Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a room overlooking an airport runway so you can note the planes arriving and taking off in your special notebook.
Two Britons, Stephen Hampton and Steven Ayres, were released on bail after being caught with binoculars and radios. Their crime? Planespotting. → Read More
As if gadget choices weren’t complicated enough, Best Buy might be making your Verizon Android handset decisions a lot more difficult. According to Best Buy’s Facebook page, the DROID is dropping down to just $99.99 with the DEVOUR going for the same exact rate when it’s released on February 25. So many choices, so little time! Need some help? → Read More
Proof that the software that matches ads to content still needs a lot of work: Omaha Steaks pays good money to link their product to heart attacks. Free shipping! Thanks to Jon Finegold at Thinking Screen Media for sending this in. → Read More
Apple thinks of itself as a mobile device company. In January at the iPad launch event, Steve Jobs noted that “Apple is the largest mobile devices company in the world now.” And responding to a direct question today at a Goldman Sachs conference, liveblogged by the WSJ, COO Tim Cook reiterated: “Yes, you should definitely look at Apple as a mobile-device company.”
Cook also pointed out that the majority of Apple’s revenues now comes from mobile devices (including laptops) or content for those devices. Indeed, if you look at the breakdown of Apple’s fourth quarter revenues of $15.7 billion, nearly $12 billion of that came from portable Macbooks ($2.8 billion), iPods ($3.4 billion) and iPhones $5.6 billion). And another $1.2 billion came from iTunes. → Read More
Happy birthday to you!
Happy birthday to you!
Happy birthday dear Lensbaby!
Happy birthday to you! → Read More
Microsoft is doing a complete 180 and reinventing the way it handles its mobile presence. When the iPhone was first announced, Steve Ballmer quipped that Windows Mobile was on hundreds of devices all over the world while the iPhone was one operating system on one handset on one carrier. It looks like he and the gang are thinking differently these days. → Read More
Apparently this has been in development for quite some time, as a mod for a modern port of Doom called Skulltag. It allows you to play as any of the 48 robot masters from the first six Mega Man games. Unfortunately, while you’ll fire the weapons associated with the boss (metal blades, cut boomerangs, etc), they won’t have their respective effects on other guys — they’re all just the basic arm cannon with some modifications. That’s disappointing, but if this blows up (it’s slated for a free 2010 release) maybe we can get it expanded on. [via TIGSource] → Read More
Apple thinks of itself as a mobile device company. In January at the iPad launch event, Steve Jobs noted that “Apple is the largest mobile devices company in the world now.” And responding to a direct question today at a Goldman Sachs conference, liveblogged by the WSJ, COO Tim Cook reiterated: “Yes, you should definitely look at Apple as a mobile-device company.”
Cook also pointed out that the majority of Apple’s revenues now comes from mobile devices (including laptops) or content for those devices. Indeed, if you look at the breakdown of Apple’s fourth quarter revenues of $15.7 billion, nearly $12 billion of that came from portable Macbooks ($2.8 billion), iPods ($3.4 billion) and iPhones $5.6 billion). And another $1.2 billion came from iTunes. → Read More
If you’re reading this post, there’s a good chance you have multiple online profiles scattered across various services, including Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr, and Twitter. And one problem you may face is pulling all of this information together to build a single online identity — be it for personal use, or to create a professional online profile. Flavors.me is a new site launching today that looks to make this as simple as possible, and it does so with flying colors. After a three month long private beta, the site has just launched to the public.
The service is as simple as they come. After completing a basic sign up form, you link your Flavors.me page to any of 15 online services, with options that include Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn (as well as any RSS feed). Flavors.me taps into these services via their APIs (you generally enter your credentials using OAuth or Facebook Connect), and within minutes you’re ready to start customizing your site. → Read More
RetailMeNot.com, “a top consumer destination for coupons, discounts and promotional codes for merchandise, groceries, travel and services”, shared some interesting statistics about consumer coupon use for the first month of 2010. New Jersey loves printing off coupons for use in brick-and-mortar stores, while New York prefers online coupon codes. Almost 15 million people visited RetailMeNot.com in January and saved over eight million dollars with online and printed coupons. → Read More
Dutch startup Sellaband, which enabled music fans to invest in their favorite bands, last week on Friday requested provisional suspension of payments in their home country. It was promptly granted by an Amsterdam Court, and was this morning changed into full bankruptcy. The news of the bankruptcy led to a flurry of reports about Sellaband calling it quits for good – or as we like to say, hitting the deadpool.
Now it appears that there’s a chance the startup may live to fight another fight after all. → Read More
Its been nearly 2 years since Apple launched the App Store. In that time, would-be comedians around the Internet have successfully extracted just two jokes from it. “Fart apps and tip calculators!” Hah! “There’s an app for that!” Hah hah. Hah. Hah. Little did we know, there was still one untapped source of hilarity involving the app store left: physical humor. At the end of last year, Butterfinger (as in the Nestle-owned candy) threw a contest challenging people to make a commercial in the vein of their classic “Nobody’s going to lay a finger on my Butterfinger” campaign. Though the contest and its resulting videos went mostly unnoticed by the population of the Internet, the winning commercial, “Butterfinger Phone App”, is just starting to make the rounds on TV. Ready for a ride on the ROFLcopter? Check out the video below. → Read More
Well – not entirely. After all, it’s bright, responsive, and has a much higher resolution. But there is a lot more to making a good screen, and under a detailed analysis it’s far from a rout when you pit HTC’s bleeding-edge OLED screen against the old-school LCD of the iPhone. Apologies if it gets a bit technical. Here is the basic list of complaints, as investigated here: → Read More
If there’s anyone who has the inside track on Buzz and all things social media related, it’s TechCrunch super-reporter MG Siegler. He’s waited two weeks to weigh in on Buzz good bad and ugly, and it turns out that Buzz is FriendFeed — or will be. In the interests of setting the record straight, let me set the record straight. 1. Buzz is not FriendFeed. If it were, it would be being used by a vanishingly small minority of social media experts who have no life. Instead, it is being used by millions of privacy-invaded geniuses who apparently either have had the intelligence to understand that they get what they click for (understanding the meaning of Yes, I’m clicking here for a service I am being offered for free) or are just hopelessly trapped in a bigco system where they have no rights and can only just keep clicking in hopes of finding the way out. 2. If Buzz is going to become FriendFeed, only with real friends, then Google has some secret ability to turn an overly complex non-viral site into a massive multiplayer gaming system disguised as an extension to email. Wait, we call that Brizzly. Failing the secret stuff, just following the playbook already laid out in detail by FriendFeed seems guaranteed to produce a community of Scoble hiders, er, muters, at such massive scale that it will take more (hu)man-years of work than went into building all the useless Twitter lists. 3. Buzz is not FriendFeed because project manager Buzz Jackson denies ever looking at FriendFeed because Google is busy getting feedback from users who didn’t know the product existed until 2 weeks ago. That leaves internal testing, which if you accept the premise that small is ugly and huge is beautiful would mandate ignoring the most sophisticated testing suite so far, namely FriendFeed. Of course, it’s total bullshit that Buzz hasn’t looked at FriendFeed. Just not enough, according to MG. 4. This small is ugly theory of disruption suggests that only massive organisms can effect change. Like the iPhone for example, which was such a resource-hungry project that Apple had to slow down the release of the next version of OS/X to build the iPhone OS out. Or that Google had to invest in a browser, an OS, and a cloud app suite in order to catch up and present an alternative that in turn → Read More
Procedures: Hospital Collection, where have you been all my life? I remember back at Webelos camp in grade school when I needed to do an Arterial Line Placement to get my “Arterial Line Placement” badge and if I had had this charming, $19.99 app I would have been able to blow in that arterial line without anyone getting hurt (sorry, Frankie!)
This app is clearly for professional doctors, not diletantes like myself, but 80 minutes of video plus plenty of images and diagrams make this quite a steal. → Read More
When it’s winter outside, you can’t play golf! There’s not even a close substitute. I mean, what are you going to do? Play it as a video game or something? Name me one golf video game! No, for those of us going absolutely bat-shit stir crazy waiting for winter to end, maybe this $13 desktop golf set will help. → Read More
Twitter is getting closer to launching its own advertising on the micro-messaging service. Speaking on an advertising industry panel yesterday, the company’s head of monetization, Anamitra Banerji, confirmed that Twitter would launch its own advertising platform within a month or so, at least in a beta test. Twitter has been planning to launch an advertising product for a long time. Last November, COO Dick Costolo told us at our Realtime Crunchup that ads were coming. He promised the new ads “will be fascinating. Non-traditional. And people will love it.” And a year ago, Twitter execs discussed different advertising revenue models in a strategy meeting, including realtime search ads, sponsored Tweets, and AdSense-like widgets that could appear on other sites.
Of course, other startups are already experimenting with their own Twitter ads ranging from in-stream sponsored Tweets (Ad.ly) to placing retweet buttons on display ads themselves (Tweetmeme). But what will an official Twitter ad look like? And will people really love it? → Read More
Internal MySpace product documents continue to leak into our inbox from presumably angry employees and former employees. Today we’ve got a late 2009 powerpoint presentation created by Tim Sutcliffe, MySpace’s Senior Manager Information Architecture. The document summarizes the recommendations on rebuilding the MySpace developer/apps platform from an outside UK based user experience firm called Userfocus.
Sutcliffe was part of Katie Geminder’s “swat team” organization at MySpace, and supposedly “knee deep” in the remakingmyspace project that we wrote about yesterday. Revamping the apps platform was a side project, but this document is representative of the type of work that group was doing, say sources.
Or at least, sort of. This document recommends what some product people call “pushing pixels around” instead of rebuilding from scratch. The remakingmyspace project was clearly the latter. Although since that project has now been scratched, we’ll never know whether it would have been successful or not.
The full document is below. → Read More
Destined to become a local news hit this week (“Next, something you don’t know about hotel room doors could shock your… or get you killed. But now, sports!”), this video of a portly, if happy, man named Barry Wels unlocking a hotel room with what amounts to a weird slim jim is just outrageous enough to scare most of America for at least two news cycles. Appearing on Black Bag, the trick involves moving a long piece of wire under and up along a door to pop the door handle. You could feasibly do this with a wire hanger, were it long enough, and as you notice it’s loud as heck when he slides in and tries to grab the handle. → Read More
Like.com has been steadily expanding its mini digital fashion empire. There is Like.com itself, a visual shopping engine; Covet.com; a recently launched visual shopping personalization application; and Weardrobe, which is a social platform for users to shop street style compilations (Like.com acquired Weardrobe last December). Today, the company is expanding its mini-empire with the launch of visual styling tool Couturious.
Couturious’ focus is on 3D photo-realistic styling. You pick a photo of a model (you can choose from a variety of races and body types) and then style the model accordingly with clothes from over 100 different brands. Like.com’s computer vision technology allows your to dress a fairly realistic model and actually style them. So you can tuck pants into boots, adjust the folding of a scarf or have the model wear the shirt with top few buttons open. And you can purchase any of the items that are styled and share your styles to Facebook and Twitter. → Read More
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