Turkish courts have famously banned video sharing juggernaut YouTube several times since March 2007. The site still isn’t accessible, despite the fact that Turkey’s president Abdullah Gül used his Twitter account last June to express disapproval of the country’s blocking of YouTube. Gül at the time said he had instructed officials to find legal ways of allowing access.
But now we’re getting multiple tips about Turkey imposing a new ban on video sharing site Vimeo (an IAC company), and chatter on Twitter suggests this is in fact the case – see #censorshipinturkey and #vimeo for more. → Read More
Murata’s Awesome Unicycle Robots Get A 2010 Upgrade Amazon Will Sell 5 Million Kindles (Kindlen?) This Year Don’t Believe The Hype, Tablets Aren’t Going To Be This Year’s Must-Have Gift Nintendo 3DS: First Titles, Final Design, And More Details Revealed Kobo Reader To Be Pre-Loaded On BlackBerry PlayBook → Read More
E-commerce platform eSellerPro has raised £2m from Notion Capital. It says it will use the new funds to invest in sales, marketing and customer service to “further drive and support huge demand” across the UK, European and U.S. markets, which has already seen the company processes more than £150m in annual sales.
For Notion Capital, which invests in early to mid-stage Internet-based startups, it represents the 8th fund investment since being founded in late 2009. → Read More
Yesterday, at Disrupt it took a long time for the judges to decide to award the top prize to Qwiki, the visual information consumption service that presents information in a fluid assemblage of photos, videos, and spoken words. It’s the kind of service that would demo really great on an iPad, where you want to just sit back and watch as information is presented to you. Although the co-founders Doug Imbruce and Louis Monier showed a concept video of an iPhone wake-up app based on the service, they only actually showed it working on a laptop in Flash. During the deliberations backstage, the question was raised whether it would even work on the iPad.
Well, it turns out that it will and Qwiki already has an iPad prototype in development. One of the Qwiki engineers milling around backstage after the awards ceremony showed off one of the iPad prototype’s features (the ability to zoom a video to full-screen in the middle of a Qwiki). The engineer kind of has a Double-Rainbow moment over it. SGN CEO Shervin Pishevar, who is an investor in Qwiki, captured the video above. → Read More
Nokia’s first Symbian^3 powered device, the Nokia N8, has now started shipping to all those proud Nokia fans that pre-ordered it.
The N8 will be Nokia’s last N-series device to run Symbian (they’re switching their high-end devices to Meego), and comes with a 3.5″ display, HDMI out, and a simply stunning 12MP camera. I miss having a good camera in my phone.
Previous rumours have said that it could come to AT&T early next year.
Follow the break for the full press release. → Read More
If you’ve been itching for the R2-D2 edition of Motorola’s Droid 2, then you should probably head on over to Verizon’s site right now, as the world’s favourite unintelligible Droid is now up for sale. It’ll cost you $249 (after an instant $100 online discount) with a two-year contract, or $599 without, and comes bundled with the special edition multimedia dock, a set of Motorola headphones, and an 8GB MicroSD card. This phone probably won’t stay in stock for long, though, so you should jump on it ASAP. [via Droid Life] → Read More
The Windows Phone 7 leaks keep on coming thick n fast, with yet another device showing off its bad self on the web. This time around it’s HTC’s high-end Mondrian (which is a code name for one of the many WinPho7 devices that HTC plan to release at or near launch). → Read More
We’ve seen Samsung’s GT-i8700 in both photo and video form, but this is the first we’ve seen of the next in their Omnia line.
Taking a page from HTC’s playbook, Samsung have decided to honour Microsoft’s latest mobile OS by skipping digits 3 through 6, and naming the follow-up to the Omnia 2 the Omnia 7. → Read More
If you haven’t powered up the ol’ Xbox 360 yet this evening, and you signed up for the Xbox 360 System Software Beta, you might want to go do that now. It’s live, and apparently has some very tasty updates to the UI, Avatars, the ESPN app, Netflix search capabilities, and something to do with that music player that no one bought. [via Joystiq] → Read More
If you’re in the market for an Android phone, but find the sheer number of devices, carriers, and plans overwhelming, then you’re not alone. Android has exploded, and there are more smartphones available now than ever before. So, what can you do?
Google have heard your cries, and have now launched their Google Phone Gallery, which offers a near-complete list of all the Android devices available to you. Best of all (at least for me as an Australian) is that it also covers carriers outside of the US. → Read More
The votes have been tallied. The judges have weighed in. A battlefield of twenty-seven startups was whittled down to a final, elite group of seven. And now the winner has been chosen: Qwiki has taken the top prize at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco.
In addition to a $50,000 grand prize, the company has just been handed the Disrupt Cup, taking over possession from Disrupt NYC winner Soluto. Upon receiving the cup, CEO Doug Imbruce exclaimed, “Let’s change the world!” → Read More
Kobo certainly seems to be hot right now, what with their wireless Kobo reader coming out and all. Well, here’s another feather for Kobo’s e-cap: the Kobo reader software will come preloaded on the BlackBerry PlayBook. → Read More
Love your iPad’s form factor, but don’t like iOS? Not sure there are really a lot of you out there, but the post must go on regardless. Hacker Hexxeh has posted a picture of what appears to be Chromium (the open-source Chrome-based OS) running on an iPad. → Read More
Pioneer announced two new speaker systems for DJs and music producers. Both systems are active reference, and product studio quality sound in a compact package. Expect to pay for this level of quality of course, the 5-inch DJ05 will set you back $899, and the 8-inch S-DJ08 will cost $1199 when they come out this January. Check out the press release after the jump. → Read More
The TechCrunch Disrupt Startup Battlefield is approaching its dramatic conclusion, and the 7 finalists remaining are making their closing arguments in front of a panel of all-star Silicon Valley judges. Here are their questions and the startups’ answers, along with links to our past coverage of each company.
Judges:
Kevin Rose
Marissa Mayer
Jason Goldman
Ron Conway
Roelof Botha → Read More
Big news for Wii players, Nintendo is working on a new controller, the Wii Remote Plus. They are combining the best qualities of the Wii Remote and the Wii MotionPlus, but little else is currently available about the new controller. Nintendo has stated that they will be releasing more information in the near future. → Read More
How exciting. iFixit found a8GB of flash memory courtesy of Samsung and a lot of the same chips and bits found inside the iPhone and iPad. There’s even solder points for a dock connector lending to the thought that the Apple TV is nothing more than a repackaged iPhone minus certain parts. See, I told you it was exciting. You can keep your high going by clicking over to iFixit for even more fun. → Read More
“Environmentalists get in the way…and do more damage than they know,” said Vinod Khosla, one of the world’s leading clean tech investors, today at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco. Why? Self-described environmentalists demand or adopt technology that sounds promising without a sense of its true cost or impact to the environment. “Painting your roof white is better for the environment than driving a Prius or similar vehicle,” Khosla pointed out.
The green movement contrarian famously invested in a business that aims to make coal power cleaner (Calera) with carbon sequestration. The very notion displeases environmentalists who are concerned about the way coal is mined, as well as emissions from coal-burning plants. → Read More
Today at our TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco, Google’s Marissa Mayer took the stage to talk a bit with our own Michael Arrington. After she revealed a couple new Google Instant features, she went right into another topic: social.
Michael (of course) asked Mayer to disclose Google’s plans for their upcoming social strategy. Mayer (of course) would not do that. But then Michael turned the discussion to a social product Google does currently offer: Orkut. To hear Mayer tell it, the service never caught on in the U.S. simply because it was far too slow after its initial launch. → Read More
