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Could Cloud Gaming Kill The Next-Generation Video Game Console?
Jul 07, 11:00PM
The current generation of game consoles is getting a bit long in the tooth, but signs point to late 2013 as the earliest that a replacement for either the PlayStation or Xbox consoles will come online. But then something interesting happened this past week, which could change the way that console makers think about their hardware and software service: Sony bought cloud gaming company GaiKai for $380 million. Sure, rumors abound about what hardware, chips, and specs these devices will have when or if they're eventually released. All indications point to about the same type of hardware development we've seen in past consoles -- including high-performance, next-gen CPUs and GPUs to power even more robust gameplay and graphics capabilities. But if I were Microsoft or Sony right now, I'm not sure I'd be betting on an ever-more powerful box to power its new game platforms. In fact, I'd take a contrarian approach and make as lean of a box as possible, and put all the processing power up in the cloud.Fly Or Die: Samsung Galaxy S III
Jul 07, 9:00PM
I said in my review that the Samsung Galaxy S III is the phone you've been waiting for, and the same holds true in this latest episode of Fly Or Die. John and I took a look at the various specs, namely the NFC-style features and S-Voice, and we both walked away with a warm, fuzzy feeling. To put it quite bluntly, the Galaxy S III is far and away the best Android phone you can buy today. Sure, the plastic back panel is a bit "chintzy," as John would say, but that's irrelevant when you look at the value in this phone.To Subscribe Or Not Subscribe? That Is The eCommerce Question
Jul 07, 8:00PM
According to my twitter feed subscription commerce is an overblown, shark jumping smoke screen and the companies that created the model are abandoning it left and right. The comparison to the flash sale model and to group buying seems to fit because the subscription commerce category has a few leaders and a ton of "me too" companies. On the surface it looks like all of them are just putting shit in a box and money in the bank but this is pattern matching gone wrong.Is The Lumia 1001 Nokia's First Windows Phone 8 Device?
Jul 07, 7:50PM
With Windows Phone 8's launch fast approaching, it not exactly a surprise to hear that Nokia is slaving away on some new hardware. The Nokia Lumia 910 -- which some suspect is a Lumia 900 meant for T-Mobile USA -- was recently spotted thanks to Nokia's Remote Device Access service, but that's not all the Finnish company seems to have in the works. A new device called the Nokia Lumia 1001 was also detected by one of Nokia's remotely-accessible phones, and its significant model number jump could mean it's the company's first Windows Phone 8 device. Or does it?UserVOD Helps Mobile Developers (Virtually) Look Over Users' Shoulders
Jul 07, 7:00PM
It must be something in the air. A few weeks ago, ClickTale released a version of its visitor recording and activity heatmap product for the mobile web. On Thursday, we wrote about Delight.io's service for recording user sessions in mobile apps. And now a startup called UserVOD is announcing the public beta of, yes, a product for recording user sessions in mobile apps. Co-founders Zahi Boussiba and Yani Douek were previously working together on a mobile social shopping app called ShopTalk. One of the challenges they discovered was the fact that all the feedback was written or verbal, which could sometimes be hard to understand, and didn't really convey the full user experience.iPad Mini Said To Look Like A Large 3G iPod Nano, Be As Thin As A 4G iPod Touch
Jul 07, 3:22PM
Watch out for iPad mini rumors! They're dropping left and right, and odds are, at least a few of them are going to be on target. The latest state that the so-called iPad mini will be thinner than the Kindle Fire the overall thickness that of the iPod touch 4G. That would put the smaller iPad at 7.2mm, nearly 25% thinner than the new iPad. The device's screen reportedly measures 7.85-inches although there doesn't seem to be a consensus among reports concerning the device's form factor and design. It might look a large iPod nano rather than a small iPad.Startup Act 2.0: Free Agency Is Still There, Still A Problem
Jul 07, 3:00PM
On May 22nd, Sens. Moran and Warner were joined by Sens. Rubio and Coons in introducing Startup Act 2.0, a revised version of legislation proposed last December that contained questionable provisions to allow university professors to choose their own agents to help transfer their technology rather than be tied to their home university's technology transfer office (TTO)—the so-called free agency provision. I dug into the new legislation, comparing it to the original wording, to figure out exactly what's changed (besides the fact that the accelerated commercialization of research provisions are now part of Section 8 rather than 7). Here's what I figured out.Louis C.K. Responds To Online Ticket Sales Experience: Scalpers' Opinions Have Been "Enlightening"
Jul 07, 2:45PM
When Louis C.K. announced that he was selling tickets to his shows for $45, cutting out ticket middlemen entirely, the response was fairly giddy. As of this writing, he sold $6,102,000 in tickets, not a bad haul. Of those 135,600 tickets, 500 are now floating around the scalping sites. He did, however do a little experiment: he sold two shows traditionally, through Ticketmaster and the like, and 1,100 of those tickets out of 4,400 available are already on scalping sites like Stubhub.Paul Carr's NSFW Corporation Has Officially Launched And There Is Much Rejoicing
Jul 07, 2:29PM
Paul Carr's NSFW Corp has officially launched, bringing us all from the doldrums and despair of the Age of Pisces and into the majesty of the Age of Aquarius. The site, essentially the news of the day with jokes, launched a few months ago in beta and is now a 17-person strong comedy juggernaut putting out stories like "UK WORRIES ABOUT SPIRALLING COST OF FREE HEALTH CARE >> Run, America. Run while there's still time //" and "KUWAIT ARMY STRUGGLES WITH OBESITY >> Are we heading for the first real Golden Arches war? A Gastric Band of Brothers? //."Greenway Wants To Put An End To Traffic Jams
Jul 07, 2:15PM
Traffic jams are annoying, but they are also responsible for extra CO2 emissions and plenty of wasted productivity. Greenway, Germany's entry into Microsoft's 10th Imagine Cup student technology competition in Sydney this week, wants to do nothing less but to put an end to traffic jams. To do so, the three-person team has developed a mobile app, which is basically a very smart turn-by-turn navigation system, and a cloud-based routing and tracking service that ensures that drivers use streets as efficiently as possible. Ideally, the Greenway team says, its app can cut driving times during peak traffic hours by half. What's cool about the service isn't the impressive underlying technology, though, but also the team's innovative business model.Heads Up! This Was Google's Apple Moment
Jul 07, 1:00PM
It looked like the X Games, but it was the most significant product launch of the decade so far. For the first time, Google did what Apple has done thrice, with the iPod, iPhone, and iPad. Granted, Apple announces products that ship immediately, while Google merely allowed a few thousand I/O attendees to pre-order a beta version that wouldn't ship until next year; but don't let the mechanics distract you from the heart of the matter. Google Glass isn't just a new product, it's a whole new product category, and it has every chance of being every bit as revolutionary as Apple's Big Three. Of course, like every revolution, it brought the nattering nabobs of negativity out in force. "We struggle to imagine Google Glasses reconciled with normal life," carps Gizmodo. That line's going to sound as embarrassingly tone-deaf in five years as these hilarious quotes from iPhone naysayers do today. Wearable computing, in one form or another, is the future. How extraordinary is it going to be? Some people suggest it could actually save Research In Motion. Now that's amazing. But a company that took most of a year to build an email app for the PlayBook isn't going to lead the way. This category is so new that Google's fail-fast, permanent-beta, make-it-up-as-you-go ethos is really the only viable direction. And we're only in its infancy; has anyone else noticed that those big thick glasses look a lot like Neurosky's brainwave sensors? Thought-controlled heads-up displays, anyone? Do I sound excited? Well, sure, yeah, I am--but I'm also kind of terrified.Google TV Needs To Decide: Platform Or Closed Ecosystem
Jul 07, 8:00AM
There is no debating that consumer adoption of Google TV is extremely disappointing. Logitech has dropped out of the business, several online publications including this one have declared the platform dead. While some new OEMs like Vizio, Sony, and LG have launched new devices with Google TV, it's not clear that any meaningful customer adoption will come as a result of these deals. I believe there is one big reason it hasn't taken off. It's that Google TV is straddling a dual-strategic approach when it needs to pick one strategy and double down on it.StethoCloud: Australian College Students Build A Digital Stethoscope And Mobile App To Fight Childhood Pneumonia
Jul 07, 6:55AM
The finals of Microsoft' Imagine Cup, the world's largest student technology competition, are taking place in Sydney this week and StethoCloud, the Melbourne-based home team, is definitely making a good case for Australia's growing tech scene. The competition's theme challenged students to build apps that "help solve the toughest problems" and the Australian team decided to tackle childhood pneumonia, which - despite the fact that it's highly curable when detected early - sadly still kills more children than measles, malaria and HIV combined. The key to survival, says the Australian team, is to detect the illness early, but that's obviously not easy for community health workers or unskilled staff in developing countries.Tipflare: Two MIT Seniors Build A One-Stop Shop For Recommendations On Anything
Jul 07, 5:24AM
With so much information, content and so many services now living online, there's a lot of choice -- even for something as simple as where to go to buy a new pair of socks. Oh, and there's a lot of data. As it's evolved and gotten better at making sense of its new Big Data, the Web has become an extraordinary engine for discovering new stuff: News, cat videos, porn, you name it. Naturally, scores of sites are becoming (or are building) recommendation engines to help users wade through the noise, and, dining on Big Data, they get smarter every day. However, as it stands today, the discovery process is pretty fragmented, as recommendation engines tend to be domain-specific. Want to find a good movie? Try Netflix. Want to find a good book? Go to GoodReads, etc. And this fragmentation makes for a crappy user experience. So, frustrated with the fact that there's no one-stop shop for great recommendations on, well, everything, a couple of seniors at MIT have developed, and quietly launched, Tipflare to be that general solution.Facebook Might Be Working On A Job Board, But Don't Get Too Excited
Jul 07, 2:15AM
Stop the presses! Facebook and LinkedIn are going to become archrivals in the recruiting market! At least, that's the subtext of a new article in the Wall Street Journal which reports that Facebook plans to launch a job posting board later this summer. It's a nice scoop if true (the Journal cites "people familiar with the matter"), but reading the story is a strange experience. Basically, it starts out by explaining why the job board isn't a big deal. Then, having established that it isn't a big deal, the story talks about what a big deal it is.Yahoo Implies It Can Still Shake Down Facebook For Patent Money. Bloody Unlikely
Jul 07, 1:50AM
Yahoo and Facebook signed a contract today that says they cannot sue each other over patents. Yet Yahoo may be trying to convince investors that Facebook would still pay to buy or license some Yahoo intellectual property. But according to a source familiar with the exact wording of the Yahoo-Facebook contract, the two companies have rights to each other's entire patent portfolios, so Yahoo would have no leverage to extort money or value from Facebook. I smell something fishy. Let's investigate.How to Get One Of Dell's Linux-Based Developer Laptops And Become A Sputnik Beta Cosmonaut
Jul 07, 12:00AM
Dell has a skunks works project underway to offer a Linux-based laptop made for developers. Now it is offering a beta program that will allow a small group of developers to get one of the laptops and join what it calls the Sputnik Beta Cosmonaut program. Project Sputnik signals Dell's changing focus to offer open-source technology that it can integrate into its servers, storage and networking offerings and solutions.Addvocate: Salesforce's Former Head Of Social Marcus Nelson Preps A New Social Enterprise Startup
Jul 06, 10:32PM
Marcus Nelson, co-founder of customer service startup UserVoice, left his role as head of social media at Salesforce.com back in April to start a company called Addvocate — and now he's starting to talk about what he's up to. When I met with Nelson yesterday, he gave me a quick demo of the initial product (currently in private alpha testing) and talked about his broader vision. He says the idea came from his work at Salesforce, where convincing his coworkers to share content on Facebook, Twitter, and other social sites was always a bit of a struggle — a complaint he's heard from other companies. The problem is that "share this blog post!"-type requests usually come at the wrong time, like when someone is just trying to read through all of their email or catch up on all of their updates on an internal social network like Chatter. Sometimes, they're even passed along via Excel spreadsheets (ouch).Sony's $380 Million Gaikai Acquisition Shows LA's Technical Talent
Jul 06, 10:26PM
Sony's announcement this week to buy Gaikai for $380 million shines a light on the startup ecosystem in Los Angeles and the explosive growth that's taking place. Though the majority of the conversation to date has been about LA's historical strengths in digital media and commerce, Gaikai represents a new class of companies built around engineering talent solving hard problems. LA has once again become a hotbed for technical leadership, as indicated by the flurry of investment activity. Entrepreneurs in the LA region attracted $567 million in venture capital in the first quarter of this year, 50% greater than the NY Metro area in the first quarter of the year, according to PriceWaterhouseCooper's Money Tree report. Between the outstanding technical talent and the passion and vision of great founders, those dollars are being invested into technology-driven companies that break the stereotype of startups in LA.Blogception
Jul 06, 10:10PM
The tech news cycle is a desperate bitch, as we've brought up before; A brief rundown of yesterday's bitchmeme sparked by a mere tweet from my colleague MG Siegler once again proves how absurd it is. "I used to love to plant one really weird bit of random information (sometimes even false) into stories to catch the rewrites," MG wrote in response to developer Marco Arment's concise analysis of the insatiable tech news beast.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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