Awww, how sweet. You know that fuzzy effect that everyone loves where you have a figure in focus in the foreground and the background is all blurry? That’s called bokeh. Well, this lets you turn lights in the background into odd shapes using what is essentially a lens cap with a shape cut out of it (Hint: you can probably do this yourself). → Read More
Following last week’s startup contest WISH 2009, Japan just got another event that gave twelve selected tech companies the chance to demo their web services, apps and tools (almost all of which are thankfully available in English). This Friday, around 130 guests attended Tokyo Camp [JP], a demo event organized by TechCrunch Japan.
The occasion: The blog, which is one of Japan’s biggest and mainly translates articles from TechCrunch into Japanese, is under new management (by DESIGN IT!, LLC., a Sociomedia (Japan’s anwer to Adaptive Path) group company).
Here are my thumbnail sketches of all of the twelve demos I saw at Tokyo Camp.
I’vRead by Akky Akimoto
Officially launched at Tokyo Camp, I’vRead keeps a record of all books you’ve read via your Twitter account and lets you find users with a similar taste in books. All you need to do is to type the title of the book (or its ISBN or Amazon URL), add “@ivread” to the tweet and (as an option) write what you thought of it. Each of these tweets will then be automatically added to your personal user page on the I’vRead site (you don’t need to register at the site itself, being a Twitter user is enough). Look here for an example.
dango
dango wants to empower online game creators worldwide to focus more on the development of content and less on the things they have to deal with after a game is finished, especially the distribution problem. The company of the same name offers a comprehensive, integrated framework called “dango-PLAY”. The system delivers online games to a number of social networks (i.e. Facebook or Japan’s Mixi) and dango’s homepage itself, using a single program and source code (dango is open source [JP]).
dango-Play aims at creating an integrated ecosystem for online games by matching users, linking to other games based on the framework, providing SMS services, managing user ID data, freeing developers from tracking user behavior etc. etc.
One of the first games that’s been released based on the dango system is Facebook app “meromero park”, an ultra-cute mix between a social network, a virtual world and a pet-rearing game (the web version has already gained massive popularity in Japan and Taiwan). The Facebook app is available in English and French. → Read More
Here at TechCrunch there’s a daily argument in the office, on Yammer and even on the blog about the supremacy of the iPhone versus the Google-Voice-goodness of Android phones. I chalked it up to the usual get-off-my-lawn-style ranting of Michael Arrington, and assumed the average techie was still like MG Siegler– a total Mac-head who will love the iPhone no matter how bad the reception, how bad the battery life and how many times it breaks and he has to get a new one.
But some reporters– long harassed by Mac fan boys when they’ve dared to criticize the company (read: do their jobs) — are saying a sea change is occurring in Apple fan boy nation. Witness Jon Fortt of Fortune’s recent blog post where he says the Valley owes Microsoft an apology and compares Apple to Napoleon the pig in Animal Farm. → Read More
This is a guest post by Vivek Wadhwa, an entrepreneur turned academic. He is a Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School and Executive in Residence at Duke University.
I have a suggestion for our President on how to boost economic growth without spending a penny: Free the H-1B’s.
More than a million doctors, engineers, scientists, researchers, and other skilled workers in the U.S. are stuck in “immigration limbo.” They entered the country legally and have contributed disproportionately to our nation’s competitiveness. They paid our high taxes and have been model citizens. All they want to do is to share the American dream and help us grow our economy.
They could be starting companies, buying houses, building community centers, and splurging like Americans. But because we don’t have enough permanent-resident visas (green cards) for them, they’re stuck in the same old jobs they had maybe a decade ago when they entered this country. They are getting really frustrated and many are returning to their home countries to become unwilling competitors. And they are taking our economic recovery with them. → Read More
Pocket video cameras might eventually be killed off by the iPod horde, but that doesn’t mean that the current crop aren’t worth your time. The Kodak Zi6 HD is a nice little camera and Woot has a nice deal one ‘em today. → Read More
Over the last few months everyone has weighed in on the question of “Why Don’t Teens Tweet” — except, it would appear, teens. We recently ran a survey of 10,000+ US teens aged 13 – 17 to see if we could add anything new to the question. As it turns out, the question itself is flawed.
To date, reasons given for the alleged aversion of teens to Twitter have ranged from the condescending “Because they have nothing to say,” to the responsible “Because it doesn’t feel safe,” to the Letterman-like “Because they can’t afford it” — at least without a mobile data plan.
Of course, all of these reasons are predicated on the widely accepted notion that “Teens Don’t Tweet” — that there is a phenomenon that needs to be explained. As recently as last week even, the New York Times cited the fact that only 11% of Twitter is teen as evidence of Twitter’s unpopularity to that group. → Read More
I liked Songbeat the minute I started using it. First released as a desktop app for Seeqpod back in January 2008, the upgraded version that was introduced nearly 12 months after that not only made searching for music extremely simple but also offered an excellent way to download tracks to your computer.
And like Seeqpod, it was also an easy way to obtain copyrighted material from the many places on the Web where that kind of stuff can be found.
Evidently, the music industry took notice and sought to shut the service down in court. Warner Music was the first to file a lawsuit against the startup behind Songbeat and ultimately forced the fledgling company to take the service offline, but not without them promising to return with something bigger and bolder in the future.
Yesterday, the guys behind Songbeat came out with a revived version of the desktop client, which has been renamed Songbeat 360. Music lovers are going to love it. The music industry, however, is not. → Read More
Google Voice users have been complaining the last couple of days that calls using the service are unceremoniously terminated after 15 minutes. The service is still in beta, but as we’ve written before, users expect perfection when it comes to voice calls. Problems like this make it hard for people to trust the service.
From one user: “almost every call I make now dropping at 15 minutes and some seconds.” Other users complained of the same issue, and Google confirmed the problem, saying: “Thank you everyone for your reports. We identified the cause of the 15 minute dropped call problem and we expect the issue to be resolved now. If you continue to see this issue, we appreciate your feedback.”
I’m using Google Voice for all of my mobile calls and haven’t noticed the issue, but my calls are rarely more than a few minutes. And as a recent iPhone user, I’ve learned to live with dropped calls, so I probably wouldn’t even notice. I’m not sure I ever managed to go fifteen minutes on the iPhone without the call dropping at least once. → Read More
This is a guest post by Nigel Eccles, co-founder and CEO of Hubdub Ltd, the company behind Hubdub, the news prediction game, and Fanduel, the daily draft fantasy sports game. Over his last three start-ups he admits he has made every mistake outlined below. Throughout the summer TechCrunch Europe is running guest posts written by people on the tech scene in Europe. If you’d like to contribute get in touch.
You know the story. A group of friends come up with an amazing product idea, lock themselves away, code like demons, eat pizza, drink coffee and several months later come out with a prototype. The prototype is good enough to convince some investors, they raise money, build the full product, launch it, users love it, product gets traction, acquirers circle and then founders exit to a large pay-off. They then give media interviews which gets summarised into something that sounds like the above story.
What is wrong with this picture? → Read More
Unlike some people around these parts, I loves me some Twitter (psst, follow me.) Thing is, just about every time I get a chance to tweet, I can’t. Maybe my hands are covered in grease as I’m stuffing my face with a delicious burger; maybe I just don’t want to come home from a long day of blogging and have to squeeze my thoughts into 140 characters with my iPhone’s made-for-babies keyboard.
Voice recognition Twitter apps are intriguing, but none of the major Twitter clients have it yet (as far as I know), and I’m just not hardcore enough to drop money on any apps that might offer voice-tweeting as its sole functionality. Fortunately, an already worthwhile app has come along and solved all my problems via upgrade. → Read More
Big surprise. There’s another URL shortening service that wants to throw its hat in the ring and into a field that’s pretty much saturated. Do we really need another URL shortener? Brinkster, the web-hosting startup behind Br.st seems to think so.
Similar to many of its competitors, Br.st offers statistics (in your own time zone) about your links, including number of clicks, referrers, and origin (by country or region) of all of the clicks. Bit.ly, which is one of the current leaders in the URL shortening space, offers all of these analytics as well. Additionally, Br.st filters submitted links through malware filters. → Read More
Ruby on Rails is well-known for being a powerful tool to help developers quickly turn ideas into working code. Rails Rumble harnesses that power and drives it to its only logical conclusion: a 48-hour programming competition pitting more than 200 teams of coders against one another for some pretty serious prizes. Each team of up to four people is provided with exactly the same thing: a virtual private server from Linode, a private repository on GitHub, and a really tight deadline. BYO caffeine.
The competition has ended and now that many of the contestants are awake again, it’s time for the public to kick the tires on these mini-applications and vote to decide who will take home the championship belt (and no, that’s not a figure of speech in this case. There really is a belt). The 22 finalists include something for everyone, whether you’re a developer working to nail down requirements, a boozehound trying to figure out what cocktails you can make with the leftovers from last night’s party, an old-school arcade nut looking to play multi-player Asteroid, or a hopeless romantic trying to employ Twitter to woo a crush. → Read More
Watching Teddy Kennedy’s wake and funeral over the past few days has been a sad but wonderful lesson in the value of public service. By public service I mean the motive variously referred to as empathy, generosity, fairness, and other such terms demonized as liberalism by the new and to some extent old right wing. The Senator’s life consumed not only those labels but the full arc of a career among the people. And in doing so, he now offers a template for success in a polarized era, at a time when hard decisions are finally coming down to a vote. Chief among his insights was the relentless pursuit of compromise as an art of war. His Republican friends spoke emotionally and graciously, but with strong doses of resistance to the famed Kennedy charm. They recognized him as a formidable opponent who could only be tamed, or at least harnessed, by finding common ground on which they could stand with him. If it was a win for them, they reasoned, I’ll gladly go along for the Kennedy ride. Not to say they didn’t enjoy the camaraderie, the chance to escape the dark hole of the sanctimonious extremists, the true spirit of enterprise that lurks in any politician’s heart. Kennedy gave them the running room to merge into the consensus of the times. We all underestimated Teddy. From the Left, we were endlessly surprised when he championed the causes his brother Jack delineated but never had the political strength to produce. When Bobby was killed, nothing tore at our weary defeated souls like Teddy’s eulogy, which used the same tones and fierce despair Bobby used in Dr. King’s death. When he anointed Obama as the next brother, he casually let it be known first as Caroline’s idea. The master’s touch, from someone we always felt was a weaker version of the sons, fourth in line to the throne. Now he’s gone, and we tremble at the thought there are no adults left to see us through. No matter how beaten up Obama gets, he retains double the popularity of the opposition. The cover of the latest Rolling Stone, with its year-long investigation of why the Beatles broke up (Yoko, for god’s sake), asks the musical question along the top: Is Healthcare Reform Doomed? What would Teddy say to that, we wonder. A quick journey to FriendFeed for the answer. FriendFeed is → Read More
Since February, Google has been quietly testing a new type of search functionality: AJAX search. Basically, Google uses more advanced JavaScript to make search result pages load even faster by only loading new information as needed on new queries. And while it doesn’t appear to be rolling out on a large scale yet, more users are starting to notice it.
One such user is Mike Stoppelman, a software engineer at Yelp. But Stoppelman’s take on it is interesting, and worth noting because before he worked at Yelp, he was an engineer at Google for four years. As Stoppelman sees it, Google is bringing out AJAX Search to combat Microsoft’s Bing search product, which has garnered quite a bit of attention since its launch a few months ago. Some claim that Bing is faster than Google, but an AJAX Google would undoubtedly be faster than Bing. → Read More
I love this! A guy cobbles together something totally cool in his own home, it blows up on the internet, and now he’s (apparently) got backing and it’s working with every console and the PC.
Yes, apparently you will be able to buy the GameGun in a retail package by Christmas, though pricing hasn’t been announced. I’m hoping that since the “TheRedneckTechie” isn’t a major corporation, he won’t be trying to ding us too hard for this thing. If I’m reading him right, he just wants everybody to have one because it’s awesome. → Read More
Feeling a bit under the weather yesterday – presumably my body’s reaction to the fact that San Francisco has suddenly become sunny – I decided to take a jaunt around the Internet for column ideas. My deadline was a whole 24 hours away, but it doesn’t hurt to be prepared, right?
My first find was this story about a bear who had got trapped in a Colorado skate park, presumably after breaking in to practice his Ollies, or whatever it is bears do on skateboards. The bear was finally rescued when townsfolk dropped a ladder into the park, allowing him to climb to freedom.
To any normal person, a bear trapped in a skate park would be little more than a heartwarming newsbite; a quirky story to distract from another week of war and terrorism and kidnapped children living in back yards in Antioch. But not for the lazy tech columnist looking for inspiration… → Read More
The Tick isn’t the only celebrity PC hired in his never ending fight against Mac. Now he’s turned to Robert Loggia. But, yeah, you probably know the outcome. → Read More
Years from now, when the history of BitTorrent-related Internet piracy is written, there will have to be at least one chapter devoted to The Pirate Bay. It showed up just as the likes of Suprnova and LokiTorrent were being shut down, and quickly became the go-to place for, shall we say, the less savvy BitTorrent user. It also became a symbol of the copyright reform movement, though the site’s cavalier attitude toward any sort of authority ultimately led to its undoing. (The whole “we’re untouchable!” gimmick the site had played up was, we can now say, ill advised.) → Read More
Amazon’s got a fully-loaded Garmin nuvi GPS unit for $310 after a $53 discount, good today only. The 885T features traffic, weather, Bluetooth, and even “directs you to the preferred lane while driving.” → Read More
It’s no secret: there’s some Benjamins to be made on the App Store. In fact, the App Store is now a $2.4 billion dollar per year business, according to AdMob’s monthly mobile metrics report. Here’s another fun fact you probably already know: most app developers fade into the App Store abyss long before they ever find fame and fortune. Even if you ignore the junk apps and the million e-books each published as a separate app, you’ve still got a solid 5-10,000 apps clamoring to grab a piece of the App Store pie. Many developers feel like the App Store is akin to high school: an anarchic and ruthless popularity contest to see who’s got the biggest, well, um, you know what I mean. That brings us to the $2.4 billion question: how do you succeed on the App Store? We’ve spent the last few weeks trying to answer that question and have come up with a list of tips and tricks that’ll help you edge your way into App Store glory. Now, none of these will replace making a good product or compensate for a million-dollar advertising and PR budget, but they’ll likely help you get noticed or keep your current momentum. → Read More
