The Nintendo 3DS is coming out next year. It will miss this year’s holiday season. That makes Nintendo investors sad. Actually, it does. Why? The 3DS was supposed to come out this year. → Read More
The TechCrunch staff has been pretty busy these last few days, what with throwing and covering a conference and all, but our excellent event photographers (Dave Getzschman, Max Whittaker, and Aaron Morris) have been even busier. They’ve taken hundreds of shots, all far better than those I could manage during the panels and chats, and they’re all collected at the TechCrunch Flickr page.
I’ve sifted through them and collected a few of what I felt were the best. Feel free to use these in any way you see fit, as long as you give credit to TechCrunch and the photographer. → Read More
Don’t go rioting in the streets or anything but apparently there are some small icons in the iOS SDK that show the HDR On and HDR Off logos in standard and “retina” resolution. This could mean that the 3GS could feasibly support HDR photo shoots although it probably actually means that Apple simply created a high-def version of all its icons and this one slipped past the censors. → Read More
Joe Wilcox at BetaNews has posted a must-read article in the wake of the announcement – made at TechCrunch Disrupt SF – that the Redmond software giant would be transitioning all its Windows Live Spaces users to Automattic‘s WordPress.com platform.
You may recall Dharmesh Mehta, Director of Product Management for Windows Live, stating that there were roughly 30 million active Windows Live Spaces accounts.
Wilcox, however, has managed to obtain internal e-mail messages exchanged between (yet unnamed) Microsoft employees that suggest far lower numbers. → Read More
eBuddy, the swiss army knife of web and mobile instant messaging services, this morning announced that it has achieved over 100 million downloads of its mobile applications since its 2007 debut, thus stepping in the footsteps of the likes of Facebook, Google (Maps), and Opera (Mini) when it comes to the number of app downloads reached.
In case you’re not familiar with eBuddy, the service basically enables users around the world to chat for free in one, aggregated interface across most major IM networks, including AIM, Facebook Chat, Google Talk, ICQ, MySpace, Windows Live Messenger and Yahoo Messenger. → Read More
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
You guys need to sleep with eachother. Actually, let’s clarify that. You can “sleep rough” for one night to raise money for homeless kids. Plus it’s an awesome way to make contacts. Did we say that? Yes.
Let’s be cynical for a moment. Byte Night is a UK-wide charity event from the technology industry – more the corporate “I.T.” world than startups – which has been going for 10 years. Every year mostly corporate technology CEOs and executives bed down in sleeping bags to support and raise awareness for the charity Action for Children, raising over £550,000. This year there will be 700 sleepers across all Byte Night locations, including London, Reading, Cambridge, Manchester and Edinburgh, all on 8th October.
But frankly let’s cut to the chase here. → Read More
Roaming the Startup Alley at TechCrunch Disrupt I came across Teamly, a new web app designed to help businesses manage their employees better. Yes, I know that sounds familiar, but what I liked about it was that this was a super, super simple app compared to a lot of the feature-crammed companies out there in this space.
The issue here is that a lot of corporate systems for managing people are really not designed for small businesses. They are just too complex, being packed full of to-do’s, tasks and projects. So Teamly is out to try and makes all that performance monitoring way easier. → Read More
