If you live in the New York City metropolitan area, as I do, and try to buy an iPhone from AT&T’s website, you will probably get the same message I did after I entered my zipcode: “Sorry this package is not available in your area.” Apparently, this is a big story. (Hey, it’s the tail end of a long holiday weekend, and there is nothing else going on). For instance, the Consumerist called some hapless AT&T customer service rep who confirmed that “the phone is not offered to you because New York is not ready for the iPhone.” → Read More
It may be an art installation, but this “digital” clock, operated for 24 hours straight by a group of staunch Dutchmen might fare better as a desktop widget. I suppose it’s meant to say something about the nature of time, and perhaps it does, but this is a gadget blog, not the MOMA coffee shop. Go, you. Talk about it there. → Read More
As predicted here on MobileCrunch earlier this month, Apple rocked it this holiday season, and the early numbers are showing it.
According to Flurry, the biggest mobile app analytics company, iPod Touch download volume saw a nearly 1,000% jump in downloads on Christmas Day. Overall, the App Store saw a 51% increase in downloads from November to December (downloads only increased by 15% from October to November). Christmas also marked the first day that iPod Touch app downloads surpassed iPhone app downloads, which makes sense (the iPod Touch is a more common gift than an iPhone; more on that later). Furthermore, the Android Market saw a nice 20% bump in app sales as well, sparked primarily by an uptick in downloads from the Motorola Droid. → Read More
Editor’s note: The following guest post was written by Rohit Khare, the co-founder of Angstro. Building his latest project, social address book Knx.to, gives him a deep familiarity with the privacy policies of all the major social networks.
I’d be wishing everyone a happier New Year if it were easier to mail out greeting cards to friends on Facebook and colleagues on LinkedIn. I’d like to use knx.to, our free, real-time social address book, but their ‘privacy’ policies prevent us from downloading contact information, even for my own friends.
At least those Terms of Service (ToS) that force us to copy addresses and phone numbers one-by-one also prevent scoundrels from stealing our identity; reselling our friends to marketers; and linking our life online to the real world. Right?
Wrong. When RockYou can stash 32 million passwords in the clear; when RapLeaf can index 600 million email accounts; and when Intelius can go public by buying 100 million profile pages; then our social networks have traded away our privacy for mere “privacy theater.”
With apologies to Bruce Schneier’s brilliant coinage, “security theater” (e.g. the magical thinking behind forcing passengers to sit down and shut up for the last hour of international flights), social networks have been dogged by one disaster after another in 2009 because they pursue policies that provide the “feeling of improved privacy while doing little or nothing to actually improve privacy.”
As long as the same information that social networks piously prohibit their own customers from using is being bought and sold on the open market by giant marketing companies, social networks are only pretending to protect your privacy. → Read More
Alex Albrecht is on Wikipedia. Therefore, he is important. Not only that, but he also made a cool iPhone app that hit the store for just $1. Cheap. Like all the other iPhone apps. Unlike most other $1 iPhone apps, this one is pretty fun. → Read More
If you live in the New York City metropolitan area, as I do, and try to buy an iPhone from AT&T’s website, you will probably get the same message I did after I entered my zipcode: “Sorry this package is not available in your area.” Apparently, this is a big story. (Hey, it’s the tail end of a long holiday weekend, and there is nothing else going on). For instance, the Consumerist called some hapless AT&T customer service rep who confirmed that “the phone is not offered to you because New York is not ready for the iPhone.”
Given AT&T’s history of bandwidth problems, especially with the iPhone, the idea that AT&T’s network can’t handle the iPhone is not entirely outlandish. Remember Operation Chokehold, and the resulting tiff between Fake Steve Jobs and AT&T? It was a failed attempt to bring AT&T’s network to its knees by everyone using their iPhones at once as a way to protest how much AT&T’s data network sucks → Read More
2009 is coming to a close, which means it’s time to reflect on the events that shaped the last twelve months. And there’s nothing like a whirlwind animated musical to put everything into perspective. Cue JibJab, which has just released their annual Year In Review: a two minute video romp that recaps the last year in all its glory. The video is packed will everything from momentous events like the induction of our first black President to moments of unparalleled stupidity (Balloon Boy). Even Three Wolf Moon made the cut.
This is the fifth year that JibJab has produced their Year In Review, and we’re told it will be seeing airtime on a number of national television networks tomorrow. For those wondering how the video was made, the company has put together a thorough blog post detailing its production. → Read More
Didn’t get what you wanted over the holidays? Still have a little money left in the bank? Here’s a handful of enticing deals for some lazy Sunday shopping. → Read More
Only the truly adventurous are running Chrome OS on their computers today. But it’s the elephant in the room whenever Jolicloud, an ambitious netbook operating system startup, is discussed.
We first covered the startup in late 2008, when netbooks were mostly running Windows XP or Linux. In June, when the first invites to Jolicloud went out, it looked like a winner.
I caught up with CEO Tariq Krim and Director Partnerships Brenda O’Connell backstage at Le Web and asked them how Jolicloud would compete with Chrome OS. → Read More
We told you previously that Roku might be adding some hidden porn to their service, but we didn’t expect it to be this soon. Adult entertainment company EroticVision.TV just announced that they are teaming up with Roku to bring lots of nasty, nasty, girls (and boys) to your living room. → Read More
Between the presents, family time and the eggnog, iPhone users will be hitting their device for competitive entertainment, says gaming community platform PlayHaven and mobile ad exchange Mobclix. According to data released today, the two companies predict that iPhone game usage is likely to set record in the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day, called a “Game Rush,” with usage 28 times greater than the same weekly period last year.
PlayHaven says as the number of games on the App Store increases (there are currently more than 15,000 games available), consumers can turn to their iPhone for entertainment vs. consoles. PlayHaven also predicted that in the coming year, discovery of games and applications is increasingly going to originate outside the App Store. By the end of 2010, PlayHaven’s founder and CEO, Raymond Lau, said up to 25 percent of iPhone app purchases may originate at some location other than iTunes or the App Store as companies like PlayHaven seek to capitalize on the increasing complexity of app discovery in a universe of more than 125,000 titles. → Read More
This guest post was written by Erik Fikkert, Lead Reviewer, AppVee. Also check out Appvee’s previous picks of the best apps in the App store
The iPhone and iPod touch have become immediately recognizable names around the world. Apple recently announced that the iPhone is the most popular mobile phone in the US. In addition, the iPod touch is generally regarded as the media player of choice, offering much more than just music. Perhaps the key to their success is the ever-growing app store which currently boasts over 100,000 apps. For those of you not crazy about math, that’s a huge number—you would have to purchase and download over 11 apps an hour, every single day for a year to test them all. While it is safe to say the majority of apps available are less than appealing, there are a few gems that stand out from the rest. We took a look and compiled a list of the best apps 2009 had to offer. → Read More
For years, runners have been able to take advantage of Nike+, a nifty accessory that lets your iPod communicate with your shoes to turn it into a personal running coach of sorts. Soon, cyclists will have access to a tool that’s in the same vein as Nike+, but far more powerful. It’s called Pedal Brain, and it allows your iPhone or iPod Touch to receive and interpret data from a variety of exercise devices that use the ANT+ wireless protocol. ANT+ is used by cyclists (including many professionals) to accurately measure and analyze their performance over a ride, but until now there hasn’t been a way to connect these devices to your iPhone.
That’s where Pedal Brain comes in. The bootstrapped startup is making a small device called the Pedal Brain Synapse that plugs into your iPhone or iPod Touch and allows them to receive this data, which is then interpreted by an iPhone app. The application shows you how you’re performing in real-time (you’ll want to mount your iPhone in plain view) and can also use GPS to show the position of your team members. → Read More
If you’re on Twitter, that means you registered an account with a password that isn’t terribly easy to guess. As you may know, Twitter prevents people from doing just that by indicating that certain passwords such as ‘password’ (cough cough) and ’123456′ are too obvious to be picked.
It just so happens that Twitter has hard-coded all banned passwords on the sign-up page. All you need to do to retrieve the full list of unwelcome passwords is take a look at the source code of that page.
Do a simple search for ‘twttr.BANNED_PASSWORDS’ and voilà, there they are, all 370 of them. → Read More
For years, runners have been able to take advantage of Nike+, a nifty accessory that lets your iPod communicate with your shoes to turn it into a personal running coach of sorts. Soon, cyclists will have access to a tool that’s in the same vein as Nike+, but far more powerful. It’s called Pedal Brain, and it allows your iPhone or iPod Touch to receive and interpret data from a variety of exercise devices that use the ANT+ wireless protocol. ANT+ is used by cyclists (including many professionals) to accurately measure and analyze their performance over a ride, but until now there hasn’t been a way to connect these devices to your iPhone.
That’s where Pedal Brain comes in. The bootstrapped startup is making a small device called the Pedal Brain Synapse that plugs into your iPhone or iPod Touch and allows them to receive this data, which is then interpreted by an iPhone app. The application shows you how you’re performing in real-time (you’ll want to mount your iPhone in plain view) and can also use GPS to show the position of your team members. → Read More
A weary hello from O’Hare Airport in Chicago, Illinois – the world’s coldest and most inhospitable airport, right in the frozen heart of the world’s coldest and most inhospitable city. That a community organizer from this city would dream of becoming President is no surprise. Chicago is, after all, the only place in the world capable of making Washington DC look like a step up.
I’m trapped here in standby limbo: my original connecting flight to Nashville cancelled due to snow – the kind of freak weather condition that no one in Chicago could possibly have predicted for December.
Still, at least I’ve been awake since 4am GMT, and at least my flight left London an hour late because every single passenger had to be patted down by American Airlines staff at the gate, having already passed through the usual madness of security. And at least by “every single passenger” I mean there unfolded a preposterous pantomime where posh white dudes like me were given the most cursorily of rub-downs in order to keep the line moving while those poor saps who fit the terrorist profile – which is to say, anyone who looked a bit brown – were deep-tissue massaged half to death a gaggle of goons in latex gloves. And at least all of that nonsense was utterly pointless because, as any self-respecting terrorist apparently knows, they don’t dare go anywhere near your groin. → Read More
A year ago Apple launched iWork.com in beta, which allowed users of their office suite of applications to publish documents online. It’s a light feature set compared to Google Docs and Office 10 – just viewing and commenting. But a job posting suggests Apple may be creating a true collaborative cloud based version of the iWork apps.
The job posting popped up on CrunchBoard on December 22. Apple is looking for a mid level engineer to “be part of the core development team” and “engage in an area from design to development” of a new javascript rich internet application for the iWork team: → Read More
Mobile advertising is poised to become a huge growth area, with research firm Kelsey Group seeing the market grow from just $160 million in 2008 to $3.1 billion in 2013. eMarketer projects mobile advertising spending in the US will balloon from $648 million in 2008 to over $3.3 billion in 2013.
While some believe search will account for the biggest chunk of the market, others expect geo-aware advertising, another way of bringing “relevant” ads to users, to have a bright future, too. This is where AdLocal, a location-based, self-service mobile ad platform that (re-)launched yesterday, comes in.
Offered by Sunnyvale-based Cirius Technologies USA, the platform has been around in Japan since 2006, currently commanding the largest share of location-based advertising in Japan’s $1 billion [PDF] mobile ad space. And now Cirius is ready to utilize the years of experience the company gained in the world’s most competitive mobile market in the US (AdLocal isn’t available outside America and Japan at this point).
AdLocal allows advertisers to manage their campaigns and publishers to add their mobile sites or applications by themselves through a Web-based dashboard. By locating a mobile user’s physical location via GPS, cell identification and other methods, the mobile ad network can tell when a consumer is close to a specific business address and then serves up ads for that business in real-time. → Read More
