Much has been made of supposed decline in the number of cable TV subscribers. But not everyone agrees that mass cord-cutting is reshaping the industry. Indeed, according to Kyle Dixon, Time Warner’s VP of Public Policy, we are seeing the “opposite” of cord-cutting with Time Warner seeing no “significant decrease” for its paid content.
I interviewed Dixon earlier this week at the Technology Policy Institute’s Aspen Forum where he spoke on a panel about the economic implications of online video. What Dixon stressed to me is that, for all the online videos of what he described as “kittens flushing toilets”, consumers still really want high-quality news and entertainment content from networks like HBO. And thus, while the Internet is obviously changing our viewing habits, it is yet to revolutionize the television industry. So is Dixon right – is cord-cutting an illusion?
→ Read More
You might remember Rob Spence, known online as the Eyeborg for his project to create a working bionic eye. We wrote about him before, and interviewed him a while back, but the project has advanced to the point where even a seasoned tech blogger is left speechless with amazement.
Spence has worked with a team of engineers to adapt an endoscope into a working in-socket video camera. It’s turned on by waving a magnet near it, at which point it will begin transmitting a wireless video signal to a handheld LCD viewer. Absolutely incredible. Watch the video inside. → Read More
Bad news for anyone who was looking to rent the latest episode of Top Gear from iTunes, as Apple has quickly and quietly removed their 99¢ television rental option today.
The functionality has disappeared from both the Apple TV’s interface and the iTunes store proper, signalling a drastic shift in Apple’s pricing policy. Individual episodes of a series can still be bought as usual, and movie rentals still cost the same going rates, so not every iTunes customer will be weeping over the loss. → Read More
Next year, search advertising will be a $15 billion market in the U.S. alone, growing by 14 percent, according to eMarketer. And, if Facebook can capture half the share of that market that Google has today, it could easily add an extra $25 billion or even far more to its value.
For most any CEO who could have even a modest chance of succeeding at it, that payoff would be reason enough to take a serious look at entering the search category. And yet, while I’m sure he wouldn’t scoff at the extra revenues, profits, or valuation, I suspect that Mark Zuckerberg finds something else far more motivating than just increasing the financial value of his company.
And that’s what will propel him next year to make a completely disruptive entry into the search category. → Read More
We’ve heard quite a bit about the Galaxy S II, which isn’t all that surprising seeing that it sold 3 million units in its first 55 on the market. As people from other parts of the globe got to experience the wonder that is the GSII, we here in the States played the waiting game. But it’s so close I can almost taste the Gingerbread.
On August 29, Samsung will finally unveil the GSII’s U.S. iterations in the Big Apple for T-Mobile, Sprint, and AT&T. If you haven’t already heard, Verizon is holding off on the GSII. In the lead up to the event, this image was leaked to PocketNow, which shows all three little beasts posing for the camera. → Read More
When it comes to massive news, the past two weeks have been absolutely insane. Google buying Motorola? HTC To Buy Beats? Steve Jobs resigning as CEO of Apple?!
What better way to cleanse the palette than a quick tromp into a conceptual rabbit hole? 3D animation shop Aatma Studios has released a concept video showing what they imagine as the iPhone of the future, and… well.. I’m ready to pre-order. → Read More
Jobs is not a child of the ’60s, but he has inherited the family business. Having used the legacy to build an adult toy based on the music of his youth, he harvested the audience and connected them via the phone, broke the carrier’s hammerlock, and changed the firmware from CD to DVD to iPad and WiFi. Just as Dylan broke the song barrier, Jobs created the new record, razor and blades, a wirelessly streaming living album that wraps, informs, emits, and shares our lives. → Read More
IBM Research has just set a world record in data storage by building a drive array capable of holding 120 petabytes. It was done at the request of an unnamed research group that needs this unprecedented amount of space for running simulations of some sort. These simulations have been expanding in size as the datasets grow, but also as more backups, snapshots, and redundancies are added.
How did they do it? Well, the easy part was plugging in the 200,000 individual hard drives that make up the array. → Read More
FEMA’s had a mobile version of their website available for a while now, but all that information does you no good if you can’t get an internet connection. Given the fragility of mobile networks during disasters, going without web access is a very real possibility.
Enter FEMA’s new, self-titled Android app, which puts a wealth of emergency preparedness information right in the palm of your hand just in case. → Read More
Cloud gaming service OnLive has been getting better and better. We had a blast checking out the OnLive booth at E3 this year, and you better believe the service’s usage will have gone up since GameStop inadvertently gave OnLive a ton of great publicity yesterday.
But OnLive isn’t resting on its laurels, as new user-requested features are rolling out today. → Read More
Well, what do we have here? Looks like T-Mobile has just snagged a new tablet accessory. We’re just not sure which tablet the accessory is supposed to go with. This 10-inch leather sleeve isn’t going to fit very well on either of T-Mobile’s current slate offerings: the 7-inch Dell Streak 7 or the 8.9-inch T-Mobile G-Slate. → Read More
In a typically forthright keynote address early this week at the Technology Policy Institute’s Aspen Forum, Clarium Capital’s Peter Thiel argued that our current technological progress is “decelerating and stalled out.” But not all the luminaries at the Aspen Forum shared Thiel’s pessimism. Krish Prabhu, for example, the recently appointed President and CEO of AT&T Labs, who also keynoted the Forum, remains bullish about America’s technological innovation, particularly that driven by what he identified as an increasingly “intelligent” digital network.
“This is not your grandfather’s AT&T,” Prabhu – a former partner at Morgenthaler Ventures and CEO of Tellabs – explained to me about AT&T Labs when I sat down with him in Aspen after his keynote. The purpose of the 21st century Labs, he explained, is delivering innovation to start-up entrepreneurs. Thus AT&T’s $80 million investment in their Foundry incubators, an initiative that has already born fruit both in Israel and in Texas and will soon open in Palo Alto. → Read More
The perception of geeks used to be that we lived in darkened houses constantly hunched over computers, never seeing the light of day. To be honest, that was me for a bit in my younger years, but these days I’ve come to appreciate the outdoors a bit more.
Still, my love for fresh air is only matched by my love of lazing about, and the Kammok sounds like a perfect fit for my ideal lifestyle. → Read More
MyHeritage, Israel’s best hope of having a big Web 2.0 winner, keeps marching along, leaving Geni further in the dust and proving a surging challenger for already-public Ancestry.com.
The company has nearly 60 million registered users, who have uploaded 20 million family trees, 800 million profiles and 125 million photos on the site. All of that inventory is helping fulfill the early promise of sites like MyHeritage and Geni: Discovery. MyHeritage is enabling more than 20 million new “Smart Matches” a month.
Today it’s announcing its Family Graph API to enable more developers to build family-oriented apps on top of this unique set of connections. → Read More
We all know by now. Steve Jobs has resigned as CEO of Apple. The outpouring of emotion from this news is something we have never really seen before and this very well may be one of the biggest stories we will ever see in this space. Even though this may be the end of an era, Steve Jobs will still be with Apple and continue to touch lives of millions.
In light of all the news, Pursuitist, the premiere travel, food, style and leisure online destination, where our very own Paul Carr is a contributor, has offered to give an iPad 2 away to one lucky TechCrunch reader. → Read More
On the heels of Apple’s decision to phase out developer access to the UDID (unique device identifier) on iOS devices, mobile social gaming network OpenFeint is offering up a an alternative solution. The company announced today that it’s launching a single sign-on system for social game developers that will replace UDIDs on iOS.
The system will become available later this fall.
→ Read More
Perhaps best known for their myriad gaming peripherals with dramatic names, Razer has just made a huge move into the PC hardware space. Announced today at PAX Prime, Razer’s new Blade gaming notebook packs a whole lot of gaming horsepower into an aluminum body that’s less than an inch thick.
→ Read More
Apple has just hired yet another member of the iPhone jailbreaking community, Nicholas Allegra, also known as “@comex” on Twitter. Allegra is best known for the JailBreakMe website which made the process of jailbreaking the iPhone as simple as visiting a webpage using mobile Safari.
The 19-year old hacker from Chappaqua, New York, posted the news of his hire on Twitter, stating that he will be starting an internship with Apple week after next. → Read More
We’ve been waiting for Delicious founder Joshua Schacter to debut the secret product coming out of his newest startup Tasty Labs. And today the wait is over with the debut of Jig, a Q&A meets recommendations site.
As fellow co-founder Nick Nguyen writes on Jig’s blog, Our Jig is a website, one that helps you with your needs– by making it easy to share them with people who can help solve them. We built Jig to make it easy to describe what you need with just a few words. → Read More
So Irene, the massive hurricane aimed straight for the East coast, is in quite a hurry to come visit us, with winds reaching 115 mph. And it’s looking like she’s bearing down on New York City. One little problem: nyc.gov is down, which makes it pretty difficult to check out whether or not you should run for cover or kick back and relax.
Sites go down all the time, and normally the only ones ever really hurt by it are the sites themselves, losing valuable clicks. This time, the public safety has come into play, so we thought we’d give you guys a couple other resources to figure out what’s happening as Irene blasts her way up the East coast. → Read More
Barcelona, Spain
New York City
San Francisco, CA
