It doesn’t have quite the same ring to it as go Google yourself, but now you can go Bing yourself. (Then again, Google took a few years to become a verb.). Bing, Microsoft’s latest effort to compete in search, is now live on a “preview” site. The key thing to pay attention to is the guided search assistance on the left and the different experiences for the travel, images, video, maps, news, and shopping tabs.
A few things to try: → Read More
Many believe the greatest potential of Twitter lies in its ability to perform real-time searches of various keywords. So when that functionality is delayed by some 3 hours, as it is right now, and has been throughout much of the night, with no explanation, you can imagine that users are going to get a little annoyed.
Go ahead, search for anything right now — a good example is for the word “the,” as it’s used in a ton of tweets. The most recent results you’ll find are from 3 hours ago. Not only does this badly impact my vanity searches, but there are companies who now rely on Twitter Search to run services such as brand management. Imagine the horror Comcast must be feeling right now not being able to see my tweets constantly bitching about their crap service in real-time. → Read More
Time sure does fly. It’s been a whole year since Devin and I popped our E3 cherries and we find ourselves back in LA for what is expected to be a return to glory for the Electronic Entertainment Expo. Not much going on today except for a few parties, but I did pass the convention center on my way to the hotel and noticed that Ubisoft and Sony dropped crazy money on signage. → Read More
Could a new Roomba be hitting the streets? Tipster Kason Jinkaid writes: Not sure if this excites you, but I heard from a Costco salesperson that they’re getting new Roombas “soon”, though that could mean months. They aren’t stocking the ones they’ve been carrying (model 550). Also Woot just sold off a bunch for 535s for ~$100 less than what they usually sell for, so are probably clearing out inventory. → Read More
Derrick Pitts, lead astronomer at Philadelphia’s Franklin Institute, talks about the telescope used in the Bloom Observatory. The 10-inch refractor telescope has been around since 1934, and was built by Carl Zeiss Jena and shipped over from Germany. → Read More
At this past week’s Google I/O event in San Francisco, Google brought a contraption it calls the “Holodeck,” for event-goers to experience. Basically, it’s a near-360 degree way to view Google Street View in fast motion, high definition video. Danny Sullivan posted a bunch of pictures of the thing earlier in the week.
Unfortunately, Google only allows it to show the area at and around the actual Google campus in Mountain View, as I’m sure it doesn’t want any legal complaint from those caught sunbathing in their backyards. Also, while it does zoom past the area where the Google Goats were kept, it unfortunately failed to catch any of them on tape. Luckily, I did that for you a few weeks ago. → Read More
Music service Last.fm, which was bragging about server uptime a week and a half ago, shuts its doors for the afternoon, claiming “datacenter temperature issues beyond our control” required them to go offline. The outage began around 12:30 pm PST, so we’re at two hours and counting. Updates are on their Twitter account. → Read More
Dell’s got a $60 price break on its 19-inch S1909WX LCD monitor, which brings it to $89 with free shipping. The monitor has a 1440×900 resolution, DVI and VGA inputs, 1000:1 contrast ratio, 300 cd/m2 brightness, and 5ms response time. → Read More
One thing I love about Facebook spokesperson Randi Zuckerberg – she says exactly what she thinks, and she isn’t afraid to use the power of Facebook to back up her opinions.
Mean bar bouncers can lose their Facebook pages (this was later retracted but remains funny). Meanwhile, Holocaust deniers are given a pass.
Now she’s taking on the Republican party, and the Republican party is fighting back.
At a Startup2Startup event last week Zuckerberg talked about her experiences at the Republican and Democratic presidential conventions last year.
“At the Democratic national convention we were like rock stars,” Zuckerberg said. “At the Republican national convention I sat in my hotel room by myself for three days, no one would meet with us, I was like begging people to meet with us.” Randi also recounts a conversation on a plane where a Berkeley professor calls Zuckerberg “you’re like the most powerful person in the world.”
The video is below: → Read More
When Fotonauts debuted at last year’s TechCrunch50, I called it a “gorgeous photopedia” because it promised to turn your photo albums into collaborative Web pages about different topics and subjects. Fotonauts is a desktop photo client which helps you tag, organize, and share your photos in a live feed, and is still in private beta. But you can see a glimpse of what the Web-facing version will look like at Fotopedia, which just soft-launched. A message at the top of the page states: “Fotopedia, a sneak peek. This site is an in-progress read-only preview of what we are going to launch in a few days.”
One of the features of Fotonauts which has yet to be turned on is the ability to turn any photo album into a Web page, complete with tags, associated Wikipedia entry, and Google map information where available. Fotopedia showcases some of the same public albums you can see in the Fotonauts client, plus it adds a few twists. Each photo can be voted up or down or flagged as inappropriate. There is an Encyclopedia tab, which shows albums by topic/tag. For instance, you can see albums about Volcanos, butterflies, or Venice. → Read More
Facebook will soon be allowing all users to claim a vanity URL pointing to their regular profile page, we’ve heard from a reliable source. The announcement should come sometime later this week. Afterwards, at a certain date and time, the landrush will begin. Users will be able to grab a vanity URL of their choice.
The Landrush rules will prohibit trademark infringement and a lots of words will be blacklisted, such as generic terms. But for the most part, we hear, users will be able to grab a name that they like.
Facebook has been toying with vanity URLs for some time. URLs for user profiles are currently user id numbers – such as facebook.com/profile.php?id=500065899 (that’s me). In March some Facebook pages started rolling out with vanity URLs, although you must have a business relationship with Facebook (or know someone there) to get one. Facebook.com/techcrunch, for example, links to our TechCrunch page. → Read More
China Mobile, you’re doing it wrong. TelecomAsia reported that China Mobile, the world’s largest mobile phone operator, wants a big slice of the app revenue pie. Real big. They seek nothing less than 50% of all revenue generated by mobile apps from third-party developers. That’s considerably larger than the likes of Apple and Google’s Android, which both limit their cut to 30% of the generated income from app sales. China Mobile, moreover, hasn’t figured out how to build incentive for developers to focus on their products, so taking such a big cut is a slap in the face at best. China Mobile is opening their store-front to all of their mobile operating systems, aside from the iPhone, which has exclusivity with Apple’s market. The people of China can expect to see an empty marketplace when it launches on their phones in September of this year. [Via TelecomAsia, Picture Via net_efekt] → Read More
I know what you’re thinking: $20 is far too much for a skewer. And normally I’d agree with you, except that this skewer is called the “Swashbuckling BBQ Sword” and features a handsome fencing grip. → Read More
Yes, Twitter is down. Yes, again. Yes, they’re looking into it. Yes, this is another Twitter post. But, I come bearing gifts. Spymaster, the somewhat controversial and addictive Twitter-based game obviously doesn’t work nearly as well when Twitter is down. In fact, it doesn’t work at all. The creators have made a fun little Fail Whale graphic of their own, indicating the the game will be down until Twitter comes back up.
“The Directorate can’t assassinate the failwhale,” the message on the site reads. Funny, but this is a serious problem for a growing number of services that are built using Twitter as their backbone. Even FriendFeed looks like a ghost-town right now with no Twitter messages coming in. → Read More
We’re less than a week away from the launch of the supposed next “iPhone killer,” the Palm Pre. The iPhone has miraculously survived a few of these attempts on its life before — it somehow weathered the BlackBerry Storm, and before that, the G1 was going to be the device the did it in. The G1 was compelling because it was the first phone to run Google’s Android operating system. But as a piece of hardware (made by HTC), it sucked. You know it, I know, even Google employees will admit it. And that’s why I was at first less than thrilled when I heard Google would be giving away Android phones to everyone at the Google I/O event a few days ago. But it turns out, they weren’t giving away G1s, but rather that device’s successor, which they call the “Google Ion,” though some know it better as the HTC Magic, or even as the “G2.” And it was a brilliant move by Google, because this device is leaps and bounds better than the G1.
Mostly setting aside the software itself — the Ion runs the new “Cupcake” variety of Android, aka Android 1.5 — the hardware that HTC has built this time around is much, much better. First of all, the thing just looks a lot nicer. It’s fairly sleek, almost iPhone-like, compared to the G1, which looked like a dull black plastic brick with a protruding chin at the bottom. The Ion is smaller, it’s thinner, the camera is nicer, the buttons are nicer, hell, even that stupid trackball that HTC insists on including is nicer. Most importantly though, it’s much more usable as a device. And we can thank one thing for that, as well as for much of its much improved design: The removal of the physical keyboard. → Read More
As my better half says, “Only in the South.” Have you guys seen these e-ciggy kiosks in malls around your neck of the woods? If you’ve never seen one of these things then check out John’s review of the SuperSmoker Blue. → Read More
Bad news for Portland-based Open-ID startup Vidoop (as well as Vidoop partners like AOL, MySpace and Flock): it’s apparently out of business. Earlier this month the company announced layoffs, but based on an email string that was forwarded to us, the company is now “officially out of business” and winding down.
From CEO Joel Norvell to Vidoop insiders, where he says that the company has no funds to pay wages or other liabilities, and that employees are being offered computers in lieu of wages: → Read More
Life is not easy for search engine startups. FIrst, it’s hard to create something that doesn’t fall flat against Google. Too much hype (Google Killer!), whether the company drives it or not, inevitably leads to disappointment.
Cuil is walking dead, for example, and Wikia Search is just dead. Other ambitious projects like SearchMe are dealing with tepid user enthusiasm, and Wolfram Alpha’s over-hype has cost it credibility.
Any search engine startup with a shred of common sense wouldn’t want to create a lot of hype about itself before launching. There are too many dead bodies lying around to prove how badly that strategy works.
But on the other hand: ambitious startups need to hire talented engineers, and they need lots of money. Crawling and indexing the web is expensive and requires thousands of servers. Those servers aren’t free. So there needs to be at least a little awareness of the startup out there for hiring and fundraising purposes. → Read More
