If you’re on a website that uses accounts, the sign in button can be anywhere. Sure, there are some common best practices, but I can think of dozens of sites that put them all over the place. Mozilla is looking to fix that, by bringing the sign in to the browser level.
A new experimental extension that Mozilla has released for Firefox does exactly this. When it’s installed, you’ll see a new… → Read More
If you’ve been reading the internet regularly this week, you’re probably familiar with Jonathan’s card, a “social payment experiment” amounting to a public Starbucks gift card. You might have bought a coffee with it. You might have contributed to it. You might have suspected it of being a Starbucks viral (it isn’t).
What you probably haven’t done is set up a script to skim money off the card in… → Read More
No-one really knows what Spotify’s US growth has been since launch a month ago month, but it appears to be making an impact on American iPhone users. Onavo, a service which shrinks your data use on the iPhone, can track what data people are using, and has thus produced some interesting stats.
Spotify’s app is very aware of its data usage allowing plenty of control such as the ability to disable… → Read More
Anyone who lives near a deciduous forest knows the joy of the maple seed, or as we called them when we were kids, helicopters. Their single wing spins the seed, slowing its descent — so why shouldn’t a similarly-designed wing be able to spin faster and actually fly upwards? Lockheed Martin has demonstrated a new drone platform, not quite a nano air vehicle but still simple and light, that… → Read More
In the wake of the UK-wide riots and the growing evidence that mobile applications like the BlackBerry Messaging system had helped rioters organise and amplify their activity, the UK government is considering a review of social media. Specifically, Home Secretary Theresa May plans to sit down with Twitter, Facebook and RIM, to discuss the issues. That’ll be an interesting chat.
She hasn’t minced… → Read More
In a move that was pretty much inevitable in Google’s overall strategy of eventual Google+ integration into most if not all Google products, the search engine has announced that it will now be including publicly shared Google+ posts in its “social search” results. → Read More
A partially-redacted letter from AT&T lawyers to FCC officials was accidentally posted on the FCC website today, and it reveals quite a bit about AT&T‘s strategy for its proposed acquisition of T-Mobile. Unfortunately, the filing has come and gone on the website, but the folks over at Wireless Week took down some notes for us. → Read More
We’ve seen a lot of interesting patents from Apple over the last few days, but Microsoft loves to patent things too — and they’ve just been granted a nice little pack of designs for mobile phones in a special slider format, and some Kinect and mouse tech to boot.
They’re not patenting a plain slider, of course. They’re patenting a few specific designs of sliding mechanism by which, once… → Read More
In Spanish it’s called vergüenza ajena, in German it’s called fremdschämen and plaatsvervangende schaamte in Dutch. What it is is second-hand embarrassment, and I just felt it, after being linked to this overly elaborate 404 page from startup Nosh. The “humorous” video, which simulates some kind of web hipster recconnaisance mission for a “rogue” web page is one of the most vergüenza ajena … → Read More
Andrew Losowsky is having a busy week. For one thing, he has just been appointed the new Books Editor for the Huffington Post (disclosure: Aol blah blah blah) and his latest essay – Reading in Four Dimensions – has just been released as a Kindle Single.
In the essay, Andrew discusses the future of publishing and specifically how the Internet has added a forth dimension to the reading… → Read More
If you regularly have to deal with a lot of repetitive data entry or sorting, there’s a good chance you’re familiar with services like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. The promise is appealing: you can hire workers to complete basic tasks for a relatively small amount of money. And, in theory, everyone wins. You get your tasks completed on the cheap, and your outsourced workforce gets to make some… → Read More
As we approach the fall, all the rumors of the Apple empire descend upon us. And this year may be the craziest yet because for the first time since the iPhone’s inception, Apple did not release new hardware in the summer. And there are still whispers of an iPad revamp as well. iOS 5 is coming. iCloud is coming. And then there are the iPods which are traditionally updated in the fall timeframe… → Read More
Short version: A solid pair of laptop or desk speakers, unremarkable but warm and powerful, with an understated and attractive design. More attention to detail would help justify their price, though. → Read More
Video chat startup TinyChat has released its first iOS app, TinyChat FB, which allows you to video chat with up to 12 Facebook friends from your smartphone. TinyChat founder Dan Blake tells me that what sets TinyChat FB apart from other services like Fring or Tango or even Skype is the fact that end users don’t need to have the service installed in order to participate in a chat. → Read More
Lens-related ephemera seems to be a soft spot of mine. Canon thermoses, Canon mugs, Nikon Mugs, Nikon bracelets — the fun never stops. Or, alternatively, it never starts, if you’re a Pentax user. All you get is great cameras and an amazing lens selection.
For the photographer who likes a tipple now and then, or just loves things that look like lenses, consider these twee 24-105mm zoom… → Read More
Waaaay back at CES in January, Sprint and RIM announced that they were cooking up a version of the BlackBerry Playbook that played friendly with Sprint’s 4G network. And then… nothing. Months went by, with nary a mention from either of the companies involved.
Alas, it looks like the Sprint 4G Playbook will be buried before it’s even born. Blaming a “lack of demand from business customers”… → Read More
Riley Hassell and Shane Macaulay were all set to go on stage at Black Hat and describe a few methods of hacking Android devices. But they never appeared: at the last minute, they decided not to reveal the vulnerabilities they had discovered. Why? “To prevent an unacceptable window of risk to consumers worldwide and to guarantee credit where it was due.” → Read More
PicPlum is a new photo-sharing startup which aims to make the curation, printing and mailing of physical photos easier than before. The service, founded by Paul Stamatiou and Akshay Dodeja, is targeted towards parents who want to send out printed photos of their children to friends and family. However, unlike the photo-printing powerhouses, Shutterfly and Snapfish, the idea isn’t to print out all… → Read More
Exclusive – TechCrunch has learned that an alleged violation of Facebook’s policies has resulted in a relatively high-profile casualty: Netlog, a sizable European social network, got banned from the Facebook platform earlier this week.
Netlog isn’t widely known in the United States, but has been around for more than a decade and claims 80 million users, most of them in Europe and the Middle… → Read More
Facebook made some noteworthy changes to its Platform policies on the 27th of July 2011, adding a couple of new terms developers need to take into account when building apps for the Facebook Platform.
Facebook appears not to have communicated the revisions on its developer outreach blog or forum as far as I can tell, and astonishingly, nobody seems to have noticed the policy updates whatsoever… → Read More
Earlier this week, smartphone maker HTC revealed its first NFC-based device, reportedly called the “HTC Stunning.” The phone is being released in China and will include support for mobile payments through a partnership with China UnionPay, a Chinese bankcard network.
What we didn’t know, however, was what kind of phone the Stunning is. Now we do: it’s just the HTC Incredible S with a NFC chip. → Read More
We reported a few weeks ago that Apple was potentially looking at TSMC (otherwise known as the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.) to start work on their next-generation A6 processor. Apple seems to have made up their mind in the interim, as the partnership was confirmed on Friday by the Chinese Economic News Service. → Read More
In a first for the social gaming giant, Zynga is actually launching an spinoff of one of its hit Facebook games, Frontierville. Today, the company is announcing the debut of The Pioneer Trail (which will go live today), a brand new Facebook game where players outfit wagons and travel across three distinct maps – Beaver Valley, High Plains and Avalanche Pass – all while trying to reach a single… → Read More
We’re back another episode of TechCrunched, your whirlwind weekly recap of top tech news.
This week’s show includes a recap of the patent spat between Microsoft and Google, revelations that iOS5 will indeed include voice commands powered by Nuance, and recent product launches to come out of Facebook. For more details, tune in! → Read More
In the wake of the UK-wide riots and the growing evidence that mobile applications like the BlackBerry Messaging system had helped rioters organise and amplify their activity, the UK government is considering a review of social media. Specifically, Home Secretary Theresa May plans to sit down with Twitter, Facebook and RIM, to discuss the issues. That’ll be an interesting chat.
She hasn’t… → Read More
No-one really knows what Spotify’s US growth has been since launch a month ago month, but it appears to be making an impact on American iPhone users. Onavo, a service which shrinks your data use on the iPhone, can track what data people are using, and has thus produced some interesting stats. Spotify’s app is very aware of its data usage allowing plenty of control such as the ability to disable… → Read More
Yokto is a newly launched video platform which offers an embeddable player that intelligently switches between a Flash-based interface or HTML5, depending on the device being used to view the content. This idea on its own is not original, of course. Similar solutions from companies like Brightcove, Ooyala, Kaltura and SublimeVideo, for example, offer much of the same thing.
But where Yokto… → Read More
NaClBox (get it?) is a port of DOSBox that allows DOS games to be played right in your browser. Right now you can play titles like Star Wars Tie Fighter complete with multi-voice MIDI sound and hot hot VGA graphics. It works on Macs, PCs, and Linux machines and runs under Chrome 13. → Read More
Monetization and distribution network for app developers, W3i, is today announcing a program specifically for iOS Game Developers. The new service, now in beta, is simply being called “Games Platform,” the company says. And its goal will be to solve the challenges facing game developers such as server set-up, maintenance, security, storefronts and analytics. → Read More
It’s coming! It’s finally, finally coming!
After nearly four months of traveling around just about everywhere but the US, the Galaxy S II is finally set to make its stateside debut. Samsung will be holding a press event on August 29th to spill all the details. → Read More
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