Nikon may have just accidentally revealed the successor to their D5000 consumer DSLR. This video shows various cameras in the Nikon family, but Nikon Rumors noticed that when it shows the D5000, the LCD is shown swiveled to the left side. The Problem? The D5000 LCD only swivels down. Not much revealed other than that, but a good catch by NR. If the release is soon, it could steal the Canon T3i’s swivel-thunder. We’ll keep you posted. → Read More
I think we are all still pretty skeptical of the tablet-based newspapers right now — nothing against them, it’s just a question of scale and pricing. With surprisingly low pricing like the Daily’s, or (relatively) high pricing like the WSJ’s, can they get enough people to subscribe to make turn a dollar?
As it turns out: yes, at least on the Wall Street Journal’s part. → Read More
Bytejacker is a good “layman’s” resource for the indie gaming world: up to date but not esoteric, enthusiastic but not fanboyish, and generally bite-sized, although this week’s episode, in which they hit up GDC, is longer than usual. There’s lots of good stuff, including a few previews of games you know are going to be big, some random good stuff, and even a brief interview with Pixel, who pretty much singlehandedly created Cave Story. → Read More
Because you ain’t nobody unless you have a special version of your app for SXSW, Posterous has today released its own effort with Posterous Events, a which allows people at a massive event like SXSW or even something as humble as a family picnic to create a simple site around that event using their iPhone apps.
All users who want to create a Posterous site around an event have to do is open up their iPhones and create a .posterous address for a specific location and post (the site you most recently posted to will stay on top of your events). → Read More
We see interesting exoskeletal mechanisms here on CrunchGear every once in a while, though most of them are pretty specific in their applications. This one is no different: it’s not for making you into a superhuman, but just making people whose work involves constant extension of the arm and heavy lifting be a little less fatiguing. → Read More
There are no products to announce or anything, but Canon has decided it’s going to saddle up with Thunderbolt, Intel’s new high-speed interface. It’s doubtful that it will be integrated into cameras being released this year, since like most companies it wasn’t included in pre-release development, but you can expect the next generation of DSLRs and maybe even point-and-shoots to sport little lightning bolts. It’s a great match for cameras, I think, since it does double duty as a display and data pipe. → Read More
Seed funded by Accel and Battery Ventures, Loosecubes is a workplace sharing community with a focus on co-working. Unlike Liquidspaces, which primarily matches people with work spaces, Loosecubes founder Campbell McKellar tells me she wants to move beyond providing an area with wifi and match people with people.
Loosecubes will be launching a redesigned site and product next week and but wants to help people come together in advance, and thus is holding a Co-Working Un-Conference in Austin tonight until 11pm at 301 Colorado (Colorado and 4th). To further drive this “bringing people together” thing home, LooseCubes built the HTML 5 app Instant Jelly especially for the SXSW occasion. → Read More
The extended cut of the Kevin Bacon Logitech Revue commercial. Yep, 3:33 minutes of Kevin Bacon hawking Google TV. Enjoy. It’s my gift to you. → Read More
“You be the rock star, we’ll be your stage.” – Aol billboard outside TCHQ
“Hey, what’s going on? – Russell just got electrocuted.” – Almost Famous
The re-invigoration of Aol continues apace today with the announcement by Tim Armstrong that 900 employees will be laid off before the afternoon is out. According to Wired, those canned include “veteran journalists from AOL’s top news sites, including PoliticsDaily, DailyFinance and Walletpop”. Or as AOL’s SVP of news put it: “I have just laid off dozens of the most talented journalists & product folks I know.”
And, lest overpaid freelancers like me get too cocky, Tim had a nice fuck-you-very-much for us too. “Going forward, AOL will invest more heavily in our in-house editorial team and transition away from a reliance on freelance journalists,” he wrote in an email leaked to Business Insider. Thank God I write books for a living, eh?
To be fair, though, Armstrong’s grand plan for making Aol the world’s greatest content company isn’t limited to laying off “dozens of the most talented journalists and product folks”. According to a second leaked memo that’s just landed in my inbox, other proposed measures to improve the bottom line include… → Read More
Here’s a fun one for your Thursday afternoon enjoyment. It looks like Universal Studios is currently shopping around a script to re-make the Doom movie, only this time it will be shot in 3D. Will Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson return? (That’s him to the left, cutting a promo on John Cena, as you do.) Unknown. Will the movie be nothing more than empty action? Almost certainly. → Read More
I remember when I first fell in love with Instapaper. It was a few years ago, and most people were still using Delicious or worse, their browsers, to bookmark things on the web. Delicious was still solid at the time, but it was also pretty slow. Instapaper was wonderful because it was fast. You hit one button (a bookmarklet) and it saved an article to read later.
The reality is that the service hasn’t changed all that much over the years. But the iPhone and now iPad have transformed it from being a useful service into an essential one. And it has grown into a big enough business where creator Marco Arment was able to leave his job as CTO of Tumblr to focus on it full time. And now we’re seeing the fruits of that. → Read More
Gemini is known for making some pretty cool DJ equipment and mixers. Today they released FirstMix, a USB DJ controller with two scratch wheels, rotaries and a cross fader. The controller sources music from iTunes or any other music library and plays them in the included Cross LE DJ software. The controller also works with Traktor, Virtual DJ and Algoriddim’s DJAY and other popular DJ software. → Read More
If you’re like me, you cringe a little whenever you put a little synthetic oil on your chain or send some toxic cleaning fluid down the drain. Seems to me that people with bikes are more likely to care about their environmental impact, and also more likely to pay more for quality gear and accessories. These sustainable bike care products from Orontas let you and your bike feel good. → Read More
This microscopic camera is the work of the Fraunhofer Institute and image sensor company Awaiba. It’s essentially a tiny 1mm square substrate with a layer of image sensors and then a lens layer on top of that — giving this camera a total size of 1x1x1mm. Yeah, it’s pretty much the smallest camera ever. → Read More
Groupola, which originally launched as a Groupon-clone in the UK but has since pivoted to become a daily deal aggregator, has been found by the UK’s Office of Fair Trading of operating ‘bait pricing’ in its much publicised iPhone promotion held last year.
At the time, Groupola’s biggest crime was that its website crashed throughout much of the day of the group buying promotion, leading some consumers to suggest it was a scam. How many iPhones were actually on sale was what most hopeful punters wanted to know, so we asked. Two hundred handsets was the official answer – also repeated on Groupola’s Facebook page – when in actual fact, says the OFT, it was just eight.
Oh dear. → Read More
The “epic fail” of PS3 security discovered by hackers in January and pried open further by Geohot (who is now being sued) may be fixed with the latest patch to the PS3. This is the natural way of things, of course. → Read More
The immense popularity of the iPad, and now the iPad 2, has Apple’s competitors, in the words of Steve Jobs, flummoxed. What to do? According to a J.P. Morgan Research analyst, it may well be that all of these competitor tablets will be sitting on the store shelves as folks decide en masse that the iPad is the way to go. In other words, competitors try to convince people that their tablet is “better” than the iPad could well be wasting their time. And money, of course. → Read More
RadiumOne, an online ad network that aims to combine social and intent data to serve ads, has raised $21 million in Series B funding led by Crosslink Capital, with DFJ Esprit, Adams Street Partners and Trinity Ventures participating in the round. This latest round brings RadiumOne’s total funding to $33.5 million. Although the company declined to name the valuation in the round, we heard from industry sources that the network’s valuation was roughly $200 million (we heard one online company tried to buy RadiumOne for $250 million).
RadiumOne was founded by serial entrepreneur and gWallet founder Gurbaksh Chahal. Chahal sold his ad network BlueLithium to Yahoo for $300 million in 2007 and at the time, Chahal’s company was the fifth largest ad network in the United States and the second largest in the United Kingdom. Chahal’s non-compete contract with Yahoo ended in October 2010, and he got back into the online ad business with RadiumOne. → Read More
VigLink, a startup that helps publishers and bloggers monetize their outbound traffic, has closed a $5.4 million Series B funding round led by Emergence Capital, with participation from existing investors Google Ventures and First Round Capital. The company raised $800,000 in January 2010 and has now raised a total of $7.3 million. The company is also revealing that SoftTech VC took part in an earlier round (their participation was not previously disclosed).
VigLink’s goal is to help publishers monetize their content more effectively and without much effort. After installing a small snippet of code on your site, VigLink will detect whenever you create an outbound link to any of 12,500 merchant sites. It will then automatically convert this link to an affiliate link, which means that you get a kickback whenever someone clicks it and eventually completes a purchase on the linked merchant site. → Read More
San Francisco is a ghost town right now. It seems as if the entire city has packed up and headed to Austin, Texas for SXSW. The conference was too big two years ago. Then it got bigger last year. And this year it’s expected to be significantly bigger once again. I’m leaving tomorrow, and I’m scared.
But the good news is that an old trusty friend will be on hand to help us navigate the insane crowds: Uber. Yes, mobile app-controlled car service is heading to Austin as well for SXSW. But they’re doing it with a true Austin twist: pedicabs. → Read More
San Francisco, CA
