Well here’s a nice price on a tiny computer. Acer’s AspireRevo nettop is now available at Newegg for $199.
The machine features a 1.6GHz Intel Atom 230 CPU, 1GB of RAM, 160GB hard drive (5400RPM), and NVIDIA’s ION graphics chip. → Read More
Last week we showed the highlights and 10+ minutes of video footage of an exclusive hour-long TechCrunch interview with Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer.
Now for the rest of that interview. The video was just a teaser. I spoke with Ballmer for another 50 minutes on the record, doing a deeper dive into five key areas of Microsoft’s product strategy: Big Opportunities, Operating Systems/Browsers, Mobile, Search and Developers.
This post is about big opportunities at Microsoft beyond their dual cash cows of Windows and Office. Microsoft generates around $20 billion a year in pre-tax profit, and spends nearly $10 billion on research and development. When Microsoft thinks about increasing (or sustaining) those profits, they have to think big. And they have to think long term.
Ballmer says he thinks about new business opportunities in three buckets: expanding current businesses (short run), building things from scratch (long run), and big aquisitions (short cuts). → Read More
Some pretty big iPhone news to share with y’all this morning: the iPhone will no longer be exclusive to O2 over in the UK, becoming available on Orange “later this year.” So for all of you in the U.S. who one day hope to see the iPhone on a different wireless provider (like, say, Verizon Wireless, differences between CDMA and GSM notwithstanding), well, you now have a precedent. → Read More
Panasonic has been toying with the idea of bringing 3D TVs to our homes for quite a while now, and today the company announced they will be showcasing a 50-inch full HD plasma TV [press release in English] that’s capable of producing high-quality 3D pictures. End consumers will have the chance to test the TV out during next week’s CEATEC 2009. → Read More
The Acer A1 has shown up over on Expansys’ German web site for 390 Euro ($571). The availability just says “Pre-order” so no word on when it’s actually shipping. Under the hood, there’s an impressive array of bells and whistles: 768MHz Qualcomm CPU, Android Donut, 512MB of ROM, 256MB of RAM, 3.5-inch 800×480 touchscreen, 7.2 Mbps download speeds, GPS, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, 5-megapixel camera, 3.5mm audio jack, and expansion via microSD. No word on whether we can expect to see this phone in the US, either, but it’d be a nice option for sure. Acer A1 (translated) [Expansys.de via Brighthand] → Read More
Livebookings, European-based restaurant reservation service, has secured $16 million in a new funding round from Germany/Pan-European VC firm Wellington Partners. Niklas Eklund, Livebookings’ CEO says Livebookings is “at a point” where it clearly sees itself scaling globally.
It’s also clearly benefiting from credit-crunched restaurants now switching to online reservations to fill their tables, something Livebookings says has risen by 91% this summer compared to last, but there is plenty of growth left in the market. Only 7% of restaurants currently use online reservations, according to the company. → Read More
Apple has announced that the App Store for the iPhone / iPod Touch has now seen more than 2 billion downloads of applications, with a half billion programs in the last quarter alone.
In addition, the company revealed that the total number of apps in the store currently exceeds 85,000, and that they are now available to more than 50 million customers in 77 countries. → Read More
So finally the official word is in, with a very short blog post by CEO Marko Ahtisaari: Dopplr has been acquired by Nokia.
Update: Nokia’s press release
Update 2: Dopplr angel investor Martin Varsavsky on the deal: ‘Nokia as a force of good in the European start up scene’
No word on price, but when Michael Arrington broke the news last week on TechCrunch, he wrote that Nokia had picked up the fledgling company for between €10 million and €15 million ($15 million – $22 million based on current exchange rates). → Read More
Last week we showed the highlights and 10+ minutes of video footage of an exclusive hour-long TechCrunch interview with Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer.
Now for the rest of that interview. The video was just a teaser. I spoke with Ballmer for another 50 minutes on the record, doing a deeper dive into five key areas of Microsoft’s product strategy: Big Opportunities, Operating Systems/Browsers, Mobile, Search and Developers.
This post is about big opportunities at Microsoft beyond their dual cash cows of Windows and Office. Microsoft generates around $20 billion a year in pre-tax profit, and spends nearly $10 billion on research and development. When Microsoft thinks about increasing (or sustaining) those profits, they have to think big. And they have to think long term.
Ballmer says he thinks about new business opportunities in three buckets: expanding current businesses (short run), building things from scratch (long run), and big aquisitions (short cuts). → Read More
Voicemail. You hate it. We hate it. Damn near everyone hates it – at least, we all hate it in its current form. It’s an antiquated system desperately hobbling on its last leg in an industry where technology moves forward at a nearly absurd rate. While our phones get bigger and better each and every month, our voicemail system has, for the most part, remained the same for over a decade. That’s not to say there hasn’t been progress. There certainly has – but it’s isolated. A handful of smartphones (the iPhone, the Samsung Instinct, and a couple of BlackBerry handsets) have embraced visual voicemail, which does away with the archaic process of dialing in for your messages by bringing your messages to you. In 2008, YouMail rolled out an independent visual voicemail system aimed at smartphones that didn’t have it out-of-the-box. This morning a competitor out of the UK, HulloMail, took a huge step forward with the launch of a native BlackBerry application. → Read More
“All Washington Post journalists relinquish some of the personal privileges of private citizens. Post journalists must recognize that any content associated with them in an online social network is, for practical purposes, the equivalent of what appears beneath their bylines in the newspaper or on our website.”
That’s an excerpt from The Washington Post’s new social media guidelines. PaidContent has the entire thing. You really should read it, because it’s a hoot.
These guidelines came about because Raju Narisetti, a WaPo editor, had some tweets recently that revealed *gasp* that he had opinions about issues. When word leaked out that he had his own opinions and was sharing them on Twitter, apparently the WaPo top brass scrambled quickly to get this under control. That included Narisetti deleting his Twitter account. Pathetic. → Read More
I’ll be in Taiwan next week and am delighted to announce that TechCrunch / CrunchGear are holding a meetup with our partner and co-organizer Chili Consulting, a local innovation strategy firm. The TechCrunch / Chili Consulting Party will take place in Taipei, on October 5 (Monday) and is invitation-only.
Details after the jump. → Read More
Usually, design-y clocks with the time spelled out on them try to hard and aren’t practical. This one, however, is not only cool-looking as all hell, but is intuitive to read. Top to bottom, right to left. Unfortunately, it’s not exactly a super-simple thing to put together — though using an LCD screen as a background would probably simplify things. But if you’ve got a hundred LEDs sitting around and a way to cut a stencil out of a metal sheet, you’re halfway there. → Read More
The Beatles Rock Band game is now in its third day here at Abbey Road West, and so far it’s getting better all the time. As social media, it’s the off the charts monetization winner Wall Street is beginning to think Twitter and Facebook are becoming. As my wife keeps saying, it’s got real Beatles songs, not some cover band. How cool is that? BRB is an extension of the Beatles Love mashup, where producers George and son Giles Martin went back to the basic tracks and transferred them to digital for remix. This is as distinguished from the new remastered mono and stereo catalog, where only the final mixdowns were brought up to date with modern analog-to-digital techniques. The Beatles recorded on two and then four tracks up until the White Album, bouncing down preliminary mixes and overdubbing additional parts as they went. The Love mixes built on a technique explored during the production of the Anthology series and fleshed out with the remixing of the Yellow Submarine record. Laying all the original pieces onto a digital checkerboard, the Abbey Road engineers could recreate the original mixes with individual control over many more elements of the recordings. Love expanded on that by literally deconstructing the various elements and intermingling them with other tracks, as in the layering of the Tomorrow Never Knows drum track under Within You Without You’s Indian percussion. With this digital map already assembled, Giles Martin could turn his attention to the Rock Band game, compositing guitars and harmonies while adding live effects and studio chatter to create yet another mashup, this one a fascinating illusion of being in the studio or in concert with some degree of input in the mix. Of course, the game opts for scoring the closeness to the actual reality you come with vocals, guitar, and most powerfully, drums. The actual music remains Beatles, but you have the feeling of getting inside the music. Ringo comes through in the way his bandmates saw him, the actual spark of the thing that became Beatles only when he joined the group. The recordings have always reflected the alchemy of the four members and George Martin, who handled many of the keyboard parts as the group’s palette expanded in the studio. But Ringo’s parts, as reflected by the dumbed down notes you sync with, underline how much the drummer shaped the variety of feels → Read More
Boston Watch Exchange, the place I picked up some red and green polishing compound for stainless steel – it buffs out the mess on stainless steel pieces – is offering a free Horosafe polishing cloth and free shipping on orders over $40. I know you’re probably not amazingly interested but who doesn’t want a 29 piece watch repair kit for $300? → Read More
One of the original goals of Google has always been to help people find the information they are looking for and get out of the way as fast as possible. It was a point of pride, and in fact a design principle, to get people off the search results page to other places on the Internet. Yahoo was the site that tried to keep you from ever leaving, Google was the opposite.
Well, it was easier to send people away when Google was just a search engine. Now it has apps and Gmail and Google Maps and Google Books, and a lot of other reasons to stick around on Google itself. But there is still a clear demarcation between its content/communication sites and search. At least there was until late last week when it launched Google Places on Google Maps. Google Places is a local search page for restaurants and other local businesses that brings together the address, phone number, Website, maps, description, directions, photos and reviews all on one page.
When you click on a pin for a local business or place of interest on Google Maps a bubble will open up, and if you click “more info” sometimes it will take you to the Google Places page. So far, so good. Google Places is simply making Google Maps better, right?
The concerns arise, however, back on Google’s main search page, where Google is indexing these Places pages. Since Google controls its own search index, it can push Google Places more prominently if it so desires. There isn’t a heck of a lot of evidence that Google is doing this yet, but the mere fact that Google is indexing these Places pages has the SEO world in a tizzy. → Read More
While there are certainly fewer interfaces around today on the average computer than there were a decade ago, there are still too many. It’s all just data, why should it matter what kind of pipe it goes down? As long as it goes both was and can handle the bandwidth you need it to, you’re golden. Intel’s pushing down that road with Light Peak, though the ultimate end of it is, obviously, obsoleting the USB standard that they helped establish. In an interesting wrinkle, however, it appears that no one less than Apple (king of irritating alternative interfaces) has been prodding Intel into action for years now. → Read More
I’ll be in Taiwan next week and am delighted to announce that TechCrunch / CrunchGear are holding a meetup with our partner and co-organizer Chili Consulting, a local innovation strategy firm. The TechCrunch / Chili Consulting Party will take place in Taipei, on October 5 (Monday) and is invitation-only.
Details after the jump. → Read More
So ya think that the Pre is still overpriced at $100 from Amazon, eh? Well, if you’re willing to buy the Pre at Walmart and deal with mail-in rebates, you can snag one for only $79.99. → Read More
