The No. 1 thing about the Internet that fascinates me is the fact that information can travel at the speed of light. One moment, something can happen in one part of the world, and seconds later, someone on the opposite side of the world can know about it. That is absolutely epic in my opinion. Be it a video, link or tweet, things travel quickly, but we rarely see how they travel. → Read More
When I sat down with Jack Menzel from Google last week, we discussed all of the cool possibilities that are to come for search. One of the most interesting projects the team is working on is Knowledge Graph, a way to connect the world’s information and provide “answers” for those inquisitive searchers.
In the past, the Knowledge Graph team has dropped some funny results in for queries, my… → Read More
“As a campaign we would not presume to know more than the collective intelligence and resources of the marketplace. We find the best firms in the country and glue them together to achieve our goals,” says Zac Moffatt, Mitt Romney’s Digital Director. Without the luxury of a 4 year head start to build out it’s own campaign tools, Moffatt has won digital parity with the Obama juggernaut by partnering… → Read More
The President of the United States of America, Barack Obama, spoke at the Democratic National Convention tonight and broke some Twitter records while he was at it, according to the company.
Extra points to Twitter, the site didn’t go down or falter once during the entire speech. → Read More
If you’re into all of this political hoopla and you gauge the interest of America from the number of tweets during political events, then Michelle Obama has put the Democrats into the driver’s seat with her speech tonight.
On my train ride home from the TCHQ, my entire feed was filled with nothing but nice things to say about the speech from the first lady. Twitter shared some stats from the… → Read More
Payvia, which just launched its new mobile payment platform for carrier billing this July, has been selected as the exclusive vendor to power the campaign contributions for Obama for America (OFA). This will allow supporters to send in donations to the campaign via text message, and those charges will later appear on the user’s monthly cell phone bill. The company says it first presented its… → Read More
U.S. President Barack Obama is making an unscheduled appearance on Reddit today. Just a few minutes ago, Obama joined Reddit and is scheduled to host an AMA (Reddit slang for “ask me anything”) session starting at 4:30pm ET. Reddit’s moderators have confirmed that this is indeed legit and the questions from Reddit’s users are already coming in at a rapid pace. Obama is scheduled to answer… → Read More
Twitter just announced the launch of its Twitter Political Index. This index, says Twitter, is “a daily measurement of Twitter users’ feelings towards the candidates as expressed in nearly two million Tweets each week.” Every day, twitter will evaluate and weigh the sentiment of tweets mentioning both Barack Obama and Mitt Romney relative to every other message that passes through Twitter’s… → Read More
Silicon Valley, President Obama just can’t quit you. In the Bay Area and free this weekend? Got 35K to toss around? Well if you’ve ever wanted to meet an in-office President now’s your chance to attend an Obama fundraiser dinner, going down at Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s house in Atherton on Sunday the 25th. → Read More
Thanks to the revolutions happening in the Middle East, our leaders have been touting social media as the new force for democracy. President Obama went out of his way to schmooze Facebook employees this week. He told them that when it comes to solving the challenges our country faces and to precipitating changes in the rest of the world, they were “at the cutting edge of what’s… → Read More
There’s a good chance that your office or home is more tricked out, tech-wise, than the Oval Office. President Obama complained yesterday, in what the AP calls “off-the-cuff remarks,” that what the Oval Office lacks is a “really cool phone.” Can someone get the president a Droid or something? → Read More
President Obama spoke to Univision yesterday at one of those town hall meetings the TV networks like to organize. What’s pertinent to us here is that our president, the man who’s famous for carrying a BlackBerry wherever he goes, does, in fact, own his own computer. → Read More
On Friday, President Obama appointed General Electric’s chief executive, Jeff Immelt — an advocate for carbon cap-and-trade — chairman of his panel of outside economic advisors, the newly branded Council on Jobs and Competitiveness.
GE is one of the world’s largest manufacturers of clean energy and related technologies. The company makes everything from large wind turbines, to electric… → Read More
The APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation) 2010 summit, which high-ranking politicians of 21 countries attended (and which ended yesterday), isn’t normally something of interest for CrunchGear. But this time, the event was held in Japan, which used the opportunity to show off its dominant position in robotics. → Read More
Our very own White House is going green. Well, trying to go green. Solar panels will be installed on the roof of the White House by next spring, ending all of our nation’s problems in one fell swoop. → Read More
Consuming more calories than you use makes you fat. That’s a fact, Jack. Figuring out where these calories come from, OK, that’s a noble endeavor, but let’s not pretend there’s anything secret going on here. Like, you see this graphic here? It’s the winner of some Michelle Obama-headed design contest to help folks figure out how to best fight childhood obesity. And you’ll see the PlayStation… → Read More
“We were working 24/7, working in very, very rapid cycles, with very, very short deadlines and milestones. We were working in a very, very nimble hyper consumer focused way…all fused in this kind of maelstrom of pizza, Mountain Dew, and all nighters, and you know idealism.”
That may sound like the caffeine-fueled, sleep-deprived rant of a typical Silicon Valley entrepreneur. Except it’s not… → Read More
In his weekly address on Saturday, President Obama announced the Department of Energy will loan almost $2 billion to two solar energy companies: Abengoa Solar and Abound Solar Manufacturing. The loans will go towards developing solar energy plants.
With the funding, Abengoa will build a solar plant in Arizona that can power 70,000 homes. When completed in 2013, the plant will be one of the… → Read More
Part of me wishes President Obama would flip that so-called “Internet kill switch.” Imagine: a world without the Internet! That would be grand, indeed. But let’s not indulge in fantasies: there is no such kill switch. Well, there is, but it’s not as if the president is going to say, “I disagree with Nicholas’ opinion of anti-virus protection, I’m going to shut down CrunchGear.” → Read More
Apparently there was some sort of media summit in Abu Dhabi recently, and a big topic of discussion was copyright infringement. (I think we need to reserve the word “piracy” for actual, sea-faring piracy, not kids grabbing the random Sublime song off LimeWire.) Rupert Murdoch called on governments to stop copyright infringers, asking them to punish them as they would shoplifters. I guess Murdoch… → Read More
Remember those guys who made those nifty Google Wave movie mash-up videos? You know, the ones with Pulp Fiction and Good Will Hunting? Well, they’re at it again, with the new hot ticket in town: the iPad.
Whirled Creative has made a mash-up of yesterday’s iPad announcement and President Obama’s first State of the Union Address from last night. Those who were concerned that the Apple announcement… → Read More
Way to go, President Obama! Thanks to your bold and forward-thinking policies, the Doomsday Clock has been moved back by one minute! That means Planet Earth is “one minute” further away from utter destruction! Well, destruction brought about by man himself; an asteroid can still smash into the planet and we’d all be doomed. Or, as we’ve seen in Haiti this week, some other cataclysm can strike… → Read More
Right now, if I could play a round of Multiplayer Game 2: The Sequel with anyone in the whole world, it’d probably be either Manuel Zelaya or The Situation from Jersey Shore. Zelaya because I’d could ask, “So what’s it like to be the first South American leader in a really long time to be illegally ousted in a coup?” Then I’d tell The Situation, “Hey, you’re terrific. Let’s do 800 sit-ups… → Read More
The market for video and computer games featuring erotic content, the so-called eroge, is huge in Japan. As a lot of smaller and independent software companies are battling it out in a highly competitive field, you often come across a lot of bizarre stuff (I’ve heard). School girl- or tentacle-themed games, for example, are especially popular (although the bulk of the latter are being shipped to a… → Read More
Editor’s note: Below is an open letter to our President from guest author Edo Segal, a concerned web geek who cares about the future of our democracy. It is followed by a proposal and a new website for anyone who thinks they know what #obamashould do (cynics please skip post).
Mr President,
On the night of your acceptance speech, just before you walked on stage, “you” sent out an email… → Read More
You guys gotta hear this. There’s a 78-year-old woman who, for whatever reason, hates the president so much that she has decided to sell her two TVs! (What’s more impressive is that the woman even has a working TV post-digital transition.) → Read More
Are you into our President? Prove it by carrying this Obama 2GB flash drive from Active Media Products. You’d be pretty hard-pressed to say that this was anything other than a cynical marketing ploy, but whatevs, it’s the POTUS! → Read More
http://c.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f9/6555681001?isVid=1&publisherID=769341148 John Hodgman, of The Daily Show and Mac vs PC commercial fame, recently spoke at the 65th annual Radio & Television Correspondents’ Association Dinner. That’s all you need to know. Just watch the video. It’s great. → Read More
Let’s not dwell on this for too long, since it’s largely a non-issue. President Obama, speaking to the American Medical Association (mostly about health care, such as it is), listed “video games” as a potential bad guy… for your health. You know, sitting on a couch all day long trying to rack up Achievements. → Read More
Good for Microsoft, kicking the American worker when he’s down. President Obama means to close a loophole in the taxcode that allows corporations to “deduct… cost at a high tax rate and report… profits at a low tax rate.” In other words, win-win for the corporation at the expense of the United State Treasury. You know how Microsoft’s Steve Balmer said he’s deal with the closing of this… → Read More
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