Today, people around the world are learning that the best Star Wars movie of them all — Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back — was not directed by George Lucas. Unfortunately, they’re learning it for the worst of reasons; its actual director, Irvin Kershner, has passed away at 87. Kershner was one hell of a director; beyond Empire, he was best known for directing RoboCop 2 and one of the best Bond flicks of all time. I know it has become a bit cliche to say “May The Force Be With You” when anyone in the Star Wars Crew-niverse passes on — but if there’s anyone that the Force is with, it’s Kershner. Raise a glass of Bantha milk tonight, folks. → Read More
For reasons inexplicable, a “Today I Learned” thread on Reddit has turned into how to make Google Translate beatbox for you, among other things. It must have taken some intense experimentation for Redditor Harrichr to get here but it seems like a peculiarity of the German translation setup in Google Translate is allowing for playing consonants in a way that sounds like drums. Or, more specifically, a delightful way that sounds like drums. → Read More
Not long after the original Nook came out, it was hacked, and progress on that front has been consistently documented over at NookDevs. The latest update to the Nook Color page indicates that yes, the new device has been rooted in part, a new UI installed (LauncherPro), and apps side-loaded to the “extras” section of the native UI. → Read More
Do you remember that 4″ beast from LG that we talked about the other week? Well, a member of the Android Forums managed to get his hands on one, and has done a little photo-shoot with it. He’s also unearthed a name and some specs.
First up, the name: LG Star. No idea if that’ll make it to retail, but that’s what it’s called at the moment.
Jump on past the break for the specs. → Read More
In the peak of the Internet bubble, a company’s valuation– and press attention– would soar simply by whispering the words “John Doerr is an investor.” But in early Web 2.0 days, the once-everywhere venture capitalist seemed to fall off of the tech press’s radar, at least when it came to Internet investing.
But boy, has Doerr made up for lost time this year: Keynoting both of our Disrupt conferences, holding press conferences at Facebook, and generally leading the charge on the messaging that Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers is serious about investing all over this mobile-social wave of digital innovation. The lastest move was his signing of Wall Street analyst Mary Meeker as a Kleiner Perkins partner– a deal he personally negotiated with Meeker, according to an interview we did with both of them this morning.
So I had to ask while I had him on the phone: Whatever happened to Doerr’s belief that cleantech was the next big thing? → Read More
In October, after the COICA bill was postponed (until now, essentially), I suggested that as long as the internet was bound by a DNS system centralized enough to be gripped at will by the United States government, it was in fact too centralized. An alternative to traditional DNS, currently presided over by ICANN, seems the only option if the current level of freedom of information on the internet is to be maintained.
I was (and am) speaking as a layman; I know virtually nothing about the technical details of DNS, and the dangers and difficulties accompanying a departure from that system are numerous. But the benefits would be considerable, and it’s beginning to look like it has to happen sooner or later. Now Peter Sunde, a man somewhat more acquainted with the way things work on the internet, seems to be of a similar opinion. → Read More
Two weeks ago, Google launched Hotpot, a new site related to Google Places that makes it easy (and sort of fun) to rate your favorite venues and see what your friends have recently liked. The tech press seemed to take notice of the site for two reasons: first, it’s got a nice design and is more fun than you’d expect. And second, Hotpot is a pretty strange name.
Now, it didn’t take long to figure out that this was a reference to the Chinese meal hot pot, but many people have never heard of that, and Google didn’t really go out of its way to explain the choice. Now, two weeks after it left people scratching their heads, it’s posted an explanation to its Places blog that gives a bit more background: → Read More
Yeah, that’s pretty damn cool. Project magazine, which we detailed last week, will go live tomorrow. We’ll check it out and give you the whole story then.
Video inside. → Read More
Asus’s Eee Note, formerly known as the Eee Tablet, got its official official debut this morning. We heard a couple months back that the device (in the middle of a name change operation) would be available in October, but as usual, the real date turned out to be a little later. Actually, a lot later for Americans. → Read More
Last September at TechCrunch Disrupt, Microsoft announced that all 7 million Windows Live Spaces blogs would be transitioning to Wordpress.com. It turned out that number was inflated, and a subsequent internal email put the real number of transitioned blogs at 300,000.
Well, the number of Windows Live Spaces blogs which have transitioned over to Wordpress.com is now at “over half a million” and another half a million new Wordpress blogs have been created by Windows Live users. So that brings the total new Wordpress blogs created as a result of the partnership to one million. → Read More
This is the car Batman drives just for kicks. Forget the Tumbler, the Cadillac CTS-V Coupe is where the real fun can be had. 556HP and 551 lb-ft of torque from a supercharged V8 and a robust navigation, hard drive-based media system complete with a pounding Bose system? Yessir, Mr. Wayne. Your ride is ready. → Read More
Remember Dailymotion? No? You remember! That web site that came out soon after YouTube with lots of video on it. Still nothing? Ok, well here’s a refresher. It’s not YouTube but like YouTube. It’s had $68.5m invested in it to date and is very big in France.
But that’s not all. According to comScore Media Metrix figures released today, it’s the 32nd most visited online destination in the world, up from the 49th most visited site in May 2010. Traffic on Dailymotion properties grew from 64 million unique visitors to over 93 million during that six-month period.
“Dailymotion has remained focused on offering the best experience for our users, partners and advertisers,” said Cedric Tournay, CEO of Dailymotion.
Dailymotion puts the growth down to curating content from premium partners alongside user generated video and sharing across social networks. → Read More
Over 60,000 people have been hit in the past few hours on Facebook by a scam which claims that after installing an app called ePrivacy you can see who checked your profile. Needless to say the app does not work. Instead it just lets the scammer access your profile and post “OMG OMG OMG… I cant believe this actually works!” to your wall, with a link to the app, thus spreading it further.
Sophos is reporting that the application does not work and simply allows the makers to steal your private data and virally spread the app amongst your friends.
The best way to check you privacy settings and remove the app is to go to Account -> Privacy Settings -> Applications and Websites.
The scammers are simply playing on peoples desire to see who looks at them on Facebook – which rather makes me wonder why Facebook doesn’t just release an official app for this and keep the scammers out. → Read More
Over the last few weeks, you may have noticed that the official TechCrunch Facebook Page is more happening than ever, with better updates and, soon, regular weekly contests for our readers. And that’s only the beginning — you’re going to start seeing similar improvements to our Twitter account, Buzz, and most important, TechCrunch itself. Today, we’d like to introduce Elin Blesener, our community manager.
As TechCrunch has grown in readership, it’s become home to a vibrant community of tech enthusiasts, venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, and plenty of other remarkably intelligent (and good looking) people. Unfortunately, the site has also attracted its fair share of trolls and spammers. → Read More
It looks like the iPhone 4 isn’t the only phone to suffer from particularly troubling death grip problems. I mean, we all knew it wasn’t the only one, but it had it bad. And now it appears HTC’s HD7 is the same way. Of course, you’ll note that the handsets in these videos aren’t showing strong signal to begin with, and as studies have shown, the death grip causes a static loss in signal that is more damaging at low initial signal levels. In other words, it’ll barely affect a good signal, might make a medium signal bad, and might make a bad signal drop. It’s difficult to tell unless you know the actual numerical values of the signal and loss. Can any HD7 owners out there corroborate these reports? [via Electronista] → Read More
So we have Seedcamp, Startup Bootcamp, The Founder Institute, Launch48, Hackfwd and various other startup programme across Europe. And we can now add another to that list: Springboard.
But this is not the Springboard we wrote about last year. Then, it was the brainchild of Red Gate Software who were effectively offering a very informal arrangement, helping young startups. It was also B2B focused.
This is a different beast. The new Springboard programme has wisely realised that there is a gap in the European eco-system for the super-early stage startup that really just needs enough cash to create something. That is in the Y-Combinator and TechStars sort of area, which is much more at the hacker/product end of the market. → Read More
Blekko, the shiny new search engine that is taking on Google, is getting into product search today with the launch of a new vertical for holiday shopping. As you may have heard, the recently launched search engine differentiates itself from Google by giving users tools to do new types of searches that they can’t do elsewhere.The search engine offers unique query refinement tools to human editors called Slashtags (i.e. /news or /date or /amazon or /blogs) to filter results to what you are looking for (you can read our full review of the platform here).
Blekko’s newly created search vertical, aptly called /safeshop, includes only human selected shopping sites and is designed to thwart spammers and malware distributors. So users can now just add /safeshop to any search to search for retail products on the web, effectively filtering out any rogue or untrusted retailers who may offer a poor experience for online shoppers. → Read More
Yandex, Russia’s search engine leader and the nation’s largest Internet company, is reportedly considering a flotation that would value the firm at around £1 billion or $1.56 billion, thisismoney reports, citing City sources. The company is said to be mulling a listing in London early next year, although it could still end up picking NASDAQ.
The IPO would follow in the footsteps of fellow Russian Internet giant Mail.ru’s successful listing – the company raised roughly $1 billion. → Read More
Well, look at that! AT&T was nice enough to share on Facebook that their upcoming Tegra2-powered Android monster, the Motorola Olympus, would be launching in either December or January — an especially kind act, given that the Motorola Olympus totally hasn’t been announced yet. The response was pulled from the page almost immediately, presumably after someone got one helluva shouting at. [Via BGR] → Read More
