From the why-didn’t-anyone-think-of-this-before department: meet Heartsy, which is basically a Groupon for Etsy, i.e. a daily deals site for handmade items sold on Etsy stores.
The concept should be overly familiar to you: registered users get sent exclusive deals on handmade items sold on Etsy by email. Acquired coupons, or vouchers as Heartsy refers to them, can be redeemed at the Etsy store that sponsored the deal (example). → Read More
Here are some of last week’s stories on CrunchGear: Review: The Nintendo 3DS, The Next Step In Portable Gaming Evolution Twimal: Super-Cute Twitter Toy Pet Reads Tweets For You iPhly Radio Control For iPhone Meridian For iPhone: In-store, turn-by-turn maps to merchandise Solarball Cleans 3 Liters Of Water A Day → Read More
Brendan Eich, creator of the JavaScript scripting language and chief technology officer at Mozilla, has joined the advisory board of Amsterdam, The Netherlands-based Ajax.org.
We recently wrote about Ajax.org’s introduction of Cloud9 IDE, a commercial, cloud-based development platform for JavaScript that incorporates HTML5, and supporting Python, Ruby and PHP.
Eich is known for his work on Netscape, where he started work in April 1995 and invented JavaScript. He then helped found Mozilla.org in early 1998, serving as chief architect, and later helped spin out the Mozilla Foundation. → Read More
This morning in London, the UK’s answer to Startup America launches, titled – guess what? – Startup Britain. That similarity aside, the initiative has been put together by a number of existing UK entrepreneurs and is not being backed by any government money, unlike the Obama initiative. Instead, we have here a ground-up entrepreneur-led initiative which is seeing over 60 leading brands offer services to up-and-coming startups in the UK. This is not specifically about tech startups – but it may well appeal to that sector.
The campaign is being launched by Prime Minister David Cameron, who is known to be very pro-enterprise. The UK has 270,000 businesses that start up every year but many fail due to a lack of support. So in effect the Startup Britain initiative is doing a few things much more differently. It’s offering a package of discounts and free trial on business services like insurance, broadband, advertising, office space and more. The claim is that this amounts to over £1,500 in value for every startup company in Britain. Startup Britain is a portal site to a package of these services. → Read More
“One of the deep mysteries to me is our logo, the symbol of lust and knowledge, bitten into, all crossed with the colors of the rainbow in the wrong order. You couldn’t dream of a more appropriate logo: lust, knowledge, hope, and anarchy.”
– Jean Louis Gassée on the naming of Apple
Why is Color named “Color”?
“A tribute to Apple’s color logo from the Apple II. This computer changed my life when I was seven (also a reference to another company name I’ve used.)
My dad bought one from ComputerCraft run by Billy Ladin in Houston. He was one of the first computer resellers back in 1977. In an odd twist, I meet him in an elevator 15 years later and worked for him. He introduced me to the Web. → Read More
We’re back with a new episode of OMG/JK, and it’s a good one.
This last week has been full of controversy — from the launch of Color, the photo-swapping app that raised $41 million pre-launch, to reports that Google is not planning to open-source the tablet version of Android any time soon. And, as you’d expect, MG and I have some differing opinions about what that means for Android’s status as “Open”. This week also brings the launch Amazon’s Appstore, which will face off with Google’s official Android Market.
Here are some posts relevant to this episode’s discussion: → Read More
Glam Media, one of the largest publishing and advertising networks on the Web, is continuing to expand its international presence with the launch of Glam Media South Korea. The women-focused vertical will represent the sixth international country subsidiary for Glam, adding to platforms in Canada, Germany, Japan, France and the UK.
Similar to Glam’s womens entertainment, style and fashion channel Glam.com, Glam.kr will feature original stories, photos and videos, as well as curated content across a range of lifestyle categories including beauty, entertainment, fashion, health and wellness, and more. Ellie Park, formerly the editor-in-chief of Elle Magazine’s online site in South Korea, will serve as editor in chief of Glam.kr. → Read More
After playing Total War: Shogun 2, one of my concerns was how I would view subsequent Total War games. As far as I’m concerned, The Creative Assembly has now perfected the Total War formula, so to play another might result in feelings of, “Oh, this again. Hm.” The same fear now applies to the first-person shooter genre post-Crysis 2, but not because the game is perfect (although it’s pretty decent). It’s just that we’re done here*. Someone needs to stand up and say, “Folks! We get it: you know how to create point-and-click shooty games with big explosions. Can we please move on?” → Read More
Everyone loves loyalty points. But it’s often a pain to get them because different companies all have their own programs that require you to remember numbers. Topguest’s goal is to unify that experience by letting you earn points simply by checking-in on social networks like Foursquare and Facebook. And now they’re adding a new layer to the mix: Instagram photos.
Yes, beginning today when the integration goes fully live, you’ll be able to earn reward points at venues around the world simply by taking a picture and sharing it on Instagram. This may mean hotel points, air miles, or other benefits at the over 10,000 places Topguest currently works with. All you have to do is link up Topguest to your Instagram account (via their new API) and make sure your picture is geotagged at the venue. → Read More
Much has been made of the iPad’s role as a laptop replacement, but for me that war is over. The phone is increasingly a remote controller for the larger screen — I use its Personal Hotspot tethering to broker FaceTime calls on the move, and push notification as pointers into Twitter and the Web document store. Chatter provides a corporate firewalled collaboration space, and I spend the rest of my time discovering workarounds for current limitations that require my Mac Book Pro. They are as vanishingly few as times I can’t get through to Scoble or weekends where I can get my column in on time. → Read More
When I first wrote about Swoopo back in 2008 I found it abhorrent. It was, in short, a form of gambling masquerading as an auction site. You paid for bids – the more bids you bought the better the chance that you’d be able to pay a reduced price for a certain item. The real money came from the suckers who ran up the price. All those previous bids, at $1, were junked in the process.
They called it entertainment shopping. Now, however, I call it dead. → Read More
Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by Mark Suster (@msuster), a 2x entrepreneur, now VC at GRP Partners. Read more about Suster at Bothsidesofthetable
Blogs. We all read them to get a sense of what is going on in the world, peeling back layers of the old world in which media was too scripted.
By definition, if you are reading this you read blogs. But should you actually write one if you’re a startup, an industry figure (lawyer, banker) or VC? Absolutely.
This is a post to help you figure out why you should write and what you should talk about. So read on … → Read More
In his recent article on TechCrunch, “Engineering vs. Liberal Arts: Who’s Right—Bill or Steve?,” Vivek Wadhwa sparked a national debate about education that raises important questions for us all.
If you haven’t read the article yet, Wadhwa, a professor at Berkeley and Duke University, surveyed 652 chief executive officers and heads of product engineering at 502 U.S. technology companies and found that only 37% held engineering or computer technology degrees, and just 2% held mathematics degrees. The rest had a wide range of degrees, from business to the humanities.
Yet in industry and education circles, STEM – teaching science, technology, engineering, and mathematics – has gained cult-like status as the primary solution to our national innovation challenges. But while investment in STEM is critical, it alone neglects the development of the types of skills that actually lead to discovery, creativity, and innovation. → Read More
“Every now and then when your life gets complicated and the weasels start closing in, the only cure is to load up on heinous chemicals and then drive like a bastard to Las Vegas…” – Hunter S. Thompson
31,000 feet on Delta flight 133 from New York to San Francisco, sandwiched between a rotund bald man and a skinny French kid in a checked shirt. I feel like the cheesy filling in an unsettlingly turbulent quiche.
Still, sub-prime conditions or no, I have a column to write: I pop open my laptop and fire up a clean browser window.
As a technology columnist, my craft can be distilled as follows: identify the week’s hot-button topic, Google what other commentators are saying about it, pick a side, argue the opposite, get paid, don’t read the comments. Piece of cake, right?
And this week, the first two of those steps has been made particularly easy. For the past few days, my fellow tech writers have been working themselves into a bubbling froth about the Valley’s latest app du jour: Color. → Read More
Many people (including myself) were a bit disappointed that Apple didn’t devote any time during the iPad 2 unveiling to talking about iOS 5, the next major revamp of the software. But there may be a very good reason for that: it’s not coming anytime soon. In fact, the plan right now is to wait to launch iOS 5 until the fall, we’ve heard from two solid sources.
If our sources are right, this would break the pattern of Apple unveiling the latest iOS iteration in the early spring, leading up to a summer launch alongside new iPhone hardware. The spring timetable usually reserved for an iOS roadmap event is why some were hoping Apple may just rope the details into the iPad 2 event. When that didn’t happen, rumors quickly spread that there may be another event in April to talk iOS 5 (and MobileMe). But it’s looking like that will not be the case this year. → Read More
This week’s Gillmor Gang started off with a bunch of no-shows from Mike Arrington and Robert Scoble. Don’t know what happened to Mike, but @scobleizer was sandbagged by a rehearsal request for Ted X, whatever that is. So we hunkered down with Danny Sullivan, Kevin Marks, and John Taschek for a rousing trouncing of the vanishing television windowing system, as performed by NetFlix, Showtime, and various Mad Men.
Showtime is mad because Netflix is closing in on its 20 million subscribers. Mad Men are mad because AMC can’t close a deal for a fifth season without promising a sixth. Android is mad because it can’t get no respect from anyone but @kevinmarks, and I’m mad about the iPad 2. As in nuts. Ce n’est pas un app. → Read More
Google is still hard at work on their social strategy. You know it, I know it, we all know it. What it will actually be, remains to be seen. But there are clues related to it that have started to appear.
The first was the redesign of the toolbar. While Google claimed it doesn’t directly point to the social strategy (even though it looks exactly like the verified +1 leaks we’ve seen), it is a first step. The second was the revamping of profile pages. Also nothing particularly social about it, but again, related to the overall strategy. And now we’re seeing something else: a unification of profiles across Google properties. And a big push for all of them to be public. → Read More
Open. Open. Open. Open. Open. Open. Open. Closed.
I’ve never liked Google’s use of the word “open” to describe the Android operating system. On one hand, the “openness” has led to situations where carriers can more easily screw consumers. On the other hand, their system is really only “open” when it’s convenient to be. Wanna include Google’s services on your Android device? Sure, sign this partnership agreement. Wanna check in code for Android? Do you work at Google? No. Well then you’ll have to wait. Open.
But still, every chance they get, we hear from Google how open Android is, as if it’s the perfect answer to every question. How are you going to compete with Apple? Open. How are you going to keep the carriers in check? Open. How are you going to make money from Android? Open. Why is the Android experience sub-par? Open. → Read More
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