German free music streaming service Roccatune has officially filed for insolvency.
After weeks of silence on their situation, Roccatune CEO Constantin Thyssen has now announced the news on their company blog. He puts the blame for the insolvency on a failed round of financing. → Read More
Last summer, Zoho, a web-based software suite that includes document, project and invoicing management tools, integrated Google and Yahoo sign-ins, allowing users to sign into Zoho using a Google or Yahoo account. Today, Zoho is launching sign-in integration with Google Apps, letting users login to Zoho using their Google Apps credentials.
When Zoho users try to login to Zoho, they’ll be given a ‘Google Apps’ option in the sign-in box. Users can input their Google Apps domain name, and will be redirected to Google to sign-in using their Google Apps credentials. They will be given the option of authorizing “accounts.zoho.com” and will then be logged in to Zoho directly. → Read More
The flood of video recording devices coming out of Japan doesn’t want to end. Today Sony unveiled five Blu-ray recorders with built-in HDDs [JP] for the Japanese market, and one of them has a 2 TB HDD. Sony says they tried to focus especially on usability and design with these machines. → Read More
If you’re new to Twitter, life is easy. A notification comes in that someone is following you, and you probably follow them back. After all, you’re going to want some tweets in your stream. After a couple dozen of those, you may start using more discretion, looking over the person’s profile and their most recent tweets. But that gets old quickly as well, and inevitably you turn to using the secret ratio that nearly everyone knows (whether they realize it or not) to determine who is worth following back: “Followers” versus “following”.
If a person has more followers than they are following, they’re probably a good person to at least consider following. If they are following more than they have more followers, the opposite may be true. The greater the discrepancy between the two numbers, the more likely each of those is true — to a certain point, since celebrities like Oprah throw this system out of whack. But for regular, non-Hollywood celebrities, the system works remarkably well as a filter. → Read More
It started off as an innocent marketing mistake: Microsoft photoshopped a black man out of a picture for their Polish website and replaced it with a white guy. They left the black guy’s hand in the photo, but whatever. and that monitor still isn’t plugged in to anything at all.
Microsoft apologized and changed the Polish site to the original image.
But it’s too late. We’re already getting comments from users who are doing a little photoshopping of their own. This first one, which was submitted anonymously, shows a famous shot of Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer.
We declare this a meme. Compete, and win. → Read More
T-Mobile will unveil “the largest product launch advertising campaign in T-Mobile history” for the Android myTouch tomorrow with a television, online, cinema, print and search advertising campaign. The stars? Whoopi Goldberg, Los Angeles Lakers coach Phil Jackson and TV personality/motorcycle maven Jessie James.
Shocked? Me too. I can’t believe they didn’t ask me to participate. I mean, I’m actually using the phone. And like Phil Jackson, I’m a huge Lakers fan. Ridiculous. I’m firing my agent.
You can see the TV commercial below, which I’ve uploaded to YouTube without any permission whatsoever. I like the Cat Stevens song. More celebritastic endorsements on the official myTouch site. → Read More
For all the billions of dollars created here, Silicon Valley is remarkably stingy when it comes to giving. I first wrote about this when I moved here in the great Web 1.0 Internet bubble. Back then, as companies went public all around us, one-third of households earning $100,000 or more gave $1,000 or less to charity—roughly half what the rest of the U.S. gave per dollar earned. And those were the fat times.
I don’t have comparable data to back it up, but anecdotally it seems the Web 2.0 generation is doing a better job at giving. Or at least Bebo founder Michael Birch is.
Birch has spent the last six months working with a team of two other people to build a social giving site for the popular organization, Charity:Water. It launched its beta site today, and with just a Tweet announcing it nearly 400 members have already raised some $3,000. → Read More
Condé Nast must be investing in augmented reality tech; there’s a nice, in-depth story on the stuff over at Wired. I kid, I kid — there are two. And I won’t disagree, it’s all very interesting, but I feel the same way about it as I do about 3D TV. Sure, it’s great when you see it and it’ll be awesome when it’s mainstream, but I’d prefer to wait until the Citizen Kane of augmented reality comes out (this is close) before I give it my full attention. → Read More
Created as a tool for people suffering from full paralysis, this system is a pretty amazing piece of work. Its called the EyeWriter, and the project is led by a group of graffiti artists driven to help one of their own, Tony Quan, who is afflicted with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis. I love this sort of grassroots innovation — and I wonder what they might get done if they had a lab and a NIS grant.
Check out the video of the gadget in action. → Read More
This is the kind of device I would think to find in the Delorean from Back to the Future. Christopher Lloyd would look all crazy-eyed at you and say something like “They weren’t counting on this little puppy!”
“What is it, a tactical nuke?” I’d ask, ever thinking of Starship Troopers. “Even better,” he’d say, eyes crazier than ever, “I went back to 1998 and got a can of Josta!” → Read More
Salesforce.com has continued to expand the capabilities of Force.com, its platform to build and deploy enterprise applications. The company recently rolled out Force.com Sites, which lets companies build and run their applications for internal use as well as for public use on Salesforce.com cloud computing platform. Today, Salesforce will be opening up an additional distribution channel off of Force.com: the Value-Added Reseller (VAR) program.
The VAR program lets partners, which are primarily IT consultants to large companies, resell Force.com and applications built off of Force.com to other companies. So for example, a VAR partner could create a recruiting app to manage HR processes for a company off of the Force.com platform and charge the company for the application and requisite services. VARs can resell the Force.com cloud computing platform, as well as additional services such as mobile capabilities, storage, sites, and development sandboxes. → Read More
The very useful-looking DSLR Camera Remote app for iPhone has finally (finally) been updated to version 1.1. Those of you who haven’t been following along wouldn’t know that this is a major release, adding Nikon support to the mix. That’s great news for Nikon owners, obviously, but Canon shooters like myself also will find an improved interface, bugfixes, and new features. And if you’re really out of the loop (god!!! Why am I even talking to you!), this is an app that lets you control and shoot your DSLR from afar, pretty much controlling every aspect of the shot and getting a live preview if you have that set up right. → Read More
SkyGrid is slowly expanding its real-time financial news empire. The powerful business news aggregator, recently struck a deal with StockTwits, a popular site that lets you track real-time discussions about stock information on Twitter, to feature a live feed of real-time news. Tomorrow, SkyGrid will launch its real-time financial news widget on Zacks, an investment research site that’s popular in the financial industry.
Similar to the deal with StockTwits, SkyGrid will embed a widget into Zacks pages of financial information for companies, showing a stream of incoming, real-time news for the company on the page. You can also filter news by sentiment: SkyGrid uses semantic text analysis to determine if each incoming article is deemed positive, negative, or neutral about a given company. → Read More
Well, they got off to a good start, but Rapid Repair has been passed up by iFixit in the race to tear an unsuspecting PS3 Slim to pieces. What’s in there? Well, apparently, the whole thing is taken up by an enormous fan and the Blu-ray drive. Where’s the PS3?! Under the fan, I suppose. Check out the whole process here. → Read More
Here’s the thing. If you’re going bacon, you have to go all the way. Bacon-like has never been enough — and it never will be. This is why Bacon Bits will always outsell Fakin’ Bacon, and this is why it will always be better to fashion a pair of bacon goggles than wear a bacon-themed pair of Oakleys. → Read More
Animoto, the startup that lets you automatically build custom music videos starring your own media, just got even more awesome. Tonight the site is launching support for video, which means you’ll be able to generate customized music videos featuring your home movies, along with photos and music, with almost no effort required. We first previewed the new feature last month, and now the company is opening it to everyone.
The results are impressive, with videos that sport professional transitions that match whatever backing music you’ve chosen. For proof, check out the video below showing off a typical day at the TechCrunch office — it looks great, but it only took around five minutes of work.
Video editing can get tricky fast, but Animoto makes it easy by retaining the same kind of simple interface that’s made the site such a breeze to use with images. Here’s how it works: you upload the images and videos that you’d like to include in your movie, and the site displays a grid of thumbnails that you can drag and drop to determine the order they’ll be displayed in the final cut. → Read More
Apparently, the optical qualities of a regular old DVD player laser lens make it a perfectly good macro lens attachment for many camera phones. I’m genuinely impressed with the quality of the pictures — perhaps I’m wrong about some of these tiny sensors. → Read More
At best people consider myYearbook an afterthought in the social networking world – they weren’t even included in our 2009 Social Network valuation model because of a lack of available traffic data.
And yet…the company has managed to achieve profitability, a goal some of its huge competitors are still struggling to reach. CEO Geoff Cook told me today that the company is generating over $1 million/month in revenue, and became profitable in Q1 2009 (they’ve been ebitda profitable since last year).
1/3 of that revenue comes from virtual gifts, a product that only first launched in late 2008. The remainder, about 2/3 of revenue, is from advertising.
The site, which is aimed at teenagers, was first launched in 2005 by Geoff Cook and his siblings, Catherine and David. It now attracts nearly 6 million monthly unique visitors (Comscore worldwide, July 2009) and just over 1 billion monthly page views. 20 million users have registered.
Our video interview with Cook is below: → Read More
Update: iFixIt tore the PS3 down like the champs they are. Check out the Blue Philips Screw of Death! Rapid repair is breaking down the PS3 Slim as we speak. Actually, they’ve only just finished taking the screws off it. Want to be the first to know that it’s fusion-powered, or actually just two PS2s taped together? Keep an eye on the post, they’ll be updating it as the pictures and hinkfo come through. I’ll bump this post when they finish up (they expect it to be several hours at least) but if you want to ride the wave, don’t let me stop you. → Read More
Barcelona, Spain
New York City
San Francisco, CA
