You’ve probably seen a few little gadgets and apps where you can wave it around and it spells something out on a long exposure, or draws a little picture. Pretty cool, but they’ve all been somewhat small — mainly good for painting stripes or single lines of text. The Mechatronics Guy’s “Light Scythe” is a two-meter bar covered in LEDs, and can be used to make man-sized graphics by moving it around in a long exposure. → Read More
This isn’t a knock on the 360, but it really demonstrates the differences between the US and Japanese markets, and shows how you can’t please all the people, all the time. Only six thousand Xbox 360s were moved in all of Japan in May, for a total of around 1.47 million. Compare that to over five million PS3s sold and over ten million Wiis. Yet here in the states, the 360 is selling like hotcakes. Well, what can you do? → Read More
In the spirit of Google’s “Let’s make the web faster” code campaign, there has been a ton of renewed interest around making web and mobile apps faster and more reliable. Really, this is for the simple reason that improved performance of applications means more visitors, higher search rankings, and lower operational costs. As a result, a growing number of app developers and site owners are spending time and money on performance and speed. Luckily, Rigor, a young startup launching today, has come to the rescue to make managing performance even easier. → Read More
With reports of social network Myspace about to sell for ~$30 million, the tech world eagerly awaits the HBS study for why the service, which was bought in 2006 by Newscorp for $580 million and was at some point valued at $1.5 billion (a quote in a Business Week article referred to it as “one of the best acquisitions ever”) ultimately failed. → Read More
If you have a kid, LeapFrog requires no introduction, but since lots of us haven’t spawned quite yet, I’ll go ahead and say that LeapFrog makes educational toys, books, and games for children. And now with the announcement of its LeapPad tablet, the company has entered itself into the tablet arena, albeit with a kid-friendly spin. That’s right, all of you tablet-owning parents will soon have something to hand over to the kids when they try to put their dirty mitts all over your precious iPad. → Read More
Soundfreaq hit the speaker dock scene late last year with the sexy SFQ-01. The firm is back and just released a white model cleverly named called the Ghost. Besides the color change, it’s the same speaker dock with a Dock Connector port, Bluetooth A2DP streaming, 3.5mm input and the oh-so-delicious design. Pricing is the same with an MSRP of $179 with immediate shipping available from Amazon. → Read More
Oh, so you thought Google was done after it rolled out Google+, Circles, Sparks, Huddle, and Hangouts? No, no, no. Google will be done when that’s Google-brand oxygen you’re breathing. This afternoon, the Google rollout announcements have continued, as the official Google blog quietly declared (relatively speaking) that the Google Search page (and products across the Google empire) will be getting “a bit of a makeover” over the next few months. And there are new web fonts, too. OMGoogle! → Read More
The story of WakeMate could be viewed as a warning to all tech-savvy entrepreneurs out there: building a hardware device is much more difficult than most web applications. The promise of WakeMate is compelling — it sells a $60 wristband that tracks your movements during the night, syncs to your smartphone, and wakes you up in the morning when you’re in the lightest stage of sleep, thereby reducing grogginess (hopefully). But the going hasn’t been easy.
The company trudged through a year of delays, faulty units, and upset customers before it finally started shipping in December, only to run into another issue: customers who had WakeMate units were having issues with the accompanying smartphone applications, which weren’t properly syncing. Which led to more negative reviews and frustration.
But now things are starting to look up for WakeMate. → Read More
There’s not a lot of real data to pull out of this unless you’re privy to a lot of internal Microsoft stuff, but it’s fun anyway. A video from Microsoft’s Cambridge campus has a whiteboard in the background that seems to have some Windows Phone 7 improvements scribbled on it. Nice eye on the viewer who spotted this! → Read More
Storage startup Dropbox has hired Ramsey Homsany as it’s General Counsel. Homsany is a long time Google lawyer. He joined the company in 2003 and was most recently the deputy general counsel of the commercial group. The 100 or so internal lawyers that reported to him dealt with Google’s various commercial and partnership relationships.
That experience is what Dropbox needs right now, CEO Drew Houston told me today. The company is inking lots of partnerships, for example. And huge growth is on the way.
“Hundreds of millions of people will be moving their hard drives to Dropbox in the coming years,” says Houston, “and we’ll be pioneering a new legal and policy frontier.” → Read More
Now that we’ve finally caught our breath from Disrupt in New York City, it’s time to to bring Disrupt back home to San Francisco. (We like to keep things moving around here). To get things rolling, we are accepting applications for startups to launch at the Disrupt Startup Battlefield in San Francisco, September 12-14, 2011. So what are you waiting for? Applications for the Startup Battlefield can be submitted starting today.
Do you think your startup can be the next Getaround, Qwiki, or Soluto—and make it through the judges gauntlet to claim the top prize of $50,000, the “Disrupt Cup” and accolades of the crowd? Sure it can. But you’ll never know unless you apply. → Read More
The latest Transformers game hasn’t been getting very good reviews, but that doesn’t mean you can’t represent your Cybertron love with some Transformers gaming swag. Razer’s got a new line of Death Adders with Autobot and Decepticon logos and colors, along with a Prime-emblazoned Vespula mousepad and some serious-looking laptop sleeves. Personally I’m not a big fan of the Transformers relaunch (the 1986 movie has yet to be surpassed), but these tie-ins seem tasteful enough. → Read More
Will people pay for online privacy? Yes, they will – at least according to Michael Fertik, the founder and CEO of Reputation.com, one of the early leaders in the new online privacy ecosystem. Indeed, Fertik believes that privacy is the next big thing in the online economy – a necessary antidote to Reid Hoffman’s Web 3.0 economy of pervasive personal data.
As Fertik told me when he came into San Francisco’s TechCrunchTV studio earlier this week, companies like Reputation.com give control back to the consumer in our Web 3.0 world. With products like the $75 a year MyPrivacy and MyReputation services, Reputation.com offers consumers a relatively affordable way to both block cookies and protect their online reputations in our increasingly public social media world. → Read More
DoNanza, which operates a platform for freelancers from all over the world (see our earlier coverage), has raised $1 million in funding from Google chairman Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors fund, AfterDox and other investors.
Founded in 2008 by Ami Dudu, Liran Kotzer and Gil Pal, DoNanza consolidates freelance jobs published across the Web, and matches them with freelancers in their database based on their individual skill sets and expectations. → Read More
Along with the 500 features originally announced for Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 Mango OS, Microsoft today announced the ability to create custom ring tones. Obviously, pre-loaded ring tones will still be available for those of us who enjoy a more classic ringer… but if you want Fergie to assure you that tonight’s going to be a good night every time your special lady friend calls, now you can. → Read More
You may not have heard of them quite yet, but a startup called Fitocracy is pretty hot right now. Six months into its private beta and Fitocracy has already gathered 18K users and has 8K more on the wait list. (And we have 1,200 free beta invites here, so click away!) But, ‘why is Fitocracy so hot right now?’ you ask in your best Zoolander impression. → Read More
Twitter co-founder Biz Stone took some time to blog today a bit about his past. He goes back to Xanga, then Blogger/Google, then (though not directly mentioned) Odeo. He talks about how after they failed to sell Odeo, Evan Williams created Obvious, a parent company with the purpose of buying back Odeo from its investors. Around this time, Jason Goldman, another previous Blogger/Google guy, joined them. Among the assets of Odeo was a little side project created during a hackathon, called Twitter. The rest really is history.
But Twitter didn’t catch fire immediately. Instead, as it slowly began to grow within Obvious, Stone, Williams, and Twitter creator Jack Dorsey decided to spin it off as its own company, Twitter, Inc. And as all of them, including Goldman, began to spend more time on Twitter, Obvious faded into the background. Until now.
After his reminiscing, Stone announces at the bottom of his post that he’s going to be taking a step back from Twitter to re-team with Williams and Goldman (both of whom recently left their full-time duties at Twitter) to re-start The Obvious Corporation. → Read More
Good news for any Windows Phone 7 owners out there who are just dying to get back to telling everyone where they are and amassing cutesy badges: Gowalla is now available on your platform. This is the first of the major check-in apps that has made its way to Microsoft’s nascent platform — which is actually a bit of a surprise. Why? Because if Microsoft’s demos back at their MIX 2010 conference were any indication, a Foursquare app was riiiiight around the corner. Turns out, that app was built by someone at Microsoft.. who’s no longer with the company. A rep from Microsoft went on record back in May saying that an official Foursquare app was on the way, but we haven’t heard anything since. → Read More
When I sat down last week with Google’s Vic Gundotra and Bradley Horowitz to get a tour of Google+, the new social project they rolled out today, my immediate reaction made them extremely happy. I told them that it looks great — Circles in particular — it was almost as if it wasn’t a Google product! That made them laugh. Then Horowitz let something slip.
“It’s Andy Hertzfeld, the original Mac guy,” he said.
Aha! → Read More
