SavingStar, the national paperless grocery coupon service, announced today that Michael Lazerow, the founder and CEO of Buddy Media, has joined the company’s board of directors. Launched in April 2011, SavingStar provides digital coupons to more than 24,000 stores and over 100 supermarket and drugstore chains across the U.S. → Read More
<The social networking wars have dialed it up to 11 this week, with Google unleashing its highly anticipated (and highly leaked) Google+ social initiative upon the world on Tuesday — to not a bad response, to be honest. So it’s not that surprising that today Facebook countered the + hubbub with its own “we’ve got something awesome” unveiling planned for next week. You crazy kids!
The resemblance between the two social networks is uncanny — my Tweet-length opinion is that Google+ is like Facebook with a more usable, streamlined Photos and Groups interface (and that might be enough to win). Only time will tell. → Read More
Well, well, well. It looks like everybody’s favorite limited social networking and photo-sharing app has finally come to Android. That’s right, Path announced via its blog that Path for Android will be available in the Android Market beginning today. And sure it enough, it is. Check it out. But this is by no means a finished product. Path considers Version 1.0 of its Android app to be a public beta, using it to test the waters and learn what works and doesn’t work as it ports to a new mobile OS.
This maiden voyage for Android has quite a few of the familiar features that Path fans have come to enjoy, but according to Path Co-founder Dave Morin, there’s much more to come. → Read More
Although the world is currently enamored of flash memory, today’s standard for solid-state storage, companies like IBM need to think a few years ahead. One of the technologies they’re looking at is called phase-change memory, in which a memory cell changes from a crystalline to amorphous phase, changing its resistance. Put a bunch of those together, and you’ve got yourself a binary storage system. → Read More
Former EA executive, KPCB sFund lead and all around inspiring person Bing Gordon led a talk today at the sFund Gamification Summit breaking down platitudes like “gamification is important” into key actionable takeaways on how succeed with gamification, takeaways that could be reformatted and applied to any company as a measure of success.
When asked why he went through the trouble of putting his guide to how to successfully gamify together for entrepreneurs, Bing told me, “Every startup CEO should understand gamification, because the new normal is games,” referring to the fact that every one who had a Nintendo at 16 also has a brain that works in a specific way that’s more receptive to game elements. “We are overdeveloping the visual cortex of our customers,” he said. → Read More
Rechargeable batteries aren’t exactly headline news these days, but Sanyo seems so excited about their new XX line of NiMH AAs that it would be cruel of me not to post them. The XX series stores 2500mAh per battery and maintains a smooth, stable voltage all the way down to the end of the charge. They’ll cost $25 for four. → Read More
Apparently, Facebook is gearing up to show off something “awesome” next week. At least, that’s what CEO Mark Zuckerberg told reporters while he was visting the Seattle Facebook offices yesterday. Reuters reports that whatever it is, it has been developed by the 40-person team based in Seattle. And they think it might be in the mobile or tablet space.
All we know for sure is that it won’t be Project Spartan, the HTML5-based app platform that Facebook has been working on with a small group of outside developers in secret for months. Spartan will not be ready to go before the middle of July at the earliest, we’re told — nor is it based in Seattle. → Read More
You guys might remember a few years back when someone demonstrated that many tubular locks, like those use on many Kryptonite bike locks, could be opened with a common Bic pen. That someone was Marc Weber Tobias, and he’s back now to warn you again that your laptop lock might not be as secure as you think. Case in point: this HP lock, which his associate opens on camera in just a few seconds by whacking it with a screwdriver. → Read More
The winners of the the yearly MEMS (Microelectromechanical system) design competition held by Sandia National Labs were announced a short time ago, and they’re pretty impressive. Students from CMU and Texas Tech were honored and their designs highlighted: the Texas Tech team built a set of millimeter-wide dragonfly wings, and CMU made an electrostatically-activated microvalve. These things are quite small. → Read More
Steam’s big Summer Camp Sale starts today! Not that you can buy anything right now, since the store is buckling under the weight of the traffic. Reddit user Remmib has put together a nice little listing of most of the deals here, but you might want to wait an hour or two before trying to get in there. Some standouts: Valve Complete Pack (Portal 2 included) for $50, Borderlands for $5, a great id pack for $30, and the Rockstar Collection for $40. Ah, Summer! → Read More
PBS NewsHour sent their tech reporter Miles O’Brien to Maker Faire where he found the weird, wonderful, and wild arrayed before him. In an excellent few minutes O’Brien experiences the wonder of making and posits that DIY could help us out of a number of doldrums. → Read More
The unique form factors and Playstation branding of Sony’s S1 and S2 tablets have us fairly excited to test them out, but Sony hasn’t been very obliging on that front. Luckily, German tech site Golem had a bit more luck. → Read More
If I asked you which of the major social sites you thought sent us the most traffic, you might think it was Twitter. After all, the TechCrunch Twitter account has over 1.7 million followers. When you compare this to the (just under) 250,000 fans our Facebook TechCrunch page has, it should be no contest, right? Wrong.
The truth is that if this were October of last year, you would have been right in thinking that Twitter was our top referrer in terms of social websites. But since that time, Facebook has far surpassed Twitter in terms of traffic coming our way each month. In fact, Facebook.com is now sends nearly double the traffic that Twitter.com does. This is probably due to the fact that last November, we added Elin, our excellent community manager, who curates and engages with people from our feed on Facebook. I also suspect it has to do with the rise of the Like button. Ever since it was released last year, Facebook has been steadily referring more readers our way.
But this info, while interesting, isn’t all that surprising. After all, Facebook is by far the largest social network in the world. With over 750 million active users, it still dwarfs Twitter. The really surprising thing is that Twitter isn’t even our number two social referrer in terms of websites anymore. As of this month, that distinction goes to LinkedIn. And it’s not even close. → Read More
It’s a bit of a random time for a video like this, seeing as the announcement was back at CES and we had a nice, thorough hands-on with the new SUR40 Surface then, but hey. Maybe you missed it. If you don’t mind a little redundancy (and of course, the ever-present soft techno), this is a nice way to catch up on Microsoft’s Surface project. → Read More
Twitter just crossed another huge milestone. People are now sending 200 million tweets per day across the service. This is up from 65 million tweets per day a year ago, or about 200 percent growth in a year. Last March, Twitter reported 140 million tweets per day last March. Way back in January, 2009 people were only sending 2 million tweets per day.
Well, “people” is perhaps a generous term. Twitter is filled with automated bots Tweeting out, as well as feeds from publishers. It is not clear how many of those 200 million Tweets a day are automated versus individually hand-crafted. Well, “people” is perhaps a generous term. Twitter is filled with automated bots Tweeting out, as well as feeds from publishers. It is not clear how many of those 200 million Tweets a day are automated versus individually hand-crafted. → Read More
NMA continues in its tech blog baiting campaign, this time capturing Google’s multiple attempts to crack the nut of social in subtitled CGI format. Our ingenious Taiwanese friends have chose to represent the Buzz debacle as a guy who conspicuously resembles Mark Zuckerberg spying on a woman in the shower and Google Wave as a group of people trying and failing to surf.
Google+, in contrast, is depicted as a Pandora’s Box, which ultimately contains only hope in the form of the product’s true innovation, Social Circles. It’s perfect. → Read More
In response to this morning’s Open Letter from a purportedly “high level” RIM employee to the CEOs of the company, RIM sent over the following statement: → Read More
