You’ve waited for it. You’ve prayed for it. You’ve spilled the blood of countless sacrificial chickens for it. And now it’s here: Hulu Plus for Xbox 360. The service is launching tomorrow and you’re basically getting the Hulu interface with which you’re familiar plus a few Kinect add-ons including voice control and gestures. With sufficient bandwidth you also get high-quality streaming on what Microsoft is calling the “biggest screen in your house.” The service will be available for free from April 29 – May 6 and will thereafter cost $7.99 a month. Click through for more info on the service, including some words about Kintect interaction. → Read More
Just to add more fuel to the conflict of interest fire we have raging over at TC HQ today, TechCrunch Israeli correspondent and Soluto Head of Product Roi Carthy has decided to build a startup. You’d think being a TechCrunch writer would make Carthy shy away from doing something as hackneyed as a Groupon clone, but Carthy’s daily deals site has a twist!
(DISCLOSURE: I, like Carthy, write for TechCrunch) → Read More
A Russian white-hat security firm, Elcomsoft, has found that Nikon’s system of determining whether an image from one of their cameras has been tampered with is vulnerable to circumvention. Are you on your way to court with photographic element? Read this. → Read More
Can gadgets betray us? Is the Pope Catholic?
Last week, we ran an interview with Robert Vamosi, a senior security analyst at Mocana, and the author of When Gadgets Betray Us, about the iPhone location tracking kerfuffle.
But Vamosi’s new book goes beyond a critique of Apple and Google. When Gadgets Betray Us is a broad warning about how the latest technology hardware – from smart meters to medical devices – is leaking our data. And Vamosi offers a broad critique of technology, even arguing that we need to redefine the concept of “hacking” in an age where both privacy and traditional notions of intellectual property are in crisis. → Read More
Teamly, the collaboration and time management tool for businesses and employees, has exited beta today and with it is announcing what it’s calling a “significant milestone”: 9 months in, Teamly users have created 100,000 “priorities”.
The term “priorities” perhaps reflects the company’s key differentiation compared with similar offerings in the “performance management” software space which, says Teamly, aren’t designed to benefit the employee and are overly-complicated and encourage micro-management. In comparison, Teamly keeps things simple with a realtime stream where you can see both priorities and goal setting for the individual in the manner of a kind of “real-time appraisal”. To-date, 6,000 individuals in “hundreds of companies world-wide” are using the Software-as-a-Service. → Read More
For any of you caught up in the frenzy over the royal wedding between England’s Prince William and Kate Middleton, we’ve collected a comprehensive list of where to watch the festivities online, where to find photos, dedicated mobile apps, Twitter accounts following the Royal Wedding and more.
As opposed to the wedding of Prince Charles and Princess Diana, this Royal Wedding is particularly unique because of the web didn’t exist back then. And neither did social media. This will be one of the most publicized and watched weddings in history and thh whole world is invited to view and comment both on TV and the web. → Read More
TweetDeck’s new iPhone app came out a couple days ago. It is completely redesigned from the ground up and looks more like it’s Android cousin than the first TweetDeck for iPhone. Instead of cramming as much as possible into an iPhone screen, TweetDeck stripped everything out but the essentials. The result is a spare mobile stream reader that packs a lot of punch. We take a look at the new TweetDeck for IPhone in this episode of Fly or Die, along with Soundtracking, and Zapd. As usual, the CEO behind one of these products appears as a surprise guest during the show.
With Twitter rumored to be negotiating a $50 million acquisition of TweetDeck to keep it out of the hands of Bill Gross’ UberMedia, it is not clear whether this brand new product will survive such a deal. After all, Twitter has its own iPhone client, among others. It doesn’t need two. → Read More
Flattr, the social micropayment startup founded by ex-Pirate Bay associates, is announcing a significant change today.
In a move that represents less altruism and more capitalism, from May 1st onwards Flattr will no longer require new users to add credit to their accounts in order to run the Flattr button on their sites and start receiving payments. In other words, users won’t be required to give to receive. → Read More
If you’re on an Android device, you may know that there are already plenty of ways to conduct video and voice calls using various third party applications (Qik, Fring, etc.). But that functionality has never been included with stock builds of Android (at least, not for phones), the way Apple’s FaceTime has been integrated into iOS for the last year. Today, that’s starting to change.
Google is currently rolling out an update to Nexus S devices that adds voice and video chat to Google Talk, which is included as part of the core set of Google applications that come pre-installed on many Android devices. The feature will work on both Wi-Fi and 3G/4G wireless networks, and allows calls between phones, tablets, and any computer with Gmail and Google Talk enabled.
The update is gradually rolling out over the air (a process that usually takes a couple weeks), and it also includes numerous bug fixes. The Nexus One will be getting an update as well, but it won’t include the video chat support (it doesn’t have a front-facing camera, though it would have been nice to have a voice-only feature for VoIP calls). → Read More
Sedo will announce shortly that it has sold the most expensive domain name of this year so far in its third biggest public sale ever handled behind sex.com ($13 million) and vodka.com ($3 million). The company has brokered the sale of gambling.com for $2.5 million in cash.
UK-based Media Corporation sold the domain to an unnamed company also based in the United Kingdom for £1.5 million in cash. According to the seller, the transaction formally completed on 27 April, with the receipt of funds and transfer of the domain name. → Read More
Just about a year ago, when Apple passed Microsoft in market cap, the Redmond loyalists were out in full force: that means nothing — look at the revenues! When Apple passed Microsoft in revenues last October, it was: who cares — look at the profits! We were looking, and we projected that this quarter just ended would be the one in which Apple passed Microsoft in that regard too.
Sure enough, they have. Easily.
Microsoft has just announced their Q3 2011 results. The numbers appear to be good, beating analysts’ expectations. But with net income now at $5.23 billion, Microsoft now comes in well behind Apple, which had a net income of $5.99 billion last quarter. → Read More
Accel Partners has invested $35 million in the crowdsource design service 99designs– a monster of a series A. Of course, 99designs is not your average early-stage startup. Born in Melbourne, Australia out of an older company called sitepoint.com, 99designs is bootstrapped, profitable and growing revenues at a rate of about 120% a year.
A few strategic angel investors also participated including Michael Dearing, Stewart Butterfield, Dave Goldberg and Anthony Casalena. Accel’s Andrew Braccia and Ryan Sweeney will join the board along with Dearing.
The growth helps explain why Braccia has been courting this deal since 2009. And he wasn’t alone. 99designs CEO Patrick Llewellyn says several VCs have been pinging the company, and until now, they’ve all been turned away. They all seem to find out about the company the same way: One of their portfolio companies uses the service to get a good, cheap logo. → Read More
Spotify continues to negotiate with Facebook over its long promised U.S. launch. But that isn’t the only thing the music streaming service has been up to. They’ve negotiated a number of deals with major movie studios to offer users streaming movies as well as music, a source in the industry tells us.
Earlier this week we reported that YouTube plans a similar service (something we first wrote about last year). As with Google/YouTube, we’re not sure when Spotify will launch the new service. But our best information suggests this Fall.
And these aren’t your standard Netflix/Amazon/iTunes type movie deals, either, we’ve heard. Spotify is aiming to offer users much earlier access to movies. Similar to the release dates that hotel’s get for premium in-room movies. They’re expensive, but users can often see them just a couple of weeks after they’ve been in theaters. → Read More
HTC is looking for an experienced professional to lead the company into the automotive technology game. Apple established itself long ago in the automotive audio field with smart iPod/iPhone integration and this job posting seems to say the smartphone company is looking to follow suit, which will hopefully lead to smoother roads for Android and Windows Mobile users. → Read More
How do you know times are booming in the tech sector? Techmeme just became a job board.
To be clear, it will continue to be the go-to source for technology news as it has been for the past several years — but there’s now a new area in the right-hand column devoted to “Who’s hiring in tech”.
Techmeme founder Gabe Rivera writes about the new addition here, noting that “billboards suck” and taking a shot at our parent company, AOL, which has become addicted to putting up billboard touting jobs all over the Bay Area. Obviously, Rivera hopes this will become a new chunk of revenue for his site. → Read More
Om Malik got a tip from an unidentified source who told him that Apple purchased the domain name icloud.com from a Swedish company called Xcerion (which recently renamed its iCloud service to CloudMe) for about $4.5 million. This is most certainly a possibility.
Last week, we also received a tip that Apple purchased iCloud.com. I immediately followed up with Xcerion and asked the company whether they changed their name because Apple had purchased the domain name / trademark from them and why they changed their service’s name to CloudMe if that weren’t the case. → Read More
Visible Measures, a third-party online media measurement solution for advertisers and publishers, has secured $7.7 million in an open-ended financing round, according to an SEC filing. We’ve learned that the round was led by DAG Ventures, with participation from Northgate Capital and General Catalyst Partners. The newest round brings the company’s total funding to $37 million. → Read More
There is a fairly egregious worm going around now that masquerades as a YouTube link for a “banned” Lady Gaga video. When you click on the bit.ly link it sends you to a fake YouTube page and then asks for permission to access your Twitter account. This results in another infected tweet being sent out on your Twoot stream, thereby continuing the long, sad cycle. → Read More
