Remember back a few months when news broke about a little device that claimed to detect different sorts of bombs? The ones that the Iraqi government spent $85 million on over the last few years even though American military commanders and the FBI stated that they simply don’t work. Well, as we all assumed, the ADE-651 is a sham. It’s just a dirty racket. Good thing that the British government finally caught on, banned the device and threw the inventor in jail. (He’s out on bail as of writing)
It seems that the heart of the device is ID badge-sized cards that are supposed to be used for detecting different items. There are different cards for everything from TNT, plastique, to even money and elephants. However, as the Cambridge Computer Laboratory found out, these cards contain nothing more than a dumb RFID tag. Seriously, watch the BBC investigation video after the jump. → Read More
For the past couple of days I’ve been in Turkey, absorbing the tech scene in Istanbul (tomorrow I’m in Munich, Germany, for DLD). I was invited over by the Nubridge Venture Summit which brought together a panoply of European VCs to listen to Turkish tech companies set out their wares. What emerged is a picture of a country in high growth, as this economy and its entrepreneurs latch on to the possibilities offered by the Internet and mobile platforms.
But first, let me tell you a story. Two years ago I contacted Turkey’s pre-eminent “Web 2.0″ blogger, Arda Kutsal of Webrazzi. I said let’s do a TechCrunch Europe meetup in Istanbul. Duly, a few weeks later I took a flight out, got to the hotel he mentioned and figured Arda had organised the meetup in the bar. No, said the receptionist, “It’s in the Grand Ballroom.” I headed down the hall to find about 400 people. That was the kind of thing that was going on then.
Two years on, with a packed room full of European VCs and private equity people hearing pitches from a wide range of Turkish technology companies, it’s clear the investment community is keenly interested in this market. → Read More
In the film Fight Club (the book has a slightly different plot), the members of Project Mayhem’s main goal is to blow up the buildings that contain credit card companies’ records so that everyone’s debt is reset to zero. (Yes, I know this wouldn’t actually work, but never mind that for now.) Yesterday, two Twitter users, Allen Stern and Louis Gray, proposed the same idea for Twitter. That is to say, with the new suggested users list (SUL) now in place, they’d like to see Twitter reset the follower counts of users (either just those that have been on the SUL in the past, or everyone) to zero, and start over.
The core idea behind this is that anyone on the SUL leading up to the change has gotten an unfair advantage in terms of the number of followers they now have on Twitter. Leaving aside the fairness of it, it certainly is true that just about every person with over a million followers on the service only got that many because of the SUL. And while you may wonder why anyone cares about the number of followers they have, for some accounts, such as those tied to blogs, a huge number of followers is beneficial in terms of clicks coming into the site when links are tweeted out. TechCrunch has certainly benefitted from this, as have a number of other large blogs on the SUL. → Read More
We’ve only got a few days to go before Steve Jobs tells us what we’re spending our money on this year. From all the leaks and positioning announcements, it appears we’re being pushed into the Pay Zone. The NY Times, the top four or five TV shows, the embargo-free bestseller. The bet is we’ll pay for same-day-as access to discretionary consumption of media. I think he’s right. But is that as big a bang as the iPhone? In and of itself, the tApplet does not change the world or even our corner of the world. But just as with the disruption triggered by the iPhone, this new disruption will move beyond the carriers and into the center of the creative core of the netertainment and information industries. In turn, this new wave of video, music, and text will quickly overturn some of the major stakeholders and rewrite how we spend our time at work and play. It’s hard to think far enough back to remember how we used to use our computer time before realtime stole onto the stage. Back before my MacBook Air, which turned every other computer in the place into an appliance: the MacBook Pro for rendering video, the iMac for Web site design, the PC for nothing. Back when software was something I paid for, music something I shopped for, television something I set a timer for. The MacBook Air’s disruption was the strategic removal of an internal CD/DVD drive. It declared independence from physical media, and bootstrapped existing devices to serve as feed machines for the rare need to rip a CD or backup a file for sneakernet. USB drives quickly eliminated even that requirement, and the move to cloud services sealed the deal. Streaming media rushed quickly into the vacuum of tangible media. Once the location of the actual bits was made irrelevant by look-ahead caching, we quickly learned to validate those services which allowed us to share pointers to the material rather than the downloadable enclosures. Identity online became the control point for micropayments, and the incentive for providing behavior and social signals in return for discounts and sponsored bundling. WiFi became the razor, and the streams the blades. In effect, we are now selling our gestures into the stream hoping to build up enough credit to buy these new devices as they reach the intersection of battery life, broadband, and social filtering. → Read More
Your groggy mornings aren’t over yet. A few months ago we wrote about WakeMate, a Y Combinator-funded startup that makes a small gadget designed to help you sleep better. Last time we talked to them, the WakeMate team had a planned ship date of January 25. Unfortunately, that’s not going to happen. Yesterday, the WakeMate team sent an Email to the thousands of customers who had pre-ordered the device (which included a $5 down payment) to inform them that they wouldn’t be getting their WakeMates on schedule. Now the first batch of orders will ship “as early as next month”. But when I asked if the WakeMate team had an idea when the majority of customers would be receiving their devices, they said they were reluctant to give an estimate since they want to avoid disappointing people again. In other words, it may be a while.
The WakeMate device, which costs $50, consists of a small wristband that you wear during the night. It tracks your movements throughout the night, which you can analyze from your computer, and can also work in tandem with your phone alarm to wake you up in the lightest phase of sleep (which is supposed to help eliminate grogginess). There are competitors in this space, like the Zeo Sleep Coach, but WakeMake is about $200 cheaper. → Read More
Voice app provider Truphone is releasing an updated app for Android which is compatible with Google’s Nexus One handset. That makes it the first VoIP client for that phone. In fact it turns out the Nexus One is going to be very important to Truphone’s overall strategy.
The update for Android device (version 3.0.2) also makes Truphone compatible with the T-Mobile Pulse, taking it to five Android devices now. Truphone worked closely with Google on the app. → Read More
Well, well. Harman International’s Lexicon brand isn’t the only company in the business of scamming buyers by simply re-badging competitor’s products. Integral, a Belarus brand for all we can figure out, apparently found it easier and cheaper to simply rebadge an Acer monitor and sell it under their name. After all, that practice isn’t that uncommon as we just found out. But generally, the rebadging is a bit more complex and thorough than Integral’s method. Check out what we mean below. → Read More
We all know by now that HPis the largest PC seller out there. Good for HP. But when you’re shopping for your next system, it helps to know how Brand A compares to Brand X. Our friends at Laptop Magazine have done just that, and put together a series showcasing the strengths and weaknesses of this brand versus that brand. Best part: regular users—like you!—are invited to give your thoughts, which will be compiled into a sort of go-to glossary. Good idea. → Read More
For the past couple of days I’ve been in Turkey, absorbing the tech scene in Istanbul (tomorrow I’m in Munich, Germany, for DLD). I was invited over by the Nubridge Venture Summit which brought together a panoply of European VCs to listen to Turkish tech companies set out their wares. What emerged is a picture of a country in high growth, as this economy and its entrepreneurs latch on to the possibilities offered by the Internet and mobile platforms.
But first, let me tell you a story. Two years ago I contacted Turkey’s pre-eminent “Web 2.0″ blogger, Arda Kutsal of Webrazzi. I said let’s do a TechCrunch Europe meetup in Istanbul. Duly, a few weeks later I took a flight out, got to the hotel he mentioned and figured Arda had organised the meetup in the bar. No, said the receptionist, “It’s in the Grand Ballroom.” I headed down the hall to find about 400 people. That was the kind of thing that was going on then.
Two years on, with a packed room full of European VCs and private equity people hearing pitches from a wide range of Turkish technology companies, it’s clear the investment community is keenly interested in this market. → Read More
An update to our post last night – Facebook Snatches User’s Vanity URL And Sells It To Harman International. Facebook says they’ll be giving Harman Bajwa his /harman vanity URL back shortly:
Thanks for bringing this to our attention, Mike. We made a mistake in this instance and are in the process of returning the username to Mr. Bajwa. To be clear, the move was not driven by monetary reasons, rather trademark protection. We strive to protect trademarks from ‘squatters’ — those who try to take protected term with no legitimate claim. The message Harman received was along those lines, but clearly not applicable. Once we understood the nature of our error, we moved quickly to resolve it. We want to apologize to Mr. Bajwa for being overzealous in our efforts and regret the disruption to his account.
Here are the Facebook guidelines on trademark squatting. Which is fine for Nike or coca-cola, but definitely a grey area for trademarks that are also legitimately in use as people’s names. I’d pay to see the emails that must have been flying around Facebook this morning. But they did the right thing here, and that’s all that matters. → Read More
http://c.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f9/42806370001?isVid=1&publisherID=293884104 Watch and laugh as Peter Ha and Lev Grossman are pwnd by a 11-year old in Halo 3 and Madden. Tools. Just more proof that Peter Ha probably shouldn’t be writing about video games for a living. I’m kidding, Peter. Much love. → Read More
Music discovery site thesixtyone unveiled a radical—and gorgeous—redesign a couple days ago. The redesign presents a single, lush full-screen photograph as each song plays, while smaller snapshots fade in and out screensaver-style. The controls are minimized to rollover menus on the upper right, an account-info strip along the lower left, and green arrows to skip to the next or previous songs. You are supposed to just select a type of playlist (top songs, hot, moods) and let it play. Thesixtyone adds Digg-like voting and gaming elements to surface the best indie music.
Users hate it. Or at least the vocal ones complaining about the change on the startup’s Facebook wall, organizing a boycott, and sending us tips. This backlash is predictable and always happens whenever a site goes through a radical change. But some of the complaints are valid. For instance, the biggest change is that you can no longer see the playlist of songs you are listening to or skip around willy-nilly. You can see the old design here or in the screenshot below. The old design was more conventional, but it was certainly easier to navigate. → Read More
Please, take this advice lightly. It came from the bowels of 4Chan, after all. But it seems that a user froze his Sony A350 DSLR and actually got better results when shooting at ISO 3200. The results he posted seem to validate his results, but once again, this is from 4Chan home of everything that is vile, rotten and antisocial on the Internet. → Read More
Could IBM be prepping more of its own location-aware technology and devices? According to a recent patent filing, it looks like it. On Thursday, Big Blue filed for a patent for a “method and system for location-aware authorization.” The inventors appear to be IBM engineers based in Rome, Italy.
According to the filing, the technology would provide a method and technology to control access to a device based on the location of that device. IBM gave the example of a company that only wanted employees to use a particular device in the office or their home and believe that their technology would allow the employer to control where the particular device can be accessed. → Read More
Could IBM be prepping more of its own location-aware technology and devices? According to a recent patent filing, it looks like it. On Thursday, Big Blue filed for a patent for a “method and system for location-aware authorization.” The inventors appear to be IBM engineers based in Rome, Italy.
According to the filing, the technology would provide a method and technology to control access to a device based on the location of that device. IBM gave the example of a company that only wanted employees to use a particular device in the office or their home and believe that their technology would allow the employer to control where the particular device can be accessed. → Read More
As companies mature from fledgling startups into small and medium-sized businesses, it becomes harder to capture and analyze ideas coming from within an organization. Email and spreadsheets are the usual tools used to deal with internal collaboration, but these modes have no way of bringing the best ideas to the top: many times they are lost in the shuffle. Spigit, creators of an enterprise collaboration platform, has come out with a new SaaS product, WE by Spigit, aimed at addressing the collaboration problems small businesses face.
Often times when an enterprise software company moves downstream, they simply strip down many core functions of their enterprise product in order to make it affordable for SMB’s. WE by Spigit has additional features in their enterprise model, such as prediction and idea trading markets, but the main functions at the heart of their service remain unchanged.
When a company purchases WE by Spigit, they are able to create an “innovation community” where their employees (up to 500), are able to contribute and collaborate on projects immediately. Spigit employs constantly evolving algorithms in their system, which, when added to a thumbs up/down feedback system, creates a reputation value for a user. These values are useful because administrators will see topics and ideas which have the highest reputation rise to the top. Each community is hosted on Spigit’s servers. → Read More
As companies mature from fledgling startups into small and medium-sized businesses, it becomes harder to capture and analyze ideas coming from within an organization. Email and spreadsheets are the usual tools used to deal with internal collaboration, but these modes have no way of bringing the best ideas to the top: many times they are lost in the shuffle. Spigit, creators of an enterprise collaboration platform, has come out with a new SaaS product, WE by Spigit, aimed at addressing the collaboration problems small businesses face.
Often times when an enterprise software company moves downstream, they simply strip down many core functions of their enterprise product in order to make it affordable for SMB’s. WE by Spigit has additional features in their enterprise model, such as prediction and idea trading markets, but the main functions at the heart of their service remain unchanged.
When a company purchases WE by Spigit, they are able to create an “innovation community” where their employees (up to 500), are able to contribute and collaborate on projects immediately. Spigit employs constantly evolving algorithms in their system, which, when added to a thumbs up/down feedback system, creates a reputation value for a user. These values are useful because administrators will see topics and ideas which have the highest reputation rise to the top. Each community is hosted on Spigit’s servers. → Read More
Ready to burn two minutes of your day? I sure hope so, friend, because after the jump is what very well could be the most exciting deconstruction video ever posted to our fine Internet. Here’s hoping that this will become the standard format for the obligatory gadget teardown. I don’t think I’m the only one tired of looking at a stale pic of a random device’s guts. “Yup, there’s a circuit board in there.” Anyway, click through to watch the the PSP Go in a stop motion video. → Read More
Voice app provider Truphone is releasing an updated app for Android which is compatible with Google’s Nexus One handset. That makes it the first VoIP client for that phone. In fact it turns out the Nexus One is going to be very important to Truphone’s overall strategy.
The update for Android device (version 3.0.2) also makes Truphone compatible with the T-Mobile Pulse, taking it to five Android devices now. Truphone worked closely with Google on the app. → Read More
This looks really, really bad. An avid Facebook user named Harman Bajwa says that his Facebook vanity Url – Facebook.com/Harman – was unceremoniously revoked yesterday for violating Facebook’s policies. His new Facebook URL is the much less memorable facebook.com/profile.php?id=538612932.
Facebook then apparently did a sales deal around the vanity URL with Harman International.
The notice from Facebook (also in image at bottom of post): → Read More
San Francisco, CA
