Wednesday, September 23, 2009

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The HP DreamScreen Not So Dreamy Top
Last week I saw some coverage of this new HP device called the DreamScreen . And more than a couple of blogs were comparing it to the elusive Apple Tablet . Given my extreme interest in this space, I thought I should get this new DreamScreen in my hands as soon as possible and see if HP had indeed beaten Apple (and us) to the punch in delivering the first high quality tablet computing experience to consumers. The press: “Want a hint at how the much-anticipated Apple Tablet might be shaping up? Take a look at the HP DreamScreen,” said one of those blogs, adding “this certainly looks like what we're expecting from the Apple Tablet.” Another site: “Hewlett Packard has beaten Apple to the punch in coming up with a beautiful tablet-like computer.” Engadget called it “something special.” The reality: I can’t repeat here what I wrote on Twitter because of the sensitive nature of the TechCrunch audience, but I will say this. The HP DreamScreen is possibly the biggest piece of crap to ever grace my desk. Which is saying something. To be fair to HP, they didn’t really market it as much more than a glorified digital picture frame, the press just got out of hand. But even that’s too much. The device costs $250. It lacks a touchscreen. It lacks a browser. It lacks a battery. And it has the annoying habit of running a very loud demo video every few minutes – the only way to make it stop is to unplug it. Which is very effective, since it lacks a battery (not a good idea when you market yourself as a digital clock). And HP did nothing to stop rabid bloggers and journalists from heralding the device as some sort of Apple killer. I can’t help but wonder if any of these guys actually tried the device. Wifi setup took ten minutes. I never got Pandora to work. I refused to even try with Facebook, because my password is long and, as you’ll see if you watch to the very end of the video below, I just don’t have an entire afternoon free to type it in. It’s also much thicker than those sexy photos on the HP site make it look. Text input makes me think that HP was actually aiming for the Macbook Wheel as a comparison point . I want my money back. p.s. – I obviously have a huge conflict of interest here. So try it out yourself. But try it in a store where you don’t have to buy it, because you are going to be seriously unhappy with this device. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco
 
Paramount Exec Lectures Poorly On Piracy At Public FCC Policy Workshop Top
In what was ostensibly a meeting of the majors last week to advise the FCC on broadband policy, the COO of Paramount was allowed to wax ignorant for 10 minutes on piracy and file-sharing technology. As a major content provider, they should certainly have some input, but this was sheer soap-boxery. Sure, peer to peer and torrent traffic (legal and otherwise) is going to be a major driver of broadband adoption and major consumer of the resource, but Paramount's contribution to the discussion didn't limit itself to germane observation and reasonable speculation. On the upside, we have a fabulous new quote on the level of Ted Stevens' "series of tubes" that demonstrates how utterly out of touch people like Paramount's COO are with actual Internet terminology and capabilities. Behold: "We are uploading it essentially to a 'cyber locker,' which is nothing more than electronic locker on the Internet." Mr. Huntsberry, we are in your debt for this immortal chestnut of cyber-wisdom. That's nothing more than electronic wisdom on the Internet, for those of you who don't know. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco
 
Foursquare Is Spending A Bit Of Its Money To Get Its Website Into The Game Top
Earlier this month, the location-based social network Foursquare revealed that it had raised a $1.35 million seed round of funding. Almost immediately, they used the money to purchase an important domain for them: foursquare.com (previously, they were found at playfoursquare.com). Today, they revealed another project that the money is being used for: A redesign. A new homepage went live today with a significantly improved look and feel. While the graphics have been prettied up, the main new feature is a constantly moving river of updates from the service. This includes when users write tips for venues, unlock badges, and become the mayors of places. There are also prominent links to its iPhone and Android apps (along with the mobile web version for other phones), and a link for businesses to learn more about how they can utilize the service . Foursquare used some of its funding to hire the design firm Hard Candy Shell to create this new homepage, Foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley confirmed to us (the two companies actually share office space in New York City). But this is just the beginning of Foursquare’s redesign plans. Currently, there is no way for users to really interact with the service through its website. You can see things like venues and user profiles, but there is no way to check-in a place, the main function of the site. That should soon change. When I asked Crowley if this new design was part of a larger effort to turn foursquare.com into a usable web app, he replied that “it’s all in the works.” Of course, the mobile apps will continue to be the focus (aside from the iPhone and Android apps, versions for Blackberry and Windows Mobile should be out soon), but Foursquare users will undoubtedly welcome news of a usable website. Previously, if you wanted to do something as simple as accept friends, it would require a full page reload, which was annoying. Now, features like this have been AJAXified, like a proper web app. Currently, you’ll only see this new Foursquare homepage when you are logged out of the site. CrunchBase Information Foursquare Information provided by CrunchBase Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco
 
DEMO Names Two Winners For Top Media Prize: Emo Labs And Liaise Top
DEMO Fall has just announced the winners of its media prizes, who will each receive $500,000 in free advertising across IDG’s publishing properties and a number of sites including VentureBeat . The winner of the ‘Enterprise’ category is Liaise , which allows you to automatically generate a To-Do list from your Email. The application performs semantic analysis to determine which portions of an Email message require an action, and can automatically generate a list of these, complete with different priorities and deadlines. Provided the technology works well this could prove very useful (no more trudging through the Email trenches to figure out what you need to do that day) but to be effective it will need to really work every time — it won’t do much good if it only catches most of your to-dos. Liaise is available in a limited beta for Outlook, with plans to come to more platforms in the future (though we’ve heard that one before).The application is free for its beta period, with plans to charge under $10 once it fully launches. Taking top prize in the ‘Consumer’ category is Emo Labs , which has created an impressive new speaker technology that’s fully-transparent. This means that speakers can actually be included as part of LCDs and other flat-panel displays, without the clunky black boxes sticking out the side. The company also says that because the surface area of the LCD panel (and in turn, the transparent speakers) is typically far greater than that of traditional speakers, users should actually notice an improvement in sound quality. For more on this new technology, check out the Emo Labs page here . Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco
 
Microsoft's Looking Glass Will Let Marketers Peer Into A Real-Time Social Stream Top
Microsoft is going to let marketers and advertisers dip their toes into the social stream. The tech giant is planning to launch a new social media product, dubbed “Looking Glass,” which will let marketers aggregate and monitor social media platforms for brands and companies. According to a report by Ad Age today, the product is still in “proof of concept” stage and will be privately distributed to testers in the coming month. Microsoft’s advertising blog also mentions the new product. Looking Glass will aggregate feeds from Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr and other social media sites and will also be able connect with CRMs, databases, service centers and more. In terms of analysis, the product will track sentiment of content but it’s unclear what other data analysis and features the application will have. Looking Glass will be browser-based and powered by Microsoft’s Silverlight technology. And unsurprisingly, all data collected by Looking Glass will be integrated with Microsoft’s Sharepoint and Outlook products. In fact, the product’s functionality may be limited for a business that isn’t using Microsoft’s enterprise suite. That tidbit isn’t too big of a surprise, considering other platforms, like Salesforce, offer social monitoring and engagement services that are attached to their software. But it seems like Microsoft is pretty late in the “stream monitoring” game. There are plenty of startups out there like Viralheat, PeopleBrowsr, Socialseek and more that offer freemium platforms that do the same thing as Looking Glass. Not to mention that Salesforce just launched an incredibly powerful version of its Service Cloud, with Twitter and Facebook features integrated within the platform. The other piece of the puzzle is if Looking Glass will have real-time functionality. That’s definitely where the future of social monitoring is, so it would make sense that Microsoft would add this into the product. We’ve contacted Microsoft about this question; we’ll update the post with more info when we hear back. UPDATE: Looking Glass will have real-time functionality says a spokesperson for Microsoft. Photo Credit: Flickr/Pfly Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco
 
DEMO: Vitamin D Brings Smart Searching To Security Footage Top
There’s no doubt that searching video footage can be an incredibly tedious and time consuming task — unless someone else has manually tagged a video with keywords, there’s a good chance you’ll have to wade through minutes (or hours) of footage to find what you’re looking for. In the last few years we’ve started to see the emergence of some new technologies to address this issue, like Digital Smiths , but most of them are focused indexing premium content. Vitamin D is a new startup making its debut today at DEMO Fall that’s looking to bring content identification to user generated videos. Vitamin D’s first product allows users to search through surveillance camera videos without having to watch though hours of footage where nothing is happening. But this isn’t just based on motion detection — you can fine tune your searches using a visual interface for building a custom ruleset. Say, for example, I wanted to monitor a specific door in a room for any humans that had walked through it. Using Vitamin D, you can drag and drop to highlight a certain doorframe and then ask the software to immediately identify any matches it has in its archive. Using this technology you could condense many hours of footage into only a few seconds, which you can browse through a in playlist-like format. The company says it will have a public beta available this fall. Vitamin D also looks to apply its technology beyond its security application, though it sounds like further products are a ways off. Also see HighlightCam , which can automatically condense lengthy video clips to their most important moments. The startup was a part of Summer 2009’s Y Combinator class (you can find our full post on HighlightCam here ). Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco
 
Twitter Needs An App Store, Oneforty Provides One Top
With the explosion of Twitter mobile apps, web-based clients, and desktop applications, it was only a matter of time before someone launched an actual Twitter-focused app store. Oneforty has built a marketplace to for basically all things Twitter, helping developers get their creations found and letting users access a centralized place to find and buy Twitter-based technologies. We have 100 invites to try out the site (OneForty is in private beta); just click here and use the code: TC140. The site lists 1,332 free and paid applications and services built on Twitter’s API, where people can search for, rate and buy Twitter services. The site also features lists of the most popular apps on the marketplace, ad lists the “best” app for nine types of Twitter services, such as apps for business, url shortners, image sharing, news, and travel. The site also hopes to be somewhat of a social network, with users having the ability to create profiles of their favorite Twitter apps and services. You sign into oneforty with your Twitter account, which lets you interact with the site with your Twitter handle. Each listing for an app or service has a detailed description of its features and and includes screenshots, and categories that the app fits into (i.e. business or mobile). You can click the “I use this” to add the app to your profile and you will be listed on the app’s page as a user. The listing also identifies the developer who created the app, features press mentions of the site or app or site and pulls in a stream of Tweets that mentions the app or site. And you can “share” a particular app via Twitter. Oneforty’s revenue model is fairly basic. If you want to download Tweetie’s iPhone app, oneforty provides an link directly to Apple’s App Store, allowing oneforty to collect an affiliate fee. Of course for the free downloads and sites, such as TwitPic or TweetDeck, oneforty will just direct you to their sites, where you can download or access the application. oneforty is also going to list Twitter-related books and merchandise, with affiliate links to Amazon.co. An interesting bit of trivia—the site’s founder, Laura Filton, wrote the “Twitter for Dummies” book and taught a “”Twitter for Business” class at Harvard Business School. Oneforty was incubated at TechStars and is advised by Guy Kawasaki. Twitter currently lists applications and also has a wiki-based directory of Twitter-related sites and apps, but it’s layout isn’t easy to navigate. Twitdom also has an application database which includes reviews and ratings but doesn’t seem to have the user interface and marketplace feel of oneforty. Finton tells me that soon oneforty will become a full fledged e-commerce platform, where developers can sell their apps on the site itself. I think its fairly easy to use and am a fan of its sharing features. If oneforty can pick up a dedicated base of users, it has a chance at becoming the defacto Twitter app store. The site is in private beta at the moment, but we have Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco
 
This Microsoft Windows 7 Launch Video Is, If Possible, Worse Than That Musical One Top
Either Microsoft's sense of humor has gotten almost British in its sophistication and dryness, or this is the worst promotional video I've ever seen in my life. Yes, worse than their Songsmith video. I'm beginning to think Microsoft's marketing department really is a thousand monkeys with a thousand high definition cameras. Or are we being punk'd? TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco
 
Mallory From Family Ties Could Be A Harbinger Of What's To Come With Twitter Retweets Top
So Justine Bateman, you know, Mallory Keaton from Family Ties , completely lost her cool this morning with a bunch of people on Twitter. She kept noticing people she doesn’t follow showing up in her tweet stream and proceeded to publicly call them all “shitheads.” Of course, what she doesn’t realize is that this really is a feature and not a bug. And it could spell some trouble for Twitter if they don’t handle it properly. The issue is that Twitter apparently enabled Bateman’s account with the new retweet functionality. Obviously, she wasn’t made aware of it, and doesn’t seem to know what the feature actually is. Clearly, she doesn’t frequent TechCrunch or a number of other tech blogs who have been covering this upcoming change extensively, because if she did, she would know that with the new retweet changes , users will now see the original tweets that are being retweeted in their stream, rather than a person they follow retweeting it. This means that people who you don’t actually follow could show up in your stream, which is exactly what happened to Bateman. Here’s what she wrote to Thing Labs (makers of Brizzly ) founder Jason Shellen : Mr. Shellen, I don’t know what kind of deal you cut with TwitterBerry or how much it cost you, but suddenly you’re on my Twitter feed and I NEVER OPTEN TO FOLLOW YOU nor do I wan to. I’m set to flame this incident all over the Internet. I suggest for the sake of your reputation on-line, YOU GET YOUR TWITTER ACCOUNT TOGETHER, and stop attempting to shove your posts into other people’s feeds. Sincerely, Justine Bateman There have been plenty of other examples of her threatening other Twitter users who showed up in her feed too. Including blogger John Gruber and Twitter engineer Ryan King . Setting aside the fact that it’s mildly hilarious that Bateman thinks that somehow users are to blame for this, and that she thinks her lame Internet threats will put an end to all of this, there is actually a potential issue here for Twitter. When the new retweet functionality goes live, which should happen relatively soon, Twitter needs to make it very clear to all users that the change is happening, and what exactly it means. Otherwise, we could very well see a backlash similar to Bateman’s only on a massive scale. As we’ve seen when Facebook rolls out changes to its site, users generally don’t like change, even if it’s for the better. The backlash that occurred immediately after Facebook rolled out their News Feed a few years ago is a perfect example of this. As is the backlash FriendFeed initially saw when it rolled out its real-time continuous updating system earlier this year. Both of those changes were for the better, and users eventually realized that, but initially they thought the company was ruining their experience. I think Twitter’s new retweet functionality is in the same boat. It seems like it will ultimately be a positive change for the service, but plenty of users are sure to hate it at first. There’s not much Twitter can do about that other than explain what is happening very clearly and to say something along the lines of “try it out, give it a chance.” But if they drop the ball on the transition, potentially millions of users who have no idea about the change are going to wake up and think their Twitter accounts have been compromised by tweets of people they don’t follow. If those users are thinking clearly (which Bateman clearly wasn’t), they’ll likely questions whether Twitter has sold them out and violated their privacy (which, of course, won’t be true, but that’s how it should look to those users not in the know). Or they’ll see it as another Twitter failure. So in some ways, Twitter is lucky that Bateman seems to be a hotheaded user who doesn’t mind attacking people publicly on the Internet. She has given them a potential taste of what is to come. Twitter should look at her reaction and come up with a plan for how they’re going to explain this upcoming change to other confused users. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco
 
SGN Snags Former EA And LucasArts Exec To Join Gaming Company Top
Social Gaming Network (SGN), the startup that creates popular games for iPhones and social platforms like Facebook, has been seeing significant growth, with SGN’s games now on one out of every three iPhone and iPod Touch devices. To compliment this growth, SGN is adding several seasoned gaming execs to its employee roster. SGN, which is led by CEO and founder Shervin Pishevar, has named gaming industry veteran Randy Breen as the company’s new COO, whee he will be managing game production, business development and finance. Formerly, Breen was Executive Producer and Creative Director at Electronic Arts, Vice President Of Product Development at Lucas Arts Entertainment, and Chief Product Officer at Emotiv Systems Eric Huynh will become SGN’s new chief technology officer. Huynh was previously a founder and CTO of gaming company Ubisoft, founder and CTO of mobile gaming company Gameloft, and was an exec at Vivendi Games. SGN’s chief creative officer, Eric Lindstrom also joins the company from Vivendi Games. Randy Angle, an experienced gaming developer, is joining SGN as director of game design where he will spearhead the development and engineering for SGN's games. Margaret Foley-Mauvais will be serving as art director for SGN and Dan Brazelton has joined company as executive producer. Girls In Tech founder Adriana Gascoigne will join SGN as director of global communications after serving as director of marketing for social network hi5 and VP of digital marketing at Ogilvy, a worldwide creative agency. SGN also recently made waves last week at TechCrunch50 with the launch of its spinoff ToyBots, which revealed its "Kindle of toys" or an "iPhone inside of a toy" technology. The technology, which has massive potential, will be licensed to toy manufacturers that will make those toys Internet connected and controllable. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco
 
You Collaborate On Web Docs. Now Collaborate On Web Designs With Notable. Top
When companies have employees based in different locations, collaboration can often be difficult. At TechCrunch, we use Yammer to communicate. But what if you want a team to collaborate and provide feedback on the development of content and features on websites and web platforms? That’s where Notable comes in. Notable, which is a product of design agency ZURB, lets you quickly and easily give feedback on design, content, and code on any page of a website or application without leaving your browser. Notable is essentially a page capture utility with an annotation feature that lets you highlight copy, design elements and even code that needs to be tweaked. To get started, you either install the Notable Firefox plugin, or download the Notable iPhone application from the App Store [ iTunes link ]. From there, you capture the design via a Firefox tool button, upload a JPG image or design mock-up from your desktop, or type in a URL. You can invite people into your “workspace” where they can leave comments in dialog boxes that can be dragged around the page and provide feedback on the design and code. Notable is giving away a free iPod Touch to anyone who has the most views on a public post through September 30. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco
 

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