Conservative political pundit Tucker Carlson is planning to launch a political news competitor to the Huffington Post, reports The Hill today. The site will be called TheDailyCaller.com and will be focused on reporting news about the Obama Administration but will add “facts to the conversation.”
Implying that the Huffington Post’s coverage is biased, Carlson said that The DailyCaller will be dedicated to “telling the truth and be accurate.” The site’s reporters will share in the profits of the news site based on how much traffic reporters get for their stories. According to Carlson the site’s motto is “every seven minutes,” and will be speedier than its competitors, including HuffPo and The Drudge Report. → Read More
Japan’s telecommunications giants NTT Docomo, KDDI au and SoftBank present new cell phones four times a year: spring, summer, fall and winter. All companies showcased their summer 2009 wares in the last few days, including some simply incredible devices.
The top 10 models across all carriers (chosen by yours truly) after the jump. → Read More
Announced back in January at CES, JVC announced today that the LT-42WX70 LCD “monitor” is now shipping for $2400. JVC is marketing the 42-inch LCD 1080p/120Hz HDTV in the hopes that it will snag photographers using a DSLR who might be shopping around for a high-end “monitor”. Sure, it displays 96 percent of the Adobe RGB spectrum and includes 52 image quality tweaks, but do photographers really need a 42-inch “monitor”? → Read More
For a service that is all about concise messaging, it’s humorous how the manner in which Twitter writes its blog posts is anything but. For the second time in as many days, we have yet another post today about the supposed Twitter TV show. This one is a clarification of the clarification from yesterday. It’s similar to how Twitter needed no less than 4 blog posts on one topic a few weeks ago to explain something (the changing of the @replies).
Here’s what the latest says: Twitter is not making a TV show. Instead, some “Hollywood folks” are, but Twitter has “little to do with their efforts but we wish them success,” Twitter co-founder Biz Stone clarifies. Of course, this is exactly what he said yesterday, as I outlined, but he said it in a very indirect way. So now we get a second post. The problem is that a massive number of Twitter users are still tweeting out that Twitter is basically developing its own show. The power of the retweet is keeping this story going. And now even CNN is covering super-celeb-user Ashton Kutcher threatening to boycott if they go through with it. → Read More
That Epic Games’ founder and CEO, Tim Sweeney, says that photo realistic games are only about 10-15 years away may be welcome news to some of you, but not to me. The whole point of playing video games is to escape the doldrums of everyday life. Fantastic settings, characters who can punch boulders at will, etc. The more realistic these games tend to be, the less interested I tend to be in them. → Read More
Contrary to popular belief, I was not a big fan of the movie adaption of the Watchmen, but I didn’t think it was terrible. Anyway, the Blu-ray Director’s Cut will include the The End is Nigh PS3 game, Parts 1 and 2 of Watchmen: The End is Nigh film hybrid as well as the Director’s Cut that includes 25 minutes of extra footage. → Read More
If we are to believe an iLounge tipster, this is what the next iPod nano will look like. The screen ratio will change from 1.33:1 to 1.5:1. the click wheel will be shifted down and shrunk a bit. And yes, it will have a camera. All this in a less scratchable plastic (eww, plastic) matte body. The same tipster states that this new nano will be released with the iPod touch which should be sometime between July and September. → Read More
Let’s say you’re going to Somalia for a family vacation, you know, just to get away from it all. Additionally, lets say you brought your Visa card for any transactions while you’re away, because cash is for suckers. But wait! When you go to buy that tiki-lamp that you haggled on for nearly an hour, you find that your bank has denied the purchase. Inconvenient? Sure. But how is your bank supposed to know it’s you buying a tiki-lamp, and not some high-profile identity theft extraordinaire? Ericsson, a Swedish-based mobile solutions company, wants to make the whole process a bit less kludgy. As stated by Peter Garside, U.K. and Ireland regional manager for Ericsson’s IPX, this service uses a person’s mobile phone to provide a confirmation that he or she is in the country where the transaction is occurring. Ericsson will play middle-man with charging and transferring funds from banks to the mobile networks using the service, keeping a fraction of the money involved. → Read More
PalmPreForum has about five hundred Palm Pre videos taken inside the Pre SDK emulator (OK, it’s really only 22). There you can see Google Maps, Copy & Paste, and even E-Mail in action, proving that given a video capture program and a little time you can create a world that revolves entirely around a phone.
The real goodies here are the Universal Search video and the phone behavior. The rest of the videos give you a fairly interesting look at a phone that will soon change the world. → Read More
Psystar put up good fight. The small company first released a $399 Mac clone little over a year ago followed by rackmount servers a little later. The company was eventually sued by Apple for using OS X on clone machines. But Psystar showed some backbone and sued Apple back . But even if Psystar had secret financial backing, the company just filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. → Read More
Editor’s note: This is a guest post by David Sacks, the Founder and CEO of Yammer and Geni. Previously he was the COO of PayPal and produced the Academy Award-nominated movie “Thank You For Smoking.” Sacks says he’s incorporating the retweet feature into Yammer, his “Twitter for the enterprise” product that launched at TechCrunch50 last year.
While there are many new features that Twitter could launch, the most powerful are likely to be based on behaviors that users have invented themselves.
That’s exactly what happened with @replies. Users started addressing each other by their @usernames. Twitter noticed and officially supported the feature. As a result, Twitter is on its way to becoming the discussion board for the web. → Read More
I’m a big fan of the T-Mobile G1 but to say that the selection of quality games from the Android Market has been underwhelming (at best) would be sugar-coating it. Luckily none of that really matters any more, as Android finally has a decent NES emulator. → Read More
Friends, every morning I wake up, look at myself in the mirror, and choke up. Look at me: a 34-year-old man, overweight, exhausted, with acid reflux and sleep apnea. I feel like the underside of a bench at the Greyhound depot. But then see stuff like this. That’s right: that, people, is a Roomba with freaking corners. → Read More
How can e-commerce continue to grow? This guest post by Jamie Murray Wells, founder and Executive Chairman of Glasses Direct, looks at the next wave coming round the corner. Latest figures show UK ecommerce sales continue to buck the financial doom-and-gloom. There was an overall 14% increase in the year to April 2009. E-commerce certainly looks like the Noah’s Ark of retail during the recession: those companies that have a strong online consumer proposition get a ticket to ride out the storm, and those that don’t, may drown. There is a lot of he growth in the clothing, footwear and accessories category in particular. According to Forrester, in those categories online sales represented 2-4% in 2003, and now represent over 10% and in some cases, over 15% of the total category. Where the sale of more ‘generic’ products such as books, DVDs and travel can be seen as something of a first wave of ecommerce, understanding how consumers want to buy high-touch, cosmetic products online such as expensive jewellery, fitted garments and for us, eyewear, could represent something of a second wave of e-commerce. For companies involved in this second wave of ecommerce, it is not as simple as relying on the old cornerstones of price, range, convenience to attract customers. Our peer group face significant consumer purchase barriers to do with try-on, fit, and product education, that one-by-one, need to be identified and addressed, through continued technological innovation and great customer service, in order to pursued customers to make purchase decisions in our favour over the high street. A number of interesting businesses ride this new wave of e-commerce innovation shotgun with us: Blue Nile, is an online jeweller that offers a completely new level of service online, changing diamond shoppers’ habits. They offer enormous amounts of information on the diamonds that they sell, specialist experts on-call, and a massive focus on education to teach you about what you should think about when buying a diamond – far more than you could get in a high street store. The technology on their site allows you to see what different carat diamonds would look like on your finger. This matched with the traditional advantages of shopping online – a massive selection, reasonable pricing and convenience, has meant their business has been a runaway success. Everyone knows ASOS, which has developed some really strong online celebrity and brand engagement. Suggestions for → Read More
When I was a kid, I loved going to arcades and playing shooting games. Something about wielding a fake, plastic gun and mindlessly blasting away at aliens, dinosaurs, or zombies was truly exhilarating. Of course, as time went on, I became a more somber and critical gamer–I wanted “realism” and thought it was ridiculous I could kill 500 enemies without getting hit once myself. The wildly successful Deer Hunter franchise capitalizes on that sensibility in older gamers by offering a more realistic hunting experience. After years of developing the series for countless feature phones, Glu has finally brought Deer Hunter to the iPhone with Deer Hunter 3D. → Read More
Within the next few days, Microsoft is expected to unveil its latest attempt at trying to be a player in the world of web search. After it has failed to get live.com any traction against Google, it will apparently launch a new engine called “Bing” — the project formerly known by its working title “Kumo.” This should be unveiled at the D conference which starts today in Carlsbad, CA — but it looks like Microsoft may be giving us a peak at the logo a tad early.
While it appears that Microsoft may have already taken it down, I visited bing.com in my browser about 10 minutes ago and sure enough saw the favicon you see above. It’s a lowercase “b” with a yellow/orange dot in the middle. It would appear that this will be at least a part of the Bing logo. The light blue and yellow/orange color combination matches that of Kumo. I find that combination to be quite ugly — sort of like the Cleveland Cavaliers basketball uniforms (below) from the 1990s — but hey, that’s just personal taste. All that really matters is now the search engine actually performs. → Read More
Happy Tuesday! Hope ya’ll had a good weekend. Just for you, reader, we have some videos of the Pentax K-7 going head to head with the Nikon D3 and an overview from the team at Pentax in Golden, CO. There’s also some talk of new lenses that may or may not reveal what Pentax has in the pipe for their SLR line. → Read More
There is another format war happening right now that doesn’t involve optical media. In fact, ZigBee and Z-Wave have been battling for some time now for control over your home’s automation needs. The two formats utilize RF networks to control light switches, universal remotes, thermostats, coffee makers, and such. However, ZigBee has been working on an update for a few years and might be what the format needed to overtake Z-Wave.
ZigBee Pro, as the update is called, will allow for communication between different manufacturer’s products and so far some big names have jumped on board including Control4 which has been using ZigBee for years. → Read More
In 1992, Disney decided to build upon the huge success of its Disneyland and Disney World theme parks by opening Euro Disney in a suburb of Paris. The company had previously licensed its name for a resort abroad just outside Tokyo, but the European version was a more ambitious project being handled by the company. It started out as a nightmare. Simply put, people didn’t go to it. And now you can avoid going to it from the comfort of your own home thanks to the magic of Google Earth.
Just as it did last year with Disney World, Google Earth now has Disneyland Paris (as it was rebranded to in 1995 following its thud of an opening) rendered in 3D. Disney has provided the program with some 85,000 photos — a huge 450GB worth — to make the renderings as realistic as possible. All the rides are there, the castle and even over 500 landscape elements. → Read More
We recently broke the story about Yahoo launching a service in Portuguese dubbed Meme that on the surface seemed to be tilting towards a Twitter-like service. But now that we’ve received an invite code from a user in Brazil Portugal, we know it’s nothing like Twitter at all.
It’s all about micro-sharing, sure, but that’s just about where the comparison ends. Yahoo Meme is much more like micro-blogging service Tumblr than anything else, and it’s a mediocre clone at that.
Here’s how it works: you create an account with your preferred username (Yahoo profile required), and you basically start off with an empty blog that you can fill with text, images, videos, music or a mixture of those media. → Read More
