Everyone is rightly very excited about the upcoming mega-hackathon at Disrupt New York. At last count, the event will host around four hundred billion hackers, working on some eighty five trillion projects. Luckily, as at all TechCrunch events, there’ll be rock-solid wifi and wired Internet for all those billions of people to use. And yet… on the other side of the Atlantic, a merry… → Read More
A few years ago Bell & Ross began to experiment with ceramic watches. The first real collection was the BRS, a smaller square cased model that was, to an extent, a women’s watch. It was thin and lovely and ended up on the wrists of more women than men. There were also ceramic versions of the BR03 – a 42mm wide version of the 46mm wide BR01. Those ceramic models had a lot of different styles… → Read More
Earlier this week I issued a report about the positive changes that have recently taken place in the venture capital industry. These changes are profound and will have a lasting effect on both the venture capital asset class as well as today’s start-ups.
Much has been written about the so-called “golden age” of venture capital in the late 1990s dot-com era, when the likes of Netscape… → Read More
Last week I wrote a post about my current investment policy at TechCrunch, and pointing out already disclosed financial conflicts of interest. Our primary duty to readers, as I’ve said many times, is transparency. To that end we will (as we always have) be extremely careful in disclosing any investments I’ve made in startups or in venture funds. And these interests will be disclosed even when… → Read More
Here’s a nice little talking point for your dinner parties and bar chatter tonight: the National Endowment for the Arts has changed its “Arts On Radio And Television” category to a broader “Arts In Media,” adding web-based video (as opposed to broadcast) and “interactive games” as potential platforms for grants. That means that the feds officially consider… → Read More
It’s just about that time again. Google I/O is happening next week and just as in year’s past, the company is expected to announce some big things on stage during their two keynotes on Tuesday and Wednesday morning. But what will those things be? Jason and I delve into some predictions for the event, which we’ll both be covering.
But first we take some time to look back at last year’s I/O which… → Read More
Back in March, alongside the roll out of Amazon’s new cloud-based music upload/player service, we noted one glaring problem: it didn’t work on iOS devices. You might think this had to due with Flash or another technology that iOS wasn’t compatible with, but it wasn’t. It looked like something else was simply blocking it from working. Well, good news. That’s no longer the case.
If you visit … → Read More
Everyone is rightly very excited about the upcoming mega-hackathon at Disrupt New York. At last count, the event will host around four hundred billion hackers, working on some eighty five trillion projects. Luckily, as at all TechCrunch events, there’ll be rock-solid wifi and wired Internet for all those billions of people to use.
And yet… on the other side of the Atlantic, a merry band of… → Read More
Since 2007, you’ve been able to sign in to your AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) account to chat with your AIM contacts directly from Gmail. You simply login with your AIM account in Gmail and your contacts will populate your gChat list, allowing you to chat with them just like you would your Google Talk contatcs.
From this notice, it looks like changes may be afoot to this feature. From AIM’s notice… → Read More
We’ve all lived the nightmare. A new developer shows up at work, and you try to be welcoming, but he1 can’t seem to get up to speed; the questions he asks reveal basic ignorance; and his work, when it finally emerges, is so kludgey that it ultimately must be rewritten from scratch by more competent people. And yet his interviewers—and/or the HR department, if your company has been infested by… → Read More
A few weeks ago we gave away a BlackBerry Playbook and, much to your disappointment, you didn’t win. In order to right that wrong, we present The Return Of The Attack Of The 16GB BlackBerry Playbook, Part II featuring a brand new BlackBerry Playbook with your name on it.
How do you win? I think you know. → Read More
Search is about to change quite radically. For more than a decade, search has been stagnant: the core product has not changed much. Users have changed radically in that time frame. Even though the kind of content users consume is different, search engines are still focused mostly on web pages. Users have become less patient and have less time on hand, while search engines still require users to… → Read More
The Felt Mouse Airship! This Bulbous Craft Could Launch In 2013 Armor Games Releases Sequel To Crush The Castle, Siege Hero Inventables: For Your Weekend Fun For The High-Tech Naturalist: LeafSnap Identifies Leaves Using Your iPhone’s Camera Thanks For The Dead Scorpion, Acura (Plus A Pulse Smartpen Giveaway!) → Read More
Around eighty entrepreneur hopefuls gathered at NASA AMES last week to pitch their ideas for breakthrough technological products, with the hopes of gaining the funding to make their dreams a reality. But this wasn’t part of the application process for a new fangled startup accelerator program, and the teams weren’t comprised of Valley visionairies in their 20s and 30s but rather high school kids… → Read More
This past November, the blogosphere was briefly set on fire when a comment Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak made in passing stated that Apple had acquired the voice recognition company Nuance. Wozniak quickly came out and corrected that comment, and most believed that he had simply confused Nuance with the company he mentioned right afterwards, Siri — a company that Apple actually did acquire in… → Read More
I wrote a while back about the limitations of a direct-interaction interface, and of course the lack of buttons and such makes for a different UI from the start. But would you say your tablet needs this Ringbow thing? → Read More
This is just plain fantastic. The LeafSnap app for iPhone identifies any leaf you take a picture of, as long as it’s in their library. Check out the video inside. → Read More
We posted on Wednesday about how publishing giant Hearst has agreed to Apple’s iTunes-delivery terms for its magazines, and will set a standard price of $2 per month or $20 per year. It seems Conde Nast will be following its example, if the NY Post’s tipster is correct. Odd, since it recently said it’s slowing down its tablet stuff. Strangely, The New Yorker is said to be their… → Read More
Hossein “Hoder” Derakhshan, widely regard as the father of Iranian blogging, has reappeared online on his Facebook profile.
He’s recently posted an album of new images titled The New Me including one titled “Gradually getting ready for a new life”, which was added 3 hours ago (it’s 18.25 in London right now).
Derakhshan was previously arrested in 2008 and eventually sentenced to 19.5 years in… → Read More
MIC Gadgets has taken some great pictures of the iPad 2 launch at the Beijing Apple store. My favorite part? The official scalping area, where people who bought up all the stock can sit and wait for disappointed buyers to come out and buy for a markup. I have to say, though, for a city as big and dense as Beijing, I kind of expected even more people than this. Regardless, Apple’s hot little… → Read More
Notable mobile developer Joe Hewitt has left Facebook to pursue independent projects related to HTML 5 development.
From his blog:
“Today was my last day at Facebook. Normally when I leave a job I go out cursing the management and wishing I had left much sooner. In the case of Facebook, I sent heartfelt emails to all of my managers thanking them for the privilege of letting me work there, and I… → Read More
Whoa there tipsters, slow down. We’ve just been bombarded with tips coming our way that Google has rolled out a new-look search results page. Scanning Twitter, it looks like there are in fact a lot of people seeing this. And boy is it ugly.
I mean, it’s great that Google appears to be trying to clean up the look of the results page, which has gotten pretty cluttered over the years as they add… → Read More
You might remember that Sleek Audio, purveyors of fine headphone goods, were teaming up with 50 cent to produce a new pair of wireless over-ears. Why not, right? All the other audio guys are teaming up with rappers, so they had to just to stay competitive. But the honeymoon’s over. Sleek Audio and G-Unit productions (Fitty’s licensing company) are quits. And the headphones? “We… → Read More
I remember poring over Uncle Milton Catalogs as a wee lad but I doubt old Milt has rubber glass, oil-absorbing polymers, or conductive foam sensors in his bag of tricks. That’s where Inventibles comes in. These guys are a one-stop shop for wild materials and scientific tools and I’m kind of salivating just going through the lists of items. → Read More
With Nintendo officially announcing their next console in June, there’s a little pressure being put on Microsoft and Sony. Sony, of course, has other things to worry about, but some think that Microsoft will use this lead time to put together something relating to its next console. In fact, one source claims that the next Xbox is already out there, just in disguise. They know because they saw one… → Read More
Remember the Readius, an e-reader with a foldable screen? Vaguely? The last we heard of this device was back in 2008, so we were pretty sure it was kaput, but apparently the company has been bought and the project funded. The device may actually live to see daylight! → Read More
Trouble looms on the horizon for T-Mobile as carrier hemorrhages subscribers. The first three months of 2011 saw 471,000 contract customers walk out the door, and even including off-contract customers, they’re still a hundred thousand in the red. Meanwhile the competition is seeing healthy boosts: AT&T is looking at a net positive of two million subscribers, and the newly available… → Read More
Who needs another social network? Maybe you, friend. Admittedly, the social networking space is packed with so many players, it makes the mind reel. Across the Web, it seems like a new social network is born (and dies) every day. There are niche social networking sites for everything you can imagine. The knitting and crochet community has one, as do gamers, pet-lovers, and bowlers.
Some of these… → Read More
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