Wednesday, February 17, 2010

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A Sneak Peek At Google Calendar's Upcoming Facelift Top
Google Calendar may not be the sexiest product Google offers, but, as with Gmail, there are plenty of people who use it to manage their business and personal lives (and wind up staring at it for hours each week as a result). Today, we’ve gotten our hands on a screenshot showing what appears to be an internal build of Google Calendar, giving us an idea of what a forthcoming UI refresh might look like. We’ve included photos of both the internal version and the current version below for comparison’s sake (be sure to click on the photo for a larger version). As far as we can tell, the changes are all aesthetic and fairly minor but they add up to make a difference — the new version looks more modern, and it also looks more like Google’s other Apps. The new version replaces many of the text-based navigation links with the sleeker silver buttons, which are also found throughout Gmail and Google Docs. The calendar has been spruced up a bit, and the entire interface is now surrounded by a colored border (in the current version, some text and links and hover above the calendar, which looks a little less polished). You’ll also notice a worldwide clock in the screenshots of the new UI. These aren’t part of the default Google Calendar site now, but you can activate it through Google Calendar Labs, which launched last summer. New Old CrunchBase Information Google Calendar Information provided by CrunchBase
 
Palo Alto Power Outage Affects Up To 240 Startups Top
The tragic  plane crash which killed three Tesla employees flying out of the Palo Alto airport at approximately 8 AM this morning also took out the city’s power.  The accident has left over 28,000 Palo Alto residents and businesses without power in the heart of Silicon Valley. According to the data in CrunchBase , up to 240 of these 28,000 customers are local startups, VC firms and other companies which include the likes of Facebook , Socialtext , Tapulous , and VMWare .  (The TechCrunch office is also out of power). The interactive map below will give you an idea of who else is affected by the outage. We arrived at this estimate by looking at companies who are within a 1.5 mile radius of the middle of Palo Alto; thus encompassing most of the city. Although this is not a perfect number (some companies shown might have power, while omitted companies may not), it is a rough estimate of which startups might be without power.  There is no current estimate for when power will be restored, but  the last estimate , as of 930 AM PST, was 5:30 PM PST. Startups have reacted differently to the outage. While many have moved to nearby coffee shops, such as Starbucks, in order to have access to Wi-Fi, some are simply working from home (assuming they live outside of Palo Alto). A few outliers are taking the day off and enjoying the warm California sun. If you were affected by the power outage, let us know how you’re dealing with the situation in the comments section below. CrunchBase Information Facebook Tapulous VMware Information provided by CrunchBase
 
Google Continues Shopping Spree; Acquires reMail And Former Gmail Employee Top
Days after Google acquired social search startup Aardvark, the search giant has acquired another email-based startup, reMail. ReMail developed a powerful iPhone application that gives you instant full text-search for all of your Email. Launched in August, reMail is an alternative to the native iPhone mail client, which has a number of shortcomings. reMail manages to store your entire Email account on your phone using some advanced compression techniques (you can fit 100,000 messages into 500 megabytes) which gives you full text search at all times and is generally snappier than the normal search. Terems of the deal were not disclosed. The startup was incubated at Y Combinator, and was founded by Gabor Cselle, who completed his Master's thesis on Organizing Email, worked on the Gmail team, and was also VP of Engineering at Xobni, which he left last year to pursue his own company. The company's backers include Paul Buchheit and Sanjeev Singh , who built Gmail and co-founded FriendFeed. According to Gselle, he will be joining Google in Mountain View as a Product Manager on the Gmail team. reMail will be discontinued and has been removed it from the App Store. If Google is shutting the technology down, it makes you wonder if they are going to be incorporating reMail into their mobile technology or just bought the company to hire back the obviously talented Gselle. Here’s the text of Cselle’s announcement: I’m thrilled to announce that Google has acquired reMail! I will be joining Google in Mountain View as a Product Manager on the Gmail team. Gmail is where my obsession with email started as an engineering intern back in 2004, and I’m thrilled to be coming back to a place with so many familiar faces. reMail’s goal was reimagine mobile email, and I’m proud we have built a product that so many users find useful. Still, I feel like we’ve only seen the beginning of what’s possible. Google is the best place in the world to improve the status quo on how people communicate and share information. If you have what it takes to make these changes happen, I encourage you to reach out and come join me. You might be wondering what will happen with reMail’s product. Google and reMail have decided to discontinue reMail’s iPhone application, and we have removed it from the App Store. reMail is an application on your phone. If you already have reMail, it will continue to work. We’ll even provide support for you until the end of March, and we’ve enabled all paid reMail features for you: You can activate these by clicking “Restore Purchases” inside the app. reMail downloads email directly from your email provider to your phone, and your personal information, passwords, and email are never sent to or stored on our servers. I want to take this opportunity to thank the people that helped make reMail a success. Fabian Siegel, Einar Vollset, Sridhar Srinivasan, Paul Bohm, Marissa Coughlin, Erol Koc, Matt Ronge, and Stefano Barbato have all contributed to building a great product. Our investors saw the potential in improving mobile email and took a bet on reMail in the darkest days of the recession. I couldn’t be more grateful to YCombinator: Paul Graham, Jessica Livingston, Kate Courteau, and Trevor Blackwell all have provided invaluable guidance. Paul Buchheit and Sanjeev Singh endured my slide deck on our multi-step plan for global email domination, and pointed out that instead I should build something small, simple, and useful. It worked. CrunchBase Information ReMail Information provided by CrunchBase
 
Plane Crash Kills Three Tesla Employees, Takes Out Power In Palo Alto Top
A small Cessna twin-engine plane crashed in East Palo Alto today, killing three Tesla Motors employees and taking out power in parts of the city. The plane took off from Palo Alto airport and reportedly hit some electrical lines. The names of those who were on board have not been released. The plane was registered to Doug Bourn, a senior engineer at Tesla. It is not clear if he was the “high ranking official at Tesla” piloting the plane or if he was even on it. Nobody on the ground was injured, but two homes caught on fire, including o ne used as a day care center . Fortunately, the day care center was empty at the time of the crash. Eric Savitz at Barron’s has been blogging updates about the accident all day. It appears to be responsible for a widespread power outage in Palo Alto, which affected Facebook’s offices and many startups. For example, power is still out at TechCrunch HQ in Palo Alto (although our site is still up because our servers are not there). The plane was headed to Los Angeles and was an older Cessna 310 manufactured in 1976. Update : Tesla sent us the following statement from CEO Elon Musk: “Three Tesla employees were on board a plane that crashed in East Palo Alto early this morning. We are withholding their identities as we work with the relevant authorities to notify the families. Our thoughts and prayers are with them. Tesla is a small, tightly-knit company, and this is a tragic day for us.” CrunchBase Information Tesla Motors Information provided by CrunchBase
 
Please Rob Me Makes Foursquare Super Useful For Burglars Top
Location-based services are all the rage right now. Even everyone seems to agree that the controversial Google Buzz did at least one thing right in adding a location element to its mobile site. But as great as these services are for connecting social networking with actual social activity , there is a downside we’re all well aware of too: privacy. A new site throws this issue back into the spotlight in a humorous way. Please Rob Me is a stream of updates from various location-based networks (though right now all I’m seeing is Foursquare ) that shows when users check-in somewhere that is not their home. The idea, of course, is that if they’re not home, you can go rob them. The site automatically scans Twitter feeds to find location check-ins that are being tweeted out. It then shows them in this stream, and also pings the person on Twitter with a message like: Hi @NAME, did you know the whole world can see your location through Twitter? #pleaserobme.com You can also use the filter on top of the site to show when specific people aren’t home (by their Twitter name), or sort by location. Again, the point of the site, while funny, is to raise awareness about this potentially dangerous location-based issue. Here’s Please Rob Me’s basic mission statement : The danger is publicly telling people where you are. This is because it leaves one place you’re definitely not… home. So here we are; on one end we’re leaving lights on when we’re going on a holiday, and on the other we’re telling everybody on the internet we’re not home. It gets even worse if you have “friends” who want to colonize your house. That means they have to enter your address, to tell everyone where they are. Your address.. on the internet.. Now you know what to do when people reach for their phone as soon as they enter your home. That’s right, slap them across the face. The goal of this website is to raise some awareness on this issue and have people think about how they use services like Foursquare, Brightkite, Google Buzz etc. Burglars, it seems, now have their own location-based social network too.
 

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