This is sheer speculation, but I’m thinking that having a complete retro-style box, rental-style plastic case, and old-school-mom-and-pop-style fabricated receipt is going to pretty much make Retro City Rampage the must-have swag stop at PAX. The game looks pretty awesome, too. → Read More
Watch out, Nike. Power Laces has your number. Of course you have the patent, but let’s not get hung on up on the ‘deets. Power Lace’s enterprising creator is already on the second generation of his self-tightening shoes and it looks surprising similar to Nike’s just-granted patent — complete with heel sensor. This guy is going for broke, though, and is currently seeking funding via KickerStarter. I’m not sure I would would drain the trust fund to allow the guy to quickly hit his $25,000 goal after seeing the Nike patent, but a few dollar bet at least makes this guys day. Plus it could net you a t-shirt or some rad 80′s-themed stickers. A $250 donation will get you the first generation if the target goal is reached.
Anyway, enough, you must click through to see the demo video. It’s surprisingly nice. Marty would approve. (You knew I had to throw in at least one Back To The Future joke) → Read More
Just as I was reading Paul Carr’s latest column about quitting social media, my husband looked at his phone and broke into a huge smile. He is a graphic designer and has long been a fan of Chank Fonts. Earlier that day, he’d taken a picture of a retro-looking podiatrist office, posting it on Twitter with the word “Font-o-licious.” It didn’t go viral. It didn’t become a trending topic. It didn’t get him 1,000 new followers or even attract much attention at all. But it was noticed by Chank Diesel of Chank Fonts who Tweeted “I’m gonna dedicate my next font to that type-savvy podiatrist” and started following my husband.
Here in front of me was one of those serendipitous moments of social media collapsing space-and-time. These moments don’t change the world, but they’re exactly what made social media so addictive in the first place. Imagine an industry hero of yours who seemed untouchable creating a product just because of a random picture you posted on an ever-moving stream of colliding information that he happened to see. Here, in the guise of my beaming husband, was the perfect articulation for why I think people—even my close friends— who declare dramatic social media bankruptcy were just doing it wrong. → Read More
Email overload has finally met its match. Tomorrow, Gmail is rolling out a new feature called Priority Inbox that is going to be a Godsend for those of you who dread opening your email. In short, Google has built a system that figures out which of your messages are important, and presents them at the top of the screen so you don’t miss them. The rest of your messages are still there, but you don’t have to dig through dozens of newsletters and confirmations to find the diamonds in rough.
The beauty of the system lies in its simplicity — it’s nearly as easy as Gmail’s one click spam filter. There’s almost no setup: once it’s activated on your account, you’ll see a prompt asking you if you want to enable Priority Inbox. You can choose from a few options (the order of your various inboxes and if there are any contacts you’d like to always mark ‘Important’) but don’t have to setup any rules or ‘teach’ Gmail what you want it to mark important. It just works, at least most of the time. → Read More
With the Samsung Epic 4G launching very soon, here’s an interesting alternative view of the device. If you dig around enough on the FCC website, you’ll be able to find nude pictures of almost every phone. Sometimes they are barely legal shots, like this Samsung Epic 4G. → Read More
Denver, Colorado based MapMyFitness, Inc has just announced raising $5 Million in a Series A round of financing lead by Austin Ventures. The health-related social network and training application company operates a network of sites including MapMyFitness.com, MapMyRide.com, MapMyRun.com, MapMyTri.com, MapMyWalk.com, MapMyHike.com, and MapMyMountain.com.
The MapMyFitness community gives their over two million members the ability to record and store their various running, cycling, walking and hiking routes as well as access to a database of international routes, fitness calculators, and events listings. → Read More
LG seems to be planning on dominating the 3D OLED market this coming year, and will be showing a few examples of their technology off at IFA this week. The current jewel in their crown is a 31-inch, 2.9mm thin OLED display. This will earn LG the title of “world’s thinnest OLED TV”. At least until someone else comes out with something thinner. → Read More
Perhaps you’ve noticed that a couple days ago we flipped the switch to enable the shiny new commenting system here on TechCrunch powered by Disqus. So far, the feedback has been very, very positive — and we’re pleased with how well it’s performing. But Disqus is just one step of what we need to do.
As many of you are well aware, the commenting situation on TechCrunch has been completely out of control for a long, long time. That seems to be one unfortunate side effect of when a site gets large enough (see: YouTube and Digg for other great examples). But we also realize that things don’t have to be that way. Some popular sites have very good comments (see: Hacker News and Quora for good examples of that). We’d like our comment section to be useful too. So we’re going to try to do something about that. → Read More
Yes, Google Wave is dead — but it won’t fully flatline until some time in 2011, Google confirmed in a post today. Well actually, their words were that wave.google.com (the front-end product) “will be available at least through the end of the year.” But yes, you can probably expect them to shut it down sometime in 2011.
But before that happens, Google is also promising that “there will be ways to export your waves before the end of the year.” So if you have been one of the seemingly few users who has been using Wave a lot, there will be a way to get the data you created out of it. It’s not yet clear what format this will be in, but we’re going to assume some sort of standard export file type. → Read More
If you doubt the efficacy of the new Pearl e-ink displays, take a look at these comparison photos. It looks like a pretty serious difference to me, although we’re still talking dark grey on light grey as opposed to black and white. I didn’t alter the pictures other than cropping them; take this comparison with a grain of salt, as it’s not exactly scientific. → Read More
Skip ahead to 4:25 unless you want to know how the whole setup is achieved. I want to make that PWIIIIIIIIIIIING my ringtone. Make that my pwingtone. I like the “honey is that you?” after the launch. Does anyone else have one of those things in their backyard? [via Hacked Gadgets and Make] → Read More
Harman Kardon has teamed up with Land Rover to make the new Range Rover Autobiography rock out. The new Harmon Kardon Logic 7 HD will be standard equipment in the Autobiography model, and will be available as optional equipment on Land Rover’s other models. The Logic 7 is 5.1 surround sound setup with a total of 1200 watts, delivering sound to 15 channels and 19 speakers including a 200mm front door woofer, and a subwoofer built into the rear quarter deck. Nothing like a little stereo power to blare out the annoying sounds of nature. Read the full press release after the jump: → Read More
Just a little something for those of you looking to pick up a DVR or set-top box to put in your pipe before you smoke it. Roku just dropped the prices of its SD, HD, and HD XR boxes to $59.99, $69.99 and $99.99 respectively. That’s $30 off; not bad. Take a look at our recent comparison of set-top boxes if you’re unsure; the Roku is a nice deal if you’re a Netflix streaming user and don’t want to access a local video library. Of course, we’ve got that Apple event coming up on Wednesday — you might want to wait until then, just in case. → Read More
If you’re running a website — be it a world-famous news portal or a personal blog — there’s a good chance you spend a lot of time poring over your stats. There are of course plenty of services available to help with this, including the hugely popular Google Analytics. But the older systems tend to have lengthy lag times before they’ll generate a report, whereas services like Chartbeat show things as they happen. Given how quickly things spread across the web these days, the future is clearly real-time, and today sees the public launch of another powerful analytics service called Reinvigorate.net.
After logging into the site you’ll see an overview page which displays the number of currently active visitors, active pages, and a graph of your traffic over the last few hours, all of which update in real-time. If you’d like to drill down more, you can jump into a separate Traffic tab, which includes stats like your daily and monthly visitor counts, bounce rates, and a breakdown of how much traffic each page is drawing. → Read More
Why do I get the uncanny sense that a lot of technology bloggers will soon be out a job? In the grand tradition of single serving niche sites like WhatthefuckshouldImakefordinner and Whatthefuckismysocialmediastrategy comes Itsthisforthat, an easy way to generate responses when you need to explain to your parents, relatives, etc why you’re eating ramen for breakfast, lunch and dinner instead of going to law school. “So, basically, it’s like a new social platform for government corruption …” → Read More
The EPA is revising the window stickers seen on new cars to more accurately reflect the capabilities of electric and hybrid vehicles. They’re also proposing, rather boldly, that a big fat letter grade head the sticker, ranging from A+ (for plug-in electric vehicles) to D (for Veyrons and R8s).
The Alliance of Automotive Manufacturers has condemned the stickers, accusing them of evoking “school-yard memories of passing and failing.” Yes, well, that’s kind of the idea. → Read More
I think I liked Google Voice better back when it was hard to get an invitation. Back then it worked most of the time, and the infrequent outages were tolerable given how useful the service is overall. But over the last week the service has become spotty at best, and unusable at times. Given that I ported my phone number to Google I don’t have much choice but to soldier on in the short term – but Google needs to figure this out fast or they’ll lose me as a user.
What happened? In June Google Voice opened up for anyone to use, and there was clearly a surge of new people trying out the service. For the most part it weathered that storm. But last week Google launched Google Voice for Gmail, allowing users to make and receive calls right from the browser. It’s awesome. Truly useful. 1 million calls were made from Gmail in 24 hours.
Uh oh. That’s when the trouble started. About 30% of my inbound calls have the caller muted – they can hear me but I can’t hear them. And outbound calls are worse. In the last 24 hours at least 75% of them failed completely. Either it never starts ringing, or it rings a couple of times and then dies. In fact, I called Google PR to give them a heads up on this story and that call failed too. As did a second attempt. → Read More
Korea has their first Android tablet. Called the “Identity TAB”, the new device runs a 1GHz Snapdragon cpu, and sports 8GB of internal memory. The tablet has a 7-inch screen, a DMB TV tuner, gyro-sensor, a 3 megapixel camera, and an SD card reader. At this point, it appears that we probably won’t see the Identity TAB here in the US, but KT (the Korean reseller for the tablet) is recommending the device for people looking for a e-Book reader or web tablet. Sales start today a 300,000 Won (about $250.00 US). [via Akihabara News] → Read More
