Sorry, Apple. These deals just don’t cut it. Your so-called Merry Monday deals makes a mockery of the whole Cyber Monday institution. Edifier Prisma 2.1 Speakers $116 instead of $129. Intense! Micheal Kors Wallet Clutch $71.95 rather than $79.95. Epic! Twelve South Compass Portable Stand for iPad $35.95, down from $39.99. What a deal!
Where’s the iPad deals? Can we not get a few bucks off a MacBook? You did get the memo that today, Cyber Monday, is the biggest online shopping day of the year so you’re supposed to mark down all your wares in order to propel your holiday sales into the stratosphere, right? You did Black Friday right, but today is Cyber Monday~! HP has the right idea. They have great deals on notebooks and desktops today. Newegg got the message and dropped the prices on a bunch of products just for today. So what’s your deal, Apple? Do you hate us? → Read More
Just last week, we were watching as Sprint rather suggestively compared the size of their “pipe” to the size of their competitors “pipe” as part of their prep work for 4G in LA. Today, all that pipe-laying comes to fruition; Sprint 4G has just launched in Los Angeles — and they went ahead and flipped things on in Cleveland, Cincinnati, Columbus, Washington D.C, and Miami as well, just for good measure. Tucked into the announcement was some good news for San Franciscan’s, as well — hop behind the jump for that bit. → Read More
Psssh. Black Friday. That’s nonsense. Cyber Monday is where it’s at. Well, at least that’s what online retailers would like us to believe. It seems true deals are scarce and instead, there are a whole bunch of standard sales posing as real deals on what’s supposed to be the biggest online shopping day ever. We did manage to dug up a few legitimate tech deals that are worth your time. Curious? Sure you are. Click through for the complete run-down. → Read More
I remember, back in the old days, there wasn’t much on TV during family holiday dinners and we wished we could play Nintendo. We’d go out to my Uncle’s house in Martin’s Ferry, Ohio and we’d watch whatever was on their old CRT – maybe the Yule log on QVC or the same old holiday specials over and over, and we’d dream about playing the NES on that big old box. But we couldn’t. It was too much trouble and the adults, after all, were hopped up on lasagna and beer.
Well I’m here to tell you that this won’t happen to my kids. And it won’t happen to your kids. They’ll get something like this 7-inch portable TV with multiple inputs from Vizio. The screen has 800×480 resolution and and comes to you courtesy of Vizio and Sam’s Club. How do you win? Easy peasy. → Read More
It’s always slightly flattering when a ten billion dollar company tweaks its business model just to please me. Well, ok, that’s a slight exaggeration: not just to please me, but to please me and the other writers at TechCrunch.
I’m referring of course to Netflix’s decision to offer a streaming-only subscription package; the first time they’ve allowed members to view movies online without also having to pay for a bunch of DVDs in the mail.
It’s obvious why they’ve made the decision now. Clearly, as avid TechCrunch readers, they read MG’s post about how his purchase of a Macbook Air has killed the optical disc. “Oh crikey” they said (in an inexplicably British accent) “if that’s the way the world is going, we’d better act quickly, or risk being left behind.” → Read More
There’s an easy way to tell that Google Earth is getting so advanced that it’s getting dangerously close to looking like actual Earth: touted new features are kind of humorous. While version 4 brought the sky, and version 5 brought the oceans, now version 6 is bringing trees. Yes, trees. I fully expect version 7 to highlight the addition of dirt.
Kidding aside, the latest version is obviously the best one yet. And trees are obviously a hugely important part of the Earth. To get them into Google Earth, the search giant has made 3D models of over 50 different species of trees. And they’ve included over 80 million of them in various places around the world including Athens, Berlin, Chicago, New York City, San Francisco, and Tokyo. They’re also working with some conservation organizations to model threatened forests around the world. → Read More
Gresso is at it again with the Gresso Luxor, an abomination of a phone designed for rich men. The Gresso has a 42-carat “sapphire crystal” and is made of steel clad in PVD. It’s clad in 200-year-old “African blackwood” because, presumably, elephant skin was too gauche. → Read More
According to Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster, Apple is selling a whole mess of MacBook Airs and iPads this year. Sadly, his assessment is based on seven hours spent in Apple stores across the country, but the limited data his efforts have provided does point to some clear trends that we’ve been following over the past few months.
As we discussed this morning, PC growth is slow but constant. Desktop towers are, however, the last thing on most folks minds these days. Devices like the iPad capture the imagination and, more important, they are the first devices to be truly portable.
For most of the past decade, we’ve suffered under a the yoke of slow progress. Laptops ranged from about 4 pounds on the very low end all the way up to twenty pounds on a very bad day. Generally, however, the average fleet laptop – think the ThinkPad or a nice Dell Inspiron – weighed in at about 10 pounds, all told, with extra battery and power adaptor. That was quite a bit to carry around, especially with all of the accoutrements. → Read More
The yearly orgy of physical consumerism is over (all that’s left is the equally orgiastic Cyber Monday) and I’m proud to say that my family and I were able to get to town to purchase a hogshead of crackers, some sorghum, a bolt of gingham, and a nice corncob pipe for Pap-Pap. Then I shot at a wolf that was skulking around the barn and then we stared into the fire as we heard the mounting howls of his brethren surround our little cabin on the big prairie. → Read More
Innovation in the TV space isn’t just about 3D these days. Toshiba today announced [press release in English] the so-called Power TV series, whose most interesting range (the PC1) consists of two devices. What’s special is that the PC1 Power TVs feature an integrated battery – a world’s first, according to Toshiba. → Read More
It looks like Verizon has bought the promoted trend “#CyberMonday” to mark the Monday after Black Friday and Thanksgiving when consumers look to the web for exclusive holiday deals. This buy follows another significant Promoted Trend this past Friday, when Target bought “#BlackFriday” on Twitter.
As with any purchased Promoted Trend on Twitter, when users click on CyberMonday, they will be see a sponsored Tweet from Verizon, which states “Starting today, Verizon’s giving you 24 days of Seasonal Surprises! Unwrap an exclusive deal now!” The Tweet contains a link to the company’s “Seasonal Surprises” campaign, which encourages users to Tweet Verizon’s message or post the message on Facebook to unlock an exclusive deal. → Read More
Japan’s second biggest telecommunications company KDDI is working on optimizing HD video streaming quality on smaller screens. Specifically, KDDI’s R&D Labs are working on making it easier to view HD content originally intended for larger screens on mobile displays. → Read More
In general, the key driver of social networking so far is games on Facebook. But most of those games aren’t social in the way that playing Monopoly or cards with your friends and family over the holidays is social. MyYearbook, which is a small but profitable social network focussing on younger teenage users, is going to try to make online games more social by getting its members to play together at the same time. The site has 4.7 million active visitors a month generating nearly 1 billion pageviews. It has about 1 million active users every day who spend a third of their time playing games and using other apps. The company makes its money from virtual currency and in-game offers, and is on track to make about $22 million in revenues this year, according to CEO Geoff Cook
In mid-December, myYearbook will launch a new set of a dozen live games which will combine casual games with live video chat. These are basic games like Warship, Gin Rummy, Chess, Checkers, line of Four, and Tic Tac Toe. MyYearbook is also partnering OMGPOP (which specializes in live online games), Heyzap, and Viximo to bring some of their games into myYearbook with a live video component. These aren’t amazing games. That is not what they are about. They are designed to get people to interact with one another, to make new friends or to flirt. They are games everybody knows and everybody can play. → Read More
Gartner’s preliminary forecasts point to a 14.3 increase in PC shipments in 2010 over 2009 as well as a forecast of 409 million PCs sold in 2011. While these numbers are exciting to anyone following the sad-sack IT industry, remember that Gartner estimated 17.9 percent growth in last September for the end of 2010 and 18.1 percent growth for 2011. Clearly “not too bad” is good enough these days.
The report also found that folks are holding on to PCs longer because “because there will be less need to replace them as often” and that there is an increase in thin clients in the enterprise. PCs are also getting it in the knees because Western consumers are deciding to buy tablets (read “the iPad”) instead of a new PC. Emerging markets are helping buoy sales but not by much. → Read More
CloudBees, a Java Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) provider, has raised $4 million in Series A financing led by Matrix Partners with participation from individual investors, including JBoss founder Marc Fleury and JBoss/HP/Bluestone vet Bob Bickel.
The round is said to be only the first in a multi-stage investment to provide CloudBees with the resources to build out a cloud-agnostic, cloud-native Java PaaS that covers both development services and a production runtime for Java. → 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. → Read More
Venture capital mega-firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers has announced that Mary Meeker is joining the firm as a partner, in another sign that the firm is focusing more on this mobile-meets-social-meets-local-meets-global wave of Web disruption. “Our number one goal is to help the Mark Pincuses of the world build their businesses into Internet treasures, and there has been no greater finder of Internet treasures than Mary Meeker,” said KP’s John Doerr in an early morning call with TechCrunch, just after Meeker broke the news to Morgan Stanley’s technology and Internet practice– a force on Wall Street where she’s made her name over the last 20 years.
In the dot com glory days, Mary Meeker was as famous as an analyst as Doerr was as a VC, so it’s appropriate and seemingly a long time coming that the two would wind up as partners. Meeker said she’d thought about making the change “from the skybox to coaching down on the field,” as Doerr described it, for years. Meeker has been in talks with the firm since late September and made the firm decision to leave Morgan Stanley and join KP the Monday before Thanksgiving. She was swayed finally by a combination of factors including confidence that Morgan Stanley’s tech practice was in a strong place, the opportunity with Kleiner specifically and the stage the Internet is in right now. → Read More
Ashford.com is offering five special watch discounts on a few name brand high-end watches through aBlogtoRead.com for Cyber Monday. Prices are additional discounts off their already lowered prices. The watches offered are a Tag Heuer, Zenith, Hamilton, Locman, and Raymond Weil. The special prices are available only on Monday November 29, 2010. → Read More
Longtime technology analyst Mary Meeker is leaving Morgan Stanley for greener pastures at venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. She will join the firm as a partner.
Mary Meeker joined Morgan Stanley in 1991 as the Firm’s PC Software/Hardware & New Media analyst. At the investment bank, she served as a Managing Director, and led the Global Technology Research Team that covered Google, Amazon, eBay, Yahoo!, Microsoft and others. Prior to her role at the investment bank, she served as a Technology Research Analyst at Cowen and at Solomon Brothers. → Read More
