The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- CrunchGear Week in Review: Surfer’s Surprise Edition
- Dropico Lets You Drag And Drop Pictures Across Social Networks
- Reminder: TechCrunch/CrunchGear Meetup In Taipei Tomorrow, October 5
- There Is A Difference Between Evil And Just Absurdly Profitable
- WITN?: Perfectly *NSync. Or when the celebrities turn geek, the going gets weird
- Facebook Prototype Measures Gross National Happiness, Confirms That We Hate Mondays
- A Handheld Sega Genesis For the Ages
- Birddi Is A Spanish Twitter Clone
- Google Injects Ads And User-Generated Content Into iPhone Maps
- Gmail, Now With Favicons
- It’s Time To Hide The Noise
| CrunchGear Week in Review: Surfer’s Surprise Edition Posted: 04 Oct 2009 09:00 AM PDT  Here are some stories you might have missed this week. LED lightbulb puts out equivalent of 60 watt bulb, uses only 6 watts Oh yes you can bike to the beach with your surfboard Mighty Mouse 2: Apple planning to upgrade its ill-fated mouse? Apple's new marketing campaign targets toddlers, kindergarteners New device brings wireless Internet to boats   |
| Dropico Lets You Drag And Drop Pictures Across Social Networks Posted: 04 Oct 2009 04:11 AM PDT
Have any pictures stored on your TwitPic account that you want to share with your Facebook Friends, or want to bring a couple of your Flickr shots to your MySpace account? Just log on to Dropico, log into the services you use and start dragging and dropping. Dropico is currently in private beta, but 1,000 TechCrunch readers can try out the service via this link. Personally, I tend to simply send pictures to my Posterous account by e-mail and auto-distribute them to my blog, Flickr and Facebook account, but I can see why people might be interested in giving Dropico a whirl. It’s an easy way of organizing media across multiple social networks, but aside from that it’s also a decent media uploading service since it also allows you to fetch pictures from your computer or from any web page. Once you’ve imported images on Dropico, you can distribute them to your social network(s) of choice all in one interface. Dropico currently works with Facebook, MySpace, Photobucket, Bebo, Twitter, Flickr and Picasa. In the near future, the Israeli startup behind the service intends to add more services to the fray, and also make it easier for users to drag and drop other media like videos across social networks. There’s also an API in the works. The startup is currently operating on some $150k from its founders and some angel investors, but is currently talking to other investors about a bigger round. (Via Orli)
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| Reminder: TechCrunch/CrunchGear Meetup In Taipei Tomorrow, October 5 Posted: 04 Oct 2009 01:33 AM PDT
Please note you can’t register for this invitation-only event anymore – sorry. Special thanks again to Chili Consulting for organizing this meetup. Make sure to follow the company's Facebook page and blog for any last-minute updates (which are very unlikely to happen).
Use the hashtag "#tctaipei" when twittering about this event (although I know Plurk is quite big in this country). Taipei 101 picture taken from Flickr Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. |
| There Is A Difference Between Evil And Just Absurdly Profitable Posted: 04 Oct 2009 12:08 AM PDT
A handful of comments pointed out the very funny Onion spoof on the company where the U.S. government uses Cash4Gold to pay down the national debt. But many of the rest say the company is a scam. Example: “They offer people significantly less money than their gold is worth and prey on people's ignorance and desperation. If those profit margins are right, they're basically stealing from the uninformed. Search online and you'll find a ton of scam stories about them. It is a very, very shady business…” Another: “There must be a difference between doing business and stealing from people. I can not believe that this company is still in business. goverment should bring some regulations and monitoring to this industry. due to the recession people are desperate and this company is taking advantage from people. how the owners can sleep at nights. they are taking advantage of people in need of money.” And: “It appears they are litigious scammers. Running scams is a great way to rake in money.” Etc. The chief complaint is that the company offers customers too little money for their gold compared to the spot price at any given time. My understanding is the company aims to pay no more than 50% of the spot price to sellers. The rest, after operational and substantial marketing expense, is profit. And there is certainly nothing wrong with a company making a profit. They are offering a convenient service to consumers (they send you the prepaid envelope to ship your gold, pay insurance, and ship the gold back to you if you don’t take their offer). If you don’t like what they offer to pay you, use another service. The site even tells you that pawn shops, local jewelers and online services like eBay and Craigslist may fetch you a higher price. Overall I don’t see any serious ethical issues at all with Cash4Gold, with one exception. If the company is in fact not sending back jewelry promptly to customers who have declined the offer, that needs to be fixed. But hard bargaining and lowballing offers to consumers isn’t evil. It’s just a business decision. There are no ethical issues here that you don’t see with Google’s business model that generates obscene profits. Or the Windows/Office franchise. Or the exorbitantly priced hot dog vendor at the baseball stadium. Or $30 wifi in a hotel. I’d personally like to see them make a flat out promise to pay some percentage of the spot price of gold – say 50% or 66%. That way people can have a better idea of what they’ll be offered. Given how many competitors there are in this market, I wouldn’t be surprised for something like that to happen eventually anyway. But let’s save the “this is evil” comments for the really insidious stuff. Like Jigsaw, who continues to make a killing of the sale of our personal information. Or the Intelius scam we reported on last year where consumers were being automatically signed up to useless credit card subscriptions. Making obscene profits may make you jealous, but it isn’t evil. There’s a reason so many people are using the Cash4Gold service – it’s easy and convenient. They don’t make promises on their website that they don’t keep, and they aren’t tricking or scamming people. They are simply buying low and selling high, and that’s capitalism at its finest. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 |
| WITN?: Perfectly *NSync. Or when the celebrities turn geek, the going gets weird Posted: 03 Oct 2009 07:27 PM PDT
It’s weird that Justin Timberlake, he formerly of *NSync and Emmy-award-winning dick boxing fame, is currently spending his days pretending to be the guy who founded Plaxo. It’s also just weird that – along with Shawn Fanning’s pivotal cameo in the blasphemous remake of the Italian Job – both of the founders of Napster have now been key plot points in major Hollywood movies. And furthermore, as if all of that wasn’t just batshit weird enough – I discover that Justin Timberlake – when he’s not dressing up as the dude from the board of Yammer – has started to invest in Silicon Valley start-ups. Weird weird weird. Those, roughly, were my thoughts on Thursday evening, as I stood - clutching a bottle of water – at the launch party for Robo.to, the latest product from Particle, which happens to be the start-up that Timberlake invested in. Timberlake was in town too – in order to dress up as the guy from Causes – but couldn’t make the party due to work commitments. That was also weird, I thought. Not that he’d bailed in order to dress up as the other Facebook guy, but rather that him doing so had resulted in a reporter from US Weekly (which I discovered is pronounced “us”, rather than “US” – which is also weird, given that it’s not about “us”, but rather about “them”) emailing me for a comment. The subject line of the email read ” US WEEKLY WOULD LIKE TO CHAT WITH YOU” which made me think, as it would you, Holy Shit! All caps! This must be important! And indeed it was…
My first instinct, of course, was to fuck with her. To reply with a whole bunch of lies about how Timberlake had sent me flowers, or written me a really sweet note of apology. That would be hilarious, I thought, especially if it ended up in US Weekly. I mean, the fact that their fact checking doesn’t even extend to ensuring that they’re emailing the right person (it was MG’s story) or even the correct organisers (it wasn’t our event) suggests that I could basically send them any old bullshit and see it in print. But that would be wrong, and unfair. After all, it was MG’s moment, not mine. So I did the right thing. I fucked with MG…
For good measure, I also Tweeted MG’s reaction to the fictitious flowers. I mean, sure, anyone seeing the tweet would think it was weird that Justin Timberlake would send flowers to a TechCrunch reporter. But then again, they’d also think it was weird that an US Weekly reporter would email me to ask about Justin Timberlake. They might also find it weird that, despite being in town, one of Particle’s main investors was too busy dressing up as the dude from the Facebook movie to attend his own party. If only Sean Parker had shown up at the party, wearing a three-piece suit and a trilby, the weirdness would have reached such a pitch that the world might have fallen off its axis. But back to me. As I considered the almost countless ways that Timberlake slowly turning into the character he’s playing is weird, it occurred to me that something very weird is happening to geeks and celebrities generally. It’s been happening for a while in fact, starting probably – and fittingly – with Shawn Fanning appearing in the Italian Job. For their part, geeks are becoming cool. And by cool I don’t mean ironic cool, like Michael Cera in Juno, or fake cool like Abby the would-be Suicide Girl in NCIS – I mean actual geeks are becoming actually cool, to the point where movies are getting made about them. At the same time, cool people – celebrities, former boyband members, husbands of Demi Moore – are doing their best to become geeks. It used to be that computer club nerds grew up wanting to be celebrities, or at least to have sex with them. Now those same celebrities are so keen to emulate the nerds that they’ve started Tweeting and blogging and investing in startups. Equally, it used to be the natural order of things that rich movie stars got paid millions of dollars to dress up as people with a fraction of their personal wealth, now it’s the precisely the reverse: Sean Parker is paid considerably more to be Sean Parker than Justin Timberlake ever will. If this trend continues, there has to be a point when the lines on the dorks/celebrities graph cross: when to all intents and purposes the two switch roles. And that day will not just be weird, but also terrifying. Just think of it for a moment: US weekly reports of Larry Page punching a staffer when he finds a green M&M in his dressing room. Scoble passed out in front of the Viper Room, a dozen paparazzo surrounding him, unaware that he’s already uploaded the photos himself to Flickr. And what’s that commotion in the bathroom stall? Oh, it’s just MG making out with a Pussycat Doll. Meanwhile the old-style celebrities will be working late at the office, pushing out a new release of their iPhone app before heading home to catch Arrington hosting the Soup. Or at least that’s what I imagined as I stood at the party, holding my bottle of water and listening to the expectant hubbub of people speculating as to whether Timberlake might show up after all. We were all pretending to care about Robo.to, of course, but we all knew why we were really there. And at that, came a shout… “Justin’s here!” Holy crap! HE’S HERE! All caps – I panicked. I’m terrible at meeting celebrities; I always say exactly the wrong thing. “Roman, great to meet you. Have you met my 12 year old sister? You guys can use my room.” That kind of thing. Heads turned. If there had been a piano player, he’d had stopped playing and you would have been able to hear a pin drop. But there wasn’t so he didn’t and you couldn’t – and anyway it was soon revealed to be a cruel joke. Justin was indeed at the party, but the geek Justin – Justin Kan from Justin.tv – not the celebrity one whose mere hint that he might show up at a party guarantees its success. Saddened yet somehow relieved that – for that night at least – the natural order of things remained intact, I took a final sip of my water and headed home, via dinner at In-N-Out Burger. Meanwhile, somewhere across the city, I imagined Justin Timberlake partying with the Pussycat Dolls, or drunk dialling Britney Spears or whatever it is that proper celebrities do. I’m only speculating on that last bit, of course, but what the hell – US Weekly, call me. I’ll Photoshop up some pictures. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 |
| Facebook Prototype Measures Gross National Happiness, Confirms That We Hate Mondays Posted: 03 Oct 2009 04:46 PM PDT
With over 300 million users and 40 million daily status updates, Facebook has an immense amount of data that could potentially be used to gauge any number of things, from the hottest up-and-coming bands to the most discussed political issues. Earlier this week some of the site’s engineers decided to use this dataset to measure something a bit more fundamental: happiness. Dubbed Gross National Happiness, this new prototype application does its best to determine if Facebook users in the United States are happy or sad. Here’s how the application’s developers describe it:
Data is collected from “public and semi-public forums” on Facebook, which is all anonymized before its analyzed. To determine if a particular status message is happy or sad (or neither), the app searches for popular phrases and words that the engineers have associated with each sentiment. You can adjust the graph by sliding the bar at the bottom of the screen. You can also adjust the zoom by dragging the handlebars on the slider, and can actually watch happiness jump hour-to-hour, though it’s a bit difficult to navigate when you’re zoomed in that far. It’s fun to play around with, but you aren’t going to find many surprises: happiness generally hits a low on Mondays, then gradually grows up through the weekend when it drops again as the work-week begins. Peaks are all found around holidays, with Thanksgiving drawing the most happiness. Also worth nothing: this year there was an abrupt drop in happiness in late June, which is likely associated with the tragic death of Michael Jackson. The app is part of Facebook’s recently released Prototypes section, which gives Facebook engineers a chance to show off the projects they’ve built before they’re ready for prime-time. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. |
| A Handheld Sega Genesis For the Ages Posted: 03 Oct 2009 01:04 PM PDT  PSP what? Nobody cares about that old thing. Honestly, do you want to carry around yet another heavy, fragile, state-of-the-art toy? No. What you need (what this country needs) is a cheap little handheld Genesis sporting 20 of the system's greatest semi-hits. No need to worry about managed copies, DRM, firmware updates, or UMD transfer — just hit the power button and you'll be playing Altered Beast or Sonic & Knuckles before you can say "Seeegaaaa!" It's Saturday. Relax and check out the video while you digest brunch. |
| Birddi Is A Spanish Twitter Clone Posted: 03 Oct 2009 12:33 PM PDT
There have been many Twitter-clones that have emerged over the past few years. There’s been Koornk, and German clone Duduku. Yahoo rolled out its microblogging service, Yahoo Meme, a few months ago in Portuguese, then Spanish and finally in English a few weeks ago. It looks like there is another clone on the block—Birddi. The microblogging site is a virtual clone of Twitter. Everything from the blue interface to the to the style of the logo to the actual “Birddi” bird is strikingly similar to Twitter. According to the site, Birddi is “a service for friends, family and coworkers to communicate and stay connected with the exchange of quick messages. People write short updates, often called ‘Berddis’ in 140 characters or less.” Like with Twitter, you can Direct Message other users, post pictures and use hashtags to mark communications. Birddi also features trending topics and search functionality. One big difference: the site features advertisements powered by Google AdSense. According to this Argentinian news article, (here’s the translated version) Birddi was started by 19-year-old Argentinian developer Martin Lio, who saw the power of Twitter during the 2008 presidential elections and hoped to inspire this communication during Argentinian elections with a Spanish clone. In the report, Lio says he is also planning to launch a Birddi iPhone app. The site has basically stolen all of Twitter's lay out, branding and wording, which seems totally sketchy. This must surely infringe upon a patent or copyright.  Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 |
| Google Injects Ads And User-Generated Content Into iPhone Maps Posted: 03 Oct 2009 12:14 PM PDT
Yesterday, Search Engine Land noted that sponsored links (ads) are starting to show up in the Maps application on the iPhone. It would appear that Google is slowly adding some new features. But what’s odd is that these features are showing up without warning, and, as far as I can tell, without a way to turn them off. While clearly, Google is not going to let you turn off sponsored links, the user-generated content element is odd. These pins show that some random person I don’t know was at the place I’m looking for, at some random time. It’s simply not useful at all. I also wonder how Apple, which loves to have total control of its devices, feels about these additions. Google helped Apple build the default Maps application, but it is still one of Apple’s own apps and now it seems that Google can simply inject any content it wants into Maps from its end. Also a bit odd is that this particular piece of user-generated content comes from the location-based social network Plazes, which is owned by mobile rival Nokia. I’m all for Google injecting user-generated content into Maps on the iPhone provided that it’s useful. So far, it doesn’t appear to be. There also needs to be a way to turn it off if you don’t want to see it. Without those two things, Maps on the iPhone could become a cluttered mess of useless information quickly. Perhaps that’s why Apple bought its own mapping company this summer.
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 |
| Posted: 03 Oct 2009 10:54 AM PDT
I loaded up Gmail this morning expecting to see the usual assault on my inbox, when something new caught my eye. Apparently, Google has started inserting favicons, the little icons that many browsers put next to a website’s URL or bookmark, next to messages. So far, I’m only seeing it for emails from Netflix. As you can see below, their Gmail favicon matches their website favicon. Others are seeing it too, but again, only for Netflix right now. The use of these icons is somewhat interesting because it definitely does draw your eye’s attention to these emails. If spammers figure out how to insert these, it could be a bad thing. But for sites like Netflix, it’s another fairly useful way to visually sort email. Anyone else seeing these for any other sites yet? Also, yes, I realize that I’ve just revealed to the world that I rented Ghosts of Girlfriends Past. Don’t judge.
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| Posted: 03 Oct 2009 09:58 AM PDT
A few days ago, Seesmic CEO Loic Le Meur (@Loic) sent out a retweet with a link to a screenshot of his CTO’s Seesmic Web client showing 1,200 Tweets across nearly 20 columns. The joke was that his CTO was trying to achieve a “world record” for how many Tweets could be loaded up into a Twitter client at one time. (It’s not a world record. Competitor TweetDeck can display an unlimited number of Tweets and columns as well). If you click on the screenshot and pan across the enlarged version of it, there you’ll find a dialog box with Loic’s old avatar doing a hang-10 while kite surfing. The juxtaposition is comical, if a little sad—poor @Loic lost in the overflowing stream of Tweets his company is trying to tame. The image reminded me of another screenshot (see below, click to enlarge) that I once took of an earlier Twitter client called Twhirl, which Seesmic bought before developing its current product. About a year and a half ago, I complained that Twhirl took over my desktop when I first installed it with a constant stream of pop-up messages. I wrote in that post:
It’s 18 months later and the problem hasn’t been solved. The screenshot I took back then still resonates because the noise is worse than ever. Indeed, it is being magnified every day as more people pile onto Twitter and Facebook and new apps yet to crest like Google Wave. The data stream is growing stronger, but so too is the danger of drowning in all that information.
This is not to say that there hasn’t been considerable progress in stream readers since that time. Containing 1,200 Tweets within neatly defined columns is definitely better than 1,200 separate dialog boxes taking over my screen, and these apps today are much more able to handle massive amount of messages. But the fact that Seesmic or TweetDeck or any of these apps can display 1,200 Tweets at once is not a feature, it’s a bug. Again, what I said 18 months ago is just as true today:
One the main methods emerging to cut down noise in your personal stream is to set up different groups of people or keywords (via search) to follow. Twitter is going to tackle this problem with its new “lists” feature. Seesmic and TweetDeck already address this problem by creating a new column for every group or category you want to follow. But as the image above makes clear, that strategy breaks down fairly quickly. I have ten columns in my TweetDeck, for instance—one for my personal Twitter account, one for the TechCrunch account, one for my Facebook stream, one for mentions of “techcrunch”, another for mentions of my name (so I can respond to people trying to talk to me whom I don’t follow), another two columns for direct messages, and so on. I rarely look at more than two columns. It’s just not an efficient way keep track of all my different interests in the stream. And if you think Twitter is noisy, wait until you see Google Wave, which doesn’t hide anything at all. Imagine that Twhirl image below with a million dialog boxes on your screen, except you see as other people type in their messages and add new files and images to the conversation, all at once as it is happening. It’s enough to make your brain explode. What these services should strive to do instead is hide the noise, keep it simple. Letting me sort through the stream by creating different groups and lists and columns of things and people I want to pay attention to is great, but it hardly solves the problem. Finding that one great Tweet from @Loic or anyone else I follow shouldn’t be a game of Where’s Waldo? Really, all I need is two columns: the most recent Tweets from everyone I follow (the standard) and the the most interesting tweets I need to pay attention to. Recent and Interesting. This second column is the tricky one. It needs to be automatically generated and personalized to my interests at that moment. It would definitely include the most retweeted messages from people I follow over the past 24 to 48 hours because I miss these things during those hours when I am not staring at the stream. (And I stare at my stream more than most people). It would also prioritize tweets from people I follow based on who I pay attention to the most, based on my past history of retweeting, replying to people, or simply lingering over a Tweet while I’m reading. Look at my behavior, and then create a favorites list of sorts out of that. And if those two columns aren’t enough, then there’s always search. Except search is broken on Twitter. Unless you know the exact word you are looking for, Tweets with related terms won’t show up. And there is no way to sort searches by relevance, it is just sorted by chronology. Maybe Twitter can use some of its $100 million in new funding to fix that, and solve the noise problem while it’s at it. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. |
Lots of negative feedback from our post the other day on 
It’s just weird.
Last night, I was out with some friends in search of a particular bar. Naturally, we did the 21st century equivalent of asking a gas station attendant for directions, we pulled out our iPhones to look it up in the Maps application. The result was odd; the bar we were looking for was there, but there was another result in the same spot, labeled as “User-created content.”
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