Back in December at Le Web, Twitter Director of Platform Ryan Sarver announced that Twitter would be holding the first conference of their own in 2010. Today, they’ve unveiled the details. Called Chirp, the conference will take place April 14 and 15 in San Francisco. Notably, this is exactly one week before Facebook’s big developer conference, f8, which will be April 21 and 22.
Day 1 of the Twitter conference will take place at the Palace of Fine Arts Theater. This day will contain the meat of the schedule. Highlighted talking points include OAuth, streaming, geolocation, business strategies, mobile integration, and the product roadmap. Right now, the only highlighted speakers include Twitter co-founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone as well as COO Dick Costolo and Sarver, but you can expect more to be added. Day 2 will see the event move to the Herbst Pavilion in Fort Mason for a 24-hour “Hack Day” for Twitter third-party developers. Naturally, there will also be a big party after the conference with “free beer, food and music all night long.” No word on any performers yet, but you can be sure that much like f8, Twitter will bring in some big names to make their community happy. → Read More
Considering that the much heralded Nexus One is being sold as a pure Android experience by Google themselves, it wasn’t at all surprising to see that it didn’t sport HTC’s oh-so-awesome Android interface overhaul, Sense.
Surprising? No. Disappointing? A bit. The 2.1 build of Android that the Nexus One runs is pretty dang solid – but in the end, we’re still longing for Sense. Looks like we might be in luck. → Read More
Who cares if this LG TV is just a 4:3, 14-inch CRT. I still want one. Look at it and tell me that there isn’t a spot in your home for the little guy. The chrome legs, soft styling, rabbit ears. There’s even a little switch that changes the picture to black and white or sepia. It’s all good. Too bad that it’s stuck in Korea and not available here in the States. → Read More
Back in December at Le Web, Twitter Director of Platform Ryan Sarver announced that Twitter would be holding the first conference of their own in 2010. Today, they’ve unveiled the details. Called Chirp, the conference will take place April 14 and 15 in San Francisco. Notably, this is exactly one week before Facebook’s big developer conference, f8, which will be April 21 and 22.
Day 1 of the Twitter conference will take place at the Palace of Fine Arts Theater. This day will contain the meat of the schedule. Highlighted talking points include OAuth, streaming, geolocation, business strategies, mobile integration, and the product roadmap. Right now, the only highlighted speakers include Twitter co-founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone as well as COO Dick Costolo and Sarver, but you can expect more to be added. Day 2 will see the event move to the Herbst Pavilion in Fort Mason for a 24-hour “Hack Day” for Twitter third-party developers. Naturally, there will also be a big party after the conference with “free beer, food and music all night long.” No word on any performers yet, but you can be sure that much like f8, Twitter will bring in some big names to make their community happy. → Read More
You’ve been working on your music career for 13 years now. Take things to the next level by purchasing a higher-quality microphone. You know, one with an XLR input. Ask any touring musician about microphones. They’ll all be like, “Dude. XLR all the way. You have to spend more than $5 on a microphone if you want to get a record deal. That’s how they keep the riff-raff out of the music business.” → Read More
Motorola’s by no means a stranger to phones with wonky form factors. I mean, just look at the Moto Backflip – the keyboard! It’s on the back! What is this, the future?
It gets crazier, friends. → Read More
The “TuneCast Auto Live” FM transmitter from Belkin costs $80. That’s a lot of coin for an FM transmitter. It works with most iPhone and iPod devices, but you get extra features if you use it with your iPhone – most notably, there’s a free app that uses GPS and a ratings system populated by other TuneCast/iPhone users to find the clearest FM channels in your area. → Read More
Just the facts, ma’am. That’s the premise behind Factery Labs, a service that scours through web content to pull out just the factual bits of information, allowing you to get the gist of an article in seconds (at least, in theory). The company first launched in November with a tech demo and API for developers to tap into. And today, it’s launching a consumer facing fact search engine at FacteryLabs.com.
The site has a spartan interface that I wouldn’t classify as good looking, but it gets the job done. When you first visit Factery Labs, you’ll see a series of widgets, each presenting facts about the current hottest trends (trends are based on trending topics from Twitter). At the top of the page, you’ll find other topics, including Sports, Entertainment, World, Politics, and Technology. Each of these topics is pre-loaded with a handful of popular queries, like “Apple” and “Tablet” in the case of Tech. Each fact consists of a line or two of information, followed by a link to its source, a ‘more’ button that lets you read the fact in context, and a share button so that you can send it to friends. → Read More
The Kandle. It’s a pun. Get it? $24.95 on Amazon and works on the Kindle, Sony Reader, and other eBook readers according to the product description. [via Oh Gizmo] → Read More
Tokyo-based crap accessory maker Greenhouse has given us a plethora of gadgets that basically make no sense over the last months, and these new USB memory sticks don’t look to be different. Much like the cork- and light bulb-shaped USB sticks Greenhouse released not too long ago, they don’t offer anything special technically. → Read More
When it comes to PR, there is damage control and then there is just plain cluelessness. Ten days ago, I found out that Aol’s chief technology officer Ted Cahall was planning to leave the company. Today, it became official. Even though our information was correct, Aol made repeated statements, on the record, that our story was wrong. To put it more bluntly, Aol lied to us, and also encouraged other news publications to say that our story was incorrect.
When we contact a company representative about a story that is accurate, they will usually either confirm the story on or off record, or simply not respond. Any of those responses is perfectly appropriate.
Here’s what Tricia Primrose Wallace, Aol’s executive vice president of communications, said to us in an email: “No, he is not leaving.” → Read More
Since leaving Google last October, former product manager and Jaiku co-founder, Jyri Engeström has moved his young family back to Helsinki and started rooting around for the next thing. Aside from working on his wife Ula’s long term project to create a hyperlink for any physical object, Thinglink, he’s also been seeking angel investments.
Today he joins the board of XIHA Life which is run out of Sunnyvale, California, Switzerland and Finland. At the same time the startup has announced a $1 million seed round. Veraventure led the round, joined by other angels and the company founders. Jani Penttinen, XIHA Life co-founder and CEO, says the money will be used to push the mobile platform and international growth. → Read More
Acer has big plans for 2010. Sometime within the coming months the world’s second largest computer maker will launch a 6-inch monochrome ebook reader, cross-platform application store and a Chrome OS netbook — along with probably a crapton and a half of computers under its Acer, Gateway, and EMachines brands. And yes, the company is working on a tablet computer says the president of Acer’s IT Products division. Tablet! → Read More
PC users, rejoice, for Google has just announced that there’s a fresh, stable release of Google Chrome for Windows, with added extensions and bookmark sync features.
You can check for the new version manually if you’re already using Google Chrome for Windows (go to Settings > About Google Chrome), or you can wait for the new release to be automatically updated within the next week. → Read More
Bill Gates has released his second annual letter from the Bill And Melinda Gates Foundation, and he has highlighted a tech startup that he finds particularly compelling, Academic Earth. We’ve written about the online video education site, which is sort of like a Hulu For Education.The startup provides a user-friendly platform for educational video that offers courses and lectures from Yale, MIT, Harvard, Stanford, UC Berkeley, Princeton and others.
Gates believes that online learning sites like Academic Earth will revolutionize education. Gates writes that sites that can cater to individual students online, offering a personalized learning experience, are innovative and will take interactivity to a new level. Academic Earth has received considerable amount of acclaim since its launch last year, also being named one of Time Magazine’s best websites of 2009. → Read More
In a savvy move, SoundCloud are to partner with music portal The Hype Machine to let labels and artists service music bloggers – a key component of the music scene now – with new and pre-release tracks.
The Hype Machine is going to be able to aggregate the output of blogs, but more importantly the bloggers get official releases without having to be forced to release an MP3 into the wild. In addition labels/artists can track listens and pull analytics on who and how the content is being consumed, as tracks get released. Since labels and bloggers haven’t traditionally got on, this move is potentially a lot more productive for both sides. → Read More
News Corp-owned HarperCollins this morning put out a release about the launch of Inkpop.com, an interactive writing platform for teens. Which caught us off guard, because the U.S. publisher had already soft-launched the website on its Authonomy blog on November 24, 2009.
Anyway: Inkpop is a project from HarperTeen, HarperCollins Publishers’ teen publishing unit. The platform aims to attract young readers and writers with a combination of community publishing features, user-generated content, and social networking elements. → Read More
Seeing the success of Farmville and other social games, Break Media is getting into gaming across its roster of men-oriented video sites. The first game, MMA FightPicker, is launching today on Break’s martial-arts video site, CagePotato. It is a pretty basic fantasy sports game where you pick a line-up of fighters and get points, in the form of potato chips, every time your fighters win. The potato chips also act as a virtual currency, which can be used to advance within the game. Every time you play, you get some potato chips, but you can also buy them.
MMA FightPicker is Break’s first game, unless you count the Tiger Woods game where he is chased by his wife. It is just the first of many games the company plans to roll out across its eight sites, including its flagship Break.com. The games are being developed by a new game studio in Shanghai, China that already employs more than three dozen developers who are ready to churn out a variety of games. “We started this studio so we could knock out social games across our properties,” says CEO Keith Richman. → Read More
Mimecast, a startup that offers a email archiving, continuity, and security software has raised $21 million in Series B financing from Index Ventures and Dawn Capital.
Founded in the UK in 2003 by Peter Bauer and Neil Murray, Mimecast’s cloud based platform extends the capabilities of most in-house email systems by integrating additional storage, archiving, and spam/virus protection. For example, the software could exchange the value of Microsoft Outlook’s email platforms. Mimecast currently has close to 2,500 customers across a range of of industries including financial services, legal, manufacturing and the public sector. The startup claims to have seen triple digit revenue growth in each of the last three years. → Read More
