Oh, the Verizon Hub. You came to the market just a few years too late. There was a time when a VoIP device with instant messaging capabilities would have been welcomed into the kitchens everywhere but that time was 2006 and not 2009. Now, that market has primarily moved onto full featured smartphones and somewhat killing the need for a home base type device. And so the Hub is no more. Verizon has official canceled the product. → Read More
Sean Parker is no stranger to Internet success. He’s 28 years old and has already helped start four very well-known services on the web: Napster, Plaxo, Causes, and of course, Facebook. And now he’s taking his impressive resume to Yammer, where he is joining the enterprise microblogging service’s Board of Directors, we’ve learned.
Yammer, which won the top prize at last year’s TechCrunch50, recently rolled out a bunch of updates to its web version, as well as its Adobe Air-based desktop client. We use the service on a daily basis for work, and those of us with iPhones are all eagerly awaiting the release of the new version of the iPhone app with Push Notifications. → Read More
While I’m sure many of you hang onto Major Nelson’s every word, you might have missed these new holiday bundles that Microsoft is cooking up. There’s the Xbox 360 Elite Holiday Bundle, and the Xbox 360 Wireless Controller Game Pack. What do these bundles contain???? → Read More
MySpace has just announced that CTO and co-founder Aber Whitcomb will be leaving the company, to be replaced by MySpace Music’s current CTO Alex Maghen. The news doesn’t come as much of a surprise — we speculated that Whitcomb would be leaving as part of the core executive shakeup that swept through MySpace last April (if anything it’s surprising that Whitcomb stayed on this long). At this point the last remaining member of MySpace’s old guard is Tom Anderson, who remains onboard in a limited capacity.
Maghen will take on the core responsibilities for running MySpace’s platform and will report to COO Mike Jones. Before joining MySpace, Maghen has previously served as CTO of MTV Networks and CTO of Yahoo Entertainment. → Read More
The pico-projector market is a new one, and the products are still evolving. It really wasn’t very long ago that this product’s predecessor, the MPro 110, hit the market. It got pretty lame reviews (before which I prematurely called it awesome), but that isn’t really indicative of the worth of this kind of device. A projector you can keep in your pocket? Genius. Now they just need to get it right. The MPro 120 takes some major steps towards doing that, but that still doesn’t quite elevate it from niche product to must-buy. → Read More
Bored? Lazy? Trendy? All of the above? You can turn a run-of-the-mill Guitar Hero or Rock Band controller into a weapon used for checking, folding, calling, raising, lowering, and more – YES! You can play online poker with a guitar controller! Finally! → Read More
My favoritest guy who plays who I’ve met recently, Jack Conte, has put together a nice version of Single Ladies by Beyonce with Nataly Dawn. While he and Nataly don’t dress up in leotards and heels – they didn’t get a huge budget for this – they do involve a Polaroid camera and a bowl of Coco Puffs. Great fun all around. → Read More
Rockstar’s Beaterator comes out today (and so does Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days… you couldn’t find two more different publishers in Rockstar and Square Enix) for the PSP. We’ve highlighted it in the past because A) Timbaland is one of the better “big name” producers out there and B) I have spent more than a few hours in Ableton Live and the like. It’s familiar territory, in other words. → Read More
Here’s what you get when you take a BlackBerry and replace the screen with a trackpad – a nice remote control for an HTPC. It’s compatible with Windows, Linux, and Mac and uses wireless RF signals to communicate with an included USB receiver. → Read More
The following guest post is written by Larry Chiang, a co-founder of Duck9 who also regularly blogs for BusinessWeek. Today he is reporting from the Finovate startup conference.
At the FinovateStartup conference in New York City today, it is clear that financial startups are pushing forward regardless of funding woes or a lackluster economy
Companies here at Finovate center around financial innovations. They track personal finance and are aggressively plodding forward because consumer adoption of the internet is rising. These companies did not just present ideas, they brought along established industry stalwarts to their demos. What’s more, many of these start-ups are already white labeling their product and integrating into established company sites (T-Mobile ads, Yahoo, Bank of America). The user interfaces are better than average, which is perhaps influenced by Finovate’s previous winner Mint.
Best in Show went to Kasasa, an Austin, Texas-based financial website that uses real-world rewards and charity donations to get people to open free deposit accounts. → Read More
Mårten Gustaf Mickos, former CEO of MySQL, is Benchmark Capital‘s newest Entrepreneur In Residence (EIR).
Mickos served as chief executive officer for the open source database company from January 2001 to February 2008, when Sun Microsystems acquired MySQL for $1 billion. Benchmark was a relatively early investor in the company; they participated in the $20 million Series B round together with Index Ventures back in 2003.
Mickos holds a M.Sc. in technical physics from Helsinki University of Technology and is also a board member of Mozilla Messaging and RightScale. → Read More
So this is apparently an electronic instrument, handmade in England, that has been in the works for 7 years. It seems to be a cross between a piano and a harp with a set of keys and a strip controller for handling pitch bending. It seems there’s also a built-in arranger as well as a drum machine. You can also pitch-bend the keys as you play. You can sign up for the release info at their website but until it’s out let’s just revel in its strangeness. More video after the jump. → Read More
Ruby-on-Rails startup FiveRuns has been acquired by WorkThink, according to FiveRuns’ site. FiveRuns provides a variety of monitoring products for Ruby on Rails and related open source and commercial systems. Built on Rails and delivered as a hosted service, FiveRuns’ products manage the complete Rails application lifecycle — from installation to production.
Products include Install, a free Ruby on Rails stack powered by BitRock; Manage, which was an application that monitors your Rails applications in production (Manage was discontinued this summer); TuneUp (a debugging tool which we wrote about here); and Dash, which was a metrics, storage, reporting, and communication hub for applications connected to the web. According to FiveRuns, Dash’s services will be discontinued by the middle of October. It’s unclear if the other products will survive the transition. → Read More
Dropbox, the easy to use file access manager which syncs your files across all your computers and the web, has introduced an iPhone application to make it even easier to access your files anywhere in the world. After almost 7 weeks of waiting, Apple has finally approved the application. With this new iPhone app, users will get access to all their Dropbox documents, PDF’s, pictures, videos and much more. Dropbox also introduced offline viewing in the iPhone app, with “Favorites.” If you add a file to your ‘Favorites’, they’ll be accessible at any time. To do so, just hit the star at the bottom of any file, and it’ll be added. Otherwise, your files stay in the cloud.
One of Dropbox’s core features is sharing your files and folders stored in the cloud with anyone else who has a Dropbox account, and the iPhone is no exception. Users can easily share their Dropbox files and folders from their iPhone to any other Dropbox user by putting in their email address, just like on the web. The app allows users to upload photos for 3G users, and videos if you have an iPhone 3GS. → Read More
Interesting. This little doodad is called FOTOBOX Plus. It’s an $80 USB apparatus that reads SD cards from your digital camera.
The idea is that you take a bunch of photos on your digital camera and then pop the SD card into the FOTOBOX Plus, which goes into your computer’s USB port. At that point, built-in slideshow software builds an automatic slideshow from your photos. → Read More
Apple today has rolled out a new series of pages on the iPhone section of its website called “Apps For Everything.” The idea here is to create an easy way for consumers to find apps based around certain categories that they may be interested in.
The categories are: → Read More
My sincerest apologies for not putting this on here sooner, but I’ve been busying Warsong Gulch. Anyhow, here we have one of the funniest men on Planet Earth (along with Louis CK and Ron Bennington), Larry David, in the opening scene of this week’s episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, dealing with something that we’ve all had to deal with: opening that damn plastic shell that surrounds our electronics. → Read More
Startup oDesk was voted as a TechCrunch50′s demopit winner thanks to the launch of a new iPhone application that allows project administrators to monitor the work stream of their team members while they’re on the go. Today, oDesk’s free app is available on the App Store.
The stream features photos of your team’s workplace, keystroke events, and lets you know when your workers are checking in and out. You can also see each team member’s latest work memo, local time, and billing status for work. → Read More
Only very few home electronics companies dare selling projectors housing a DVD player. There’s a good reason for this: The things aren’t really a picnic for the eyes, as this example from last month shows. And even established brands like Epson fail to deliver well-designed hardware in this niche. Case in point: Their new dreamio EH-DM30 [JP]. → Read More
With the Hollywood Creative Machine (TM) officially out of new movie ideas, we’ve had to sit through countless craptastic remakes of movies about toys from the 80’s. While the above trailer for “Paperboy: The Movie” will likely never go into full production, you never know which junior-level assistant to the assistant to the associate producer might actually pitch it for real. The video was “A submission into the 2009 Totally Awesome Video Game Movie frenzy competition for the 2009 Fantastic Fest.” I can vouch for its awesomeness and fantasticality. [via Kotaku] → Read More
