Heads up to you Mac folk. Opera has released a new version of its eponymous browser, version 10.52, that brings a number of improvements to the game. Might be we worth a look if you’re tired of Safari and Firefox, or don’t want to subject yourself to the Google borg with Chrome. → Read More
We’ve all had the experience. You visit cnn.com looking to catch up on the day’s news and have a total WTF!? moment when instead you’re greeted by Jessica Alba’s plans to adopt a child. Meanwhile, bombs are exploding around the world, people are dying — but wait, what’s Tiger Woods thinking right now? Also, how do you harness the power of bugs?
A new site, WTF CNN?, compliments of Breadpig, shows you exactly what world news you’re missing by clicking on CNN. The way the site works is simple: CNN.com is displayed at the top of the page, and under it, you get a choice of seeing the frontpage from one of the following global news sites: ABC (Australia), Al-Jazeera (Qatar), BBC (UK), China Daily (C → Read More
Breaking news, fresh off of the wire: HP just finalized agreements to buy Palm for $1.2 billion dollars. HP’s $1.2 billion dollar purchase breaks down to roughly $5.70 per share of common stock. While this is spot on with the $1.2-$1.3 billion pricetag Palm was rumored to be shopping around as of late, it’s still a mammoth difference from what Palm was trading at just months ago. In October 2009, Palm was worth about $17.46 per share; by January of this year, that was down to $13.41. It has, unfortunately, been a downward spiral ever since. And for all you webOS fans out there: Don’t worry — it doesn’t look like the platform is going anywhere just yet. It appears that the companies plan to continue the development of webOS, leveraging HP to “rapidly accelerate the growth” of the platform. HP has seemingly been lightening their efforts in the pocketable mobile space lately — but with the iPAQ line and countless Pocket PC handsets behind them, they’re by no means strangers to it. However, the smartphone space might not be HP’s only interest here – given HP’s recent desire to take on Apple in the tablet space (with the HP Slate) and that Windows-powered tablets just don’t seem to sell, might we see a webOS-powered tablet sometime in the future? Paired with the proper hardware, webOS could easily make for an absolutely incredible tablet experience. Even if HP abandoned webOS altogether (which, again, doesn’t appear to be the plan right now), they just bought them selves a monstrous card to play: Palm’s patent catalog. It’s a porcupine tactic: It’s hard to make a big dent in the smartphone biz when every company around can throw patent infringement suits at you — but when you’ve got hundreds upon hundreds of patents (or quills) in your armory, people are going to be a whole lot more careful about stepping on you. Contrary to previous whispers, it appears that CEO Jon Rubinstein will be staying with the company. To quote the release, “Palm’s current chairman and CEO, Jon Rubinstein, is expected to remain with the company.” CrunchBase Information Hewlett-Packard Palm Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Google has warned THE INTERNET to be on the lookout for phony anti-virus software. The deal is that malicious software makers have started “hiding” malware inside software that purports to be anti-virus software. But it’s not anti-virus software! → Read More
Say goodbye to your lunch break. It’s called Super Mario Crossover, created by Exploding Rabbits, and it’s a Flash game that puts several classic video game characters inside the Mario universe. (I picked Mega Man, then died instantly. I’m not good.) You pretty much just need to play it right now. That’s all there is to it. → Read More
How many Shanzai does it take to clone the new iPhone? Apparently one and he doesn’t need very long to do it, either. Hot on the heels of the iPhone leak Chinese cloners are already producing iPhone-alikes that look just like the iPhone HD/4G/XXX/]I[. Shenzhai makers in Shenzhen that have the most acute business sense took advantage of these informations and work out a clone of this fresh iPhone, and that’s what in front of you.Except the copied design, nothing is special. You can expect things like dual sim, Java, FM radio from it as you do from other ordinary MTK chipset phones. No words about the price, but it’s not surprising if you see one in a electronic mall with a price tag around 500 Yuan. UPDATE – GizChina has a video. → Read More
Japan loves robots, we know that much. Last year, the Japanese government announced it plans to to send a robot to the moon by 2020 (that was to be joined by a human astronaut 10 years later). Today, the Osaka-based “Space Oriented Higashiosaka Leading Association” (SOHLA) announced [JP, PDF] a quite similar undertaking: putting a robot on the moon by 2015. → Read More
Last fall Reddit, a very popular link sharing community, launched a new self-serve ad platform that allowed any of its users to spend a little dough to get their links prominently displayed on the site. The logic? People were always trying to game the system anyway, so Reddit figured it might as well get them to pay for it. Today, Reddit is rolling out an upgraded version of the ad platform.
The biggest addition to the ad platform, and the one that most people have been asking for, is targeting — you’ll now be able to specify which sections of Reddit you’d like your ad to appear on (there are many options, including everything from ‘funny’ to ‘cooking’). When you target a link at, say, the Science Reddit, it will appear both on that section and on the Reddit homepage for logged-in users who have subscribed to the Science section. Reddit is also using some logic to help advertisers targeting more niche Reddits get their money’s worth — if you target the ‘Knitting’ Reddit (which isn’t particularly popular), then Reddit will make sure that the small number of users who are subscribed to Knitting will see that ad on the Reddit homepage. → Read More
I just got out of a Yahoo! press conference in London where I got an opportunity to talk briefly with Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz.
The topic on everyone’s lips was Yahoo’s rumored talks with Foursquare, so I asked her what she thought of TechCrunch’s advice to the location-based startup: don’t sell out to Yahoo!.
Bartz’s response: “It depends how much money they want.” → Read More
Why haven’t we applied the “gate” suffix to this Infinity Ward-Activision story yet? “Infinity Gate” has a certain ring to it, sorta sounds the name of a private military company. Anyway, how would you feel if you worked for a company and you made a product. It was a successfully product, like, you made the company $1 billion in just a few months. As per your contract, you’re due a certain amount of money (royalties) for your troubles. The thing is, the company says, “Hey, you know that money we owe you? We won’t give it to you until you finish another product. If you leave us you forfeit all claims to that money we owe you.” Not cool, no, but that’s what the Infinity Ward Employee Group now claims. → Read More
[Netherlands] RES Software, which offers workspace management software and services, has secured a €4.7 million investment from the publicly traded European private equity and VC firm Gimv.
Having recently appointed a new CEO and seen ‘significant customer wins’ in the Netherlands, UK and France, RES Software says it will use the new finance to further its international expansion, although North America is cited as a priority. → Read More
This is just sweet. There’s no other word for it. Ignore the comical knees and slightly more bulky build, that’s the TF2 Spy. He has everything from the smirky grin to his cigerate to his various masks. It’s classic. → Read More
Google wants us to move all of our data to the cloud. And yet, they keep having issues where a service that many people rely heavily on goes down. The latest is Google Calendar, which has been down for many people for well over an hour now.
The App Status Dashboard, and Google Calendar’s Twitter account confirm the disruption, but won’t say what caused it. We have an email into Google as well and will update when we hear back. → Read More
Waiting for the World of Warcraft movie? Prepare to keep waiting. A recent interview revealed that the movie is still in the super early stages of pre-production. They’re still going over the story at meetings, still trying to figure out how to adapt the entire Warcraft universe to the big screen. Movies take a long time to create. → Read More
AOL had a rough quarter. Total revenues dropped 23 percent, and even the advertising part (you know, AOL’s future) was down 19 percent to $354 million. In the same quarter, Yahoo saw display advertising revenues rise 20 percent, Google’s ad revenues were up 21.5 percent, and even Microsoft saw a 12 percent uptrick in online revenues. “We are hustling as fast as we can,” offered AOL CEO Tim Armstrong on the earnings conference call today. But Armstrong, who is an avid marathon runner, knows he needs to hustle faster. “We are not happy with overall lagging the ad market,” he acknowledges, and promises to “put our foot on the gas pedal.”
One big cause of the flagging ad sales is that AOL’s sales force is still going through a wrenching transition where 80 percent have been assigned new accounts and are now organized differently. So that is still working through the system. But if you look at the breakdown of ad revenues there are other things to worry about as well. → Read More
Last week I walked through the set of American Idiot, a new broadway musical featuring the songs of the skiffle band, Green Day. I’m not big on musical theatre – I was never given even a chorus part in high school and ended up doing crew, which was much more fun, so maybe it’s sour grapes – but this musical has 44 different video screens on stage, each doing something different, making it one of the most technically impressive productions on Broadway. I was there to find out how they did it. The forty-four screens, as you see above, are all Sony Bravia TVs of various sizes. The goal during production was to “sequence” the screens to match the onscreen action. Interestingly, because of union labor guidelines, the TV controls had to be connected to the lightboard using a theatrical networking protocol called DMX512 so the trained lightboard operator – whose training usually stops a the ability to push a slider up and down – would be able to press one button to get all of the TVs to work correctly. Why? If they had to hire a special “TV operator,” the unions would force every production in the future to hire a “TV operator” and given tight budgets, they have to kluge like crazy. It’s the equivalent of controlling a massive network of computers from a green-screen terminal with only a serial port simply because the boss likes his Wang desktop. There’s no business like show business! → Read More
[UK] Brits are football mad and so are advertisers. It’s no surprise then that the online rights of the English Premier League are highly contested. This morning, Yahoo UK announced that it has secured the exclusive UK online highlights for the next three seasons (2010-13), taking over from Virgin Media who is the current rights holder.
The deal means that from August this year, British football fans will get access to five minute highlight packages of every Barclays Premier League match exclusively on Yahoo.co.uk, helping position Yahoo as a serious player in the coverage of football online and help to beef up its advertising opportunities as a result. It follows the success of similar efforts by the company in the US with regards to NBA, PGA, NHL and MLB among others.
From the press release: → Read More
Fwix, a news site that offers a stream of hyperlocal, realtime news by location, is tapping into Facebook’s recently launched Open Graph API to socialize content on its platform. As we wrote in our initial coverage of Facebook’s announcement of the API, it aims to add a layer of social connections and instant personalization based on people’s interests and “likes” on every single page on the Web.
Users on Fwix can now like any piece of content on the platform. And readers can customize news feeds for any level – by place, topic or Facebook friend – and then connect with others interested in the same topics. Other readers’ interests and comments that are similar to yours will also show up in your own news feed, as well as social interactions around news, suggested topics and more, aiming to create an ecosystem of real-time local and hyperlocal news. → Read More
Only Art Lebedev could come up with something so clever, but yet simple, as a temperature-sensitive battery mug. You know, because it shows the ‘power level’ of your hot drink. Get it? $28. [Art Lebedev Store via UberGizmo] → Read More
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