Kenwood is making portable music players, too. The company announced [JP] the so-called Media Keg MG-G608 for the Japanese market today, the newest addition to their Media Keg series of DAPs. → Read More
Why Don’t You Get Yourself A Nice Wooden Tie Since 2009 Kickstarter Funneled $60 Million To 24,000 Crowd-Funded Projects Ollie The Socially Awkward Blimp Wants To Be Your Friend Set Your Living Room To Turbo With This NES Advantage Lamp The Pioneer AppRadio: Select iOS Apps In Your Car’s Dash For Less Than $500 → Read More
Earlier this week, Amazon offered the new album from superstar Lady Gaga, ‘Born This Way’, for a mere $0.99 in an effort to get people to discover its recently launched Cloud Drive / Player service.
Only problem was that the offer was so good that it quickly put quite some strain on Amazon’s infrastructure.
Well, the company wants to make amends by repeating the offer today. → Read More
If you’re the kind of guy that always has to have some kind of off-the-wall tie, this could be right up your alley. No, it’s not pixelated, or LED-lit. It’s made of wood. Like real reclaimed wood pieces held to one another by sturdy elastic cord. Made by Wooden Thumb, they come in large and small (how large and how small isn’t specified), both for a very reasonable $34, plus shipping. [via NotCot] → Read More
Mark Zuckerberg made an appearance at the E-G8 Forum today in Paris. The largely PR-filled event created by French President Nicholas Sarkosy to address the effects the Internet is having on the G8′s agenda of globailsation witnessed possibly the softest interview Zuckerberg has ever had, and that’s saying something. Interviewer Maurice Levy, as head of Publicis, is a powerful man, but the interview was less than satisfying.
Despite this, Zuckerberg revealed a couple of things.
Significantly he appeared to kill any likelihood of a “Facebook phone”. → Read More
Three days and 32 startup pitches later, the winner of TechCrunch Disrupt has been determined. Out of the 30 startups and two audience choice winners, we whittled the list down to six finalists, which include Billguard, ccLoop, Do@, Getaround, InvoiceASAP, and Sonar. Without further ado, the two runners-up are Billguard and Sonar (that’s the first time we’ve had two runners-up). And the winner is….Getaround!
Getaround is a car rental market place where you can rent a car by the day, hour or week through a smartphone app. Getaround’s all inclusive package, which includes insurance, 24 hour roadside assistance, a Getaround car-kit, iPhone app and a web app makes it easy for people to conveniently car share anywhere. The company’s founder said today that currently the startup has signed up 1,600 cars for sharing since its launch yesterday, which is 20 percent of car-sharing giant Zipcar’s fleet of 8,000 cars. → Read More
Looking for a startup with a healthy dollop of hubris, a sense of humor, and a shroud of secrecy? Meet Amen, a company that claims to be offering “the best job in the world”.
At this point we don’t know much about the startup aside from a few things: it has a very solid founding team, and it has something to do with strongly voicing opinions.
The company’s founders include Florian Weber, a very early Twitter employee who played a major role in that company’s creation (to the point that he has been called a forgotten cofounder). Amen also includes Felix Petersen, who formerly founded Plazes, which was acquired by Nokia in 2008. Rounding out the roster are Caitlin Winner (MIT, Nokia) and Ricki Vester Gregersen (Input Squared). → Read More
Remote control cars, while amusing, tend to get in more car accidents than life-size vehicles. If it isn’t rolling off a curb, drifting into a pool, or crunching under the tire of a pick-up truck, it’s just plain out of battery. For that reason, and possibly for success and profit, the folks at Pop Culture Software have launched the RC vCar application, for the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad 2. → Read More
Hasselblad is known for high megapixel counts, but this is getting a bit ridiculous. On the other hand, the engineering solution they’ve employed to create that count is really interesting. Most camera makers, including Hasselblad, increase the pixel count of their sensor by reducing the size of the photosensitive wells and pushing them closer together. This has some benefits, but also drawbacks, one of which is a sort of pixel density wall that Hasselblad has probably been running up against for a while.
But instead of making the sensor bigger or packing more into it, they created a clever hardware-software combination that might give them a real advantage over the competition. → Read More
Google is holding an event tomorrow in New York City. While everyone seems to be aware that it’s a partner event to announce the NFC strategy for their Android phones, Google has refused to confirm it. Well, they don’t have to. One of their partners just did.
We just got an email from the PR firm representing ViVOtech, wondering if we were going to the Google event tomorrow. They try to talk vaguely about ”Google’s latest innovations”, but that doesn’t matter. Just look at what ViVOtech does. They make NFC software. → Read More
Whatser, the location-based service that lets users share their favorite locations with friends and discover new ones, is rolling out a new money-making feature today: Brands can now create collections of their favourite locations, which users of the platform can then ‘follow’.
Collections are a form of location curation so in this sense brands get to put their stamp on places that are worth checking out, perhaps around a certain theme that, conveniently, ties-in with the brand’s own offering. So, for example, Heineken could start a collection with rooftop bars around the world that a user can follow. Or Red Bull could host a collection of skateparks around the world. → Read More
http://cdn2.themis-media.com/media/global/movies/player/flowplayer.commercial-3.2.5.swf → Read More
TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield finalist Getaround is already disrupting the current car sharing industry, only a day after its launch. As we wrote yesterday, GetAround is a car rental market place where you can rent a car by the day, hour or week through a smartphone app. Getaround’s all inclusive package, which includes insurance, 24 hour roadside assistance, a Getaround car-kit, iPhone app and a web app makes it easy for people to conveniently car share any where.
Today, the company’s founder said that since its launch yesterday the startup has signed up 1,600 cars for sharing. That’s 20 percent of car-sharing giant Zipcar’s fleet of 8,000 cars. Impressive for a bootstrapped startup that has only been open to the public for a matter of hours. → Read More
A recent evening news report from North Korea showed the insides of a computer manufacturing facility, where the country claims to be developing its own PCs. A little digging has shown that one of the laptops in question is actually a super-low-cost netbook already on the market here in the US, but buying OEM hardware doesn’t mean they aren’t working on something of their own. The other PC, for instance, appears to be a bit more customized, and is made to attach to a TV, presumably to reduce cost of entry among the generally low-income households (if low-income is the correct term in a communist economy). → Read More
At the TC Disrupt startup battlefield finals, after Sonar CEO’s product demo (Sonar is an app that introduces you to the people relevant around you) TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington asked founder Brett Martin, how much he spent to build the service.
When Martin replied that Sonar took around $250K to date to build, Arrington commented, “This is better now than Color could ever hope to be,” looking at Sequoia investor Roelof Botha for comment or reaction. There was none. Sequoia invested about $25 million in Color’s $41million Series A round. → Read More
If you’re short on cash and desperate for the speedy joys of 4G connectivity, go ahead and cancel your late-night plans for tomorrow. The pink carrier is offering the T-Mobile G2 and the Sidekick 4G smartphones during its After Hours special tomorrow night, from 9 p.m. to 3 a.m. And get this: they’re free. Of course, you’ll have to sign up for a new two-year contract with T-Mobile to participate in the deal, but the good news is there’s a pretty good chance you can get out of it once AT&T swallows T-Mo. → Read More
Enamored of the shiny orange Brammo Enertia electric motorcyle adorning the stage during the latest presentations here at Disrupt NYC, Michael Arrington decided that it should be given away. Never mind that it wasn’t ours to give, and that we were already significantly over time. Once the idea took hold of his mind, he was not to be dissuaded, and after a short talk with Brammo CEO Craig Bramscher (conveniently present backstage following a panel on next-generation motoring), it was a done deal. → Read More
As some of you may have read, I was all set to step on a plane on Sunday to head to New York City for TechCrunch Disrupt. Then a giant volcano exploded.
But being stranded in Iceland wasn’t all bad. First of all, it’s a beautiful country. Second, when some local entrepreneurs read about our misfortune, they got together and organized an event: TechCrunch Erupt. My friends and I headed over to the event on Monday for conversation, beer, and livestreaming of TechCrunch Disrupt from the U.S. → Read More
Barcelona, Spain
New York City
San Francisco, CA
