The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- Devs Roll Over To Palm’s “Recommendation” Not To Talk About Pre Web Tethering
- Google, Other Tech Heavyweights Back Volunteer Community Service All for Good
- Get A Job With Reddit Jobs. Or At Least Vote On One.
- Caterina Fake’s Hunch: “Yahoo Answers Is Not The Answer.”
- Fidel Castro’s Son Cyber-Stung By Cuban Blogger In Exile
- The Postman Always Bings Twice
- Hunch.com’s decision making engine launches. Someone add Twitter now
- Microsoft Has Found The Cheapest Meals In America (Or Is Just Cheap)
- About That New CrunchPad Video
- GeeksOnAPlane Briefing On The Chinese Tech Industry At Startonomics Beijing
- iPhone OS On A Touchscreen Monitor, Multi-Touch and All
- Does America Need to Make Things?
- Google Voice’s Secret Weapon: Number Portability
| Devs Roll Over To Palm’s “Recommendation” Not To Talk About Pre Web Tethering Posted: 15 Jun 2009 08:28 AM PDT  In an example of rolling over in the name of "good relationships," the Pre Dev Wiki has shut down their tethering page because "Sprint could get angry." This is in stark contrast with iPhone devs who couldn't give two squirts about "good relationships" and instead produce interesting technical content including unlocked phones. "We have been politely cautioned by Palm that any discussion of tethering during the Sprint exclusivity period (and perhaps beyond—we don't know yet) will probably cause Sprint to complain to Palm, and if that happened then Palm would be forced to react against the people running the IRC channel and this wiki.
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| Google, Other Tech Heavyweights Back Volunteer Community Service All for Good Posted: 15 Jun 2009 08:00 AM PDT
All for Good basically lets you browse volunteer activities and find related events based on your geographical location and/or interests. The site brings together listings from organizations and local groups to help you find volunteer activities that fit your time and talent. If you ‘like’ a certain item, you can share it with your friends across various social networking services, hopefully spawning more attention and the possibility for the activity or event to spread virally within your network. According to the about page, All for Good was “inspired by the call of President Obama to engage more Americans in service”. The link to the White House is notable: according to a report by MSNBC, the seeds for All for Good were planted by people who advised Barack Obama during the transition period. Two names that circulate: Jonathan Greenblatt, a faculty member at the Anderson School of Management at the University of California at LA, and Sonal Shah, former head of global development at Google.org who currently leads the new White House Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation. The report also cites Kate Bedingfield, a White House spokeswoman, who apparently said she felt All for Good is “an exciting and innovative idea” and added that the White House is working with the corporation to explore ways to use the tool. The site is in the process of being transferred to a new non-profit organization called Our Good Works, formed by some of the people who initiated the project. For the moment, the project is hosted and managed by Google, and several of the search and advertising giant’s engineers developed All for Good as a 20-percent project (as widely known, Google lets engineers spend a day a week on projects that interest them). In the spirit of openness, All for Good is completely open source and lets people log in with a slew of digital identity providers, including Facebook Connect, Google Friend Connect, Yahoo and OpenID. The service also comes with an extensive API that makes it possible for third-party developers to create applications based on data generated by the All for Good community. (Via Ostatic) Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.  
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| Get A Job With Reddit Jobs. Or At Least Vote On One. Posted: 15 Jun 2009 06:58 AM PDT
Not surprisingly, that’s a key selling point of Reddit Jobs, a new job listing site branded by the popular social voting site. Just with the regular Reddit site, on the main page you’ll see a list of content — in this case, jobs — and you can give any of them an “up” or “down” vote depending on if you like them or not. “We think this is a pretty sweet opportunity for employers to find great tech-savvy folks and learn more about how they’re perceived by potential employees,” Luke Groesbeck, the co-founder of JobAlchemist (which created the site for Reddit), tells us. Clicking on any of these job listings will take you to a page with more information about the job. This information is presented in a standardized way that is easy to follow with headers for the position including: “Overview,” “Who You Are,” “What You’ll Do,” “What We Offer,” and “How to Apply.” This page also features a nice drop-down Google Map of where the company is located and has elements such as ways to share job postings over other social networks.
But it’s the actual job posting functionality that could be a key feature. “Employers can either post jobs in a quick 1-2 minute process or build a profile to share more about themselves and get feedback on their listings from the reddit community,” according to Groesbeck. It’s similar to Startuply, another job listing site that JobAlchemist has built, and has seen some moderate success. Reddit Jobs is technically the first white label version of Startuply, and that branding and built-in community should help it grow even faster. But for posting jobs, there are costs involved — but at least they’re very straightforward. It will cost you $300 to list an opening on Reddit Jobs for 30 days. There are also discounts for listings done in bulk. So why did Reddit want to make a job board? “Given the state of the economy (and our pool of talented programmers) it made perfect sense for us — and will likely be a great white label solution for other community sites,” Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian tells us. It’s also a nice way for Reddit and parent Conde Nast to make some money. Applying the social voting idea to monetization practices seems to be a hot issue right now. Reddit rival Digg just recently launched the ability to vote on ads on its site. As a special promotion to commemorate the launch, Reddit Jobs is giving some fast-acting TechCrunch readers who wish to post jobs a steep discount on the rate. The first 50 who use the code “TechCrunch” when listing a job on the site will get $175 off of the listing price. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0  
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| Caterina Fake’s Hunch: “Yahoo Answers Is Not The Answer.” Posted: 15 Jun 2009 06:54 AM PDT In search, nobody wants to go up against Google. Even Microsoft is trying to position Bing as a “decision engine” even though it is really just a search engine. But Hunch, a startup which launched publicly today, is an actual decision engine. The only thing it attempts to do is help you make a decision through a question-and-answer interface. Hunch is part of a recent flowering of Q&A sites (such as Aardvark and Mahalo Answers) which address a part of search that is orthogonal to what Google does. In part, these startups are responding to the success of Yahoo Answers, but they also push beyond what Yahoo Answers does. Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake, who worked on Yahoo Answers before she left Yahoo and is now running product design at Hunch, says: “Yahoo Answers is not the answer.” The problem with Yahoo Answers is that most of the answers aren’t very good. As long as one answer is good, that is the one which comes up highest in results. But it doesn’t really learn from all the answers to a particular question come up with a better answer. Fake explains: “The question has been asked and answered thousands of times. Collective knowledge systems don't work unless they retain knowledge, you can add knowledge to them in a simple and straightforward way, and it gets smarter every time somebody uses it.” I had a long discussion with Fake about what Hunch is trying to do on Friday. You can search for questions which have already been entered into the system, or add your own. Each question is actually a series of questions with multiple-choice answers which take you down different paths (or, “decision trees’). The questions and answers are contributed by Hunch’s community (so far the site has been seeded by its 40,000 beta users). “Anyone can add a new set of sub-questions to main question, and improve the overall results in the same way that many people can contribute to the same Wikipedia article to make it better or add tags to someone else’s photos on Flickr. It only takes aminimal effort to make each question marginally better. For instance, the question “Should I get a convertible?” leads to a series of other sub-questions aimed at helping you make that decision: “Are you okay with the possibility that you’ll pay more for a convertible?”; “How’s the weather in your city/country?”; “Do you live somewhere known for car theft or crime?”; “Do you keep a lot of things loosely scattered around the interior of your car?”; “”Do you often wear fancy or personally valuable hats or scarves?” After you answer all the questions, you get an answer. This could be a yes or no answer or s specific recommendation, such as what blogs you should read. At the end of this process, you tell Hunch or not you agree with the result. Hunch not only has a results algorithm, but also has a question selection algorithm, which it tunes to each person. Theoretically, the more questions you answer on Hunch, the more it knows about you and the better follow-up questions it can present to come up with the best final answer. It sounds complicated, but the user interface is simple and game-like. You are presented with a series of questions, and you click on the answers which apply to you. Then at the end, you get an answer to the original question you were exploring. Fake estimates that about 40 percent of the topics on Hunch right now are monetizable with ads or affiliate links. If you try to use Hunch to figure out which camera you should buy, for example, and the answer turns out to be the Nikon D80, already you will see a sponsored affiliate link to Amazon. Other business models might emerge in the future. Other sites will be able to tap into Hunch’s question-selection and answer-selection algorithms to create their own Q&A system. Using Hunch’s API, a developer could create a custom product recommendation app for retail sites. Bob’s Bait And Tackle shop could set up a series of questions and answers to guide shoppers to the perfect fly or fishing tackle. All of these questions and answers would then feed back into Hunch’s core system. The more people who use the system, the smarter it should get. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.  
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| Fidel Castro’s Son Cyber-Stung By Cuban Blogger In Exile Posted: 15 Jun 2009 03:23 AM PDT
Or in this case, on the Internet Fidel Castro’s son wouldn’t know you’re actually a male Cuban living in exile posing as a woman just to play a number on you. Apparently, Miami-based Luis Dominguez has duped 40-year old Antonio Castro into believing that he was chatting with a 27-year old female sports journalist named Claudia Valencia, using the man’s alleged weakness for “young women and sports”. Dominguez told the BBC that he has no regrets for the deception - which consisted of eight months of on-and-off chatting - saying he wanted to expose the hypocrisy of Cuba’s leadership, who enjoy “oppulent lifestyles”. No state secrets were revealed during the chats, and it’s unclear if the sessions involved cybersex of any kind. Gotta admire the dryness of the BBC report, which ends with:
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| The Postman Always Bings Twice Posted: 15 Jun 2009 03:22 AM PDT
I bought practically every piece of software they made (yes, including Bob). I was at the midnight launch of Windows 95 in my hometown. I bought Windows Me and XP the day they came out. But then a combination of things happened. First, Apple’s products started to get better and the iPod served as a gateway drug of sorts to their computers. Second, the rise of Google and the web as a whole made what desktop software I was using less important. Third, Microsoft’s products went through a period of lack of innovation, or worse, regressed. I bring this up because some people familiar with my work, seem to want to believe that I dislike all Microsoft products by default. That’s simply not true. Even to this day, I will praise the work Microsoft has done with the Xbox 360. And I find a smattering of other things within the company that I find interesting, like Azure. And now something else from Microsoft is coming on my radar: Bing. I’ll admit that I mocked Bing from the second I heard its name, as basically a non-starter. But here we are a few weeks later, and I’m still hearing a significant number of people talking about it when I go various places. At the very least, that’s a marketing win for Microsoft — but that will only get you so far. More interesting to me is that Bing does actually seem to be pretty good at what it was built to do: Search — er, sorry, “Discovery.” Take tonight, for example. The Los Angeles Lakers just won the NBA title, so there are a ton of searches right now for Kobe Bryant, the Lakers’ star player. I just did a search for him on both Bing and Google, and to be honest, Bing’s results are a lot better, at least for the here and now. On Bing, the top result is a full listing of Kobe’s box score from tonight. On Google, the top result is a link to his NBA.com player profile. A few spots down, Google gives me some YouTube clips, but they’re all old. There are no clips on Bing’s main page, but in the top “Highlights” tab, there is a ton of video from tonight’s game. The other tabs on Bing offer easy access to relevant information as well. Sure, Google has its own options to better tailor the results to my liking, but they’re still tucked away, the average user is not going to click on those. And so I really have to say that Bing’s results, as presented to me in this case, are better than Google’s. Now, that’s just one example, and it’s of a breaking event. But still, I’ve noticed this on a few hot items recently. And perhaps that’s why we’re hearing all the talk about Google’s co-founder Sergey Brin scrambling a team to address the Bing question. I’m not sure how much weight to put in such a report — while it’s become basically the company’s canned response, I’m sure Google really is always tweaking its search engine/strategy. But even the rumor of Google being at least interested by anything Microsoft is doing in search is something we really haven’t heard before. And that’s more than anything Yahoo — still the #2 search provider — can say recently. So will Bing replace Google as my default search engine? No. The main reason for this is still very simple. Even if Google and Bing have similar results, and even if Bing offers better results in some cases, Google has already won the search war as it exists today. It already exists in people’s minds as basically synonymous with search. Bing could do very well on the desktop web, but that will basically mean low double-digit share versus Google’s high double-digit share. And while you might point out that something like how Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser once had an over 90% share of the market, but has been failing steadily in recent years. I’d blame that on the fact that Microsoft rested on its laurels with that huge lead for far too long (it basically stopped work on IE for several years), and now has a browser that is arguably the worst on the market. Google, as a search engine is not in any way, shape, or form the worst on the market. And plenty would still say the exact opposite. I just can’t see Google becoming complacent and yielding ground on search the same way Microsoft did with IE. And so its success should remain perpetual. If nothing else, Google is now built-in as the default browser or homepage on far too many web browsers. That’s not a battle Bing can win. I know that it’s touting itself as the “decision engine,” but that’s a marketing gimmick that will wear off soon. Search is search — ultimately, people want one place to do it. For now, many will settle for two (Google and Twitter being two examples), if they serve a completely different purpose, but that will change with time. And everyone will also realize that despite the rhetoric, Bing is really not any different as a tool from Google. And when that happens, Google will win that battle. But there is an interesting opportunity for Bing in the mobile space, I think. Yahoo has been touting mobile as a bright spot for its search product in recent months because it knows that the one really hot area where Google had not yet fully won the battle. The reason for that is that mobile web browsing is still a fundamentally different beast than desktop web browsing. While some browsers like Safari on the iPhone have search built-in, most do not. And so the playing field is much more open on the mobile web. Microsoft should be pushing hard to make Bing the mobile search (or decision, or whatever it wants to call it) engine of choice. Because mobile browsing on the smaller screen with different input methods is different than the desktop, it stands to reason that searching on these devices should also be somewhat different aside from the simply cosmetic changes. And there are quite a few interesting things you can do easier on mobile device than you can on a desktop, like location. And location leads to some interesting things with advertising, which, at the end of the day, is what this all really comes down to for both Google and Microsoft now from a business perspective. It’s interesting that Microsoft seems to have some good buzz for Bing so far. And I do think it’s actually warranted. But it’s just a first step. Bing has a name that is on people’s minds right now, but it needs to continue innovating to keep it there. And in my mind, that extends far beyond the desktop space, which Google is not going to yield anytime soon. If Microsoft insists on playing Google’s game on Google’s turf, I fear Microsoft Bing may ultimately end up just as forgotten as Microsoft Bob. But I think these past few weeks have proven that there is at least a little something to Bing, and so it doesn’t have to be that way. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors  
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| Hunch.com’s decision making engine launches. Someone add Twitter now Posted: 15 Jun 2009 03:00 AM PDT  Hunch, the new startup from Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake, has launched and it's beguilingly fun. After filling out 42 questions ranging from "Have you sky dived" to "Do you like it when the cabin crew cracks jokes on airplanes?" I was presented with a number of things I might be interested in (I chose which film directors I should watch: Tim Burton). I was hooked enough to fill out the profile page (you can get answers without logging in) and at this point it becomes clear: Hunch is a social network where the social object is sharing questions (and thus answers) which might be relevant to you. The more questions you answer the more your profile page become relevant to you. And you can of course share those questions around with a widget.
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| Microsoft Has Found The Cheapest Meals In America (Or Is Just Cheap) Posted: 14 Jun 2009 09:49 PM PDT
In case you missed it, let me highlight the hilarious part: $1.15 per download. For 8 meals. Let’s do the math. $1.15 divided by 8 equals just about $0.14 a meal. I don’t know where Microsoft is eating, but I have never heard of any place that you can get a meal for 14 cents. And this isn’t one of those “for just 10 cents a day…” commercials that promise to feed starving children in Africa, this is meant to feed people in the United States. Hell, a gum ball from one of those machines at a convenient store costs 25 cents. Some cost 50 cents. That’s almost 4 meals by Microsoft’s math. We all know how this works. Microsoft was never actually giving anyone any meals (hence the, “Meals are used for illustrative purposes only.”), it was just pledging to throw money at what sounds like a worthy cause if it got something in return — users to download what many consider to be a sub-par web browser. But if you’re going to do that, don’t claim to be giving 8 meals away for every download, when you’re really only donating $1.15. That’s just misleading. If you’re really interested in helping to fight hunger in America, go to the actual Feeding America site and donate. They don’t even force IE8 upon you. Of course, the minimum donation amount they recommend on the site is $25 — which is something like 180 Microsoft “meals.” Update: Rather than respond to all of the comments saying the same thing, let me be clear: I understand how this works — as I said above, it’s all about Microsoft donating a dollar amount to a charity, and not really about the meals. That’s why it’s misleading to say in big bold letters that it’s donating 8 meals for every IE download. Microsoft is not actually donating any meals, it is donating a relatively small amount of money to a charity that provides meals. How small is the amount from Microsoft? Well, it’s spending a reported $80 million to promote Bing, but is only giving $1 million to fight hunger. This despite the huge words talking about how awful it is that 1 in 8 Americans struggle to have enough to eat. One thing Americans aren’t struggling with is a lack of web search options, or a lack of advertising. Of course, I’m being a bit facetious, hunger is a very real issue and Microsoft has a right to wrap its own agenda (getting people to download IE8) in a charitable cause. I just find it inappropriate to use the cause in a misleading way. If you’re donating about a dollar per download, say that. Don’t say how many meals you’re providing based on some numbers that, as commenter Josh Forman notes, don’t even add up. That was obviously just a tacky way for Microsoft to get a number “8″ that would match its own IE8, for branding and marketing purposes. [thanks Andrew] Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0  
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| About That New CrunchPad Video Posted: 14 Jun 2009 08:06 PM PDT
The video has now been removed from YouTube. This was not a sanctioned or official video, nor is it even very interesting. It’s just the last prototype being taken out of its box (which should be sort of obvious, pictures of the prototype in the video have been circulating since April). It’s certainly not the launch prototype, pictured here, which doesn’t actually exist yet. The only official information on the CrunchPad at this point is in the blog post I wrote a couple of weeks ago, and you can send an email to crunchpad@techcrunch.com for various updates. We’re planning an event in July to give more information. Until then, I hope we’ve seen the last of these ridiculous fingerprint smudged “unboxing” videos. And that guest who took the video without talking to me first won’t be back at any TechCrunch events anytime soon. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.  
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| GeeksOnAPlane Briefing On The Chinese Tech Industry At Startonomics Beijing Posted: 14 Jun 2009 07:00 PM PDT This past Thursday, the GeeksOnAPlane group of traveling techies had the opportunity to attend Startonomics Beijing and learn about broad swaths of the Chinese web industry. The speakers, who represented companies such as Google China, Kong Zhong, Five Minutes and ChinaNetCloud, discussed topics such as gaming, social networking, network infrastructure and internet cafes. Overall, we were impressed not only by how massive the Chinese market for computing-related services is, but how fast it’s still growing as well. According to Georg Godula, whose company Web2Asia helps internet companies get off the ground in East Asian countries, there are currently about 350 million internet users in China, many of which are very new. In 2008 alone, the internet population grew by approximately 80 million people. That’s an astonishing 220,000 per day, or 9,000 per hour. Most of these users are quite young, with a distribution centering around 18-24 years old. Since the number of users outstrips the number of computers, Chinese youth spends much of its time browsing the web and playing games in Internet cafes, particularly in less dense parts of the country where few alternative entertainment options exist. Perhaps the most refreshing presentation of the day came from Dr. Kai-Fu Lee, President of Google China, who admitted that Google has had a difficult time breaking into the Chinese market and competing against Baidu, the dominant search engine here. He attributed the slow advances in their marketshare to patience and humility, explaining that Google has had to carefully learn about the market and how it differs from those in the West. This was a trend that appeared throughout many of the presentations. Foreign companies who try to localize for China are often outgunned by Chinese competitors who know the culture and business environment here better. They also tend to suffer from a litany of other missteps, such as entering China too late, failing to set up a local development team, getting blocked by complex local legislation, and simply being outwitted by local competitors with better ideas. Lee gave an overview of how Chinese internet usage differs from what we see in the United States. According to studies, the Chinese read news and conduct searches at a similar level to their American counterparts. But they read and write email a lower frequency, preferring other communication methods like instant messaging (Twitter, for that reason, has the potential to take off here…if numerous other clones like Digu, Fanfou or Zuosa don’t take the wind out of its sails first). The Chinese also consume a lot more music, almost all of which is pirated or provided by free by companies like Google. Gaming and blogging are also two popular activities, while ecommerce still plays a comparatively smaller role in the web industry. Kaiser Kuo, a technology commentator in Beijing, presented the Startonomics crowd with a balanced view of how censorship works in China. On the one hand, it poses a definite human rights issue that needs to be solved over time. On the other hand, reports of censorship in China are often over-exaggerated, especially when they affect Western services like Twitter (which is only used by a very, very small fraction of the population here). He was keen on pointing out that the Chinese government isn’t like a bogeyman always lurking around the corner ready to crush out any and all vocalized signs of dissent. Instead, it tends to focus on preventing organized resistance, while leaving most individuals who air their grievances online alone. If anything, censorship plays out indirectly, with the government putting pressure on web companies to patrol their own users’ content. Pornography, for example, is strictly banned here, so companies need to police their services vigilantly or suffer penalties. The biggest trend we saw throughout the presentations was just how big gaming is for Chinese youth. While mobile technologies aren’t as big here as in Japan, the Chinese spend a lot of time and money on casual games, especially in internet cafes. The industry is lucrative, with a fraction of wealthy gamers (~10%) willing to shell out lots of money for virtual goods. It’s no surprise then that 6 of the biggest 10 internet companies are game publishers. World of Warcraft is unusually popular, given that it’s made by a Western company (Blizzard), although legacy games such as Starcraft and Counterstrike also make the rounds via piracy. Other big players include the Chinese companies Netease, Giant Interactive (who among other titles developed Zhengtu Online), Kingsoft and the9. While there’s been a shift from console to browser-based games in the last few years, the impulse has remained the same: Chinese youth play games not particularly because of the challenge or entertainment, but rather because they are Steve Mushero of ChinaNetCloud, an internet service provider, gave a detailed overview of how fractured the internet infrastructure is here. Unlike the mesh of networks that carry data across the United States, data served up in China tends to stay on the network of one monopoly. Unfortunately, these monopolies tend to be region-specific, making it difficult and costly to send data across the country latency-free. The Chinese also don’t apply standard internet protocols such as BGP, complicating life for system admins who already have to deal with data centers that vary widely in quality and price. While bandwidth is a big business here and readily available, connections in and out of the country are flaky - here one day, gone the next. There’s a perception in the West that Chinese web companies clone Western services instead of coming up with their own ideas. My impression has been that this is certainly the case, although not exclusively. There are also web companies trying new things, or at least copying Western services and then remolding them for China; they just tend to get drowned out by the clones, which actually affect Chinese companies as well. The popular social network Kaixin (at kaixin001.com), for example, was cloned by competitor Xiaonei after the latter company bought the domain kaixin.com. Overall, the industry is like the Wild West. There are a slew of startups (unlike what we saw in Japan), many of which are going after the same markets and creating an intense competitive environment for foreign and local companies alike. Slides from Startonomics Beijing can be found on SlideShare. Dr. Kai-Fu Lee’s presentation is embedded below. I’d also like to take this opportunity to thank Founders Fund and BlueRun Ventures for helping make this trip possible for the entire GeeksOnAPlane group. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0  
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| iPhone OS On A Touchscreen Monitor, Multi-Touch and All Posted: 14 Jun 2009 04:43 PM PDT  Now this is the hack of the weekend or the hoax of the weekend. Some intrepid hackers have run what appears to be iPhone OS 2.x on a "multi-touch" monitor with accelerometer support. I've found a few examples of monitors that could potentially pull this off but I haven't been able to pin down a model number. However, because iPhone OS is basically a
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| Does America Need to Make Things? Posted: 14 Jun 2009 02:25 PM PDT
In some ways, Agassi is even more ambitious than Elon Musk—you know, the guy who builds rockets and $100,000 electric sports cars. Agassi wants to re-engineer the entire auto and oil infrastructure with electric cars, charging stations, battery replacement stations (staring robots who actually change the battery for you) and sophisticated software to keep it all running—one country at a time. His company is called Better Place, and while some have accused Agassi of being an egomaniac, I give him huge props for walking away from one of the most powerful jobs in the tech world to start a new company that was this hard to pull off. I last interviewed Agassi several years ago on stage when he was at SAP, and I was covering the oh-so-sexy enterprise software beat for BusinessWeek. If memory serves, we were good-naturedly sparring about whether Oracle's acquisition strategy would work. (I'd argue I was right.) But I have to say, I like this Shai better. He made his name as an intense and gifted entrepreneur who wasn't afraid to take risk and sometimes people like that are wasted inside big organizations, even if they have the top job. Agassi seemed inspired and unleashed compared to his SAP days. There's more about Better Place itself and Agassi's plan here. But at the end of the third segment (embedded below), Agassi said something that's been sticking in my head ever since: America has to start making things or the economy won't work. He argues you don't have a country with just a service economy to support it. I'm starting to fear that he's right, especially spending time last month in China and this week in central Africa, both places where manufacturing and consumer goods industries are being built fresh and in incredibly innovative ways. It's a bit like what you kept hearing after the dot com bust: When things turn south it's good to have hard assets to fall back on. Trust me, as I sit on a terrace in a landlocked African nation that has to import almost everything to great expense, America doesn't want to get in the pure-consumer, non-producer game. And while some argue the intellectual work—ala thinking up the idea or doing the hard core engineering—is higher margin, it's absurd and arrogant to think we've got a lock on the people who can do that kind of thinking. This is clearly the biggest concern in the rust belt where thousands of manufacturing job are at risk. But if Agassi is right, Silicon Valley is in trouble too, because we hardly make anything anymore. Look at the semiconductor business: Most start-ups for the last ten years have been so-called "fabless" chip companies. And how many gadgets are made here? The great age of networking and telecom rollouts are over—instead monopolies are upping revenues by "metering" our broadband not rolling out a newer, faster infrastructure. Even outsourcing low-level software development to Balkan states contributes to this. It's a win-win for now, but long-term emerging markets benefit more than we do. Tech got in this situation for two reasons: technology advanced quickly enough we could outsource all the assembly and VCs liked it that way because it's cheap. But there's more than enough cash flowing around this Valley to fund a few risky, expensive manufacturing plays. Here's what I'd like to see America start making again. Leave your ideas in the comments. 1. Better consumer devices. For decades VCs have shied away from consumer devices given the manufacturing and consumer marketing costs. Sure there are loads of duds out there to support that point. But whether they’re entirely made in the US or not, haven't the iPhone, the Flip, the Kindle, the Jawbone and others proven a good device that does something well still has a future coming out of the Valley? Increasingly, people will pay up for brilliant device execution even if it only does one thing well, even if it's not necessarily a new category. 2. Cars. Yep, we're doing it already but it largely hasn't been funded by the Valley. Musk invested $70 million of his own money and Agassi's cash mostly came from Israelis. Props to Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers for funding Tesla competitor Fisker. But now that these pioneers have proven there's a viable market here, the US establishment whether it's the Valley top brass, DC lawmakers or Detroit need to get behind it in action, not words. Although President Barack Obama has been careful to say the government won't dictate strategy for the car companies we now own, Agassi thinks America should take the opportunity to push on electric manufacturing hard. After all, we do own them. Why not get something out of it? (More on that in the video below too.) 3. Medicine. What ever happened to the biotech boom? The promise from decoding the genome? The rhetoric that the Valley was going to give birth to dozens of Genentechs? I'll tell you what: VCs got into the habit of selling promising pre-clinical research to big pharma early and often. There's no more company building in biotech, and that's a shame. I get that drug discovery is hard and expensive, but we need the innovation, real science and jobs if you ask me. There's also the side benefit of screwing with the big pharma oligopolies. And saving lives is generally a good thing for the country. 4. Electric planes that go really fast. Ok, it sounds even crazier than rockets or electric cars, but every time I board a creaky old Boeing jet for a 10-hour-plus international flight, I can't stop thinking about Musk's idea for an electric plane that's supersonic and lands vertically. I don't even know if that's feasible, but I'm ready to retire my much-beloved noise-reduction headset if it is. If anyone would like to build a teleportation device I'll sign up for a beta tester on that one too. I don't care if there's a risk that my organs will arrive on the outside of my body, I'm so over 20-to-30 hour flights on planes older than I am. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors  
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| Google Voice’s Secret Weapon: Number Portability Posted: 14 Jun 2009 01:04 PM PDT
Once you’ve jumped in head first to the product it will straighten out your phone life forever. You’ll never have to worry about figuring out which phone numbers to give to different people. Give them one number - your Google Voice number - and then use rules to determine where your calls go based on who’s calling and what you are doing. There are significant switching costs, though. You have to tell everyone your new phone number and get them to start using that, instead. New business cards have to be printed, which is another cost. For most people, that’s just too much heavy lifting to fully embrace the service. And there’s the additional problem of your outbound calls and outbound text messages showing the phone number of the device you are calling from instead of your Google Voice number. Your friends need to store that number or they won’t know who’s calling. And once it’s stored, they’ll use it, bypassing all the great voicemail and call routing features of Google Voice. But Google has a plan to deal with all of these issues, we’ve heard. And it starts with Number Portability. Today you are issued a new phone number when you sign up for Google Voice. But we’ve confirmed that a very small number of people have ported their existing numbers to Google (Google uses Level3 to handle phone numbers). In the U.S. it’s possible to port any phone number to another service provider - even a mobile number to a voip provider like Level3. Google is only testing the service for now, but we’ve heard from a source inside Google that they plan to roll out number portability as a general feature later this year. Once that happens, users will be able to move the phone number they’ve had forever to Google, and avoid the switching costs. That means you can switch your mobile number to Google and then just use whatever device you happen to have in your hand to receive calls. That’s an extremely powerful feature for Google Voice. Outbound calls from those devices will still show whatever phone number is assigned to it, though. But Google has that covered, too. We’ve learned that they are preparing to launch apps for the major smartphone platforms that will automatically route outbound calls through Google Voice. That means whoever you call will see your Google Voice number as the caller. I’m banging on every door I can find to get Google to let me port my mobile number over to them as soon as possible. I’ll have to pay a $175 fee to AT&T to switch away, but it’s worth it. As long as Google is around I won’t have to be shackled to any of the ridiculous U.S. mobile carriers. I can just use whatever device I’m testing at any given time as my main phone. And I won’t have to ask people to call me at my home VoIP line when I’m here just because my iPhone doesn’t work at all at my house. Instead I can just switch my inbound calls to Vonage. Callers won’t know the difference. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0  
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A coalition of non-profit organizations, technology developers, designers, marketers and others has unveiled the alpha version of a new Web service dubbed 
There are no shortage of job listing sites out there, especially in this economy. But how do you know if the jobs listed on any of them are actually any good? Why not vote on them?
“On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” (
You may find this hard to believe, but back in the 90s, I was what you might consider a bit of a Microsoft fanboy.
So, maybe you heard about 
It seems like I’ve heard that title somewhere before. 
KIGALI, RWANDA– As I've 
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