Earlier this week we saw that McLaren got together with Specialized to make their exquisite Venge road bike. Apparently Audi felt left out of the party, and has announced the fruits of its collaboration with Portland bike-maker Renovo: the “duo” series.
The bikes’ primary differentiating feature is, of course, the wood frames. Audi has built them out of “woods selected to match the look of Audi… → Read More
Facebook corporate development manager Michael Brown (pictured left in happier days) recently and abruptly left Facebook, and the company then hired a senior Google employee to replace him. It was a curious departure and the chatter around Silicon Valley was that there was a lot more to the story.
And in fact there is. Via a scandal that could have far reaching consequences by bringing even more… → Read More
New York City announced the winners of its second BiggApps competition tonight. BiggApps is a way to get developers to use city and government data to create useful apps for citizens and visitors to New York City. The prize money was doubled to $40,000 split up among 14 winning apps.
The first prize went to Roadify, an iPhone app that crowdsources information about public transport and parking… → Read More
Thanks to the influence of owner and tech entrepreneur Mark Cuban, Dallas Mavericks season ticket holders will be able to enjoy a touch of the technological when claiming their 2011 playoff tickets. The Mavericks have teamed with Qualcomm to add augmented reality to this year’s playoff tickets.
Augmented Reality — or “AR” for those “in the know” — refers to a display in which simulated imagery… → Read More
The website and show “Know Your Meme” were swallowed up this week by ICanHasCheezburger networks in a seven figure deal, proving once again that Internet memes are serious business. In light of this news, the Know Your Meme crew, Internet folklorists Elspeth Rountree, Kenyatta Cheese, Jamie Wilkinson, Patrick Davison and Mike Rugnetta actually performed an episode of their heralded show live on… → Read More
Head to YouTube after 4AM local time and you’ll notice that it looks a little old fashioned — and not in a 1999 blinking construction sign sort of way.
YouTube is reverting back to what it would have looked like had it been around in 1911, complete with grainy, sepia video footage, no audio tracks (save for piano accompaniment), and title cards in place of the site’s normal comments. Yes, it’s… → Read More
The original ceramic crinkled cup has been around for decades, but this glass version is, if anything, better. Sure to get lots of comments at parties. You know, parties, where your friends come over and hang out. You know, your friends. Oh. Oh, I see. Me neither. [via Swiss Miss] → Read More
If ordering a new mouse off Amazon — because it looked cool and you have prime — only to find that it clicks like a 1980s keyboard frustrates you, then check out the Nexus 7000 quiet mouse. It has a great shape and look, comes in white or black, has one of those really tiny USB receiver dongles, and costs only $28. [via The Awesomer] → Read More
Some photos of Pentax’s NC-1 have leaked ahead of the supposed May / June release. If anything, this says they’re close, if not finished, with the smallest mirrorless camera in the world. → Read More
Not every Apple patent that comes down the line is worth gawking at, but these two are definitely worth a quick note. First, putting a battery in a charger is a pretty good idea — though I doubt they’re the first to do it. And this touchable OS X patent is a nice reminder of Apple’s convergence strategy. → Read More
Road and Track is a great car magazine, but they forgot an important fact about April Fools’ Day: the date. Yesterday, March 30th, they outed some pictures of the Volt sans roof. Their post even discussed some new tech for the unsightly little thing, despite its lack of a regular size gas tank. “We’re extremely excited about the new GM-patented photovoltaic film that covers two-thirds of… → Read More
With 35 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute, the Google-owned video behemoth would be the second largest search engine were it standalone site. Web video has become a powerful medium. But, I think it’s also fair to say that this powerful medium is in serious need of curation. What if you’re just looking for a quick laugh, a short video, and don’t want to wade through billions of videos… → Read More
You might have heard of the da Vinci surgical robot — it’s the state-of-the-art system used by surgeons to operate remotely, and although it’s quite a bulky setup, it’s also nearly as precise as human hands. Seattle surgeon Jim Porter, in order to show off the da Vinci’s capabilities, folds a paper airplane using the system’s little grippers.
Check out the video inside, it’s really quite… → Read More
Wow, this is a pretty crazy deal. Impulse is selling Battlefield: Bad Company 2, which the guys tell me is just excellent, for the ridiculous price of $5. It’s normally around $20, and even in the Steam winter sale, it only got down to $8, I think. → Read More
If you’re thinking of picking up HTC’s Arrive, the Windows Phone 7 QWERTY slider of your dreams, now might be a good time. Sprint is selling it at the premium phone price ($199 with a two-year contract), but if you order today from Wirefly you can grab it for only $25. With contract, of course. Be sure to put in the coupon code “ARRIVE0331″ before checkout to get that extra… → Read More
It must be an absolute nightmare being a Hollywood executive in 2011. Four big studios (20th Century Fox, Sony, Universal, and Warner Bros.) have announced plans to introduce a premium video-on-demand service, to debut on DirecTV next month as “Home Premiere,” that will screen movies a mere 60 days after their theatrical debut. Renting such a movie will set you back $30. And if you think… → Read More
Google is planning to introduce a smartphone app that can identify faces. If you capture someone’s head shot on your smartphone, Google will search their database of photos to try name them. We were pretty excited when Google Goggles came out. But this is a bit excessive. → Read More
Google launched the +1 feature of its social layer yesterday and if you’re like most tech journalists you probably likened the move to attaching a Facebook Like button to Google search results.
Well now someone has gone and done exactly that, no joke. Meet +Like, a Firefox, Safari and Chrome extension that lets you see how many people have liked a specific Google search result on Facebook as well… → Read More
Common sense, for once, has prevailed. For whatever reason Boston College was telling its students that using a wireless router could be considered a “common example of copyright infringement.” Word got out, the Internet complained, and now the offending bullet point has been removed. → Read More
We’ve been more skeptical than most about Spotify’s promises to launch in the US, but it looks like Europe’s favourite music service is finally ready to make good on its promise.
Deals are in place with the major US record labels and Valley investors are lining up to provide the cash needed to pay for costly music licenses.
The catch? We’re hearing from multiple sources today that in order… → Read More
Most people over the age of 20 will remember the ViewMaster toys that let you see slideshows from your favorite movies and cartoons in 3D. Shabby, static 3D, but still. Well, Hasbro has put out a product that, while it sounds ridiculous at first, is actually sheer genius. Replace the slide wheels with an iPhone! It’s brilliant! → Read More
Hyundai plans to reveal their rather fetching Blue2 (pronounced “Blue square”) hydrogen fuel cell concept later this week at the Seoul Motor Show. We haven’t been seeing many hydrogen-powered cars lately — most of the ongoing eco-craze involves electric cars. Nonetheless, hydrogen-powered cars are considered to be the industry’s endgame, and the “liberator” for polluting vehicles. Exciting stuff. → Read More
Earlier this afternoon, Mike posted an exclusive story about an internal war raging within Google.
In the post he mentioned that Google revenue chief Nikesh Arora had recently returned from a two week jaunt in the Caribbean with Demand Media CEO Richard Rosenblatt aboard Rosenblatt’s yacht, The Adsense.
A few minutes after the post went live, Rosenblatt called the TechCrunch office and left a… → Read More
Back in August of ’10 (them were the days) we posted about how an Israeli company called Better Place was testing out a system for switching out batteries in Japanese electric taxis. They drive in, get their new battery, and drive out. A good idea for fleet vehicles, we said at the time, but it would take some refinement before coming to regular cars.
Well, Better Place is taking that step now… → Read More
This year’s European startup conference GeeknRolla has become a platform for news, as startups launched and speakers broke news direct from the stage.
Duedil, the business reputation startup, secured first prize in the startup competition, and an on-the-day announcement from DFJ Esprit that it would award the winner a £50,000 no strings investment in the form of a convertible note. This would… → Read More
Shortly after Apple releases new products into the market, they find their way onto eBay — at a premium, of course. According to data released by eBay, the iPad 2 has been one of eBay’s most popular items over the last few weeks; eBay sold 12,000 iPads in the first two weeks (65% to US customers and 35% to international customers). → Read More
Power struggles within Google’s executive team, which have been brewing since the announcement of long time CEO Eric Schmidt’s departure, are apparently bubbling up to the surface.
Case in point: In an extraordinary move to illustrate its independence, say sources, the Google webspam team actually classified Google Places as spam and a content farm, and temporarily removed it from search results. → Read More
For years now, Facebook has offered quite a few ways to access the site from mobile devices, and they’ve proven immensely popular. In February 2010 the site had 100 million mobile users per month — today it’s announcing that it’s up to 250 million. To coincide with the growth stats, Facebook has some other news to announce about mobile.
We hear most often about Facebook’s native applications… → Read More
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