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
I’m a bit of a movie fanatic. As such, back in the day one of my favorite websites was Hollywood Stock Exchange (HSX). On it, you bought and sold both movies (moviestocks) and movie stars (starbonds) based on how you thought they would do with upcoming releases. Of course, all of this was done with virtual cash (H bucks), making it a fun game. But in April, the game turns real. As in, real money.
On April 20, HSX will become a real-money commodity exchange, according to The Hollywood Reporter. As such, they’ve had to file with the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission for approval, which they did in November, and are now in the final phase of approval, apparently. Yes, this is actually happening. And yes, this will essentially make HSX a real-world betting site. → Read More
Finding quality video content on the web is hard. There’s too much porn, or too many lolcats derivatives, and not enough crazy music videos involving LEGOs. Following John’s Posterous is one good way to find serendipitous content you might enjoy, but there’s only one John, and he does occasionally sleep. If only someone would make an app to crowdsource my web viewing, so that only the best of the best floats up to my screen. Oh, look! Redux does exactly that. And today they’re announcing their new Boxee app, to bring all that great content to your television, so you can passively enjoy all that the web has to offer without all that tedious typing and clicking! → Read More
Slowly, but surely, Internet Explorer 6, long the bane of many a web developer, is dying. And you’re invited to its funeral.
A Denver, CO-based design company, Aten Design Group, has built a site to mark the occasion. At IE6funeral.com you can RSVP as to whether you will be able to attend the funeral service or not. It’s at the company’s headquarters in Denver, but those who aren’t able to attend in person are being asked to send flowers. For those who can attend, “Funeral attire is encouraged.” → Read More
HTC seemed pretty confident that the HTC Desire and HTC Legend weren’t US-bound when we talked to them at Mobile World Congress. But hey, things change — right? Boy Genius Report has just received word that the two handsets are bound for this side of the ocean, along with details on which carriers might be nabbing them. → Read More
This strange app is a touchscreen interface that connects people, places, and things using “clouds” of items and people. It basically makes Venn diagrams of your contacts and allows you to share and explore content and messages.
This looks way too weird for the average user but clearly someone out there may want to move Sven and Nikola to a timeline and figure out which emails came from each person and which emails overlap.
The text input system is actually quite cool, however, because it predicts the words you’re about to type. Pop over to 4 minutes in to see how that system works.
Video after the jump. → Read More
The Grace Allegro Wi-Fi internet radio costs $170 and supports streaming of over 16,000 radio stations, Pandora, Sirius, Live365, and MP3tunes. It can run for around eight hours on six AA batteries and the device can detect whether standard batteries or rechargeable NiMH batteries have been inserted and then recharge as needed. → Read More
Since we’ve spent two posts covering Street Fighter IV, a game that will presumably be terrible to play on the iPhone, I thought it was only fair to give a bit more love to a game that should be awesome on the iPhone. Actually, two games: Final Fantasy I and II. We knew they were coming (see trailers/screenshots here) – but now we know when they’re coming. And it’s surprisingly soon! → Read More
For web publishing startups like Scribd and DocStoc, premium content is the viable business model to monetize their platforms. For example. Scribd has signed a number of deals with publishers to sell online books to users on the site. Today, DocStoc is officially opening up its premium content channel, called the DocStore, addressing a lightly different sector, with a focus on selling professional documents to businesses and individuals.
DocStoc’s CEO and founder Jason Nazar says the one of the platform’s fastest growing user base segments are small business owners looking for free and paid documents for entrepreneurs, startups and professionals. Documents range from legal documents to real estate contracts to analysis to forms for business models. The DocStore also features documents in a variety of formats, including Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, and Excel files. The marketplace has been open to select partners since last summer (including TechCrunch), but today will mark its public debut. → Read More
Tokyo-based crazy USB gadget maker Thanko has done it again. The company today announced [JP] not one but two “Hot Lunch Bags”, special cases that are supposed to warm up lunch boxes you brought to the office from home via USB. Thanko offered a first version of the “Hot Lunch Bag” back in winter 2008. → Read More
Being eco-friendly should definitely be high on the priorities list for electronics manufacturers and service providers, so I’m pretty happy to see that Sprint is doing its part to make our planet a nicer place for future generations. Just in case you’re the apathetic type when it comes to the three Rs (recycle, reuse, reduce!), Sprint has put some incentives into place for you. → Read More
We may give AT&T a bit of grief for the fact that their network essentially curled up into a ball and cried for two years after the launch of the first iPhone, but they’ve been dumping a ton of change into improving things over the last 8 months — and it looks like its helped. A lot. → Read More
