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.
Good news, everybody! The iCade Mobile, a Bluetooth case that slides around your iPhone, allowing you to play games using a trackpad and read buttons, is now shipping for $80. The iCade Core, an arcade joystick for the iPad, is also shipping. It costs $100.
Announced a few months ago, folks have been waiting breathlessly to play Megaworm with a trackpad. The devices should be available at ThinkGeek and you can check them out here. You can check out the Core here. → Read More
If Appsplit is any indication, either crowdfunding is the future of everything or there’s a crowdfunding gold rush. I’m going to bet it’s a little of both.
This new service allows programmers to crowdfund their projects. Why not use Kickstarter, you ask? Beats me, but here’s what’s up. Appsplit is first and foremost a place to put your app campaigns. You tell folks what you’re building (“An app that tells you what time it is in Fiji.”), how you want to be funded (an “Open” project allows folks to keep the money even if the project isn’t funded), and how much you need. You then do a little marketing, tell your friends, and you’ve got an app. → Read More
Cleveland, known to many as the “Land From Whence The Cleves Came,” is rarely mentioned when you think of hotbeds of entrepreneurial energy. But yet it was the long time home to Harvey Pekar and does still have many local colleges, including Case Western Reserve, John Carroll, and Cleveland State. It is also home to Sherwin-Williams, Progressive Insurance, and now LaunchHouse.
In other words, it’s a city that’s ready to make a few sweeping changes. → Read More
Robots are hard to talk to. They’re not friendly, they’re mostly made of plastic, and, as anyone who has tried to chat with a Roomba can attest, they are often dedicated to a single task. Luckily, there’s ApriPetit.
Toshiba’s R&D department built ApriPetit as a successor to their larger ApriPoco. This little guy is about six inches tall and follows along to conversations by moving its slug-like body and eyes in ways that resemble proper conversation. → Read More
In an excellent piece by David Sanger, the NY Times has confirmed what we all suspected: that the US deployed the Stuxnet worm, a powerful worm that targets very specific machines within Iran’s nuclear enrichment program.
Waxing for two at Take-It-Offs in Scranton? $100 worth of Polka lessons for 40 cents? An avant garde grilled cheese sandwich meal with metal shavings in it at Chez Naif for $60? You don’t want any of those daily deals, right? But they’re still coming.
Two people (lovers, really), Edwin Hermawan and Lea Pische, wanted to fight back. And they did. With UnsubscribeDeals.com.
“We stopped buying daily deals a long time ago, but the emails kept coming. We had to find a way to stop them,” said Hermawan.
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The RIM PlayBook by just received a developers update that adds some interesting new Android functionality to RIM’s tablet. This new version now supports Android apps running in their own windows, improving compatibility with the general Android app universe. → Read More
Yancey Strickler, co-founder of Kickstarter, dropped us a line about the systems in place to “hide” failed projects. He told us that Kickstarter does indeed hide many projects from search robots, but it’s for a good cause.
“The original poster was correct in noting that we don’t have a browse area for projects whose funding was unsuccessful,” he wrote. “This isn’t to ‘hide failure,’ as the original post said, it’s because it would be a poor user experience (there’s no action that anyone could take) and it would expose the creators of unsuccessfully funded projects to unnecessary criticism from the web (those projects would be prime for trolling).” → Read More
Another day, another iPhone 5 leak. This time we’re looking at a four-inch long front panel of what appears to be a new iPhone. This panel suggests a longer, 16:9 style body and screen and lines up with previous news of a longer iPhone casing with a Micro USB port on the bottom.
I’m very skeptical in regards to these videos simply because rapid prototyping and sourcing is getting so simple these days anyone can carve out a convincing iPhone shell and take some good footage of it. Am I skeptical enough to dismiss this outright, however? No. → Read More
Although I seriously doubt these things will take off into the stratosphere like the Pebble, the Cookoo watch on Kickstarter has already hit $120,000 on a $150,000 target, placing it up with the big boys in the crowdsourcing race. The Cookoo is essentially an e-ink watch with a few wireless tricks up its sleeve – namely Bluetooth connectivity that will notify you when you have messages, etc.
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I would totally embed this video but Wordpress won’t let us, so here it is. It’s essenitally a quick run-through of Google Glass thanks to Sergey Brin. He even gave them to California Lieutenant Governer Gavin Newsom who got to try them on.
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You’re hitting deadline and you want to add that special something that will totally knock your web app out of the park. Do you add rounded corners? A Tweet This button? No, motherlover, you add Clippy JS.
Clippy JS, made by Smore, is a cute little bit of Javascript code that allows you to embed Clippy, Merlin, Rover, or Links (all of Microsoft Office fame) into any webpage. You can make these folks do all kinds of things including look around, jump up and down, and even converse with your users. Why? Because it’s funny, that’s why. → Read More
An Irish women’s charity, Women’s Aid, linked to some articles on the Irish Examiner (like this, this, and this) and thought that all was right with the world. Heck, that’s how the Internet works, right?
It turns out that according to the Irish Newspaper Licensing organization, you need to pay to link to the newspapers. And there the troubles begin.
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Although one could argue that Facetime and Skype are already nearly perfect telepresence systems, there’s definitely some value in having a jolly little robot sit on your shoulder and transmit, in real time, everything you see and hear to a friend far away. Right? Please say I’m right?
This experimental robot is called the Miniature Humanoid 2 or MH2 and was built in Japan by Yuichi Tsumaki, Fumiaki Ono, and Taisuke Tsukuda of Yamagata University in Japan. The robot requires a big honking backpack so it’s a little bit cumbersome but essentially the MH2 can move around on your shoulder as you move around the world, creating a sort of Master/Blaster relationship or, more likely, a Kuato/host human situation. → Read More
Now look: these are probably fake as all get-out, but bear with me. These handsomely watermarked photos are purported to represent a brand new iPhone design with a sort of two-tone brushed and chromed casing. Whether they are real or not (they’re definitely going to get UBreakIFix plenty of SEO juice), there is still a bit more to this story than just some blurry-cam shots (and these nice shots on 9to5mac). The most important thing to note is the size of the dock connecter. That’s right: it’s a micro USB port (or, less likely, a Thunderbolt port). → Read More
If you’ve been in the baby monitor racket as long as I have, you’ve seen it all: the good, the bad, and the unusable. Well here’s a monitor that just might win my heart. It’s called the BabyPing (there’s an N in there) and it allows you to view your child’s every squiggle and giggle on your iPhone or iPad. The app and monitor costs about $230 and is currently available in Europe only, although it’s expected to hit our shores shortly.
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According to a very short, very rumor-filled VG24/7 piece, Sony is looking at adding cloud-enabled gaming to the PlayStation line, presumably in the form of an Onlive or Gaikai partnership.
Given that we won’t see much new this year at E3 – aside for official Wii U availability and perhaps (just perhaps) whispers of next gen Sony and Microsoft consoles, this bit of news could carry the show. The Vita is powerful, to be sure, but it’s hardly nailing it in terms of game availability and to be able to play a game on the handheld and then pop over to the console is pretty compelling. Presumably the console can also act as a conduit for a definitively more interesting gaming experience. → Read More
If you’re in the City of Brotherly Love, you’re in a for a treat. Thanks to constant entreaties by one of your own, Anthony Coombs, we’re going to hold a mini-meet up in Philly on June 19 at the Field House, 1150 Filbert St.
Please RSVP here.
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If you’re an older gamer, you will remember the holy trinity of Sierra RPGs – King’s Quest, Space Quest, and Police Quest. All three of these games used something called “imagination” and “storytelling” to immerse early gamers in an Ad Lib sound card-induced gaming coma.
Now you can relive those heady days with a new game by the makers of Space Quest, Scott Murphy and Mark Crowe (aka “The Two Guys from Andromeda”). Their new game, called SpaceVenture, is a refresh of the old Sierra series and promises spills, chills, and horrible jokes. It’s getting funded on Kickstarter as we speak.
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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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