Ready for some more SNES-flavored nostalgia on your iPhone or iPod Touch? Capcom has recently released Mega Man X for iOS, which should brighten the day of just about anyone who spent ehir formative years slaying robotic octopi. → Read More
Experian Hitwise, which has analyzed the top 1,000 search terms for 2011, is reporting that Facebook was the top-searched term overall in the U.S. for the third year in a row. Facebook accounted for 3.1 percent of all searches, a 46 percent increase from 2010. Four variations of the term “facebook” were among the top 10 terms and accounted for 4.4 percent of searches overall, a 24 percent increase from 2010.
Searches for “youtube” actually moved up from the third spot in 2010 to the second spot in 2011. “Facebook login” was the third most-searched term in 2011, followed by “craigslist” and “facebook.com.” Facebook.com moved up one spot in 2011 to be among the top five search terms. When combined, common search terms for Facebook, such as facebook and facebook.com, accounted for 3.5 percent of all searches in the United States among the top 50 terms, up 33 percent compared with 2010.
→ Read More
Online retail giant Amazon this morning announced that it will open four new distribution centers, two in Virginia and two in Tennessee, and that it will invest a total of $270 million to get the new facilities completed by next fall – just in time for next year’s holiday season.
In Virginia, Amazon says it will create about 1,350 jobs, while the new distribution centers in Tennessee will create 1,300 jobs. Amazon operates such facilities, which it calls fulfillment centers, to warehouse and ship items customers have ordered on Amazon.com. → Read More
Amazon has stopped pretending that a group of e-reading apps it allowed onto its Android Appstore weren’t available on the Kindle Fire. For whatever reason, the company was effectively hiding e-reading apps from companies like Wattpad, Kobo and Bluefire, even though they worked perfectly fine on the low-cost tablet computer.
Confused about why its app didn’t appear for users on the Kindle Fire, which is proving to be quite a sought-after device, Wattpad engaged in conversations with some folks over at Amazon, which apparently led to a necessary change in policy for all makers of mobile e-reading apps.
It’s unclear when Amazon started showing e-reading apps from rivals (including Wattpad’s) on Kindle Fire, exactly, but it seems they started appearing in listings sometime yesterday afternoon. Possibly, this was part of the Kindle Fire update that was delivered earlier this week. → Read More
Cloudability, a platform to manage and monitor all of your cloud costs in one place, has raised $1.1 million in seed funding, led by Trinity Ventures and Walden Venture Capital.
Cloudability, which launched in early November, helps businesses be more efficient on the cloud by analyzing a company’s entire cloud spend for cost savings opportunities and make recommendations. Cloudability supports more than 80 cloud and application providers, including AWS, Rackspace, Heroku, Airbrake and Google Apps, to give companies the ability to monitor and analyze complete cloud spend across multiple vendors.
→ Read More
Japan, one of the most advanced mobile nations in the world, doesn’t want to be a “cell phone Galapagos” anymore, at least when it comes to payments over NFC. Paying with cell phones is already ubiquitous in Japan, but now the country’s top three telcos (NTT Docomo, KDDI au, and SoftBank Mobile) are trying to switch from the Nippon-only Osaifu Keitai system to the Type A and Type B NFC standards used globally.
The problem for the carriers is that Osaifu Keitai (“Portable Wallet”), which is based on Sony’s FeliCa RFID smart card technology, isn’t compatible to the Type A and B NFC standards. Docomo, KDDI, and SoftBank have set up the so-called Japan Mobile NFC Consortium to coordinate the domestic adoption of those standards with “service suppliers and handset manufacturers”. → Read More
Akamai has indeed acquired Cotendo, one of its largest competitors, in a deal valuing the CDN and site acceleration services company at approximately $268 million.
The confirmation comes nearly a month after Israeli business press reported that Akamai was mulling an acquisition of the website and mobile acceleration technology vendor for up to $350 million. → Read More
It’s a common platitude in the gaming industry: it’s the killer titles that make or break a video game system. One case in point is Nintendo whose 3DS sales in Japan, one of the biggest video game markets in the world, are expected to cross the four million mark two months earlier than expected.
Just two weeks ago, Nintendo president Satoru Iwata said this will happen “in February next year”, but Japanese business daily The Nikkei is now reporting that cumulative domestic sales of the 3DS will reach four million before year-end. The newspaper is referring to stats from Tokyo-based market research company Enterbrain, which says Nintendo managed to sell a weekly record of 390,000 systems between December 12-18 (and 380,000 units between December 5 and 11). → Read More
Here are some recent posts on TechCrunch Gadgets: → Read More
Both Netflix’s brand and shares have been battered this year after price hikes last summer and the botched attempt to spin off the DVD rental business. Netflix was roundly criticized for its miscommunication with customers, but what’s been the actual effect? Citi analysts Mark Mahaney surveyed almost 10,000 former and current Netflix customers to find out.
While overall satisfaction levels did decline, 57 percent of consumers surveyed are still either “very satisfied” or “extremely satisfied.” That number is down from 83 percent in May, with a big drop in the number of people who are “extremely satisfied” coming down from 50 percent to 18 percent. (The “very satisfied” category actually grew 6 percent). Netflix is essentially holding its own. What’s more, it actually increased its lead over Hulu among respondents. Asked which websites they use to watch movies or TV shows online, 27 percent said Netflix, versus 15 percent for Hulu. → Read More
From tech titans like Zynga, Facebook, Microsoft, Google and Apple, to startups just launching, the battle lines of 2012 will be drawn across the landscape of HTML5. Below are 14 bold predictions for how HTML5 will evolve in 2012.
Welcome to a more interconnected web:
In 2012, HTML5 will be adding support for some really useful and cool APIs that allow one
website to connect to another.
For example, Zynga games on Facebook run inside of iframes. Using the new postMessage API these games will be able to communicate within the containing Facebook frame directly. Before HTML5, inter-window communication had to rely on a remote server – or use unreliable hacks. → Read More
More than a fair amount of business success hinges on telling stories about the future. The reason Yahoo’s market cap is down to $19.83 billion from a high of $55 billion is because shareholders don’t believe that it has a future. The reason Aol bought Bebo for $850 million (a little over half of Aol’s current market cap!) is that at the time it essentially believed — after processing analysis and reports, of course — that it was worth that much …
→ Read More
You’ve got a few hours left before all of the free “Get it before Christmas!” shipping deals come to a close, and you’ve still got people left gift-less. What ever will you do?
Give’m the gift that just about everyone would love: pornography booze the gift of music! We’ve had all sorts of aural accessories come through our office in the last year, so join us after the jump for a quick, last-minute recap of some of our favorites.
→ Read More
There’s been a recent interesting trend in the tablet market: devices 8 inches and smaller that are as powerful as their bigger cousins but considerably more portable and convenient. In this episode of Fly Or Die we talk about the mid-size trend and decide whether a smaller tablet makes for a better tablet.
→ Read More
Playdom’s Gardens of Time took the #1 spot of Facebook’s Most Popular Games of 2011 list. But wait, Zynga’s CityVille was ranked #3 despite peaking at over 100 million monthly active users and 21 million daily active users — far more than Gardens of Time’s peaks of 17 million MAU and 4 million DAU, or its current stats according to AppData. That’s because Facebook’s list was mostly based on Yes / No user surveys of whether they’d recommend the game, and hardly on active user count like it said
It’s almost as if Facebook used its cloudy methodology to keep Zynga from completely dominating the list, as the Mark Pincus machine currently owns all 5 Facebook games with the most DAU and still ended up with 4 of the top 10 spots on Facebook’s list. → Read More
Open. Open. Open. Open. Open. Open. Open. Open. Open.
Every chance they get, someone from Google brings this up as a huge advantage of Android over rivals like iOS. Never mind the fact that a good percentage of the time it’s pure marketing bullshit — why exactly isn’t Google Wallet on Google’s own Galaxy Nexus device? — even when it’s true, there are some very real downsides. The user experience angle has been debated ad nauseam. More interesting is what we’re seeing now. A downside for Google.
Amazon’s Kindle Fire runs on Android, but nothing about it is Google’s Android. It doesn’t look like Android and it doesn’t feature Google’s own apps. That has to annoy Google, but something exposed the other day must truly piss them off: the Kindle Fire redirects all Android Market requests to Amazon’s Appstore. That includes all attempts to go to market.android.com even when the Fire’s accelerated browsing (routed through Amazon’s servers) is turned off. → Read More
Call me naive, but I just assumed that when Asus showed off a device called the Transformer Prime, they had some sort of deal to license or at least provide some kind of royalty to the Transformers franchise. Apparently not, as Hasbro has just filed a lawsuit alleging that Asus is infringing on the Transformers trademark.
Now, if the device were just called the Transformer, I think I would come down on Asus’ side here. After all, transform is a common word and although it may recall to mind certain memories from the 80s (and, to a lesser extent, the last few years), it is just a word and it also describes the transforming capacity of the device. But then they had to go and call it the Prime. What’s next, Soundwave speakers? A Bumblebee netbook? → Read More
Just last week, Google was promoting the fact that “Google+” was the No. 2 fastest-growing search term of the year in its annual Zeitgest list. And it did have an amazing pop when it hit “10 million members” a couple weeks after launch last summer. People wanted to know what this new Google+ thing was all about. And since it didn’t exist the year before, on a percentage basis the growth in the number of searches for the term was astronomical.
If you are not paying close attention and hear that “Google+” was the No. 2 search term of the year, you might assume that a lot of people are still searching for it. But you would be wrong. The Zeitgeist site shows all sorts of stats about that pop in searches for “Google+” back in July.
What you won’t find there is the overall trend of searches for the term, and the fact that searches have been declining. → Read More
Barcelona, Spain
New York City
San Francisco, CA
