It appears that Lenovo’s U1 hybrid tablet/laptop, which we saw at CES, is being scuppered. My guess is that the Skylight OS, a custom implementation of Linux, just wasn’t good enough to compete with the tablets on the market — and possibly the cost of continuing to support such a project was too much. Whatever the case, the U1 is off the table, as is the Skylight smartbook, though they say they’ll continue to support “innovative new concepts.”
RIP, U1. I guess you were too weird to live. → Read More
Peter Pham, CEO of BillShrink, has just Tweeted that he’s leaving the startup to become an entrepreneur-in-residence at VC firm Trinity Ventures. According to a blog post, Pham says he is “moving on to pursue new entrepreneurial opportunities as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Trinity Ventures, which led BillShrink’s Series B of $8 million.”
BillShrink’s co-founder Schwark Satyavolu will assume the role of CEO (he was previously the CTO). Before starting BillShrink, Pham was the Vice President of Business Development at Photobucket.com, which was acquired by Fox Interactive Media in 2007. He’s also an advisor to Docsctoc, Scrapblog, Ustream, and a number of other startups. → Read More
Via’s cheap Android tablets have been supposedly been found. Via Gallery has a 16-pic spread showing different angles for each. Call us underwhelmed. Also, call us right for predicting this garbage. Anyway, click through for a shot of each product. → Read More
Not that it makes that much difference when you’re limiting your tasks to email, browsing, and flash games, but it’s nice to be able to pick between AMD and Intel. The Acer Aspire One 521 is a nice little AMD-based netbook, and now it’s joined by an Intel-based twin — or near-twin. The Aspire One 533 sports a little more chrome, but beyond that it’s the same old mid-range netbook you may know and love. → Read More
Augmented Reality may not be super practical yet. But it sure is cool, and a lot of fun. And a new Android game looks to make it even more fun.
Space InvadAR is a new Android game by Zenitum. It’s the world’s first “vision-based” AR game, according to the team. And it looks awesome — watch the video below. → Read More
Yesterday we wrote about the imminent release of picplz, the new location-centric photo streaming service being being developed by imeem execs Dalton Caldwell and Bryan Berg.
The service is still in closed early testing, but early adopter types can now download it from the Android Marketplace and create an account. Once you have an account you’ll get access to the web version as well. Note that it’s only available for U.S. Android users right now though. → Read More
Hey, what do you know? Speaking of the Droid 2, Droid-Life just got the above inventory screen cap seemingly listing the previously top-secret handset. → Read More
Some cool cat over in Engadget‘s comments claims to have gotten a bit of hands on time with the totally not-yet-announced Droid 2, and was kind enough to bring back a pic to back up their story. Check it out after the jump. → Read More
Sweet Jupiter’s Loins! Look at this thing. It’s a quad rotor flyer with 20 independent cameras designed to blow through windows and sneak around tight spaces nary a whisper. I’m not sure what’s scarier – the device itself or the sounds it makes. → Read More
The first Hurt Locker lawsuits are a-flyin’. Were you one of the lucky winners? → Read More
The first TechCrunch Disrupt conference kicked off with a bang this week in New York, with Charlie Rose interviewing renown venture capitalists John Doerr, and Yuri Milner. Highlights of the conference included a colorful exchange between TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington and Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz; Sean Parker and David Kirkpatrick discussing the past, present and future of Facebook, and VCs Fred Wilson and Ben Horowitz debating the virtue of the lean vs. fat startup. We also heard from Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber’s managers and celebrated the winner of the startup battlefield competition: Soluto! Here’s a comprehensive list of all of our coverage of the event. → Read More
You might have missed the original Mafia. I thought it was a great game, but people complained about how you had to do mundane missions, stop at stoplights, and of course it was all a little overwrought. But that was all kind of the point. Hopefully they haven’t changed too much with Mafia II — except for making the graphics and physics all kinds of awesome. → Read More
[See Update below] Microsoft Bing will replace Google in the next version of the iPhone operating system to be released in June, we’ve heard from mulitple sources, including a high level source who claims to have been briefed on the matter. We’re not calling this more than a rumor yet, but one thing is sure – our sources close to Google in particular are speaking freely about this as fact. In January Business Week reported that Microsoft and Apple were in talks over an iPhone search deal, and the deal certainly would be brilliant for Microsoft.
There’s been speculation around Google’s future on the iPhone since last year when the first public spat broke out between the companies over the Google Voice app for the iPhone. Android’s continued gains in market share only highlight Google’s direct competition with Apple, and the fact that so many core iPhone apps, including search and maps, are controlled by Google, has been a sore point with Apple. From that post: → Read More
Oh, Microsoft. Don’t worry: people still love you. Also, people still hate you, so it all works out in the end. CEO Steve Ballmer told the Wall Street Journal something along the lines of, “So what Apple is now the “biggest” tech company in the land. Big deal. We still make incredible amounts of money. In fact, I’m going to go swim in my giant pool of money right now. Talk later.” An exact quote? No, but it certainly captures the spirit that Ballmer was trying to convey: let Apple have its moment in the Sun, but we’re not doing too bad for ourselves over here, you know? → Read More
The video below, which we believe will be shown to publishers to promote the new Digg, gives a never before seen look at the new version of Digg, version 4, that the company has been working on for over a year – founder Kevin Rose first spoke about it in April 2009.
The new version of the service is designed to get publishers, currently enamored with the viral spread of content on Twitter and Facebook, to start focusing on Digg again. As Rose says in the interview, only the top headlines on Digg – 100 or so stories a day – actually get much traffic. So publishers, including us, have focused more on promoting sharing on Twitter and Facebook, where it isn’t an all or nothing outcome.
Key changes: → Read More
Last week at the Founder Showcase, a quarterly event put on by Adeo Ressi’s TheFunded, Evernote CEO Phil Libin gave a presentation discussing some of the startup’s key revenue numbers and strategy. During his talk, Libin outlined some of the ingredients in making the freemium model work, and how long-term users actually become more valuable over time.
Evernote, for those who haven’t used it, is a great service for quickly storing and organizing ideas, photos, documents and other information that you encounter both online and in the real world. → Read More
Google Chrome has been my primary browser for a few months now. And since it became fully stable, it’s the only browser I use. It’s fast, lightweight, and awesome. And it keeps getting more awesome.
One of the best things about Chrome is extension support. There are already nearly 5,000 of them despite only launching this past December. And the extensions continue to get more powerful. Today, on the Chromium Blog, Google has announced that desktop notifications are now available to third-party extension developers. → Read More
PostRank is a nifty tool that measures different ways that readers engage with online content. The ranking is based on how many times a particular post has been linked to, voted up on Digg, shared on Google Buzz, commented on, Twittered about, bookmarked on del.icio.us or viewed through feed readers like AideRSS and Google Reader. Today, the startup is adding a new feature that actually stores and shows you these activities.
As PostRank says, the activity streams feature similar in theory to a FriendFeed, but for a blog or site’s content. Previously, PostRank aggregated and reported activity events but the new feature aggregates Tweets, votes, distributed comments and more in a single view. Publishers simply have to insert their RSS feed into PostRank Analytics and the startup will aggregate and filter activity into a dashboard. → Read More
Either you lead or follow and Chinese manufacturing houses have been chasing Apple’s designs for years. The iPad is just their latest victim. You can’t blame them, really. It’s the hottest device since the rotary phone.
We’ve seen a steady stream of clones flowing onto the web for months. Here’s the seven best starting with the just-found iPed. → Read More
Waaay back in April, a handset with strikingly similar specs to the beastly Samsung Galaxy S showed up in the Bluetooth certification database. The big difference here, though, was the model number: SGH-i897. Through good ol’ fashion science (and by that, I mean looking at the model number), we deduced that this guy was headed for AT&T — and we were right. → Read More
