Short Version: This good-looking, small internet radio receiver has the potential to fit right in with your home audio equipment. But those looking for a portable streaming audio device will want to look elsewhere, as the Myine Ira Wi-Fi Internet Radio is tied to its remote control and doesn’t feature built-in speakers. → Read More
It’s been just one month since email startup Xobni got an investment from the Blackberry Partners Fund, which brought its total B round up to $10 million, and already it has a working prototype for an upcoming Blackberry app. Xobni executives were showing off the app at a Mobile Meetup in San Francisco last night, and the screenshot above found its way into my inbox (which is “xobni” spelled backwards, you know).
The app was working, and could be released sometime this summer, according to my source. The photo above shows the app on a Blackberry Bold, and appears to be showing off its contact search functionality. You type in a few letters, and it returns the contact information for every match in your inbox (even people who you haven’t necessarily added to your address book yet). I wonder what else it can do. → Read More
Good news, BlackBerry users! Never again will you need to kludge around in your browser just to dig up a number or determine who’s behind the number that just called. Following the success of their iPhone and Android applications, WhitePages will soon be announcing the upcoming availability of a native BlackBerry application. It’ll still be a few days before the app makes its way to the BlackBerry App World, but we’ve been tinkering with a pre-release copy for a few days now. → Read More
Will the Internet run out of bandwidth? That’s the concern expressed by an upcoming study, and it could mean the end of the Internet as we know it. Uselessly slow Web sites (think: YouTube, Hulu), Internet “brownouts” (“please wait: processing request”), and general mayhem could be the norm in just a few years’ time. So let’s freak out about it. → Read More
For the past several weeks, plenty of my friends have had the new Twitter interface featuring both Search and Trending Topics on the main page, but I had yet to see it. Today, I log in to see that I’m finally special enough to get it as well — only to learn that it’s now officially been rolled out to everyone.
Say hello to the new Twitter.com, it’s a lot like the old one, but with the two important features. Search works great because it’s all done on the page without any reloads. And perhaps the most useful feature is that you can save searches that you do over and over again. Also included in the right hand sidebar is Trending Topics, which keeps track of the hot items people are searching for across Twitter. Not surprisingly, right now Swine Flu takes up the top two spots, with Mexico a little below it. → Read More
I don’t generally check to see what’s new in apps when I’m prompted to update, but I’m glad I did. The latest Google app update put a ninja into your iPhone. We’re all doomed. → Read More
Earlier in the month, we reported ArcSoft’s SimHD technology, a video enhancement technology that supposedly could take DVD quality video and make it into passable 1080p. At the time, we were understandably skeptical, especially since the claims were accompanied by images that were extremely easy to fake. But SimHD rolled with it and just recently sent us this little reel showing off the tech in HD. And it looks like I was wrong. → Read More
With more than 15 billion photos (and 60 billion image files with replication for different sizes), Facebook eats up a lot of storage with its photo application alone. Members are adding 220 million new photos every week. Facebook currently has more than 1.5 petabytes of storage for its photos, and that is growing at a rate of 25 terabytes a week. Last year, Facebook spent an estimated $30 million on NetApp storage appliances alone just to keep up with the growth of photos and other uploaded content. To reduce some of these costs, Facebook decided to engineer its own storage architecture called Haystack.
Now more details have emerged about how that system actually looks and works. In a nutshell, Haystack will allow Facebook to switch from expensive, commercial storage appliances to commodity off-the shelf hardware. It is going from a traditional network file system to something more akin to stripped-down network application that does only what it needs to do. Not only will Facebook get the cost savings of going commodity, but they also get a 3X improvement in storage capacity. In other words, what used to take 30 discs to store, now will take only 10. → Read More
I’ll admit it. I’m a sweat-hog. My palms have been sweating since childhood – I remember dreading the “sign of peace” handshake during mass at Catholic school – and I am 100% it’s mostly mental at this point but I still can’t shake it. So tomorrow I’m going to get Botox treatment, which apparently works for about 9 months. My CrunchQuestion is this – how did you treat your sweaty palms? Have you tried this weird iontophoresis technique? There’s a video after the jump. → Read More
After 15 years at Microsoft, Richard Theversam has left his role as senior director of business, insights and strategy. Theversam accepted an education-related role at Apple’s European office. Between 2005 and 2007, Theversam was the director for platform and marketing for Xbox. → Read More
BuddyPress, the side project of blogging powerhouse WordPress, has just hit version 1.0 and has officially launched. It’s basically a social layer that you can lay on top of your WordPress (MU — more on that below) blog to give it some of the social network features that you’re already familiar with from larger social networking sites.
Here’s what version 1.0 features: Extended profile, private messaging, friends, groups, “the wire,” activity stream, blog tracking and forums. Yes, that’s a lot of stuff in a first version — and it looks great (see the screenshots below). All of these features should be relatively straightforward from their names, except “the wire,” which is basically like your Wall on Facebook. People can go to that area and leave messages. → Read More
Are you a big Tekken fan? Want to win the swag I got from the Namco Gamers Day event? What’s up for grabs: one Xbox 360 Kazuya Mishima face plate and one Tekken sticker poster. → Read More
This afternoon Charles River Ventures partner George Zachary is sitting down for a one on one interview with Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla whose other credentials include cofounding SpaceX and PayPal. The interview promises to be an interesting one – Musk hasn’t been known to pull any punches. Michael, who is attending the event, is streaming it live using Qik. http://qik.com/swfs/qikPlayer4.swf → Read More
Japan has a thing for face masks. In the summer, people wear them because of those nasty allergies. In the winter, it’s an anti-flu measure (although most Japanese people wear them in order not to infect others. Yes, they are that nice. → Read More
If you thought that $300 for the ESPN Ultimate Remote was a tad too high when it was announced about a year ago, the invisible hand of supply and demand agrees with you. They’re now going for just over $100, which seems far more reasonable. → Read More
Newegg’s little “here’s a few ‘deals’ you might enjoy” e-mail just showed up in my inbox. It’s about games. There’s a few deals you might enjoy. → Read More
Travel guides are a dime a dozen on the web. But for the most part, they’re not very conducive to really exploring – it’s not much fun to click through various guides to get a feel for where you’d like to visit, because each guide is loaded with a wall of text. Ruba, a new travel site that launches today, is looking to offer users a way to visually browse through cities and their attractions around the world, offering photo-rich guides and an emphasis on making it easy to quickly discover new locations.
The site is headed by Mike Cassidy, who has founded a number of successful companies, including Xfire, which sold to Viacom in 2006 for $102 million. Cassidy says that his team has worked to create a very clean site that is very snappy and easy to casually browse through, with a strong technical emphasis placed on search. Rather than ask users to tag the guides they create, the search engine identifies keywords in their descriptions and titles. And while this can be prone to false positives, in the demo I saw it seemed to work quite well (a search for ‘kids london’ resulted in guides like “Top 5 Things To Do With Kids In London” and “The London Aquarium”). → Read More
San Francisco, CA
