At the beginning of October, we pulled the curtain back on a certain Jungle device from Panasonic, but there’s been little chatter since its dramatic debut. But in an email recently sent to some users, Panasonic appears to be fishing for testers for the device. Could we be approaching a public hands-on? → Read More
Two days after Internet whistleblower WikiLeaks released 251,287 U.S. diplomatic cables to major media organizations including the New York Times and Der Spiegel, international police organization Interpol has placed founder Julian Assange on its wanted list for “Sex Crimes,” in a warrant issued by the Public Prosecution Office in Gothenburg, Sweden.
The Interpol mediated charges here are in… → Read More
The Europas, the European Startup Awards, were held recently in London. It was the culmination of a month of online voting by the European tech startup industry for the finalists, where some 33,126 votes were cast across 23 categories, eight judges deliberated over the results and over 350 people joined the cream of Europe’s startups, VCs and entrepreneurs on the 31st story of stunning venue with… → Read More
Heartland Robotics today announced that it raised $20 million in a series B venture round led by Highland Capital Partners. Other investors include Sigma Partners and existing investors Bezos Expeditions and Charles River Ventures. The Boston-based company previously raised $7 million in August, 2009.
The founder of Heartland Robotics is Rodney Brooks, a former AI reseracher at MIT and one of… → Read More
*Now* do you people understand why Net Neutrality isn’t merely some thing that Slashdot-dwelling sysadmins argue about during lunchtime? Surely you’ve heard by now that Comcast, one of the largest Internet Service Providers in the U.S., has been fiddling with Netflix traffic? But no, Net Neutrality isn’t worth defending, right? → Read More
Reader Grant posted this comment when I asked for great Black Friday stories. His is the greatest:
some friends and I were hanging out, buying random stuff on Newegg, until about 11:30 on thursday. We then decided to head out to the mall area, and the lines were so long we wondered what to do. We were driving my Ford E-350 van, and the cargo bay happened to be full of about 30 two pound cooking… → Read More
Virgin’s somewhat highly-anticipated Project iPad magazine went live early this morning. Its focus is on “design, entertainment, technology, entrepreneurs” and its format is kin to other attempts at next-generation magazines, though I’d say this one is more successful.
Of course, it requires an iPad with 4.2 to enjoy, and while five or six million of those have been sold, not everybody will get a… → Read More
Is there no escape from the Playboy franchise? Jolt Online, the Ireland-based social games publisher that was acquired by GameStop last December, has unveiled its latest Facebook game: Playboy Party.
Described as featuring “pretty much all the things that you can imagine from a Facebook Playboy game” – I haven’t a clue what that means – the accompanying press release assures us that you’ll “find… → Read More
Earlier today, Winamp released a new version of its Android application that allowed users to sync their music wirelessly with their Windows desktop (disclosure: Winamp and TechCrunch are both owned by AOL). It’s a great feature, but in the race to become the ‘iTunes of Android’, another contender may already be about to lap Winamp.
We’ve been tracking DoubleTwist and its close affiliation with… → Read More
Back in July we wrote about bootleg film site TVShack.net rapidly moving offshore to the Australian-located TVShack.cc address in order to escape ICE’s shutdown of about nine sites. We took bets on when the feds would eventually shut down the new site, and lo and behold five months later the domain is seized in a takedown of about 80 or so other copyright infringing sites. → Read More
The European Commission has launched an investigation into Google after two vertical search engines submitted formal complaints that the firm had use its dominant position to crowd out and disappear results from these engines – as reports various outlets including Bloomberg and the BBC.
The EU is obliged to look into whether Google as purposely lowered the search rankings of price comparison… → Read More
The thin and light Dell Vostro V130 comes in multiple colors (including red) and weighs in a 3.5 lbs. What’s under the hood? An HDMI port, two USB port, and a Core i3 or i5 ULV processor. I know, right? It supports WiMAX, Bluetooth, and WiFi. → Read More
Well, so much for the G2′s much-knocked anti-tamper system. You know, that one that would reset the hardware to its original state if it detected it had been modified? Yep — it’s toast. Burnt, smoldering toast. → Read More
A mighty impressive 2.5 million Kinects have been sold so far. An even mightier impressive 4.1 Sony Moves have been sold, but that’s been available since September. Translation? People, for whatever reason, are still enthralled with motion control. And here I thought people got their rocks off with Wii Bowling a few years back, but apparently not. → Read More
I really loved my Kindle when I first got it. I love writing books, and I’m for anything that helps people consume and purchase more of them– I don’t care if I make a fraction of the royalties off electronic sales.
I was especially struck by how much I wished I’d had a Kindle in college. As a literature major I read about five books a week, not to mention all the textbook reading for other… → Read More
Back in August, at a conference in Europe, Google showed a little preview of the Chrome Web Store and noted that a launch would probably take place in October. While there were some hints of it coming along in October (including some pricing details that were apparently turned on by accident), it never came. And since today is the last day of November, I think it’s safe to say it’s not coming this… → Read More
Is there no escape from the Playboy franchise? Jolt Online, the Ireland-based social games publisher that was acquired by GameStop last December, has unveiled its latest Facebook game: Playboy Party.
Described as featuring “pretty much all the things that you can imagine from a Facebook Playboy game” – I haven’t a clue what that means – the accompanying press release assures us that you’ll “find… → Read More
Unfortunately, I’ve exhausted all of my Clásico references in that Windows Phone 7 post. How much sense would it make to use all of the references all over again? I mean, this time I could link to El País’s match report (“goals rain down in the Camp Nou like leaves in the autumn, in a natural manner, with a just rhythm, with a beautiful and serene shape, a sign of health and footbalistic… → Read More
MyTweetMag, launched quietly in the summer by Hamburg-based Sebastian Schuermanns, is a paper.li-like service that lets users create a ‘magazine’ based on links and other content pulled in from their Twitter stream.
However, where it differs slightly from paper.li is the degree of manual intervention that is required. Instead of automatically culling links from a user’s tweets and those of the… → Read More
Old Bill’s Effectology series is getting more and more complex. Take this post, for example. It allows you to turn a guitar into a Moog synthesizer using a bunch of EHX pedals. Obviously not everyone can recreate Switched On Bach with a git-fiddle and some boxes, but darn it, isn’t it great that someone somebody tried? → Read More
Back in July, I wrote about a nifty new startup called Standing Cloud that makes it easy to set up hosted installs of dozens of cloud-based applications — like WordPress, Drupal, or Trac — with a single click. Unfortunately, all our commenters seemed to care about was the company’s logo, which consisted of Papyrus font set against a plain white background.
Now Standing Cloud is back with a… → Read More
PlayStation 3 controllers are pretty nice. However, these are just a little bit nicer. For $34.99 Nyko is offering the Raven PS3 controller in standard and alternate configurations with soft-feel grip and a 25-hour battery. The controllers allow you to swap buttons and the “alternate” configuration offers a swap of the left analog stick and the D-pad. → Read More
Verizon’s been pretty open about their plans surround the launch of their 4G LTE network — 38 cities, by the end of this year — but that doesn’t mean there aren’t some lingering fuzzy details. When will the roll out start? Will bandwidth be metered/pay-per-megabyte? Who’s going to explain to all of our grandmothers why the mobile world is using yet another confusing… → Read More
Virgin’s somewhat highly-anticipated Project iPad magazine went live early this morning. Its focus is on “design, entertainment, technology, entrepreneurs” and its format is kin to other attempts at next-generation magazines, though I’d say this one is more successful.
Of course, it requires an iPad with 4.2 to enjoy, and while five or six million of those have been sold, not everybody will get a… → Read More
Techcrunch has published thousands of blog posts over its nearly 5 and a half years. Many are good one-day stories, some we’d like to forget, but others are gems. These classics are just as interesting today as when they were first written.
Why Michael is a pirate. The age of process journalism. The best ways you can get blogged. Our first AOL official meeting. Plus, some of the major news… → Read More
Shama Largan Ding Dong? Digitimes, whose news we need to take with a grain of salt, is reporting that Largan Precision is making the cameras for the so-called iPad 2. If you read the Digitimes statement, they’re basically saying that Largan Precision is declining to state whether they are making the part or not in a Taiwan Stock Exchange. Largan reportedly makes the 5-megapixel cameras for… → Read More
Only a few hours after rocking the boat, Wikileaks now finds itself on the business end of a denial of service attack. Access to the site is spotty right now, which would make sense given that the attack is “now exceeding 10 Gigabits a second.” Someone out there is ticked off, but who? → Read More
High-end computer display maker EIZO has announced [JP, PDF] a 3D monitor for the Japanese market today, the DuraVision FDF2301-3D. The LCD is sized at 23 inches, offers full HD resolution and comes with directional backlight. But the major selling point here is that users can view 3D images without glasses. → Read More
After we reported on rumors that Yahoo plans to cut as much as 20 percent of its workforce a few weeks ago, Yahoo called that number “misleading.” But layoffs do seem to be brewing, judging by the increasing number of tips we’ve been getting.
On November 23, one tipster wrote that layoffs would be “officially happening after Thanksgiving but before Xmas 2010.” Then yesterday, we started getting… → Read More
Looks like Apple is playing the heel again. It has asked PhotoFast to stop producing its 256MB SSD upgrade kits for the new MacBook Air. Boos can be heard all over the arena Why, Apple, why? Why’d you do it? → Read More
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