The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- Now Legal In The U.S.: Jailbreaking Your iPhone, Ripping A DVD For Educational Purposes
- Snapgoods: Like Zipcar for Gadgets
- 17 More Countries Get the iPhone 4 On Friday
- Hearst’s Kaboodle Gets Into Social Commerce With Flash Sales Site PopPicks
- The 2011 Ford Explorer Goes Green(er): No V8, Front-Wheel Drive, Unibody Platform, V6 Or I4 EcoBoost
- AudioBox.fm Hits iPhone, Stream Your Music Collection From The Cloud
- Penny Auction Site MadBid Secures £4m From Atomico
- The Wallee: The Real Apple TV
- Some Tech Behind Inception And Avatar Becomes A Reality On Your iPad And iPhone
- NSFW: Sorry AirBnB Hipsters, I’ll Take Health and Safety Over the Cult of Disruption
- Going Global: George Stephanopoulos And ABC News Execs Discuss New iPad App
- Uranium Is Getting Some Glowing Reviews On Amazon
- ParkWhiz Is The OpenTable For Parking Spots
| Now Legal In The U.S.: Jailbreaking Your iPhone, Ripping A DVD For Educational Purposes Posted: 26 Jul 2010 09:04 AM PDT
     
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| Snapgoods: Like Zipcar for Gadgets Posted: 26 Jul 2010 08:00 AM PDT
Think of Snapgoods as Zipcar for stuff. You reserve an item – an iPad, a bike, a pommel horse, a chainsaw – pay a small amount per day ($10-$15 or more for pricier items), put down a security deposit using your Paypal account, and you pick up the item after meeting the lender or, barring that, you pick it up and drop it off at a place local to you both that acts as an escrow point. In short, Snapgoods assumes that most people won’t break your stuff and that there are people out there who want to try or use your stuff for a few hours. This could be an iPad or, in a more practical case, a concrete drill. In order to ensure that the renter doesn’t break your stuff, they require a number of verification measures including SMS replies, Facebook connections, and “group” creation for different parts of each city. Most important, however, is that Snapgoods is hyperlocal. You’re not going to get offers for people in Kansas City (unless you’re in Kansas City). In fact, Snapgoods is New York only for now, and will be expanding over the next few months.      
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| 17 More Countries Get the iPhone 4 On Friday Posted: 26 Jul 2010 06:23 AM PDT Not much more than that (I’m sure your local blogs will share with you the local prices in drachmas, pesos, pfennigs or whatever it is Sweden uses and we’ll put them here when we grab them) but get in line now. After all, World Cup is over so you guys have plenty of time.      
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| Hearst’s Kaboodle Gets Into Social Commerce With Flash Sales Site PopPicks Posted: 26 Jul 2010 06:10 AM PDT
Social shopping site Kaboodle, which was acquired by Hearst Interactive Group in 2007 for $30 million or so, is trying its hand at social commerce with new community-driven flash sales site PopPicks. PopPicks, which is members-only, partners with a retailer each week to feature a collection of products. The Kaboodle community is then invited to vote for the products they like best. After four days of voting, the most liked products are made available to Kaboodle members at an steeply discounted prices for four days or until the inventory is sold out. While Kaboodle is a little late to the online sample sale game, with the element of voting, PopPicks has a slightly different take on the flash-sales model that Gilt Groupe, Ideeli, Hautelook, Beyond The Rack and others have seen success with. The ability to vote on what clothes go on sale could be a compelling feature to the flash-sales market. Initially, PopPicks will feature primarily fashion apparel and accessories and will eventually broaden its offering to include retail brands in home, beauty and gadgets. Kaboodle, which underwent a realtime makeover earlier this year, has over 1 million registered users. Launched in 2005, Kaboodle faces competition from ThisNext, Like.com and Sugar’s ShopStyle.      
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| The 2011 Ford Explorer Goes Green(er): No V8, Front-Wheel Drive, Unibody Platform, V6 Or I4 EcoBoost Posted: 26 Jul 2010 04:44 AM PDT
Ford is attempting to reinvent the SUV for the 21st century or some nonsense like that. But what they’ve created is more crossover than SUV. Where do I start?      
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| AudioBox.fm Hits iPhone, Stream Your Music Collection From The Cloud Posted: 26 Jul 2010 02:24 AM PDT  AudioBox.fm, the cloud-based music service that lets users upload their music collection and access it anywhere, has added the iPhone/iPod touch to its list of supported devices through a native application. Previously, iPhone users could only access AudioBox via Mobile Safari, a bit of a kludge since the QuickTime Player plugin effectively takes over the phone's browser. There's also existing support for Android, a nifty HTML5-based browser version and a Windows desktop app, with the Italy-based company touting itself as an open platform to store a user's media library in the cloud, giving them "access to uploaded media from anywhere through the highest number of devices possible."
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| Penny Auction Site MadBid Secures £4m From Atomico Posted: 26 Jul 2010 01:29 AM PDT  MadBid, a fast growing "pay-to-bid" auction site has secured £4 million in a Series A funding from Atomico Ventures. Launched in 2008, MadBid is one of a number of pay-to-bid auction sites which have appeared in the last couple of years, with Swoopo among them. CEO Juha Koski says the Atomico investment will be spent on technology and expanding in Europe. Mattias Ljungman of Atomico has joined the board. MadBid is claiming 1 million users since launch and says customers are attracted by brand products with the possibility of saving of 80% on the RRP of an item. That drives people to bid of course and so the site makes its money off the customers who are not successful, not unlike a casino. 
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| Posted: 25 Jul 2010 08:42 PM PDT
Look at me. Now look at the kitchen wall. Now look at me again. I’m on a horse. Look again? Look at the iPad on the wall! Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. I’d like to present to you the Wallee, a thingamabob for your iPad that lets you attach it to your wall. That’s right: you’ve just made your own 10-inch Apple TV.      
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| Some Tech Behind Inception And Avatar Becomes A Reality On Your iPad And iPhone Posted: 25 Jul 2010 06:30 PM PDT
Several years ago, it seems like just about everyone saw the film Titanic. This past year, it seems the same was true for Avatar. And this past Summer, it seems as if everyone is seeing Inception. All three films share something in common: their use of Autodesk Maya, a piece of visual effects software. Now that technology has been ported to the iPhone and iPad. Obviously, Autodesk Fluid FX isn’t going to be as powerful as Maya running on a hardcore system. But Fluid FX is nonetheless impressive. And it’s pretty amazing that these kind of effects can be done on these relatively cheap consumer devices, whereas a just a few years ago systems costing thousands of dollars were required to render this stuff. The best way to describe what the app can do is to show it to you. For that, watch the video below. But basically, it’s an app that lets you manipulate pictures with a range of effects. And it has other natural elements like smoke and fire that you can manipulate on your iPad or iPhone. The use of these devices’ multi-touch capabilities is the key to all of this. The app can recognize up to 10 simultaneous multi-touch inputs, we’re told. The resulting work you make can saved to your devices. Or you can output any of this to a larger screen, like a television. There’s also a way to cycle through various effects and put them on display. But to me Fluid FX is just as interesting as a technological demonstration of what these devices are now capable of. And perhaps even more so, as a way to show was the other software Autodesk offers is capable of. Autodesk’s Joe Stam, who has won two Oscars for his work effect work on films, created this app. Previously, Autodesk has released Sketchbook Mobile for the iPhone and iPad, which was a top-selling app. Autodesk Fluid FX will be out in the App Store tomorrow. It will cost $1.99.
     
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| NSFW: Sorry AirBnB Hipsters, I’ll Take Health and Safety Over the Cult of Disruption Posted: 25 Jul 2010 04:56 PM PDT
And as for you, hotels – ha! hotels! – if ever there was an industry ripe for disruption, it's you clowns. Charging $300 a night for a bed and a shower and a tiny plastic enema of shampoo when AirBnB will let you get the same, and more, for $50, so long as you don't mind the creepy thrill of living in a stranger's apartment. Kapow! See you in hell, hotels! But of course the old men are fighting back – dusting down their old service uniforms and oiling their muskets and surrounding themselves with legislative sandbags to prolong their pathetic existence for another few months. This week, New York Governor, David Paterson, signed a bill outlawing the use of private dwellings as makeshift hotels. The bill, supported by hotel industry lobbyists (natch), bans rentals of less than 30 days and makes operating a residential apartment as a transient hotel illegal in New York City. Good news for big hotels, bad news for poor old New Yorkers who now find themselves banned from letting space in their apartments using AirBnB or Craigslist. And even worse news for NY-bound tourists who will now struggle to find a room in Manhattan for less than $100 a night (apart from these). As TechDirt's Mike Masnick puts it, "the internet has made it so that people can be more efficient in things like transportation or short-term housing, and the old guard doesn’t like it one bit, so they come up with regulations like these to outlaw it." Yeah! Except, no. Disclosure: I like hotels a lot – and I’ve spent much of my life in them. Both of my parents are career-long hoteliers, first managing large corporate chain units and now owning their own hotel in the UK. A couple of years ago I decided to sell almost all of my possessions, abandon my over-priced apartment in London and instead live permanently in hotels – in San Francisco, or wherever in the world I find myself in any given month. I’ve just finished writing a book about hotel living. In the past thirty years I've stayed in hundreds – thousands? – of hotels. Some have been amazingly opulent, some adequate, some dreadful, some absolute flea-pit shit holes by the side of highways in Dallas. But every one of them has been licensed to operate as a hotel. Why? Because I don't want to be burned alive by faulty wiring. Because I don't want to be robbed, or scammed or murdered. Because I want to pay by credit card and not have that card cloned. Because I want legal recourse if something goes wrong. Call me old-fashioned. In New York, as in many major cities, there is a serious problem with transient hotels. Slum landlords know that even the most scummy city apartment – $500 a month stuff – can deliver that same amount per day simply by packing the place with bunk beds and advertising it on Craigslist or any one of the plethora of foreign language NYC hotel sites as a travelers’ hotel. Not only does this put guests at risk due to a lack of fire exits or basic electrical safety, while causing a living hell of noise and violence and shady goings on for the owners of adjacent apartments – but, given that New York apartment vacancy rates are hovering around 1% (against an 8% national average), it also makes it harder for families to find somewhere else to live when they're forced out by drug-addled European backpackers armed with camping stoves. And yet, despite all of these sound reasons for outlawing faux-tels, it seems that some people would rather let a Spaniard burn to death, or a family be left homeless, than allow The Man to impede the rise of AirFuckingBnB. Says the opening para of this post by one Sean O’Neill, writing on Newsweek's budget travel blog…
And says Joe Gebbia, president of AirBnB.com…
Yeah, Joe. Screw the small number of "illegal hotels" and the untold misery they cause. Hipsters in peril – that's the big story here. Except it's really not. For a start, there's an explicit exemption in the bill that allows for the letting of rooms in private dwellings if the owner is present (as is often the case in AirBnB lets). And for other lets (absent owners can lend their rooms, but are banned from taking money) State Senator Liz Krueger who sponsored the bill has made it clear that "the city is not going to knock on doors,"; AirBnB users will only fall foul of the law if their neighbours complain. Which they’re perfectly entitled to do. And yet, commentators like Masnick and O'Neill and entrepreneurs like Gebbia are so enraptured by the cult of "Disruption" – that any use of the Internet to circumvent the traditional way of doing things is inherently good – that they can't help but see the new law as The Man standing in the way of Progress. Or as Masnick puts it “the hotels, which have their high prices and don’t like the competition.” They simply can't contemplate the heretical idea that sometimes The Man is right, and that some of his laws are created for good reason. That not everyone on the Internet is a Gawker-reading, fixie riding hipster who just wants to share his space with weary travelers for a few bucks extra pot money. That some people on Craigslist are criminals. That sometimes legislation is needed to protect innocent people from those criminals, even if it stops the rest of us us doing precisely what we want. And that one of the dictionary definitions of Disrupt is "to interrupt or impede progress", rather than the opposite. Blogs disrupting newspapers is great, except when no-one can be held accountable for gross inaccuracies and libels. Online pharmacies disrupting doctors is great until someone is poisoned by Indian ‘viagra’. And advertising rooms on the Internet without legal safeguards is great until the platform is used by gangsters and slum lords to drive families from their apartments and fleece tourists into spending their vacations under unsafe roofs. If AirBnB et al are so smart then they'll figure out a way to thrive in New York's new legislative environment. These are, after all, disruptive times. But if they can’t understand the fact that disruption cuts both ways, and that the rights of Internet folk to create awesome new business models doesn’t trump a city’s right to disrupt criminality, then it's time for them – not the hotels industry or legislators – to get out of the way. Young man.      
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| Going Global: George Stephanopoulos And ABC News Execs Discuss New iPad App Posted: 25 Jul 2010 04:55 PM PDT
To learn more about the app, our own Lora Kolodny ventured over the ABC News headquarters, where she interviewed anchor George Stephanopoulos and a pair of execs who helped create the application. Stephanopoulos says that he was quickly enamored of the application’s globe, which is a running theme in the interviews (though he said that he hadn’t had a chance to play around with it too much at the time of the interview). On a related note, when guaging his affinity for gadgets on a scale of 1-10, he gives himself a 4.5 (he does own an iPad, but his family has issues getting the cable box to behave properly). Andrew Morse, Executive Producer of Integration and Innovation at ABC News Digital, says that the globe is meant to be a “meandering experience”. He explains that on traditional sites, people complain that you only get what you’re looking for, and that there isn’t the discovery factor you get from a newspaper. Isaac Josephson, VP Product Development for ABC News Digital, says that the team has been working on the app for a solid three months, and that it stirred up more excitement among traditional broadcasters than any previous product they’d developed. My take on the app? Looks aren’t everything — if you want to catch up on the day’s top headlines at a glance, this might not be what you’re looking for. The globe may be fun, but in my experience it also has a habit of obscuring most of the app’s available content (only two or three stories are legible at once). You can flick the globe around a few times and be pretty confident that you’ve seen everything, but it’s hard to kick the nagging feeling that you may have inadvertently skipped over the day’s top story. That said, the ABC team may be right: if you’re just looking to kill some time discovering random highlights from the day’s news, this may be exactly what you’re looking for. And if you just want the headlines, you can venture over to the ABC News HTML5 site, which is integrated into the app.
     
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| Uranium Is Getting Some Glowing Reviews On Amazon Posted: 25 Jul 2010 04:08 PM PDT
Did you know you can buy uranium ore on Amazon? Well you can. It’s actually been on sale for a while — BoingBoing pointed it out back in 2007. But talk of it has recently started popping up around the Internet once again this past week. Our sister site CrunchGear did a quick post pointing it out last week. Since then, a whole new batch of great customer reviews have been flowing in, as Amazon CTO Werner Vogels points out today. Some of the negative reviews note that uranium is “bad for you.” Another says that it killed a pet gorilla. But some positive reviews mark is as a “great gift for a hostile dictator.“ As Vogels points out, the best reviews are highlighted on reviews-only page. The most helpful positive review reads: “So glad I don’t have to buy this from Libyans in parking lots at the mall anymore.” Meanwhile, the most helpful negative review reads: ”I purchased this product 4.47 Billion Years ago and when I opened it today, it was half empty.” Overall, uranium ore has earned 4 out of 5 stars after 221 customer reviews — with the majority of them giving it a 5-star rating. It’s largely seen as a good deal for $29.99. You may recall that these are the same users who love to review milk. The discussions on the uranium page are good as well. One person wants to know, “Does this product put you on the CIA watch list?” Another person wants to know: “This is a joke, right?“ Unrelated, it’s worth noting that people who viewing uranium on Amazon also viewed items such as wolf urine, fresh whole rabbits, and yes, milk.      
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| ParkWhiz Is The OpenTable For Parking Spots Posted: 25 Jul 2010 11:55 AM PDT
Via a web app and a newly launched mobile HTML5 website, ParkWhiz allows you to reserve parking near concert and event venues in the U.S. ParkWhiz partners with parking lot owners, which range from people who own a single space to large parking management companies, across the country to list their inventory on ParkWhiz. So far, ParkWhiz has partnered with 300 participating parking locations in over 25 cities in the U.S. Currently, ParkWhiz currently offers parking reservations near Fenway Park, Wrigley Field, AT&T Park, Cowboys Stadium, Madison Square Garden, Busch Stadium, US Cellular Field, Orpheum Theatre, Lyric Opera of Chicago, Beacon Theater, plus 17 airports around the country. For example, ParkWhiz just helped park over 400 cars (who paid on average of $40 per parking spot) for the Paul McCartney concert at AT&T Park last week in San Francisco. ParkWhiz’s CEO and co-founder Aashish Dalal says the startup has also started to serve coupons for restaurants and bars (in neighborhoods nearby the event space) with parking reservations. In terms of pricing, there is no fee to list a parking space on the site; ParkWhiz collects a fee only if a reservation is made and handles payment processing for the parking vendors. Generally, the user has to pay 10 percent customer convenience fee to ParkWhiz in addition to parking price, and ParkWhiz will also take a 15 percent cut from the base rate from the parking vendors. In a year, the site has already taken 50,000 reservations, with the goal of hittig 100,000 resetvations by the end of the year. Of course, ParkWhiz isn’t the first company to use technology to try to solve the problem of finding parking. Car Harbor allows you to rent your parking space, and there are a number of iPhone apps to aim to solve the same problem including Spotswitch and Primospot. Even Google is getting into the parking game, recently launching Open Spot, an Android app that shows you a map with nearby open parking spots marked with colored dots.      
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It's no longer illegal under the DMCA to jailbreak your iPhone or bypass a DVD's CSS in order to obtain fair use footage for educational purposes or criticism. These are the new rules that were handed down moments ago by the U.S. Copyright Office. This is really big. Like, really big.
Let’s pretend that you don’t have very many geeky or sporty friends. It could happen. Say you wanted to try and iPad or a bike or a 
Ford just pulled the sheet off the brand new 2011 Ford Explorer. It’s a bit different than we’re used to. Traditionally next-gen SUVs are bigger and badder than the previous generation. While the 2011 Ford Explorer is slightly longer than its predecessors are, the engines are smaller, the ride height is lower, and the overall off-roading capabilities are dramatically reduced. Jalopnik Editor-in-Chief even goes as far as stating that
Get out of the way, old man! You're being Disrupted! Screw you, newspapers: blogs are stealing your readers and Craigslist is pillaging your revenue! Take that publishers: Andrew Wiley 
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