When Google announced what is clearly the best car navigation application on any mobile today, it didn’t just take a swipe at GPS navigation companies such as Garmin and TomTom. It took a swipe at Apple.
Beyond the advanced features of the Google Maps Navigation app (voice search, crowdsourced traffic data, Street View navigation), what makes the app noteworthy is that it launched on Google’s own Android phones first rather than on the iPhone. By doing so, Google is putting Apple on notice that it is no longer reserving its best apps for the iPhone. This is but the latest sign of a growing rift between Apple and Google. → Read More
One of my favorite games of all time, Catan, is now available as a $5 download for the iPhone and iPod touch. As board games go, The Settlers of Catan is a psycho-erotic thriller capable of hooking even the most un-hookable of gamers. → Read More
Brightkite was one of the early players in the location-based social networking game, which is a space that is growing rapidly. Originally a TechStars startup, Brightkite was bought in April by Limbo and has been flying a bit under the radar as a fresh crop of location-based services have popped up including the new favorite, Foursquare.
A few weeks ago, the startup launched Brightkite 2.0 for the web, which was chock full of new and noteworthy features. Today, the much-awaited Brightkite 2.0 for the iPhone, which is free, hit the app store. → Read More
The Future University (cool name) in Hakodate, Northern Japan, presented the Ikabo, a giant squid robot at the Digital Contents Expo in Tokyo (that ended on Sunday). Not only is the robot tall (2.2m), cute and pretty heavy (weight: 200kg), but it also mimics your hand movements via Wii motion controllers. → Read More
Scrapblog, a startup that lets you build rich Flash-based online scrapbooks, is launching a nifty new tool today, called QuickMix, which lets users create personalized scrapbooks in minutes. The launch is coupled with the announcement of Jill Braff as the new CEO and president of Scrapblog.
QuickMix lets users upload photos from a variety of photo sites and applications, including Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, Picasa and more. You can then select a pre-built “kit,” which is a layout and design for the online scrapbook. Kits have a variety of styles, including designs catered to weddings, birthdays, travel, holidays, and babies. For example, you could select a Halloween-themed kit for photos from the holiday. Then, QuickMix will instantly produce a digital scrapbook tailored to the photos themselves.QuickMix’s technology will crop all the photos and organize the images vertically and horizontally. I demoed the new feature and it’s very quick and easy to use; high-quality, pretty scrapbooks can be made in minutes. → Read More
The somewhat blurry image above is, we believe, a new Digg homepage voting feature that will launch in the near future.
So what is it? It’s not the “Real Time Digg” relaunch that will integrate data from Twitter and other sources. Instead, we believe it is an experimental feature Digg will try out that encourages users to vote on whether a particular upcoming story should make it to the homepage or not.
Digg isn’t talking, so we don’t know much else. The 3/25 numbers on the left are a counter to show how much longer the story will remain on the home page (3 minutes, 25 seconds, based on us squinting at a blow up). It’s notable that users are asked to vote a story up or down without seeing comments or how others have voted.
The identity of the hand is also a mystery. More on this when it launches. → Read More
While I’m not quite down with a lot of Watchismo’s aesthetic choices, you gotta respect his drive. This guy loves Swiss quartz, crazy designs, and even goes nuts over Hamilton Electrics, watches that are so odd that only one person in the world can fix them. → Read More
Good news, everyone. (I hope people understand that reference.) Grand Theft Auto: Episodes From Liberty City comes out tomorrow, and to help grease the wheels a little bit, this weekend will be a free-play weekend on Xbox Live for GTA IV. That is, if you have GTA IV but don’t subscribe to Xbox Live Gold, you’ll be able to play online multiplayer this weekend. → Read More
Google released a new mobile navigation app today and GPS navigation companies such as Garmin And TomTom saw their shares take a plunge. The announcement shaved $1.2 billion off of Garmin’s market cap alone. Its shares are down more than 16 percent so far today to $31.60. TomTom’s shares are down 21 percent to $8.11.
And this is just for an Android app. But Google could very well make it available to other phones as well, and that is what has investors worried. GPS navigation apps are among the most expensive, and most lucrative, of all mobile apps. → Read More
At first blush, it seems like Song Li is one of those stereotypical Chinese Web entrepreneurs. The kind who rips off successful US sites and hopes operating in the world’s largest consumer Internet market will magically create a successful company. After all, he made a good bit of money investing in ChinaHR—a job board site that sold to Monster.com for more than $200 million over two deals — and right now he operates Digu.com, a Twitter-clone, and Zhenai.com an online dating site that could be the Chinese Match.com.
But if you dig a little deeper into that dating site, you start to understand how differently Li thinks, and how that thinking reflects an aspect of Chinese consumer Web sites that Westerners frequently miss. Where Chinese Web entrepreneurs shine is in taking an existing business idea – ripping it off, if you like – but then completely rethinking and reinventing that idea’s business model and process. This not only makes the companies more profitable faster, it’s a big reason why home-grown Chinese versions continually beat US companies trying to expand into China. → Read More
Do not adjust your computer because Bill Ruppert has put together a nice set of sound effects using only EHX pedals and some creativity. I love how he makes a clock sound with just the pick-up switch and then adds in some bells for spooky effect. → Read More
Here you are, friends and Romans, the Motorola Droid from Verizon, the phone you’ve been salivating over for the past few months. It’s now sitting quietly on the desk next to me, wondering where you are. The Droid wants you. After working with the Motorola Cliq and MotoBlur, Motorola’s own operating system, I had high to middling hopes for this phone. Looking at it now I’m happy to report that Verizon finally has an Android phone worth a second look. → Read More
Since its beta launch this summer, Brizzly has been hands-down one of the best ways to interact with Twitter. The web app puts a new and intuitive user interface over Twitter’s data, which allows you to do things like see pictures inline in your stream, and easily retweet anything with the click of a button. Today, Brizzly applies its magic to Facebook.
The new Facebook functionality for Brizzly, which should be live in the next couple of hours, puts the Brizzly look and feel over some of Facebook’s features. Within Brizzly, you’ll now be able to do Facebook status updates, wall posts, comments, and likes. For now, you won’t be able to post pictures or videos, but Brizzly will offer a way to display them inline that is arguably better than the way Facebook itself does it. → Read More
I’m a simple man. I don’t ask for much, I try to do the right thing. So why must everything I want be priced at $500? Take this mobile desk, for example: part tricycle, part desk, all awesome (except the price tag, of course). → Read More
More FCC news for you, this Wednesday morning (and before Droid news consumes us all). The agency is considering taking some of the bandwidth that is currently allocated to digital television, and auctioning it off so that broadband companies can bid on it. The point, of course, is to increase the availability of wireless broadband. → Read More
Facebook is holding a Developer Garage today at its offices in Palo Alto, and a number of new app policies will be formally announced. Some of the changes, though, are so dramatic that Facebook has briefed the bigger app developers in advance. And those developers are, to say the least, more than a little worried about the effect the changes will have on traffic and usage. One source we’ve spoken with estimates that the changes may drop usage on their apps by 70% or more (more on that below, some developers may use the changes to their advantage).
Like previous changes, Facebook is moving to clean up their user interface and try to get application spam under control. The changes will roll out over the next six months, we’ve heard.
Last week Facebook changed the way it publishes the news stream to users. For the last few months users have seen a constant Twitter-like stream of news from friends. Now the default view is algorithmic. A lot of applications (especially these guys) encourage users to add a status update every few minutes with what they’re up to – and when there was a constant stream of this stuff the apps benefited from all the extra traffic. That’s all muted now, and developers we spoke with say traffic and usage has declined 20% – 30% from just that one change.
And today Facebook will hit developers even harder. An even more lucrative traffic stream for apps comes from notifications – the pop up box in the lower right hand corner of Facebook that tells you when people leave comments or “like” your links and updates, etc. Today apps have free reign to publish into notifications without even telling the user. And they do it. A lot. When the changes go into effect, we’ve heard, apps will no longer be able to publish to notifications. There goes another 40% of traffic for the apps that use it heavily, say our sources. → Read More
You know the words, folks – sing it with me: ♫ Lets all go to the lobby, lets all go to the lobby, lets all go to the lobby, and get ourselves a discount on concession stand goods via our cellular telephones. ♫ Sure, those aren’t the words to the jingle as we know it – but they might take over, eventually. This morning, turn-key mobile coupon service bCode announced a partnership with Sprint and in-theater advertising group Screenvision to bring bCode’s mobile coupon kiosks to over 500 theaters nationwide. → Read More
At today’s Yahoo analyst event, Yahoo exec Bryan Lamkin shed some light on the company’s recent status update numbers. Yahoo launched its “status-casting” feature a few months ago, which added basic status updates to its Mail and Messenger products. In both Yahoo Mail and Messenger 10, you can update your status and all of your contacts who also use either of those two products can see your updates.
Today, Lamkin says that Yahoo is seeing 800 million status message updates per month through this new feature. AIM has been doing this for sometime now, so Yahoo’s status update feature isn’t new but the quantity of updates is certainly something worth noting. The integration of these status updates into mail and IM represents the merging of private and public messaging. → Read More
Oh noes! I have like five or six of these recalled surge protectors around my house. Plus I sold countless numbers of them over the pricy Monster Cable models during my days at Circuit City. Maybe I was somewhat responsible for one of the fires that spurred the recall…oh no… → Read More
We have another early entry into the wonderful world of leaked Black Friday ads with Sears opening at 4:00 AM on Friday morning and offering a pretty enticing list of door busters (available until noon) and other sale items to satisfy the rabid consumer in everyone. → Read More
