Joint Brings Group Chat To Twitter
About a month ago, Tom Anderson (or Myspace Tom, if you prefer) wrote a post on his new favorite social network, Google+, offering a few bits of advice for Twitter. While many of us enjoy a good Twittering now and again, Anderson pointed out that there are a few simple features Twitter might consider if it wants to boost the overall quality of its user experience. The main thrust being that the social experience of Twitter might be improved were the company to add a “discussion” or chat function that would, in Tom’s conception, give the viewer an input box by which to leave a comment and easily discuss tweets without flooding followers’ streams with one part of an on-going conversation.
Well, Tom might just be interested in a new startup launching today, called Joint, which turns Twitter into a virtual chat room, where users can group chat synchronously in realtime — and privately discuss any hashtag stream of their choice in realtime — bringing synchronous realworld-like interaction to social media (namely Twitter). → Read More
Facebook Photos Get Another Size Boost
The web’s most popular photo sharing site is getting another update.
In a blog post this evening, Facebook — which is by far the biggest photo site on the web — has announced that it’s launching a new photo viewer that presents images that are 960 pixels wide, as opposed to the 720 pixels they’ve been since March 2010 (they were 620 pixels before that). The viewer itself is also getting an update that replaces the current black lightbox with an opaque white, which it says puts more of the focus on the photo itself. Facebook also says that photos now load twice as fast, though it doesn’t get into how it’s serving the content so much faster. → Read More
Sponsored Ads
Recording Labels Sue YouTube Downloader Website, Fail To Grasp The Insignificance Of Their Actions
The recording industry doesn’t have the most respectable history when it comes to lawsuits. Between asking for millions for trivial acts of piracy, and asking potentially for trillions in more serious cases, they’ve shown that they’re not only completely disconnected from reality, but totally unheeding of the actual effects of their litigation. So it’s not surprising to see them tilting at yet another windmill.
Today’s target is TubeFire, a site that should be familiar to you, at least in principle. It allows you to download and convert YouTube videos to a format more easily watched offline (FLV files can be tricky). You give it the URL, it churns for a bit, and then you can download the video in MP4 or another format. Clearly this re-containering of free content is a grave threat to the recording industry, and must be stopped at all costs. So 25 of the world’s largest labels have gotten together and sued them. → Read More
Life Is Crime: If You Try To Shakedown My Virtual TechCrunch Office, I Will Virtually Beat You Down
There’s a simple fundamental reason why Grand Theft Auto exploded into a phenomenon. Everyone has criminal tendencies sometimes. And virtually indulging them is a hell of a lot better then actually indulging them and dealing with the moral consequences — or the physical consequences. Like prison.
But what if you could make the Grand Theft Auto concept even more immersive by tying it to the real world? That’s what Life Is Crime is all about.
The new mobile game by Red Robot Labs — a startup founded by Mike Ouye and Pete Hawley, former executives at Playdom, EA and SCEE — allows you to put a life of crime onto your phone. It’s a location-based game launching today for Android devices that’s likely to be highly addictive. → Read More
Facebook Kills Daily Deals, But Keeps Check-In Deals
After quietly announcing they were killing off their nascent Deals product this afternoon, Facebook caused some confusion. You see, with the decision to kill off Facebook Places earlier in the week, everyone wondered what it meant for the location-based deals they launched alongside it? Those would remain alive, Facebook said at the time. But does today’s execution change anything?
No, says Facebook. Daily Deals are separate from Check-in Deals. The Check-in Deals will work a bit different with the end of Places, but the company will continue to support and enhance that product. Daily Deals are dead — and my email account thanks them for that. → Read More
Keen On… Kyle Dixon: No, Cord-Cutting is an Illusion (TCTV)
Much has been made of supposed decline in the number of cable TV subscribers. But not everyone agrees that mass cord-cutting is reshaping the industry. Indeed, according to Kyle Dixon, Time Warner’s VP of Public Policy, we are seeing the “opposite” of cord-cutting with Time Warner seeing no “significant decrease” for its paid content.
I interviewed Dixon earlier this week at the Technology Policy Institute’s Aspen Forum where he spoke on a panel about the economic implications of online video. What Dixon stressed to me is that, for all the online videos of what he described as “kittens flushing toilets”, consumers still really want high-quality news and entertainment content from networks like HBO. And thus, while the Internet is obviously changing our viewing habits, it is yet to revolutionize the television industry. So is Dixon right – is cord-cutting an illusion?
→ Read More
Video: “Eyeborg” Replaces Eye With Functioning Wireless Video Camera
You might remember Rob Spence, known online as the Eyeborg for his project to create a working bionic eye. We wrote about him before, and interviewed him a while back, but the project has advanced to the point where even a seasoned tech blogger is left speechless with amazement.
Spence has worked with a team of engineers to adapt an endoscope into a working in-socket video camera. It’s turned on by waving a magnet near it, at which point it will begin transmitting a wireless video signal to a handheld LCD viewer. Absolutely incredible. Watch the video inside. → Read More
Sponsored Ads
Apple Quietly Kills 99¢ TV Show Rentals
Bad news for anyone who was looking to rent the latest episode of Top Gear from iTunes, as Apple has quickly and quietly removed their 99¢ television rental option today.
The functionality has disappeared from both the Apple TV’s interface and the iTunes store proper, signalling a drastic shift in Apple’s pricing policy. Individual episodes of a series can still be bought as usual, and movie rentals still cost the same going rates, so not every iTunes customer will be weeping over the loss. → Read More
Prediction: Facebook Will Enter the Search Market Next Year
Next year, search advertising will be a $15 billion market in the U.S. alone, growing by 14 percent, according to eMarketer. And, if Facebook can capture half the share of that market that Google has today, it could easily add an extra $25 billion or even far more to its value.
For most any CEO who could have even a modest chance of succeeding at it, that payoff would be reason enough to take a serious look at entering the search category. And yet, while I’m sure he wouldn’t scoff at the extra revenues, profits, or valuation, I suspect that Mark Zuckerberg finds something else far more motivating than just increasing the financial value of his company.
And that’s what will propel him next year to make a completely disruptive entry into the search category. → Read More
Video: This Isn’t The iPhone 5… But I Kind Of Wish It Was
When it comes to massive news, the past two weeks have been absolutely insane. Google buying Motorola? HTC To Buy Beats? Steve Jobs resigning as CEO of Apple?!
What better way to cleanse the palette than a quick tromp into a conceptual rabbit hole? 3D animation shop Aatma Studios has released a concept video showing what they imagine as the iPhone of the future, and… well.. I’m ready to pre-order. → Read More
Imagine
Jobs is not a child of the ’60s, but he has inherited the family business. Having used the legacy to build an adult toy based on the music of his youth, he harvested the audience and connected them via the phone, broke the carrier’s hammerlock, and changed the firmware from CD to DVD to iPad and WiFi. Just as Dylan broke the song barrier, Jobs created the new record, razor and blades, a wirelessly streaming living album that wraps, informs, emits, and shares our lives. → Read More
FEMA’s New Android App Arrives Just In Time For Hurricane Irene
FEMA’s had a mobile version of their website available for a while now, but all that information does you no good if you can’t get an internet connection. Given the fragility of mobile networks during disasters, going without web access is a very real possibility.
Enter FEMA’s new, self-titled Android app, which puts a wealth of emergency preparedness information right in the palm of your hand just in case. → Read More
OnLive Adds Group Voice Chat, Parental Controls And Facebook Achievement Sharing
Cloud gaming service OnLive has been getting better and better. We had a blast checking out the OnLive booth at E3 this year, and you better believe the service’s usage will have gone up since GameStop inadvertently gave OnLive a ton of great publicity yesterday.
But OnLive isn’t resting on its laurels, as new user-requested features are rolling out today. → Read More
Keen On… Krish Prabhu: This Is Not Your Grandfather’s AT&T (TCTV)
In a typically forthright keynote address early this week at the Technology Policy Institute’s Aspen Forum, Clarium Capital’s Peter Thiel argued that our current technological progress is “decelerating and stalled out.” But not all the luminaries at the Aspen Forum shared Thiel’s pessimism. Krish Prabhu, for example, the recently appointed President and CEO of AT&T Labs, who also keynoted the Forum, remains bullish about America’s technological innovation, particularly that driven by what he identified as an increasingly “intelligent” digital network.
“This is not your grandfather’s AT&T,” Prabhu – a former partner at Morgenthaler Ventures and CEO of Tellabs – explained to me about AT&T Labs when I sat down with him in Aspen after his keynote. The purpose of the 21st century Labs, he explained, is delivering innovation to start-up entrepreneurs. Thus AT&T’s $80 million investment in their Foundry incubators, an initiative that has already born fruit both in Israel and in Texas and will soon open in Palo Alto. → Read More
Build an App for MyHeritage and Win $10,000
MyHeritage, Israel’s best hope of having a big Web 2.0 winner, keeps marching along, leaving Geni further in the dust and proving a surging challenger for already-public Ancestry.com.
The company has nearly 60 million registered users, who have uploaded 20 million family trees, 800 million profiles and 125 million photos on the site. All of that inventory is helping fulfill the early promise of sites like MyHeritage and Geni: Discovery. MyHeritage is enabling more than 20 million new “Smart Matches” a month.
Today it’s announcing its Family Graph API to enable more developers to build family-oriented apps on top of this unique set of connections. → Read More
TechCrunch Giveaway: iPad 2 #TechCrunch
We all know by now. Steve Jobs has resigned as CEO of Apple. The outpouring of emotion from this news is something we have never really seen before and this very well may be one of the biggest stories we will ever see in this space. Even though this may be the end of an era, Steve Jobs will still be with Apple and continue to touch lives of millions.
In light of all the news, Pursuitist, the premiere travel, food, style and leisure online destination, where our very own Paul Carr is a contributor, has offered to give an iPad 2 away to one lucky TechCrunch reader. → Read More
OpenFeint Announces Replacement for UDIDs on iOS
On the heels of Apple’s decision to phase out developer access to the UDID (unique device identifier) on iOS devices, mobile social gaming network OpenFeint is offering up a an alternative solution. The company announced today that it’s launching a single sign-on system for social game developers that will replace UDIDs on iOS.
The system will become available later this fall.
→ Read More
Apple Hires iPhone Hacker Nicholas Allegra (@Comex)
Apple has just hired yet another member of the iPhone jailbreaking community, Nicholas Allegra, also known as “@comex” on Twitter. Allegra is best known for the JailBreakMe website which made the process of jailbreaking the iPhone as simple as visiting a webpage using mobile Safari.
The 19-year old hacker from Chappaqua, New York, posted the news of his hire on Twitter, stating that he will be starting an internship with Apple week after next. → Read More
The Jig Is Up: Delicious Founder’s Tasty Labs Debuts Q&A Meets Problem Solving Platform
We’ve been waiting for Delicious founder Joshua Schacter to debut the secret product coming out of his newest startup Tasty Labs. And today the wait is over with the debut of Jig, a Q&A meets recommendations site.
As fellow co-founder Nick Nguyen writes on Jig’s blog, Our Jig is a website, one that helps you with your needs– by making it easy to share them with people who can help solve them. We built Jig to make it easy to describe what you need with just a few words. → Read More
NYC.gov Goes Down When We Need It Most: Here Are Some Alternative Info Sources (Update)
So Irene, the massive hurricane aimed straight for the East coast, is in quite a hurry to come visit us, with winds reaching 115 mph. And it’s looking like she’s bearing down on New York City. One little problem: nyc.gov is down, which makes it pretty difficult to check out whether or not you should run for cover or kick back and relax.
Sites go down all the time, and normally the only ones ever really hurt by it are the sites themselves, losing valuable clicks. This time, the public safety has come into play, so we thought we’d give you guys a couple other resources to figure out what’s happening as Irene blasts her way up the East coast. → Read More
Sponsored Ads
