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
The ability to multitask got a lot of press when iPhone 4.0 OS was first announced. But less attention was given to some of the more subtle things this will allow, such as always-on location for third-party apps. This feature could actually make a service like Google Latitude useful on the device. So it’s coming, right? Maybe.
I asked Google senior product manager Steve Lee (who is in charge of Latitude) whether Google would build a native app for the iPhone now that it includes background location. “From the start, we’ve made Latitude available across platforms. Supporting iPhone with a great Latitude user experience is extremely important to us, and we’re evaluating the best way to deliver that on iPhone OS 4.0 now, so we don’t have anything to announce just yet,” Lee answer (emphasis his). → 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
http://media.rockstargames.com/products/rockstar/mediaplayer/RockstarMediaPlayer.swf?skin=reddeadredemption/EN/embed&vidID=4801&legacy=no Can we all agree that Red Dead Redemption is one of Rockstar‘s finest games? It’s probably one of the best games of this generation, too. A 30-minute short film based on the game, directed by the guy (John Hillcoat) who directed The Road (good) and The Proposition (great), debuts tomorrow night on the Fox network at midnight. Set your DVR. Here we have a short trailer (that I should have posted yesterday). → Read More
The idea of putting iPhone apps on the Apple TV has been something some of us have been thinking about since at least 2008, when the original App Store launched. When rumors were swirling about Google TV, it became an even better idea as the living room was likely to be a new battleground for Apple/Google. And with the unveiling of Google TV last week, it became clear that this would be a next major fight — provided Apple started taking it seriously. Soon, they will be, if Engadget’s sources are correct.
The gadget blog says that a tip they’ve since confirmed with “a source very close to Apple” suggests that Apple has been working on the next version of the Apple TV. The goods according to them: it will be a very small box (smaller than the current one) with perhaps only outputs for power and TV-out cables. It will run on Apple’s new A4 chip (the one found in the iPad and soon the new iPhone). It will still do 1080p video, but may have as little as 16GB of flash memory. That’s because the thing will be based around streaming over the cloud (or from other computers in your home) rather than local storage. Most significantly, it will run the iPhone OS. → Read More
Facebook is not evil, despite the disproportionately loud grumblings of its critics — which (as Mark Zuckerberg recently pointed out) is a small fraction of its 400-million-plus user base. But Facebook is also not a non-profit despite Zuckerberg’s claim that they’re not in “this for the money.”
On Wednesday’s press conference, Zuckerberg said: “It might seem weird, we’re not doing this to make more money. For all the people inside the company, that could not be more true. It’s such a big disconnect that we’re doing this for the money.”
Methinks the Zuckerberg doth protest too much.
Zuckerberg is not a saint and he’s also not the same 19-year old who allegedly mocked his users for trusting him with their information, but somewhere in between lies reality. → Read More
