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Toshiba's New Excite X10 Tablet Is World's Thinnest 10-Inch (For Now)
Jan 09, 2:30AM
So much excitement. This is my first CES and while MG may be correct to think that some of my fellow tech bloggers find this trip a tad tedious, I'm pink with barely controlled glee just from being here. But I've been excited about CES for a few weeks now, ever since I went to meet with Toshiba and get a sneak peek at their latest tablet. The Excite X10 is now the world's thinnest 10-inch tablet, measuring in at just .3 inches thick and weighing just 1.2 lbs. A brushed magnesium alloy finish graces its backside, with Corning Gorilla glass up front to prevent any scratching. It's really a beauty.Watch The TechCrunch Gadgets Team Live At CES Unveiled
Jan 09, 12:58AM
The TechCrunch Gadgets team is live at the CES Unveiled event in Las Vegas, and we'll be taking you through some of the latest and greatest tech from the world's largest consumer electronics trade show. CES doesn't actually kick off proper until this Tuesday, so consider this a sneak peek of the awesome live coverage you'll be able to watch later this week.How People Watch TV Online And Off
Jan 08, 11:28PM
At this point, video is just a regular part of the web. But how is it gaining on regular TV watching. Just in terms of audience reach, Nielsen estimates that almost 145 million people watch video online in the U.S., compared to about 290 million who watch traditional TV. So the penetration of online video is already about half of the overall TV-watching population. For all the video people watch on the web, it is still a tiny fraction of how much they watch on TV in terms of time spent. Yet when you drill down into the watching patterns on the biggest video sites on the web, a different picture emerges.Acer Unveils Thinnest Ultrabook At 15mm: The Aspire S5
Jan 08, 10:53PM
Just as we expected, the first of what I'm sure will be plenty of ultrabooks has just showed itself at the CES International show in Las Vegas. Acer just announced what they're calling the world's thinnest ultrabook: the Acer Aspire S5. Just 15mm thick at its thickest point, the 13.3-inch ultrabook sports a magnesium alloy cover, with all of the same requirements were seeing out of ultrabooks like InstantOn technology. There's also a creative use of space on the S5 with a bevy of ports including HDMI, USB 3.0, and Thunderbolt ports along with an SSD.AcerCloud Is Acer's Answer To The Media Cloud
Jan 08, 10:41PM
It is the dawning of the age of cloudquarius. Acer, in addition to a set of ultrabooks, just announced something it's calling AcerCloud. This service, like iCloud, brings all of your content onto all of your devices, allowing you to "create, acquire and consume on different devices."Facebook Adds In-Game Offers Option For All Developers, Hoping To Further Diversify Revenue
Jan 08, 10:17PM
Facebook has just started letting any developer on its platform run advertising offers that pay out directly in the native currency of their games. Let's say you're playing Ravenskye City, a new simulation-exploration game from Lolapps, and you want to get some more of its Skye virtual currency without buying Credits. You can now take a selection of offers -- signing up for a Flixster movie account, for example -- just by clicking through the "Earn Skye Credits" interface. This is a big deal for many developers, because for the past year or so Facebook has restricted in-game, native curency offers to only the largest companies on the platform. That is, Zynga, EA's Playfish, Playdom, and a few of the others who had signed on to the exclusive five-year commitment to use Facebook Credits as their exclusive virtual currency in games.Square Expands Retail Partnerships; Now Sold At OfficeMax And UPS Store Locations
Jan 08, 8:39PM
For disruptive mobile payments startup Square, 2011 was a year of massive growth on many levels. The startup ended the year with over 1 million merchants using the mobile payments platform to accept credit cards (there are only 8 million merchants who accept credit cards in the US). In November, Square announced it was processing $11 million in payments per day (up from $4 million a day in July). Sir Richard Branson, Kleiner Perkins, Visa, and other investors poured over $100 million over the course of the year into Square, with the company's latest valuation pegged at $1 billion. And Square announced a number of new product innovations, including Card Case, a new iPad app and more. Not to mention the unveiling of retail deals with Apple, Wal-mart, Best Buy, Radio Shack, and Target. It's hard to imagine how Square could top such an eventful year. But according to COO Keith Rabois, 2012 will prove to be even more monumental for the mobile payments company. Square is kicking of 2012 with two new retail deals, OfficeMax and select UPS Store locations. With these new retailer partnerships, Square is now being sold at 10,000 retail locations, up from 9,000 at the end of last year. Square's credit card readers sell for $9.99 in stores but each purchaser can redeem a $10 credit to their bank account. According to Rabois, retail sales of Square has been a large driver of adoption. In fact, currently 80 percent of U.S. population is within 15 minutes of a Square device sold at a retail location.Want A Great Team? Focus On Talent, Not Hiring
Jan 08, 5:30PM
One of the questions most founders always ask is about the key secrets to hiring. What they need to understand is that there's a big difference between "hiring" and "talent". I'm continually surprised how rarely I see people put down their strategy for talent compared to hiring. It's so prevalent, in fact, you'll often see on a company's priorities a bullet of "hiring". And that slight shift in wording fundamentally sets up the wrong dynamics. Hiring, is a sub-bullet of talent and if you're focusing on hiring you'll be quickly setting up a revolving door. However, if you're focusing on talent, you now can create a strategy to build a great team.You Can't Spell Media Without "Me"
Jan 08, 3:30PM
Without question, one of the greatest gifts of the human species is our ability to communicate. We can create, transmit, and absorb ideas with immense freedom in pictures, speech, writing, music, and more. And yet, from the earliest days of man until very recently, the state of the art of media has been about as sophisticated as cave paintings.Box: Mobile Adoption Is The Gateway Drug To The Cloud In The Enterprise
Jan 08, 2:00PM
Cloud storage platform Box (which you no longer have to refer to as Box.net as it now owns Box.com!), has seen incredible growth over the past year, both on the consumer and on enterprise side. Much of the growth has been driven by mobile, with the company seeing a 140% increase in mobile customer implementations each month in 2011, leading the total number of new mobile users to jump up by 171% monthly. By year end 2011, Box's total mobile user count reached 1.9 million, up 9 times over 2010. But nowhere has mobile's impact been more felt than in the enterprise, where iOS and Android especially have driven business adoption of not just mobile apps, but the cloud in general.Selling Apple In October Wasn't The Best Move, But Not Buying Google Was Worse
Jan 08, 6:20AM
MG Siegler argues that if you sold your Apple stock last October, right after the company's Q4 2011 earnings report, you are an idiot and/or a moron. After all, Apple's stock price closed at $398.62 on October 19, and it closed at $422.4 last Friday (a respectable 6 percent bump). So selling your Apple stock that day was idiotic, right? Maybe, maybe not. Flamebait headlines aside, for all we know you could have been selling Apple stock you acquired back in 2000, in which case I daresay you were a true visionary. Of if you spent the money to buy your kids and spouse some nice Christmas gifts, or treated yourself to that plane ticket to Cambodia or whatever. Reality is that, yes, Apple stock was oversold that day, but I'll be damned if I'm calling anyone an idiot over doing it if I don't know what you did with the money.Why Bootstrapping Is Just As Over-Rated As Raising Venture Capital
Jan 08, 3:06AM
Entrepreneurship requires balancing unbridled optimism with delusional foolishness. Most entrepreneurs are mocked and misunderstood until they are wildly successful, at which point the chorus changes from "good luck with that 'business', pal" to "I always believed in ya, buddy!" There is an undeniable appeal to the notion of bootsrapping your company to success without venture capital. While bootstrapping has many advantages aside from control and ownership—such as being master of your domain and giving you the freedom to build your own Xanadu for all stakeholders—the reality is that the disadvantages may be greater. I speak from experience, having bootstrapped my own company, WatchMojo.SolarKindle Cover Is Walking On Sunshine (Whoaaa!)
Jan 08, 2:52AM
I've done my fair share of Kindle cover research, and to tell you the truth I wish this new cover from SolarFocus was around when I did. It's the world's first solar cover for the Kindle, with a solar panel built right in. The SolarKindle promises "up to three months of unplugged Kindle use under normal sunlight environment." In my experience that means near a window, which should be easy enough.When You Have To Buy Their Love, You've Lost
Jan 08, 12:24AM
Over at WindowsITPro, Paul Thurott outlines some details of Microsoft/Nokia's (purported) marketing plans for Windows Phone in 2012. Amongst them: a $10 to $15 commission for retail sales people who sell Windows Phone handsets over Android or iOS. In turn, John Gruber asks: "If this strategy was on the table, why didn't Microsoft start this a year ago?" Here's why: because it's an admission of failure.
The Road To CES: A Peek Inside Our Gadget Bags
Jan 07, 11:34PM
When you're a small team going to cover the biggest electronics show in the world, every person has to act as a Swiss Army knife, able to fill any role at any time. This generally produces an incredibly heavy bag, packed with spare cameras, lenses, batteries, cords, and of course a laptop. Luckily for us, our live-camera approach to covering the show takes a bit of that burden off of our sagging shoulders now, but old habits die hard and it's good to be prepared just in case. Aren't you curious what's filling your favorite bloggers' bags to bursting? We've rounded up the items we'll be taking to CES, arrayed them, and described them for your benefit. Take a look.Just A Friendly Reminder: If You Sold Your Apple Stock In October, You Were, In Fact, An Idiot
Jan 07, 11:21PM
On October 19 of last year I wrote a post entitled: If You Sold Your Apple Stock Today, You're An Idiot. Because their Q4 numbers missed Wall Street expectations, Apple's stock dropped over 5 percent on that day, to close below $400-a-share after hitting an all-time high just days before. My argument was that it was the Wall Street expectations that were horribly flawed, not Apple's actual performance. And the stock would recover quickly as a result leading up to their Q1 earnings, which even Apple was predicting would be a blow out. Reading the comments on that post — which I love to do — you'd think I was saying something insane. When the stock fell to $363 right after Thanksgiving, a few remembered the post and once again pointed out the irrational insanity of this fanboy. But then a funny thing happened yesterday. Apple's stock closed at a new all-time high.How To Create An Early-Stage Pitch Deck For Investors
Jan 07, 9:05PM
This is a guest post by Ryan Spoon (@ryanspoon), a principal at Polaris Ventures. Read more about Ryan on his blog at ryanspoon.com. When raising capital, a combination of your company's product, vision, team and execution are what ultimately attract investment. And while the pitch deck is ultimately less important than vision and product, it exists to convey both elements and consequently get investors hungry for more. Like other investors, I come across 100's of pitches each month - some in person, others in email; some as PowerPoints, and others as full-fledged business plans. Your goal is to craft a deck that is both:(Founder Stories) ZocDoc's Massoumi: A Bad Flight & Terrible Customer Service Created ZocDoc
Jan 07, 9:00PM
In 2007 Cyrus Massoumi ruptured his eardrum on a flight to New York and turned his distasteful experience of trying to track down a physician into ZocDoc - a service that enables customers to quickly book appointments with doctors and dentists online. In a relatively short time, his streamlined offering has attracted considerable interest from both consumers and investors. Supported by doctors who pay a fee to be listed on the site, ZocDoc is now available in more than a dozen United States markets, claims 200+ employees and has tallied $95 million in funding. In this episode of Founder Stories, ZocDoc's CEO and co-founder Cyrus Massoumi tells host, Chris Dixon how ZocDoc came together.First Pictures Of OLPC's XO-3 Tablet Break Cover
Jan 07, 7:43PM
Last night we heard that the One Laptop Per Child program would be showing off its long-awaited XO-3 tablet at CES. We'll be getting a hands-on then, but they were kind enough to send out a couple pictures of the device this morning, and they seem worth sharing.Scheming Intentions
Jan 07, 7:11PM
From Vannevar Bush to PageRank, the World Wide Web was built on hypertext, the notion that any morsel of information can link to any other. But that was always only a dream, and a rapidly-dissipating one of late. Nowadays even Web links are likely to terminate at warnings, paywalls or registration screens. Anil Dash rages that "Facebook is gaslighting the Web" with its treatment of content outside Facebook. Jon Mitchell and Jamie Zawinski complain that Google Plus will "mess up the Internet" for its treatment of content outside Google+ff (and Zawinski adds "they just ripped off this model from Tumblr.") Google's Tim Bray, in turn, is irate about single-page JavaScript sites breaking the web. Meanwhile, six months ago, according to Flurry, time spent using mobile apps surpassed web consumption. You can link out of apps easily enough -- clicking on a phone number to open a dialer, or a hyperlink to open a Web page -- but it's very difficult to reliably link in to an app.If at any time you'd like to stop receiving these messages, just send an email to feeds_feedburner_com_techcrunch+unsubscribe-hmdtechnology=gmail.com@mail.feed2email.net.
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