Another six months, another iteration in the CX series from Ricoh. This time, though, Santa has been a little stingy, and the improvements are minimal. I’d say the most relevant feature on the CX5 is how it’s going to drive down the price of the nearly identical CX4. → Read More
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the U.S. Department of Justice announced today that Hovensa LLC — a joint venture between Hess Corporation and Petroleos de Venezuela, S.A. — will pay a civil penalty of more than $5.3 million, and spend more than $700 million in new pollution controls as part of a settlement resulting from a complaint about Clean Air Act violations by the company at its St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands refinery.
According to the government-filed complaint, Hovensa made changes to its petroleum refinery that increased its emissions, after having failed to obtain pre-construction permits, and failing to install required pollution control equipment there.
The proposed settlement requires the company to spend $700 million on upgrading its refinery business with… → Read More
“We need to make a tablet version of Facebook. It’s something we’re working on right now.”
That was Facebook CTO Bret Taylor speaking to me yesterday in a sit down following his one-on-one interview on stage at the Inside Social Apps conference in San Francisco.
Now, before you get all excited, note that Taylor is not specifically saying that the social giant will make a native iPad app. Instead, he’s saying that there’s needs to be a better version of the service for tablets in general. Having said that, he didn’t exactly rule out a native iPad app either in our chat. → Read More
Oh, Verizon iPhone; you’re not even on the shelves yet, and you’re already stirring up drama Just yesterday, Verizon COO Lowell McAdams disclosed that they’d be offering $30 Unlimited Data plans to iPhone users at launch (though, as he later clarified, that offer won’t last forever.) That may very well be enough to convince a chunk of AT&T’s iPhone-toting crowd to jump ship, given that AT&T’s $30 Unlimited Plan was killed off months ago in favor of the new $15/200MB and $25/2GB plans. It looks like AT&T’s $30 Unlimited Plan might not be totally dead, though. → Read More
Say you’re on the subway or hiding in your favorite bushes. Say you only have one hand free and want to use your iPad. Do you hold the iPad in one hand and tap at the screen with your nose like a chicken? No, you don’t. You buy an Assero Defender, a front-mounted backpack for people who are absolutely fine with looking like a doofus because dammit, they don’t need society to tell them what to do. → Read More
Friend-finder has launched as a way to help websites go viral, not via newfangled social media but good old fashioned IM. It’s the latest product from London-based Comufy, the communications platform for businesses.
Similar to TweetSwitch, which we covered last year, the service is powered by Comufy’s existing technology. The widget can be integrated into virtually any website with a single line of code, claims the UK startup, and enables users to login via IM to invite their friends to visit the site. IM, of course, is still largely the communication platform of choice for teens, hence Comufy’s new product is particularly suited to browser-based gaming sites, says the company. Social betting sites are another potential target. → Read More
How many of you have played “violent video games” since you were a wee pup? I certainly have, and you don’t see me stealing cars or robbing banks, do you? Exactly. The most violent I get is when I boo the TV when stupid Manchester United improbably comes back against the most entertaining team in England, Blackpool. I bring this up because a congressman from California has proposed a new warning label for video games rated Teen or higher that would say: “WARNING: Excessive exposure to violent video games and other violent media has been linked to aggressive behavior.” Sure it has. → Read More
The TrimSlice is a mini-PC with a mission: to be amazingly small and light and feature TV-in and a number of useful and surprising outputs. It is, in short, one of the coolest kiosk or dedicated use PCs I’ve seen in a long while. The Tegra 2 chip is housed in a thin, fanless case with stereo line in/out as well as HDMI out. It can hold a laptop hard drive and runs 1GB of DDR2 memory. It has four USB ports, SD and MicroSD readers, and even a freaking Ethernet port. If I weren’t worried about processing power, I’d say it would make a great HTPC. No pricing, but it won’t cost very much, that much is sure. Click through for full specs. → Read More
Google is a behemoth. They’re a behemoth with a massive amount of APIs that millions of developers use around the world to build millions of apps and services. There’s simply no good way to keep track of them all. But Google comes close with a pretty nifty way: a periodic table.
As you can see on this page, Google has a full periodic table built out showcasing their APIs and developer products as of January 2011. → Read More
It was just a week or so ago that I wrote our own “review” (more a primer) for Minecraft. I hadn’t really even thought that Yahtzee would review it, much less take to it like he has, considering he’s generally concerned more with putting a shiv between the ribs of the major publishers than highlighting indie games. At any rate, he loves it, and describes the general early Minecraft experience quite well, if you ask me. → Read More
After months of over-saturation, word on the street is that “‘Pivot‘ is the new ‘Fail.’” And while Instagram, Twitter, Foodspotting, Groupon have all successfully pivoted in recent years, it seems like everyone and their mother is doing it nowadays, to mixed results.
But if you are one of the desperate millions that is currently considering a pivot, there’s nothing better than learning from others’ experience, so here is an illustrative guide to the evolution of some famously pivot prone companies as well as predictions for their next moves. → Read More
Android’s answer to the iPad — a software release called Honeycomb — is coming soon. Multiple tablet devices like the Motorola Xoom are on the way, and we’re probably going to see dozens of them by the end of the year. But while the OS is nearly done and Google’s apps are looking great, third party developers still have to optimize their applications for these much bigger screens. Today, Google is allowing developers to do just that: it’s released the preview version of the Android 3.0 SDK.
This is going to give us our closest look at Android 3.0, which has been demoed before, but never very throughly. Many of the new features are spelled out on the Platform Highlights page, which we’re still combing through. Here are some of the main highlights: → Read More
A couple of timely education items hit my inbox this morning. First, a report suggests that U.S. students suck at science. From the report,”less than one-half of students are demonstrating solid academic performance and competency over challenging subject matter.” Granted, ‘science’ is an extremely broad term and encompasses many different disciplines, but the gist of that report is pretty troubling. This might be a good time to remind readers of Scitable, Nature Publishing Group’s free online science library. Although limited in scope to genetics, cell biology and ecology, they’ve been growing since last we covered them, with many new articles as well as a new guide to life science careers and English Communication for Scientists. The latter, alone, should be worth your time today.
Also word comes today that McGraw Hill is jumping into the mobile education market with their upcoming mConnect platform: “an open-standard mobile learning platform designed to bridge the skills gap in emerging markets.” mConnect will initially roll out in India, and will, much like Scitable, have a strong focus on cellphone-as-learning-device. Specific details are lacking right now, but mConnect looks to be a more general education initiative. → Read More
The recent victory of IBM’s Watson computer against human competitors in an exhibition round of Jeopardy got computer scientist Stephen Wolfram thinking about how regular search engines might fare in such a match-up. So he took 200,000 known Jeapardy clues and ran them through six search engines (Google, Bing, Ask, Blekko, Wikipedia Search, and Yandex). He excluded known Jeopardy sites from the results, and didn’t test his own Wolfram Alpha because it is not designed for those kinds of queries.
What he found is that the search engines did fairly well, depending on how you measure success. Google did slightly better than the rest, but Bing and Ask were close behind. On average, Google got the correct answer somewhere on its first results page 69 percent of the time, versus 68 percent for Ask and 63 percent for Bing. Google got the right answer somewhere in the title or snippet of text of the very top result 66 percent of the time, versus 65 percent for Bing (and Ask dropped to 51 percent). → Read More
No doubt, the International category at the Crunchies usually gets the most head-scratching here in the TechCrunch offices and in the auditorium. And truth be told, if we’re picking the best candidates it probably should. The most transformational International companies aren’t building things for the US market that we might have heard of; they’re building things that are transforming their own home markets. And in countries like China, India, Indonesia, Russia and Brazil– those domestic markets are huge.
One of my favorite nominees this year is called Crivo, and it’s revolutionizing the credit markets in Brazil, opening up opportunities for car loans and house loans for the growing middle class for the first time. Because positive credit incidents– i.e. paying your credit card on time every month for ten years or buying a $1 million house– are considered private information that can’t be legally shared, banks are incredibly conservative when it comes to lending money. Crivo scours digital databases for anything else that could tell them whether you are a good credit risk– even whether you lied about your phone number. The results are returned within three seconds, giving lenders more information then they’ve ever had before. → Read More
Yandex, the leading Russian search engine thought to be mulling over an IPO for up to $1.5 billion, has added ‘Geo-targeted Ads’ to its arsenal, targeting local businesses who might otherwise not have an online presence. The feature itself doesn’t sound too innovative – on one level it amounts to sticking ads on a map – and is something that Google and others have been doing for yonks, but given Yandex’s reach, it’s noteworthy nonetheless. The search engine claims 25 million users, with 11.5 million utilising the Yandex.Maps service. → Read More
Kudos to O2, the Telefónica-owned mobile operator, for planning a country-wide free Wi-Fi network. That country just so happens to be the UK, the home of “dark forces.” Hmm. The network should be fully operational by 2013. → Read More
We’ve learned exclusively that BlueKai, an online auction-based data exchange, has bought TrackSimple, an analytics company that provides reporting, analysis and prediction services to media companies. Terms of the deal were not disclosed but we’ve heard the deal is an all-stock transaction. This SEC filing indicates that the stock sold to TrackSimple is worth $6.8 million.
TrackSimple, which only launched in 2009, was founded by former Amazon employees Jon Ingalls and Ajit Banerjee. The startup, which raised $2.5 million in funding, provides data analytics and optimization services for media buyers and advertisers to bring all of their media and commerce data (online & offiline) into one place. TrackSimple’s product, InsightService, will not only aggregate all this data, but will also make recommendations and serve insights on data based on performance. → Read More
(It’s funny because Peyton’s not going this year — or next) Hopefully it’s widely known by now that the weeks preceding the Super Bowl is the best time out of the whole year to buy an HDTV. Retailers combine the game’s hype with clearing out leftover Christmas inventory. It’s a home run for you! Wait…Touchdown! Walmart is getting in on the action with a big sale. The so-called Game Time event includes at least deep discounts on seven HDTVs and even bigger savings if purchased with a Blu-ray player. This isn’t the only sale in town though. Best Buy, Amazon, Frys, and all the rest will have events too so click through, scope out the deals, but ultimately shop around. Brick & Mortar stores will probably even negotiate with you. That’s fun. → Read More
Oh, how fast time flies. It seems like only yesterday that Motorola was introducing the Droid X; now, we’re already gossiping about its successor. → Read More
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