Social products are an interesting bird. For even the most experienced product designer, social products prove an elusive lover. While there are many obvious truths in social products, there are also alot of ways to design them poorly. Especially when you are deep in the moment making pixel-level decisions trying to remember what’s important, things may not be so clear.
The only magic I’ve found in designing compelling social products that have the best shot at breaking through the noise and capturing people’s time and money is in being extremely clear on how your social product meets a few key design principles. → Read More
Well here’s something to freak you out as you brave the Black Friday crowds today. (Remember: Matt wrote a nifty little survival guide for today’s insanity.) A local TV station in Florida has warned its viewers to be on the lookout for so-called electronic pickpockets. Using “a credit card scanner attached to a battery pack,” an evildoer can quite easily obtain sensitive credit and debit card information—without you even knowing! Yes: it’s yet another warning about the dangers of RFID. → Read More
Every year, Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) releases a hit list of the best robots the country has produced and gives their makers an award. And yesterday, the METI announced who will get the Robot Awards in 2010 [JP]. What follows is a list of all the robots that made the list. → Read More
CAT IS NOT FOR SALE Our good friend Phil Torrone sent us this list of cool homebrew deals on Chumby devices, Adafruit boards, and other goodness. Fist, you’ve got some Chumby-powered devices that are actually little Linux PCs. The Infocast, for example, is $129 on Best Buy. This thing has an 800MHz processor and small screen and can be used either as a little info monitor or as a fully-fledged Linux device. → Read More
Get thee to the Applery! Apple’s Black Friday deals are now up and you can grab: $101 off Macs including the iMac, MacBook Air, and MacBook $41 off of the iPad and the iPod Touch $21 off of the iPod Nano Free shipping on all Apple goodness A few more deals after the jump. → Read More
Welcome to Death/Star, a new show we are testing on TechCrunch TV. It’s a product review show with a twist. My co-host, CrunchGear editor John Biggs, and I give our opinions on three hot products. In the inaugural episode we cover the Android-powered Samsung Galaxy Tablet, photo-sharing app Instagram, and the Boxee Box.
To spice things up, we try to go beyond the traditional thumbs up/thumbs down to predict whether each product will end up in the graveyard (in which case we mark it for death) or become a bona fide hit (in which case we give it a star). Hence, the name: Death/Star. A surprise guest appears at the end and punks Biggs (the look on his face is classic). → Read More
The mobile check-in is not just a way to tell your friends where you are via FourSquare or Facebook Places, it is a marketing opportunity. Southwest Airlines is combining Facebook Places and charitable giving to the Make-A-Wish Foundation to encourage travelers to check into Southwest when they get to the airport.
From now through Christmas, Southwest Airlines will make a $1 donation in the form of free travel credit to the Make-A-Wish Foundation, which grants wishes to children with life-threatening medical conditions. Often these wishes involve travel, an Southwest will donate up to $300,000 in travel credit through this promotion. → Read More
It wasn’t easy accumulating the research data displayed in the following guide. I saw horrific sights working retail for seven long years in both a big box electronic store and a major shopping center. I saw things that will haunt me the rest of my days. I watched two kids get trampled by what I call Double-Wides because Circuit City clearanced-out Dreamcasts for $80 on Black Friday. I once hid behind a massive video display just for a few moments to myself during the chaos. I’ve seen people fight, bite, and trample other members of our human race just to save a few dollars. → Read More
To quote Dwight Hansen, I do know a thing or two about a thing or two and as such I’m allowed, sometimes, to prognosticate. Even as we thrust our fists into the air triumphantly when we snag the last tattered box containing a Kung Zhu hamster value bundle, the IT industry never sleeps and, like a shark, it must keep moving to survive. Based on what we’ve seen this year, let’s take a look at what we can expect to see next year when we once again fall into the Black Friday Breech. → Read More
Sony yesterday announced [JP] it’s ready to re-enter the Japanese market for e-books with the launch of two new e-readers – after having failed miserably between 2004 and 2007. In 2007, Sony pulled out of Japan and focused solely on markets outside Japan, especially the US. But according to the company, e-books will soon be the fourth pillar of its entertainment segment, next to music, movies, and video games. → Read More
A recurring refrain in my Twitter feed is the coded question, “11 or 13?” Despite it’s religious overtones, this is not a reference to passages in the Bible. It is a question familiar to any Apple-obsessed consumer: Should I get the 11-inch MacBook Air or the 13-inch?
If you’ve been asking yourself the same question, today the price difference will not be the deciding factor. Although the cheapest 11″ MacBook Air is still $999, a Black Friday deal on the the 13″ models makes the lower-end one with a 128 GB flash drive the same price as the higher-end 11″ model with the 128 GB flash drive. It is actually a dollar cheaper, $1,198 versus $1,199, and the battery lasts longer. → Read More
This is just getting silly. Yesterday, we reported on a new Chrome extension created by a developer that allowed you to scrape your Facebook contact information. Called “Facebook Doesn’t Own My Friends,” the extension provided a work around to import your friends contact information on Facebook into Gmail and CSV files. As we noted in our post, it appears that the extension has been taken down. It’s unclear who has actually taken the exporter down, but the implications are clear. The only companies that will provide these technologies are Facebook and Google, and this will probably involve a peace treaty of some sort.
So what got us to this dark place where ten minutes after the workaround was posted on TechCrunch, it was taken down? Nearly a month ago, Google began blocking Facebook API access to download Google contacts. Facebook hacked its way around that, and Google subsequently issued a statement that they were “disappointed”. Facebook Platform engineer Mike Vernal then responded in the comments of one of our blog posts about the slap fight, defending Facebook’s policy and calling it “consistent”. → Read More
Back in April, Japan’s largest cell phone carrier, NTT DoComo, began running a bizarre promotion campaign in Tokyo (which prompted me to go out and post this photo report on MobileCrunch). Docomo used Darth Vader in a number of weird posters and viral video clips, without saying why and what Vader was supposed to promote. → Read More
Last year, Google Checkout debuted a holiday savings promotion in time for Cyber Monday, the monday after Thanksgiving and Black Friday. It looks like Google has gotten a slight head start this year, and is now offering Black Friday promotions for Google Checkout promotions.
According an email sent to consumers from Google Checkout, Google will offer exclusive discounts of $5, $10, or $20 when you use the payments system for purchases on Buy.com, BlueNile, and others. You can find participating e-retailers on the deals homepage here. → Read More
A lot of people out there still seem to think that all blogs do is riff off of major media content. Reblog it, or just plain plagiarism. Most people know that most major news is now broken by blogs, but the prejudice is still out there.
One thing we abhor is “the unattributed rewrite,” When some publication takes a story that was broken by someone else and simply rewrites the same story in their own words without any attribution to the source of the story. It’s just not done by reputable sites, whether they’re blogs or mainstream media. A simple “the story was first broken by the Associated Press,” or whoever, is the honorable thing to do.
Speaking of the Associated Press, they’ve stepped in it again. → Read More
Well known comedian and tech icon Stephen Fry is happy for people to hack the new Xbox Kinect and play with it. That at least appears to be his intention, after he tweeted to his many followers that they should back a new thing called the OpenVizsla project. And it seems like quite a good idea.
A featured project on Kickstarter it promptly took $8,000 in a day (without any press attention). The group is shooting for $17,500 in 30 days and is already on $9,421 on its page. Stephen Fry has contributed money to the project here. → Read More
So, it appears that the first Chrome OS netbooks are set to launch in the next few weeks. And it now appears that the first ones will be Google-branded versions, built by a third-party manufacturer. And you can be sure that Google is already testing these internally, as they do this for basically all of their products leading up to launch. And a few more hints about them may reside in the Chromium issue tracker.
For several months, Google has been internally testing Chrome OS on a wide variety of netbooks. These have included Asus Eee machines, Lenovo machines, Dell machines, and a few others. How do I know? Because they’re often listed under “Type of computer” in bug reports. But more interesting has been the numerous references to “dogfood” machines. “Dogfooding” is the name given to the process of internally testing your own product. Again, Google has been doing this for months. → Read More
You want a video about your startup. You don’t have a huge budget. Video production companies are quoting you an arm-and-a-leg-price. Well now there’s a new option. Admittedly it’s not a tech company, but, in fairness, Newspepper and founder Hermione Way have been a staunch supporter of tech startups that they kind know how the space works.
Way says she is bringing a ‘fremium model to media production’. In essense that means giving students and graduates internships to create much cheaper video projects – but thus allowing the students to learn on the job and apply their skills practically before moving into the industry.The upshot? You can get a free video where the quality is not guaranteed, or you can pay the professional rate where it is. Now students join the site and basially get rated n their skills, so it’s a kind of community play.
There are lots of websites already connecting interns with internships; Enternships, Interninc Urbaninterns, internships.com, Internshipking to name a few. Whatever you think, it seems to have worked, working with Channel 4, NESTA and the BBC since 2008 (and TechCrunch). → Read More
The move to 4G is certainly happening, with Verizon, T-mobile, AT&T, and even MetroPCS all having rolled out (or at least having announced a timeframe to roll out) some variant of a 4G network.
And, whaddayaknow, Cellular South have also joined the 4G club, announcing last week their partnership with Samsung that will bring 700MHz LTE waves out to their part of the world, as well as two handsets in 2011. → Read More
In a move that cynics might claim is just cheap PR, busuu.com, the language learning community, has launched a campaign to save Busuu, a Cameroonian language with only 8 remaining speakers and on UNESCO’s list of ‘critically endangered’ languages. Yes, apparently, such a list does exist.
The Save Busuu campaign takes the form of a music video and learning pack, along with a social media campaign inviting users to create their own song in the near-extinct language. The aim is to raise awareness of the Busuu language (from which the European startup plucked its name) and to, ultimately, prevent its extinction, however lofty a goal that might be. → Read More
