Ever since I got it, the album art for Cul de Sac’s Death of the Sun has intrigued me. I’m ignorant of 19th-century landscape painters, which is as far as I could nail the style down, and after extensive Googling I could find nothing on it at all. Ten years ago I would be SOL. But today the whole internet is a community, and you’re only one step away from the answer to your question, whether you know it or not.
I think it’s worth celebrating every once in a while when something goes exactly right on the ol’ internet. Here’s one that happened to me lately. → Read More
API aggregation platform Gnip is laying off 7 out of its 12 employees, or 60 percent of the startup’s staff, we’ve confirmed with CEO and co-founder Eric Marcoullier. He says that Gnip is planning to hire an engineer in the near future, which will bring the final count back up to six employees. We’ve added the cuts to our Layoff Tracker.
Gnip serves as an API hub, collecting data from services like Twitter, Facebook and Digg, and pushing it out to other data-consuming services and Websites. Data consuming sites using Gnip’s platform can get public data streams for over 30 social media networks and sites, including Twitter, Digg, Delicious, YouTube, WordPress, Flickr, Six Apart and others without ever visiting those sites or accessing their individual APIs.
Marcoullier says the reduction in headcount is necessary to streamline the business. Orginally, Gnip tried to build its own database, but it has seen a massive influx of data to the system, which Marcoullier estimates at around 150 million Tweets, status updates, Diggs and bookmarks pulled into the platform per day. Gnip has been forced to restart from the ground up when it comes to building a database that can be a central part of Gnip’s platform. It is abandoning its own effort and will move to an existing database that can be integrated into its service. → Read More
Social media applications are increasingly abstracted from their web-app roots, be it in Adobe air or an iPhone app. Devices like the Chumby have made some inroads towards completely breaking something like Facebook away from your desktop, but they haven’t been popular enough or good enough to catch on. I doubt that will change too much with the Lighthouse SQ7, but I’d be happy to be proved wrong. It’s just that incorporating voice recognition technology into your device seems like overreaching, as cool as it would be if it worked.
At any rate, it’s good to see companies still plugging away at what seems like a sort of awkward tweener device, but honestly, one I might like to have around. A combination alarm clock, social media doodad, and lightweight browser — fitting somewhere on the twisted continuum between tablet computer and digital picture frame. → Read More
The Nintendo Wii is finally $199. We knew the price cut was coming and are glad it’s here. But now that the MSRP is only $199, online retailers and brick and mortar stores have the opportunity to sweeten the deal. We’ve done some searching and have the best deals after the jump. → Read More
I was just installing some software for this new LifeCam HD when I saw this picture. That looks familiar, I thought. In fact it’s more than familiar, I was just there. And I’ve met that girl (very attractive in real life). But why in the world is Microsoft taking candid photos at Bauhaus? → Read More
The Peek has been around for a year already and surprise, surprise, it’s still around. In fact, you can now snag one without a monthly subscription charge for $299 exclusively from Amazon. Now, I’m not saying you should spend $299 on a device that just does email now that smartphone’s monthly subscription costs are dropping, but someone out there might want a dedicated device for email, Twitter, and Facebook.
Update: Kind of ironic deal found. It’s after the jump. → Read More
Xerox, “the data company,” announced today it plans to acquire Affiliated Computer Services; a move which will firmly place them in the $150 billion business process outsourcing market. This cash and stock transaction was originally valued at $6.4 billion based on Friday’s closing Xerox stock prices, but has since dwindled to $5.5 billion due to a 14% decrease.
The steep decrease in stock stems not from a lack of faith in Xerox and their current capabilities, but rather from concerns regarding the strategic overlap of the two companies. Deals such as the recent Dell acquisition of Perot Systems and last years purchase of EDS by HP were much less radical as the initial products had far more overlap. → Read More
This is called the “Yay! Scale” – it’s a $55 scale that has no numbers. Instead, you’re greeted with esteem-building words like hot, lovely, cute, ravishing, and stuff like that. → Read More
Wii Sports is an excellent game, but it can feel a bit silly at times flailing your arms about as you pretend to play various games. Perhaps it’s fortunate then, that no matter what the game, it appears that there is an accessory for it. Case in point: the new officially licensed Louisville slugger bat. → Read More
http://media.techpodcasts.com/techvi/http://p.castfire.com/C2I9q/video/166049_2009-09-28-152838.flv Just had a nice little interview with Randall of TechVi and Nate of CNET about 3D TV. My dream 3D kit? Something like the Death Star simulation on board the Rebel ship in Star Wars. My nightmare kit? Watching someone play a 3D video game when there’s only one pair of glasses in the house. → Read More
Do you remember the days when video cards were only as large as your hand? I personally remember installing a TNT2 — and at the time, I thought that was big. Now you’ve got dual-GPU monsters like the just-leaked 5870 X2 coming out which, in addition to taking up two PCI-e slots and requiring a secondary power source, are nearly a full foot long. Not that you’d be buying one unless you’re rich as Croesus and have a case as long as the Nile, but no matter what you’d have to choose your motherboard carefully, since not everyone designed the layout planning on accommodating a damn sub sandwich. → Read More
This is either a good thing or a bad thing. Actually, like most things, it’s a bit of both. Adobe’s FLV file format is the de facto standard for web video due to sharing sites like YouTube using it exclusively. Many would argue that’s a bad thing (despite the fact that it works well for most people) because it gives a single company a stranglehold over an entire province of internet content.
So when NVIDIA works with them to accelerate decoding the format, it’s a bit of a mixed blessing. Better performance and integration like this will surely extend the life of, and silence performance complaints about, FLV. For now it’s a good thing, but come HTML5… → Read More
Running your own small business has plenty of perks: you can set your own hours, work from home, and there’s nary a TPS report in sight. But there are also a number of downsides, not the least of which is the fact that you have to take on role of your business’s accountant. That means keeping tabs on business expenses, filing taxes four times a year, and plenty of other headaches. Cue Outright.com, a startup launching out of beta today that looks to be the “absolute simplest” online application for small business back office tracking, accounting, bookkeeping, and more.
Getting started with the site is quite easy, because Outright has recently partnered with a number of financial services: you can import invoices from Freshbooks, receipts from Shoeboxed, your PayPal transaction history, as well as your credit card transactions through a deal with Expensify, which supports 94% of US credit cards. You only have to do this once — once you’ve linked your account, they’ll keep automatically updating until you unlink them. → Read More
What’s all this nonsense about professional athletes getting into trouble over what they say on Twitter (or whatever other site)? The NFL, which, as we all know, stands for the No Fun League, freaked out after Robert Henson, of the Washington Redskins, tweeted a few choice words to critical fans last week. Things like “All you fake half hearted Skins fan can .. I won’t go there but I dislike you very strongly, don’t come to Fed Ex to boo dim wits!!” and “The question is who are you to say you know what’s best for the team and you work 9 to 5 at Mcdonalds.” I say good for Mr. Henson. Fans can get away with murder, but the man cannot speak his mind? Lame. → Read More
This guy was asking the quality question way before the PSP Go The PSP Go just launched and the blogworld is in a tizzy about the price – $249 – and the apparent chintziness of this new PSP replacement. You see, the device doesn’t support Sony’s exciting UMD optical standard and is generally reported as “feeling” cheaper than the bulky but solid PSP. The PSP Go also requires you to buy your old games in UMD-less form, at least for the time being. So basically you get a smaller device, are forced to pay for downloadable content you probably already own, and, according to the teardown we linked to above, you get a poorly-made device with quite a few extra potential points of failure. Why am I bringing up this litany of complaints? Because of something Sony execs said back in June, namely that they PSP Go is a premium product and was therefore priced higher than, say, the Nintendo Wii. → Read More
Something has entered the water in the UK tech startup scene swins this week – distribution deals appear to be on a sudden uptick. The first today is Moo and Moonfruit. Moonfruit and MOO are partnering up to co-promote eachother’s communities of small businesses and individuals. Moo’s SME market of business people who like their on-demand, flexible printing, and Moonfruit SME-oriented build-you-own site audience. Some 10,000 Moonfruit customers will be able to order MOO’s 50 Business Card Free Pack, which is currently only available to selected partners. And MOO customers will get a 20% discount on all Moonfruit premium packages during the next 3 months. → Read More
The i-Toc is really what you would call a “mystery watch.” It has two overlapping disks that are graduated from light to dark and the point of absolute black – or whatever color you’ve bought – marks the hour and minutes hand. Pretty sly, right?
Designed by CG reader Sean, the i-Toc is a mere $99 and comes in six colors including silver, blue, purple, red, and orange. It has a 41mm case and has a silicone strap with butterfly clasp. Heck, they even have a screen saver so you can add a pink i-Toc to your PC or Mac. → Read More
Matchday Two of the UEFA Champions League begins tomorrow. You probably already know this, because, really, who doesn’t love the Champions League? Exactly. But unless you have DirecTV (here in the U.S.), you’re stuck with whatever games are on the Fox networks. These games primarily feature the English teams, because, I guess, the idea is that “Americans speak English, so they probably like English teams.” Maybe it’s a ratings thing, I don’t know. (There’s a point to all of this, believe me.) There’s a company based out of Barcelona called Flumotion that has developed a new, maybe even better, way to watch the Champions League online. If you’re at all familiar with a DVR, then you’re familiar with the company’s new setup. → Read More
If there is a poster child for the battered Web music startup, Project Playlist is it. The company had to fight lawsuits from the record labels, is still trying to iron out licensing deals with those labels, lost its last CEO Owen van Natta to MySpace, lost its CFO Mike Sheridan, and by the looks of it is losing its audience. What else could go wrong?
Well, it looks like the self-styled music search engine is actually hosting MP3s of major label artists via content delivery networks such as Limelight. If you search for Britney Spears songs, for example, the second result is “(You Drive Me) Crazy.” The originating site where the MP3 was hosted, http://www.sarzamin.org/, is no longer available. But not to worry because Project Playlist cached the song on its CDN, Limelight Networks. Khalid Shaikh, a TechCrunch reader and developer who wanted to harness Project Playlist to create his own music site, discovered this arrangement and sent me a screencast to prove it (after the jump). → Read More
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