http://www.viddler.com/simple_on_site/faeb32b4 It’s about damn time. Her royal fatness will launch on the PlayStation Network this Thursday (7/30) for $15. → Read More
A few weeks ago a good source gave me a legal document written by a former federal prosecutor and senior Department of Justice official. It was arguing that social gaming company Zynga could be breaking multiple state and federal anti-gambling laws via its popular Texas HoldEm game.
A few things are striking about this. First off, Zynga is one a handful of companies building Facebook and iPhone apps that has found a way to make money. Lots of money. Close to $200 hundred million in revenues to be precise. The fact that it could be the next target for an overzealous state attorney is a big story in and of itself. Second, the fact that competitors are this threatened by Zynga’s cash machine shows an ugly battle royale brewing in the application space. (More on that in a bit.)
Online gambling is illegal, according to the U.S. State Department and a handful of states, but there are still some gray areas. In June, the Feds started cracking down on gamblers in an attempt to clear things up. Meanwhile, others like Massachusetts representative Barney Frank are seeking to legalize and tax the $1 billion or more in annual revenues U.S. poker players are mostly sending to sites based overseas. Frank clearly faces a huge uphill battle from religious groups who see poker as a moral issue.
But a site like Zynga should be able to side-step all of this, because although you can buy chips for Zynga’s Texas HoldEm game you can’t redeem them for money, right? Maybe not. → Read More
Google Voice is a pretty amazing service, but it comes with a number of minor annoyances, including the way it handles outgoing calls and SMS messages. Fortunately, Google has recently come out with a number of smartphone apps for BlackBerry and Android that obviate the need for any extra steps, making Google Voice a natural replacement for your phone’s native dialer. The iPhone still lacks an official client, but that hasn’t stopped a handful of third party developers from releasing their own apps, which have been available on the App Store for the last few months. Today, however, it sounds like Apple has made the decision to crack down on these: Sean Kovacs, the developer behind the popular app GV Mobile, has written on his blog that Apple is going to be removing his application, citing the fact that it “duplicates features that come with the iPhone”. → Read More
Japan-based Sumitomo Electric Industries has developed the world’s first laser that’s able to produce “pure” green light (press release in English), meaning its semiconductor laser doesn’t need to convert light to green via another color. Until now, original semiconductor lasers were only available for the other primary colors of light, red and blue. → Read More
In Turkey, there is a new service which hasn’t been doing a lot of PR, but it’s developing into something pretty interesting. AkAkce.com is fast becoming the nation’s price comparison market of choice. Koray Karatas, co-founder of the company, says the new features of Ankara based AkAkce have resulted from combining its online comparison model with the data acquired from offline environments. With an average of 60,000 users daily, AkAkce is still the market leader ahead of Cimri.com. The company, which retrieves price information from 127 different stores and has recently started to collect data from inserts, ads and booklets of companies and brands in addition to the prices in online stores. Thus, when listing the numbers from various e-trade web sites in product searches, AkAkce also uses prices “for information purposes” from “other places”, e.g. “Price from 17-30 July catalog of Real store” in this section. So it’s competing with print catalogues as well. Here’s an example for the Nokia 6303. → Read More
Remember all the brouhaha about Twitter trademarking the word ‘tweet’ and subsequently having to explain that they were not exactly doing this to attack third-party app developers over the use of the word?
Well so far Twitter hasn’t been that terribly prolific in using the words ‘tweet’ or ‘retweet’ apart from some odd blog posts and individual employees’ messages on the micro-sharing service. That has changed today.
TechCrunch reader @JoeHagofsky informs us that Twitter has apparently changed the word ‘updates’ on the right sidebar of the page you see when logged onto its website to ‘tweets’ (see screenshots below). It’s also changed on individual profile pages. We see them too and as far as we know this is in fact new. → Read More
WiTricity is working on a wireless power solution that can send power over short distances, thereby reducing the need for wires and cables. The system uses resonant magnetic coupling – essentially a form of radio trasnmission – that can send enough power to charge cellphones or run a television. The actual technology is still a ways of – near field charging will probably appear before this does – but it’s nice to know someone is trying. → Read More
In what may be the most thorough and energetic unboxing of a video game in the history of the internet, everyone’s favorite enthusiastic gamer, DiiFii, unboxes Wii Sports Resort. And we’re talking a major unboxing here: the cardboard, the advertising inserts, the look and feel of the box itself, the simplicity of the actual game disc, and more. There’s also a quick fondling of the MotionPlus peripheral and, of course, some gameplay footage. To enjoy this video as a drinking game, take one drink every time DiiFii says “awesome”. Wii Sports Resort Unboxing [YouTube] → Read More
Buying clubs are dull from an internet-web-app-startup-style point of view but boy do they make money. And it appears they scale too. European online buying club Vente Privee, which launched in the UK in September 2008 after a stellar run from its original French home base, has posted a half-yearly turnover of £290 million – a 40% increase year on year. The company is projecting a turnover of £557 million excluding taxes in 2009 (an increase of 27%). It also aims to organise 1,800 sales events (180 in the UK) with a portfolio of 850 different brands. In the first half of the year the company held 870 sales events across Europe (93 of which were in the UK) in partnership with 850 brands which equates to a 47% increase on 2008. The site’s membership has continued to increase, reaching 8 million members by the end of June (160,000 UK members) – a 42% growth for the same period in 2008. The first six months of the year saw an increase of 33% in the number of parcels dispatched (6 million). → Read More
Verizon confirmed in an analyst conference call that the Palm Pre, the little smartphone the could, will be available on Verizon’s network between Q1 and the end of Q2 next year. This should come as a relief to people who are waiting to ditch their Blackberry Storms for Palm’s new offering. There’s not much more info than that: they just said it would happen. This confirms rumors that the Pre would break out of its pen at Sprint sooner than later and could mean new Sprint models coming running Palm’s WebOS. → Read More
One search engine dies, another takes a step forward. This is a hard space to find a niche in, but the money at stake if you succeed is staggering.
Blekko, the stealth search engine we’ve been covering since early 2008, has raised a third round of financing – $11.5 million from USVP and CMEA. That brings the total amount of capital raised to $17.5 million, including a $1 million credit line. Their last round was in March 2008.
We took a look at Blekko in late May. The company wants absolutely no press at all while they continue to bake the product, but we think there is something interesting under the hood. And apparently a few investors agree. → Read More
To quote Grandpa Simpson, “Oh, bitch, bitch, bitch.” Today I woke up to reports that AT&T was being Evil, blocking access to certain sections of 4chan, which you’ll see described as anything from a “Wild West” to a “hornet’s nest.” (That blocking has since stopped, by the way.) I like to describe it as the last honest place on the Internet. People are creative like that. Anyhow, before you e-riot or whatever, consider this posting by an admin at unWired, another ISP that was blocking access to 4chan. → Read More
King of Queens Season Five, Episode 20 (titled Driving Reign) finds Doug Heffernan and his cousin Danny squaring off in an IPS truck race. Hilarity ensues — see the video clip below.
But did you know that the friendly men and women of the United Parcel Service, upon which the fictional International Parcel Service is based, have their very own real-life driving competitions? It’s true! → Read More
Ever wished Spotify were a litte more… social? That you could share playlists with friends and discuss your favourite tracks? Well, you have been able to for a while with community site ShareMyPlaylists, but the site has just relaunched. The result that its name is now deceiving: you can do an awful lot more than just share playlists. In fact, with its “wire” (a bit like a wall), “activity stream” and “friends”, it’s obviously aiming to a be fully-featured social network. Users can even create WordPress-powered blogs to discuss the music they love. And because the whole thing orbits Spotify, users are actively sharing, recommending and listening to new music all the time. → Read More
While there’s a lot of talk about Apple’s rumored tablet device as it relates to new initiatives from the music industry, the device is undoubtedly a lot larger in scope. The music-angle talk is mostly thanks to the Financial Times all-over-the-place first report yesterday. But a second story also released yesterday with much of the same information, clears things up a bit, and adds a few interesting new nuggets of information.
Here’s the best excerpt:
“It would be a colour, flat-panel TV to the old-fashioned, black and white TV of the Kindle,” one publishing executive said.
Uh oh, Amazon. → Read More
Now this is odd. Wee Matt Buchanan from Dublin above has been receiving tweets complaining of his incessant attacks against telecom giant AT&T. Three people have said the exact same thing about his angry tirades, suggesting that either Matt has been hitting the sauce (very possible) or that someone has attempted a very stupid astroturfing campaign with or without AT&T’s permission (more possible). → Read More
USB gadget specialized Thanko strikes again. This time, the Tokyo-based company gives you a small portable camera [JP] that can be attached to your bike or helmet, for example. The so-called Action Camera is similar to a device Thanko released in May, but this new model isn’t waterproof.
But it can record video at 30fps (in 640 x 480 VGA), weighs just 80g and stores video on MicroSD cards (up to 2GB, the internal memory is 32MB only). Charge the battery for 2.5 hours and you can use the Action Camera for up to 2 hours. Needless to say, there is also a USB 2.0 port (this is a Thanko product, after all). → Read More
Back in 2004, one of the most well known members of the English House of Lords, Baroness Hale, stated that it is always difficult for the courts to make balanced judgements when more than one fundamental Human Right is in play. It seems, however, that today there are still people who cannot accept that in the era of social media and the Web the Law as applied by some European governments remains in the dark ages. → Read More
