It surely didn’t escape anyone’s attention Twitter is on track to becoming a mass phenomenon globally. The service is also growing nicely in Japan where it has been embraced by the geek community in particular (Japanese is the only alternative language Twitter is available in until today).
And today a small group of those Japanese geeks, members of the so-called Koress Project, have announced the development of the Akiduki Pulse box, a device that automatically posts your heart rate to Twitter [JP]. → Read More
Free fun, thy name is Lemonade Tycoon. I downloaded EA Mobile’s free Lemonade Tycoon to my iPod touch yesterday and spent the better part of the afternoon creating my own beverage empire, one fresh squeezed glass at a time. → Read More
People have always been inclined to join mobs – most people have at least one story to tell about a time that they got swept up in or had to face a crowd demanding justice for one thing or another (both of my experiences were in college). The Internet has proven to be a frighteningly efficient tool to create virtual mobs. But we note two trends that suggest a bleak future: the increase in non-anonymous mob participation and the evolution of online services towards ever more efficient and real time communication platforms that facilitate mob creation and growth like never before. Things are changing online way too fast for society and culture to adapt. Something will eventually break.
I’m going to pick on FriendFeed in this post because I believe it is the nearest thing to Shangri-La for mob justice enthusiasts. I explain why below. But first I want to compare FriendFeed to Syphilis, which may have been the “perfect” disease when it first hit Europe in the 15th century. Today Syphilis takes years to kill its victims and is easily treated with antibiotics. But back in the early 1500′s it led to certain death within months. → Read More
Last month, Lance Walley left his position as co-founder and CEO of Ruby on Rails hosting company Engine Yard, after the VC-funded startup was forced to trim its workforce by 15% last January.
With nothing else on his hands immediately, Walley started building a Twitter application on his own dime (about $10,000) that would basically link your Twitter account to a brokerage account and enable you to trade stocks via the micro-sharing service. PollyTrade is the result of his work, and it’s currently available in public beta. → Read More
Of all the misguided schemes put forth lately to save newspapers (micropayments! blame Google!), the one put forth by Judge Richard Posner has to be the most jaw-dropping. He suggests that linking to copyrighted material should be outlawed.
No, Posner does not work for the Associated Press (which also has some strange ideas on linking). He is (normally) considered to be one of the great legal minds of our time. Posner is a United States Court of Appeals judge in Chicago and legal scholar who was once considered a potential Supreme Court nominee. He is someone who should know better. → Read More
Get some sweet, sweet Palm Mojo early. It’s basically the SDK for WebOS and it just showed up on the interwebs. Most interesting, however, is the lengths folks will go not to anger the Palm Gods:
Currently, no word on whether or not Palm is okay with this, and we can’t imagine that they are thrilled, so download at your own risk. Depending on how this one goes, we may have to pull all the links if Palm requests (we’re all for the sharing of information, but we want to help Palm, not destroy them). If they feel leaking the SDK early is only detrimental to them as a company, then we will remove the URLs.
I’m not sure I think this is such a good idea, Sony. A PSP crossed with one of Sony-Ericsson’s phones probably wouldn’t enjoy hybrid vigor, seeing as neither device is exactly best in breed. I mean, they’re both fine for what they are, but let’s be honest: they’re generally overpriced and only sport the most basic features.
I’m afraid I don’t trust you guys to make a successful crossover device, although you’re welcome to try. Er…continue to try. Just remember what the N-Gage did to Nokia. → Read More
If you’ve been holding off on purchasing your very own chainmail coif because you think chainmail prices have gotten out… of… control, you’ll be delighted to hear that ThinkGeek is selling chainmail coifs starting at $35. → Read More
When Nokia launched its Ovi Store for mobile applications a month ago, it was clear that – despite its less than stellar launch – it would be a mistake to simply dismiss the Finnish mobile juggernaut’s efforts as meaningless. The company may be struggling to stay relevant on the software and services side, but with a reach like Nokia’s on the handset distribution level I think it goes without saying that a lot of eyes are firmly fixed on Nokia’s initiatives in the field. → Read More
Aardvark’s social search service has been allowing beta users to invite friends since March. But if you don’t already know someone on the service, you’ve had to wait in line. That wait ends today, though, at least for Facebook users. You can now create an account via Facebook Connect and start using the service.
The service, which we described a couple of months ago, lets users ask questions of their friends and friends of friends like “What’s the best place to go hiking in Marin?” But it only works well, the company says, when your friends are already on the service. That’s why people who weren’t able to get an invitation from a current user had to wait in line until now:
Aardvark is a way to get quick, quality answers to questions from your extended social network. You can ask questions via an instant message buddy or email. The questions are then farmed out to your contacts (and their contacts) based on what they say they have knowledge of. If you ask taste related questions about music, books, movies, restaurants, etc., they’ll ask people who tend to show similar tastes as you in their profile.
This post is a bit different from the technology news that we generally cover here at TechCrunch. But it’s something that I think needs to be said.
Last night I got word that my parents had witnessed a tragic accident while driving in Northern California. I won’t get into the details, but suffice to say one person was killed and others were left bleeding, in various states of unconsciousness. Thank God my parents were not hurt in the accident, but they witnessed it first hand, as well as the disturbing aftermath.
Immediately after the accident, my parents and other witnesses began trying to dial 9-1-1. Attempt after attempt resulted in a busy signal. This isn’t unusual in the event of an emergency, as multiple dialers often tie up the lines to report the same incident. Except it seems that nobody managed to get through for far too long: emergency personal didn’t arrive for 20 minutes. The first officer to arrive at the scene said it took him two minutes to get there from the time he got the call. Which means that it took approximately 18 minutes for the news to reach him in the first place.
During a conversation with my father following the accident, he said one of the most profound things I’ve heard since I arrived in Silicon Valley: “Why is it that I can pull out my cell phone and call France or browse the Internet whenever I want, but I got a busy signal for 9-1-1 for 20 minutes?” I wish I had an answer for him. → Read More
When Nokia launched its Ovi Store for mobile applications a month ago, it was clear that – despite its less than stellar launch – it would be a mistake to simply dismiss the Finnish mobile juggernaut’s efforts as meaningless. The company may be struggling to stay relevant on the software and services side, but with a reach like Nokia’s on the handset distribution level I think it goes without saying that a lot of eyes are firmly fixed on Nokia’s initiatives in the field.
There was some criticism about the lack of content on the Ovi Store at launch day, particularly because of the fact that a lot of big names were lacking, but I figured I should give it at least a month to see if and how many developers would flock to the platform. Now, I think it’s time to take a look at where they stand after that month, and I thought I’d start by comparing the content offering to that of Apple’s App Store. → Read More
While Bing might have been a hit at launch, plenty of us have gone back to using Google. But now a small new web service makes comparing the two far easier. Bing vs. Google lets you – obviously – search Bing and Google at the same time by providing a split screen interface. Both screens (frames) scroll at the same time and can be arranged either vertically or horizontally. One thing Bing vs. Google can’t do is switch between the result pages of both search engines simultaneously, but using it I’ve rarely had a real need for this particular feature. Even when I did, two clicks instead of one wasn’t as tiring as having two separate tabs open for Bing and Google separately. The service was developed by Domagoj Pavlesic, a Croatian web developer and IT journalist, who says he created, tested and launched Bing vs. Google in under six hours: “The idea came to me in bed and I ran to my computer to register the domains bing-vs-google.com and google-vs-bing.com. The next morning I got to work immediately and it was finished in about five hours: setting up the server, design, development, testing,… It was made in Javascript with a couple of lines of ASP.NET in the backend.” With some looking for an alternative for Google and others just wanting to test the latest new service, Bing vs. Google gets the job done. Now, do we also need Wolfram Alpha vs TrueKnowledge? → Read More
Though the consolidation of Web 2.0 services in the last years has changed the way we use the Internet, some online services have remained almost unchanged for the last 5 or 10 years. Buying and selling tickets seems to be one of these areas. So far, US companies like Eventbrite or Ticketleap dominate this market, although Germany’s Amiando is giving them a run for their money and Belgium’s Oxynade is gearing up for launch. Now Spanish startup Ticketea, an online service that tries to boost the traditional management of events, has entered the game, raising a modest $280,000 and will launch in the next few weeks. The company will be based in Spain and is backed by American and Spanish business angels. Investors include Jaime Diaz, founder and CEO of the NYC Investment company, Worldwide Wealth Management. Diaz is also an experienced investor in relevant Internet companies such as Digital Domain, Artica or Domin-8. This Spanish company aims to develop a different way to promote events and sell tickets for small and medium size event organizers by levering 2.0 tools, and will try to make organizers’ life easier in six areas when it comes to manage an event: Attendees Registration, Event Promotion, Event Monetization, Ticket Distribution, Ticket Validation and Data analysis. This will be the first venture of this kind in Spain, and was set up by two friends who came across this business idea when they were trying to organise a party in order to raise funds for a non-profit organisation: the 2009 Mongol Rally. Javier Andrés, founder of the venture, initially developed this original idea as a student project for the Instituto de Empresa’s Venture Program. CrunchBase Information ticketea Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Do venture investors with the biggest and best networks end up producing the best returns? An academic paper from a few years ago by Yael Hochberg, Alexander Ljungqvist, and Yang Lu titled “Whom You Know Matters: Venture Capital Networks and Investment Performance” (embedded at the bottom of this post) suggests that is the case. They looked at historic venture returns and found that “better-networked VC firms experience significantly better fund performance,” as measured by how many of the companies in their portfolios exited via an IPO or acquisition.
A venture firm’s network in the study was defined as being made up of all the other venture firms who co-invested with it in funding rounds. The more co-investors a venture firm has, the better its network. The better its network, the better its overall returns. The correlation between the size of a venture firm’s network and its returns may have something to do with better access to deal flow, talent, advisers, potential customers, and potential exits.
If this is true, then who are the most connected venture firms and angel investors today? Vijay Dondeti, a graduate student in bioinformatics, applied the analysis in the Hochberg paper to about 2,700 investors in CrunchBase who participated in over 3,300 startup funding rounds between 2006 and 2008. He scored each investor based on how well connected they are to other investors as well as how well-connected their co-investors are to other investors. “In summary,” says Dondeti, “to get a high score, you need to co-invest often with others that also co-invest often.”
So which venture investors have the best networks? → Read More
Yesterday we posted about Glam Media contacting Twitter app developers concerning an upcoming ‘Twitter-powered ad network’, and requested more information from CEO Samir Arora as the e-mail we were forwarded by one of the developers was rather scarce on details.
He came through earlier this morning to confirm the accuracy of the scoop, and also provided a statement from his team in order to shed more light on the imminent initiative. As we suggested, the new solution is tied to GlamApps, the company’s application platform. → Read More
An engineer at Microsoft has ballparked the cost of the 16GB ZuneHD at somewhere between $250 and $280 (for reference, a 16GB iPod Touch is $300). That’s a little bit higher than I’d have guessed, but considering OLED screens are still expensive, to say nothing of flash memory, it’s a solid estimate. Trouble is, where are they going to get people to take it for a spin? Apple’s got a great spot for iPod discovery — maybe it’s time for Microsoft to do the same. → Read More
It’s been a while since we last took a look at Swoopo, the “entertainment shopping” site that’s one part auction-house, one part virtual casino. Since launching in late 2008, the site has closed a $10 million funding round led by August Capital, and has grown to over 2 million members. Now, the site has quietly expanded to launch a Canadian portal, and is also beginning to test a ‘buy it now’ function on its German site that allows users to apply the costs of their previous bids towards the purchase of an item.
For those that aren’t familiar with Swoopo, here’s how it works: the site uses a unique pricing model that invites you to purchase virtual “bids” for 75 cents, which can then be used to bid on goods ranging from video games to high-end televisions. Whenever you bid on an item, its price increases by fifteen cents and an extra 20 seconds are tacked on to the duration of the auction. Oftentimes items wind up selling substantially below their market value, but this lower price comes with some risk: if you bid on an item, you don’t get that 75 cent bid back when the auction concludes. → Read More
There are more than 10,000 games on the App Store, according to Apptism. That’s 20% of all apps released on the store: how the hell do you decide which one to buy? We can’t help you there, but we can keep serving you up reviews of recently released games so you can decide for yourself. We spent the week fumbling around with 5 of them: Tradewinds 2, Castle Of Magic, Archon, Jungle Bloxx, and Pocket Gold. Read on for our impressions → Read More
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