A man named Dave has cobbled together a remote car starter that uses a pre-paid phone to start the car’s engine. The launch sequence is initiated when the phone gets a call or when a particular event in the phone’s calendar comes up (he uses the calendar to start the car at specific times in the morning and at the end of the day so as not to waste minutes. Dave, I like the cut of your jib. → Read More
Tokyo-based Keio University (which happens to be my alma mater) is ready to take Sim-Drive, its eco-friendly vehicle technology, to another level. The university announced over the weekend that it will collaborate with a total of 34 Japanese companies and municipalities, including powerhouses such as Mitsubishi Motors or Isuzu, to release a new electric car. → Read More
Can we agree that Modern Warfare 2 was an average shooter, just one that happened to be backed by a gigantic marketing budget? It wasn’t bad, certainly, but the story was bat-shit crazy—Red Dawn was more plausible—and No Russian was so clearly developed to spark controversy. This is why this Mario story warms my heart so. New Super Mario Bros. Wii is now the fastest-selling game on a single console to reach 10 million units sold worldwide. The previous record holder was Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. → Read More
[Germany] Berlin-based Tagcrumbs wants to be the YouTube for places, although a much more apt comparison might be Delicious. The location-based service, which on the surface competes with usual suspects Foursquare, Yelp, Gowalla and Germany’s own Dailyplaces, enables users to bookmark, tag and share places.
This week Tagcrumbs debuted its iPhone app (iTunes link), which takes advantage of the phone’s GPS capability, making it a snap to begin using the service. Users aren’t even required to sign-up to start discovering new places. → Read More
Ah, Pee-Wee’s Playhouse, my favorite TV show when I was a kid. If you find yourself searching for some kitsch to deck out your own playhouse, perhaps this replica Clocky will do the trick. It’s a real, working clock, too. → Read More
[UK] This one could be straight out of a science fiction movie. Streetcar, which claims to be the UK’s largest pay-as-you-go car club, has released an updated version of its iPhone app that includes the ability to unlock your hire car using the phone itself.
The app lets users search for and book nearby ‘street cars’ that are parked across 1,000 locations in London and other smaller British cities, such as Brighton and Cambridge, as well as manage their accounts and keep up with the latest news related to the service.
And of course, as already mentioned, members can also use the app to unlock their chosen hire car. → 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
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
Currently still in stealth mode, Moscow-based Drimmi aims to become the number one social game developer and publisher in the Russian Federation. And Mangrove Capital Partners and ABRT Venture Fund are betting money on them succeeding at it, investing “millions” into the startup.
Currently with a team of 20 people, Drimmi aims to use the extra capital to expand the resources spent on games in development and build regional technical offices. Drimmi is also developing solutions for social gaming analytics and marketing. → 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
[France] Music search and discovering service Deezer is currently caught up in a storm of controversy: its co-founder and CEO Jonathan Benassaya has effectively been forced out by his investors. After Deezer faced mounting competition from services like Spotify, it’s emerged that investors ousted the founder in order to put in place a more experienced business manager to both reorganize and perhaps prepare some kind of exit. They’ve been disappointed with Deezer’s performance towards a premium service and low advertising revenues.
The rumour that this was about to happen began last week grew a head of steam over the weekend, as reported by music expert Philippe Astor on French site Electronlibre (Google translation). Midem, the annual conference for the music industry, is currently taking place in Cannes, France and the departure of Jonathan Bessaya from Deezer was one of the buzzing topics during the weekend. One of the things that confirmed this rumour was that the CEO was due to participate on a panel on Saturday during Midemnet (the part of Midem focused on the online music industry) but he conspicuously did not show up. His name was even up on screen during the panel he was supposed to attend. On this panel was also Paul Brown, SVP of Spotify, that is widely regarded as a Deezer killer. → 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
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