Concrete USB drives weigh as much as they hold Lamp poster (poster lamp?) adds a surrealist bent to your bedroom Super Mario Bro. Crossover gets Ryu from Ninja Gaiden mTouch: An affordable multi-touch web table SNES HD emulator for iPad looks sick – even the iPhone controller → Read More
A hundred startups lined-up the Startup Alley at TechCrunch Disrupt. Here’s just a small taste of some of the interesting companies that over 1,700 attendees were able to see:
6rounds, which we wrote about in a previous post can be best described as a snazzy one-on-one video chat product.
At TechCrunch Disrupt, 6rounds announced a new API for developers of game, entertainment and collaboration-based apps. With the API, developers can easily integrate all the rich and interactive functionality of 6rounds, including gifting, video effects, and the ability to add multi-user functionality to single player games and videos.
More after the jump… → Read More
It’s so appropriate yet sad that Alyx is tasked with announcing the six-year old Half-Life 2′s Mac launch. But really there’s no shame in playing the some-what old Half-Life 2 even today. It’s one of the games that we agreed with in PC Gamer’s top games of all time list. But it’s yet another sign that the Mac gaming scene still has a long way to go. → Read More
We were fortunate enough to witness a lot of fascinating startups strut their stuff here at TechCrunch Disrupt, not just on the main stage but also in the Startup Alley and beyond.
But of course the event is and remains a competition, so the experts have been working hard to select those startups with the most potential to be genuinely disruptive, and vote them into the second round of the pitching contest. Just ten of the original twenty startups have been invited back to round two.
The final few startups will be announced tomorrow, and they’ll be back on stage for the final round of demo and rapid-fire Q&A with our experts. Here they are: → Read More
Maybe the standard Sony Vaio P is a bit pedestrian for your taste. It’s just not enough, right? Well then. How about one covered with crocodile skin? It’s supposed to be a digital clutch anyway. → Read More
It’s hard out here at Disrupt for gadget geeks, but we just got lucky. Merel Technologies is showing off a very cool multi-touch web table that uses gesture recognition, object recognition, and multi-user multi-touch to create a new way to interact with media and kiosk apps.
The best thing? It costs $3,200 for the 32-inch model and $4,200 for the 42-incher and they’re available now.
The table is made by Merel Technologies in New York and it uses a stacked multi-touch layer along with an LCD TV to display the interface. A built-in PC runs the whole thing and you can tear it down to create a coffee-table sized device. You can also customize colors.
Click through for our hands-on video. → Read More
It’s a pain to play emulators on the iPhone because not only is it small, but you have to sacrifice screen space to allow for buttons — and in the SNES’ case, that’s a lot of buttons. The iPad has a lot of promise as a portable gaming platform, but without a decent controller and interface, even a perfectly emulated console will be no fun to play. This SNES HD app seems to pretty much solve all those problems… at least, if you have an iPhone or iPod touch to use as a controller. → Read More
It’s been no secret that LinkedIn has been steadily trying to make its platform more social and interactive with users. LinkedIn integrated with Twitter last fall, allowing users to Tweet from the platform and pull Tweets into the network with a #in hashtag. In fact, over one million users have tied their LinkedIn and Twitter accounts. And this year the network added the ability to “follow” companies, taking a page from both Twitter and Facebook. Today, LinkedIn is furthering its Twitter integration by allowing members to easily find and keep track of their LinkedIn connections on Twitter and more, essentially becoming a full-fledged client.
Once you’ve installed the Tweets application, the “Overview” tab on your homepage will allows you to see everyone you currently follow on Twitter, view their Twitter feed, and Tweet from your own account. A new feature, Connections to Follow, has been added to recommend new people for you to follow, based on your LinkedIn connections. You can easily see all of your LinkedIn connections who have added Twitter accounts to their LinkedIn profiles and allows you to see who you are and aren’t following on Twitter. → Read More
It’s takes a special type of nerd to read a video game’s novelization, and I’m none too proud to say that I recently started reading the Mass Effect novel. But there’s a certain quiet dignity in reading a novelization that simply isn’t present when sitting at the multiplex (or downloading the Blu-ray rip, as it were) watching a movie. Get ready: EA has sold the movie rights to Mass Effect, and it’s gone to Legendary Pictures, the same people behind The Dark Knight, Watchmen, and The Hangover. So there’s hope the movie won’t be total dross. → Read More
Interesting. Despite all the brouhaha about Facebook seizing control over the entire Web and putting an end to privacy as we know it, publishers are – still – fast adopting the “like” button and other social plug-ins.
Latest to apparently add Facebook “like” buttons is Yahoo, which as we’ve written before seems to be happily outsourcing all that social nonsense to Zuckerberg & co lately.
To see the integration in action, go to any MLB team on the Yahoo Sports website (e.g. the Cleveland Indians). → Read More
This morning at TechCrunch Disrupt, AOL cofounder Steve Case sat down for an interview with our own Michael Arrington to discuss an array of topics, including his current venture Revolution, his motivation to stay involved in entrepreneurship, and even a story about AOL’s offer to buy Yahoo for $2 million back in 1995 (they turned it down, but Case said Jerry Yang and David Filo probably would have agreed to $3 million).
One of the more interesting topics to come up during the conversation was whether or not Case thought the Time Warner merger was a good idea. Case hasn’t been directly involved with AOL for years — he left his role as CEO when AOL merged with Time Warner in 2000, and left the board of directors in 2005 — but he didn’t shy away from speaking about the company. Case said it was obviously clear in hindsight that the deal has been a disappointment. → Read More
2010 was called the year of the tablet and Via might make that come true. The chip maker plans on releasing five tablets by the end of the year. The kicker is that these five models will cost between $100 and $150 — or so says a Bloomberg report. These tablets are said to run Android and will be available in the states in the second half of the 2010.
Via’s upcoming tablets are of course in response to the iPad and is a classic CE move. Instead of producing a quality product, a company, in this case Via, is outing a whole range of low-cost (and likely cheap) alternatives. → Read More
That quote in the title is completely from Plantly, not from me. Today at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York, the company won the audience award to get on the stage and give their pitch.
Title aside, Planty is a risk-aware investment tool. They use a lot of advanced tools to show users exactly what will happen to their investments based on various scenarios. “We want you to touch this to get a feel for what will happen to your money,” is the way they put it. → Read More
Can you dig it? Ryu from Ninja Gaiden on the NES was a real badass. He could climb on walls and he had unlimited shuriken, a big plus when you’re going against hordes of anti-ninja forces on the NES. But how is he against Koopa Troopers? Our favorite game, SMB Crossover, just announced they’re adding Ryu to their line-up of classic characters. → Read More
Now more than ever, marketers are using tools to monitor and keep track of the conversation about brands taking place on sites like Facebook and Twitter. While many of these tools monitor sentiment around Tweets and updates including a brand’s name, Keenkong takes a slightly different approach. Launched at TechCrunch Disrupt today, Keenkong segments the conversations taking place on Facebook and Twitter by topic (what), by intentions (why), by network size and more.
So when you click on a segment in Keenkong, you can see the related conversations according to a particular topic. Keenkong’s linguistic processing engine extracts live why people are talking, what are they talking about, who they are and it segments messages accordingly. Keenkong automatically captures, parses and groups incoming messages from Twitter (including lists and searches) and Facebook. For example, Keenkong will segment Tweets about users choosing between your brand and another into one category. Or KeenKong will create a segment of Tweets and updates where a brand should thank the consumer for highlighting a positive aspect of a brand. → Read More
If you don’t have room in your office for another lamp, yet find yourself squinting as you read over your books and parchments, then perhaps you should consider investing in one of these fabulous lamp posters.
Sure, you could just open the window, but you’d have to get out of your chair. Plus, when people see this, they’ll immediately think you well-versed in surrealist art. When this happens, don’t say anything. Just stare at them — if you have a beard, stroke it. → Read More
I’ll admit that I know nothing about fine art. It actually somewhat interests me as an idea, but I’m never going to go to a gallery. Basically, everything I do is now online. But finding fine art online seems hard. A quick Google search brings up sites that look to be the exact opposite of fine art. Art.sy wants to change that.
The new social site, started by Carter Cleveland, is “the place to discover and share original fine art online.” Okay, it’s easy to say that. But Art.sy’s approach is to make it easy to discover this art through searching. Their custom search engine allows you to find art by period/style, the portion of their career that the artist is in, or the regular stuff like size, color, and, of course, price. → Read More
Everyone loves movie clips. But, unfortunately, they’re often hard to find online in one centralized place. There’s a simple reason for this: licensing. If someone could just solve that, they’d have a pretty killer website, right? That’s what Movieclips has. And now they’re trying to extend it with Movieclips Mashups.
The key to this (beyond a killer domain name, movieclips.com) is that they have partnerships with six major Hollywood studios to provide them with clips from films. How many clips? So far, over 12,000. Imagine if the studios could make some older clips relevant again? And what if users could do it themselves? That’s what this new Mashups products is trying to do. → Read More
Once television moved beyond the three major networks, there was a problem. With all the new channels and content, how could people find what to watch and when? That’s where services like TV Guide and eventually on-screen guides came in. There’s a similar problem right now on the web — only times a million. A new product being launched in closed beta today at TechCrunch Disrupt, Live Matrix, wants to be that TV Guide for the web.
Now, to be clear, there have been plenty of products that have attempted to be the TV Guide for the web as it relates to web video. But Live Matrix extends far beyond just video. It’s about anything taking place on the web. Audiocasts, auctions, chats, MMO games, etc. Live Matrix wants to organize it all. So far, they’re up to 80,000 scheduled events every week, and growing quickly. → Read More
Football (soccer) writers are typically terribly serious about what they do. Relax, buddy, it’s just a game. A fun game, yeah, but just a game. The Guardian’s Barry Glendenning does things a little bit differently: he’s actually good! In a column today, Glendenning prepares us all for the inevitable complaints that will surround the Jabulani‘s performance at the World Cup. It’s a time-honored tradition, complaining about the new ball: the ball is too heavy, the ball is too light, the ball swerves too much, the ball swerves too little, etc. Most accurate ball ever created? Obviously you haven’t seen a Michael Carrick pass. → Read More
