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
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
This clock looks like it’s from olden times but it isn’t. It’s from the modern age! You basically load this baby up with your own music or recordings and rock out all morning. It costs a mere $40.81 plus shipping and… who am I kidding? → Read More
The following is a short play describing Kerchoonz’s K-Box. It’s a device that turns any flat surface into a speaker. → Read More
Mark Logic, an IT company that creates software to host large amounts of content, has raised $12.5 million in Series D funding led by Sequoia Capital, with participation from Tenaya Capital. This latest round brings Mark Logic’s total funding to $45.5 million. Founded in 2001, Mark Logic says it will use the funding to grow sales channels, expand to international markets and develop new verticals. Mark Logic’s software is an XML server that allows users to store content in a platform and serves as a platform for rich applications. CrunchBase Information Mark Logic Corporation Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
In case you needed any further convincing that kids these days have the coolest toys, please witness the remote controlled Warthog, Mongoose, and Flying Hornet from the Halo series. → Read More
It was just a matter of time, but frankly speaking, I am amazed at how fast Sharp makes its mini solar panel (67.5 x 41.0 x 0.8 mm) available to manufacturers worldwide [link in English]. After all, the company’s solar-powered cell phone that uses the so-called LR0GC02, isn’t even on sale yet (not even in Japan where sales start next month). → Read More
http://videomedia.ign.com/ev/ev.swf The future is coming and it’s only 498 years away. → Read More
This morning Facebook announced that it had accepted a $200 million investment at a $10 billion valuation from Russian investment group Digital Sky Technologies. Over the last few weeks there have been reports of the company turning down investments at lower valuations, and debate over if the investors would get a coveted Facebook board seat (DST did not). Facebook is holding a teleconference to talk about the new investment. Below are our notes. → Read More
