We’ll have a full review of Alienware’s pint-sized gaming machine, but in case you guys haven’t seen enough pictures of it (or there just wasn’t enough bokeh in those other sites’ shots), I’ve put together a nice little gallery for you. I’m happy to take more pictures too if you want close-ups of this or that. → Read More
Are you in the Harrisburg area? Are you able to type in English? Well some weird company wants you to shill for them, offering $50 for your trouble. Here’s the post: We are an internet marketing company that increases market awareness for our clients and there is a large project with a March 29th deadline, requiring 50 comments for each brand. All you need is an internet connection and excel. No posting is required, only the blog post URL and comment is needed. The estimated time for 50 comments is 3-4 hours. 50 comments – $50 We will offer future work to quality comment writers. This is an ideal opportunity for students, stay-at-home moms, or anyone with writing skills looking to make extra money. → Read More
To say we were a tad flabbergasted that Modern Warfare 2‘s 5 map pack DLC costs $15 is about right. We weren’t exactly outraged. It’s just a video game after all and really doesn’t matter that much. But $15 is a bit much for five maps with two of the recycled from previous Call of Duty games. Infinity Ward’s Creative Strategist Rob Bowling disagrees. He calls it an investment. Well, Creative Strategist is just code for Public Relations so he kind of has to say that. → Read More
I’m not sure how useful this will be, but it sounds interesting. Chinese manufacturer Creation Tech is selling a 7 inch ultra mobile PC for $65. The specs aren’t very impressive, but for that kind of money what do you expect? → Read More
Skoofy — a site I’ve never seen before today but appears to be a dog-themed Woot clone — has a nice deal on an HP printer. It’s just a basic Deskjet model (D2660), but it’s only $28.99 and comes with brand spanking new ink. Normally the printer sells for $49.99 with additional ink cartages fetching $31.99 for a combo black and color pack. → Read More
The problem with having more than a million followers on Twitter, or even more than 1,000, is that you don’t really know who they are. But Hunch thinks it knows a lot about the followers of at least popular Twitter users. It is now pulling together detailed psychographic profiles of those followers with a new Twitter Followers tool.
For instance, Hunch suggests that if you follow TechCrunch on Twitter—as close to 1.4 million of you do—you are more likely to be entrepreneurial, very experienced in your career, and talk about computers “like a gear head talking about a four-barrel V8 engine.”
It also predicts that you are more likely to have bought someone flowers in the past 6 months, get birthday cakes from expensive bakeries, and are an optimist (if you drop a piece of toast you believe it will land butter-side up). I’ve met some of you, and I’m not so sure you’d buy anyone an expensive cake. But some of the other characterizations seem spot on. → Read More
Tires take a lot of crude oil to make. Around seven gallons each, actually, which of course is the cause of Al Gore’s hemorrhoids. But a solution is in the works that will utilize renewable feedstocks from sugar cane, corn, corn cobs, switchgrass or other biomasses rather than petroleum. Mmmm, corn tires. → Read More
A month ago, Google announced that it would be deploying its own “experimental” fiber-optic network to U.S. communities that would be 20 times faster than residential fiber optic services offered today. As soon as the announcement was made, cities of all sizes began vying for the opportunity to be Google’s guinea pig, going through great lengths to be chosen for the trial. Mayors signed proclamations and jumped into freezing lakes, city employees were forced to sing Google-come-hither hymns, some cities even pulled out the glow sticks. → Read More
There’s no denying that Windows Phone 7 (or Windows Phone 7 Series, or whatever awful branding was chosen) looks to be a huge improvement from the previous iterations of Windows Mobile. And there’s even some talk that it may be able to compete with the current golden boy of the smartphone industry, Apple’s iPhone. If an early look at the new Foursquare app for Windows Phone 7 is any indication, it just may.
As shown off by Windows Phone Senior Product Manager Anand Iyer on his blog this morning, Foursquare for Windows Phone 7 looks amazing. In fact, it looks much nicer than the recently-revamped version of Foursquare for the iPhone. As you can see in the screenshots, the app has a simple elegance to it, with most of the app being made of different color text against a black background (just about the opposite of Foursquare for the iPhone). Also nice is the maps (Bing, naturally) implementation on the check-in pages, venue pages, and individuals’ profiles. → Read More
YouTube EDU, the video portal’s collection of university and college content contributed by schools around the world, launched a year ago today. To commemorate the occasion, the YouTube team has shared some stats about the initiative.
Since launching, YouTube has grown to include content from 300 colleges and universities, spanning 10 countries and seven languages. The collection has grown to 65,000 videos, including 350 full courses. And with the addition of auto-captioning, the site can automatically translate any lectures spoken in English to other languages. → Read More
We all know the story: Circuit City Stores spiraled down from its high point in the late 90′s to bankruptcy in 2008 and then liquidation in 2009. Systemax then bought the rights to the brand a few months later and quickly relaunched CircuitCity.com. Since then Systemax has been racking in the cash. So much cash in fact that Systemax is thinking about opening some Circuit City retail locations. Seriously. → Read More
“Big stuff that will blow away folks. Not just an awesome “Peek for Life” promo. But really, truly big stuff. So stay tuned for Project Big Stuff.” That’s a direct quote from Peek’s official blog after stating flat out the company is short on cash even though they make a decent amount of revenue. Of course Peek could probably raise a bit more if absoulity necessary, but we’re curious what the company that brought us the email-only, and more recently Twitter-only, device is working on. → Read More
While Foursquare and Gowalla garner much of the buzz around location right now, Booyah’s MyTown continues to garner many of the actual users. In fact, the service has crossed 1.5 million users. And it’s gaining them at an incredible rate of 130,000 new users a week. Compare this to Foursquare, which during SXSW crossed 600,000 total users. And MyTown is showing no signs of slowing down, with another new version of the app now available.
MyTown 3.0 comes just two months after the launch of MyTown 2.0. The easiest way to think about the game is as a sort of real world Monopoly for the iPhone. You travel around your city and check-in places, gain points, and then decide which properties to virtually buy. While no one could argue that MyTown hasn’t been a fun and addicting game, previously, it was largely a solitary game. With this latest version, Booyah pumps up the social aspect. → Read More
Plaxo President and CEO Ben Golub is leaving the company he’s led for the last five years, we’ve confirmed. Golub will be replaced by Justin Miller, who has been Plaxo’s General Manager for the last few months. As part of the transition, long-time Plaxo employee Ryan King will become Chief Operating Officer. Golub hasn’t yet shared his plans for the future, but we’ll have more information on those and other recent developments at Plaxo in the next few weeks.
A lot has happened at Plaxo in the five years since Golub joined. The company, which builds software to help consolidate all of your contact information into a single address book (among other things), was acquired by Comcast in May 2008 for between $150 and $170 million. → Read More
The world of Hackintosh can be a scary place to enter. You wanna make a OS X netbook but have no idea where to start. I feel you. Here’s a comprehensive chart that will get you going in the right direction. The worst thing you can do is buy a netbook on a whim and expect everything to work in OS X. There are definitely better models suited for the task than others. → Read More
IAC’s Citysearch has brought on a new technology chief Christophe Louvion, to its executive team. Louvion will hold the role of Chief Technology Officer and Senior Vice President of Core Products.
Louvion most recently served as chief technology officer for online ad sales company Gorilla Nation Media. Prior to that, he held positions with BizRate.com and Shopzilla. In his new role, Louvion will be responsible for CityGrid’s ad and content engine, in addition to Citysearch’s search and data platform. → Read More
Need to read what your loverly wife is sexting to the neighbor? It’s apparently quite easy. Some hackers – Vincenzo Iozzo and Ralf Philipp Weinmann – sent an iPhone user to a special site that was able to steal the phone’s entire SMS library in one swoop, winning the Pwn2Own challenge. → Read More
Madrid-based Tuenti, sometimes called the Facebook of Spain, has been around for four years now. It’s a very well funded company that, despite a huge growth in user numbers and a number of product releases, has been getting some bad press on their lack of monetization and for not having a clear direction – though if you follow the product releases and the company’s hiring habits, there is a roadmap.
However Tuenti has now launched what it deems to be their most strategic move yet – tapping into their social graph to introduce location-based features. The launch is a beta, still lacking some oomph perhaps, but it’s interesting to pick over what they’ve done. Especially as everyone is expecting Facebook to do the same at some point. → Read More
This is the year of Micro Four Thirds. While Nikon and Canon still haven’t dipped their toes in this pool, I think it’s time for the average camera user to look at these things seriously and the power and elegance captured in the E-PL1 – and the affordability captured in its $599 price tag. → Read More
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