iPhonAsia has some information on China’s exciting WiFi-crippled iPhone. The device will cost less than the smuggled, grey-market iPhones currently available in China and will include special apps for the Chinese consumer.
Considering Apple and China’s track record these last few weeks I wonder how much good will Apple last left in the land of the violent Foxconn security team. → Read More
Looks like 24 inches is becoming the new low-price sweet spot for LCD monitors. Newegg.com is selling one for just $170 with free shipping. That’s the lowest-priced new 24-inch monitor I believe I’ve ever come across. → Read More
Last week Verzion pushed Slacker Radio onto the BlackBerry Storm. This time around, the BlackBerry Tour is getting the same treatment. Why you ask? Well, Slacker Radio has put a little icon within the app that links available songs to the VZW V-Cast music store. So when a tune plays through Slacker Radio, customers will be able to purchase the song right there. → Read More
Ah, there we go — a little more info about Creative’s mysterious “Zii” project. It now appears to be an iPod touch-like device, called the Zii EGG, running Android. Interesting… I’m listening. → Read More
Given the enormous creative energy some robot geeks regularly demonstrate, this took longer than I expected: A robot hobbyist (who is Japanese, I believe) created a humanoid with an iPhone head. To be more exact, he took a commercially available robot body kit and used an iPhone 3GS as its “head (through the dock connector). → Read More
If you’ve got a company and you want a big acquisition in a year or two, you may want to consider hiring Alfred Lin, currently the COO/CFO of just-acquired Zappos. Every company he’s worked for has been acquired, and the smallest deal was $265 million.
Lin dropped out of a PhD program at Stanford to join LinkExchange in 1996 as acting CFO. Two years later the company was acquired by Microsoft for $265 million in stock. He then cofounded Venture Frogs, a $27 million venture fund, with college buddy Tony Hsieh. Investments included Zappos, TellMe, OpenTable, MyAble, Mongo Music and Ask Jeeves, all of which have been acquired or went public.
Lin then joined TellMe in 2001 as VP Finance and Business Development. At the time he joined the company was losing $60 million per year, he tells me. Microsoft bought the company for $800 million in 2007.
Then he really outdid himself. He joined Zappos, reuniting with his old friend Hsieh, in 2006 as COO and CFO. How’d they do? Yeah, they were acquired last week by Amazon for close to $1 billion. → Read More
Ho-ly crap. For $323 plus $20 shipping you can get a digital monkey wrench that tells you when whatever bolt you’re tightening is tight enough. All these years I’ve been relying on the old “it doesn’t turn any more, so it must be tight” rule. → Read More
Google is finally figuring out that short links are just easier to deal with, especially on a mobile phone. No, it is not rolling out its own URL shortening service just yet (bit.ly, stand down). But today it is introducing what it calls “smart links” to the mobile version of Gmail.
When it recognizes a super-long link like one for Google Maps, it will shorten it to the underlying name thing being linked to. In this case, it is an address. → Read More
Indie rock band Greenpeace has a problem with HP, specifically its broken promises vis–à-vis toxic chemicals in its products. The band’s frontman, Casey Harrell, says that “HP continues to put hazardous products on the market despite promises made years ago to phase out these toxic compounds.” So, to get back at HP, Greenpeace members “climbed to the top of HP’s global headquarters and painted the message ‘Hazardous Products’ in big, bold letters on the roof.” → Read More
Hello, my name is Christopher Hawker. I am a professional inventor, specializing in innovative consumer products. My company is called Trident Design, LLC. I have developed many products in numerous industries and have over 20 products on the market. My most famous invention is the PowerSquid, a cephalopod-inspired power strip with outlets situated at the end of short cords, thereby eliminating the problem of losing outlets to bulky transformer plugs. John Biggs, editor-in-chief of this blog, has asked me to write the story of the birth of the PowerSquid and its development and journey to market. This is the Song of the PowerSquid.
This is part 6 of a 6 part series. Read them all here.
Part 6: Philips Enters the Picture
In the summer of 2006, I got a call from the president of Power Sentry to tell me that they were being bought by Philips, the Netherlands-based consumer electronics giant. My initial instinct was that this would be a mixed bag. They were just too large. He reassured that it would be great for the PowerSquid, with the awesome brand and marketing power of this giant, worldwide corporation suddenly behind our product. What really ended up happening was that the huge corporation barley noticed that it sold PowerSquid, since it had thousands and thousands of other products. The lack of focus quickly became evident as the relationship began to unfold. Most notably in their responsiveness to our needs as Flexity, which usually amounted to, “bad news delivered late.” Nevertheless, we continued to push Flexity. Philips agreed to let us distribute their other power products to our customers, so we became a distributor of the original non-surge PowerSquid, as well as their lower-end (UL Listed) surge protectors.
We successfully sold the Calamari into Dell’s and Apple’s online stores, which were two of our major targets all along. Unfortunately, they both sequestered them to the last page of their surge protector sections. We had no “pay-to-play” money to get higher placement. With no special attention drawn to them and backwoods positioning, neither venue proved as successful as our own site. → Read More
Expect to starting seeing ATSC tuners in notebooks, netbooks, and UMPCs soon. MaxLinear and Hauppauge Digital are working on a minicard that should tune in ATSC, QAM, DVB-T, DVB-H, and DTMB signals. The small card also consumes 50% less power than other tuner cards, and the small size means that it can make its way into more packages. Sounds great, right? I’m just doubtful that it will pull in ATSC signals without a large antenna and therefore killing any portability. → Read More
Twitter is great for a lot of things, but I think my favorite use of it is public smack-talking. Just read what Lance Armstrong has to say about his Tour de France-winning teammate, Alberto Contador. And in the tech world, we have some good smack talking from Verizon directed at rival AT&T today.
John Czwartacki, who is the policy blog editor for Verizon, sent the following public message on Twitter, “This what USA’s most reliable wireless network sends BEFORE a conference. #VDC“— complete with a TwitPic (below) of a giant Verizon truck parked outside the conference to bolster signal. → Read More
The much anticipated Microsoft/Yahoo search alliance is in the “final stages of negotiation” says a source close to Yahoo, and may be signed at any time. The two companies have been negotiating the terms of the transaction for weeks, and our source says that the deal guys are largely out of the process now. The lawyers are negotiating the final details.
That doesn’t mean the deal is guaranteed, of course. But everything we’re hearing says it’s highly likely. The deal will be announced publicly shortly after it’s signed, and could come “today, tomorrow, next week” according to our source.
Most of the negotiations have been over an up front payment to Yahoo, speculated to be in the $500 million – $1 billion range. The size and specifics of the up front payment have been a sticking point, including whether it is a simple payment for the deal or a guarantee on future revenues. We have no additional information on where the two companies ended up on that deal term.
Both companies announced less than stellar quarterly earnings last week. Yahoo revenues were down 13%, and Microsoft had its own woes to deal with. → Read More
Here’s a nice little deal on the 11.6-inch Acer Aspire One 751h (see our review here) over at B&H. You can get the fully-loaded (loaded as far as netbooks go) version with 2GB of RAM, 250GB hard drive, and six-cell battery for just $350 after a $54.10 instant rebate and with free shipping to boot. → Read More
Yo, Sidekick LX ’09 owners. Check out the Download Catalog. You should find the Sidekick Sync app somewhere in there and guess what? The app brings push email, attachment viewing, syncing, and Exchange support to your beloved Sidekick. Tits, right? (If you don’t see the app right away, check back a little bit later today) → Read More
No, I’m not posting this for the fun of it, but I can’t tell you why I’m doing it either. Just watch the video and I’m sure you can figure it out. Sound off in comments if you think you know. → Read More
Somewhere in sleepy Wisconsin – actually in Oshkosh – Virgin Galactic displayed the mothership Eve to the general public for the very first time. The plane soared over thousands of people attending the Experimental Aircraft Association’s annual AirVenture convention and then landed so people could get a closer look. Chances are that this will be the first and last time many of these folks will see of the space rocket delivery system. Not everyone can pay for a trip into space like Sir Richard Branson. It’s a tad pricey. → Read More
Now the dust has settled a bit, let’s take a look at exactly what happened yesterday. At around 2pm in the afternoon, after reading our story about a new challenger to Tweetmeme called Retweet.com, TechCrunch commenter @travisketchum found the live, public server where Retweet.com’s files were being kept. The TechCrunch community quickly found remarkable similarities between Retweet.com’s and Tweetmeme’s code. Alerted to this, Nick Halstead from Tweetmeme investigated himself. Evidently, he was not happy with what he found. Nick accused Retweet.com of directly copying Tweetmeme’s code, and indicated that he was seeking legal advice. Our own investigation seemed to back Nick up: we observed Javascript functions like “tm_update($content)” (where “tm” is clearly a reference to Tweetmeme) and references to “rednose” (Red Nose Day is a UK charity event – there’s no reason why it would exist in a US start-up’s code), coupled with line after line of identical code, on Retweet.com’s server. → Read More
You’ll have two more T-Mobile cellphones to pick from beginning next month. There’s the HTC Touch Pro2, which still doesn’t have an AT&T release date (so T-Mo can lord that over AT&T), and the Samsung Gravity 2. → Read More
I’ve now been given an extended demo of the Spotify iPhone app which is currently awaiting Apple’s approval.
Unfortunately the guy who showed it to me managed to prize the iPhone with the app on it from my cold sweaty palms, so I wasn’t allowed to take the app away on my own iPhone. However, screen grabs taken from the video they released this week illustrate how the app works very well.
I can confirm that everything in the Spotify app works as the video showed it. It’s in fact a very simple application, but extremely easy to use and the sound is magically good. Here’s what I found: → Read More
