Currently, if you want to share a Pandora station or song with a friend, you have to email it to them. Last time I checked, this isn’t 1994. Tonight, Pandora is joining the 21st century with the addition of simple ways to share stations and songs on Twitter and Facebook. And it’s further emphasizing a feature that no one seems to realize exists: Gifting Pandora stations.
On Pandora’s main playback pages you will now see a new set of buttons next to the traditional playback ones. These include a Twitter button, a Facebook button, a mail button, and a gift button. Clicking on any of those allows you to send the current station or current song you’re listening to via those respective services. → Read More
A helmet-mounted radar unit seems redundant with the kind of crazy surveillance and intel they already have available or in the pipes, but hey, whatever helps our boys. While satellite and air-based imaging are invaluable to the modern field commander, an individual infantryman has little feedback in an more local tactical situation. So why not have an imaging system for individuals? → Read More
Yeah ok it isn’t that Apple Tablet. But this is a picture, taken around 1990, of the Apple Pen Mac, a little known and never launched Apple tablet project. As far as we can tell there is no other image of this device anywhere on the Internet, and very few references to it at all.
The Pen Mac was a fully functional Mac computer (it even played the Mac startup chime) with a pen based touch screen. The screen itself was identical to the Mac Portable, but with the addition of pen touch. And of course the case was a lot smaller than the Mac Portable. The Pen Mac was supposedly not much more than one inch thick. Users could plug in a keyboard and mouse or easier input.
Holding the Pen Mac in the picture is Glam CEO Samir Arora, who told me about the device over dinner a couple of weeks ago. Arora worked at Apple on the project, eventually going to a spinout company, Rae Technology, which was designing applications for the Pen Mac. Rae Technology eventually morphed into NetObjects.
The Pen Mac project was led by Paul Mercer but was eventually axed in favor of the Newton. Then Apple CEO John Sculley wanted a PDA, not a tablet. From a 2006 NY Times article: → Read More
Keep in mind, 100,000 approved apps doesn’t mean 100,000 GOOD apps, but according to the App Shopper, a major milestone has been hit. There are a few technicalities though. → Read More
A new generation of database products and companies is beginning to emerge, and one of the more interesting examples is Swedish-based Neo Technology, the developer and vendor of the neo4j graph based database (graph in the data structure sense). The neo4j product has been in development for over 8 years, and Neo Technology are today announcing a new $2.5M round of funding. The company has been developing the neo4j project as a commercial product, and is now taking it to market with a dual-license model. A graph database is a more natural method for expressing, storing and retrieving data that does not fit well in a standard relational database schema. The best example is to consider social networking models, or other models with relationship elements that are either not easily expressed in a traditional table structure or where a table and relationship based structure does not scale. In a demo of the product we saw, a mock social network structure was created where 1,000 users were defined, each with 50 friends. The traditional table based database took 2,000ms to query every friend from every user, while the graph-based neo4j database took 2ms. To demonstrate the efficiency of the database further, with 1,000 times more users at a million (and an order of magnitude magnitude more connections), the total query time was still 2ms. The graph model and the neo4j database are able to easily scale with complex relationships between entities and with a more flexible schema. Neo Technology are providing a commercial version of neo4j, Neo, along with services, training and support for the product. The product is licensed under the AGPLv3. The company raised $2.5M from Sunstone Capital and Condor Venture Partners. They previously raising a smaller seed round of $300k from the Swedish government. Neo Technology was founded by a small team lead by CEO Emil Eifrém. The team originally developed the neo4j product as an internal database at a previous company, and have applied the technology in commercial environments for almost 10 years. Neo Technology are closely following in the footsteps of another Swedish database company, MySQL. They not only share the same home country, but both companies started with a solid open source product, both are database companies and both share a similar business model around open source software. Neo provides the next generation of database, more suited to most common data problems faced in the → Read More
Last May we wrote about a new company called Crash Corp that was being formed by Digg’s long-time Chief Architect Joe Stump and Social Thing founder Matt Galligan, who were looking to build alternate reality mobile games. Over the last six months a lot has changed: the team has changed the company name to SimpleGeo, and they’re now building something that’s entirely different, and significantly more ambitious: an infrastructure that other applications can use to easily build location-based applications.
The new company caught our interest when we learned that AOL’s former chief life streamer David Liu had invested in the company. Stump and Galligan declined to comment on the company just yet (they’ll be launching at Under The Radar next month) but we were able to glean some information from Under The Radar’s directory of presenters. → Read More
Foursquare and Loopt have put location-based social networks on the map, and have potentially created a viable business model as well. Now there’s a new kid on the block, called Stalqer, which best described as a Foursquare on steroids. The iPhone app, which will be free, should hit the app store in the next few hours.
In theory, Stalqer is very similar to Foursquare in that it tracks your and your friends’ locations and broadcasts this information via the application and through push notifications. But one of the key differentiators is the fact that Stalqer updates the location in the background, which Foursquare, and most other apps, don’t do at the moment. This is because the device does not allow third party apps to run in the background. But Stalqer has found a way to record your location without you having to actually open up the application. So how does Stalqer do it? → Read More
As the endless brouhaha ringing from all corners of the Internet has proven, AT&T (or Apple, or whoever takes the blame in the end) really dropped the ball on this Google Voice thing. Whether it was rejected outright or shelved indefinitely, competing parties have been quick to play on their delays. First, Palm essentially put third-party Google Voice dialer gDialPro on its shoulders and carried it across the finish line by ensuring that it was one of the first (and still one of just a few) applications to land on the webOS App Catalog. Now, Sprint has come along and done something rare: they’ve dropped long-established fees. With Google Voice’s new keep-your-number feature in mind, Sprint will be doing away with the call forwarding fees associated with third-party voicemail services come mid-November. → Read More
Even cameras with mechanical shutters, it seems, aren’t immune to sensor carryover issues. It seems that when you’re doing that famous 8FPS continuous shooting, it’s possible under certain circumstances that a ghost image will be present in the next image shot.
Canon says it’s “barely noticeable,” but someone must have noticed anyway because they’re having to issue a fix. It doesn’t occur in single shots or movies; I’m guessing it’s just a timing issue where the sensor isn’t completely reset before the new exposure begins. → Read More
We just got a BFG Deimos in today, and it is big, shiny, and competing against Alienware’s M17x. So far, I can tell you that it’s a bit lighter then the Alienware, but (unscientifically speaking) about equal as far as speed. We’ll be doing a full review in the upcoming weeks, but I wanted to share some pictures and first impressions with you today. → Read More
In the interest of bringing Ron and Fez‘s fantastic radio show topics to a more tech-minded audience, I propose the following: games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band, while fun and, generally speaking, “good,” will not save rock music. Rock and roll, for all intents and purposes, is dead. Bear with me for a minute, I’ll make this relevant to CrunchGear. → Read More
Peek, the tiny non-smartphone smartphone dedicated to email and messaging, is now available at Blockbuster stores across the nation. Peek buyers will also receive one month free of Blockbuster Total Access, a Netflix-like service that lets you rent DVDs and BR disks by mail or in-store. You can also refer a friend and get a $15 Blockbuster gift card. The Pronto costs $59.99 with $14.99/month service. The Classic costs $19.99. → Read More
I don’t know how you could forget, considering we’ve been posting Droid updates just about every day, but according to our calculations, tomorrow is October 28th: the day Droid drops. Now, we don’t expect the Droid to set the mobile world on its head exactly, but we’re pretty sure that it’s going to be the premier Android device — until the next premier device comes out. → Read More
Samsung has just announced a pair of LCD monitors with built-in TV features that promise to “eliminate the line between work productivity and HD entertainment,” according to the press release. And speaking of that press release, it appears that Samsung has also eliminated the most basic and important spec from the products’ list of features. → Read More
Intelius is trying to dip its toes into the public market again. Last year we wrote about their business, which combined for-pay people search information with a post transaction marketing scam. After purchasing people information, users were encouraged to take a survey for $10 cash back. In reality, if users clicked yes the $10 was never mentioned again and they were signed up for a nearly impossible to cancel $20 monthly credit card charge.
The IPO never happened. But last week the company quietly filed a new registration statement with the SEC, indicating their attempt to try the markets once again.
Little has changed with their business. They are still selling people information that you can find on other sites like WhitePages.com for free. And during and immediately after the transaction, users are asked if they want $10 cash back. If they click yes, they are signed up for a $25/month credit card subscription.
Consumer complaints continue to flood the company. 1,159 consumer complaints have been filed with the Better Business Bureau in the last 36 months. There are another 214 complaints on RipoffReport. And they have had to deal with class action lawsuits in both Washington and California. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. → Read More
Flixster, a social networking site for movie fans, is doing pretty well for itself in the mobile space. Name any smartphone platform, and there’s a good chance that the Flixster app has spent some time on it’s top download charts. iPhone? Yep. BlackBerry? Yep. Android and Palm webOS? Double yeps.
Earlier today, the company shared with us the news that they’d crossed over a fairly monumental landmark, along with the details surrounding updates for their apps on both Android and BlackBerry OS. → Read More
I hear (via John’s review) that Astro Boy is a fine movie. I doubt I will actually see it until my boy catches wind of it in a few years. but I tell you what, this Astro Boy netbook is geek chic and I sort-of want it. The specs are standard fare with an Atom N270 CPU, 1GB of RAM, 160GB hard drive, and XP home, but it’s the special edition lid that I can appreciate. It’s notebook art done right; clean, simple but yet slick. So here’s what you do. → Read More
As any member of the Greg Kumparak Fan Club (Hey! It exists. They have T-shirts. And buttons.) should know, I was a bit of a Helio geek prior to jumping on board with the Crunch family. My interest weened pretty quickly once Helio got snatched up by Virgin Mobile, as it seemed like their efforts with the property would be few and far between. I wouldn’t have wagered, however, that they’d be taking steps backwards. That’s exactly what they seem to be doing, however. We’re not sure exactly when this happened, but it was recently brought to our attention that the Helio Ocean 2 — which just launched back in February — no longer appears on Virgin Mobile’s list of available phones. If you want an Ocean, you’re stuck with the now ancient original. → Read More
Playing guitar with your hands is so 4 years ago. So this team of DIYers and soccer football players crafted the first ever, wall mounted, full sized, football hero. The control pads are large piezo sensors controlled with the Arduino electronics platform. But let the video do the talking. → Read More
Today’s a pretty big day in gaming, ladies and gents. You’ve got DJ Hero, Tekken 6, and Forza Motorsport 3 all coming out today. (Incidentally, I’ll have like a mini FM3 “review” tomorrow, and we may have some fun Tekken news this week to share—stay tuned!) So I decided to go around some of the big gaming sites, and take select quotes, completely out of context, and share them with y’all here. Let’s go~! → Read More
