This week’s episode of OMG/JK is a bit top-heavy. There simply wasn’t a ton of news this week beyond the one giant fight that broke out between Google and Microsoft over the patent issue. Channeling that spirit, Jason and I get into an argument about the argument.
Is Google right? Is Microsoft right? Do they both look like huge asses? → Read More
Talk to any tech company and they’ll tell you that hiring quality programmers is an incredibly difficult task — the smaller companies often have a hard time getting in front of the best candidates, and the large and ‘hot’ companies are inundated with applications, many of them sub par.
Interview Street is a new Y Combinator-funded startup that’s setting out to fix both of these problems… → Read More
Google just made it easier for you to invite friends to its new social network, Google+, by providing a short link you can post on the web or share with others over instant messaging. In order to get the link, says Google product manager Shimrit Ben-Yair, you simply click the “invite friends” button on the right-hand side of the stream – the same place invites were found before.
This news… → Read More
And so it begins. Carnegie Mellon researchers recently combined Facebook profile pictures and PittPatt‘s facial recognition software to identify supposedly-anonymous pictures from a dating site. Now they’re planning to demo a smartphone app that identifies faces by tapping into cloud-based image databases and recognition software. What’s next?
That’s a question I’ve been thinking about for a… → Read More
The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Danny Sullivan, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — talked patents and PR, Spotify, and everything except Google+ for the first time in months. It’s not that G+ has jumped the shark; in fact, it is the shark on which realtime video streaming will emerge when YouTube finally goes live. It’s a race with iCloud to get there, with AirPlay-enabled Spotify stoking the… → Read More
It was twenty years ago today/ Tim Berners-Lee taught the world to play/ Although 20 years ago he would have sworn/ That there wouldn’t have been so much porn. That’s right – the world’s first website, a placeholder page written by Sir Berners-Lee way back on August 6, 1991 in the then-nascent Hypertext Mark-Up Language, is celebrating its 20th birthday today. And, on this important anniversary… → Read More
Editor’s note: This guest post was written by Dave Chase, the CEO of Avado.com, a Patient Relationship Management company that was a TechCrunch Disrupt finalist. Previously he was a management consultant for Accenture’s healthcare practice consulting to 25 hospitals and was the founder of Microsoft’s Health business. You can follow him on Twitter @chasedave.
ZocDoc just announced a $50M… → Read More
China currently has the most Internet users of any country in the world, with some 420 million people connecting to the Web. Some more recent statistics even put that number as high as 485 million. Granted, China has a population of just over 1.3 billion, which means only 32 percent of its population is using the Web, a percentage far lower than the U.S. and Japan (at at 77 percent and 78 percent… → Read More
I’m currently looking at an email from US Airways customer support, where the only return contact info available in the email is a physical mailing address WTF — And a visit to the US Airways website reveals a similar over-reliance on snail mail. I mean, who does that? Still? Granted a little bit of on site digging reveals, gasp, phone numbers!
I guess somebody’s still into paper modes of… → Read More
Japan-based chemical and tech company Asahi Kasei has developed a small healthcare product that should make life for paramedics, emergency doctors (and patients) easier: the portable device (pictured) makes it possible to instantly access all medical data on a specific person with a PC or smartphone, via RFID. → Read More
By now it is a common axiom of Silicon Valley small talk that good engineers are, at the moment, murder to come by. While the most prominent talent battles have thus far been between Facebook and Google, I was curious whether there was a specific smaller startup that everyone wanted to work at.
So I set up a GoPollGo poll asking, “If you could work for a startup, any startup, which one would it… → Read More
Earlier today when we wrote about UrbanSpoon trying to get a piece of Opentable’s pie, this quote from Urbanspoon VP Kara Nortman really struck me, “Two years ago, an online reservation system required a massive upfront investment,” she said, now claiming that building a similar platform is as simple as setting up an iPad/iPhone app. → Read More
Try this: open up a new tab and type “kindle” into the address bar. Chances are it will send you to a Google search results page. That is, unless the ISP is intercepting such rogue queries and doing what they will with them. A pair of computer scientists at UC Berkeley have found that at least a dozen ISPs are still doing this, the result being that, for example, when someone types “kindle” into… → Read More
We’ve known for weeks now that Dropbox has been talking to investors about a new mega round of funding. The company, which has only raised $7.2 million in a seed and Series A round in 2007, has been seeking something between $200 million and $300 million, we’ve heard. But now we know a bit more. And we’ve heard something from one source that is nothing short of shocking.
Dropbox held an auction… → Read More
Happy International Beer Day! I just finished celebrating by brewing ten gallons of smoked stout, and I’m looking forward to a draught of blonde ale from my kegerator later today. I’ve been homebrewing for about two years, and it’s a fun, practical hobby. Variety is the name of the game, both in terms of beer styles to produce but also in terms of the methods used to produce beer: extract, partial… → Read More
Here’s your chance to let your kitten help other animals, using nothing other than its feline reflexes.
You may be familiar with ‘Game for Kittens‘, an iPhone game developed by Little Hiccup that’s exactly what it sounds like: it’s a game for your kitten (okay, so the title is slightly misleading — cats of all ages can play). And starting this week the game’s developer has teamed with HeyZap… → Read More
A few weeks ago I was meeting with Peter Thiel and that pesky question of whether we’re in a bubble or not came up. In a debate both sides are getting bored with, Thiel made a point I hadn’t heard: That LinkedIn’s IPO wasn’t some Netscape moment that opened the markets up for everyone else. In fact, he argued, it was the opposite.
LinkedIn showed that you can have a compelling IPO and get an… → Read More
Following up on our earlier coverage of Google’s Chrome browser for OS X Lion, it looks like development is moving along faster than expected. Specifically, swiping gesture support has already been fully implemented (in the right direction now too), and now a proper full screen mode has hit the Canary build of the browser as well.
Shortly after Lion’s launch a few weeks ago, we noted the Chrome… → Read More
I’ve said this before, but working at AOL is my first experience working at a “big” company. I’ve watched, mostly with amusement, as a Dilbert cartoon has come to life around me. Some of the policies and bureaucracy are useful (I’ll think of some examples, just give me a second).
Some are hilarious (forced drinking events). Some are really annoying. For example, every couple of weeks I get an… → Read More
As you know, Disrupt is coming to San Francisco this September and we have some amazing speakers and judges to announce. Tickets for Disrupt SF are on sale here.
We have already announced a few of the key speakers: Peter Thiel, Ron Conway, Marissa Mayer, Mike McCue, and Vinod Khosla. Who else is going to be there? Well, today we are announcing a few more key speakers. Not only will we have the… → Read More
Take two minutes out of your day and watch this beautifully-made and interesting little short documentary about Shikai Tseng and his interesting photographic technique. Tseng uses a custom-built multi-pinhole box to expose objects, which have been coated in “Liquid Light,” to their environments. → Read More
The recently revealed BlackBerry Curve 9360 is proving to be a surprising bit of hardware. Not only did it (thankfully) get rid of the chintzy chrome-ish highlights of its last iteration, IntoMobile reports that it also packs a a more competitive hardware configuration (hello NFC!) and a little feature hidden in the settings that doesn’t seem to have popped up on any other OS 7 device recently… → Read More
I know this is more or less just a publicity stunt sponsored by Vodafone, but that doesn’t stop me from wishing we had one of these LED towers here in Seattle. It’s an installation at the Sziget Festival in Budapest, Hungary, and attendees will be able to play an oversized shoot-em-up called Rocket Bullet Storm, by Nemesys Games. → Read More
We caught up with LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner yesterday, just after his first earnings call as a public company CEO. In an earlier segment we talked about the surprisingly good quarter LinkedIn had; in this one we talk about the company’s insane roller-coaster of an IPO.
I asked Weiner what that week was like for LinkedIn, a company that’s usually the boring social media giant with no pedophile… → Read More
There is a lot of creative talent out there, but for a long time, designers, artists, and creative professionals were underrepresented in the digital world. Not only that, but the Web happens to be a perfect medium for artists to showcase their talents, distribute their portfolios, and hook up with benefactors. So, back in early 2008, Scott Belsky and co-founder Matias Corea, along with… → Read More
One of the all-time most popular restaurant apps on mobile is Urbanspoon (iTunes link). It is still one of the top 10 travel apps on the iPhone. The app’s signature gesture is a shake to find nearby restaurants. Urbanspoon just passed one billion shakes and has been downloaded 20 million times across all mobile platforms (iOS, Android, Blackberry). In March 2010, it hit 500 million shakes, so… → Read More
In case you’re sensitive to noise and look for a discreet way to solve the problem in your apartment or office building, for example, the so-called Feltone [JP] might do the trick for you. Developed by Japan-based Tokyo Blinds, Feltone is a blind that can absorb sound and push down power noise by up to 60%. → Read More
LinkedIn posted its first earnings as a public company yesterday and in true form as a social network, the company used a number of social media outlets to disseminate this information. LinkedIn posted earnings slides on a SlideShare Pro Channel at the close of the bell yesterday, which made it much easier for bloggers and others to then embed and share these slides on their sites (we… → Read More
Car buying sucks but Nissan is trying to make it suck less by putting QR codes on vehicle window stickers. The thought is that buyers might want a little more info than the Maroni providers, and these QR codes are a direct link to Nissan. Jon Brancheau, Nissan’s VP of of Marketing calls the On Vehicle Graphics QR codes a “silent salesperson” but it’s more like a trustworthy salesperson. Amirite? → Read More
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