The latest from TechCrunch
- Mac Browser Camino 2 Gets A Release Candidate
- DeepDyve: Like iTunes for Scientific Papers
- Live From Google's Music Roundtable In Hollywood
- Google Should Make Apple Beg For Maps Navigation
- Google Redefines GPS Navigation Landscape: Google Maps Navigation For Android 2.0
| Mac Browser Camino 2 Gets A Release Candidate | Top |
| When it was revealed that Mike Pinkerton , the lead developer for the Mozilla’s Mac-based Camino web browser was moving over to Google to take charge of building Chrome for Mac, there was some concern that Camino would be neglected. Pinkerton assured development on Camino would continue, and sure enough it has. Today brings the first release candidate for Camino 2, the new version of the browser. Camino, though much less prevalent than its Mozilla sibling, Firefox, has a solid following among Mac users who appreciate its speed. It has long been my browser of choice as it’s relatively lightweight and very fast compared to Firefox. And compatibility with various sites seems better than Apple’s own Safari. We’ve been beta testing Camino 2 for several months now, and it’s solid. It offers several improvements over the first iterations of Camino, notably in speed and the way it looks. Mozilla notes that this Release Candidate 1 could become the final, first official build of Camino 2 if there are no critical issue found. So it looks like despite Pinkerton’s Chrome time commitments, Camino 2 will beat Chrome for Mac even reaching beta status. The anticipation for Chrome for Mac continues to build. Even Google co-founder Sergey Brin admits that he’s disappointed with how long it has taken to develop. But, as we noted the other day, Chrome for Mac — not Chromium, the open source browser on which Chrome is based — looks like it’s getting closer to a beta release . Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. | |
| DeepDyve: Like iTunes for Scientific Papers | Top |
| It’s been years since I let my subscription to Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery lapse. I could barely afford it and, as those Shriners soon found out, I am not actually a surgeon. However, I do enjoy pouring a glass of Old Granddad, sitting down in my favorite chair, and reading up on Snapping Scapula Syndrome or the Three-Dimensional Kinematics of the Rheumatoid Wrist After Partial Arthrodesis. It does a body – and a soul – good. Thanks to a new online market, DeepDyve , I’m never further than a click away from those relaxing and enlightening scientific papers. The site, launched today, offers full-text search of scientific articles along with 99 cent downloads and a subscription service that allows fans of Clinical Chemistry to read as many stories as they’d like. Why is this important to me? you ask. What do I look like? A rocket surgeon? Well, there is an untapped market for scientific research. Doctors, for example, may have access to these journals at school but they rarely can afford them in their own private practices. Scientists, amateur or professional, may want to look up something important to their work and the ill and infirm may want to look up their treatment options. Because most journals are kept offline, most readers thus far have resorted to piracy either by asking for a photocopy from a friend or downloading the journals from pirate research sites. Yes, pirate research sites exist. DeepDyve launched last year as a search company. Their specific expertise was in large string searching, allowing you to look for multiple topics in one search string. This led to work in the research space and, ultimately, the company changed into a article rental service. Articles cost 99 cents for 24 hours and an unlimited plan for $19.99 a month. A $9.99 plan allows you to access 20 articles per month for up to seven days each. The site currently holds 30 million articles and each article is indexed and available in a free preview. You can create email and RSS alerts on specific topics and a “More Like This” feature allows you to dig deeper into a topic. The company is based in Menlo Park and received $9 million in angel funding. Are you a big fan of research? Leave a comment and we’ll be giving away free subscriptions to DeepDyve to 10 random readers. Now back to Spinal Injuries and the Sacral Arch and another snoot of whiskey. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. | |
| Live From Google's Music Roundtable In Hollywood | Top |
| Google has just launched into a surprise roundtable at its music event in Hollywood, where a number of top music executives and artists are discussing the news and the music industry. I’m live blogging my notes below (everything paraphrased). Guests: Mos Def Wendy Nussbaum (UMG) Steve Savoca (Domino Recording) Syd Schwartz (EMI) Mike Shinoda (Linkin Park) Ryan Tedder (OneRepublic) Mike Shinoda: We used to be called Hybrid Theory. We settled on Lincoln Park, we went online to see if we could get our URL. We were online early on, changed the name of the band to get URL that would give the fans the most direct link to our fans. Q: Did you ever think international? Do you think about the French version of the Linkin Park website? MS: We’re in the process of doing that right now to create an easier experience for fans in Asia and Europe.. Q:What do you think of what we’re launching today, what do you see happening from record label perspective? WN:I think this is an amazing new product launch. Consumers want something easy, Google gives it to them. The key thing for us is that you’re leading people to legitimate sources of music. Whereas Googlesearch is dynamic, don’t control what rises to the top. This is guaranteed to be our partners. Q: We’ve been talking about music discovery. Syd Schwartz: I remember back in the day part of my things to do was build out my jazz library. I remember going to Tower Records, saw Donald Fagan of Steeley Dan, was trying to follow him to see what he got. Took a while, I discovered some great stuff but was sort of stalking the guy. Now I look at what has been presented here today… There’s never been anything like this to help discover music. Q:What gets you excited in the world of Technology? Mos Def: I think Google and technology and events like this have been incredibly important to artists. We’re still absorbing it, I think it will take half a generation to fully understand these. It’s a huge presence in artists around the world. Me, I walk around every day feeling I’m in Battlestar Galatica. I’m still really getting over the cell phone to be honest. Q: Are you thinking of these as a megaphone? MD: It’s a way to share new content. I think what we’re in now is similar to the early 20th century which had lots of technological advances. It’s a wide open field. What you see here with having an artist recording a song Tuesday, having it out Wednesday or Thursday is really exciting, helps connect more organically. Q; You represent lots of up and coming artists, what does this launching mean to you? Steve Savoca: It’s absolutely outstanding to have an independent having a seat of the table today, this means a lot to us. What we do is niche, we’re tlaking about artists that are primarily word of mouth. People come to our artist through hearing about them and wanting to listen about them immediately. What we’re talking about here is instant gratification — hear about it, search for it, listen to it. This is a huge opportunity for us. What Lala has invented and what iLike brings these are fantastic, what’s been missing has been a conduit to bring music fans to these services. The challenge remains, we have to change consumption behavior. We have to make it turn key to access these amazing music services, and I think that’s been lacking. Q: I was watching the video for your music video to Apologize, started counting up the numbers for number of people who had watched the video. And setting aside all the fun and crazy covers, just looking at yours, over 120 million views. Can you speak to how this has an influence on ou going forward? Ryan Tedder: When the Apologize remix came out, the question was do you feel Timbaland was what made you guys break. I always tell people we broke through MySpace. I’m not going to say which record label was dropped, by the same label who dropped Katy Perry and Jonas Brothers. We joined MySpace forever ago, when it had 2 million people. I thought if I have to shower posters around town, that sucks. The Internet.. MySpace was perfect, free, we used that like crazy. If I knew that I had a show or something coming up I would find every high school in that city, and Email everyone from age 16-22. We became top unsigned artist on MySpace, labels came after us. Apologize was on MySpace for three years before it came out. By the time it came out, no discredit to Timabland, had quarter billion listens before it hit radio. OneRepublic wouldn’t be here without Myspace. On Google when you typed in a song, the first 6-7 things were bittorrent illegal download sites, this fixes that. Someone once said we had 75 million illegal downloads. When I hear about this Google thing, that’s what gets me most excited because now those will be top. We’ve partnered up with MySpace to help launch the album. This was perfect timing for us, this made total sense. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors | |
| Google Should Make Apple Beg For Maps Navigation | Top |
| When Google announced what is clearly the best car navigation application on any mobile today, it didn’t just take a swipe at GPS navigation companies such as Garmin and TomTom. It took a swipe at Apple. Beyond the advanced features of the Google Maps Navigation app (voice search, crowdsourced traffic data, Street View navigation), what makes the app noteworthy is that it launched on Google’s own Android phones first rather than on the iPhone. By doing so, Google is putting Apple on notice that it is no longer reserving its best apps for the iPhone. Navigation apps are a key category for mobile phones, and the iPhone is for once at a disadvantage here. Even the paid navigation apps in the iTunes store can’t compete because Google’s new navigation app is an extension (albeit a customized one) of its search engine. When a navigation app becomes an interface to Google’s massive search engine, it begins to deliver things that GPS app developers like Garmin and TomTom will never be able to build (search along a route, natural language search). Oh yeah, and did I mention it is free? This is but the latest sign of a growing rift between Apple and Google. A couple years ago, when the iPhone first launched, Google and Apple had a strong partnership. At the time, Google CEO Eric Schmidt described the relationship as so close that it was akin to merging “without merging. Each company should do the absolutely best thing they can do every time.” Google supposedly didn’t need to creat its own phone, because it could simply create software for the iPhone. And, in fact, some of the best apps on the iPhone—Mail, Maps, YouTube, Search—were developed by Google. Only two years later, Apple and Google no longer have such a cozy relationship . A new Android phone is now launching every other week, it seems. Feeling the competitive threat, Apple started blocking Google apps such as Google Voice and Latitude from getting on the iPhone, and Schmidt stepped down from Apple’s board (although there were also other reasons for that having to do with antitrust scrutiny) . The tensions really came to a boil around the whole Google Voice saga. As we wrote at the time : Multiple sources at Google tell us that in informal discussions with Apple over the last few months Apple expressed dismay at the number of core iPhone apps that are powered by Google. Search, maps, YouTube, and other key popular apps are powered by Google. Other than the browser, Apple has little else to call its own other than the core phone, contacts and calendar features. So Apple starts to back away from letting Google take over the iPhone with all the best apps by rejecting them. And now we have Google’s response: a big middle finger. If Apple is going to make it hard to get on the iPhone, then Google will stop giving Apple its best apps first and use them to make its own Android platform more appealing. Apple is in a terrible position here because the future of mobile apps are Web apps, and Google excels at making those. Apple needs Google, it’s most dangerous competitor in the mobile Web market, to keep building apps for the iPhone. Google would be foolish not to since the iPhone still has the largest reach of any modern Web phone. But it will no longer be a priority. The sad thing is that Apple has been here before—with Microsoft. In the late 1990s, Apple had to beg Microsoft to keep building Office for Macs. Now it may be in the same position with Google. There may be more than 85,000 apps in the App Store, but it is only a handful which actually drive purchases. If Google Maps Navigation becomes one of those types of killer apps, Apple might need to do some begging first before Google goes through effort to make it for the iPhone. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors | |
| Google Redefines GPS Navigation Landscape: Google Maps Navigation For Android 2.0 | Top |
| If you weren’t sure about switching to an Android phone in the near future, this might put you over the edge. Google Maps Navigation is an absolutely killer app. And it is only available for Android 2.0 phones. Today is Droid day , and for the most part Google is taking a backseat and letting their partners get most of the attention . But Droid is the first Android phone to run Android 2.0, and Google Maps Navigation is clearly the early trophy app for those devices. Google Maps already has 50 million active users across various mobile phones, says Google. But what users have today isn’t even close to the new Navigation product. First off, it’s connected, which puts it ahead of all but a tiny percentage of in-car navigation systems which have no Internet connectivity ( Dash is a notable exception). The application is also completely free. So all those paid navigation apps (Navigon, TomTom , CoPilot, MapQuest, GoKivo and Sygic Mobile) are at an immediate disadvantage. But even if Google charged for this app, it would still win hands down. The features include easy search (no need for address), voice search, traffic information (from data sources and crowd sourced from app), and street view close up pictures when you get near your destination. And the car dock mode gives bigger, simpler icons and auto-voice mode (see video): Search in plain English. No need to know the address. You can type a business name (e.g. "starbucks") or even a kind of a business (e.g. "thai restaurant"), just like you would on Google. Search by voice. Speak your destination instead of typing (English only): “Navigate to the de Young Museum in San Francisco”. Traffic view. An on-screen indicator glows green, yellow, or red based on the current traffic conditions along your route. A single touch on the indicator toggles a traffic view that shows the traffic ahead. Search along route. Search for any kind of business along your route, or turn on popular layers such as gas stations, restaurants, or parking. Satellite view. View your route overlaid on 3D satellite views with Google’s high-resolution aerial imagery. Street View. Visualize turns overlaid on Google’s Street View imagery. Navigation automatically switches to Street View as you approach your destination. Car dock mode. For certain devices, placing your phone in a car dock activates a special mode that makes it easy to use your device at arm’s length. Here’s Navigation in the Droid dock, followed by an image gallery for the app: Video Demo Of Google Maps Navigation Official Google Navigation Video Screenshot Gallery Of Google Maps Navigation Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors | |
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