There are things you need to be afraid of when you’re a new parent. There’s gluten, pull cords, Disney products, and BPA, to be sure, but what about wild robotic strollers that look as if they’ll eat your wee ones in one snap of their plastic jaws?
Luckily, the 4moms Origami stroller won’t close on the little ones and is in fact a automatic stroller with a bit of a twist. Instead of pressing down on some hydraulics, this thing opens and closes with the tap of a button. It is, in short, pretty darn amazing.
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Twitter photo sharing service YFrog has deleted the account of Grace Dent, an influential UK Twitterer and writer with over 94,000 followers. There appears to be no explanation for the blunder at the moment but we’ve reached out to YFrog for comment.
Twitter recently became the number one photo sharing service on its platform, handling 36% of shares, and YFrog is down to 21% from 29.3% five months ago, indicating a slow death. → Read More
LaunchNow.co is a new startup that turns building startups into a game. (Yes, we’re there now.) The idea is that players will pit their companies against each other in order to earn badges, achievements and a “Gamerscore” which is then published to their startup’s profile page. Oh, and here’s the crazy part: LaunchNow is meant to be used with real-life startups, not fake ones. → Read More
Apple Stores are awesome places to shop. All the latest Apple products are on tables, just waiting to be used and abused. The employees are generally very knowledgeable and they tend to let shoppers wander without pestering (they have an app for that). Oh, and the free tech support at the Genius Bar is, well, genius. The techs don’t try to sell unknowing customers surge protectors or gold-plated USB Monster Cables. Apple Stores are without question retail done right. Then there’s Best Buy. As their latest TV spot reminds, they sell Apple products, too. → Read More
AT&T sure isn’t wasting any time on shoring up their LTE lineup: just a few weeks after the HTC Vivid and Samsung GSII Skyrocket hit the scene, AT&T has announced that the LG Nitro HD will hit the streets on December 4 for $249.99.
Better known as the Optimus LTE outside of the United States, the Nitro HD sports a pretty impressive spec sheet. As the name would imply, the Nitro sports a high-definition 4.5-inch AH-IPS running at 720p, and an 8-megapixel camera sits on the Nitro’s rear-end. Under the hood is a dual-core 1.5GHz processor, along with 4GB of internal storage and a pre-installed 16GB microSD card. → Read More
With Angry Birds, Rovio found a way to transform normal, healthy people into raging bird-flinging addicts. This isn’t really that big of a deal — at least not in most cases — unless some shady app developers begin impersonating Rovio and selling fake apps on the Android Market.
Did I mention that some shady app developers have started impersonating Rovio and selling fake apps on the Android Market? → Read More
Early results for Cyber Monday are looking good for retailers. Cyber Monday 2011 online sales are already up 20 percent for this same time period over Cyber Monday 2010, according to IBM’s Coremetrics retailer data.
IBM says that it expects most online shopping to come from laptops and PCs during the day with mobile shopping activity picking up later in the day, when consumers are purchasing from home.
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Black Friday is an awful day compared to today. Sure, you might walk away with that one deal you had your eye on, but for the most part it’s a lot of waiting, fighting, and pepper-spraying. To make up for such an excruciating sale experience, retailers have given us Cyber Monday — the light to Black Friday’s darkness.
That said, we’ve decided to round up some of the best sales of the day just in case you chose to forego Black Friday proper (and why wouldn’t you?). → Read More
Google has kicked off the week by posting a six-minute video clip that gives a fast-paced overview of its history as a search company, from its earliest days of Larry Page and Sergey Brin’s PageRank algorithm to its more recent feature launches, like Google Instant. The video features interviews from key members who have worked on Google Search, including Google Fellows Ben Gomes and Amit Singhal, and Google VP Marissa Mayer, who led Search for a decade before taking the helm of Google’s local products.
The video revolves around Google’s mission to surface the information people are looking for as quickly as possible, but the most interesting bits focus on the problems and stumbles that Google has had along the way.
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Online retail always peaks around the holidays, and with the frantic purchasing of gifts come the inevitable deluge of email receipts. It’s all too easy for them to slip unnoticed into the recesses of your inbox, but a new service called OneReceipt aims to aggregate and track those receipts so users will be able to see exactly what their money is being spent on. → Read More
If you’ve been having trouble getting your Windows Phone 7 handset to connect with your Mac (I’m sure the hybrid Mac/WP7-owner exists out there somewhere, right?), it’s time to give it another spin — after you’ve taken a trip to the Mac App Store for an update, that is.
Microsoft’s latest release of the Windows Phone 7 Connector is said to fix a number of bugs, including the spotty connectivity that a number of users have reported. → Read More
French business media are reporting that Viadeo, the professional social network challenging LinkedIn in a number of countries, has acquired Soocial, a Dutch contact management, syncing and backup service provider (via Journal Du Net).
The service basically lets users sync all their contacts across their smartphones, email accounts and computers, and lets them manage, clean up and share contacts from their digital address books. → Read More
The U.S. comScore Video Metrix stats are out now for October, revealing that 184 million U.S. Internet users watched online videos last month, with an average of 21.1 hours per viewers. The total U.S. audience viewed 42.6 billion videos, an all-time high, says the measurement firm. Meanwhile, “Google sites,” led by YouTube, retained its number one ranking. However, in October, Facebook staged a comeback by moving up into the number two slot from its previous position of fifth place.
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With all the talk of iPhone vs. Android these days, it’s easy to forget how the majority of the world’s mobile users still make calls and access data: via feature phones. A recently released report from mobile strategy firm VisionMobile takes a look at today’s mobile marketplace finding that, despite the sharp rise in smartphone shipments over 2010 and 2011, global smartphone penetration (by OS) is at just 27%.
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We’re still waiting for our chance to nab a Galaxy Nexus on this side of the pond, but it seems European users haven’t exactly been having the best luck with their first-run devices. Fortunately, it looks like the folks at MoDaCo have a (quasi-official) fix for one of the Galaxy Nexus’s most irritating issues: the dreaded volume bug.
If you haven’t seen the volume bug strike before, do yourself a favor and check it out below. When the Nexus hops onto the 900MHz 2G band (or is even placed near another device that is), the volume level can be seen jumping around wildly. → Read More
We’ve heard rumors of a sort of MacBook Pro/MacBook Air convergence for the past few months and it seems Digitimes may be confirming the arrival of a larger, ultrabook-like 15-inch MacBook Air.
The source believes that Apple is working on updated 11.6-inch, 13.3-inch and 15-inch models. This will be distinct from the Pro line. → Read More
Recently I had a conversation with a friend of mine who was interested in doing product management at a startup. He was working as a consultant, but wanted to join a company like foursquare as a PM. However, he wasn’t getting any return calls and was becoming frustrated, and wanted my advice on why. I told him this:Guess what? Everyone thinks they are the next Steve Jobs, but they aren’t. The odds are you aren’t God’s gift to product design. And even if you are, no one will be inclined to believe it, because you have no evidence: you’ve never 1) started a startup, 2) worked at a startup, 3) worked in product management, 4) designed products as side projects. All your experience is in another irrelevant field; why should a successful startup give you a chance? → Read More
You know, I’m becoming something of a fan of Brandon Harris (the latest face of Wikipedia’s fundraising efforts, which you should absolutely donate to.)
First, he’s a programmer on Wikipedia, which is pretty much the most world-bettering programming gig you could ever have. Second, he stopped in for hugs even as we were sort of poking fun at him. Third, he’s taken the time to answer the question we’ve been asking for over a week now: what’s up with the crazy confusing/hilarious donation plea portrait placement?*
The answer: They do it intentionally. Because it works. → Read More
While Apple’s engineers toil away deep in the heart of their Cupertino headquarters, developers have taken it upon themselves to make Siri even more impressive than usual. Forget about setting reminders and checking the weather — with a little bit of know-how (and a homebrew proxy server), Siri can start your car for you.
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We’ve been posting quite a few products over the past few weeks, starting with our exciting and inviting Bag Week, and now our nefarious mission has become clear: welcome to TechCrunch Gadgets’ 2011 Gift Guide, a series of posts dedicated to how to shop for folks you love/like this holiday season.
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