We’re all pirates because of DRM. That’s the conclusion of a new UK study—and it’s a long one, coming in at 200+ pages—. The idea here is that the DRM schemes imposed by rights owners do just as good a job at restricting people who have legitimate claims to the material as it does restricting those without any claim at all. → Read More
Google unveiled its new communication tool, Wave, this morning with a bang at Google I/O. The blogosphere is a buzz with talk of the new product, which blends email, instant messaging, collaboration and real time functionality into one platform. And Wave will open up its API soon to developers and will eventually be an open source product, letting the developer community take an active part in shaping the platform. We spoke to Wave’s creators yesterday, brothers Lars and Jens Rasmussen and Stephanie Hannon. One question that’s is on everyone’s minds is whether Gmail and Google Apps become obsolete with the emergence of such powerful platform?
TechCrunch IT Editor Steve Gillmor caught up with Google co-founder Sergey Brin (who he also talked to about Chrome yesterday) after a Q&A session with Wave’s creators, and asked him about the future of Google Apps and more. → Read More
http://videomedia.ign.com/ev/ev.swf Ahead of E3, EA announced earlier today that Dead Space Extraction for the Wii will ship to retailers on September 29 in North America and on October 2 in Europe. If it’s anything like the original Dead Space then I’ll be waiting in line to get Extraction for the Wii. Developed at EA’s award-winning Visceral Games studio, Dead Space Extraction tells the story of a handful of space colonists desperately struggling to escape from a horrific infection on the Aegis VII mining colony deep in the furthest regions of space. The game introduces Lexine, an important new heroine, to the Dead Space universe. Players will play as the crew who falls victim to a mysterious contagion aboard the ship, with it quickly becoming clear that protecting Lexine will be their only hope for survival. → Read More
If you think you’re ready for some “moderate outrage,” strap in. Those are the exact words that Fortune columnist Stanley Bing has just used to express his feelings about the “brand intrusion” that Microsoft’s impending “Bing” search engine has just dumped on his proverbial doorstep. → Read More
This has been quite a week for Google, especially with the announcement of Google Wave at the Google I/O Conference. Not to be ignored, Google Earth has been quietly rolling out some nifty features, including business listings. Today, Google Earth has added 3D tours of buildings, bridges, baseball stadiums and more.
The tours are self-running views into buildings, bridges, museums, skyscrapers, stadiums and castles from around the world, most of which were built Google SketchUp users who model buildings for Google Earth. → Read More
After hearing Brad Paisley say that a Fender Telecaster “is nothing more than a cutting board, a baseball bat, and strings,” Zachary Custom Guitars decided to put that idea to the test — minus the part about the baseball bat. → Read More
If you have ever wanted to plug in a pro-quality microphone and headphone to an iPhone or iPod touch, pay attention and read on. → Read More
We blogged about a number of particularly cute digital photo frames in the past, but this Hello Kitty model beats them all. Announced in Japan by Sanrio [JP] today (Sanrio is the corporation behind the cartoon cat), the device goes on sale in Nippon on May 31. There will be two variations. → Read More
The Palm Pre’s ringtone has leaked. You can listen to it now, perhaps even assign it to your iPhone 3G if you’re feeling adventurous. → Read More
The Palm Pre will be Twitter friendly. In a demo of the Palm Pre at the D7 conference a few minutes ago, Twitter search was showcased as one of its universal search options (along with Google and other search engines). Other features shown in the demo included the ability to sync the Pre to iTunes, download music over the air from the Amazon MP3 store, run multiple apps at the same time, and integrate third-party apps with other apps on the device such as the calendar. For instance, if you buy a movie ticket through a Fandango app, it can make an entry on your calendar.
In an interview on-stage, Palm’s largest investor Roger McNamee of Elevation Partners noted that Palm represented 45 percent of the capital invested by Elevation so far. McNamee compared Elevation to the early days of Kleiner Perkins, where the partners are fully engaged in the businesses they invest in and they invest in very few companies (Elevation has six portfolio companies and five partners). Palm is its biggest bet by far. “This will be the thing that defines us,” says McNamee. He is confident that there is room in the transition from feature phones to Web-enabled smartphones to carve out a decent business for Palm. First, he’s got to make sure the Pre does not flop. → Read More
Get ready to meet your maker. Alienware‘s Allpowerful (that’s the codename) will decimate everything in its path and leave nothing but trembling subjects in the wake. This monstrosity is more than a desktop replacement. It’s so big, it could be the desk. Trust us, we’ve seen and played with the beast. Alienware isn’t ready to release it yet, but this riddle provides some clues of what’s too come. We can’t give any hints though so you’re on your own to decipher it.
The sum of the first four primes
denotes a state of two parts
known as the gentleman’s muscle car of 1967
when pure, it will carry a yield strength of 7-11 mpa
is always empty in zero sum games
Facebook has just announced the 20 final winners of the latest round of fbFund, the joint entity created by Accel Partners and Founders Fund in conjunction with the social network to help foster quality applications on Facebook Platform and Facebook Connect. This round’s winners will be invited to join a special Facebook startup incubator in downtown Palo Alto this summer. We’d previously learned about the program’s 50 finalists, each of whom was given $1,000 in advertising credit. But this is the real prize that the applicants have been shooting for.
The incubator program is being called fbFund REV, and will operate in a similar fashion (at least in some senses) to programs like Y Combinator and TechStars. Twenty companies, which include two nonprofits, will take part in a program headed by Founders Fund’s Dave McClure, and will have the chance to work with Facebook engineers and a range of Silicon Valley veterans. Facebook intends to keep us posted on the startups’ progress throughout the session, and will be holding a demo day at the end of the summer to help expose the companies to investors and press. → Read More
Bombarded with dozens of news sources and code-heavy web sites, mobile news browsing seems to be a daunting task at best. Even on Wi-Fi, some of the most powerful mobile phones take their sweet time rendering. Searching for a solid application that can handle aggregation of popular and trusted news sources can be just as tedious as actually reading news on a mobile phone. Tedium, however, may have come to an end for us Android users with the release of Handmark‘s Express News. With 10,000-50,000 downloads, Express News has maintained a 4.5/5 score to an often-critical crowd. With all the buzz on this product, we figured it was time to give it a run. → Read More
It’s the rumor that refuses to go away: the next Sony PSP. Well, E3 is next week, thank God, and you should absolutely expect to see it, henceforth referred to as the PSP Go!, debut at Sony’s press conference. It will be UMD-less (you can hear developers cheering), and possibly cheaper. That, and the slimmed down PS3 is real, too. → Read More
NBC’s The Biggest Loser, a hit reality TV show that pits real-life overweight contestants against each other to see who can lose the most weight, will be coming to the Nintendo Wii and DS later this year. → Read More
Playdom, a popular social gaming developer on MySpace, is moving to a studio model, similar to the model of competitor Zynga. Playdom has largely flown under our radar until now, but they’ve built up some very popular social networking apps on MySpace, and are also moving to Facebook as well.
Adopting the studio model means that Playdom will have multiple independent teams working on different games. To head up the two studios, Playdom has brought in substantial talent from successful gaming companies. Former Director of Game Design at Zynga, Dave Rohrl, will oversee a studio focused on new intellectual property and former Studio Director at Pogoa/Electronic Arts, Sean Clark will head a studio focused on role-playing games or RPGs. → Read More
Whether you like the name Microsoft picked for its shiny new search engine or not, Bing has got tongues rolling and keyboards rambling.
One of the funniest takes on this we’ve seen today comes from Fortune columnist and author Stanley Bing, who is ‘moderately outraged’ over the new name but is not considering legal action at this point.
Sure, Bing’s doing his best to get some free publicity out of the carefully planned preview of the new search engine, but his sense of humor is spot on, so enjoy the read. → Read More
Cue the triumphant music. “And here it is. The greatest advance in television since color television itself.”
Take a trip back to 1961 when RCA introduced the remote control and forever increased the average weight of Americans. The original demo video is after the jump and well worth 5:47 of your day. → Read More
At D7 today, Kara Swisher sat down with Huffington Post’s Arianna Huffington and Washington Post’s Digital Chief Katharine Weymouth to discuss a topic that has been beaten to death: old vs. new media. Much of the interview was spent massaging each other’s egos, with each praising the other for the quality of their respective publication’s journalism.
But Huffington spiced things up when Swisher broached the issue of monetization. Huffington denied that HuffPo would ever consider subscriptions, saying “We absolutely never imagine subscriptions. Unless you’re selling porn, and especially “very weird porn”, you shouldn’t sell subscriptions.” Swisher cited a Penn Schoen & Berland survey that found that 5% of people would pay for blogs and 92% of people don’t pay for online content today. → Read More
Earlier this morning we stumbled across Hulu Desktop, an impressive new application from the popular video portal that lets you use your remote to control your Hulu experience. As it turns out, Desktop is only one of a set of new features Hulu is launching today as part of Hulu Labs, which is now live.
First, there’s Time-Based Browsing, which is the feature I’m going to be using most (aside from Hulu desktop). This allows you to see all new Hulu videos sorted by the day they appeared. Before now you could always sort individual shows in order, but if you missed a night of prime time it was up to you to figure out which shows you’d missed. Now you can just jump to that date under Time-Based Browsing and Hulu will do all the work for you. → Read More
