Hexbugs are all about fun. You’ve probably seen these things in stores for years. Radio Shack is the exclusive seller of the Spider model this holiday season and I must say, these things are fantastic. They should provide you with enough cubicle entertainment to more than justify the $24.99 price tag. Be warned though, there are only two discrete IR channels, which somewhat limits the size of your spider army to just a pair of marauding robots. The control schemes are simple enough that most 3-year-olds should be able to operate them if you wanna share. But you don’t have to share. This isn’t kindergarten. → Read More
We see cool gadgets all the time here at TechCrunch. But not many of them can help paraplegics walk again. This one does.
Berkeley Bionics has created an exoskeleton product called eLegs that literally gets these people up and walking. Arm swings on crutches control the legs and tell them when to walk. Time Magazine calls it one 50 best inventions of 2010, and they are clearly right. Technology like this may eliminate the concept of a wheelchair for millions of people with spinal cord injuries, stroke, MS, etc.. Here’s it in action: → Read More
There’s nothing particularly “new” about the use of ATM skimmers, but a recent report from the European ATM Security Team (EAST) has reminded us all of the dangers. What evildoers do is construct a skimmer out of common materials, including a magnetic reader and somewhere to store the resulting data. Back in the day you’d use a tape recorder, but nowadays you can affix a cheap portable audio player and you’re good to go. I’m almost certain I’ve read articles to this effect in issues of 2600 over the years. → Read More
The man who just bought one of the first Apple I computers, which sold at auction in London ysterday for £133,250 ($210,000), is Italian businessman Marco Boglione. But who is he?
Well for starters he’s President of Italian holding company BasicNet SpA, which owns the trademarks Kappa, Robe di Kappa, Jesus Jeans, K-Way and Superga. Kappa, for instance, is a global sports clothing brand.
BasicNet was founded in 1983, and listed on the Milan Stock Exchange in 1999. In 2003, the total sales of products marketed under the group’s brands exceeded EUR200 million. → Read More
Oh, XDA-Developers, how I love thee. You’re a haven for hardcore handset hackers everywhere, with much of the ROM hackery that makes our Android handsets oh-so-much better going on within your virtual walls. Every once in a while, though, ROM hackers get bored of the same stuff day-in-day-out — and when they do, awesome stuff like this Android-based garage door opener is born. → Read More
I had the privilege of joining the Monaco Media Forum in Monaco recently. It was a fairly star-studded event: opened and closed by Prince Albert, dinner at Hotel de Paris, Monte Carlo, great hotel etc. But to be honest it was the debates in the conference room that were the best thing about the event, and I had a lot of fun on my closing panel of the week: “Silicon Envy: Will Europe ever build the next new media giant?”
Now, admittedly with such a subject we had to run through the usual arguments, which I hope are now well known. Silicon Valley is the product of over 50+ years of history, Europe is only just getting going, America has one big unified market, Europe is splintered into many etc etc etc.
Luckily, however, I think my fellow panelists and I moved the debate on to what I call “New Tech Europe”. Namely, people in their 20s now coming out with agressive startups which go international from the word go and where the founders are not afraid to get out of their home markets and scale globally. Ironically this takes far less money than it used to, hence why VCs are having to adjust their model and Angel investors are being asked to step up to the plate. → Read More
Janet Napolitano, the head of Homeland Security, says that increased security measures may have to expand beyond the nation’s airports if we’re ever to fully protect ourselves from evildoers. Napolitano, seen here, told Charlie Rose, of PBS, that the nation’s subways and train depots may be the next target of TSA‘s efforts. Think of it: every time you hop on the A train in New York City you’d need to pass through one of those full-body scanners or face an enhanced pat-down. → Read More
I recently purchased Rainbow Six Vegas 2 on Xbox Live. My friend has it and we wanted to have a coop campaign marathon. It didn’t work and that’s not all of it. → Read More
In what has to be a first, luxury auto manufacturer Porsche will be celebrating its one millionth Facebook fan by carving the names of fans who sign up through the social network onto a special (and probably very unattractive) Porsche model to be displayed in the Porsche museum in Stuttgart, Germany.
For most people (myself included) “Liking” that Porsche on Facebook is the closest we’re going to get to a Porsche in real life. → Read More
Earlier today, Reuters ran a short interview with Twitter co-founder Biz Stone in which he talked about the possibility of tweets being used to create a “Twitter News Service”. It seems pretty likely that Stone was just running with a hypothetical idea that was on his mind at the time of the interview. (Okay, it seems very likely.) And in fact, it’s hardly the first time a Twitter co-founder has talked about similar ideas in the press — which nothing ever came of (at least not yet). But that doesn’t mean it’s not an interesting idea. As Stone tells Reuters about Twitter, ”From the very beginning this has seemed almost as if it’s a news wire coming from everywhere around the world.”
Back in the early days of Twitter, it wasn’t the mundane updates from web people that made the service so interesting to me, it was when it started being a go to place for realtime news. This started with Twitter’s ability to spread links faster than other services at the time. But it quickly escalated into something much more when an earthquake would happen somewhere else in the world, or a massive fire would break out. People would be there, on the ground, tweeting about it in realtime. It made the traditional news outlets look like absolute dinosaurs. So it shouldn’t be any surprise that now, a few years later, many of them are using the service on a daily basis to augment their news coverage. → Read More
Is Europe poised to miss out on the massive growth in mobile in Africa? In the last couple of years I’ve noticed a small but significant trend – European tech people taking more of an interest in Africa. The trouble is we are talking about tiny numbers. I know perhaps only three entrepreneurs who’ve done this. But clearly they are on to something and mobile is going to be a big component of this.
According to new figures from Stat Counter the highest share of mobile web usage is coming from emerging countries, and among them those in Africa are amongst the highest mobile web users. → Read More
If you’ve been rocking out to SlingPlayer on your laptop, this is pretty good news. SlingPlayer for iPad is now available for $29.99 from the app store. Yeah, you read that right. $29.99. But hopefully if you love Sling the way most people love Sling, this will be a small price to pay. Not much else to say. If you’ve used SlingPlayer, or any other media player/DVR for that matter, you’re looking at the same features. Sling, obviously, allows you to transfer video from your own set-top-box to any other device, including browsers. It works with the Slingbox SOLO or PRO-HD. Sling Media, Inc., a wholly-owned subsidiary of EchoStar Corporation (Nasdaq: SATS), today announced the availability of the SlingPlayer Mobile™ player for the Apple iPad. Available for purchase on the iTunes App Store, SlingPlayer Mobile software for iPad lets Slingbox® owners extend their living room TV experience to their iPad and takes advantage of the iPad’s high-resolution, 9.7-inch LED-backlit display for great video quality. The revamped program guide uses the iPad’s intuitive native interface, and a recent channels feature puts a viewer’s recent channels at his fingertips. Product Page → Read More
So let me give you the backdrop here. One of the bands I play in is a Nashville group called Bucktown Kickback. There are a cast of musicians that play and tour with the group and over the years, I have gotten to know many of them. One, in particular, is a guitarist from Ann Arbor Michigan named Alex Anest. I play a gig with him, maybe… once every year or two and over time, I have seen him play through several unique looking guitar pedals. I finally asked him where all these cool pedals came from and he deadpanned “Jay, I make pedals.” That was 5 years ago. → Read More
Runa Capital, a new Russian VC fund that launched in August, has announced its first investment: $2 million in OnAir3G, which is described as a “voice-enabled mobile social networking platform”.
Notably, the Moscow-based startup is founded by Andrey Vasilevsky who also co-founded SmartCom, a developer of navigation software for Symbian, Windows Mobile and J2ME, which was sold to the Russian search engine and Internet juggernaut Yandex. However, little else is known at this stage as the company isn’t set to publicly launch until Q2 2011, aside from the fact that OnAir3G is in the mobile social networking space and is focused on voice communication over text. → Read More
I’ve been allowed the great privilege of enjoying a spirited discussion on this very site with a number of die-hard fans of the Notion Ink Adam tablet. In over 135 comments directed at us by this post I’ve been lambasted, my integrity angrily derided, and I have been compared to a set of hirsute female genitalia. You claim that I have some sort of bias against this product or perhaps any product that is not Apple or Microsoft or some other brand name. I’m here to tell you that I do not have a bias against the Adam in the way you assume I do. I have a bias against bad products in general, and based on my experience in this industry and I believe that aside from a few die-hards who will admonish me to try pry their Adam tablets from their cold dead hands, most of you will be disappointed. → Read More
Popular cartoon cat Hello Kitty is getting another gadget treatment. This time, it’s a super-cute speaker dock for the iPod or iPhone, offered by a Japanese company called CAV [JP]. The dock is an update to a very similar model CAV started offering in August. → Read More
ZipList, which lets you manage and share your grocery lists online and on the go, has raised a little over $2 million in funding, a SEC filing reveals.
ZipList combines a robust recipe search engine with a free shopping list management service that allows users to easily create and manage grocery lists and efficiently share them with others. → Read More
New York City art world startup Art.sy, which launched at our first TechCrunch Disrupt and won the Rookie Award, is raising $1.25 million from a very impressive group of super angels on both coasts.
The investors include Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Wendi Murdoch (wife of News Corp. founder Rupert Murdoch), Jack Dorsey (Twitter, Square), VC Jim Breyer, art “czarina” Dasha Zhukova, Founder Collective, Keith Rabois (Square, Slide, PayPal), Charlei Cheever (Quora, Facebook), Dave Morin (Path, Facebook), and David Kidder (Clickable). The round was led by Josh Kushner through Thrive Capital. → Read More
We can’t say we’re really surprised: according to market research company Gfk, smartphones are getting increasing popular in Asia, with Android now being the region’s most popular OS for this type of handsets. Cell phones with the Google software on board have reportedly enjoyed brisk sales in that region in the second and third quarters of 2010. → Read More
When you love something so much – as much as this guy Pascal likes Star Trek’s LCARS UI – that you recreate it down to the smallest detail, you’d better be willing to go all the way. While he has skinned Windows to look like a screen on the deck of the Enterprise, why doesn’t he have his girlfriend dress up like a Klingon? Why aren’t there tribbles in his kitchen? Where is the Borg? WTF, Pascal. You don’t cut and run when it comes to religion. → Read More
