Unless you’ve been living offline for the past year, you’ve undoubtedly heard and/or seen “I’m On A Boat,” Lonely Island’s mock hip hop song/video. Today brings a response to it in the form of a group of Apple fanbois rapping about their love of using Apple products. They even have one character autotuned up, just like T-Pain in the “I’m On A Boat” version. No word on if they used the I Am T-Pain iPhone app to get the effect, but a major plus if so.
It’s pretty standard stuff: Love Macs, love iPods, love iPhones — hate PCs, hate Zunes, hate drivers and viruses, etc. Fairly well made, this isn’t nearly as bad as the Bing Jingle, but it’s still a little cringe-inducing. Sample line: “I’m pluggin girls, you at work pluggin in devices.” → Read More
Hot news, everyone. I just received word from a reliable source deep within the confines of a Chinese brothel, that that our own John Biggs is making a 9.789-inch Apple Tablet in his basement. Now, you wouldn’t know that this random house in a quiet Brooklyn neighborhood is actually the home of a Apple design genius, but that’s what our source says, so it must be true. And all those random reports about Innolux and Cheng Uei Precision producing the Apple slate are just unfounded Internet rumors and should be ignored as such. What’s behind the jump here is the truth. → Read More
The second batch of 150 tickets to attend the Crunchies Awards are on sale now, courtesy of Eventbrite. Balcony seats are $45 (orchestra is sold out.)
Remember that voting is open through midnight PST, Wednesday, January 6. Everyone is eligible and encouraged to vote daily for their favorite people, products and companies of the year.
The Crunchies Awards celebrate the best tech accomplishments of 2009 and will be held at the Herbst Theater in San Francisco on Friday, January 8, 2010 at 7:30 pm PST. Along with our co-hosts, GigaOm and VentureBeat, we will announce the winners from 18 different award categories live on stage. → Read More
Back in August, I blogged about Thanko’s Catgirl Earphones, which were shaped like cat ears. And today, the notorious Tokyo-based USB gadget maker started selling the so-called Hot Cat Gloves [JP]. A big day for the Cosplay crowd, especially those with a penchant for dressing up as a catgirl.
These things may appear totally silly, but Thanko says that the Catgirl Earphones from the summer are still their No. 1 selling item. And the company has to make money to keep their three (!) brick-and-mortar stores in Tokyo going somehow. → Read More
There are a plethora of online invitation sites that let invitees and event organize utilize both Facebook and Twitter to publicize events to their social graphs. Cocodot, Pingg and others will pull in Tweets about an event by hashtag and also allow invitees to Tweet about the party from its platform. VeVite has a different twist on social event invitations by providing a deeper integration with Twitter.
Invites are sent via Direct Message, with a link back to the event on VeVite to RSVP. Once you login via your Twitter credentials, you can RSVP, and your comments on the page are automatically shared on Twitter as well. A host can only invite 250 people every 24 hours because of a Twitter DM restriction. But if the event is “open” then anyone can RSVP without getting a DM. → Read More
How many USB ports is too many? Not ten, apparently. Meritline.com is selling a ten-port USB 2.0 hub for an actually-reasonable price of $26 with free shipping. → Read More
Pre-toting people around the Internets have been hoping and praying that Palm would add video recording support to the Pre ever since the device launched. When Palm’s CEO Jon Rubinstein mentioned that webOS 1.3.5 would be hitting the Pre in just a few days, people started getting antsy; surely this would be the one that brought video, right? No such luck. While it does fix a handful of issues (most importantly, they’ve upped the number of apps you can have installed at once), the lack of video isn’t one of them. → Read More
Owing to last week’s “bomb attack bid” on a U.S. airliner, there’s going to be a whole lot more security at airports. You probably already knew this. Expect long lines, confusion, malaise, and weariness. (Good thing that the entire tech world is going to be flying to Las Vegas in a couple days for CES. Leave your gadgets at home unless you want to spend 400 hours on the metal detector line.) The Transportation Security Administration is implementing new procedures to deal with everything. Here they are. → Read More
What’s not to like about free directory assistance? Investors are pouring yet another $6.75 million into Jingle Networks, the company behind 1-800-FREE-411. The funding round was disclosed today in an SEC filing, and it brings the total amount raised by the company to almost $90 million.
The investors in this round were not disclosed in the filing, but previous investors include First Round Capital, Goldman Sachs, Hearst, and Liberty Associated Partners. → Read More
A handful of sites are linking to a post on NetbookNews.de, which links to a post on a UK-based site called IBTimes titled Google Chrome OS-based netbook tech specs are out. It seems fishy and the site doesn’t get a lot of traffic in the first place but if the post ends up being credible, I apologize. → Read More
A random tablet broke from a random company named Notion Ink a week ago. The thing looked almost too good with an NVIDIA Tegra T20 chipset. Like Vaperware good. But the Adam (that’s the product name) seems to be scheduled for a June 2010 launch according to a report by The Hindu. Who knows, we might actually see this thing, but chances are six months from now it will not look nearly as tantalizing. → Read More
Do you remember the so-called Crazy Earphones Tokyo-based gadget maker Solid Alliance released back in October? Apparently the silly things sold well, otherwise the company probably wouldn’t have updated [JP] the series, which consisted of sushi, bananas, cat paws and bolts. → Read More
Best Buy is offering a deal for consumers to get a free TweetDeck app with the purchase of a CD under Interscope Records, which includes artists such as 50 Cent, Flyleaf, Weezer, OneRepublic, Black Eyed Peas, Timbaland and others. With the purchase of one of the CDs, which range from $10.99 to $13.99, the buyer will receive an Interscope branded TweetDeck application that is pre-loaded to connect them to the social media content of the 16 various artists.
Best Buy is promoting this as a “Special Offer.” You get a “free Tweetdeck app when you order a CD.” The irony of the deal is that it’s not really a deal. You can download the regular TweetDeck app for free, both as a desktop application or as an iPhone app, and then create a list for the 16 artists to follow. I created a Twitter list of an assortment of the artists whose CDs are being peddled within five minutes. → Read More
The most rewarding and infuriating aspect of golf is that it takes a LOT of time and patience to get good at it. As Americans, should we continue to let the challenge of golf trample upon our freedom to easily and quickly excel at the sport? NO! → Read More
If you’re diligent about mail-in rebates, you can get this Gyration Air Mouse for $10. For the rest of us, it’s $30 through Woot.com today only. → Read More
Well hello there, Handsome. File this one under “Stuff I Want Despite No Practical Use In My Household” and cross file it into the “Not Bad For $60” folder. We’re looking at an HTPC-friendly remote control with built-in keyboard, trackball, and media buttons from Lenovo. → Read More
A (four day old now) spoof of all the “making of Avatar” videos is out there. It makes fun of James Cameron’s 15 year journey to create Avatar. And yes, telesync versions of Avatar are available on BitTorrent now. And watching it that way is nothing at all like watching the movie in a theater in 3D.
The video is below: → Read More
Google recently revealed that the Federal Trade Commission was intensely reviewing the search giant’s recent $750 million acquisition of mobile ad network AdMob. Last week, Google said the FTC has made a second request for further information about the deal. Today, two consumer groups, Consumer Watchdog and the Center For Digital Democracy, have asked the FTC to block the deal on anti-trust grounds and possible privacy issues.
In a joint letter to the FTC (embedded below), the two groups say that Google’s acquisition of AdMob would lessen competition in the mobile advertising market, having a potentially negative impact on consumers, advertisers and application developers and others. AdMob is the leader in the mobile advertising space, which is chock full of competitors, including Greystripe and others. We’ve all been speculating on what the impact of a Google-backed AdMob would have on the rest of its competitors, and the mobile advertising market in general. → Read More
Google is getting serious about realtime search, adding Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace streams into results and adding a recent “updates” option which is addictive. But behind the scenes Google is also getting ready to push out an entirely new way for indexing the Web. Codenamed “Caffeine,” Google has been testing it since last summer in one datacenter, and is now getting ready to push it out across all of Google. Some SEO-minded tipsters say that they are starting to notice faster search response times, but Google is sticking to the party line that Caffeine won’t roll out until after the New Year (in part so that everybody can enjoy the holidays).
When Caffeine does roll out, what can you expect? Most people won’t even notice. The look and feel of Google results won’t change. Caffeine is an under-the-hood upgrade to Google’s search index algorithms. But it will significantly speed up how fast Google can present results, especially across different media types such as photos and videos. Overall, search will be more realtime because Google considers the speed of its index to be a competitive advantage. → Read More
Even though it’s now a Panasonic subsidiary, Sanyo lives on as its own brand. And one of the major reasons Panasonic bought the company is its “green” image, mainly achieved through selling products under the “eneloop” sub-brand. The latest of these products, the so-called eneloop music booster, was announced today. It’s a rechargeable DC 9V battery unit specifically designed for music devices. → Read More
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