While a nice, toasted brown color signalizes a perfectly done marshmallow to yours truly, it’s a bit alarming when it’s streaked across the back of an iPhone 3GS. Now, we knew that the 3G could get pretty warm, and would even warn you when it was getting dangerous.
But the 3GS appears to have a different strategy: let it get so hot that it burns the paint. → Read More
There’s some buzz right now about the iPhone 3G S and other phones being capable of 720p recording, or perhaps even 1080p if they use the newest sensors. Wow! The future is here! 720p video built right into your phone! But here’s the thing: would you rather have HD video recording implemented very badly, as it must be with the limitations of mobile phones, or would you rather not have it at all and have space for more battery or RAM? Because there’s no way that video is going to be watchable, except as a low-bandwidth stream, and if that’s your idea of 720p… I feel sorry for you. → Read More
It’s raining for perhaps the 900th day in a row here, so we might as we learn something while we’re all stuck inside all day illegally downloading Michael Jackson songs. The Amazon Kindle—I’m sure you’ve heard of it. What you might not know is that it represents perhaps the last piece of tech gadgetry that I actually enjoy. Well, would enjoy—at $350, it’s still a tad expensive for me. In any event, Fast Company has a fun cover story this month, written by an old professor of mine, about how Amazon is trying so, so hard to make e-books the new hot thing, just like how Apple did a few years ago with digital music downloads. → Read More
Apparently there is a single guy who is intimately acquainted with the internal doings of both Microsoft and Sony. Double agent? Contractor? Seducer? Nobody knows but Ars Technica, who enjoy exclusive access to his oracular expectorations. Er, his tech predictions.
It looks like both the PS3 and 360 are due for a price drop, via the Tetris effect, which I have just now invented. It’s where products are stacked on top of each other, and once you score on the bottom, that row of products disappears and is replaced by the one above it. Apple does it year after year with the iPhone, and now it looks like console makers are about to do it again as well. → Read More
In a terrific example of a self-organising industry, some of OpenCoffee Greece’s founding members and a number of web entrepreneurs and venture capitalists have launched Openfund, offering seed capital for internet startups in Greece and South East Europe. The model draws inspiration from YCombinator and Seedcamp, with plans to fund up to five startups per round. The startups will receive €20k- 30k in return for up to 20% equity. Perhaps more importantly, Openfund aims to mentor the startups too. To this end it has enlisted a number of well known business figures from Greece, that are willing to consult the startups free of charge — among them: the country managers of Microsoft and Google. Timeline for first round: Call for applications: Open, up to September 30, 2009 Evaluation and selection: October 1 to November 15, 2009 Seeding: Starts December 1, 2009 Next call: December 1, 2009 The fund has been hailed rather enthusiastically as a game changer in a traditionally VC dry region. Venture capitals in Greece tend to make late stage investments and are rather risk averse in comparison to their counterparts elsewhere. Very few technology companies have been funded so far. Opencoffee Greece has managed to attract 200+ people audiences every month, giving space for new and old startups to present their work. Complaints about the lack of funding have been a constant theme of these meetings. It is out of these complaints that the idea of Openfund was conceived. And the name denotes the connection. Despite legitimate questions about the next financing rounds (such as, a) whether they will happen and b) who will be willing to undertake them), the overall reception of the idea has been positive. In other words, the seed is sown. We have to wait and see if it will bloom too. → Read More
Well how do you like that? It seems Sony was in town here in New York showing off the PSP Go. (I refuse to use that dumb exclamation point anymore.) Of course, CrunchGear wasn’t invited to play with it, to my knowledge, but let’s not complain about that today, on this very sad day for us all. Anyway, Cnet got to play with the device, and put together this snazzy video. Let’s watch it! → Read More
As we wrote about a couple weeks ago, Someecards, makers of hilarious online greeting cards, are delving into doing video cards. The first batch are now online. And yes, they’re quite good.
The cards feature the same solid color backgrounds that are distinct on Someecards, but rather than black and white drawings, they have actors acting out short video skits. The first ones feature comedians Michael Ian Black and Michael Showalter, who are promoting their new Comedy Central show, Michael & Michael. → Read More
Chiara Cicenia and Dejan Strbac, two MSc students of Politecnico di Milano in Italy wanted to give some advice to big companies about their products, marketing strategies and operations, but couldn’t find an easy way to do it. So they created Aleveo, designed along the principles of the good old-fashioned suggestion box. Similar in principle to Uservoice, Get Satisfaction and other consumer feedback services, Aleveo’s USP is that its user base is restricted to students. The model assumes that students posting ideas and feedback to companies will be talent-spotted by recruiters, or at the very least be able to take credit for successful ideas in their CV. Companies get fresh, new and most of all free ideas. As a student-centric service, their product is free for students and companies to use. Companies and small teams can use the tool for soliciting and evaluating internal ideas, receive external ones on defined tags. The model is however a classic freemium with other two plans available. With the “supporter” plan companies will be able to post “public challenges” for USD30/month, while for USD 100/month you can become an official sponsor of the project (as well as getting everything in the other plans). Dejan Strbac says the research he and Chiaria conducted in setting up Aleveo indicates a strong presence of discrimination in organizations against students. The hope is that the platform will allow students to narrow the gap between the expectations of skills between the worlds of education and work. What I see in the future of this project is a merit-based job-marketplace, with students competing for jobs through their ideas. The guys are really aiming high, but we’re still not sure if they will go for the corporate route or keep small businesses in the game. CrunchBase Information Aleveo Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
UK tech site T3 is doing its yearly gadget awards, powered by votes, and I think we need to make our presence felt. CG readers are a hardy bunch, kind of like techno-Vikings, and it is our prerogative to make sure our opinions are reflected in any and every online poll and discussion — especially British ones. → Read More
You guessed correctly (I assume)! It’s a lightsaber. Well, let’s be honest: it’s a glowing rod that projects from the end of your Wiimote and makes lightsaber noises. And, geniuses that they are, the makers decided to make sure this thing didn’t support the MotionPlus add-on. Sure, the game they’re going to bundle it with (Republic Heroes) doesn’t support it either, but come on, just make the bottom end extend a little more. → Read More
Just like every other major Website, Google was inundated with people looking for news about Michael Jackson yesterday. Above is a chart showing the volume of search queries for the deceased pop star. Searches peaked right around 3 PM PDT, as people all over the world were trying to find out information about his passing.
More details on the Google blog. → Read More
A lot of us here at TechCrunch quite like Bing, Microsoft’s new search, sorry, discovery, no sorry, decision engine. For a number of queries it seems to provide better results than Google. But that doesn’t mean the public will start using it. And this video by College Humor I think lays out why.
“Bing helps you Google the best choice, faster. And shows related Googles right there on the results page. Bing knows what you like to Google.” → Read More
Here’s a little treat for all you Apache admins out there in The Internet: mod_pony. It produces an ASCII art representation of a pony. It would be grand to see ponies proliferate around The Internet today! → Read More
I can’t remember the last time I wanted to eat a peripheral this badly. Please obseve a keyboard made of graham crackers, chocolate, and marshmallows. It’s the S’more Keyboard. → Read More
For the last few weeks it hasn’t been unusual to see AT&T among Twitter’s trending topics — following its disappointing performance at WWDC and the activation issues with the iPhone last week, the carrier hasn’t exactly been garnering positive reactions from its legions of Twitter-using members. Today, it’s reached the top spot on Twitter once again, and, once again, AT&T is the target of waves of contempt.
The source of the recent flurry of AT&T tweets is Adam Savage of MythBusters fame, who tweets that for “a few hours of web surfing in Canada” he was charged a whopping $11,000. AT&T is apparently claiming that Savage managed to download 9 gigabytes in Canada using his USB data connection (which he calls “frakking impossible“). What’s worse, the customer service rep Savage was dealing with was apparently a bit loose with their decimal points, telling Savage that “data is charged at .015 cents, or a penny and a half, per kb”. Read that again — there’s a couple orders of magnitude difference there. → Read More
A couple of days ago we wrote about Facebook’s new Live Stream Box funtionality. Ustream was the first to offer a live video solution for users with Facebook Pages. But the sign up for the free option is limited, and the white-label version carries a one-time fee of $15,000. Enter Stickam. It’s offering live video via its StreamAPI service to anyone. And there’s no set up fee and no monthly fee. But it will still cost you.
The StreamAPI solution is pay-as-you-go, with live video costing you 45 cents a gigabyte. That includes support for HD video, customizable solutions (with no Flash knowledge required) and analytics. It’s a similar approach that Stickam takes with its regular StreamAPI product. → Read More
MJ always had a reputation for putting on a good stage show, but did you know that some of the equipment he used was so creative as to warrant a patent? In the “Smooth Criminal” video, everyone on the stage ends up leaning over at a 45 degree angle at one point, something that is normally not possible. But instead of being held against the stage by the pure power of funk, Jacko actually invented a very special shoe to help pull off the trick. → Read More
We’ve got some NZXT gaming gear to giveaway, but we want to ensure that it goes to a gamer and not some chump that will flip the stuff on Ebay. So we’re actually asking you to do something this time around rather than just leaving something in the comments. It should be easy for a gamer though. All you have to do is spray a logo in a game and send us a screenshot. Prizes: Cryo S Alumium notebook cooler Avatar Gaming Mouse Panzerbox Aluminum ATX Chassis [PSGallery=7p8rl7jquh] All the details, including the files you’ll need, are after the jump. → Read More
A few years ago, Max Levchin—of PayPal and Slide fame— told me there were two kinds of entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley: Those who work tirelessly and are great at execution, and those who are visionary and truly create new ideas—and sometimes new markets. Levchin put himself in the former category. Indeed, a lot of Slide’s success has just been the result of doing a better job ripping off ideas from competitors like RockYou. He put Evan Williams of Blogger and Twitter in the latter. At the time, Twitter was only a techy phenomenon, but Max noted that unlike a lot of other Web 2.0 companies, Twitter was one of the only ones doing something untested and new.
With all the hyperbole about Twitter today, if I asked you whether the executor or the visionary would wind up being more successful, nearly everyone would say the visionary. But—as Levchin no doubt knew when he made this point—the visionary is usually the one that gets the shaft in Silicon Valley. → Read More
