The Wall Street Journal has long envied the success of professional social network LinkedIn and its 15 million or so monthly visitors (WSJ.com has just a third of that). In late 2008 they launched WSJ Community, a social network bolted onto the main WSJ site. That community is a ghost town – raise your hand if you’ve even heard of it, let alone visited it. At some point, they’ll likely shut it down as quietly as possible.
But they are still serious about gunning for the LinkedIn crowd and all those monetization opportunities (jobs, ads and a heck of a marketing pool for WSJ subscriptions). They’ve been working on a new social network, to be called WSJ Connect, we’ve confirmed. And instead of building it internally, like they did with WSJ Community, they’ve enlisted the help of another arm of parent company News Corp. – Slingshot Labs. And yes, they call it “LinkedIn Killer” internally.
Slingshot Labs is the R&D arm of News Corp. and works on digital products. Their first product was Daily Fill, which launched earlier this year. They also built the MySpace Events product that we covered in March. They operate fairly independently, have their own funding and 40-50 staff, according to one person familiar with their operations.
WSJ Connect is still in the planning/conceptual stages, says one source, but there is “strong interest” to move the project forward. Importantly, it would leverage the WSJ brand but would be a separate property and unencumbered by the need for a paid subscription to the newspaper. → Read More
If you’re anything like me — and let’s face it, you’re reading CrunchGear, so chances are high that you are — you had more than a fleeting notion to buy one of those pet collar cameras to use for yourself, rather than your pet. The very nice people at uCorder are here to save you from the embarrassment of wearing a dog collar out in public. → Read More
Anyone who has ever tried to use Gmail as a central hub for their Email has likely fallen prey to one of the service’s annoying flaws: there was no way to use another site’s outgoing SMTP servers to send Email. For the vast majority of people this wasn’t an issue — Gmail was happy to send your Email for you from your Gmail account, along with message indicating that it was being sent “On Behalf Of” your other account. But those three words were still there, serving as a constant thorn in our sides. And to make matters worse, it could also confuse people: they might start sending messages to your Gmail account rather than your primary Email address. Today, you can kiss those “On Behalf Of”‘s goodbye, as Gmail has just started allowing users to send their messages from third party SMTP servers.
If the previous paragraph confused you, here’s an explanation: Many people like to use Gmail’s web interface for their Email but don’t have the option of using Google Apps on their mail server, especially when it’s for their work account. → Read More
Last February, when the news of the original Microsoft-Yahoo deal first broke, it didn’t take long before people were Photoshopping new logos. Flickr users were especially passionate, fearing that a Microsoft acquisition would ruin Flickr’s creative appeal.
This time around, it’s the same story. Here are some of the more interesting logos: → Read More
We’re gonna need another cliché to describe the Nintendo Wii. It seems the little system isn’t as much of a money-printing machine as it once was, with Nintendo’s profits down 66 percent (!) from the same quarter last year. Now, the video game industry is a little weird because in no single quarter are you guaranteed to have a hit game. There’s no law that says a new Mario or Zelda has to come out every May. → Read More
We’ve been covering the new web email project MySpace has been working on in stealth mode for the past several month. Now it’s ready to begin a quiet rollout today, in beta, for users around the globe.
Here’s why this matters: Right off the bat, MySpace Mail with a sexy new interface is a major player in the e-mail space based on sheer size alone. With nearly 130 million global users, it will enter the field as the 4th largest email provider in the world, and 2nd largest in the U.S. And it’s being built on top of the MySpace Messaging service that plenty of people are already using a lot — it accounts for some 20% of MySpace’s site traffic, we’re told.
Here’s what else is nice: Because MySpace has had so-called vanity URLs since its inception (unlike Facebook, which just rolled out the feature), you can use those as your email address with the new MySpace Mail. So for a page that resides at myspace.com/techcrunch, the email would be techcrunch@myspace.com, for example. And, if you don’t like the vanity URL you currently have, MySpace is giving you the opportunity to change it to something else (assuming it’s available). This would also change your vanity URL for your profile. → Read More
Ready for more ebook readers? I hope so ’cause Sony has two in the pipe right now. Somehow the service manuals were posted in some random corner of the Internet and of course a forum user downloaded them. The PRS-300 seems to be an entry-level model and the PRS-600 is a slightly larger, better equipped ebook reader. → Read More
Anything that begins “I built this as part of an audio visual project for Burning Man 2007″ is automatically suspect, but this is actually cool. It’s basically a huge cardboard tube with a massive driver. The resulting noise, at about 30Hz, was loud enough to be heard around the creator’s block. → Read More
The D-Link DIR-685 Xtreme N Storage Router has a lot of features stuffed into a small, attractive package. It’s the first router I’ve ever made space for on the top of my desk and, expensive though it is at $299, it’s part router, part Chumby, part print server, part network hard drive, and more. → Read More
Over the last few days we’ve seen a lot of attention centered on the new iPhone application from Spotify, the so-called ‘iTunes Killer’ subscription service that lets you plays songs on demand from a library of millions of tracks. We still don’t know if that app is going to make it through Apple’s nebulous approval process, but it’s already got some possible competition: Grooveshark, a streaming music service that lets you stream nearly any song from its web interface, has its own iPhone app ready for release and it’s just about to submit it to Apple. Like Spotify, the application lets you search for any song you want and stream it from the cloud almost instantly.
Now Grooveshark just needs to face the daunting Apple approval process. So will it make it though unscathed? Almost certainly not. → Read More
Losing sleep over rumors that Gearbox may be working on a Halo title for the Xbox 360? Rest easy, friend. 343 Industries byway of HaloWaypoint’s Twitter account announced that Gearbox is not working on a Halo title for Microsoft. → Read More
We on the web are a simple folk — especially us males. We need but two things to keep us happy: Explosions and boobs. And thank God someone has finally cut through all the BS, and given us exactly what we want in one brilliant site called yes, Explosions and Boobs.
The site is actually more elaborate than it may seem at first glorious glance. If you click on either the explosion picture or the picture of the boobs, you will get new pictures of explosions and boobs! Brilliant. It’s hours of endless fun waiting to happen. Who needs to sit through an entire Michael Bay movie when you have this? → Read More
Poof! Sony lost $390.5 million in the first quarter compared to a profit of almost $800 million in Q1 last year. TV sales are way down along with still and video cameras. Samsung, it seems, is kicking their butt. → Read More
Mozilla’s Firefox browser is about to hit a major milestone: 1 billion total downloads. As you can see on this Twitter account set up to monitor the download numbers, it just crossed the 999,000,000 threshold earlier today. Judging by the rate at which it’s increasing, it could hit the milestone as early as tomorrow.
And Mozilla is preparing for the big day with a new site (not live yet), called www.onebillionplusyou.com, which will go live on Monday. There, you’ll find information about the one billion downloads Firefox has seen, we’re told. When the browser hits the milestone, more information should also be available here. → Read More
We don’t typically cover PS Home updates at the ‘Gear, but the Sony PS team just dropped a tiny morsel of goodness and I feel compelled to tell you about it. The Movie Theater in Home is getting revamped with a 10-screen layout that PS Home Community Manager CydoniaX says could one-day stream full-length TV shows and movies. Nothing is set in stone so we’ll throw this one on the backburner for now. → Read More
I always an enjoy a good vortex cannon. Whether you’re using those small ones to scare cats or using a big one to blow up little houses – above – they’re a good time. The cannon sends a huge puff of air in front of it. Some are a bit more powerful than others, but Make has instructions for making your own impressive unit. → Read More
I’m guessing most of us have experienced the sensation of our eyes glossing over and and losing the ability to focus on the computer screen. It feels like your looking at Magic Eye art, almost like you’re looking through the screen. It usually happens after staring at the computer screen for endless hours during an all-nighter LAN party or while sitting in a cubical, mindlessly calling people to refi their mortgage with you. (experience talking there) These Wink Glasses aim to solve that issue by forcing your eye blink. Neat. → Read More
