Amazon has a pretty solid deal on an HP MediaSmart Home Server. Found elsewhere for over $550, you can get your hands on it for $450 until September 3rd. It was briefly priced at $419.99 direct from HP but that deal has expired and it’s now $600. → Read More
The BlackBerry Storm may finally have found its pricing sweet spot. The phone definitely was overpriced at $200 last year and even the $100 price cut a few months ago didn’t seem right, but $50?!? Yeah, I wanna throw mine into a wall and piss on the remains daily, but VZW isn’t going to have any trouble at all clearing out the inventory. You know why it’s only $50 right? → Read More
Wuh oh – things just got real. Just last week, two mysterious Palm devices showed up in Verizon’s inventory: the P101, and the P121. The P100 is the Palm Pre, so it’s a pretty safe bet that the P101 is a VZW-branded version of the same handset. But the P121? It may well be the Palm Eos, but no one knows for sure. Making things that much more complex, a Sprint version of the mysterious P121 has just popped up in their inventory system, going as the P120. Taking it one step even further, it’s joined by another model: the Palm C40. Now we’re looking at three separate model numbers on two carriers, none of which we’ve got any concrete information on. Yeesh. [Via PreCentral] → Read More
The Walt Disney Company has agreed to acquire Marvel Entertainment in a stock and cash transaction, the companies announced this morning. Under the terms of the agreement and based on last week’s closing price of Disney, Marvel shareholders would receive a total of $30 per share in cash plus approximately 0.745 Disney shares for each Marvel share they own.
Based on the closing price of Disney stock on Friday, August 28, the total transaction value is $50 per Marvel share or approximately $4 billion.
Under the deal, which has been approved by the boards of both companies, Disney will acquire ownership of Marvel including its portfolio of over 5,000 Marvel characters. That portfolio includes many familiar names like Iron Man, Spider-Man, X-Men, Captain America, Fantastic Four and Thor. → Read More
Israeli startup Cellogic, makers of the fine FlyScreen software, have spent the last 8 months or so developing a custom version for the Android platform to complement their currently Symbian-exclusive version. Today, the company is debuting the private alpha version of the Android-compatible program, and we have 1,000 invites to offer for those carrying around HTC phones running Android 1.5 (it works on the Samsung Galaxy too but is less optimized for that particular device).
So what’s FlyScreen?
Essentially, a collection of expandable widgets that comprise syndicated content (such as TechCrunch) and small apps that hook into Twitter, Facebook etc. You can use it to fetch the RSS feed of your favorite blogs, and thus be able to quickly access previews of published content, tag articles for later reading or share posts on Twitter and/or Facebook in just one click. → Read More
The BlackBerry Storm may finally have found its pricing sweet spot. The phone definitely was overpriced at $200 last year and even the $100 price cut a few months ago didn’t seem right, but $50?!? Yeah, I wanna throw mine into a wall and piss on the remains daily, but VZW isn’t going to have any trouble at all clearing out the inventory. You know why it’s only $50 right? → Read More
Yokohama-based electronics company Kumazaki-Aim has announced a “portable” LED video projector [JP] (size: 268×295×92mm, weight: 2.5kg) that won’t win any design awards but houses a DVD player. Buyers also get a screen (132×25×980mm) for their money. → Read More
Everyone hates re-runs. They’re episodes you’ve likely already seen, being run out of order because there is no new content to run. But Fox may have just figured out a way to make them more interesting: Twitter.
The television network will be airing old episodes for two of its shows, Fringe and Glee, with Twitter commentary along the bottom of the screen. But no, sadly, not just anyone can tweet anything and have it be on national television, these will be moderated streams. And most of the it will be taken up by the tweets of the two shows’ casts and producers, apparently. → Read More
Platogo, an Austrian startup which we recently covered as being a Mini Seedcamp finalist, opens up in private beta tomorrow. Platogo, (as in Play Together Online) aims to be the one-stop-shop for simple online multiplayer gaming. You’ve heard of MMORPGs such as World of Warcraft, but Platogo focuses on simple, easy-to-learn, online flash games with nifty graphics which are easy to play, thus tapping into the far larger market of casual gamers. We have 50 exclusive Beta Invites for Techcrunch Europe Readers. The first 50 commenters on this post will get an invite code. And we’ll see if we can strong-arm the startup into handing out more. [Update: We got them to add 150 more]. → Read More
Recently NetVibes, the startup that lets you create a widget-filled customizable homepage, rolled out a free feature allowing users to create widget-based web pages, dubbed Theme Publishing. Ostensibly aimed at users, it also has one eye on potentially charging brands and agencies to create customised home pages.
In other words, Netvibes is trying to monetize itself as fast as possible. To that end it’s also now re-selling its architecture to portals and ISPs. Germany’s largest portal and ISP, T-Online, has thus now launched launched Meine Seite, a user-personalized, widget-based version of their site powered by Netvibes. → Read More
Over the last few months we’ve seen the rise of a new and highly controversial kind of website that focuses on “Entertainment Shopping” — online stores that offer customers goods with very steep discounts, but with some risk involved in the shopping process. Some have likened these to gambling or scams, while others consider them auctions. In any case, it’s only becoming more popular, and now there’s a startup called SevenSnap that’s bringing Entertainment Shopping to the iPhone.
The app isn’t out on the App Store yet, but the company recently released a video (embedded below) that shows it off. Here’s how it works: every 60 minutes, SevenSnap puts a new item up for grabs (the example in the video is a Macbook Pro). If you want to have a shot at purchasing the item, you need to purchase “time credits”, which run a dollar per minute. → Read More
Virtualization giant VMware is launched two new products at its annual conference tomorrow, VMworld. The first is a suite of VMware’s existing virtualization solutions, called the VMware vCenter Product Family. The suite is built on top of VMware’s vSphere 4 to help enterprises create and maintain dynamic and flexible IT infrastructures.
VMware says that they have received an overwhelmingly positive response the latest generation of vSphere 4, with approximately 75 percent of customers planning to upgrade to VMware vSphere 4 within the next six months. → Read More
A leaked poster told us most of the pertinent information about Canon’s upcoming 7D, and this adds weight to that info. There are a few new specs; apparently the AF system is a new layout, and it’s a dual Digic IV processor setup, which probably accounts for its ability to shoot at 8FPS. There’s also a new flash and an… aerodynamic body design? What? → Read More
Looking for any easy way to transfer photos or files from one iPhone to another or an iPod Touch or Mac? Well, friend, we have a deal for you! DropCopy 2009 is currently free from the App Store. The file transfer app was $5 until this morning. It has its fair share of flaws but it’s free.
More pics inside if you’re curious. → Read More
Don’t forget to enter the Resident Evil: The Darkside Chronicle zombie tee contest brought to you by Capcom. If your beer belly and man boobs are hindering you from entering the contest then just send in a photo of yourself making a zombie face to contest at crunchgear dot com with the subject line “Me Want Brain” and don’t forget to tell us what size shirt you’d like. We have L and XL size tees. We’ll be running the contest until Tuesday. → Read More
Facebook is big. Really big. So it comes as little surprise that every tweak made to the site (like the subtle change to the header a few days ago) can have a pretty substantial impact on the way people use the social network. Earlier this week Facebook’s Engineering team posted a note written by intern Zizhuang Yang, who has spent the summer researching how changes in things like load time can affect users. Yang writes about three main experiments he conducted over the last few months, including one involving overall site speed and two in the way pages load, and the results are quite interesting.
The first experiment examined how Facebook users would respond to a general slowdown. Yang found that regardless of site speed, users spend around the same amount of time on Facebook. That might sound like good news (at least they don’t get frustrated and leave immediately), but it means that if the site is running slowly users are going to be seeing fewer pages in the same amount of time, which Facebook obviously doesn’t want. So — no surprise here — Facebook is striving to make the site as fast as possible. → Read More
How many of y’all got around to installing Snow Leopard yesterday? I meant to, but then I bought a new hard drive for my old iMac (hey, any discreet graphics card is better than this old MacBook’s Intel bologna), so I’ll be upgrading everything next week. As if any of you care, I know, but trust me: there’s a point. If you did install Snow Leopard, you’ll no doubt have noticed this glaring kick in the teeth: Apple has removed ZFS! This will go down as one of the greatest injustices ever brought upon mankind. → Read More
Looking for an inexpensive TV for your den or rumpus room? Target’s selling a 19-inch 720p LCD TV for $149 this week — that’s just over $50 off the regular price. → Read More
