When I used to go to NYU, I assisted in teaching a web class to graduate students. There was one woman in the class who was amazed that I was able to publish her information to the Web so quickly! She thought the Internet was a black box somewhere and that I had to ask permission to put stuff onto it. Well now you can make your very own black box of Internet, courtesy of the IT Crowd. You can loan folks the Internet but remember to return it to a high tower where it can get the best reception. → Read More
At first glance, $30 may seem like a lot for a one-button old school Atari joystick with a USB connection. But this one comes with the Stella Atari 2600 and 80 games built right in and you can remove the USB controller board for use with that MAME cabinet you’ve always wanted to build. There’s even labeled solder points on the board for adding additional buttons. → Read More
What we have here is a machine that automatically turns office paper into toilet paper. It’s called White Goat (seriously) and is made by a Japanese company called Oriental [JP]. The way it works is simple: You just feed the machine with about 40 sheets of office (or whatever) paper, wait for 30 minutes and take out a perfectly made toilet paper roll.
The machine shreds the paper, which is then dissolved in water, thinned out, dried and wound into toilet rolls. Oriental says one roll costs 10 Yen ($0.11) to make, which isn’t bad. And the machine can be installed right in your office, too. Oriental also claims that regular usage of the machine can save up to 60 cedar trees annually. → Read More
Listen: cry me a river about Flash and multi-tasking. If Apple wants to keep multi-tasking for their own apps in an effort to prevent folks from making their OS run like Windows Mobile on a good day, be my guest. Push servers work great for always-connected applications. As for Flash, I think it’s all political. Anyway, rant over. Those little minxes at 9to5mac found Flash running in Safari on the iPad. If you watch the video after the jump, you notice that when they browse the NYT you can see the Dining section pop up. The Dining section is usually represented by video in a Flash box. → Read More
Have you heard about Blu-ray? Don’t question it, just get a player! They’re all the rage! You can get into the whole Blu-ray game for just $90 today as Amazon is selling the Sylvania NB530SLX Blu-ray Disc Player at a $42 discount. → Read More
Social bookmarking service Delicious is kicking the year off with a few enhancements to its service and interface. Delicious, which has made Michael’s favorite products list for the past three years, allows you to store, access and share your bookmarks and links from around the web.
The service has updated its bookmark display options in a more compact interface, combining all of the options to th right of the Tagbar. Tag Options has been reshuffled and moved it to the sidebar where the tags are actually listed, which makes sense. → Read More
The momentum around local online advertising is growing, especially with the expansion of the Web to mobile devices and flowering of Geo-mobile apps which need a way to make money. Today, Citysearch is throwing its hat into the local advertising ring with the launch of CityGrid, a set of APIs which makes all of Citysearch’s local listings content and advertising available to other Websites and mobile apps. The APIs include more than 15 million local business listings, 3 million user reviews, and access to 500,000 local advertisers looking to reach people near their places of business.
I sat down with Citysearch CEO Jay Herratti at IAC headquarters in Manhattan to get an overview of CityGrid (watch the video interview above). Citysearch itself is a 12-year-old site which Herratti has been updating, but it is not really growing much anymore and it is feeling considerable competitive pressure from Yelp and, even more so, from Google Local.
To counter that pressure, Citysearch already distributes its local listings content to about 100 sites and mobile apps with a collective reach of 100 million people (about a quarter of that is Citysearch.com). “I thought what if I took all the tools that we put together to build Citysearch and put it on a platter, an API and web services layer,” says Herratti. Specifically, he is referring to all the descriptions of local businesses, the reviews, photos, videos, hours of operation, offers, menus, metered phone numbers, merchant messages, and more. “What if I open that up to publishers big and small?” he asks. “I let them take it and enhance their experience, and get more pageviews.” → Read More
There’s no doubt that President Obama’s White House has been using technology more than any other previous administration. The President has a Twitter account, is using YouTube in innovative ways and has even developed an iPhone app. The White House is releasing some impressive engagement numbers from this week’s State of the Union address.
The White House had a live stream of the speech that was embeddable on blogs or websites. Nearly 1.3 million people tuned into the WhiteHouse.gov’s live video feed of the speech, which is a ten-fold increase in traffic over the most popular live-streamed event. Unfortunately, the White House doesn’t have any concrete statistics on the number of unique streams of the speech from the new iPhone App, but says that nearly a terabyte of data was served to iPhones with the application during the event. → Read More
It’s not the first Hello Kitty TV out there, but this new Toshiba TV is perhaps the one with the most discreet design. Announced [JP] today, the Hello Kitty 19A800KT is a 19-inch LCD TV that sports the cartoon cat on both the device itself and the remote controller. But that’s not all. → Read More
Social networking company Tagged.com has been awarded more than $200,000 in a default judgment against Erik Vogeler, who spammed thousands of Tagged members by sending them unsolicited messages with links to an adult dating website.
In a ruling issued earlier this week, a U.S. District Court Judge in the northern district of California found Vogeler guilty of sending messages to 6,079 Tagged users and assessed damages of $25 per violation for a total of $151,975. Court also ordered Vogeler to pay Tagged $50,000 in attorneys’ fees and to cease sending commercial emails through Tagged.com. → Read More
Apisphere, a startup that delivers location-aware technologies to mobile applications, has raised $4.6 million in funding according to an SEC filing. Apisphere creates mobile applications that use location-aware technologies to provide customized information to users.
For example, the startup created Apisphere for Outlook, a location aware plug-in for Microsoft’s Outlook that lets users to send and receive automatic messages on their mobile devices or GPS-enabled laptops based on their Outlook calendar and location. So when a meeting is scheduled in Outlook, the plug-in will provide relevant location-based information around the event including mapping, real-time traffic updates and geo-triggered voice and text messages for reminders on the go.pping, real-time traffic updates and geo-triggered voice and text messages for reminders on the go. → Read More
An SEC filing has revealed that video ringtone sharing community Vringo has filed to raise an estimated $64.3 million $13.8 million via an initial public offering of stock and warrants.
The company plans to trade on NASDAQ, with Maxim Group serving as lead underwriter. Vringo shareholders include Warburg Pincus, who invested $12 million for a 31.9% ownership stake in 2007, and undisclosed private investors.
Update: the initial $64.3 million IPO figure was inaccurate. Dow-Jones News Service has filed a correction to its story on Vringo’s filing of a Form S-1 with the Securities & Exchange Commission. The correction makes clear that the funding target for Vringo’s proposed IPO is $12.0 million, with the potential to reach $13.8 million if an over-allotment of shares is exercised. → Read More
Chances are you’ve never heard of Netbiscuits – I sure hadn’t. But the company operates one of the world’s largest B2B web software platforms enabling thousands of publishers to create, manage and generate revenue from mobile websites.
Netbiscuits serves the mobile Internet programs for brands like Yahoo, MTV, and eBay, and well known digital agencies such as Razorfish, Isobar, and ad networks like Google-owned AdMob. To give you an idea of its size: globally, Netbiscuits claims to deliver more than 1.5 billion mobile page impressions on a monthly basis.
This morning, the decade-old company announced that it has partnered with Universal Music Group to help the music company expand its line-up of direct-to-consumer mobile content and services. → Read More
Most of Tokyo-based Thanko’s USB accesories are utterly useless, but I don’t know what to think of their latest creation, a 80-port USB board [JP]. Yes, they put 80 USB ports on one board. You can’t transfer data over the ports but only charge your gadgets though, it’s not a USB hub. → Read More
“Millions of people now own Kindles,” said Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com yesterday. That surprised analysts, who thought that Amazon would sell 2.5 million or so of the devices by the end of 2010, nearly a year from now.
We’ve checked with our sources, who have been amazingly accurate on the number of Kindle’s sold over the last couple of years. The total number of all types of Kindles out there in users hands hit 3 million sometime in December, says a source close to Amazon. And that was before the new model with worldwide data hit. And before Amazon started offering free Kindles to select long-time customers. → Read More
Obviously, yesterday was all about the iPad. Actually, today is too. There have been thousands of stories already written about the device (including something like two dozen on TechCrunch alone), but a few points seem to be completely overshadowed by the glow of the iPad itself. Let’s revisit those.
The A4
While only a few people really picked up on it, in my mind, the biggest news yesterday was not about the iPad itself, but rather about what powers it. Apple has created a new processor, the A4, a customized ARM A9 processor. Never mind that it appears to match the specs of the Snapdragon (the chip inside the Nexus One), the key point is that Apple is now in control of their processors. Is there really any doubt that these Apple-designed chips will end up in the next iterations of the iPhone from here on out? → Read More
I’m going to keep this post short and sweet because no one likes a blogger who says “I told you so.” But, Spotify fans: Paul Carr and I told you so.
StrategyEye reports that less than 4% of users of Spotify—the gorgeous online music app with a troubled business model—are paying subscribers. StrategyEye quotes Universal Music International digital VP Rob Wells who says the company needs 10% to 12% of its users to subscribe to be a sustainable business. It’s only at the 10%-12% threshold that Spotify is able to ink revenue share deals with labels, until then, it has to pay for music by the stream, driving its costs up substantially. → Read More
