Biggs is the East Cost Editor of TechCrunch.
Biggs has written for the New York Times, InSync, USA Weekend, Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, Money and a number of other outlets on technology and wristwatches. He is the former editor-in-chief of Gizmodo.com and lives in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. You can Tweet him here and G+ him here. Email him directly at john@techcrunch.com.
The auction house Sotheby’s is selling an official memo from Steve Jobs to Atari about improving the World Cup Football game. The pages – stamped and signed by Jobs himself – describe circuit diagrams and paddle layouts. Delightfully, the stamp says “All-One Farm Design” and features a Buddhist mantra, “gate gate paragate parasangate bodhi svahdl.” As you do.
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TechCrunch is headed down south this summer and we’re starting our trip in Savannah, Atlanta, Charlotte, and Raleigh-Durham. We already have some great spots lined up but we definitely need your help finding a few more locations.
We begin by riding down to Savannah where we’ll see what the Coast is up to then on to Atlanta, Charlotte, and ending in Raleigh-Durham where we’ll have a great night planned of networking, chit-chats, and boozing. → Read More
Spring has sprung and like Persephone loosed from Hades’ bonds, our iPad app is now available to all and sundry. This app is literally years in the making and we have been back and forth and up and down regarding functionality, design, and look and feel for most of this month. I’m pleased to report, however, that it is ready to go, free, and fabulous.
The app connects our blog content with live Internet reactions as well as some amazing functionality centered around CrunchBase data. You can also just view Gadgets and Mobile content with one click and an offline mode will cache content for the road. It is retina-ready and looks pretty darn good.
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Apple is continuing its “famous person uses Siri” commercials by bringing in famous person John Malkovich to add a soupçon of Old World weltschmerz and philosophizing to what is, in short, a way to schedule a wake-up call without unlocking your phone. The commercials feature Malkovich in what appears to be the house above the nasty places in Hostel where he muses on fine meats and the meaning of life.
I don’t quite get these celebrity appearances but, in the end, I suppose they’re good for brand awareness. Siri isn’t for the geeks – it’s for the folks who may have once been in love with BlackBerries. Siri suggests a certain ease, a certain subsumed technicality that would draw in the C-level exec and, in parallel, well-known superstars. It is, in short, a little assistant that will never talk back to you, never ask for a raise, and never request that you stop cursing. → Read More
Dan Misener, in a fit of inspired data mining, scraped half of Kickstarter to find failed projects. He could not, it seems, find a single one. Why? Because Kickstarter hides them behind a non-searchable wall. They exist, sure, but you won’t find them with google and they never, ever show them in their “Discover” browsing system.
And good for them.
In a general sense, Kickstarter isn’t a marketplace. It’s not like Etsy or eBay or Amazon where the slow-sellers sit next to the hot items. It is, instead, more of a competition. It’s a competition for eyeballs, for cash, and for media attention. It is more a dog show than flea market, and you don’t keep the ugly dogs on stage after the first round of judging.
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As evidenced by the success of Chatroulette, people get a kick out of seeing each other (anonymously) on video. Taking that to heart, WhosHere – an app that has allowed countless people to meet and greet each other in meatspace – has launched a video chat service that lets folks connect when and where they want.
The update embeds video chat into the standard text and voice chat already available through the app. Rather than allowing random video and photo encounters immediately, however, the system turns off most media sharing by default. → Read More
Vinylmint is a Norfolk-based startup that aims to assist musicians in creating their music. It’s essentially a recording studio in the cloud. You record uncompressed audio right into the computer, the service uploads it to the cloud, and then you can listen to and edit tunes in your browser. Think of it as a mixing board with microphones all over the world.
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Sonos has just gotten really deep (get it?) with their new Sonos Sub, a wireless subwoofer that connects to any Sonos system and adds just a bit more oomph to the musical proceedings. The sub costs $699 and offers (according to the press release) “thick layers of bottomless sound that let you hear and feel the weight of every chord, kick, splash and roll.”
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This week we recorded live from the show floor at Disrupt NYC. We sat through 24 hours straight of hot-rod hacking at the Hackathon and now we’re preparing for the main show and, most important, the brand new Hardware Alley where we’ll have loads of great hardware start-ups for you guys to check out.
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Teaching kids – especially little girls – about electronics is a hard job. First, there’s the electricity. Then there’s the sense that soldering, wiring, and lining up LEDs is considerably less fun than watching Tangled. This project, called Roominate, aims to change the way girls think about electricity.
The kit consists of a set of tiny furniture with built-in wires and switches. You can wire up your dollhouse however you like, adding lamps and switches. $49 gets you one regular room and $95 gets you a “duplex.” → Read More
GameStop is hurting. Same store sales fell 5%-11% and revenue was down 17% to $2 billion. Profit fell to $72.5 million. Arguably, those are still huge numbers and presumably a new console refresh should push the company out of the doldrums. But what the company has just launched – a new MVNO called GameStop Mobile – is almost inexplicable.
GameStop Mobile is, in short, an unlimited data and voice offering for $55 a month (down to $20 a month for pay-as-you-go plans.) Gamestop is just selling SIM cards and service and is running on AT&T’s network with some notable dead spots.
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While, arguably, you’re not going to convince many kids to give up their Topps or Pokemon cards for these things, it’s nice to know they exist. They’re 3D Printer trading cards featuring some of the best 3D printers in the world. You got your Makerbot Replicator, your UP! Printer, and your Printrbot Plus. You got stats on there, a little trivia, some pricing information and then you can trade with your friends (“Awwww man, I need that Reprap clone!”) You can check them all out here or see them in person at Maker Faire in SF this week. Sadly, they’re not actually printing these things but if they did I’d totally buy a pack. The impetus? They came to creator Shawn Wallace in a dream: I had a dream that I found a box of 3D Printer Trading cards from 2012 at the Seekonk Speedway Flea Market. When I awoke I realized that might be a good way to introduce some of the 3D printer makers who will be exhibiting at the Maker Faire Bay Area next week. I’ll be posting these all week in no particular order; collect them all! → Read More
Say you’re a misanthrope and you’re afraid of humans. What to do? Well, you could cower in the dark when people ring your doorbell or you could laugh derisively at their smug faces in the screen of your iPhone. I’m going for the derisive laughter. This DIY Arduino project involves a simple circuit, a webcam, and a few API calls to PushingBox to enable a truly enjoyable derisive experience. The system works by pushing images grabbed by the webcam through PushingBox to an app like Prowl or Pushme.to. When the doorbell is pressed, it sends a serial signal to the Arduino board which in turn notifies the various services. The webcam picture then gets sent over to you so you can decide whether to let whoever is outside in. It’s probably a little more complex than it needs to be, but if you’re totally into watching the world pass you by it’s a great solution and a fun weekend project. Project Page → Read More
In this first installment of Gadget Of The Week I decided to try something a bit different. Rather than focus on some obscure cellphone or wonky laptop, I decided to take on one of the biggest questions in the average small and home office: which juicer should I buy? After trying a number of juicers – and investing in a few – I’m pleased to report that the Omega J8006 is definitely worth the investment.
I am what they call, in the medical literature, a fat and lazy blogger. There’s nothing I love more than scarfing down cookies as I sit at my computer. With that in mind (and inspired by Brian Lam’s article at The Wirecutter), I decided to try my hand at juicing.
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This is the age of thinking thermostats and, not to be outdone by a well-known circular model, hardware startup Ecobee has released the Smart Si. It is a smart thermostat with small color screen and a web interface so temperature wonks can update their heating models on the fly.
The Smart Si is not quite as sleek as the Nest but offers more accessible settings – think of this as the Linux to Nest’s OS X. The web interface allows you to see your home’s current status, set a vacation profile, and view reports on your system’s performance including HVAC and heater usage. → Read More
“People are sick of shitty customer service,” said FastCustomer co-founder, Stephanie Hay. And she and her team aim to do something about it.
Their first product, for the iPhone, Android, and other platforms, allowed you to search for a customer service number – say Adam & Eve – and press a button. The program waits on hold for you and then calls you on your phone immediately upon connecting. The company saw 100,000 downloads and estimates that they saved people 1 million minutes of hold time.
They’ve just launched a new telephone concierge service, 1855-DONT-HOLD (855-366-8465), that allows you to call in and perform the same operation. In short, this thing stays on hold for you. The whole process usually takes less than an hour.
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Every few days something really amazing dumps over the transom here at TC HQ. Today it was YesterdayMe.com. Built by Vladimir V. Tuporshin and partner, Ilja Razinkov, the site essentially allows you to enter yesterday’s alcohol consumption. Why? Because, that’s why.
While the Russians are known for their heavy-duty drinking – although they’re moving from vodka to beer and wine these days, perhaps to prevent liver death – this site is ingenious in that it offers a very simple, hangover-proof interface for registering how much you sucked down. By sliding little drink indicators back and forth, you can tell the world or just yourself that you had too many beers.
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At a J.P. Morgan conference held in Boston on Wednesday, Netflix CFO David Wells said that the company was looking up and, more importantly, customers who cancelled the service because of the Qwikster rebranding, plan repricing, and subsequent poor PR are now returning.
The company drove users away due to a considerable price hike on its cheapest disk plan – from $9.99 to $15.98 – as well as its ham-handed decision to split the company into a streaming arm – Netflix – and a disk-in-the-mail arm – Qwikster. Wells said:
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For some inexplicable reason, Nintendo and Toyota have teamed up to turn the Nintendo DS into a navigational remote control, thereby allowing drivers (although I hope passengers do most of the fiddling) to set their routes using their game consoles.
The service, called Kuruma de DS lets you see map and destination info as well as tour information as you drive through town. The service slightly gamifies the experience by adding a POI saving option. → Read More
Back in in 1999, just as Ebay was coming into bloom, William Gibson wrote a piece on his experiences buying expensive watches online. He called the article My Obsession and it details his youth as a picker in the 1970s.
He writes:
This “job,” if it can be called a job, is all but dead these days because of some of the basic properties of the new market. Barring those folks on American Pickers who find items that will eventually hang in a TGI Fridays, the potential for making a lucrative trade in a post-Internet world by finding and selling odd items is nearly nil. First, a picker depends on arbitrage. Arbitrage depends on incomplete information on someone’s part or, in the case of collectable, desire. → Read More
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