Last January, the iPhone was graced with one of its greatest applications yet (at least, for burrito lovers): a native Chipotle app, allowing users to order their meals online for easy pickup. But the joy was to be shortlived — within hours after appearing on the App Store, the Chipotle application was pulled, sparking The Case Of The Missing Burrito. Given the TechCrunch office’s love for Chipotle’s cheesy bundles of awesome, we followed the case closely, tracking down the developers of the app to learn what had caused its early demise only to be told we could expect it to return in around two weeks. Today, over seven months after vanishing without warning, Chipotle has finally made its way back to the iPhone. You can download it here. → Read More
GooseGrade, a startup that uses crowdsourcing to let anyone copy edit web sites, has tweaked its service to allow readers to copy edit any web site online. Previously, “citizen editors” could only edit sites which already have the gooseGrade plugin installed.
With the launch of the new service, readers only need to install gooseGrade’s new browser bookmarklet, which can be found on gooseGrade’s website. When a reader finds an error (spelling, grammar, factual, or otherwise) while browsing a site, they can click the “Copy Edit” button in their browsers’ toolbar, highlight the text that they are editing, and submit their edit. Citizen editors will also see any pending edits on the page submitted by other users. → Read More
Back in the 1990s during the original browser wars between Netscape and Internet Explorer, one of Microsoft’s chief weapons was the ability to bundle IE into Windows as the default browser. With bundling came market share, or so the government argued in its antitrust case against Redmond.
Fast forward to today’s search wars. You’d think that bundling a search engine into a browser would have some impact on market share. But some new data provided by search advertising network Chitika suggests that at least for Bing, being bundled with IE isn’t doing it much good. → Read More
I don’t envy the PR people who have to write press releases. They can never just call a spade a spade. Case in point, Sony’s new S Series Walkman. Its main feature is built-in speakers. But instead of just saying it has built-in speakers, it’s instead a “unique user experience” that adds “a new social element to the world of digital music and video.” → Read More
We just launched Best Comment Ever, our new running contest in which we award the authors of the best comments (on any story) from each week with awesome prizes. You can find the full details here. For the first week’s give away, we’ve got a set of Jaybird JB-200 Stereo Bluetooth Headphones, worth about $130 bucks a pop. The box touts them as “Small & light weight”, “Sweat & water resistant”, with a “Secure comfortable fit”. You should be able to get anywhere from 6-10 hours of music listening out of them per charge – and once they’re dead, you just plop them on the included charging cradle. Good luck folks – we’re looking forward to your comments! → Read More
A Japanese company called Evergreen is selling wooden speakers with a built-in digital alarm clock. Two versions are available: The DN-WSP1802 (pictured above) is the double speaker model, while the DN-WSP1406 is one unit only. Both versions will play your music in stereo (3.5mm). → Read More
Just a heads up for those of you looking for a quick hit of nostalgia. GOG.com has Unreal Gold, Unreal Tournament GOTY, Unreal 2 The Awakening Special Edition, and Unreal Tournament 2004 Editor’s Choice Edition for 15 percent off this week. That means each game is yours for $8.49 a pop. → Read More
You know what? We like you. We talk at you all day about cell phones, gadgets, and awesome stuff from around the Internets, but we rarely get the chance to hear back from you. We want to fix that. That’s why we’re introducing our new running contest: Best Comment Ever. Each week, we’ll throw a prize up for grabs. One week, it might be an iTunes gift card; the next, it might be a fancy new cell phone. If you want to win, you’ve gotta comment. Unlike many of our past contests, we’re not going to just blindly pick from comments at random. Each week we’re going to give the prize to the best comment left anywhere on the site, as determined by the CrunchGear/MobileCrunch staff. Maybe your comment is especially insightful, or it had us busting a gut laughing; if it stands out to us as particularly great, it has a chance. You can read the full rules and details here. → Read More
How adorable is that little solid-state SATA drive right there? You just plug it right into the SATA port on your motherboard! Look at you, little man, with all your data! You’re holding an entire operating system — yes you are! Yes you are! → Read More
I’m sure we’ve all had the situation on Twitter where you want to tweet something without it being attributed to you. Some users have separate accounts for these outbursts, but there’s still a chance those can be linked back to you. But a new service (which is really two new services) wants to make anonymous tweeting easy: Tweet From Above and Tweet From Below.
As their names imply, one of these services is meant to be used for good, while the other is meant for evil. Both allow you to use a third-party Twitter account to send out messages. While you might think that’s pointless, if you use it to @reply someone, they will obviously see the tweet, without knowing exactly who it is from. → Read More
It has become increasingly important for marketers and PR folks to keep a pulse on the conversation surrounding brands on the web while also maintaining relationships with writers, bloggers and other influencers who are starting these conversations. There has been an emergence of “social CRMs” that help brand marketers and PR reps follow the buzz on the web. TechCrunch contributor Brian Solis recently wrote about the importance of both real-time monitoring and engagement in the social CRM space following TechCrunch’s Real-Time Stream event.
Buzzstream, an Austin-based startup, has developed a social CRM and monitoring tool that is worth a look. Buzzstream’s application will automatically convert any blog or news story into a profile complete with author contact information, their requisite social networks information (Twitter handle, Facebook page), and also shows metrics for the writers’ publications. → Read More
Most Web sites started in the late 1990s have either gone public, been acquired or are defunct. Wired has a rather harsh cover story on one of the most famous ones that isn’t, Craigslist. But there’s another one that could rile up even more attorneys generals and socially conservative figureheads: Betfair.
The London-based online gambling company is seldom written about or mentioned in the U.S. despite its gargantuan size. It employs 1,800 people around the world, generates more than $500 million in annual revenues and is profitable. Oh, and those revenues have grown nearly 30% in the last year. What world-wide recession?
Of course, there’s a reason we rarely hear about Betfair: Its core betting exchange is illegal in the United States. In fact, Betfair has gotten to this size despite being locked out of the three of the largest gambling markets in the world: the US, China and Japan. That first one is slowly changing. → Read More
More evidence that the Xbox 360 will be getting a price cut of some sort in the next few days. This ad, from Target, shows the Xbox 360 Elite at $299 (down from $399) and the Xbox 360 Pro at $250. → Read More
We don’t usually announce blog launches but this one is pretty much beauty: it’s PlasticAxe, a blog about music gaming. Granted he’ll probably run out of stuff to write about on day 10, but Joe Rybicki, formerly of 1UP and a bunch of other gaming sites and magazines, has melded his love of music gaming with his love of Wordpress templates and created a niche blog to end all niche blogs. → Read More
Sorry for the delay, kids. It’s been a little busy around CG HQ. Without further ado, here are the winners of the Target exclusive Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen Superion action figure. Check your inbox! Thanks to everyone for entering and we’ll be sure to team up with Target and Hasbro again in the future to give away more Transformers. → Read More
Oh boy, another accessory to buy for the Wii. This one is a soft football that holds a Wii-mote and Nunchuk. It’s actually just a patent so far (submitted by Nintendo), so it may never make it to market in the first place. → Read More
Neither one of the companies involved have confirmed this officially so far, but the Nikkei, Japan’s biggest business publication is usually very reliable: According to that source, Hitachi and Toshiba are joining forces to take the leadership in the field of next-generation HDDs that have 10 times the memory capacity of models today. → Read More
Over a year and a half ago, YouTube launched a new Partner Program that allowed some of its most prolific and popular content owners to make some money from the content they contributed, inviting them to get a revenue share of ads placed against their videos. This was all well and good for YouTube’s cream of the crop, but let’s be honest — most of us don’t contribute all that regularly, and the vast majority of our videos don’t become popular, which means we couldn’t get into the program. What’s worse, even when one of your videos suddenly did go viral, if you weren’t already in the program there wasn’t anything you could do to reap the benefits. Today, that changes: YouTube is launching a new addition to its Partnership Program that will give anyone the chance to make some money when lightning strikes, even if it’s the first video they’ve ever uploaded.
Here’s how it works: YouTube will be monitoring its site for videos that quickly go viral, and will then reach out to the content uploader with an Email invitation to “Enable Revenue Sharing” on that video. If you choose to enable the feature, then YouTube will place ads against the video and will give you a cut, which gets paid into your Google AdSense account. → Read More
When it comes jumping on new trends in technology, CNN, like most other mainstream media sources is usually fairly slow to act. Sure, they’ve been hyping up Twitter non-stop for the past several months, but that was only after everyone in the tech world had already been talking about it for a long time. But one thing that hasn’t yet caught on in the tech sphere, but apparently has on CNN, is the use of “Bing” as a verb.
Check out this article about the most dangerous celebrities to search for on the web. The opening line: “Be cautious if you plan to Bing Jessica Biel or Google Brad Pitt. A new report says you might get a virus.” Um, “Bing Jessica Biel”? Aside from it sounding oddly sexual (insert badda-bing joke here), it’s a little odd to see that on CNN.com before it has really entered the tech lexicon. Sure, Microsoft wants everyone to use it as a verb to be like Google, but there’s obviously a big difference between a company wanting something to happen for branding, and it actually happening. → Read More
Potentially bad news for you UK readers. An amendment to the big Digital Britain report would kick off “hardcore copyright pirates” from the Internet. The amendment would require ISPs to tell repeat offenders to knock it off, or else. The cost for doing this—it’s not exactly inexpensive to keep track of copyright infringement, mail out letters, etc.—will be burdened by both the ISPs and rights holders. → Read More
