TechCrunch
Tuesday August 19th, 2008
5.9
Apple Is Flailing Badly At The Edges
From TechCrunch, 1 day ago,
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My first computer, purchased by my parents after nearly a year of begging, was an Apple II+. That was 1982. I was a Windows user for the next 20 years, but went back to Mac when they switched to Intel chips a couple of years ago. Since then I’ve bought seven Macs for myself, as [...]
4.6
NewsCred Goes Public With Credibility-Based News Source
From TechCrunch, 1 day ago,
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NewsCred, the news aggregator that ranks stories by the credibility of their source, has launched to the public. Instead of relying on popularity as many social news sites do, NewsCred instead allows users to rate each story, author, and publication’s credibility, which is then plugged into an algorithm to determine the site’s prominent headlines.
We [...]
1.0
EngrishFunny Is Newest Site In Lolcats Empire
From TechCrunch, 1 day ago,
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The company behind the popular ICanHasCheezburger site has launched a new website, EngrishFunny, which makes fun of grammatically incorrect variations of English (often found in Asia). Users send in photos of poorly translated or written products, signs, instructions, etc. to the site.
This is the seventh website for parent company Pet Holdings, Inc., which bought the [...]
4.6
3Jam Offers Refuge For Abandoned Twitter Users
From TechCrunch, 1 day ago,
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Last week Twitter announced that it had disabled outbound SMS updates for nearly all of its international users because it has been unable to negotiate favorable deals with cellular carriers. Up until this point, Twitter has allowed users to receive incoming SMS messages free of charge, footing a bill that it says amounted to [...]
5.4
Yahoo Buzz Opens Doors To Everyone
From TechCrunch, 1 day ago,
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Buzz, Yahoo’s Digg-like effort to leverage reader gestures and third party content in determining the most popular news, removes it’s barriers to entry tonight.
Until now only a hundred or so invited publishers could post news to Buzz. This was a big plug - Yahoo pushes a few Yahoo Buzz stories to their home page [...]
Friendster Launches Support For OpenSocial Apps
From TechCrunch, 1 day ago,
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Friendster, the social network that has seen explosive growth in Asia but continues to lag behind Facebook and MySpace elsewhere, has launched support for OpenSocial apps on its development platform. Friendster initially launched its platform last October, but has restricted available applications to those developed especially for Friendster’s API (much as a developer would [...]
Monday August 18th, 2008
Poll Everywhere Asks The Crowd To Spice Up PowerPoint Presentations
From TechCrunch, 1 day ago,
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Despite using a plethora of flashy graphics and professionally designed templates, many lecturers have to grapple with one common dilemma: PowerPoint presentations are usually pretty boring.
One common way in increase engagement, especially in a large group setting, is to encourage audience participation using a polling service. Unfortunately, many of these systems use [...]
In Anticipation Of An Actual Phone, Android Releases A New SDK
From TechCrunch, 1 day ago,
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Now that the first Android phone has been approved by the FCC, Google figured it might be a good time to update the software development kit for the mobile OS. There were hints that this would happen earlier today, but now it is official. According to the Android Developer’s Blog, here is what is [...]
Japan’s Kao Chekki (Face Check) Proves That Vanity Apps Know No Boundaries
From TechCrunch, 1 day ago,
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On Facebook, there is no shortage of apps that tell you what celebrity you look like based on your photo (FaceDouble is the most popular), but in Japan we like our vanity apps on our mobile phones. After all, the camera is built in. Take the case of Kao Chekki (Face Check) by J-Magic, [...]
Where Are We In The Hype Cycle?
From TechCrunch, 1 day ago,
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New technologies tend to follow different trajectories of hype, hope, and despair as they are discovered by different groups of people and finally adopted (or ignored) by consumers. Gartner actually goes ahead and charts this hype cycle for different technologies. Its latest hype cycle for 2008, shown above, is making the rounds. (It [...]
1.8
FCC Greenlights First Android Phone (HTC Dream)
From TechCrunch, 1 day ago,
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The only thing holding back the launch of the first Android-powered phone, the HTC Dream, was approval from the Federal Communications Commission. That approval has now come through, and T-Mobile can launch the phone. The filing asks for a November 10 release date, but (as Matt Marshall at VentureBeat points out) T-Mobile could [...]
4.2
Google Uses YouTube To Try To Rally Public Support For WiFi 2.0
From TechCrunch, 2 days ago,
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The fate of an important chunk of wireless spectrum in the U.S. is being decided by the FCC, and Google wants to rally public support for turning this spectrum over to unlicensed uses, just like we do today with WiFi. The spectrum in question is the “white spaces” in the analog TV broadcast signal [...]
3.4
Del.izzy Does What Del.icio.us Won’t: Search The Full Text Of Your Bookmarks
From TechCrunch, 2 days ago,
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When you search your bookmarks on del.icio.us, all you are searching is the tags, titles, and descriptions. If you want to search the full text of the underlying bookmarked pages themselves, you have to go to Del.izzy, a site out of Melbourne, Australia that was hacked together in three days. Del.izzy takes each page [...]
3.4
Jitterbit: An Open Source Project That Bridges Data Gaps
From TechCrunch, 2 days ago,
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Jitterbit, a service that helps companies bridge and integrate data from different sources, has released a new 2.0 version of its software along with a new pricing model that it hopes will make it more appealing to businesses and consumers alike.
Jitterbit is an open source project that allows users to efficiently use and modify data [...]
2.6
Redesigning For A Reason: Towards Better Conversion Rates
From TechCrunch, 2 days ago,
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Mint, an online personal finance site, has gotten a facelift. The new site sports a much cleaner design than the previous iteration, and appears to be focused on describing what Mint actually does rather than presenting pretty (but somewhat overwhelming) graphics.
That normally isn’t big news, but what caught my attention is that Mint [...]