The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- First 4G Mobile Network Launches . . . In Sweden :(
- Qik Hastens Its Live Broadcasts With A Desktop App
- Google Wants You To Give Chrome For Christmas
- Chartbeat Brings Realtime Analytics to TypePad and DreamHost
- Microsoft China Blatantly Rips Off Microblogging Service Plurk
- Attn: Online Job Boards – Subject: RealMatch Breathing Down Your Neck.
- Work Management Software Maker Clarizen Raises $8 Million More
- Google Touts City Of LA’s Decision To Equip 34,000 Employees With Google Apps
- Google Goes All Out To Market Chrome To UK Users
- Hipster Parenting Site Babble Launches Facebook App
- Location’s Social Paradox
- CrunchGear Giveaway: Monster Miles Davis Headphone Pack
- Branchr Advertising Launches New Ad Network, CPMForest
- MySpace Continues To Get Trashed Over Imeem Shutdown
- Google, DST Make Play For AOL’s ICQ
- Google Phone Get Its Own Holiday Game. Nexus One Users Only.
- NSFW: Undressing models and messing with Daniel Ek. There are apps for that
- Cerevo Cam: Hands-On With The Social Camera That Directly Uploads Pictures To The Web
| First 4G Mobile Network Launches . . . In Sweden :( Posted: 14 Dec 2009 09:15 AM PST For all of you waiting for mobile data networks to catch up to broadband speeds on cable and DSL, the first 4G/LTE network has arrived . . . in Sweden. TeliaSonera launched the first two cities of its 4G network, which promises wireless download speeds of up to 100 megabits per second (yeah, right) using equipment from Ericsson and Huawei. So if you live in Oslo or Stockholm, you get to try it out. Everyone else is out of luck. TeliaSonera says it will roll out the 4G service to 25 cities in Sweden and Norway in 2010. But you know how these things go. The full rollout may take longer because they are still trying to follow the instructions on how to put it together. They are pretty sure they are missing some bolts. For the rest of us, the wait will be even longer. Mobile carriers in the U.S. are struggling under the weight of soaring Web phone data usage. Their 3G networks can hardly keep up (cough, AT&T). Verizon is supposed to launch 4G/LTE service in the U.S. next year, and AT&T won’t offer its version of 4G until 2011. Until then, I suggest you move to Oslo. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
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| Qik Hastens Its Live Broadcasts With A Desktop App Posted: 14 Dec 2009 08:55 AM PST
Their answer is Qik-in-Touch, a new desktop application that runs on Adobe Air. Once you start this app, it resides in the background until one of your Qik contacts starts recording a live video. When that happens, Qik-in-Touch pops up on your screen to show you the video as it’s happening live. It’s a much more direct, and more importantly, faster way of connecting you with live Qik videos.
Qik co-founder Bhaskar Roy also made it clear that Qik-in-Touch is part of the service’s strategy to make it easier for mainstream users to utilize Qik. He notes that thanks to many of the deals they have struck with mobile companies to pre-load Qik onto phones, there are seeing more of these types of users. And he notes that they often share differently then the early adopter crowd. Whereas the early adopters were all about sharing their videos with as many people as possible, the mainstream users care more about just sharing with a small group of family or friends. I also asked Roy about the Qik iPhone app, and he confirmed that they have submitted it to the App Store, and now they’re just waiting to see if it gets approved. Seeing as Ustream’s similar app was just approved, he anticipates that there will be no issues with their’s. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
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| Google Wants You To Give Chrome For Christmas Posted: 14 Dec 2009 08:27 AM PST Not sure what presents to get for the holidays? How about giving away a free browser? Your friends and relatives won’t think you are too cheap to get them a real present. They might even thank you, if the present is Google’s shiny new Chrome browser all wrapped up in virtual wrapping paper. In a holiday promotion, Google lets you give ChromeForChristmas. It’s a pretty simple, but effective, marketing site. You choose some themed paper which gets wrapped around the Google Chrome logo and then is delivered via email to the person receiving the “gift,” along with an e-card with your picture or even a video attached. They get to unwrap the virtual gift and are prompted to download Chrome. Google is starting to push Chrome in a big way now, not just in the U.S., but also abroad. The Chrome beta is now available on Macs and it is now offers a growing array of extensions. There are worse presents you could give. (Hat Tip to Paul Foster) Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
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| Chartbeat Brings Realtime Analytics to TypePad and DreamHost Posted: 14 Dec 2009 07:20 AM PST If Google Analytics just isn’t fast enough for you, there’s Chartbeat, a betaworks company which provides realtime analytics to Website owners. It gives Website publishers a second-by-second view of the number of visitors on their site, which pages are spiking in popularity, referring sites, as well as alerts on slow load times and server crashes. It is particularly useful for blogs. Today, Six Apart’s blog hosting service, TypePad, is starting to promote chartbeat by making it available from its stats page. Website hosting service DreamHost is offering a deeper integration, showing a hover-over summary of current visitors and top referring sites on its dashboard page. Chartbeat also has an iPhone app which sends you push notifications every time your traffic spikes or your site is down. TypePad and DreamHost users won’t get the realtime analytics for free, however. After a 30-day trial, Chartbeat will begin charging it’s regular $9.95/month fee. TypePad Pro accounts will get a 30 percent discount. Chartbeat is hoping a large enough sliver of users will get addicted to pay the monthly charge. In an age when Google Analytics has trained people to expect not to have to pay for analytics, that could be a tough sell.
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| Microsoft China Blatantly Rips Off Microblogging Service Plurk Posted: 14 Dec 2009 07:19 AM PST
But the software giant may well have cut a few corners here and there to get their service up and running, and has seemingly turned to outright theft of code and design elements of Plurk to launch in a hurry. The design of MSN Juku sure has the same looks as Plurk, as you can tell from the screenshots below. But according to a blog post by the microblogging startup, there’s more going on than just design inspiration:
Piggybacking off a similar service’s design is one thing, but effectively going in and steal code? MSN Juku looks too similar to be a coincidence, and Plurk most certainly provides some really good evidence of code theft in its post to bargain. We’ve reached out to Microsoft to get their side of the story and will update when we hear back. If this is what we think it is, though, shame to Redmond. (Thanks for the heads up, Amir) Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
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| Attn: Online Job Boards – Subject: RealMatch Breathing Down Your Neck. Posted: 14 Dec 2009 07:00 AM PST
Realmatch’s end-to-end solution appeases employers, candidates and partners. It begins with employers who instead of shelling a couple hundred bucks, get to post their jobs for free. They’ll then start receiving candidates for which they’ll be able to view CV summaries for. Employers who want access to full CVs can either purchase a pack of six views for $95, or unlimited views per job posting for $195. Once access is purchased, employers can then contact the candidates by way of email, chat, and video conferencing, all of which are integrated into Realmatch’s system. Realmatch does a couple of interesting things before it sends CVs to employers. First, it qualifies each candidate by grading and ranking their skills against the requirements of the position. I was told there’s real algorithmic work here to ensure quality matching. Second, Realmatch also sends employers ‘passive’ job seekers. These are prospects which did not submit their CV to the particular position, but whose skills were found to be a match by Realmatch after mining its candidate database. The second end of the equation is Realmatch’s partner network. The company believes its real strength is in taking the form of a dating network so to speak, as opposed to a destination such as Monster.com. To be able to achieve such a network paradigm, Realmatch’s solution is offered in white-labeled form that can be easily integrated into the partner sites. The partner solution includes a variety of features such as a back-office suite with client and job management, reporting and CRM with campaign and contact management. Partners can modify the job site’s homepage but not the internal pages. They can however run their own ads on any of the pages. The partner network which is reaching 37 million job seekers a month now tops 1200 sites that range from online editions of newspapers to blogs, and any site in between. Current partners include the South Bend Tribune, Washington Times, BioFind.com and SanDiegojobMatch.com. Revenue produced by employers’ purchase of CV access packages is split three ways. The partner site gets a third, the site that added the employee’s CV into the pool gets a third, and Realmatch gets a third. As fair and square as it comes. Finally, the benefit for candidates is obvious. CV’s uploaded into any Realmatch-powered site is distributed across its network, regardless of where they where added. Realmatch is currently in the midst of raising a second round of financing. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
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| Work Management Software Maker Clarizen Raises $8 Million More Posted: 14 Dec 2009 06:22 AM PST
The company provides collaborative project management software that allows businesses to easily manage all of their projects and resources in a single, online environment. In 2009, Clarizen claims sales grew more than 400 percent year-over-year and that it has recruited more than 100 new customers in Q3 alone. The company says its products are now in use by over 500 customers. The extra financing will be used to expand its marketing and sales operations. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
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| Google Touts City Of LA’s Decision To Equip 34,000 Employees With Google Apps Posted: 14 Dec 2009 05:55 AM PST
According to Google’s blog post, the city – which is replacing its Novell GroupWise system – had evaluated 14 e-mail technology providers for a revamp of the city government’s communication and collaboration platform, and ended up picking Google Apps. The deal, which includes servicing done in partnership with CSC, has a three-year base period and two one-year options. The deal was unanimously approved by the city council in Los Angeles at the end of last month and is worth $7.2 million. Los Angeles, the second-largest city in the United States, is far from the first government to go with Google Apps to bring their e-mail, calendaring, document sharing and chat applications to the cloud. Washington D.C. and Orlando, FL had earlier made the same move. Randi Levin, CTO for the City of Los Angeles and general manager of the city’s Information Technology Agency, provides more information about the decision here. Another sign that cloud services are maturing, or a security disaster waiting to happen? Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
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| Google Goes All Out To Market Chrome To UK Users Posted: 14 Dec 2009 03:58 AM PST
We’ve seen Twitter reports of the newspaper ads appearing in London and Manchester, but it looks like it’s across the whole country, which would give the campaign a total Metro circulation of over 1.3 million. Circulation of the Metro paper in London alone is 738,000. This is a big footprint. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
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| Hipster Parenting Site Babble Launches Facebook App Posted: 14 Dec 2009 02:30 AM PST  We recently wrote about Babble, a magazine and parenting community site aimed at urban hipsters, after the startup raised $1 million in funding from Greycroft Partners. Spun off from sex and dating community Nerve Media, Babble takes a more modern view on parenting, aimed at a younger generation of parents who live in cities, equally share parenting duties (or at least make an effort) and use the internet to access information. It is the same demographic that the magazine Cookie is going after, except it tries to appeal to the Dads as well. Babble’s new Facebook app, called "Connected by Kids," allows parents to create Facebook profiles for their children, as well as groups for schools, softball teams, and friends. The virtue of the app is that it allows users to share photos and updates with family friends without sharing them publicly. Babble’s CEO Rufus Griscom told me that many parents don;t care to share intimate pictures of their children with their entire friend base on Facebook. Babble’s app lets users create a mini-social network within Facebook. The site has steadily been growing in traffic, and now is seeing around 3.5 million unique users per month. The Facebook app should only help contribute more traffic to the site. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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| Posted: 14 Dec 2009 02:00 AM PST
A few weeks ago, our own Jason Kincaid wrote a post about how Facebook is poised to take over the geolocation space. In it, he makes a number of good points, but there’s one that’s particularly interesting to me. “At most, there are probably a few dozen people who you'd like to share your location with,” he writes. Overall, that’s likely true to a varying degree depending on who you are, but it points to a larger problem I’m starting to notice with these location services: The more people you follow on them, the less useful the service is. This is location’s social paradox. I’ve written before that location is the missing link between social networks and the real world, and I absolutely believe that’s true. But the way most of these location-based services are built right now, they are becoming an unmanageable mush of finding the location of the people you actually care about. Perhaps the most popular of these networks right now, Foursquare, is a perfect example of this. When I was following 20 people on the service, it was very useful. When I was following 50, it was still useful, but there was some clutter. Now, at around 250 people, I find myself scrolling through my stream just to find certain people that I actually want to know their location. I cannot even imagine what Scoble does with the 1,700+ people he follows. Of course, this problem is entirely my own fault. If I don’t want to know where someone is, I shouldn’t follow them. But there are two problems with this. First, there are some people that I would like to follow some of the time, like if we’re all in a different city at a conference together. Or maybe if I’m just bored and looking for something to do on a particular night. Second, and more importantly, today’s social networks carry a social pressure to accept many people that request your friendship. Again, of course you don’t have to, but not doing so can often be misconstrued as a slight on that person. Bigger picture: Today’s social networks are predicated on the idea of “more.” The more friends you have on these networks, the more social you are, the better you are at the service, the bigger ego you get, more, more, more. None of that is true, but the perception (as it is with most things in the world) is that more is better. With these location-based social networks, more is actually worse, and that’s awkward. There are a number of things that these networks could do to alleviate some of these lesser issues. One would be to create friend groups, like Facebook and now Twitter offer, to filter friends. Another would be to offer a “mute” button, like Brizzly offers for Twitter users that you don’t want to unfollow, but don’t want to see in your stream all the time. But one of Foursquare’s strengths is that it’s very simple right now. It’s all about checking-in to places and seeing a stream of your friends’ check-ins. If you start to add layers to that, you become the mess of rules and settings that Facebook has become. And because the concept of location-based social networking is still so new and potentially scary to people, I would argue that it’s imperative that Foursquare and these other services do keep it as simple as possible for now.
Another service, Gowalla, also has Push Notifications, which are useful. But that service is less built around the friend stream idea, and it’s much worse if you try to use it for that. Not only do see friends who are in other cities in your main stream (with no indication of what city they’re in), but you are forced to see all your pending friend requests at the top of that list. I’m currently scrolling through dozens of them just to get to the main stream. I could either accept or ignore them all, but I don’t want to. Again, social pressure. In some ways, this is a good problem to have. If users are starting to feel overwhelmed because they have too many friends on your network, it means there are a good number of people actually using it. For most people, Foursquare and Gowalla aren’t there quite yet. But if they keep growing, they will be. And in some other ways this is reminiscent of Twitter when it was younger. Many users started following a lot of people before feeling overwhelmed by the constant flow of updates from people you might not care about so much. But Twitter evolved rapidly from the “What are you doing?” mundane updates, to be more of a multi-layered broadcast service. It’s hard to imagine these location-based services being able to transform in a way that makes them naturally more compatible with having a large group of people you follow. Remember too that Twitter is an asymmetrical network (you can follow others without them having to follow you), while Foursquare and the like are symmetrical (you have to accept and follow them in return). This will always limit the “socialness” of your service, but it seems to be a requirement giving the privacy implications of location (though another location network, BrightKite, recently moved to be more asymmetric). Ultimately, I think if these location-based networks are to survive (and not just get taken over as a feature of Facebook), they’re going to have to shift the mentality that all social networks have to have huge, tightly wound social graphs. Facebook used to be of that mindset to a certain extent, but as we’ve all seen recently, they’re trying to extend their social graph in a major way now. The good news is that the business models forming around these networks don’t require your social graph to be huge. But at the same time, it may be difficult to convince people about the vitality of your network if it doesn’t have a ton of inner-site traffic, which is obviously easier to achieve is everyone is friends with one another and clicking on their pages. Maybe it’s about convincing people that real world “social” is more valuable than social networking “social.” And that the number of friends you have on these networks is increasingly just a useless ego-metric. But it’s a hard sell because deep within our collective psyche, more is always better. [photo: flickr/arenamontanos] Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
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| CrunchGear Giveaway: Monster Miles Davis Headphone Pack Posted: 14 Dec 2009 01:57 AM PST  Boobledee ooh ooh woo woo ha lala! We're coming at you with a fancy Monster Miles Davis Headphone pack. The kit includes Monster Miles Davis Tribute Jazz In-Ear Headphones, three albums, and a sassy print. Take the A train past the jump to figure out how to win.
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| Branchr Advertising Launches New Ad Network, CPMForest Posted: 13 Dec 2009 11:58 PM PST Today, Branchr Advertising is announcing a new ad network called CPMForest. The new network focuses on using a CPM model for billing, which the company has not offered until now. CPMForest is designed to appeal to a very broad market: while websites with low traffic are often rejected from CPM based networks, CPMForest aims to remove this barrier allowing all sites onboard regardless of their size. CPMForest uses custom technology to analyze websites and display relevant, contextually targeted advertisements in a fraction of a second. CPMForest is available beginning today in a limited release, but will officially open up the ad network in 2010 to all advertisers. CPMForest is currently taking on board medium-to-large scale advertisers and ad partners for its full launch. CPMForest’s CPM is regularly between $0.10 and $3.50. In August Branchr Advertising acquired CRM tool Atomplan, which is running as its own product right now. There are a lot of other options for CPM advertising solutions, including Adagency1, Adpepper, AdSmart, Adtegrity, Banner Connect and others, so CPMForest is jumping into a crowded market. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
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| MySpace Continues To Get Trashed Over Imeem Shutdown Posted: 13 Dec 2009 11:26 PM PST It’s been nearly a week since MySpace Music closed its acquisition of some of the assets of music service Imeem and redirected imeem.com to music.myspace.com. MySpace took a lot of heat for the sudden shutdown of the Imeem service, particularly the API. But the fact is that MySpace didn’t shut the Imeem service down. Imeem’s creditors and the music labels did. If MySpace hadn’t done the deal Imeem would have shut down anyway. The company was just out of cash and options, and the wheels had come off the car. For the most part the press now gets that MySpace had very little to do with the shutdown, and has settled down.
It’s not exactly the warms hug MySpace probably thought they’d receive when they stepped in and saved as much of the Imeem service as they could. And with the benefit of hindsight some basic communication to Imeem users other than the shock of a redirect to MySpace Music might have been a good idea. Like an email to users telling them what was happening, for example. But the result is the same. The demise of Imeem had nothing to do with MySpace, and whatever parts of the service do live on will only do so because MySpace stepped in to buy some of Imeem’s assets. The hard part, of course, is getting that message to those 16 million pissed off users. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
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| Google, DST Make Play For AOL’s ICQ Posted: 13 Dec 2009 02:55 PM PST
ICQ, which AOL acquired in 1998 for $400 million, has 33 million worldwide monthly users, according to Comscore. But 8.3 million of those are in Russia, where it hold the no. 1 spot for instant messaging. That explains DST’s interest. It also explains some of Google’s interest as they struggle to get a proper foothold in that market. The end price for ICQ may be higher than $250 million. Rumors of ICQ’s possible sale were first reported in mid November. We’d heard speculation that Naspers was interested late last month but have since dropped out of the bidding process. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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| Google Phone Get Its Own Holiday Game. Nexus One Users Only. Posted: 13 Dec 2009 02:01 PM PST
If you visit this URL, you should see a quick flash of the game’s rules before you’re redirected. But if you’re on the Nexus One, the rules page would remain. It reads:
Digging into the code of this page reveals that it is in fact sniffing to see if your device is the Nexus One. If not, it does the redirect. Nice of Google to spread the holiday cheer with a game that only they can play. They even made their own festive Android icons for it (right). Bah humbug. Update 1: Apparently, one of those cute Android guys is named “Robo-Ralphie” after the kid in A Christmas Story. Awesome. Thanks to Andy, one of our developers, for digging this up. Update 2: Of course, if you really want to trick the sniffer into thinking you’re on a Nexus One when you’re not, you can do that too. Andy and Emmanuel both point out that you can easily spoof the user agent and play the game to your heart’s content. For example, in Safari 4 if you have developer tools enabled, go to Develop -> User Agent -> Other and type ‘Nexus One’ in the box. You can do it in Firefox by typing ‘about:config’ in the address bar and filtering on ‘useragent’ and setting it there. It’s apparently not quite as easy to do with the Chrome dev tools. The other way is to just download the source of the page and the JavaScript file that it links to and modify the JavaScript to not check your User Agent at all — that’s the more permanent solution. [thanks Alberto] Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
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| NSFW: Undressing models and messing with Daniel Ek. There are apps for that Posted: 13 Dec 2009 12:04 PM PST
Ek (pronounced “Eek” – he’s Swedish) recently became our favourite comedy target after we heard a Spotify employee telling a girl that he sometimes acts as Ek’s (”Eek’s”) bodyguard at important gatherings. Just think about that for a moment, and reflect on the peculiar kind of ego you’d need to possess to fear kidnap when you’re hemorrhaging money at the rate Spotify is. What on earth does Ek (”Eek”) think they’re going to demand as a ransom? Equity? Unmarked hype? And so, like all right thinking Brits, the moment Andy and I heard that story, we knew it was our duty to mess with him. Our brilliantly simple plan? We’d spread the rumour that Daniel Ek’s name is actually pronounced Daniel Eek. (”He’s Swedish”) We were just starting to figure out how we’d actually kick off the rumour when we were interrupted by Arrington, who had been sitting on an adjacent bed, engaged in an important meeting of his own. “Hey, come and see this,” he shouted to me, in the way people who think you work for them do. “This”, it turned out, was a strikingly pretty red-headed girl, clutching some kind of European smartphone, and flanked by an arguably even prettier blonde PR girl. The redhead appeared to be dressed as some kind of couture clown, while the PR girl was dangerously close to wearing a skirt. A good rule of thumb for PR people: try not to upstage the talent, especially when the talent in this case is Anina – a Paris-based American model who, with her cartoonish dress and love of all things tech, is apparently building a huge following in China. Anina was in the middle of pitching Arrington on her new mobile app. It’s called Anina Dress-Up and, as the name hints, it allows teenage girls to dress up Anina in various outfits, and pervy men to do the exact reverse. Fun for all the family. The app is available as a free download, but each item of clothing – right down to the underwear – is a replica of a real garment that can be purchased through a mobile store. As Arrington filmed on his Flip cam (video below), Anina and I talked for a while about just how disturbing it must be to know that people are dressing and undressing you on their phones. Anina explained – with an entirely straight face – how surprised she was how many people requested more underwear options in the app. The requests worried her, not for the reasons you’d think but rather because she feared that showing too much skin might get her blocked from Apple’s app store. I told her to focus on Android where that kind of thing is positively encouraged. What struck me about Anina’s demo of her app – apart from the mind-blowing weirdness of watching a hot real-life cartoon undressing a virtual cartoon version of herself – is how neatly it illustrated the latest fad for wired celebrities: the ego-app. It used to be that the must-have accessory for the tech-savvy celeb was a fan-page. Then came a blog, and a MySpace profile and Twitter. Now, at the end of 2009, you’re no-one if you don’t have your own app. Soulja Boy has an app. The Pussycat Dolls have an app. Lady Gaga has an app. And of course T-Pain has an app. Companies like Moderati do the heavy-lifting for the high-end famous like Soulja Boy, while Mobile Roadie offers a $500 out-of-the-box app for impoverished bands, athletes, authors and – of course – web celebrities. Two weeks ago, I sat in a bar in San Francisco while a friend scrolled through her iPhone to show me her latest download: the Brian Solis app. Yes, Brian Solis – Valley PR, always-on web 2.0 schmoozer and occasional TechCrunch contributor – has his own app, available through Apple’s app store. Thanks to the app, Solis fans can view photos of their hero, read his latest tweets, track his speaking appearances and even see when he’s visiting a town near you. That last feature also generates the most sinister alert box I’ve ever seen on a hand-held device” “Brian Solis would like to access your location. Allow?” Deny! Deny! Deny! It’s easy to dismiss the the Solis app as an ego trip of Ekian (Eek-ian) proportions, but really there’s a strange logic to the Twitterati wanting to secure themselves a place on your iPhone’s home screen. The fact that the web allows anyone to become famous prevents an ironic problem for the succesful micro celebrity: egalitarianism is all well and good while you’re on the way up and using Twitter and MySpace to make a name for yourself. But once you hit a certain level of pseudo-fame, you suddenly find yourself needing to distinguish yourself from all of the other plebs who have dragged themselves to the top of the cyber-heap. After all, if everyone is equally famous, then really nobody is famous at all. A place on Twitter’s suggested follower list used to be the mark of truly having made it – but they’re letting any old schmuck on there now. Having a popular blog or online TV show won’t cut it either – anyone can do that with Wordpress and iMovie. But an app! An app takes real money and development time – and so having one immediately sets you aside from the herd. Whether your app actually does anything useful is irrelevant, as long as it features your name and face – and reflects your “personal brand”. Giving it a clever name isn’t that important either – Brian has shunned clever titles like “Quantum of Solis” in favour of simply naming his app “Brian Solis”. The important thing is that having your own app means you’ve truly made it as a micro celeb. This week the new paperback edition of my WWII-winning book is published in the UK and I’m seriously considering creating a Paul Carr app to promote it. Rather than having any features of its own, the app would simply – and awkwardly – wedge mentions of my book into everybody else’s apps. Superimposing tiny photos of the cover into Brian’s photos, or using T-Pain’s auto-tuning technology to make it sound like everyone is singing about me. That kind of thing. And of course once my app hits the app store, it will surely be only a matter of time before my tech-journo colleagues follow suit. TechCrunch fans can look forward to the Michael Arrington App, which will be available on iPhone at first, before deleting itself in a fit of pique and moving to the Droid. (It will also be simultaneously the most and least popular app in the app store – a contradiction that no-one will be quite able to account for.) Or perhaps the MG Siegler App – the only app that reviews itself on TechCrunch four hundred times a day. Away from TC, there’ll be the Om Malik App, offering up-to-the-minute technology news, read in the voice of Milton from Office Space – and, somewhat less charitably, I’m looking forward to the Kara Swisher App which does exactly the same as the Arrington app, only a couple of days later. (Or the Pete Cashmore App, which is basically the Kara Swisher app in a smarter suit and with more typos.) One person who won’t have to worry about developing his own ego-app, though, is Daniel Ek. Given how busy Ek is with Spotify, Andy and I have generously decided to build an appropriate app for him. Titled “The Daniel Ek Rumour App”, it’ll be your number one source for amusing lies about Daniel Ek. We really hope he likes it – after all, we’d hate to get a visit from his security detail. And don’t forget – it’s pronounced Eek. He’s Swedish. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
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| Cerevo Cam: Hands-On With The Social Camera That Directly Uploads Pictures To The Web Posted: 13 Dec 2009 12:00 PM PST
After months of development work (the camera was completely designed from scratch and in-house), the shoot-and-upload camera is finally available in Japan. To recap, the big idea here is to simplify the process of uploading and sharing pictures online. Cerevo Cam users can send pictures directly from the device to the corresponding photo management site (dubbed Cerevo Life), mail addresses or to a number of web services – even when the camera is turned off (a feature that Eye-Fi doesn’t offer). The so-called “Networked Camera” detects Wi-Fi spots and transfers pictures automatically without you needing to take it out of your bag. You can choose at which time(s) the upload should take place or initiate this yourself from the menu. The auto upload function, probably the most important feature, worked flawlessly during my test (Cerevo gave me a sample for a few days). Alternatively, you can use a 3G modem with it (to be connected through USB). Here are pictures of the camera and box (final designs – more pics in my earlier Cerevo post): These are the final specs of the camera:
The device has four main buttons (on/off button, shutter release, white balance switch and strobe switch) and a D-pad for navigating the menu (Japanese and English). It’s available in black or white and has a Japanese street price of $225. Here are two sample pictures (more can be found here – scroll down to the gallery). Quality wise, you get what you can expect from a point-and-shoot camera that puts emphasis on simplicity. Snaps can not only be sent directly to Cerevo Life or email addresses but also to Twitter, Flickr, Tumblr, TwitPic, Picasa and a bunch of Japan-only sites. Once the auto upload is finished, the camera notifies you via email (which happens when the battery is about to die, too, by the way). You can control to which sites you want the pictures posted to either via Cerevo’s homepage or their mobile site. As far as global sales are concerned, Cerevo CEO Takuma Iwasa told me he wants to explore the domestic market first to use that experience for a possible world-wide release at a later time. And he should, since the country that’s home to the most social media geeks (clearly his main target group) is America – and not Japan. His camera appears to do well so far in Japan (where it’s been available for pre-order for a few days now). But what do you think: Has Cerevo carved out a niche for themselves with their social point-and-shoot or will you go on using your “normal” cameras and smartphones to share pictures online? Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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