Panasonic just announced the Toughbook S9, a 12.1-inch laptop with DVD drive and Core i5 processor. It starts at about $2,400 and offers 11 hours of battery life on one charge. Again, good old Kyp gives us the tour. → Read More
Today at our TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco, Google CEO Eric Schmidt took the stage to give a speech about his thoughts on the future. It was a very interesting talk which spanned a variety of topics. Naturally, the most important topic that Schmidt talked about was search.
“We want to give you your time back,” Schmidt said. He noted that we live in an age of information overload, where we all have too much to do. The first step in getting your time back is Google Instant, the realtime search feature that Google recently launched, Schmidt said. While the feature may only shave a couple of seconds off of any search, in aggregate (Google is doing 2 billion searches a day), this is a huge amount of time saved. → Read More
The BlackBerry PlayBook hit yesterday and Amazon was ready with a presser announcing a Kindle app for the platform. Great news, no doubt. However, the WattPad app is the top eReading app in the BlackBerry App World so it should make a good amount of dedicated BlackBerry users happy to know that the app will launch alongside the PlayBook early next year. → Read More
Women in tech, the song that never ends … Somebody realizes that the ratio of women versus men in tech is 80 to 20 and decides to write a blog post blaming something or in the case of Mediaite’s Rachel Sklar writing a piece in the WSJ calling out TechCrunch founder Mike Arrington for the lack of women in tech, to which he responded. → Read More
Twitter has just announced on the Twitter Development Talk Google Group that their User Streams feature of the Twitter Streaming API is now in regular product. This means that any third-party client can now access it — and all its realtime goodness. While it’s specifically meant for desktop clients, Twitter notes that “experimentation in other use cases is encouraged.”
Twitter had been beta testing User Streams since July. The hope is that this new API will ease the overall strain on Twitter’s APIs. Twitter Head of Platform, Ryan Sarver, called this a “big milestone”. → Read More
Germany’s leading online private shopping club, Brands4friends, has hit somewhat of a milestone this week, ratcheting up €1 million worth of sales in a single day. Just in time for its third birthday, apparently. → Read More
These $50 earbuds are designed for swimmers and heavy sweaters who need a little extra protection as they glide around the waters of their local pool like a pasty, bulbous manta ray. That said, H2OAudio has been pretty strong in the waterproof devices and cases department so there’s no reason to think these aren’t good. → Read More
Today at TechCrunch Disrupt, our own MG Siegler led a panel called Design vs. Engineering, featuring Charlie Cheever (Quora), Jason Goldman (Twitter), and Bradley Horowitz (Google). The conversation focused on the relationship between UI and the engineering muscle driving it, and how important each is to the success of a product.
During the panel, Jason Goldman, who leads product at Twitter, mentioned that New Twitter — which is a total redesign of the site with a bevy of new features — was initially planned to be a less ambitious, more iterative product. But CEO Evan Williams stepped in and said that users needed “something much better for end users”. → Read More
Yammer, which launched as the “Twitter for businesses” at TechCrunch 50 in 2008, is launching the next-gen version of its platform today. Aiming to be a full-fledged social network for the enterprise, Yammer 2.0 is being released today at TechCrunch Disrupt. As we wrote in our initial review of the new platform, Yammer is adding a number of applications to its platform that increases its functionality beyond just a communications platform.
These new applications include polls, chat, events, links, topics, Q&A, ideas, and more. And a new Activity Feed will aggregate stories about co-worker actions within all of their enterprise apps (both on and off Yammer) and will allow users to follow content. → Read More
Do you subscribe to Sky Broadband in the UK? Have you ever torrented pr0n? Terrible news! The names of many thousands of you—5,000 at last count—have been leaked onto the Internet. It’s pretty much the most egregious leak of this sort that I can ever remember, because now the whole world will know you downloaded Hot Chicks Doing Stuff Vols. 1-9! → Read More
Want an easy Halloween custom? Buy this $450 Iron Man briefcase from Entertainment Earth, don your best suit and sunglasses, and go as Tony Stark. The ladies will love it and at least you’re briefcase will look the part even if your frumpy nerd frame doesn’t exactly scream superhero. Entertainment Earth’s replica is finished in bright red aluminum with leather pockets and a laser cut EVA foam complete with an Stark logo inside. Of course it doesn’t contain the Mark V armor inside, but that’s probably for the best. It’s not like you have an Arc Reactor embedded in your chest. [Entertainment Earth via Baller House] → Read More
As you may have heard, AOL’s CEO Tim Armstrong had some fairly significant news to announce at TechCrunch Disrupt this morning.
Yes, AOL is acquiring TechCrunch and all of our properties and yes, we will be joining the AOL Technology Network. If you missed the live feed, we have videos of the on-stage announcement and co-editor Erick Schonfeld’s backstage interview with Armstrong. See videos ahead. → Read More
Do you need a lot of storage? I mean, an amount that can be officially described as a shit-ton? But the only requirement you have is that the device has to be the size of a toaster. Well, buddy, do I have good news for you. Let me introduce you to the Seagate BlackArmor NAS 440. → Read More
You may not have heard of GreenDot, a $2 billion public company, but you’ve seen their products everywhere — they’re largely responsible for the pre-paid credit cards that litter retail outlets around the country. Last night, we wrote a look at Green Dot’s past, and for good reason: today at TechCrunch Disrupt, Green Dot founder and CEO Steve Streit and celebrated Sequoia Capital Partner Michael Moritz took the stage to talk about Green Dot, entrepreneurship, and what makes Moritz such a successful investor. Our own Michael Arrington moderated.
The discussion kicked off with a brief history of Green Dot. Streit recounted how he had started the company in his home over a decade ago, when he decided he wanted to give young people a way to buy things online (online purchases generally require the user to have a credit card). Streit says that at the time, these cards were called “host-based stored value cards”, which isn’t exactly a marketable product to consumers. → Read More
“Something interesting is about to happen.”
That was what Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s opening remark at our TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco today. He continued on to say that the people in the audience represent another transition in the ways people use computers. We now have “an augmented version of humanity,” Schmidt said. The future is about getting computers to do the things we’re not good at.
Schmidt noted that it’s ridiculous that humans and not computers drive cars. “Your car should drive itself. It just makes sense,” Schmidt said. “It’s a bug that cars were invented before computers,” Schmidt remarked. → Read More
Talking about the geography, proximity to Stanford and other “ingredients” that make San Francisco a great place to incubate startups here at TCDisrupt, San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom gave a laundry list of San Francisco startups including Twitter, Zynga, and Foursquare.
Only problem? Foursquare is actually located in the Village Voice building, in New York City.
Note: While Foursquare does technically have “office space” in San Francisco, they are sharing it with another startup, Square. Perhaps avid TechCrunch reader Newsom was referring to this post while up on stage? → Read More
At TechCrunch Disrupt, an audience member just asked Google CEO Eric Schmidt a question about what he thinks of Twitter, and whether Google is buying them. Schmidt declined to answer the latter question but did provide interesting commentary on the first query.
He said: Twitter strikes me as being a very important platform (not surprising, Schmidt actually joined Twitter last year and has used it from time to time). What was interesting was Schmidt’s commentary on Twitter’s potential. He said that “Twitter should be able to come up with advertising and monetization products that are very lucrative.” → Read More
Hardee’s is apparently turning 50 this month (they have a Facebook page saying as much) and they want you to know they like you even if you may consider their food beneath your delicate palate. However, knowing our readership would never turn their nose up at free Country Fried Steak and Gravy Sandwich Smorgasbord for 20, I’ve decided to abandon our traditional locavore tendencies and stoop to offering you the $50 Hardee’s Gift Card they wanted to send us. → Read More
Roku is quickly turning into a major source within the streaming community and its just-announced deal with Ooyala will likely bring even more content to the massive install base. The deal allows publishers to utilize an Ooyala-made, turn-key operation to create a custom Roku channel.
This is a big move for the video distributor as it suddenly gives publishers a totally new demographic to target along by bringing their content to the livingroom. Content can be shot with a big screen in mind. It truly opens new doors for Ooyala users such as Alloy Digital, which is the first content partner to implement the Roku custom channel. → Read More
