With all the chatter about Yahoo’s impending roll-out of a completely overhauled brand – see Techmeme for more – this particular tip that landed in our inbox last night definitely caught our attention.
TechCrunch reader Bradley Scott Shoemaker checks in with us to tell us this new Yahoo homepage turned up when visiting the portal using Google’s Chrome browser. All his other installed browsers still showed the classic Yahoo website, which lead him to believe they’re gradually bucket testing the new redesign for now (update: some users reported seeing it for over a month already). → Read More
According to pocket-lint, HTC CEO Peter Chou has confirmed that the HTC Sense interface will be available as an optional addition to “other existing [HTC] devices.” Though he did not detail which phones would receive the addition and when, it isn’t hard to extrapolate. There are only a few other HTC phones running on Android, though each has a few variants: the HTC Dream, otherwise known as the T-Mobile G1, and the HTC Magic, known as the myTouch, ION, etc. Speaking of variants: From what we’ve heard from our talks with HTC, it seems a bit unlikely that Sense will find its way to any “with Google”-branded handsets – at least not in any official manner. That means the T-Mobile G1/myTouch are out, but the ION and another other handsets lacking the “with Google” subtitle are in. Cross your fingers, HTC fans, your phone may get a facelift soon. → Read More
Wait, what? There’s pornography on the Internet? When did this happen? It must be, like, a new thing, otherwise I cannot understand the curiosity over a newly updated iPhone app called “Hottest Girls”. It’s $1.99, and includes pictures of women, some of whom are topless. It’s almost like living in Europe, where topless women can be found on magazine covers and advertisements. → Read More
Opera, the Norwegian software company behind mobile browser Opera Mini, has released its latest State of the Mobile Web report, providing some interesting data points for a detailed look at the evolution of Web browsing on mobile phones.
Looking at global trends, Opera Mini’s nearly 25.4 million users (as measured in May 2009, up 8.4% from the month before and up 36% compared to May 2008) have viewed over 9.6 billion pages. Since April, page-views have gone up 11.0% and increased an amazing 227% since May 2008. Opera says Mini users generated nearly 160 million MB of data for operators worldwide in May 2009, and claims that that would be 1.5 PB worth of data if the company didn’t compress this data up to 90%. → Read More
The HTC Ozone might just be one of the best deals at Verizon Wireless. Check out everything you get for only $49.99 after a $70 mail-in rebate: QWERTY, Winmo 6.1, global roaming, Wi-Fi, and teathering. I don’t think you could ask for a better value out of a brand new Verizon phone. → Read More
Tokyo-based electronics company Lancerlink has announced the iJector [JP] today, an LCOS projector that you can use with your iPod or iPhone. Shaped like a dock, the device makes it possible to watch video stored on your iPod on the go via its built-on stereo speakers (3W×2ch). → Read More
AdMob has released its metrics report for May 2009 (PDF download link), and looked closely at the actual distribution of users of the iPhone apps in their network this time. The main take-away? There may be tens of thousands of applications available for the iPhone, but a whole lot of them simply never actually make it onto the device.
Out of 2,309 tracked applications (representing 15.1 million unique iPhone and iPod Touch users), no less than 54% are actively used by south of 1,000 persons. That’s a very long tail there, and not an economically interesting one at that. Only about 20% of the tracked apps have more than 10,000 active users, and only 5% (or 116 apps) boasts more than 100,000 active users. For the record, an active user is considered to be someone who used the app at least once in May. → Read More
A group of Movable Type specialists – some of them former Six Apart employees – wanted to speed up the development of the open source version of the popular publishing platform and decided to group together in a quest to build an independent, community-driven CMS for bloggers and other publishers.
The platform is dubbed Melody and will be managed by a non-profit named The Open Melody Software Group, which has Anil Dash (Six Apart’s outspoken VP and Chief Evangelist) on its board. → Read More
Mochi Media continues to quietly build out monetization and reporting tools for Flash game developers. In May we reported on the big growth in their ad network – over 100 million people a month now play games that include their ads. You can find their games on big sites like Hi5, RockYou and Meebo. We’ve heard that games that include Mochi Media stats or advertising products are played over 1.5 billion times a month.
These games are embedded on publisher sites and are very often “borrowed” by other sites who just lift the Flash files. So it’s important that the game files generate revenue directly. Ads served by the publisher around the game aren’t reliable. Mochi Media puts the ads directly into the games, so even if they are ripped off, the ads still show and create revenue.
The problem is these ads don’t make a whole lot of money – the industry average is around $0.50 per 1,000 game plays.
To fuel revenue growth to developers (and therefore Mochi Media), the company has launched a payments platform called MochiCoins with a handful of game developers. MochiCoins lets developers charge for game upgrades – users can pay for coins via credit card, PayPal or SuperRewards, and the coins that then be used to purchase upgrades in games.
The early results, we’ve heard from someone close to a game developer on the platform, are stunning. → Read More
A few posts ago Dave Winer continues his criticism of Twitter’s 140 character limit. Never mind that Dave aggressively supported cloning Twitter’s APIs and character limit in the Bearhug days when Twitter needed the support. Never mind that things have changed now and apparently Twitter is too big for our own good. Dave’s back and forth is part of a grand old tradition, where new facts obviate old ones and alliances switch to account for new alignments. In Twitter’s case, the early instability and the high stakes involved made for a great deal of passion and attendant posturing. We all took it personally (well, I did) when Twitter removed key features that favored serendipity and discovery. Until then, we felt the new space Twitter opened up was like the Old West, expanding outward without sense of limit or control. It wasn’t that Track was the most useful part of the service. It was more that it represented the horizon, the frontier, the lack of boundaries. Taking it away hardened the service into its fundamental structure, the familiar limits of space and time, the tenuous constructs of “friend” and “follow” rather than the surprise of the unfamiliar appearing suddenly with fresh ideas and humor. Before Track went away, we never knew what would happen next; afterward, we knew enough to not anticipate. In a similar way, 140 characters felt less like a limitation and more like an invitation to be surprised at how much you could squeeze into the frame. Like perspective in a painting, or echo in a recording, the creative use of limitations helped us overcome gravity and imagine more than we could “see.” Supporting the limits became a creative validation of the surprise that Twitter has always been. How many events and ideas must we share before we get over that surprise, that once again Twitter has exceeded expectations? 140 characters brought us url shorteners, the key to this new self-compressing and auto-expanding universe. Our software is now compensating for the microURL opacity, unpacking these links and harvesting the metadata they carry to aid indexing of the gestures they contain. Once again, the apparent limitations of the shorteners (gas station on every corner, lurking potential runaway code, mom and pop businesses closing down and orphaning links) are creating investment opportunities and entrepreneurial enclaves. It’s a little like the present wrapped in a series of enclosed boxes, where the → Read More
Gateway’s got a new line of student-friendly notebooks in the NV Series. There’ll be a myriad of configurations available starting at $499, most or all of which will feature a 15.6-inch LCD with 1366×768 resolution, 4GB of RAM, 320GB hard drive, six-cell battery, DVD burner, integrated webcam, HDMI, and Vista Home Premium. → Read More
In the online reservation space, you probably know about OpenTable. The restaurant reservation service’s IPO in a time of drought for IPOs, made big headlines. Now imagine OpenTable for just about everything besides restaurants. That’s BookFresh.
Who might need such a service? A lot more services and individuals than you may realize. While most services have some sort of scheduling system, many aren’t optimized, and can’t adapt on the fly to openings/changes. Massage therapists, dentists, doctors are all perfect examples of who could use such a system, founder Ryan Donahue tells us. He notes that health and beauty has been a particularly hot area.
He knows that because the service has actually been around for a little while, but it was formerly know as HourTown. But BookFresh is a much better name for the service because, “appointments are much like produce items in a grocery store, it’s a perishable thing,” Donahue says. → Read More
Google has just debuted the latest entry to its fleet of Labs products, introducing the search giant to the travel space. Dubbed City Tours, the new site can build itineraries for brief trips to locations around the globe in a matter of seconds. At this point details on the new product are fairly sparse — it looks like Google hasn’t written its customary blog post yet, but given how basic the product is it’s pretty easy to figure out how it works.
Getting started is incredibly easy — just type in where you’re visiting (say, San Francisco or London), and Google will present a suggested itinerary spanning a three day trip, with around a dozen attractions per day depending on the city. From there you can change the number of days you’ll be staying (Google will show more attractions the longer you stay), and you can also manually adjust the list of places you’d like to visit. You can add a new attraction by entering its name in a text field, and Google will try to find it in its database. All attractions include a star rating, along with its hours operation and location. → Read More
Some of you may be growing tired of hearing about companies described as the ‘Kayak of _____’ but if the analogy fits, we might as well abuse it to nausea. So without further ado, I give you DoNanza, the Kayak of online freelance project search. With 70,000 projects on offer, there’s high chance there’s something for you as well so you should consider giving it a whirl if you’re looking to make some extra money on the side in these tough times.
The one thing you have to keep in mind about DoNanza is that it keeps clear of offline gigs, so if you’re looking to for a babysitting job, DoNanza is not for you. It does however have 70K available projects on offer right now, with 30K new projects added each week, or about 4K a day. There are 12 main categories with more than 400 sub-categories. The most active in terms of user-interest are (in the following order): Writing, Web Development, Graphic Design, Virtual Admin. Support, Translation, Marketing, SEO, and Programming. → Read More
Normally I’d be more up in arms about something like this — as far as I’m concerned, once I purchase a device I should be able to do whatever I want with it — but this is really more of a virtual recall than hardware DRM. It seems that Panasonic, worried that third-party batteries might prove troublesome in their cameras (wouldn’t be the first time), has created a battery authentication process to make sure your power source is approved. Nice of you to do so, Panasonic, but don’t you think a warning dialog would have accomplished the same thing? → Read More
Just as we were speculating a couple nights ago, Apple has apparently decided that with the new parental controls now built into the iPhone 3.0 SDK, nudity is now okay in iPhone apps. The first such app, Hottest Girls, has actually been around for a little while. But an update today “upgraded” the pictures from girls in bikinis and lingerie, to topless and completely naked girls.
“We uploaded nude topless pics today. This is the first app to have nudity,” Hottest Girls’ developer Allen Leung tells Macenstein. Quite an accomplishment.
While some will undoubtedly see this as a bad thing, I think this is actually a good thing. First of all, allowing mature content like this should free up the App Store screeners to be able to focused on finding apps that are actually malicious or out of line, rather than being prude-police. → Read More
Before you get excited, I should probably state for the record that the headline is totally fake. There’s no way to tell whether Jesus actually recommends this robot &mdash he’s just holding it. He might not like it at all. But if that’s the case, I would have to respectfully disagree with him there, because this little robot looks like a lot of fun. It’s a pretty simple little guy, as robots go: all it does is follow any line you put it on, at a speed of up to 3ft/s. That’s pretty fast for a robot the size of a CD. → Read More
Another day, another weird Twitter story. Tonight the news broke that NBA superstar Shaquille O’Neal was being traded to the Cleveland Cavaliers. Huge news, but what’s humorous is that apparently Shaq found out he was traded on Twitter.
Look at Shaq’s last few tweets. Several minutes ago he tweeted out “I didn’t hear dat yet” in response to this tweet, “is it true u a CLEVELAND CAVALIER.” A few minutes later someone sent Shaq the following tweet, “U CLEVELAND BOUND…shaq found out he was traded thru twitter! lmao….hahahaaaaaa” Shaq’s response? “I kno right.” → Read More
