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
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
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
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
Looks like President Obama isn’t the only one resorting to Facebook as a way to reach constituents. In a first for an American President past or present, former President George W. Bush will hold a discussion and Q&A live from Facebook headquarters in Palo Alto in about 20 minutes.
Bush will be talking to Facebook employees about his new book Decision Points, and those of us not employed by Facebook will have the opportunity to watch it on the Livestream above. → Read More
Guys are easy to shop for. We’re pretty much content with anything — even socks. But don’t buy an outdoorsy guy a tie for Christmas. Sure, they might need one church and/or court appearances, but the seven gifts after the break are guaranteed to be on the top of their Santa wish list. There’s something at nearly every price point so, please, don’t drop the ball and give your guy some camo slippers. No one wants those. → Read More
It’s impossible to throw a rock at a media outlet today without hitting a story about Wikileaks. And to make the rock throwing even easier, the subject of this week’s Why Is This News is: Wikileaks – ‘enemy of democracy, just plain fact of life… or both?’
In it, Sarah argues that, for good or ill, the leaking of several hundred thousand diplomatic cables simply reflects today’s reality that no information is ever truly secret in the Internet age. The US government, like major companies before them, simply need to adapt to that reality – improving their behaviour, but also getting better at locking down the truly secret stuff. Paul, on the other hand, just hates everything about Wikileaks, describing it as one man’s pathetic ego trip which reveals almost nothing useful and which, if anything, will massively set back the site’s stated goal of ‘transparency’.
In many ways, we’re both arguing the same point from different angles. But, hey, at least we’re arguing – which always makes for a fun episode. Video below. → Read More
It’s the Internet contest that anyone can play! Yes, Ron and Fez‘s Search Search Hurry Up And Search returns, now with plenty of prizes just in time for your holiday shopping. Why leave the house? Why spend all day browsing Web sites looking for deals when you can Search Search Hurry Up And Search your way to success? → Read More
Black Friday is behind us, but we’re currently in the midst of its pale imitation of a sibling, Cyber Monday. (Not to say that the Cyber Monday deals aren’t worth your time, but the name grates on my soul.) Great, great… but not as great as Nintendo’s sales! Yup, the company has revealed just how well it did during the week. Spoiler: 1.5 million consoles in total were sold. Not too shabby, no. → Read More
From what we can tell from a brief Reuters report, Microsoft is in talks with HBO and Showtime to broadcast and sell a la carte video through the XBox. Microsoft already offers ESPN through XBox Live.
For years pundits have been blathering on about the “Trojan horse” that is console gaming. The Playstation 2, arguably, was the first DVD player many of us ever had while the PS3 is probably the first Blu-Ray player many of us ever used. These devices were also some of the first to stream Netflix and, with this new deal, they’ll start replacing the cable box entirely. Imagine – a full complement of content available 24/7 from a box you already own. That is amazingly compelling and, dare I say it, kind of exciting.
Presumably you’re not going to sit and watch HBO’s regular programming through this service. Instead, you’ll watch a la carte versions of their original shows and exclusive movies, which is definitely compelling to some. The issue, obviously, is the cost associated with this service versus the cost tacked onto your cable bill for the actual channels. → Read More
The geolocation wars are well underway. If you need any proof of that, simply look at this thread in Quora. A startup posted a question wondering which place database they should use for their new check-in app. The responses? Foursquare: Us. Gowalla: Us. SimpleGeo: Us. Factual: Us. Locationary: Us.
Each of these companies, along with a few other big ones not practicing the art of self-promotion on Quora (Google, Facebook, Skyhook) are all in the midst of what is sure to be a drawn-out battle to become the underlying location layer that lets a thousand other startups bloom on top of it. → Read More
Okay this is just awesome. Internet marketer John Boyle has taken creative liberty with the rumors circulating about a Google Groupon acquisition and mocked up a meta “Groupon for Groupon,” which is exactly what it sounds like.
So far the counter says “0 bought” but that might change in the coming weeks. And at negotiation prices reportedly reaching upwards of $3 billion, the search engine could probably use the discount. → Read More
Social gaming is an international phenomenon. While Zynga is the leading social gaming company in the U.S., in Brazil it is a company called Vostu. The company has been growing rapidly and just closed a $30 million series C financing led by Tiger Management, with Accel Partners joining the round. Accel partner Jim Breyer, who sits on Facebook’s board, will take a board seat on Vostu. Previous investors Intel Capital and General Catalyst partners also participated. Investors purchased about 10 percent of the company in this latest round, giving Vostu a post-money valuation of roughly $300 million, according to a source with knowledge of the deal. Including previous rounds, Vostu now has raised a total of $46 million.
Vostu boasts 20 million active players a month, a tenfold increase from the beginning of the year. With only 40 percent Internet penetration in Brazil, that means that about a quarter of all Brazilians who are on the Internet play a Vostu game. Vostu currently has six social games (including a farm game, poker game, as well as soccer and crime role playing games) which are played on Brazil’s largest social network, Google-owned Orkut. Almost all the revenues comes from virtual currency, which players spend inside the games. → Read More
At this point, there’s not much we don’t know about Verizon’s upcoming Android piece, the HTC Merge. We know what it looks like from just about every angle, have seen it both rendered and real, and we’ve even got a pretty good idea of what the specs will be. If you want one, you probably know it by now — and you’re probably waiting on the edge of your seat.
Unfortunately, this update isn’t going to make the edge of your seat any less painful. → Read More
Now that Wikileaks has everyone in the US angrily jumping up and down, there’s one story that’s bound to die a death: the TSA. It’s pretty clear that the so-called Opt Out Day was a failure of XFL proportions, but the reason it was a failure may actually because the TSA simply wanted to avoid a scene. Twitter was full of reports saying that those silly machines were turned off just to expedite holiday travel. → Read More
Good news, everyone! Google’s going to keep working on Android after the upcoming Gingerbread (v2.3) release! Oh, we knew that? Oh, well they’re probably going to codename the next build Honeycomb! Oh, we knew that too? Here’s one you probably didn’t know: an early build (or two) of Honeycomb just got spotted in some logs whilst someone (presumably a Google engineer) was testing its Adobe AIR performance. → Read More
Yup, Wikileaks did, in fact, leak yet another series of documents at the weekend, just as many had predicted. This time around the documents are more of a diplomatic nature, that is, their leak has the US Department of State looking quite foolish. Der Spiegel writes: “Never before in history has a superpower lost control of such vast amounts of such sensitive information—data that can help paint a picture of the foundation upon which US foreign policy is built.” It turns out that there’s at least one bit of information in the leak that would be of interest to y’all, and it has to do with Google’s relationship with China. → Read More
