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… → 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,”… → 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… → 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… → 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… → Read More
The world woke this morning to the sight of some of screens from the iPhone 3.0 firmware, proving that we must remain vigilant every single day until WWDC next week. Perhaps tomorrow we’ll see images of the iPhone’s biomimetic skin? → Read More
A screen in a public bicycle lending site in Zamora, Spain was hacked to display porn for hours and hours, resulting in loads of Iberian titters and even more Iberian… well. → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → Read More
The Franklin Institute in Philadelphia is currently running a Star Trek exhibit with all sorts of whimsical items from the various TV shows and movies. A few devices, in particular, look mighty familiar to present-day gadgets. → Read More
It never really dawned on me that Microsoft had a stranglehold on production of wireless Xbox 360 controllers. It just wasn’t something that I thought about when plunking down in front of the TV to play some video games. In any case, Mad Catz has scored the exclusive global rights to produce “Xbox 360-branded wireless specialty videogame controllers.” That’s great and all, but… → Read More
Here we go, friends. E3 is next week and Sony will be launching this UMD-less PSP Go with 16GB of memory. There’s even a freaking video out, after the jump. → Read More
ITV.com is leaping aboard the social media bandwagon to encourage realtime interaction around this afternoon’s FA Cup final between Everton and Chelsea FCs. The broadcaster has integrated updates from Twitter and our old friends AudioBoo in an FA Cup Buzz microsite. The site uses Twitterfall to keep track of tweets about the match, with an added enhancement; a tool developed by thruSITES… → Read More
And you thought the South Carolina v. Craigslist story was dead.
If anything sucks more than being the target of an ambitious but delusional gubernatorial candidate who has suddenly developed a bit of a fetish for prostitution, it’s being ignored by that candidate. As far as Village Voice sees the world, Craigslist just got a bunch of free press. And they want their share.
When Craigslist… → Read More
Warning: It appears that a worm has hit Twitter-the tweet will say “Best Video” with a link to “http://juste.ru.” If you see this in a tweet, do not click on the link. It’s unclear exactly how the worm is spreading. But from the look of Tweets about the virus, if you click on the link, you account could be compromised and spammed.
According to reports on Twitter, users who clicked the juste.ru… → Read More
Venture capitalists can be valuable sources of information about the tech community. Not only do they have quality insider information but they also have a knack for figuring out how to evaluate startups. So it makes sense that their blogs can be compelling reads.
Larry Cheng, a partner at Fidelity Ventures, has compiled a list of the 100 top VC blogs, according to the number of Google Reader… → Read More
When you’re on the road, passing time reading up on things online from your mobile phone, it can be quite a pain in the ass to bookmark articles for later or share them with others. Smub aims to change all that by debuting a web-based tool that you can access from anywhere and lets you easily bookmark and share stuff from your mobile browser without necessarily having to register for the… → Read More
Each Friday for the foreseeable future, we’ll be showcasing a handful of recently launched applications from the iPhone App Store. Generally, we’ll highlight the best apps to hit our inbox, shining a guiding light on the gems that might otherwise get lost in the endless torrent of app releases. Unfortunately, the best apps to hit our inbox this week .. really weren’t very good. Read. Comment. → Read More
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