TechCrunch Editor Sarah Lacy’s book Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good came out in paperback edition earlier this month. We posted some of the new Twitter history that she included in a new chapter included in this edition a few weeks ago.
You can buy the book here. But since most of you are way too cheap to actually pay for a book, we’re going to give away 15 signed copies for free (postage included!).
Here’s what you have to do – retweet this story using the retweet button at the bottom of this post (or just click here) by midnight California time tonight. We’ll choose 15 at random and contact you for delivery details. Good luck, and enjoy the book. → Read More
Who says that the zoo is boring? I would pay money to see a tiger play with a Panasonic Toughbook. Good money, I tell ya. [PSGallery=7l0ia10grlf] → Read More
Another public official of South Carolina shames himself: Governor Mark Sanford is extremely sad that he got caught cheating on his wife. The video is here, the transcript is here. Bottom line, he says “I’ve been unfaithful to my wife.” Read all about it everywhere.
All I’m wondering is, where’s South Carolina Attorney General Henry McMaster when we need him? Adultery is serious business. This is clearly, somehow, all Craigslist’s fault. For example, how do we know that Sanford didn’t meet his mistress in the adultery section of Craigslist? And also, can we please kick South Carolina out of the Union now? → Read More
Huzzah! After almost a year in development, the Novint Falcon has gone native with Valve’s Orange Box — that’s Half-Life 2, Team Fortress 2, and Portal. “Native” meaning that you no longer need a special version of the game to use the Falcon. What does that say to me? It’s time to really review this thing, since everyone involved clearly believes it’s fit for human consumption now. → Read More
I like the Apple TV as a device, but its remote is awful. It’s the same little dinky white one that used to come with all Apple computers a few years ago. While it’s pretty good for using the FrontRow feature on a computer, your computer also has a keyboard for navigation and things like searching — the Apple TV does not. And so the white remote by itself is painfully slow navigating the Apple TV. But with an update to both the Apple TV and its Remote app available for the iPhone and iPod touch, Apple has completely revamped the way you can navigate the system using gestures and multi-touch.
Watch the videos below to see it in action, but to say this is improved is beyond an understatement. Rather than clicking those little buttons dozens of times, you can now just slide around the iPhone screen to move around. And it’s much easier to get to the iPhone’s keyboard to do things like searches — a funtionality which is basically unusable with the white remote. → Read More
Here are some of the topics from today’s podcast… The new HTC Hero Nokia and Intel announce a “strategic long-term partnership” Sirius iPhone app Game Gun! Wiimbledon! LISTEN: Show Link | RSS Feed | iTunes Link → Read More
And just who will be the cover athlete(s) for Pro Evolution Soccer 2010? → Read More
Stealth startup Small Batch has raised an undisclosed round of equity funding from True Ventures with Twitter co-founder Evan Williams, Flickr and Hunch co-founder Caterina Fake, WordPress/Automattic Founder Matt Mullenweg, renown investor Ron Conway, Chris Sacca, Josh Felser and Dave Samuel participating. Small Batch is launching Typekit, a service that lets designers build sites with web-native typography.
Small Batch was co-founded by Jeffrey Veen, who was one of the founding partners of Adaptive Path and project lead for Measure Map, the well-received web analytics tool that was acquired by Google. After the acquisition, Veen worked at Google and started Small Batch in January of 2009. Veen was also the recipient of TechFellow award a few weeks ago. → Read More
I’m a sucker for a multi-tool. I had a great Swiss Army one – I think it was Victorinox – but I lost that and then I got a Leatherman. This one looks nice, though. It has a caribiner, a saw, two screwdrivers, and a knife. Best of all it’s only $37, which is considerably less than I paid for my Leatherman.
It will be available at RockyNational in July. Click through for a thrilling video. → Read More
More than a few people have left comments on our Twitter posts related to the Iranian situation wondering if they weren’t really articles by the satirical site, The Onion. Here are two that come to mind, Twitter Reschedules Maintenance To Allow Iranian Protests To Continue and Bush Advisor: Twitter Founders Should Get Nobel Peace Prize. Well, The Onion finally has one of its own. And as you might expect, it’s good.
The post is short, sweet and to the point. But the best parts are the fake quotes by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey:
“Twitter was intended to be a way for vacant, self-absorbed egotists to share their most banal and idiotic thoughts with anyone pathetic enough to read them,” said a visibly confused Dorsey.
I’d imagine by now you’ve seen this picture of Megan Fox snubbing this poor little portly boy at the London premiere of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. If you haven’t then you need to get out from under the rock or watch The Soup or something. → Read More
Fever is a hot new RSS reader that aims to cure “second inbox syndrome, unread item guilt, and unbold elbow.” In other words, the common plights of the modern RSS power user.
Besides offering a full-featured feed reader, the application attempts to create a personalized Techmeme by scanning a user’s feed list for popular (or hot) links. Fever then groups these links into stories and assigns each a “temperature.” This allows a user to quickly keep a pulse on what’s going on in his or her “slice of the web.”
The other refreshing feature of the app is its move away from email inbox-style unread counts. As a long-time Google Reader user, I always dreaded the experience of returning from an offline vacation only to find several thousand unread items in my reader. With Fever, the emphasis is on dividing subscriptions into two camps: must-reads (called Kindling) and everything else (Sparks). By moving the “hit-or-miss” feeds into the Sparks bin, Fever ensures that a user gets only the most relevant content. → Read More
One of my favorite recent Twitter-related trends is the onslaught of jokes from late-night talk show hosts pointing out how laughably dull (or stupid) some of our favorite celebs’ tweets really are. Read aloud, even the most seemingly innocuous Tweets are often hilarious.
Now Break.com, a video site heavily geared towards a male audience, is looking to get in on the action. The site has signed on comedian Mike Polk (formerly of HBOLabs) to host a show called Tweet Boxx, which is specifically focused on making fun of the Twitterverse. You can catch the first episode here.
Polk kicks off the inaugural show saying that each week he’ll “be sharing with you my favorite celebrity Twitter tweets of the week” following that up a moment later with, “what am I saying here, these are words?” Welcome to my life, Mr. Polk. → Read More
A Japanese company called Interlink [JP] is organizing a contest to find potentially lucrative future gTLDs (generic top-level domains). And the best thing is that the “World Domain Cup” is open to everyone with the contest’s dedicated web page being available in English, Japanese and Chinese. → Read More
Herold, Austria’s biggest Yellow Pages publisher, has taken a 24% equity investment in Austrian start-up Tupalo.com for an undisclosed amount; more info here and here. Tupalo has also received an undisclosed equity investment from i5invest which helped in steering and incubating the company over the past six months. Prior to that the City of Vienna supported the company with €75,000 through its departure programme, which funds development in creative industries. Tupalo joins the somewhat crowded social yellow pages space, dominated by Qype and Yelp, offering user generated content, reviews and other social aspects created by users who the company calls ‘Tupaleros’. Mike Borras, who founded Tupalo.com with Clemens Beer (both ex-Rockstar), says the deal opens access to the business listings which Herold brings to the strategic partnership. He also feels Tupalo can now provide more of a trusted service and consolidate revenue streams like sponsored listings and the various forms of advertising that are working while exploring new revenue streams. Herold is part of the European Directories family that also operates directories in Netherlands, Finland, Denmark, Sweden, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland and Gibraltar, offering Tupalo an easier route to international expansion. An immediate effect of the partnership will be a “rate this business” link appearing next to business listings on Herold.at where there is a corresponding entry on Tupalo.com. So what’s next? Mike says they can’t wait to grow the team, continue product development, push sales, increase business development and expand the business incrementally. The mission is to build a “kick-ass yellow pages experience”. His advice for all the budding Viennese and European start-ups out there is: Focus on your users, build, listen, then build again. Stay focused on your plan and maintain the drive the got you started in the first place. Do lots of A/B testing and iterate as often as required. If you can get state funding, go get it! It can buy you time to focus on your product. Try to think about revenue as early as you can, you are going to need to adapt so the sooner you start the better. Be prepared to pitch your business again and again and again… Try to connect and speak to angels, vc’s and other interested parties early on. Listen to them, update them if you can and act on feedback. CrunchBase Information Tupalo Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Cable providers Comcast and Time Warner might be late to the Internet video party, but that doesn’t mean they are going to let us enjoy content for free that they pay for. Oh no, the TV Everywhere Model is designed to give Comcast and Time Warner paying subscribers access to content and block-out everyone else. And this system might find its way into Hulu.
You can’t blame the cable operators for their plans. They have to pay good money for access to cable stations. Then they, of course, pass along the cost to subs via a monthly bill. The thought is that those people that pay for the content should be able to watch all of it on both their TVs and computers.
Of course the other side is that if you don’t pay for those services, then you’ll be shut out. This authentication system will be used initially on sites like Comcast’s video site, Fancast, but there is always the possibility that it could eventually make its way on to Hulu. → Read More
Teenagers spend their days texting, tweeting and hanging around on YouTube, Facebook and MySpace! Honestly, that’s what I assumed too. Turns out I’m wrong, and I needed Nielsen to teach me that. The audience measurement company is releasing a brand new report on teens and media with a lofty promise of serious myth busting and hard fact presenting that will downright knock your socks off.
Ready for some eye-openers? Here we go: → Read More
“You know the beautiful thing: June 29, 2009, is the two- year anniversary of the first shipment of the iPhone,” Elevation Partners (which owns a huge portion of Palm) co-founder Roger McNamee told Bloomberg in March. “Not one of those people will still be using an iPhone a month later.”
We’re 5 days away from that milestone. Anyone want to take that bet still?
It’s been 18 days since the launch of the Palm Pre, and the device has already passed an important milestone: 1 million app downloads, according to mobile analytics firm Medialets. That’s impressive for a store with only 30 or so applications. While Apple surpassed 10 million downloads in its first weekend following the App Store launch in 2007, it had over 500 applications at launch, and already had a few million devices (the original iPhone) with which people could download from. → Read More
Even though Nokia and Intel were both relatively tight-lipped yesterday about the actual hardware products that’ll spring forth from their new joint-venture, rumors are already circulating that Nokia has placed orders with Quanta and Compal, Taiwan’s number one and two netbook/smartbook manufacturers, respectively. → Read More
Here it is in living color: the HTC Hero/Sense UI walk-through. This is a real phone running the actual software and we delve into some of the most important features including social media integration and the browser experience.
The most interesting thing is that all of the contact/Facebook/Twitter interaction is automatic. You import your login info and it just shows up without fuss or muss. There is none of the Palm Pre’s linked-list creation. This is a small improvement but makes a world of difference in most cases. The Facebook info updates once every two hours so when profile pictures or contact info is updated online, the phone updates itself automatically. → Read More
