http://player.ooyala.com/player.swf?embedCode=83OWtxMTrj42breWai40MczwjirhbakO&version=2 GoPro isn’t a new name in the sports camera world. People have been strapping their cams to motorcycles, surfboards, and cars for some time now and their latest model brings high-def video for a bit less. The HD Hero 960 offers most of what the big brother HD Hero does, but for nearly half the price. You might not mind what’s missing, though. → Read More
Born from the cradle of Disrupt’s NY Hackathon, GroupMe is turning the codefest into something of a company tradition. The startup, which officially launched in August and recently raised $850,000 from a few prominent investors, took the stage on Sunday at the San Francisco Design Center to pitch their latest hack in 60 seconds or less. → Read More
This weekend, 450 or so developers descended upon the San Francisco Design Center to hack. The result? Some really cool/interesting/crazy stuff being made at our TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon. On Sunday, it was time to present before our selection of judges: Cyan Bannister, Brett Bullington, Rebekah Cox, Chris Dixon, Bradley Horowitz, Dean Hovey, Michael Marquez, Christopher Poole, Joshua Schachter, and Mike Schroepfer.
After 86 60-second presentations on stage, the judges went backstage to pick the ones they felt put their time to best use last night (and/or gave the best presentation on little or no sleep).
Updated: Video with the winner ahead. → Read More
Dan Lyons raises a provocative question in his latest Newsweek article: Is Silicon Valley still solving hard problems? After all, the “silicon” in Silicon Valley comes from its being the birthplace of the microprocessor. The magic of shrinking circuits gave rise to the computer industry, the Internet, and all of its offspring. In contrast, Lyons suggests that today’s Silicon Valley companies are not tackling big enough challenges that could fundamentally alter the economy and or how people live. He points to Facebook, Twitter, and Zynga, “the three hottest tech companies today,” as proof that Silicon Valley is nothing more than Silly Valley.
There are so many things wrong with Lyons’ argument that I don’t know where to start. For one thing, he hangs the entire thing on quotes from Nathan Myrhvold, the former Microsoft CTO who is now best known as a patent extortionist. So I guess it’s Myrhvold’s argument. But using a patent troll’s complaints about the lack of “real” innovation in Silicon Valley as your main example is flawed. Let’s separate the argument from its source. The question on its own is still important, and should not be rejected out of hand → Read More
A new electric vehicle, the Coda Sedan, is set to hit the streets stateside, starting in California in 2010 and expanding sales to Hawaii in 2011. In the U.S. the Coda Sedan is priced to compete with the Chevy Volt and Nissan Leaf at $44,900 before federal and state discounts or incentives.
Reports by Car And Driver revealed that the Coda Sedan is a four-door, five-seat, totally electric vehicle with a body and chassis licensed from Mitsubishi. The body and chassis will be modified and assembled in China then shipped to California for the installation of electrical systems. → Read More
Intrigued by the experience of viewing a friend’s Twitter timeline, angel investor Shervin Pishevar collaborated with 15 year-old iTunes Instant creator Stephen Ou to create Twtroulette.com after a week of work.
With Twtroulette, users can now visit what industry notables like Mike Arrington, investor Brad Feld, and YouTube’s Hunter Walk see when they open Twitter i.e. what it’s like to follow the people they are following. People can also volunteer their own timelines by adding themselves to the directory. And, like Chatroulette, there’s a random function so one can shuffle through profiles if they’re feeling lucky. → Read More
If angel investor Ron Conway wants us to post something here on TechCrunch, we’re going to post it. This morning he asked us to do just that.
This is a clarification, he says, to the private email slamming investors over “AngelGate.” That private email became significantly less private last week when we posted it here on TechCrunch. → Read More
Either a lot of Techies are into really kinky things, or there is a Twitter worm going around. It looks like a ton of people just started sending out Tweets saying “I Like Anal Sex With Goats.” This Tweet is followed by another one that says “WTF” and includes a link. Do NOT click on this link; it appears that it will cause you to send out the same series of Tweets from your account. It looks like this is happening across third-party clients and on Twitter.com
As commenter Andrew Nacin points out, the bug is called a cross-site request forgery. Web programming security 101. It should only affect twitter.com, as it relies on an iframe of twitter.com and a little JavaScript to post the tweet form (twice). It seems that if you click this link “http://pastehtml.com/view/1b7xk3b.html”, and you are signed into Twitter, it will autotweet two Tweets with the sex with goats bit and the WTF link. → Read More
If you live in the San Francisco Bay Area, you have no reason not to attend the Hackathon Demo session this morning, which is free and open to the public. For late stragglers, there are still available seats at the San Francisco Design Center Concourse.
However, because we know most of you will not be able to join us in person to witness the thrilling conclusion to SF Hackathon 2010, we are streaming the entire event live, starting at 11am PST, thanks to Ustream. So sit back, relax and enjoy the parade of blink-and-you’ll-miss-it 60 second presentations and root for your favorite in the comments. Watch the feed ahead. → Read More
Picture this: late night coding, new and tenuous liaisons, the driving desire to create something great and just a dash of booze. No, I’m not talking about that movie, I’m talking about the pressure cooker that is TechCrunch Disrupt’s Hackathon.
With less than 4 hours until show time, the programmers, designers and entrepreneurs have been slaving away (or at least that’s the expectation) through the night to make something stage-worthy and coherent. Starting at Sunday 11:00am EST, you can watch the frenzy as the teams deliver 60-second presentations in rapid-fire succession to our panel of expert judges. However, before we hurtle to the triumphant, disoriented end, let’s savor the blood, sweat and Redbull: please enjoy this trailer (sorry, I didn’t have time to find a creepy soundtrack).See video ahead. → Read More
Earlier this week, I attended Accelerate 2010 in Singapore, a two-day tech and mobile industry event that attracted no less than 2,000 international attendees. Organizer and major telco SingTel (which boasts around 350 million customers worldwide) offered up a slew of presentations and panels. But giving in to my penchant for discovering Asian startups, I will just focus on Accelerate’s so-called “Asia’s Top 50 Apps” program in the following (head over to e27 for more coverage of the event).
Here are thumbnail sketches (of varying depth) of all these 50 Asian mobile apps and web services, starting with the top 10 and in no particular order (luckily, almost all products listed up after the break are available in English). → Read More
If the new Ping sidebar that was launched today as a part of iTunes 10.0.1 looks familiar, perhaps it’s because you’ve been using the iLike Sidebar — an iTunes (and Windows Media Player) plug-in that does pretty much the same thing. We know at least one person finds the two very similar: Ali Partovi, the co-founder of iLike.
“I just hope Apple also copies iLike’s mission of democratizing music by empowering artists, especially the little guys. With Ping’s restrictions so far on artist signup, the major labels are the winners, not artists, and that breaks my heart,” Partovi told us today when asked about Ping’s newest feature. → Read More
Pizza has just arrived for the second time (!) here at the TC Disrupt Hackathon at the San Francisco Design Center Concourse and it’s finally cooled down after weathering one of the hottest days we’ve experienced in San Francisco in awhile.
I’ve been here for about seven hours and met some great and incredibly nerdy folks. Some of us are working hard, some of us are hardly working and some of us are already asleep at 8:00 PM PST. → Read More
In a little over 24 hours, the sun will rise on the second TechCrunch Disrupt conference, brilliantly titled “TechCrunch Disrupt: San Francisco“. (Rejected titles include “TechCrunch Disrupt 2: Money Never Sleeps”, “TechCrunch Disrupt 2: For a Few Dollars More”, and “TechCrunch Disrupt 2: I Still Know What You Did Last Summer”.)
For those of you who missed the inaugural Disrupt, held in New York back in May, the event is a mash-up of two formats: a start-up competition where 24 as-yet-unlaunched businesses compete for $50,000 and an old bowling trophy The TechCrunch Disrupt Cup – plus a star-studded conference where the likes of Eric Schmidt and Barry Diller take to the stage to inspire entrepreneurs and attempt to out-swear Carol Bartz. It’s a ridiculously impressive line-up, with a ratio of three Chabillionaires to every Chamillionaire. → Read More
Instead of another boring lecture, last week my students at UC-Berkeley got quite a treat: a lively discussion with TechCrunch founder Mike Arrington. I once described Mike as a cross between Oprah Winfrey and Howard Stern; so I was ready for a little controversy. But he ended up lighting such a big fire, that I’ve been bombarded with questions from students about their education and careers. The questions aren’t just coming from Berkeley; after the discussion was posted on TechCrunch, students at Duke asked me to discuss this at a keynote I am giving at their entrepreneurship symposium on Wednesday; and students at other schools, from as far as India and Singapore, have asked for advice. So I’ll just respond here in the hope of quenching this fire. → Read More
“The rules of media have completely been broken,” according to Say Media CEO Matt Sanchez. Because we’re no longer living in a world where print media is sold on a newstand and video media is only presented through cable television, everything is changing. And as old companies have to adopt to that change, there are opportunities for new empires to sprout up. And that’s exactly what Say Media is going for — and that’s why VideoEgg bought Six Apart last week, forming this new company.
I sat down with Sanchez the day after the deal was disclosed (we first broke the news of the deal the day before it happened) to get his take on why such a deal makes sense and what it means going forward. → Read More
In a week marked by Twitter and Facebook service fails, Google just became the third huge web service to experience turbulence, with primarily Brazilian social network Orkut being hit hard today by the “Bom Sabado” javascript worm, which infected user streams with a scrap with the text “Bom Sabado” and then automatically signed up those users for groups. → Read More
It launched with much fanfare, but I don’t think it was unreasonable to call Ping a dud out of the gate. While pretty much everyone initially signed up to try it out, a few days later, the activity stream seemed to trickle to almost nothing. And there was a good reason for that: Apple’s social network for music made it very hard to share stuff — you know, be social. But an update today makes it at least a thousand times better.
iTunes 10.0.1 released this morning brings some big Ping updates with it. Most notably, you can now use Ping with your own iTunes library. Previously, you could only share songs on Ping through the iTunes Store — a big difference. This basically meant that even if you already owned a song, you had to hunt it down in the iTunes Store to share it. This was almost laughably tedious, and it ensured that no one would use Ping for more than a couple days. → Read More
There are fewer than 48 hours to go before TechCrunch Disrupt kicks off, and we know you’re all aching to see some of the industry’s best investors, entrepreneurs and startups take the stage. We’ve got a little something to tide you over though the home stretch: yep, it’s the latest episode of OMG/JK.
This week fellow TechCrunch writer MG Siegler and I talk about the elusive (but totally real) Facebook phone, the reintroduction of Google Voice onto the Apple App Store, and the revamped #NewTwitter. We also briefly touch on Yahoo’s roadmap, only to realize that we still don’t have a clue what they’re up to. → Read More
