Reader Arman bought a Candino C4372_5, a “Swiss-Made” quartz with a bit of a problem. Can you spot it? The model seems to be a few years old which clearly gives the company a bit of leeway in what kind of garbage it can sell its customers. Arman hasn’t heard back from Candino and I doubt he will. → 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 about 7pm. All those Finns in favor, please email me at john@crunchgear.com with the subject line “RSVP HELSINKI.” 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
Most web application developers have been there: your monitoring system shows nothing but green lights, yet the app is down or not functioning the way it should. Traditional web monitoring services often don’t dig deep enough to detect glitches in the application code, and database or find that problems arise with bugs in Ajax, Flash or Silverlight front-end applets.
German startup iOpus is today unveiling the public beta of a product it claims offers a solution for many a developer or website owner who would like their monitoring services taken up a notch. Enter AlertFox. (free Pro accounts for 100 TC readers)
What AlertFox does is provide in-depth monitoring of rich internet applications (RIAs), offering a potential solution for many SaaS and Web 2.0 web service providers out there who are not satisfied with a simple uptime checker that only provides superficial information without detecting the root cause of problems. AlertFox runs directly from the browser (with support for both Firefox and Internet Explorer) and is capable of keeping tabs on the functioning and performance of sites built with ActiveX, AJAX, Flash, Flex, complex HTML or Silverlight technology. → Read More
I may not listen to a lot of Zappa but his section in this excellent video essentially describes what’s wrong with the music industry these days: presumed familiarity with the market. When there was no feedback and no real understanding of demographics, you were able to experiment. Now, with the granularity available from modern data gathering techniques you have a set of executives who know they don’t have to move too far off of a median of “music that sells” to make money.
Then there are the rest of the guys in this video, including Chuck D, who are all riffing on this initial concept. Even Dick Dale has some great advice. Amazing stuff. → Read More
Apps on the iPhone are huge. We know that. As if we needed more proof, Apple moved its billionth app earlier this afternoon. But some recent data from Compete suggests that smartphone owners who don’t have an iPhone, apparently don’t love apps. Or at least, don’t download them.
If you look at the graph below, you’ll see that iPhone owners are very diversified in the number of apps they download. Some have only 1-5, some 6-10, some over 31 (that’s me — several times over), etc. But look at the other phones surveyed. A lot of them haven’t downloaded any apps. And those that don’t have zero, seem to prefer downloading only 1-5. → Read More
DVICE has an excellent video showing the difference between text-to-speech and what us humans call “neurons-to-speech.” As evidenced by this brief scene from Blade Runner, acted out by an iPod Shuffle and a Kindle 2, we find that the Authors Guild is as crazy as a sack of beetles in a windstorm.
TTS hasn’t improved for one good reason: the human voice is just fine for reading out text and through the use of simple synthesis – Garmin, for example, uses a nice Australian woman to synthesize everything its GPS devices have to say – you can say almost anything you want. Although you’ll get a few clinkers in there where the software can’t quite translate a phoneme, it’s mostly correct. → Read More
Time is a funny thing. Sometime you need to know exactly what time it is, and sometimes you really don’t care. For the times that you don’t care, a clock that tells you roughly what time it is more desirable then a perfectly accurate digital clock. → Read More
GPS manufacturer Navteq says it does. They recently released the results of a study that they had commissioned that show that drivers that have a navigation system used less fuel on an annual basis then drivers that don’t. → Read More
The Samsung Spring lineup we went over at the end of March was apparently incomplete. As it turns out, the Korean electronics giant has one more trick up its corporate sleeve, and it’s actually quite a sexy one. But far from cheap, I’m guessing.
The leaked 9000 series of HDTVs will do everything the high-end 8000 series does (240Hz, Internet@TV, various sort so media decoding), but with one less set of wires. Yes, it will have wireless capability built-in, and you’ll be able to stream your music and movies and so on from a box somewhere out of sight. It also will have what’s known as local LED dimming. → Read More
I’m not a big fan of the folding bikes because they can never fold small enough or go fast enough for my taste. But I totally see where they could be useful, and some of the engineering is pretty cool. Unfortunately, this cool one has a bit of a design flaw in that stopping it is like getting kicked in the berries.
But is that a deal-breaker as well as a… well, you know. → Read More
If all these games are really going for $10 each, you better take out some loans. Sure, I expect stuff like Petz Crazy Monkeys and Shrek Carnival Craze to go for that much, but Soul Calibur 4? Fracture? Not bad at all.
Head on through for the full listing. → Read More
Sony in Japan has announced the Walkman E-series [JP], which (technically) looks pale compared to the recently unveiled OLED touchscreen Walkman, but can score with some interesting designs. The USB stick-type player will be available with 2GB (NW-E042), 4GB (NW-E043), or 8GB (NW-E044) internal memory and in a total of 10 different colors. → Read More
When you hear the name Alienware, most people think of a high-end machine with some funky styling and a premium price. Alienware is trying to shake this image, however, and they are taking a giant step in that direction with the new M17 notebook. → Read More
Location-based services haven’t yet caught fire, but location itself is increasingly finding its way to web services as a complimentary feature. The latest to use it is the Google Toolbar. If you have it installed, and open Google Maps, it will now auto-center on your location.
That’s a small, but useful feature, but the ramifications of this move are potentially much large. This adds location capabilities to the millions of people who have Google Toolbar installed. You may be thinking that a lot of those users with the latest version of Firefox already had it — but this feature is for Internet Explorer only right now. That, combined with Mozilla’s use of its Geode location plug-in (which again, is built into the latest version of Firefox), puts location on a good percentage of browsers in the world. → Read More
It’s over! Here’s to another billion. And here’s to the hopeful billion-app would-be multitudes: Android Marketplace, Blappworld, Marketplace for Mobile, and all the rest. Live long and prosper. → Read More
The OLPC project, Hydra-like in its many initiatives, has given birth to a new project, focused on making an extremely versatile display with multiple modes, allowing consolidation of technology and (one hopes) reduction of total cost. After all, if a device is being used as an e-book, it shouldn’t be using TV technology to display the text; it’s both wasteful and less effective. So PixelQi is working on creating a display that’s good enough to work as both a high-definition LCD and a high-contrast e-paper surface as well. → Read More
A wrap-up post collating lots of feedback and thoughts by people who attended Geek’ n Rolla is coming. But one of the most hotly debated issues since the conference on Tuesday has been the panel about Women in Tech, specifically tech startups. Here’s who was on the panel and the original title: 11.50am Panel: Just a girl – Balancing Tech Culture: Getting more women involved in tech startups Moderator: Cate Sevilla, BitchBuzz Panellists: Leisa Reichelt, User experience consultant Sophie Cox, Worldeka.com Paul Walsh, OpenSoho (startups networking event) & Entrepreneur Zuzanna Pasierbinska-Wilson, Huddle.net Nacera Benfedda, Director of Product, Viadeo First some background about why I put this panel together: A long time ago I was a journalist covering the media industry. That business sector was (and is) full of women, probably even over 50%. It is full of smart women contributing to a vibrant industry. I then moved on to writing about new media. In the mid-1990s, admittedly, there were more men than women generally, as it was a more male/geeky environment then. That changed and I would say that the “new media” sector is pretty balanced these days. But over the last few years I have headed profoundly into the tech space and I have been puzzled at the dearth of women involved. It really doesn’t make a lot of sense to me to be honest, and from time to time it pops up in conversations on and off-line. Plus, I think it’s something tech startups should address, not because they are inherently sexist – far from it I would say – but there are huge advantages to be had from tapping into this relatively untapped talent. And sometimes male-led tech startups don’t really *think*. For instance, they will get the cheapest office they can find in the most dangerous part of town and then wonder why they can’t attract any female candidates for that job opening… So I felt we needed to discuss it. After consulting with lots of people and consulting with the chair, Cate Sevilla, we decided to put the debate slap bang in the middle of a fairly mainstream event for tech companies – GeeknRolla. We could have put it on as a standalone event. But we figured that would just be alienating the subject even further. It needed to be debated by men and women, broadly. In hindsight we should have balanced the panel with → Read More
Good Data, a startup founded in the Czech Republic and with headquarters in San Francisco, has closed a second round of financing – $2.5 million from Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz, OATV and General Catalyst. The company has now raised a total of around $4.5 million in capital.
You don’t see a lot of startups coming out of Eastern Europe, and even fewer who receive Silicon Valley capital. But founder Roman Stanek is an exception and a highly fundable individual. He sold his first startup, NetBeans, to Sun for $10 million and his second, Systinet, to Mercury Interactive/HP for $105 million. And like his previous startups, Stanek has perfected the running of a tech company with operations in both the U.S. and Prague.
Good Data is disrupting a highly lucrative multi-billion dollar market – data analytics. This is a sector dominated by huge software companies like IBM (via their Cognos acquisition), SAP (via Business Objects) and Oracle (via Hyperion). Companies pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for the software, plus large yearly maintenance fees. And now Good Data is offering a cloud based solution. For free. → Read More
San Francisco, CA
