What doesn’t kill you will only make you stronger. Adam Lindemann learned that the hard way with iMindi, a startup trying to create a “thought engine” that was skewered by our judges at last year’s TechCrunch50. “It almost destroyed us,” says Lindemann. But he and his team have completely redesigned the product, which creates a mind map of your thoughts based on semantic indexing technology, and lets you “merge” those thought maps with related ones created by other people.
It is still rough around the edges, but is a vast improvement over the original concept. Today, iMindi is launching in private beta, and we have 1,000 invites for TechCrunch readers (sign up here).
The drubbing iMindi received at TechCrunch50 last year was brutal. After Lindemann’s presentation (see video below), Mark Cuban, who was a judge, laid into him: → Read More
According to the Guardian, O2 has scored the exclusive on the Palm Pre for the UK. It’s been quite a while since we first saw a GSM variant of the Pre at MWC, but things have been quiet ever since. Beating out Vodafone and Orange, O2 – the UK’s largest mobile provider- hopes to stock the upcoming Palm device by the holiday season. But that’s not the only must-have handheld that the UK mobile operator will be carrying this year. Assuming Apple announces new hardware next month, O2 will also carry the latest iPhone before the Pre launches later in the year. This is going to be a stellar year for smartphones and I’d better start saving my pennies. → Read More
Farkie is a free online tool that lets you extract and download multimedia content from websites and social networking services, including videos from YouTube and MP3 files from MySpace playlists. The web-based file downloader has been in public beta for about two months now, works without the need to register and is easy as pie.
All you need to do is copy-paste e.g. a public YouTube video URL, and Farkie will offer the video file to you in a variety of formats (MP3, AVI, WMV, WAV MOV or FLV). → Read More
When the WSJ broke the story about Russian tech investment group Digital Sky Technologies looking to buy a stake in Facebook for $200 million – a deal that would value the private company at $10 billion in preferred stock – there was still some uncertainty about whether the firm was gunning for a seat on Facebook’s board of directors as part of the investment offer, of if they’d be happy with just purchasing equity.
This is important, because we know Facebook recently received a term sheet for a similar venture round of funding at a lower valuation ($8 billion) which was turned down because it was based on the requirement of a board seat. → Read More
Japanese telecommunications giants SoftBank and Docomo unveiled their summer 2009 line-ups last week and were followed by the country’s No. 2 carrier, KDDI au, today. While SoftBank is to roll out 15 new cell phones this summer and Docomo even presented 17 models, KDDI au showed only 8 new candy bars [JP] in the morning. But some of these are amazing. → Read More
In the eyes of imaginative and opportunistic advertisers and marketers, bloggers and online influencers are the new celebrities and athletes. Brands are showering them with endorsement deals rich with products, cash, trips, exclusive access to information, and VIP treatment each and every day, creating a new genre of star spokespersons.
Many expert and lifestyle “citizen” bloggers and online weblebrities are creating communities around their personas as they freely and actively share personal and identifiable experiences online, in social networks and also in the real world. Those who can successfully connect their stories to others in and around their peer groups earn trust, visibility and authority – limited only by ambition and ingenuity. They’re rewarded for their presence and ability to point their followers in strategic directions.
These new brand ambassadors are almost the perfect instruments for surreptitiously sparking and cultivating a groundswell of desire within desired target markets.
Consumers look to experts and trusted peers for guidance and insight when making decisions.
But who’s to say that the information they’re receiving from their trusted sources is indeed truthful and honest? Many of these followers are blind to the fact that some of these authorities are actually directly or indirectly compensated for their opinions and insights. → Read More
Move over, Nokia N97. Your bigger, badder, unannounced brother is on the way – and one of our sources at Nokia has just clued us in on all of the details, from worldwide launch targets to hardware specs. → Read More
The iPhone is quickly becoming the platform of choice for nostalgia-inspiring classic games, with releases like Myst and Wolfenstein now landing on a regular basis. The latest addition, and the one that may strike closest to home for those console gamers of the early 90′s, is Sonic The Hedgehog. The game is now available for a reasonable $5.99, and you can download it here.
Now, I’d consider myself a pretty experienced gamer, and there are few games that I feel more attached to than the original Sonic the Hedgehog series. At a time when most popular games consisted of hopping and bopping on enemy baddies at a leisurely pace, Sonic brought something new to the table: speed. Sonic could race across the screen at a breakneck rate, clearing entire levels in under a minute or two (if you knew what you were doing), with the framerate keeping up the whole way. And he had an edgier attitude to boot, making him substantially cooler than the colorful plumbers representing that other gaming company. So does the iPhone edition do justice to its console predecessor? → Read More
TiVo has featured online scheduling and DVR control for a while, but it wasn’t anything special as it could only preform simple tasks. Not anymore. The website just got a refresh in the style of the TiVo Beta Search and is now loaded with features. In fact, there isn’t much that the new site can’t do. → Read More
Hey, Mike. John here. Remember that weird telekinesis game you liked from CES this year? It’s available at Amazon for pre-order, so go ahead and pick it up. It’s going to cost $99 and I personally think it’s garbage but I know you and the TC team were into it so go ahead and buy it. When I’m in town for WWDC I’ll school you all in Jedi mind games. “This is not the blogger you’re looking for.”
Our video after the jump. → Read More
CrunchDeals abound today as retailers feverishly drop prices in an attempt to keep people from going outside on a long weekend. Here’s a tidy list for you to peruse at your leisure. Enjoy… → Read More
According to Palm’s little accessory guide here, non-Palm micro-USB charging solutions won’t work. What the hell? I can’t just plug it into my computer? That Touchstone dock is cool, but I don’t want to have to carry it everywhere I go. Besides, weren’t we supposed to all be moving towards a unified charging solution? I guess like with all highly-anticipated products (like Android, or the President), we have to be ready for some letdowns along the way. Let’s hope it’s just a fib to sell more of Touchstones. There’s more Palm accessory stuff here, and plan info etc, so if you’re curious and the grill is still warming up, go do your thing. [via Gear Diary] → Read More
You’ll recall that, about a year ago, we decided to make captchas—those things you find on Web sites at login that require you to decipher and type words or numbers—our raison d’etre. Two days later we stopped caring (though it is incredibly annoying to have to deal with a captcha, as you see up there, when trying to log into my router—is a spammer or other evildoer going to bother with my dumb router?). So imagine my delight this morning when I read that Google is hard at work developing a new type a captcha, one that, hopefully, won’t drive us crazy anymore. → Read More
In case you missed the earlier CrunchDeal on an Asus EeePC 900 netbook, here’s your chance to snatch one up again. Woot! now has the 8.9-inch netbook on the main site for $150. Pick between white and black and be on your merry way. Asus EeePC 900 Netbook [Woot!] → Read More
Claw vending machines, also known as UFO catchers or crane games, are a multi-billion dollar business in Japan. Combine this fact with the Japanese penchant for robots, and you get the Puchi Robot Catcher, whose arms are used instead of the usual cranes. → Read More
A few weeks ago Rocketboom founder Andrew Baron gave us a glimpse of his next project: a new video portal with an emphasis on analytics and social interaction, dubbed Mag.ma. But aside from some nifty screen shots, nobody has really gotten a chance to play around with the site until now.
Earlier this evening Baron included us in a small batch of new users invited to try out the site, and we’ve been testing it out for the last few hours. To be clear, this is by no means our final review of the site, as it is very much a work in progress and some of its most key features—which allow people to set up and follow real-time video feeds—haven’t been implemented yet. But even with some missing elements, at the very least, it’s clear that Magma is going to be a great place to kill some time.
In his original post on Magma, Baron outlined three main use cases for the site. The first, and the one most people will be using Magma for, is as a comprehensive guide for what’s currently hot in web video. → Read More
The tech world is an interesting one when it comes to companies making money. Some at the top like Microsoft, Apple and Google are raking in billions in profits every year. And each of those do it with different models: Microsoft through software, Apple through hardware and Google through advertising. But at the other end of the spectrum, most startups, even the very popular ones, haven’t yet figured out how to make money beyond their costs.
While the advertising-based model is working for a select few, for most, it’s simply not proving to be a very good stand-alone model. Pandora is one of the companies that web-based advertising is actually working pretty well for. But even they’re not expecting to turn a profit until next year — and that’s based on projections. I bring them up because they recently decided to move forward with a freemium model in a serious way for the first time last week. As a large service with a rabid fan-base, this seems like a brilliant move. And I wonder if the time isn’t right for more services to try this? → Read More
I was about to ignore this email from Microsoft but it seems there is a nugget of wonderful info in there. Remember when we said you could share your apps with four friends – behavior that essentially works on an iPhone and the App Store when you sync to the same iTunes instance? Well you can’t. OK? You can’t. Be quiet. → Read More
A man once told me that I could not have my Cupcake and eat it too. He was obviously dead wrong. Today’s big buzz on the Android front is that the official OTA install package for Android 1.5 (lovingly known around the internets as ‘Cupcake’ update) is now available for direct download and manual patching. For those of us who have waited patiently for the official patch but just can’t wait another day for it to come over-the-air, it is our day of rejoicing. At long last, we get to sink our teeth in to that green sugar-coated muffin, complete with video recording, on-screen keyboard, an expanding library of widgets, and stereo bluetooth support (to name a few additions). → Read More
