By now, just about everyone on the planet has heard the term “Apple Fanboy.” If you’ve ever said anything good about an Apple product, you’ve likely been called one. But a new class of fanboy has emerged — one that, amazingly, may be be equally as passionate. The Android Fanboy. And it’s actually a good thing.
In case you missed my review of the new HTC EVO 4G phone yesterday, be sure to read some of the comments. As stated, I was coming at it from the perspective of a dedicated iPhone user. Long story short, I don’t really like the device. To the Android lovers, I might as well have killed Bambi. → Read More
After exploring the mobile and Internet landscapes in Shanghai and Beijing, the GeeksOnAPlane (GOAP) group (30+ techies mostly from the Silicon Valley) continued their Asian field trip to Korea today. In Beijing, the GOAP attended two of China’s largest tech conferences: CHINICT, “the largest conference on China tech innovation” (which was livestreamed on TechCrunch), and the “Global Mobile Internet Conference” (GMIC), both of which are held in the city every year.
The GOAP got in touch with and gained unfiltered insight from dozens and dozens of local entrepreneurs, VCs and industry observers during the conferences and the events that took place around them. What follows are just a few learnings and impressions the GOAP group picked up during their China web crash course in Beijing (the size of the tech landscape is summarized in my previous post).
Some points on innovation in China, the mobile web, and challenges for the country’s tech industry after the break. → Read More
Man alive. I don’t mind SMB Crossover, but the creator, Jay Pavlina reminds me of Vince Veneziani on a little too much Red Bull. Watch as the creator of the game plays the game, a meta picture-in-picture experience that’s like watching a hand draw itself. → Read More
Right on cue, then. ‘Twas only a few days ago that I had mentioned the grand tradition of World Cup goalkeepers complaining about the ball used in the tournament, and we now have our very first complaints (at least I think it’s the first). Spain goalkeeper Iker Casillas, who’s probably the best goalkeeper going into the tournament (it’s either him or Júlio César, of Brazil), said after Spain’s 3-2 win over Saudi Arabia in a pre-tournament friendly about an hour ago: “It’s a little sad that in a competition as big as the World Cup to have such a poor ball [the Jabulani]. It’s not just the goalkeepers complaining, but the outfield players as well.” Here we go~! → Read More
One of the founders of Reddit, a Digg-clone, openly criticized Digg founder Kevin Rose yesterday for his plans to implement “me-too” features into the new version of the service. We consider this to be absurd and rather impolite.
Yesterday we discovered a video showing some of the features of the upcoming relaunch of Digg. In a nutshell, Digg has been trying to find a way to leverage social sharing to make the site more relevant, and users will soon see links to interesting things based on the what people and entities they choose to follow are voting on.
That goal isn’t anything new, founder Kevin Rose has been talking openly about it for more than a year now. → Read More
Back in January, I wrote a post entitled An iPhone Lover’s Take On The Nexus One. At the time, the Nexus One was soon to be released as the latest and greatest Android phone, and a number of iPhone users were wondering whether it was worth it to switch for the benefits of Android (and perhaps more importantly, another network besides AT&T). My take: it was the best Android phone yet, but it wasn’t better than the iPhone. Now I’m going to do the same type of review for the new HTC EVO 4G phone, which Sprint is launching next week.
At Google I/O, the search giant gave the phone away to every attendee complete with one month of service to try it out. Just as with the Nexus One, I’ve decided to use it as my primary phone for the past week or so to get a real sense of the pluses and minuses of the device. Just as with my Nexus One review, this isn’t meant to be an all-encompassing review or roundup (for that, see here or here or here). Instead, this is just my reaction to the device as an iPhone user. → Read More
Apple’s Steve Jobs famously offered us “freedom from porn” in his ongoing war with Adobe Flash on the iPhone and iPad. But notoriously liberal Berlin has a different take on the matter, perhaps offering us freedom from being told what to do by Apple…
Billboards announcing the arrival of the iPad on Friday have been going up all over Berlin, but one of them in the subway station of Rosenthaler Platz is quite different to the rest. As you can see from the images below, the iPad appears to be about to offer an entirely new experience of porn. → Read More
It’s no secret that mobile, hyperlocal advertising is poised to grow into a massive market in the next few years, spurred by the proliferation of GPS-equipped smartphones. Earlier this week we saw the launch of another competitor called BeThere Deals that’s hoping to crack the nut. The service offers a self-serve platform for local businesses, who can quickly deploy time sensitive deals that are limited in quantity.
While it’s focused primarily on time sensitive, local deals, BeThere Deals isn’t really in the same vein as GroupOn and LivingSocial — it doesn’t have a ‘group buying’ mechanic, and it features many deals in an area, rather than one or two. → Read More
By Lars Erik Holmquist of the Mobile Life Centre, Kista, Sweden The rate of innovation in mobile services is just about to take a quantum leap. We are going from a divergent and messy ecosystem, where every new concept has to be made into a specialized ”app” that works only on a small sub-set of mobile handsets (even the mighty iPhone only has around 3% of the global mobile phone market), to an environment much more like the web. Today, new services can easily be composed out of existing components and run on a common platform – the browser. We are entering an age where the creation of a new mobile service – taking advantage of such features as the user’s location, social network, personal data, and even phone-specific functions such as the camera and accelerometer – can be mashed-up and put on-line just as easily as Web 2.0 services have been for several years already. At the Mobile Life research centre in Kista, Sweden, partners from academia and industry are working together to imagine this future of abundant mobile services. Fortunately, we are not working in the dark – we can build on a foundation of several decades of research. Some 20 years ago, Mark Weiser, a research scientist at Xerox PARC in Palo Alto, had a vision of the future: he called it ubiquitous computing. He imagined that dozens, even hundred of small computers would be available everywhere, and seamlessly support us in our everyday tasks. Unlike the personal computers at the time, these devices would be un-tethered, user-friendly, aware of their surroundings, and conducive to communication and collaboration in the real world rather than through a screen. To explore this vision, he and his team built a number of computing devices in different sizes – they called them Tabs, Pads, and Boards. Each was connected to a wireless network and aware of its location and other factors in the environment, the so-called context. → Read More
After speaking on a panel Wednesday at TechCrunch Disrupt with Facebook’s Chris Cox and Google’s Vic Gundotra, Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley sat down with our own Evelyn Rusli for a backstage video interview.
It is clear that he feels Foursquare is still in its infancy and still has a long way to go. “The products is 10% of what it needs to be,” he says. “Look at the stuff we are doing with game mechanics, it is 1.0 game mechanics.” Where does he see it going? The badges, points, and Mayorships that people acquire by using Foursquare increasingly will be used to “unlock free goods” in real places like restaurants and stores. → Read More
The H-1B visa has become the beachhead in the battle against the legal immigration of skilled workers. This visa allows highly educated and skilled workers from abroad to take employment in the U.S. and eventually become citizens. Anti-immigrant groups believe that they can close the door to foreigners by restricting or abolishing it. So they have been trying to convince lawmakers that H-1Bs depress wages and take jobs away from American workers. To prove their point, they highlight examples of unscrupulous body shops that underpay their workers, and they cite questionable research published by other anti-immigrants. But a new peer-reviewed study, published in Management Science, a top academic journal, challenges these claims. This research finds that foreign-born I.T. professionals on temporary work visas actually earn more than their American counterparts; and that limits on H-1B visas cause the salaries of foreign workers—not Americans—to increase. This, along with research completed by my colleagues at UC-Berkeley, Duke and Harvard, confirms what most people in Silicon Valley already know: that foreign-born I.T. workers complement American professionals and make the pie bigger; they don’t take jobs away.
This new study was completed by University of Maryland professors Hank Lucas and Sunil Mithas, using data from a survey of 50,000 I.T. professionals that InformationWeek and Hewitt Associates conducted from 2000 to 2005. After adjusting for educational qualifications, work experience, and other individual characteristics, the researchers found that I.T. professionals without U.S. citizenship earned 8.9% more than U.S. citizens. Tech workers on temporary visas were paid 6.8% more than those with U.S. citizenship; green card holders took home 12.9% more than their American-born counterparts. In years when Congress increased the numbers of visas available, salaries of foreign workers dropped. → Read More
Last week on the final day of TechCrunch Disrupt, the TechCrunch Hack Day winners got to present onstage just before the Startup Battlefield finalists went into Round Three. It was an opportunity for the Disrupt audience to meet a few of the best and brightest from the past weekend’s event. When Daniel Raffel, Chad Dickerson and myself imagined the event we saw it as a chance to open a backdoor into the conference for some great devs—every presenter received a free pass to the conference. With over 60 teams presenting, judging was a challenge. Since not all of the teams got to present onstage Wednesday, we wanted to highlight some of the projects that stood out for us and the judges. → Read More
Apple’s Steve Jobs famously offered us “freedom from porn” in his ongoing war with Adobe Flash on the iPhone and iPad. But notoriously liberal Berlin has a different take on the matter, perhaps offering us freedom from being told what to do by Apple…
Billboards announcing the arrival of the iPad on Friday have been going up all over Berlin, but one of them in the subway station of Rosenthaler Platz is quite different to the rest. As you can see from the images below (NSFW but then it’s Saturday, right?), the iPad appears to be about to offer an entirely new experience of porn. → Read More
iPad case designers? You’re done. Pack up and go home. We don’t need you anymore. Yup, even you Vaja. The handmade DODOcase just put you out of business. → Read More
This is a nice-looking homebrew tablet created by “Slampana” just for fun. It may not be as slick in the UI department as the iPad (it’s poor, unadorned Windows 7), but it’s a nice-looking piece of hardware and I like that screen. → Read More
This particular item isn’t exactly a bargain buy — large-format digitals will run you upwards of $40,000, and this one was custom-designed by a Swiss studio called Estragon. I just loved the square outline. Somebody buy me one. [via DeZeen and Notcot] → Read More
http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=11968215&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=00ADEF&fullscreen=1 HOVERBOARD – NILS GUADAGNIN from nils guadagnin on Vimeo. Yes, it really hovers. (But only in one place and over an electromagnetic system) via Geeologie. → Read More
Who wants a 2-tuner DVR? Anyone? Arris doesn’t think so and is now only offering 3-tuner Moxi DVRs. → Read More
The video below shows how two public company CEOs – Yahoo’s Carol Bartz and AOL’s Tim Armstrong – answered the first question I asked each of them during our interviews at TechCrunch Disrupt earlier this week: “What is Yahoo/AOL?”
The contrast in coherence is staggering.
The one thing that everyone remembers from my interview with Bartz was when she told me to fuck off near the end of the talk. I’ll talk more on that in a post next week, but that was completely overblown – neither of us took it seriously on stage and after the talk there was no ill will at all. → Read More
