Archive for: July 12, 2009

Finnish startup Linkotec is close to debuting the public beta version of dazzboard , a browser-based media manager that it says has all the goodness of iTunes but without the disadvantages of Apple’s closed environment. Granted, we hear that a lot, but I’ve been invited to take an early peek at what they’ve been cooking and came away fairly impressed. Dazzboard is currently invitation-only but is shooting for a Wednesday release of the public beta version. TechCrunch readers with limited patience (yes, you there) can already sign up to take it for a spin before that: 500 of you can register for an account right here . Note that the web application currently requires Windows - a Mac-compatible version is in the works - and works best when you’re using the latest Internet Explorer or Firefox browser. With dazzboard, you can plug a wide range of mobile devices into your computer and easily transfer multimedia content like photos, videos and music to the web-based management interface, after which you can organize all your files and seamlessly share them through a variety of social networking services. It goes both ways: with the use of the ‘Dazz me’ bookmarklet you can download content from the Web to the media manager and distribute it to your favorite social network or your mobile device once it’s transferred to your account. Dazzboard supports any portable device that can be used in mass storage or media transfer mode. The company divides the range of portable media players and mobile phones it supports into two groups: full supported devices (supported and maintained by the Dazzboard database, meaning no specific user action is required) and so-called generic devices (not fully supported by Dazzboard so handled as a generic media hub). In the latter case, it’s possible not ...

Thank you to all of you who came out to support the 2009 Summer CrunchUp! We broke 600 attendees to the Real Time Stream CrunchUp, double our initial expectations, and we hosted lots more of you at the August Capital outing. In typical TechCrunch style, it was a work-hard, play-hard day. Thank you to all our CrunchUp speakers for investing your time with us to talk about new trends, boundaries and your passions. Plus we fit in 22 new product highlights from start-ups and big internet companies alike. If you missed the CrunchUp, the video is on the CrunchUp site , courtesy of Ustream . Both they and FutureWorks did an amazing job to help us stream and record Real Time for future use. We live blogged as much of the conference as possible. In case you missed yesterday: The Real-Time Opportunity , including Ron Conway’s Top Ten List of Monetization Opportunities The Real-Time Moment Real-Time Search Real-Time Mobs (and Syphilis) Real-Time Business Real-Time Roundtable Demos and announcements. including: Tweetdeck Funding Microsoft Silverlight PeopleBrowsr Brizzly , from Thing Labs Seesmic Browser Client Bantam Live Camtweet, from Justin.tv Qik Push API ECHO, from JK-Kit 12seconds.tv Mag.ma Additional archives are on the CrunchUp site. We incorporated real-time widgets and services, from CrunchUp sponsors Tinker , cc:Betty and Tokbox . Thanks again to Charles River Ventures and Microsoft BizSpark for helping to underwrite the CrunchUp. August Capital was unbridled start-up networking and fun. As usual, we are indebted to David Hornik and the partners at August Capital for allowing we hooligans onto their beautiful back deck under the premise of business socializing. We did manage to get a bit classy this year. Grey Goose Vodka hosted an amazing martini bar for us, complete with ice sculpture. (We were told the last time ...

Twitter has hired Alexander Macgillivray , Google’s associate general counsel for Product and IP, as their new General Counsel, we’ve confirmed. Macgillivray is still an employee of Google, and his start date at Twitter has not yet been determined. We’ve been sitting on the story all day and were trying to talk with Macgillivray because our understanding is that he may not have told Google that he was going to Twitter and we didn’t want to be the one’s to break the news. But the story broke on the NY Times, so I’m guessing they know all about it now. We’ve also confirmed that Twitter is aggressively hiring across the board, including top executive spots. A number of candidates have been interviewed for the CFO job in particular. Macgillivray, a former Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati attorney, has been a key figure in Google’s legal battles over their book scanning efforts. The U.S. Department of Justice has opened an investigation into the matter. Macgillivray is leaving Google at a crucial time. The books settlement is a key antitrust issue that needs to be handled delicately, and he was leading the charge (or, perhaps, retreat). Google will be scrambling to fill his role. One problem Twitter has had in attracting key executives, multiple sources have told us, is the impression that they may sell the company sooner rather than later. They have told candidates that they intend to stay in it for the long haul, and don’t plan to sell any time soon. We’ll see. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

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Twitter Expanding Executive Team: Hires General Counsel From Google, Looking For CFO

Animoto is turning into a cult favorite web app - upload a few pictures to the service, pick some music, add some text and get a really cool video slide show back. They made my annual “ can’t live without ” list last year based on their obsessive desire to perfect a single product. Many, many users agree. Last month they announced a new round of financing and turned cash flow positive. Users are flocking to their iPhone application that lets you create slide shows from events even before you get back to your computer. And soon, CEO Brad Jefferson tells me, they will let users upload video clips as well as photos to make their slide shows. They actually showed the feature last month in a promotional video for the Webbies, which shows photos as well as short video clips. The feature is near-ready to launch to users, Jefferson told me last week. I was on a Southwest flight with him and Wired editor Fred Vogelstein (see his recent Facebook article and a 2007 article on TechCrunch) on the way back from an event in Seattle. Jefferson showed me some of the Animoto clips with video, and even showed off a 3D product they are working on. I took the video above when we landed at Oakland airport, much to the amusement of a few late night passengers hanging out near us. Make sure you watch to the end - Vogelstein is hilarious with the 3D glasses on. Here’s what’s great about Animoto - these clips take just a few seconds to create. Animoto does all the hard work for you. And the demo videos show clips with mixed images and short video clips put together into a seamless product. You will actually be able to create these ...

Social Media has evolved beyond a series of platforms that enable content publishing, sharing, and discovery into a genuine, peer-to-peer looking glass into the real world conversations that affect the perception, engagement, and overall direction of the brands we represent. Socialized media didn’t invent “conversations,” it simply organized and amplified them and established an opportunity for learning and collaboration. Twitter and Twitter Search have ushered in a new genre of not only communications and associated search technology, but also dedicated ecosystems that transform and support how we as consumers share and discover relevant information in real-time. Online discussions, rants, and observations are either alarming (and motivating) brand managers or fooling them into unforeseen enthrallment. But the reality is that real-time dialogue is fueling connections and perceptions in the statusphere , blogopsphere, online communities, and the social web in general. It’s this swelling tsunami of chatter that will only intensify and heighten as it forces a new genre of Social Customer Relationship Management ( sCRM ). Social CRM is no longer an option. It necessitates brand involvement to proactively share answers, solve problems, establish authority, and build relationships and loyalty, one tweet, blog post, update, and “like,” at a time. In the world of business, social media, led by Twitter, is forcing companies to augment the offshoring of reactive customer service with the nearshoring of proactive customer engagement. The conversations that power social media are sparking a sense of urgency to identify influential voices and talk to customers in a place and time of their choosing (generally, in public and online). For example, on Friday at during a panel at the CrunchUp on Real Time Business , Porter Gale, vice president of marketing for Virgin America, made it clear that Virgin America understands the promise, prospect, and value of listening ...

(Credit: Insignia) The price of HD Radio technology has been dwindling over the past few years, with digital-capable car stereos and clock radios priced south of $100. But Insignia’s new NS-HD01 adds two new wrinkles to the HD Radio equation. The iPod-sized unit is the first truly portable (battery powered) HD Radio, and its $50 price tag makes it the most affordable HD model to date. The NS-HD01 is scheduled to hit shelves at Best Buy on June 12, but we got an early look at the unit. …

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Insignia’s NS-HD01 is the first portable HD Radio–and it’s only $50

Anyone who has tried to use the immensely popular ‘housing’ section of Craigslist to do some apartment hunting is well aware of its limitations: aside from breaking listings into basic neighborhoods, for the most part they lack any structure, which can make them a pain to browse through, especially when you’re trying to compare more than one apartment. Y Combinator startup RentHop is looking to offer an alternative, featuring thousands of structured housing listings that are much easier to search though and compare. Of course, there are plenty of other sites that offer comprehensive housing listings, so RentHop is also looking to differentiate itself by eliminating housing broker fees. For the time being RentHop is only available in New York City, largely because of the way apartment hunting is set up there. For those who aren’t familiar with the situation, most of the time when you’re looking to find an apartment in New York City, you’re forced to work through a broker who will charge a fee of 15% of your first year of rent (which works out to around $3,000 based on NYC’s average rent). So why not just skip the brokers and go straight through Craigslist, which offers a broker-free ‘no fee’ section? RentHop co-founder Lee Lin says that oftentimes brokers will spam this section with fake listings, hoping to seduce viewers into calling them at which point they can say “Oh, that one is taken, but we’ve still got this one available…” and so on. Because NYC apartment listings rarely include an actual address, these are very easy to fake. RentHop solves this problem by going to major landlords, some of which own many buildings in New York City, and getting the listings straight from them. Each listing on RentHop has a valid address, which means ...

I’m a fan of DNA startup 23andMe . In fact, I was one of the first people to lay down $1,000 and take the test. And I like what they are doing to help disease research. But this blimp (or rather a zeppelin) they’re flying around Silicon Valley is a menace. First of all, I go outside to get away from work, not to look up in the sky and see a big startup logo hovering over my house. And our attempts to take a video of it almost resulted in a car crash (video below) (Yeah, probably more my fault than theirs, but still, it’s there, I need to video it. From a moving car). Go away, Blimp. Or Zeppelin. Apparently this thing has been around for a while. An excruciatingly detailed overview of the zeppelin and why it is flying around with a 23andMe logo on it is here . Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

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23andMe Zeppelin Hanging Out Above My House, Creeping Me Out

This much . That’s 44 accounts by my count. Where are all those Jaiku accounts? Still think they have no interest in the micro-messaging service? Of course they do. It just may cost them more than a billion dollars to satisfy their fixation. And Microsoft is starting to get a fixation too . Remember when the two had a bidding war over a stake in Facebook? Update : Interesting. As Habib points out in the comments, it looks like Google may have missed one of its own accounts in the region list: Google Arabia . That makes 45. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

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How Much Does Google Like Twitter?

This morning I woke up and saw an interesting headline on Techmeme from Forbes writer Brian Caulfield: Why Google Is Stealing Apple’s Ideas . Wow, a story involving two of the world’s largest technology companies and scandal? This was going to be good. And then I read the story, which turned out to be a strange hit job on Google for no apparent reason, trying to imply that Google has somehow bypassed Apple’s “renowned secrecy” and used its ideas to foster the development of its new Chrome OS . And somehow, Google CEO Eric Schmidt is behind it. Caulfield claims that Apple may have “missed a spot” by letting Schmidt stay on Apple’s board. First off, why does everyone seem to assume that Apple isn’t well aware of the fact that Eric Schmidt is the CEO of Google?  To paraphrase John Gruber , does anyone actually think Steve Jobs is too shy to confront Schmidt? Of course, Caulfield immediately goes on to say that Schmidt isn’t actually a spy, but rather that somewhere along the line Apple and Google have become “accidental competitiors” who have simply yet to realize it. Right. But the Schmidt point can be forgiven. It’s possible, however improbable, that Eric Schmidt has somehow been accidentally abusing his position at Apple to gain insider knowledge that he then leveraged to empower Google, all under Jobs’ nose, and without realizing that he was competing with Apple. After all, he is a very smart man. So on to the points where Google has apparently copied Apple, which range from the silly to utterly ridiculous. Caulfield points out that Chrome OS runs on x86 and ARM processors and is based on Unix. But look: Apple’s OS X also runs on both x86 and ARM processors, is based on a ...

CPUID HWMonitor Pro is our extended version of the hardware monitoring program HWMonitor In comparison to its classic counterpart HWMonitor Pro adds the following features
Remote Monitoring
Watch the sensors of one or several distant PCs through a simple TCP IP connection

Graph Generator
Save monitoring data and generate logging graphs as bitmap files

Improved Interface
Sensors in system tray editable sensors labels

PWM Control
Fan PWM control for ESA compliant devices

The K Lite Codec Pack is a collection of codecs and related tools Codec is short for Compressor Decompressor Codecs are needed for encoding and decoding playing audio and video The K Lite Codec Pack is designed as a user friendly solution for playing all your movie files With the K Lite Codec Pack you should be able to play all the popular movie formats and even some rare formats K Lite Mega Codec Pack combines the contents of two packs K Lite Codec Pack Full and Real Alternative