The latest from TechCrunch
- Talkatone Lets You Make Calls And SMS Over Wifi For Free, No Strings Attached
- TC Cribs: The Sights And Smells Of LikeALittle's Ridiculous Hacker House
- iPhone Location Update: All Users In 1 Week; Android 2.3 Update: 4% Of Users In 5 Months
| Talkatone Lets You Make Calls And SMS Over Wifi For Free, No Strings Attached | Top |
| Like Pinger , Talkatone allows you to make phone calls using Wifi. Unlike Pinger, Talkatone uses Google Voice as a channel to let you make and receive phone calls to and from your phone contacts, for free. While Pinger, using Textfree with voice , gives you a certain amount of minutes free and then charges your credit card or asks you to complete tasks, Talkatone, after some jiggering of your Google Voice account, allows you to make unlimited calls without having to jump through any additional hoops. To set Talktone up log into your Gmail account and select the “Call Phone” option under Chat. Use the “Call Phone” option to make one call to a regular phone number. Then sign out from Google Chat and return to Talkatone. Make a phone call from its phone widget and you should be good to go there. In order to receive incoming calls, you have to upgrade your Google Voice account to get a phone number and select “Forward to Google Chat” on the Voice Settings page. You can then receive calls to your Google Voice number in Talkatone. (For more detailed instructions click here. ) This latest Talkatone release also lets users in the US and Canada send and receive unlimited SMS messages via Wifi, using just their data plans. It includes an audio compression upgrade to improve voice quality over weaker networks. Talkatone is particularly useful for phone deadzones like TechCrunch offices, but might be a godsend for people who turn off their cell service on trips abroad and just use their data plans. Imagine being able to make calls from French hotel Wifi or even on a plane? You can try Talkatone for free here. | |
| TC Cribs: The Sights And Smells Of LikeALittle's Ridiculous Hacker House | Top |
| Warning: if you are an obsessively clean person, you may want to skip this episode of TC Cribs. For those of you brave enough to tune in, here’s a bit of an explanation. Over the last few months we’ve seen some pretty blinged-out offices, featuring go-karts, gorgeous skyline views, and endless supplies of free snacks and beer. But the reality is that most startups don’t look anything like that. Instead, they often consist a handful of founders working (and sleeping) out of somebody’s apartment and eating ramen noodles twice a day with the occasional pizza splurge. LikeALittle (LAL) is a lot like that. For those that haven’t seen it, LAL is a college-focused service that’s like a more structured version of Craigslist’s missed connections, allowing students to post ‘flirts’ to other nearby users. The company just raised some seed money from a very impressive list of investors. And the team consists of a dozen young guys sitting in one room in a house in Palo Alto. There’s stuff everywhere. Not necessarily gross stuff, but the floor was littered with dolls, photos of Ashton Kutcher, iPads, markers, venture capitalist business cards, and popcorn. In other words, it was a lot like my college dorm. And it’s awesome. Credit once again goes to Ashley Pagán and John Murillo for the camera work, and to Mr. Murillo for the great editing. Make sure to tune in to our past episodes of TC Cribs: Inside The Psychobox: A Tour Of Dropbox's Bumping Office Take A Doc On The Wild Side At Scribd (With Bonus Go Karts!) Dogs, Unicorns, And Mysterious Gongs: Inside Yelp's 5-Star Pad TC Cribs: IGN HQ Gets Its Game On With Lawn Gnomes, Plumbers, And Creepy Dinosaurs TC Cribs: From Frenchmen To Randy Raccoons, An Inside Look At Seesmic TC Cribs: Inside The Snuggified Home Of Posterous TC Cribs: Meebo's Headbanging, Rocket-Flinging Office (With Magical Passageways) CrunchBase Information Likealittle Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| iPhone Location Update: All Users In 1 Week; Android 2.3 Update: 4% Of Users In 5 Months | Top |
| Earlier today, Apple released the iOS update that resolves the location tracking issues that had the press in a tizzy over for the past couple of weeks. For those keeping score at home, it took Apple exactly one week from when they first addressed the problem to ship a solution to every affected iOS user. Yes, just one week later, the situation is resolved (well, aside from a smaller encryption issue which will be fixed in the next major iOS update). Regardless of your stance on the issue at hand, that turnaround time is impressive anyway you slice it. And it’s especially impressive when you consider the alternative. The Android alternative. This Is My Next’s Nilay Patel (formerly of Engadget) drove this point home with a tweet today . “It took Apple just a week to deploy this update to all iPhone users, while Android makers are still shipping 2.2, and WP7 is a mess,” he wrote. The Windows Phone 7 update situation has been a nightmare from the start. And Microsoft knows it and claims to be working on the process — though it still doesn’t appear to be going smoothly . But they’re also a new OS and a relatively small one. So let’s focus on the mature massive one. Let’s say there was some big OS issue with Android that Google wanted to resolve and get to users as quickly as possible. How long would it take? As Patel alludes to, looking at the Android OS distribution numbers, it doesn’t look good. The most recent major version of Android, 2.3 (if we don’t include the tablet-only 3.0), has been out for about 5 months now. On what percentage of Android devices is it installed on? 4 percent, according to Google’s numbers . Four percent. After five months. While the holdup isn’t entirely Google’s fault, it is their fault by proxy. By allowing the OEMs and carriers to set their own schedules for OS releases, they ensure these insanely slow roll-outs (and sometimes the carriers choose not to roll out the updates at all). “I don’t blame Google for Android update problems — the blame there is squarely on the OEMs and carriers. They have to match Apple,” Patel writes in a follow-up Tweet. Okay, but they never will unless Google applies that pressure. But isn’t that type of pressure against Android’s core principle of open? Oh, you mean “open” ? “Open” as in, Google is complying with carrier requests to remove tethering apps from the Market? Don’t be fooled by the marketing bullshit . Google could apply more pressure if they wanted to to get the carriers in line. And they should have no problem doing that if the carriers are forcing their hand on things. It should work both ways. And the same goes for the OEMs. We’ve been hearing for years now that Google would do more in this regard. So far, nada. Currently, this issue has only led to annoyed customers who buy new Android phones and expect updates, only to have to sit on the sidelines for months. But this could become a major problem if Google ever has to push an update quickly. Instead, Google’s only option now is to release backdoor fixes through their own Market — which is hilarious. They had to utilize this method this past March when a bunch of malicious apps were published into the Market and were affecting users’ devices. But what if the problem was more of a core OS problem? Or what if the malicious app disabled or removed the Market? Google would have to push an update through the carriers. For Apple, this process is instantaneous because they’re in control. For Google… well… [image: flickr/ laihiu ] CrunchBase Information Apple Android Information provided by CrunchBase | |
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