and some clever programming. → Read More
Just how big a task does MySpace’s freshly appointed CEO Owen Van Natta have in front of him? Let’s take a quick peek at the latest global traffic stats from comScore which just came out today. On a global basis, Facebook attracted more than twice as many visitors in the month of March as arch-rival MySpace.
Facebook had an estimated 294.7 million unique visitors in March, 2009 on a worldwide basis, compared to 125.7 million for MySpace. While Facebook gained 19 million visitors during the month, MySpace gained only 2 million. In terms of pageviews, MySpace has seen a drop of 20 percent since January (to 37.9 billion), whereas Facebook has seen growth of 22 percent in the exact opposite direction (to 87.3 billion). And while MySpace is still bigger in the U.S., Facebook is closing that gap fast. → Read More
Would you still consider your TV to be a necessity, or has its functionality largely been replaced by other devices such as your computer? Well, the largest number of Americans since 1973 no longer see television as a necessity. Only 54 percent of Americans think TV is a necessity these days. Not surprisingly, young people are least likely to call TV a necessity. → Read More
It was only a matter of time. Naked Pizza, a uniquely healthy pizza joint in New Orleans, has replaced its “call for delivery” billboard in favor of something a bit more unorthodox: its Twitter handle. The restaurant now features a large Twitter bird above its storefront, inviting passersby to follow ‘NAKEDpizza‘ for special deals.
Aside from being among the first brick and mortar businesses to so prominently feature its Twitter handle, Naked Pizza is notable for a few other reasons. Its menu was created to offer the “world’s healthiest pizza”, with each slice only weighing in at a fraction of the calories and fat of standard pizza, while still tasting delicious, according to Yelp reviewers . Oh, and Mark Cuban just partnered with the company to turn it into a national franchise. → Read More
Just saw this behavior today. This is on a stock iPhone running 2.x firmware, no funny business. The Calendar app just kept scrolling back and forth. Kind of funny. → Read More
Why is it that you can book a table at a fancy restaurant through OpenTable, but you can’t book the bar for a corporate party? That is the question that a startup in New York City called Pogby is trying to answer. Barely in beta, Pogby is an event booking service founded by Joshua Gooch, who used to run JetBlue’s Website and helped build its TrueBlue customer loyalty program. Pogby aims to become the OpenTable of events, where corporate event planners and others can find and book venues for parties.
The site is really not much more than an online demo right now, with only a half dozen venues in New York City on the site. But Gooch and his VP of sales Duane Lawrence plan to sign up 50 to 100 restaurants, bars, and other event spaces in short order. They are focusing on New York City to prove the concept. (This is really early stage—the company is still looking for seed funding). Each venue on Pogby gets its own page with pictures for each available event space, along with a calendar showing availability and a booking engine. Gooch knows a lot about reservation systems from his time at JetBlue, and you can see some of the design influences on Pogby.
it’s a fairly simple concept. Find a venue, check pricing and availability, and book online. Pogby plans to charge venues an 8 percent commission fee for any bookings and eventually will introduce a $99/month subscription fee. A typical event can cost $4,000 or more, and event spaces typically go unused 70 percent of the time. So any extra events a restaurant or venue can capture is worth the fees. Why hasn’t anyone done this already? → Read More
The race between actor Ashton Kutcher and CNN to a million Twitter followers at first seemed to be little more than an exercise in online vanity. But then it transformed into a race to help out a cause, Malaria No More, in a meaningful way. But really, why does anyone need a race to do that?
With that in mind, tomorrow, Kutcher, with his nearly 1.4 million followers, and Digg’s Kevin Rose, with his over 500,000 followers, along with other notable users plan to use to Twitter as a platform to further the cause. The message they will send out is simple: “Every 30 seconds a child dies from Malaria. Nets save lives. Support World Malaria Day = http://bit.ly/30Io8” → Read More
