After suffering a massive outage last week, Skype CIO Lars Rabbe has now detailed what went wrong.
One of the root causes? A bug in the Skype for Windows client (version 5.0.0152). → Read More
In a few nights, an estimated 1 million people are going to pack into New York’s Times Square for New Year’s Eve (brrr). And amidst all of the confetti, snow, and alcohol, they’re going to see a whole lot of ads, which is what Times Square does best. One of them represents a win for location-based mobile game SCVNGR: the service will be prominently featured on American Eagle’s Times Square billboard starting today and running through the new year.
To mark the occasion, American Eagle will be offering New Years-themed challenges on SCVNGR (for example, entering what your resolution is for 2011). For each challenge that’s completed, American Eagle will be donating $5 to Big Brothers Big Sisters of America — and SCVNGR will be matching that donation. As people stand outside in the frigid cold waiting for the ball to drop, you can bet a good number of them are going to check out the app. → Read More
An interesting startup called Wild Needle that will be entering the social mobile gaming space soon, is raising $3 million in funding, $2.5 million of which it has already secured, according to this SEC filing.
Self-proclaimed to be in “super sneaky stealth mode”, the company, which was founded earlier this year and is based in Mountain View, boasts that its mission is to “stretch the boundaries of the mobile game experience farther than it’s ever gone before”. → Read More
Using the web to track power consumption at home is something several companies are working on at the moment (including Google). Tokyo-based startup Sassor is developing a solution that offers two big selling points: their so-called Energy Literacy Platform (ELP) [English link] lets you track each household appliance individually and makes it possible to turn these devices off remotely, for example by pushing a button on your smartphone.
The Energy Literacy Platform is based on the idea that by empowering consumers with a tool that informs them how much energy their appliances really use, they will start saving energy. The platform consists of three parts. → Read More
Would Buying Leon’s Resident Evil 4 Jacket Make You A Cosplayer? Gresso Launching iPad For The Stupidly Rich See How Japan Crash Tests Their Robots Quirky Digits Makes Any Gloves Touchscreen-Friendly Poll: Only 21 Percent Of ‘Likely US Voters’ Support Net Neutrality → Read More
As the end of each year looms, there’s a fun tradition amongst news organisations of publishing lists of “new words” coined during the preceding twelve months. The only slight problem with the lists is that they’re largely nonsense, comprised mostly of phrases made up by lazy journalists on a deadline.
Some lists, though, are deserving of slightly greater consideration – like, for example, this one compiled by “Sprakradet” – The Language Council of Sweden. I mean, “Sprakradet” – that sounds like it might actually be a real thing.
Or maybe not: according to the esteemed Council, 2010 was the year in which “Spotify” became an official Swedish verb. Unfortunately the verb’s definition is also in Swedish so I can’t actually read it, but I assume it must be something along the lines of…
Spotify (v): To repeatedly and embarrassingly fail to launch in the US.
The list also got me wondering which other tech-centric verbs might – or at least should – have been coined this year. Verbs like… → Read More
LG’s notorious obsession with having thin bezels is well known, and they are continuing that vein with their new Xnote P210, a notebook computer with a 12.5 inch screen. The other features don’t necessarily stand out as much, but at least they are trying. → Read More
YCombinator-backed Seeing Interactive, which helps newspapers build and sell space in online ad directories and YC-backed Weebly, the service that lets you build your own drag and drop websites, have partnered up to give local newspapers even more options when selling local advertising to small and medium sized businesses.
Seeing Interactive, which raised $1 million in June, used to direct businesses to Weebly when they needed to build websites to supplement Seeing Interactive’s SEO-optimized Marketplace directory pages. Seeing Interactive has now integrated Weebly into its backend and as of January 1st will allow its newspaper clients to offer advertisers the ability to manage their website and directory listings from the same dashboard. Newspapers can now sell the two services as a package, or separately. → Read More
Tired of dealing with the legal hassles with Microsoft, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has ordered that all government agencies will be running on open-source software by 2015. Russia has a rocky relationship at times with Microsoft, and started this whole process by first proclaiming that schools will run only open-source software, and now proclaiming that the government would follow suit. → Read More
One of the last items on that leaked T-Mobile roadmap from way back in July has leaked. “Begonia” has made its debut, and is as expected the Cliq 2. The original Cliq was perhaps a little before its time; the Blur interface was sluggish and many useful services and shortcuts weren’t yet employed by Android. This time around things might be different. → Read More
Chances are you didn’t get all the games you wanted this holiday season. Fear not! Amazon has a deal going right now where you can buy one game, and then get the second game for half-off. There are about 600 titles in this deal, so here’s your chance to go pick up that copy of Borderlands and Left 4 Dead 2. → Read More
Yesterday we heard LG would be showing off the world’s largest (for now) 3D LED TV, and today they tell us they’ve got a 3D TV coming, the LW6500, that doesn’t use active-shutter LCD glasses (thank god). I’m beginning to feel used as a blogger — they’re clearly trickling information out for maximum effectiveness. So to spite them, I’m going to write very little here other than that I think passive/polarized 3D is way superior to active-LCD, and they’re on the right track. We’ll get a hands-on at CES, don’t you worry. → Read More
In rather unsurprising news, the world’s most popular smartphone was the most popular item on eBay this year — or rather, it was likely the most popular search term. I suspect a vast majority of iPhone 4s were bought by more traditional means — but accessories like cases, headphones, and car kits thrive in the eBay environment.
The rest of the items seem to follow larger trends, but incredibly, only one item is shared with last year’s list: The Beatles.
Here’s the rest of the eBay “Top Shopped” items list. → Read More
Here at TechCrunch, we’ve long been fans of personal finance site Mint, which won our first TechCrunch40 conference in 2007 and was acquired two years later by Intuit for an impressive $170 million.
But things may not be going gangbusters at the company these days. We’ve learned that in the next month, three key employees from the original, pre-acquisition team will be leaving, including Director of Marketing Stewart Langille, lead designer Justin Maxwell, and head software engineer Daryl Puryear. One Mint insider estimated that around 40% or more of the pre-acquisition team has left since Intuit bought the company in September 2009, some of whom have left substantial amounts of unvested stock on the table. Most of the executive team remains, but many employees have gone on to work at or launch their own startups. → Read More
Here’s a bit of a sticky situation: Apple is facing a class-action lawsuit alleging that they are allowing apps and ad partners to identify specific users — a breach of Apple’s privacy policy and supposedly of privacy itself.
Apple’s privacy policy touches on this directly, yet leaves plenty of room for movement on their side, which is really what the suit is all about, though Apple is simply the biggest target at the moment. The lawsuit alleges that the “non-personal information” collected by likes of Pandora and The Weather Channel can easily be collated and used to identify individuals. → Read More
The 3DS launches in Japan on February 26th, which will no doubt shut-down the country in a state of mass histaria. But early next month Nintendo will make the 3DS available to the general public for the very first time at the self-named Nintendo World. Unlike at the press- and industry-only E3 show where the 3DS was announced, every Joe and Jane from the street’s of Tokyo will be able to play with the 3D gaming marvel and Nintendo has a whole set of playable demos ready. → Read More
Samsung today announced an update to their NX10 mirrorless interchangeable lens camera, just about a year after we first heard about it. The NX11 is actually not much of an improvement (which is not to say it’s bad); the addition of i-Function lenses and an adjustment of the grip seem to be the only new features. → Read More
Here’s a version of the iPad you’re not going to see at the airport vending machines. Luxury manufacturer Gresso is producing an iPad made from African Blackwood and 18k gold. → Read More
One of my favorite toys of the season was the Paper Jamz guitar and amp. Sadly, Gibson didn’t think it was so great and sued the manufacturer, WowWee, for infringing on their image. See, the Paper Jamz may be made of paper, but they kind of look like the Gibson, so the guitar company sued them for trademark infringement, suggesting that WowWee claimed that the guitars “looked like” Gibsons. While this is untrue, Target and a number of other stores have pulled the toys. → Read More
