The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- The Tyranny Of Government And Our Duty Of Confidentiality As Bloggers
- 2010: My Fifth Annual List Of The Tech Products I Love And Use Every Day
- Namebench: Google’s 20% Project To Find The Fastest DNS Server
- Six New Years Resolutions For Apple And The iPhone In 2010
- Ten Technologies That Will Rock 2010
- Hotel WiFi Should Be a Right, Not a Luxury
- Frank Gruber Leaves Aol To Pursue His Own Ventures
| The Tyranny Of Government And Our Duty Of Confidentiality As Bloggers Posted: 02 Jan 2010 08:32 AM PST
As bloggers, we have a duty of confidentiality to our sources. And that means keeping information confidential even if threatened with the tyranny of government. And even if the legislatures and courts haven’t decided that as bloggers we have real rights protecting us from that tyranny. I’ll never be surprised by a tyrannical government. In a sense, it’s their job. It’s our job as bloggers to stand up to that tyranny, even if our liberty has been threatened. Journalists have gone to jail rather than disclose their sources. If bloggers want the same level of respect, and protection from government by the courts, they need to stand up for what’s right. And Frischling, when faced with the decision to do what’s right and go to jail, flailed badly. He willingly handed his laptop over to the government. Easy To Say, Hard To DoYou could argue that it’s easy for me to make statements like this, since we blog about technology. The Department of Homeland Security doesn’t knock on my door very often demanding to know my source for the latest Google acquisition rumor. But if they did, I’d like to think I’d tell them to go to hell. Even if that meant they dragged me out of my house and put me in jail. We have received a number of threats of lawsuits unless we revealed our sources around various sensitive stories. In each case we’ve either ignored the threats or told them to pound sand. In each case the other side backed down. We’ve also had other situations where we’ve had to consider revealing sources. In March 2008 we wrote about acquisition negotiations between Digg and Google. The companie’s CEO Jay Adelson effectively called us liars, and we were sorely tempted to reveal our original source. But to do so would mean that people would know that under certain circumstances they couldn’t trust us. We want that trust to be unconditional, and so we took our lumps and never revealed the source. Later we had our vindication anyway. We were challenged yet again in 2009 with the Last.fm/RIAA story where we believe at least one source, including an executive at Last.fm, lied to us. We haven’t, and never will, publish that information. Even though there’s an email string that would make excellent reading. And there is a whole book I could write around the Twitter document fiasco from 2009. That book will never be written either. I think I can understand how frightened Frischling must have been when the TSA agents showed up at his house. Even though he has has worked for Life, Time, Newsweek, New York Times, and was embedded with troops in Iraq, he “didn’t know what to do.” He caved, and he gave the agents his computer. From Wired:
His argument is that he received the email from an anonymous source via Gmail, so he wasn’t really handing over confidential information. But the TSA, seeing the email, can then easily get Google to hand over information around that Gmail account, and can likely track down the source. Any anyway, it doesn’t matter. At the end of the day, he lacked the courage to stand up for what’s right. Anyone working with Frischling now knows that he’ll respect your confidentiality, just so long as it’s not inconvenient to his liberty. And that’s not respect at all. He let all bloggers down the other day when he willingly handed over his computer to the government. It was his duty to stand up to those agents, and even spend time in jail. Perhaps if he fought the whole situation in court it would lead to stronger laws protecting all bloggers. But Frischling didn’t do that, and the tyranny of our government went unchecked once more. If I’m ever in the same situation as Steven Frischling I hope I have the courage to do what’s right. Not just what’s right for me right then. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
      |
| 2010: My Fifth Annual List Of The Tech Products I Love And Use Every Day Posted: 01 Jan 2010 06:46 PM PST
These aren’t necessarily newly launched products (see Daniel Raffel’s post yesterday for a solid list of great new products). This is a simple list of the tech products that are an integral part of my day – work or play. Some have withstood the test of time and I just can’t live without. Others are newcomers that have captured my imagination. I use most of them every day, or nearly every day, and I would not be as productive or happy without all of them. There are now 24 products on the list. Just three of these products have been on the list all five years: TechMeme, Skype and Wordpress. As I said last year, TechMeme continues to be the news aggregator I check multiple times per day to keep up on tech news (although Google News is becoming more important over time). Skype is the instant messaging and VoIP platform that I use most often at work and with friends. And Wordpress software powers all of our blogs. I've added 13 new products to last year’s list: Android, Apple Magic Mouse, Dropbox, Evernote, Foursquare/Loopt/Gowalla, Google Docs, Google Voice, Kodak Zi8, MOG, Skitch and Spotify. I've removed seven products from the 2009 list: 1-800-Free-411, Digg, Friendfeed, Google Reader, iPhone, MySpace Music and Zoho. There are lot of products that I use daily that aren’t on the list for various reasons. My iMac and MacBook Pro and Droid phone, for example, aren’t on the list specifically even though all three products are exceptional. I don’t really have a browser preference, although I suspect Chrome will be on the list next year. And there are lots of websites and services, like Posterous and Amie Street, that I use regularly but just didn’t make my arbitrary cut. We also use Bit.ly extensively on the site for URL shortening, and EventBrite and Amiando for event ticketing. Here’s my 2010 list of tech products that I love and use every day: AndroidI gave up the iPhone this year and switched to Android mobile phones. First the MyTouch, then the Droid. I’ll soon be upgrading again. What I like best about Android is the deep integration with Google Voice, which I talk about below. These two products go hand in hand. AnimotoI first put Animoto on the list last year. The service makes beautiful slide shows of photos, and this year they added videos (here’s one I made). Their iPhone application continues to impress. This company is now profitable and my guess is someone like Apple will acquire them in the next year. Apple Magic MouseThe Apple Magic Mouse is the best computer pointing device ever made. It functions as a normal mouse but also has multitouch on top. Once you use it you’ll never be happy with an old mouse or touchpad again. DeliciousDelicious, the social bookmarking workhorse, has been on my list every year except 2007. It’s not perfect but it’s better than anything else out there. DropboxDropbox is a new addition to the list this year. It’s just dead simple file syncing across all your computers, mobile devices and the cloud. It’s also a great way to privately share big files. Dropbox is now one of my must-have productivity tools. I just wish Google offered something similar so that I could have an integrated dashboard for my Google Docs files and Dropbox stuff. EvernoteEvernote is also a new addition this year. Like Dropbox it is an amazing productivity tool that lets you capture, organize, and find information across multiple platforms. You can take notes, clip webpages, snap photos using their mobile phones, create to-dos, and record audio. All data is synchronized with the Evernote web service and made available to clients on Windows, Mac, Web, and mobile devices. Additionally, the Evernote web service performs image recognition on all incoming notes, making printed or handwritten text found within images searchable. This is the third year in a row that Facebook has been on the list. Facebook has won the social wars, and even the biggest companies are now surrendering to them. Facebook Connect is turning into the defacto online identity solution for tens of millions of people. Foursquare, Loopt and GowallaThese three startups (Foursquare, Loopt and Gowalla), among others, are battling to control mobile social networking. They all have variations of the check-in model, where users are encouraged to note where they are for their friends to see. Foursquare has all the early adopter momentum, But Loopt has millions of users and Gowalla has a compelling product. All three are likely to win. GmailThis is the fourth year in a row for Gmail. It’s the best webmail out there, and I appreciate the free imap support and forwarding. Enough said. Google DocsThis is a new addition for me this year. I never bothered installing Office on my new laptop, and find that Google Docs has all the functionality I need, plus easy sharing with others and storage in the cloud. I may never install Office again. I previously had Zoho on the list, a competitor, and removed it only because I find that centralizing as many services as possible at Google makes things easier for me as a user. Google VoiceThis has been a big year for Google Voice, previously called Grand Central. The mobile apps let Google Voice completely take over Android phones. I’ve ported my mobile number to Google Voice and now any time someone calls that number I can direct it to any phone I like based on where I am, who’s calling and when. It has changed my life, and I will never use a mobile phone that doesn’t have deep integration with the service. HuluThis is the second year in a row for Hulu. I’d love for them to add a paid model and let me watch HBO shows or pay per view new release movies. And I wish they could secure rights to archived libraries of shows, but even as it currently exists, Hulu is a great entertainment service. Kodak Zi8This digital video camera beats the pants off the current Flip models. The best feature is the ability to add a microphone. Flip doesn’t have this, and the audio quality is often terrible. The Zi8 is a full generation ahead. MOG, Pandora and SpotifyMOG and Spotify are new this year. Pandora has been on every year except 2008, and with hindsight I should have added them that year, too. These are three streaming music services that are awesome. MOG, which is $5/month, is the best music experience on the Internet. Spotify, a desktop streaming service that hasn’t launched in the U.S. yet, lacks the radio and social features of MOG but is currently free. And we hear it will launch on a limited basis in the U.S. very shortly. Pandora is still a very cool place to just sign in and listen to music that I love quickly and easily. Scribd and DocstocScribd and Docstoc, two services that let you upload office files like PDFs and Word documents and then embed them on sites, are very useful to bloggers like us. When we have a document that we want to share with readers, we use one of these services and embed it into the post. Both services were also on the list last year. SkitchI’ve been using Skitch for years. It’s Mac software that makes basic image manipulation a breeze – sort of a very light version of Photoshop. For 90% of our images, Skitch works just fine. It’s easy to add text, resize and crop images, etc. And it automatically uploads them to the website for you, too. SkypeSkype is on the list every year and will probably stay there, even under new management. I'd give up email before I gave up Skype. I use it almost exclusively for instant messaging, and a big percentage of my voice calls are over the service. I love doing video chat with friends oversees, too. TechMemeTechMeme is another service that has been on the list all five years. It is the definitely news aggregator for technology news, and a huge asset to our community. TripItTripIt is a simple travel service that is absolutely awesome, and returns to the list this year. You forward confirmation emails from flights, hotels, etc. to the service and it creates an itinerary automatically. You can then access it via a mobile device. Twitter is fast becoming as essential marketing tool for TechCrunch, and I’m addicted to it personally. This is the third year I’ve added Twitter. For mobile use, I love the Seesmic Android application. WordpressAll our blogs run on Wordpress’ open source software, and we use other services of the company, Automattic, that runs the project (Akismet for spam, polldaddy for polls). It has been on the list all five years, and we are thankful for such cool, and free, software. YammerYammer, a Twitter-like service for companies to use internally, won TechCrunch50 in 2008 and is an essential productivity tool at TechCrunch. We long ago moved to the paid version of the service, and we’ve never looked back. YouTubeThis is the fourth year in a row for YouTube. It’s always good for a two minute entertainment diversion from work, and we use it exclusively to host our own video content. Let me know what services you’d add to your list, or leave off. Each year in the comments I hear about someone’s passion for a new product that I overlooked before, and sometimes they make the list in the following year. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
  |
| Namebench: Google’s 20% Project To Find The Fastest DNS Server Posted: 01 Jan 2010 06:31 PM PST
Thomas Stromberg, a Google engineer based in Belgium, created Namebench, a piece of software to find the fastest DNS server available for you to use. The program is available for OS X, Windows, and Linux, and the entire thing has been open sourced by Stromberg. Once you install it, Namebench couldn’t be easier to use. You simply load it up, hit the “Start Benchmark” button and let it do its thing. Depending on the number of test you run (you can set that), it will come back with the results in a few minutes. The results open in your web browser, showing you the first, second, and third best DNS options right up top. There are also a number of charts and and graphs if you want to drill down into the numbers. Now, you might worry that since Namebench was created by a Googler, it would promote Google Public DNS above all others. But actually, in the test I just ran, Google’s solution ranged from the middle of all the DNS offerings to the slowest. OpenDNS, considered Google Public DNS’ biggest competitor, was actually the fastest. “Are you a power-user with 5 minutes to spare? Do you want a faster internet experience?,” is the way Stromberg pitches it on the site for project. If that applies to you, you should check it out. Stromberg wrote more about the idea a few months ago before Google Public DNS was a reality. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
  |
| Six New Years Resolutions For Apple And The iPhone In 2010 Posted: 01 Jan 2010 05:42 PM PST Last night, as we waited for Carson Daily to tell us that it was time to make a lot of noise, I found myself laying on my buddy’s lawn with glass number one-too-many of something toxic in my hand. As I stared up at the stars, I pondered something I’d imagine most of the country was pondering as well: Does Steve Jobs make New Years Resolutions? I mean, really; outside of continuing to kick cancer’s ass and perhaps expanding his wardrobe, there’s probably not much that needs resolving in El Jobso’s personal life. His number one pet project (outside of that other one), however, could probably use a bit of work right now. Read the rest of this post at MobileCrunch >> Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
  |
| Ten Technologies That Will Rock 2010 Posted: 01 Jan 2010 03:50 PM PST Now that the aughts are behind us, we can start the new decade with a bang. So many new technologies are ready to make a big impact this year. Some of them will be brand new, but many have been gestating and are now ready to hatch. If there is any theme here it is the mobile Web. As I think through the top ten technologies that will rock 2010, more than half of them are mobile. But those technologies are tied to advances in the overall Web as well. Below is my list of the ten technologies that will leave the biggest marks on 2010:
Chrome OS Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
  |
| Hotel WiFi Should Be a Right, Not a Luxury Posted: 01 Jan 2010 03:39 PM PST
What gives with hotel WiFi? This is a ten-year-old technology that has improved in speed and quality nearly everywhere—in homes, in offices, in public spaces, in coffee shops, in airports—even on planes. You can even get free WiFi at Krystal, a fast food chain that's on par with White Castle and sells hamburgers for less than $1 each. Over the past two years I've stayed at more than two-dozen hotels around the United States and the emerging world. I've noticed a trend that seems to fly in the face of basic economics and technology adoption: The pricier and fancier hotel, generally the worse quality the WiFi, if it exists at all. On a trip to Boston two years ago my fancy downtown, five-star hotel had no wireless access. The brand new W in Santiago, Chile has no wireless access. In India, Rwanda and Argentina I've had to buy expensive 24-hour WiFi passes, which can add up to hundreds of dollars per stay, for a connection that was just OK. But I knew better than to complain: The quality of the connection is almost always better in emerging markets than Western Europe. London is hands-down the worst: I've stayed at the Sanderson in London twice and always had a hard time getting online, and I've also stayed at the Malmaison where even the wired connection didn't work. I had to go down to the lobby to get a signal. Even then it was like the early days of wireless where you wandered around holding your laptop looking for bars like you were panning for gold. Arrington may have his silly germaphobe, fist-bump movement. MG may be determined to hold AT&T accountable for its embarrassingly bad iPhone service. Here's my outrage: Why in 2010 do so many hotels have zero, unreliable or outrageously expensive wireless Internet access? This is clearly not a cost issue when economy hotels like Holiday Inn and Days Inn have no problem offering free wireless access from the middle of nowhere in the South. (Not to mention Krystal.) This is an issue of greed or tech ignorance on the part of luxury hotels and consumers and business travelers need to start showing some outrage. On the greed point, Paul Carr—whose parents are hoteliers and lives in hotels now—says the sky-high prices are largely the result of hotels losing fees from business travelers making phone calls, now that we all have mobile phones. The only way to make up the cost was to start charging for Internet access. I wouldn't have a huge problem with that if the access was good. But I get angry when you charge me $20 a day for a connection that barely works when I can get a better connection at a coffee shop next door for free. Why not do what the Royal Orchid in Bangalore does? They offer a basic connection for free, and offer a paid rate if you want a faster speed. That still allows a way for the hotel to make money off business travelers with expense accounts, gives guests who need a high-speed connection an in-room option and offers price-conscious guests a way to do the basics like checking email for free. The other issue is technology. A lot of hotels—deeming themselves too tech-ignorant to install and manage wifi networks themselves—entered into pricey service relationships with third party providers. Hotels say it's those providers who saddle us with the high fees, and in my experience, not very good connectivity. If hotels feel they absolutely can't manage these networks themselves, there have to be better options. What about big Web portals and search engines like Yahoo and Google, or for other countries the local equivalents? Google was ready to wire up all of San Francisco for free access in exchange for ad placement and a Google start page, why not do that for, say, a chain of boutique luxury hotels instead? Or at a minimum, outsource to a service like Boingo that is pretty consistent in service and that many travelers already have a subscription for anyway. It makes the fees hurt less when you can buy an annual pass that's also good at coffee shops, airports and other public spaces. These are just a few ideas, and no doubt those of you with more experience setting up networks for big spaces have more. The Internet is fully woven into our lives now. It is the primary way people stay in touch, work and entertain themselves. There is no reason we shouldn't expect a decent—and preferably free—connection when we pay upwards of $150/night for a hotel if a $30/night hotel can offer it. I, for one, would forgo the pillow mints, free HBO and mini-shampoos if that helps with the margins. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
  |
| Frank Gruber Leaves Aol To Pursue His Own Ventures Posted: 01 Jan 2010 03:10 PM PST
Gruber has been at Aol for over three years now, working in a variety of roles. Here’s a recap from his post:
Gruber tells us that his decision wasn’t affected by the new direction that Aol is taking (he says he likes it). Rather, he wants to pursue his own ventures. In his post, Gruber writes that some of his attention will now be spent on further expanding TECH Cocktail, which holds events across the country to help connect local startup communities. He’ll also be working on Shiny Heart Ventures, his startup that’s “focused on building products that remind us of the joys of life”. In September the company launched a site called ThankfulFor, a microblogging service for sharing the things you’re most thankful for. And last week it launched Shiny Maine Lobster, a site for a family-owned lobster business that ships lobsters direct by mail to its customers. Other recent Aol departures include Chief Lifestreamer David Liu, who left the company in October. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
  |
Last week two bloggers, Steven Frischling and Chris Elliot, were visited by TSA agents and threatened with jail time if they did not reveal their source of the TSA Travel Directive that they each published shortly after the attempted terrorist attack on Christmas day. Frischling 
It’s time for my annual list of technology products that I love and use every day. This is the (wow) fifth year I've done this. Here are my previous lists: 
When Google 
I'm in my hometown of Memphis, Tennessee for Christmas and on a drive between Memphis and Nashville I noticed that every $30/night hotel offered free wireless Internet access. Further, when we got to Nashville and checked into the relatively low-frills Holiday Inn Express we had better wireless Internet access than I've had in hotels around the US and the world—some of which I paid double to stay in.
| You are subscribed to email updates from TechCrunch To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
| Google Inc., 20 West Kinzie, Chicago IL USA 60610 | |
No response to “The Latest from TechCrunch”
Leave a Reply