That little R2 unit is certainly crafty hiding in a Dalek like that. $9 at TeeFury. → Read More
Booyah’s InCrowd, famously announced by founder Keith Lee at the Facebook Places launch event earlier this month, just hit the App store. InCrowd is the first of the inevitably many apps that will be built off the Facebook Places API and the only location-based app that has exclusive access to Facebook search.
Touted as part game and part social utility, InCrowd is unique in the LBS space as it goes beyond collecting check-ins and allows users to experience a virtual world corresponding the real world visited in Places. Like a location based Second Life, InCrowd app users can create their own customizable avatars, “interact” with old and new friends nearby as well as accumulate status and virtual goods. → Read More
Here’s what’s fun about TechCrunch’s new(ish) San Francisco office. I go out to grab a sandwich, see people I know and get to rudely grill them about how well their company is doing. Today it was Mat Honan, one of the founders of Longshot Magazine, which just put out its second issue, around the theme of “Comeback.”
You may know Longshot better by its pre-lawsuit name of 48 HR Magazine. It’s a really cool concept that leverages every new technology surrounding the publishing space to create a magazine on the fly. Those technologies include using social media to get submissions, cloud services like GoogleDocs to edit across space and time, using MagCloud for on-demand, glossy publishing and using the iPad to get it in people’s hands even faster. It got a ton of buzz during the last issue—so much that it prompted said lawsuit.
But oh how fickle we Web consumers are. → Read More
So the Skitterbot is a slightly creepy, mostly cool little remote control robot that’s being advertised as “the world’s fastest legged micro-robotic toy”. The Skitterbot is available in four different colors, each representing a different frequency so you can race, battle, or just torment your cat with them. I like the fact that they charge off of a USB port, and are quite reasonably priced at $19.99 each. The 5 function remote allows you to move the Skitterbot forward, back, left, right, and stop. Check out the overly dramatic yet slightly ominous video after the jump. → Read More
When you get a good story, sometimes you just need to whip out your flip camera and hope for the best. Apologies for the lighting on this one, but Micah Baldwin’s interview was just too good to miss.
Graphic.ly (a really cool digital comic book community) is based in Boulder, Colorado, which is starting to get a reputation for its hotbed of startups.
There are several interesting venture backed companies that have emerged from Boulder such as SimpleGeo (multi-homed in SF as well), OneRiot, Lijit, Sendgrid and now graphic.ly. Cool companies (Kid Robot and Threadless) gravitate towards Boulder and open up offices. When questioned about what makes Boulder special, Micah responded, “Boulder is amazing. I think something like 1 in 10 people is involved in a startup!” → Read More
Editor’s note: Guest author Adam Rifkin is a Silicon Valley veteran who organizes a networking group for entrepreneurial engineers called 106 Miles. In this post he argues that Gmail is perhaps not the best vessel for Google’s social ambitions.
Last week was marred for me by a temporary but super-painful Gmail failure, and the software’s behavior points to why a “more social” Gmail would be a PERMANENT FAILURE. It pains me to write this because I actually believe the Gmail team has been the best web application team long-term in the entire company, and they come way closer than anyone else inside Google to understanding how normal people work and think.
So it’s telling that even within the Gmail team, there is a basic, fundamental, deep-seeded inability to put things together in a contextually graceful way that makes sense to actual (non-Googler) users—in other words, to deliver a great user experience. Let me explain with a personal experience. → Read More
Good news for the budget minded out there, Audio-Technica is releasing two new headphone models, both with active noise canceling, and both for under $100. Both models come with a detachable cord that allows you to turn them into wireless headphones, and the audio will work even if the battery runs down on the noise cancellation feature. → Read More
SellMyMobile.com, the UK mobile phone recycling price comparison site, is launching a white label service which enables partner sites to offer their own branded version of the service and take a cut in any revenue generated.
Like similar price comparisons sites for other sectors, SellMyMobile works by comparing the prices from all of the leading aftermarket mobile phone buying sites: a user enters the make and model of their phone and SellMyMobile checks prices from 28 services, such as envirofone, fonebank and muzuma, to provide what it claims to be the most comprehensive and accurate price comparison. → Read More
Internet investment group Digital Sky Technologies (DST) today formally announced the acquisition of Russian social network Odnoklassniki.ru, which we reported on last week.
DST has bought out out the minority shareholders in Forticom Group Limited – which it now fully owns – and Odnoklassniki, and interestingly transferred its interest in the Polish social network Nasza-Klasa.pl to the previous minority shareholders of Forticom as part of the deal. → Read More
Forgive the music because you’re going to wanna trudge through this video. It is by far the best Samsung Galaxy Tab video to date and might be some sort of official demo. The entire 2:43 video is filled with nothing but action shots and size comparisons. Is it an iPad killer? Still hard to tell, but this video certain makes a case for it. Click through for the video. → Read More
AOL has just acquired Rally Up, the Santa Cruz-based mobile application company, we’ve learned. The 9-person team will become a part of AOL’s mobile group reporting to David Temkin, the head of mobile. No word on the price, but we hear it was less than $10 million.
The company made a mobile location app (also called Rally Up) which we first covered back in December of 2009 when it launched as “Rally” — a location-based social network for your real friends. They were also among the first to bring a location social network to the iPad. But more recently, the team had built a pretty cool app called FacePlant — which allowed you to easily see who you could use your iPhone 4 to FaceTime with. Apple’s current functionality for this is very limited — you basically have to guess that someone has both an iPhone 4 and is on WiFi to use it. FacePlant got around that with a slick app — but Apple has yet to approved it. → Read More
There’s a rumor making it’s way around the internet this morning, it seems that Microsoft may be launching an updated Xbox 360 controller this coming holiday season. Again, this isn’t official, however Joystiq seems to think that their source is pretty reliable. What are they updating? Well, apparently the D-Pad needs some refreshing. The plan is apparently to rotate the D-Pad by 90 degrees, thus raising it up about a quarter of an inch. The change is apparently intended for fighting game fans in particular, but I’m not sure that I see the point. At any rate, when/if this rumor becomes official we’ll let you know. Update: It’s official, and it’s shiny – as in silver covered shiny. And the D-Pad converts from the old style flat version, to the taller new version just by twisting it. The bad news, it’s part of a $65 play-and-charge bundle that’s coming out Nov. 9th. Watch the video update from Major Nelson after the jump: → Read More
Zalando, the Zappos clone started by the Samwer brothers through their investment vehicle Rocket Internet, has closed a new round of funding. The amount remains undisclosed but according to multiple sources it’s designed to supercharge the German e-commerce behemoth to the next level. Although speculative, when looking at the site’s traffic and data from similar sized companies, the pre-round-valuation is thought to be around €100 million.
The new shareholder for the online fashion and shoe store is Swedish Investment bank AB Kinnevik who previously invested €5m in Citydeal, another Samwer startup, which was recently acquired by U.S. Groupon. Aside from AB Kinnevik, other participants in the round include Tengelmann and Holtzbrinck Ventures, an investor in Zalando from its early days. → Read More
There’s always something cool coming out of Y Combinator, but even so Greplin stands out from the crowd. It’s a personal search engine for all that data you keep locked away in the cloud. If you’ve used desktop search like spotlight, you’ll get Greplin right away. It’s like spotlight for your cloud data.
It’s dead simple to use. Sign up and authorize any number of social services for Greplin to index – I signed into Facebook, Twitter and Google Voice to start. After a few minutes of indexing time Greplin then presents you with a Google-like search box. Run a query and find the public and private data you’ve locked away on those sites. Tweets, including DMs, are shown, as well as Facebook messages and Google Voice voicemail transcriptions and SMS. You can also index Gmail, Dropbox, LinkedIn and a bunch of other services.
After you use it for the first time you’ll understand that you’ll never not use it again. And there are nice touches like showing real time results as you type. And Greplin only uses OAuth and other APIs for authorization, so they never see your third party site credentials. → Read More
PogoPlug keeps getting better and better. Today they’re announcing that wireless printing, first mentioned earlier this summer, is now available. Users can print from iPads, iPhones, Androids and pretty much any other Internet-connected device. While you’re vacationing in Rio, you can print off instructions for your buddy who’s house sitting for you! Or you can print off a stack of vacation photos while still on vacation! Also announced today is that the PogoPlug Biz and the PogoPlug WiFi Adapter are both shipping. → Read More
People are always trying to spruce up their email signatures with funny witticisms, quotes, professional information and more. WiseStamp is trying to innovate on the traditional email signature by allowing you to customize your message with recent Tweets, links to your social network profiles and more.
WiseStamp, which was incubated within Dogpatch Labs, is launching its platform to the public today. Essentially, WiseStamp’s Email Apps allow users to add dynamic content to each outgoing email – for example, adding the latest selling eBay item, recent blog post, the latest tweet or a cause to promote. The recipients will able to interact with the Email App directly from the email (e.g. retweet or follow in case of the Twitter App or buy the product in case of the eBay App). → Read More
No matter the size of your website, commenters tend to be a smaller subset of your audience. But they’re also often among your most loyal readers who are the most engaged. Wouldn’t it be great to know something about those people? That’s what Disqus is trying to nail with a new Analytics offering.
While it’s still in its early stages, the key to Disqus Analytics is that it’s very simple to use and pull meaningful data from. You’ll not only be able to see who your most loyal commenters are, you’ll be able to see the topics that are clearly the most important when it comes to engagement with your audience. And you can get data about which posts or people are most often “liked” and which login method your commenters are using to leave comments on various types of posts.
As some of you have noticed, we just turned on Disqus comments a few days ago. So far, the system is excellent. That on top of more community management should hopefully keep the trolls at bay. We’ll see. With these analytics though, at the very least we’ll know something about the trolls. → Read More
The G2, sequel to the late, lamented G1, has been leaking all over the place. This latest, caught by CellPhone Signal, has what appear to be the official pictures for T-Mobile’s site, and though they don’t really reveal anything new, they’re clear and show the handset off well. And would you care for some specs with those leaked pics, madame? 3.7″ OLED display 1GHz Snapdragon processor 3G HSPA+ Android 2.2 … with Sense? 5MP camera Now, that Sense thing goes against what we heard of the firmware. It also goes against what we heard about the G2 being a “pure” Android experience with Google branding. I also see plain 2.2 running in those pics. I’m guessing the specs are mistaken. → Read More
What I want is simple: a way to share certain things with my friends, and other things with everyone. “Simple” is the keyword there because you can do that with Facebook, but it’s not simple enough. I want flick-one-switch simple, not create list, use drop-down, choose Everyone or Friends and Networks, Friends of Friends, Friends Only, Customize simple. A few startups are starting to get this level of ease — Treehouse is one of them.
When we last wrote about Treehouse back in June, I noted that it was perhaps the perfect app for sharing Bros Icing Bros pictures. Sadly, that meme died at the hands of Smirnoff Ice. But luckily, Treehouse has become even more useful since then. Notably, the iPhone photo-sharing app has a revamped interface that allows you to comment directly from photo pages, swipe left and right to quickly browse photos, and swipe down to see comments, likes, and location. There are also some nice new overlays that show all this information. And you can now leave photo comments. → Read More
This is a guest post by Alain Raynaud, Director of the Founder Institute Paris, an incubator that bridges Silicon Valley and France. He is also the founder and CEO of FairSoftware, a TechCrunch50 Finalist, and the organizer of the Founder Conference.
Ask any European entrepreneur why they don’t move to Silicon Valley, and you are guaranteed to start an intense discussion.
I have lived in Silicon Valley for 10 years, but in 2010 started the French branch of a famous Silicon Valley incubator called the Founder Institute. As such, I witnessed firsthand the pros and cons of doing a startup in Europe. So I couldn’t resist sharing my impressions when we graduated the first class of the Founder Institute with Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet, the French Minister for the Digital Economy. While I can’t share what she told me afterward, I can disclose the points I made publicly. → Read More
