It was so close I could taste it. Two weeks ago we were ready to publicly launch the CrunchPad. The device was stable enough for a demo. It went hours without crashing. We could even let people play with the device themselves – the user interface was intuitive enough that people “got it” without any instructions. And the look of pure joy on the handful of outsiders who had used it made the nearly 1.5 year effort completely worth it.
Our plan was to debut the CrunchPad on stage at the Real-Time Crunchup event on November 20, a little over a week ago. We even hoped to have devices hacked together with Google Chrome OS and Windows 7 to show people that you could hack this thing to run just about anything you want. We’d put 1,000 of the devices on pre-sale and take orders immediately. Larger scale production would begin early in 2010.
And then the entire project self destructed over nothing more than greed, jealousy and miscommunication. → Read More
You may have noticed things have been a bit quiet on the MobileCrunch front for the past few days. After a few months of nose-to-the-grindstone, the siren call of over-packed plates and family good times stemming from the Thanksgiving holiday was too much; we locked up shop for a few days, headed home, and had a good ol’ vacation. And with that out of the way, we’re back with bellies stuffed and typin’-fingers rested. Expect more stories and faster coverage over the next few weeks, now that my writin’ cells are all recharged. Oh, and be on the lookout for contests – we’ve got some awesome stuff lined up for December. → Read More
In your face, parents all over the world. After pleading with your children to quit rotting their brains with non-stop video game playing, your suggestion of playing a board game instead has backfired on you with the Nintendo edition of Monopoly. → Read More
Digg has poached Keval Desai away from Google as their new Vice President of Product, we’ve confirmed from the company. Desai’s last day at Google is today.
Desai is a long time Google employee, first joining the company in 2003. He’s currently their Director of Product Management and has led development of product/businesses in Google’s advertising business (including AdWords, Syndication & TV Ads).
He’ll be Digg’s first head of product, a responsibility that has been shared at various times by founder Kevin Rose, CEO Jay Adelson and Chief Strategy Officer Mike Maser. And he’s got a big job ahead of him: Digg is hard at work on releasing an entirely new version of the site. → Read More
There is a lot of buzz around SimpleGeo right now. The service, which participated in our RealTime CrunchUp earlier this month, also took home two prizes at the Under The Radar conference just prior to that. And that was a big deal for the company considering it won the audience award even though it’s not exactly the most consumer-oriented project. But people seem to understand that the location space is getting really hot right now, and SimpleGeo, which provides its geolocation infrastructure to other companies, offers one of the best models to capitalize on that. So it should be no surprise that they’ve attracted some big time investors.
SimpleGeo has just closed a $1.5 million seed round of funding, we’ve confirmed. This round, led by First Round Capital, also includes from Redpoint Ventures, Ron Conway, Kevin Rose, Chris Sacca, Joshua Schachter, David Cohen, Debbie Landa, Tim Ferriss, Shawn Fanning, Gary Vaynerchuk, David Lee, and Freestyle Capital. Yes, it’s basically a who’s who in angel investing that is on board now with SimpleGeo. → Read More
So this is how the other half lives, huh? It must be nice to have a house full of $1200 remotes customized with user profiles and home automation controls. Yes, this remote costs $1200 and that doesn’t include installation and yes, you need it to be installed professionally. This isn’t a Harmony remote that can be set up in 10 minutes. But once it’s installed, holy cow, it’s effen amazing. I would call it the perfect remote, but I had two demo units die on me. → Read More
A round-up from Shakil Khan, effectively Spotify’s consigliari today in London opened the kimono a little on where it’s at.
Speaking at the new NOAH Conference in London, the headline points from his talk were that we can, as we expected, see a U.S. launch in Q1 2010 as well as a launch in Germany and China in Q1/2 (so no pressure then). Spotify will also extend from its existing handset deals into premium services on other platforms in 2010. They are talking to TV manufacturers about embedding Spotify into internet-enabled TV sets and Khan said they now get “a call a week” from games console makers which want to add Spotify to their service.
He also went through a round-up of its stats and model to date. → Read More
There were some interesting panel discussion today at the NOAH conference – a new event in London aimed at presented tech companies to the private equity and banking sector – but the plethora of suited and booted attendees were shocked out of their chairs a little when Klaus Hommels, (one of the first angel investors in Skype, QXL and XING and recently a venture partner with Balderton (formerly Benchmark Capital Europe) spoke his mind.
The panel he was on had been beating about the bush on investing in tech startups, until he broke into the discussion to make some salient points:
“Structurally we fucked it up. European tech companies would normally have been picked up by media companies in Europe but they are in such a bad state this is not possible. So before anyone puts money into new companies, we need to ask: who is going to by all the shit in our existing portfolios?!” (I think he might have meant to say ‘stuff’, however…) → Read More
Today is Cyber Monday. It’s like Black Friday but with more indoorsiness. And while Black Friday is more of a brick-and-mortar, you’re-there-in-person type of thing, Cyber Monday is all online and there are far too many stores and deals to completely cover. Here’s a head start on some of the better deals from the bigger sites, though. → Read More
Rumors have been swirling that IBM will be acquiring database security company Guardium after the Israeli financial newspaper, The Market, reported the acquisition yesterday (translated version here). Big Blue is reportedly shelling out $225 million for Israel-based Guardium. This year alone, IBM has acquired six companies, including RedPill Solutions, SPSS, Ounce Labs, Exeros and Outblaze.
A subsidiary of Log-On Software, Guardium provides technologies that ensure security of enterprise databases. The startup protects databases for Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, Sun Microsystems and other companies. The Market reports that Guardium is profitable, with sales in the tens of millions per year. → Read More
You’re going to have to wait a bit longer to pick up the $260 Nook in some Barnes & Noble retail stores. The lot that was earmarked for the brick and mortar retail market has been redirected to fullfill Internet pre-orders. Those damn early adopters always get all the fun. → Read More
As more consumers turn to the sites like Yelp and Citysearch to find restaurants, it’s important for establishments of all sizes to have a website. While larger restaurants may have more resources to create a sleek site, the mom and pop restaurants need an easy way to create a presence online. GrabMyTable is hoping to be a resource for restaurants to create websites easily as well as a restaurant discovery platform for consumers. We have free lifetime subscriptions for the first five TechCrunch readers and restaurateurs who sign up for GrabyMyTable here.
GrabMyTable was designed with the small restaurant owner in mind who doesn’t have the time or money to put into developing an established site but still wants to maintain an informative website. The platform lets administrators with no HTML knowledge create a site with contact details, photos and videos, menus, specials, and even lets users add a customer review system that can be controlled by the site’s administrator. The service costs $60 per month per site. The startup is also including a consumer-facing directory of all sites created with its technology broken down by city/regional area. → Read More
Amazon is mighty proud of its Kindle. So much so that the retailer outed a press release proclaiming that the Kindle is the best selling device on Amazon.com and even pre-Cyber Monday, November was its best selling month so far. Nook what? → Read More
Streamreaders just keep getting better and better. A new version of TweetDeck is rolling out today with some major improvements, including support for Lists, Retweets, maps for geo-tagged messages, and LinkedIn streams. TweetDeck has already been downloaded more than 10 million times, and its active user base is in the low millions so this is a significant update.
As soon as Twitter launched Lists (the ability to create and follow groups) as a regular feature, all the stream readers rushed to incorporate it. TweetDeck already let you create Groups in separate columns, and is now replacing that with Twitter Lists. Existing TweetDeck Groups will still work, but from now on when you create a new group it will be via the official List functionality and available for all other Twitter users to see if you choose to make it public. You can also export your old groups as a List. → Read More
It was so close I could taste it. Two weeks ago we were ready to publicly launch the CrunchPad. The device was stable enough for a demo. It went hours without crashing. We could even let people play with the device themselves – the user interface was intuitive enough that people “got it” without any instructions. And the look of pure joy on the handful of outsiders who had used it made the nearly 1.5 year effort completely worth it.
Our plan was to debut the CrunchPad on stage at the Real-Time Crunchup event on November 20, a little over a week ago. We even hoped to have devices hacked together with Google Chrome OS and Windows 7 to show people that you could hack this thing to run just about anything you want. We’d put 1,000 of the devices on pre-sale and take orders immediately. Larger scale production would begin early in 2010.
And then the entire project self destructed over nothing more than greed, jealousy and miscommunication. → Read More
[France] A commercial court in Paris has fined eBay €1.7 million euros (roughly £1.6 million) for allegedly not sticking to an injunction banning users from selling on products of luxury goods conglomerate Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton (LVMH in short).
Allowing the LVMH perfumes and cosmetics to be purchased by Frenchmen on its French and UK website according to the ruling violated a prior court order to remove all such postings (June 2008), part of a €38 million verdict saying eBay had not done enough to stop the sale of counterfeited LVMH items. → Read More
Nearly five months after launching a free, ad-supported application for iPhone and iPod Touch, eBuddy is today introducing a paid version of the program, which enables users to communicate with contacts across various instant messaging clients.
Priced at $4.99 (iTunes link), which in my opinion is fairly expensive, the app lets you chat with friends on Facebook Chat, ICQ, Gtalk, AIM, MySpace, Windows Live Messenger or Yahoo Messenger alike. → Read More
TransferJet is a close-proximity wireless transfer technology that was introduced by Sony in 2008. Toshiba announced during IFA in Berlin this year they are planning to use the technology in their products soon. The idea is to let two electronic devices quickly exchange data, theoretically at up to 560 Mbps, just by bringing them close together (touch is possible, too).
And today, Sony announced in Tokyo [press release in English] that the first LSIs supporting the standard will be shipped to manufacturers before December starts. The “CXD3267AGG” (pictured on the left) and the “CXD3268AGW” will cost $17.45 each. Sony says they managed to optimize the technology so that TransferJet can now be integrated into smaller electronic devices, too. The LSIs can be used by makers of cell phones, digital cameras, computers and HDDs. → Read More
As we’ve noted, Chrome for Mac is getting very, very close to its official beta launch. The team is down to a mere 8 bugs to fix before it’s ready (and it looks like the list has been trimmed to 7 as of a few hours ago). This is great news for Mac users who want to try out the Chrome experience that PC users have had for well over a year now. But still, the product will be in beta, and it will be incomplete.
It’s been known for a while that Google would have to trim some features from the initial Chrome for Mac beta launch to get it out before self-imposed “end of the year” deadline. But what’s on the chopping block? A scan through the Chromium logs on Google Code seems to reveal what will and won’t be a go for Chrome for Mac beta. → Read More
It’s the Monday after Thanksgiving / Black Friday, which means many people will dub today Cyber Monday, a horrendous marketing term that refers to yet another one of the busiest days of the year for retail.
And while Microsoft has been making many online shoppers happy the past few days with the Bing Cashback system, Google has now set up a special ‘Checkout Deals’ page where you can get discounts on products purchased using Mountain View’s Internet payment system. → Read More
