The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- Nomadesk, Not Just Another File Sharing Service, Launches FolderLink (Video)
- Beyond Realtime Search: The Dawning Of Ambient Streams
- Another Reason Why I Wish All My Friends Had iPhones: Blipr
- The World Has Changed. Is Jigsaw Still Evil?
- NSFW: Free as in “my publisher will disown me after I pirate my book on TechCrunch”
- Each And Every Person With An iPhone Owes Me 100 Nazi Scalps
- MacStories Is Giving Away $10,000 Worth Of Mac Apps
- Avatar Is Like The iPhone Of Movies
- B&N Confirms Nook Shipment Delay, Says Only “very small percentage” Affected
- Google To Acquire DocVerse; Office War Heats Up
- Wine.com Uncorks iPhone App
| Nomadesk, Not Just Another File Sharing Service, Launches FolderLink (Video) Posted: 20 Dec 2009 08:00 AM PST
It’s the reason why we don’t exactly jump up and down out of sheer excitement when another such service launches and asks for a TechCrunch review. It’s what I keep telling my friend Filip Tack, CEO of Nomadesk, one of the many players in this field: that in order to make waves in this space it’s far from enough to build a great product, and that it’s at least as important to have a better-than-average distribution model and a PR and marketing strategy that allows you to get noticed almost on a daily basis by people who can spread the word. And then some. For what it’s worth: Nomadesk really has an awesome desktop client (Windows and Mac) that goes far beyond most of what competitors have to offer, and the distribution part of the equation is slowly coming to fruition as well (the company recently signed a deal with Bell Canada for the company to use Nomadesk’s solution as a white-label service they can offer directly to their customers, and has similar agreements in place and in the pipeline). But while the company has been consistently growing after its inception a couple of years ago, albeit slowly, the startup has received very little attention from tech press and industry pundits so far. I genuinely think that Nomadesk deserves more of it, as its service stacks up against most proponents in this space, particularly in the way you can control your virtual fileserver(s) from your mobile phone. Maybe a new feature being launched today will raise some eyebrows: Nomadesk is today introducing a welcome feature that allows users to share an entire folder – regardless of its size – with anyone with an Internet connection and a browser. Simply use the desktop client to right-click any folder you’d like to share, and you can relay the link to whoever you would like to share it with, and they don’t need to have the software installed let alone be a registered Nomadesk user to access all the files in the folder. As you can tell from the video below, it’s pretty easy to do and it ‘just works’, and the fact that there’s no folder size limit is very appealing. The only thing it really lacks at this point is the ability to preview documents and videos from the Nomadesk interface, but I’m told that’s coming shortly. For your background: Nomadesk (formerly Aventiv) was founded in 2004 and is based in Belgium (which, whether you like it or not, doesn’t exactly help with getting on influencers’ radars). The company has raised about €3.3 million euro (roughly $4.75 million) from GIMV, one of the largest investment firms in these parts, and while it has a direct sales channel through its website its strategy is to offer the service as a white-label plug and play solution to as many OEMs as possible. You can sign up for Nomadesk and enjoy a one-month free trial with no restrictions on their website, so I suggest you try out both the desktop client and the mobile website (nomadesk.mobi) to see how the service stacks up to its competitors.
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| Beyond Realtime Search: The Dawning Of Ambient Streams Posted: 20 Dec 2009 07:15 AM PST The following guest post was written by Edo Segal (@edosegal). It was 1993 and I had just decided to drop out of college. I was a graphic design major in a great art school but decided I want to start my second company. Knowing this would mark the conclusion of my studies there I set out to create my final project. I would write a short story, design and produce it in print. I put out an edition of 300 and gave it to my friends and people who inspired me like author William Gibson. Cut to November, 2009, when I returned from sitting on a panel at the second Realtime CrunchUp. I had urged the audience and participants that when thinking about the realtime web we should not consider the challenge through the lens of how consumers behave today. I argued that the future potential of the realtime web is not in the misnomer “realtime search,” as the consumption of this signal will predominantly be in what I call ambient streams. These are streams of information bubbling up in realtime, which seek us out, surround us, and inform us. They are like a fireplace bathing us in ambient infoheat. I believe that users will not go to a page and type in a search in a search box. Rather the information will appear to them in an ambient way on a range of devices and through different experiences. A few days after I got back from the CrunchUp, I was organizing some old documents when I stumbled on I Was Just Dead< , a cyberpunk short story I wrote 16 years ago. A story about a world of augmented reality. A world where at birth a chip is embedded in people’s brains creating a reality where they no longer discern what is “real” and what is augmented in their surroundings (Hear the audio-book or download the free eBook below). It was strange to hear my former self calling out about the importance of augmented reality from across the span of almost two decades of experiences in the digital world, half of which were spent solving the problem of how to filter the massive realtime stream. When trying to understand something potentially transformative, knowing what questions to ask is more than half the challenge. We are still in the early stages of these changes and don’t yet have the necessary metaphors to make the leap into the future. It is for that purpose that I want to suggest what I consider to be the building blocks of our next big evolutionary leap in how we use technology. The four main building blocks are:
Before these building blocks can create an ambient stream which is not overwhelming, all of this data needs to pass through a filter. The Holy Grail is a filter which only serves up information which is relevant based on who you are, your social graph, what you or your friends are doing now, what you or friends have done before, and in context of other information you are consuming. It needs to be delivered wherever you are and on whatever device or display can deliver the ambient stream: mobile phone, laptop computer, TV, heads-up display in vehicle or inside your glasses. The future of how ambient streams might enter our world is illustrated with the following simplistic diagram: Putting all of these building blocks together will be an industry-wide task. There are a relatively small number of people who have already managed to spend a lifetime thinking about this problem. It has bred several academic disciplines and many sci fi novels and films. These related fields include pervasive computing, everyware and the buzzword du jour augmented reality (AR). All of these technologies produce ambient streams. AR, in particular, (which is focused mostly on methods of how to render information visually) is capturing the imagination of innovators around the globe. The underling technologies that allow devices to marry data to physical locations continue to evolve at a fast pace, and with other disciplines jumping into the mix the magic is finally starting to happen. One only needs look at a teenager today as they do their homework, watch TV, play a game, and chat while watching their Facebook stream to get a sense for humanity’s expanding affinity to consume ambient streams. Their young minds are constanty tuning and adapting to an age of hypertasking .A very useful metaphor is that humanity is constructing its own synthetic sixth sense. An ambient sense that perceives the context of your activity and augments your reality with related information and experiences. Increasingly, we will be sensing the world with this sixth sense and that will change the way we collectively experience the world. Going back to the point made earlier, the watershed event is when we will be experiencing this “ambient sense” without being in a retrieval mode (i.e. not when we go to the computer or our mobile device to find information but rather as a product of our activity, location, and profile in context with the events and information available to us in a wired world). We will be seeing the first swells of this coming tsunami in the years to come, but for our children the ambient sense will play a bigger and bigger role as it slowly evolves and weaves itself into their consciousness much like Google search weaved itself into their memory functions. The challenges we face in terms of making real progress stems from the fact that the overarching goal is one that requires a multi-disciplinary approach across a myriad of data sets. While there are many companies executing in each of the quadrants few are in a position to access the full scope of data and therefore the ability to create the Holy Grail of filters is limited. This is where the world of walled gardens and deals with major search providers presents a challenge for progress. Many iterations and mistakes need to be made before we arrive at the right way to collate and filter all these different streams of data into an ambient sense. If only one or two companies are in a position to iterate, progress will be very slow and the probability of success diminished. For success, it is necessary to create an ambient sense that will manage to balance the level of interruption with insight and arrive at the true goal of any sufficiently advanced technology, which is to be transparent and taken for granted as part of the human experience. It may sound like science fiction, but there are engineers and entrepreneurs out there already trying to make it fact. Is it possible in the age of Facebook, Twitter, Google, and Apple for a startup to innovate across the entire stack to come up with this sixth sense? Chime in at #ambientstreams I Was Just Dead By Edo Segal
Guest author Edo Segal (@edosegal) has launched and sold several companies. In 2000 he founded eNow, which he sold to AOL in 2006 (after it was renamed Relegence). Today, he runs his Incubator/Investment vehicle Futurity Ventures, which recently launched a new search engine for wisdom. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
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| Another Reason Why I Wish All My Friends Had iPhones: Blipr Posted: 20 Dec 2009 05:44 AM PST
Then there are iPhone applications like Skype, eBuddy and Nimbuzz that allow you to call and/or IM your friends over the Internet waves, sans extra carrier charges. Here’s another fun one to add to the mix: Blipr (iTunes link). When you install the free app, you get a unique BliprID that you can share with your friends. Using that ID, your iPhone-carrying friends can add you to their contact list once they’ve downloaded and installed the software program from the App Store too. Once connected, you can use the tool to send messages to each other, with or without added sound bites. Since it supports push notifications natively, you’ll soon find that Blipr’s a much more enjoyable – and cheaper – way of communicating with your buddies than sending a text message that cannot include fart, animal, burp sounds or other short audio snippets. The tool also runs in the background, so once turned on you can do anything you want and still receive Blipr messages on your iPhone. Blipr also supports EMOJI icons if you have them enabled on your device. And finally, you can check the history of your conversations much like you can with text messages, and replay the sounds that came with them. The small company behind the app, Return7, aims to generate revenue from the app by offering paid sound packs (e.g. Christmas themed audio bites) straight from the app. Sadly for them, they’ve already jammed so many sounds (over 100) into the free app that there’s little reason for anyone to pay for more. (Via Orli) Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
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| The World Has Changed. Is Jigsaw Still Evil? Posted: 20 Dec 2009 01:15 AM PST
Even if you found out about Jigsaw there was no way to get the information removed. Hand out your business card to the wrong person and you could suddenly find yourself in vendor cold call hell. From my original post: “Jigsaw makes money while pushing costs to other people…[by] making private contact information public. The problem here is that Jigsaw's actions aren't easily found out by people getting constant cold calls and emails – it's very unlikely they'll know that these people got this contact information at Jigsaw in the first place.” Jigsaw has changed its model since 2006. People can now see if their personal information has been uploaded, and there is a process to have it removed, at least temporarily. And users are no longer paid cash to upload contacts. Instead they receive points that can be used to download contact other people’s contact information. Fast forward to today. Jigsaw continues to thrive, because there are lots of people out there who desperately want contact information for sales and business development purposes. Revenue is rumored to be around $30 million/ year. Is Jigsaw still evil? The company softened its approach to data by removing the cash incentive and giving people a way to remove data. But more importantly, the world has changed a lot since 2006. Facebook has been the catalyst for much of the change. Back in 2006 people still had a notion of privacy online, particularly around contact information. Today those walls are crumbling. People share information today without blinking that they never would have considered sharing in the past. Things that bother us today probably won’t matter much this time next year. But while sites like Facebook encourage us to share personal information with the whole world, and services like Loopt, Gowalla and Foursquare get us to voluntarily share even our location publicly, at least users still have a choice; it’s their decision. And most people still don’t want to give up their privacy. Jigsaw doesn’t give people that choice. And they’re sharing contact information, giving people direct access to your email and phone number. As I said nearly four years ago, that pushes the costs of their business, which is people having to deal with unwanted contact from vendors, to third parties. We have to have control over the distribution of this information. As long as it’s legal (in the U.S. at least) there will be companies that disregard morality and pursue profits. So for now, Jigsaw isn’t really evil. They’re just amoral. The first purpose of our government is to protect the rights of its people. Data privacy rights should really be no different than property rights. Jigsaw can’t come and put up posters on my house advertising their service. The same logic suggests they shouldn’t be in the business of selling my contact information, either. Since Jigsaw won’t get off my lawn, it’s time for the government to make them. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
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| NSFW: Free as in “my publisher will disown me after I pirate my book on TechCrunch” Posted: 19 Dec 2009 06:18 PM PST
My agent rocked back in his chair (a chair bought with 15% of my earnings) and laughed. “I didn’t say it was my advice, I just said there’s nothing they can do to stop you.” Before our meeting had taken its subversive turn, we had been talking about ebooks: a subject that’s on every publisher and agent’s mind this week after the decision by Stephen R. Covey, author of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, to make his books available exclusively on the Amazon Kindle. Covey’s move has caused a highly effective shit-storm because he made it in direct defiance of his paymasters at Simon & Schuster who won’t see a penny from the deal. ‘Seven Habits’ was originally contracted back in the pre-ebook days of 1989 and as such Covey claims that the electronic rights remain with him to do with as he wishes. Simon & Schuster, perhaps unsurprisingly given that they sold 136,000 paperback copies of the book this year, disagree – arguing that Covey’s contract precludes him from publishing any ‘competing works’. "Our position is that electronic editions of our backlist titles belong in the Simon & Schuster catalog, and we intend to protect our interests in those publications." said an S&S spokesman, ineffectively. It’s no huge coincidence that Covey’s decision came just a few days after Simon & Schuster, along with several other publishers, announced that they were postponing the ebook release of dozens of titles on the basis that Amazon’s $9.99 price point for electronic titles was cannibalizing hardback sales. Hardback sales – especially of popular titles – are one of the cash cows of publishing, costing just a few cents more to produce and distribute than paperbacks but with a far higher cover price. Ebooks on the other hand sell for less than paperbacks but, by and large, pay a larger royalty to authors: somewhere in the region of 25% of the cover price, leaving even less profit for the publisher. The hardcore book buyers who regularly buy hardback books are also the ones most likely to have an e-reader – meaning that delaying ebook releases should result in more hardback sales. Or so goes the publishers’ logic. The problem is that book sales are not a zero sum game. Your average Kindle owner, on discovering that a new release is not available electronically, is unlikely to set down his expensive gadget and drive down to Borders to buy the hardback. Instead he’ll simply choose a different title from the hundreds of thousands that are available. Hardcore fans of a particular author might still insist on the hardback, but they would anyway given that it’s much harder to get an ebook signed by their hero. Meantime, as ebooks become an increasingly important distribution channel for books, authors who aren’t convinced by their publisher’s digital strategy won’t hesitate to take matters into their own hands. New authors will simply choose a different publisher, while veterans like Covey will try to exploit loopholes in their existing contracts to maximise ebook returns. For Covey, the problem with Simon & Schuster’s digital strategy seems to be largely financial. The company that he has chosen to publish his new Kindle edition – Rosetta Books – has made a big play of the fact that they’re paying him a significantly higher royalty on sales than he was previously making on ebooks. Meanwhile Amazon has promised a huge site-wide promotional campaign for the titles. Other authors choose a publisher because their digital strategy reflects their principles. Cory Doctorow publishes many of his books with Tor Books because they agree to allow him to give away the electronic versions of his books, on the day of publication, without DRM protection. By contrast, when Apple refused to distribute the audio book of his ‘Makers‘ anthology in the iTunes store without DRM, Doctorow walked away from the deal rather than compromise his principles. I can’t fault my publisher on money: Weidenfeld & Nicolson has paid me not one, but two generous advances to write books about myself, and I’m certain I’ve cost them the same again in lawyers’ fees thanks to the legal threats I seem to attract prior to publication. I earn a decent royalty on ebook sales in the UK and Europe and, because I still own the US rights to my books, I was free to produce my own Kindle edition – limited to US customers – and take 100% of the profits. Equally, I can’t fault W&N on supporting my principles: largely because I don’t have any. No, the reason I found myself in my agent’s office earlier this week bitching about my publisher’s digital strategy was something even stronger than money and principle: my monstrous ego. Since moving to the US and starting to write for TechCrunch, I now have more people reading my words each week in North America than I do in the UK. Every week I delight in annoying commenters by promoting my war-of-the-worlds-winning book, to the point where people seem genuinely upset when I miss an opportunity to do so. And yet barely a day goes by without someone telling me they tried to find my book in the US, only to be disappointed that – due to publishing’s ridiculous obsession with territories – it’s only available outside North America. “It’s available on the Kindle” I say. “Pft” they reply, “I don’t have a Kindle”. In most cases I end up emailing them a PDF – a distribution model that doesn’t really scale. The logical solution would be to publish the PDF on my site. The print version of the book has been available for 18 months now – it’s had plenty of time on bookstore shelves and with the publication of the paperback in the UK and no US publisher on the horizon, any future sales are just part of the long tail. There’s already a pirated version available on Limewire – that’s where I got the PDF from in the first place – and the more time that passes, the easier it will be to find an unauthorised digital copy. By releasing the ebook myself for free at this stage of its life, it would do very little damage to sales but will get my words into the hands of a whole new US audience: readers who might then seek out other things I’ve written or pay me to write new things, or buy the properly-formatted Kindle edition with clickable footnotes – or any of the other myriad benefits that Doctorow cites for wanting to give his books away free. But that’s where W&N’s digital strategy lets me down. The company has the rights to all digital sales of the book outside North America and their parent, Hachette Livre, has decreed that they will not allow any ebooks to be distributed for free, or without DRM. If I make the ebook of Bringing Nothing available for free in the US then there’s nothing to stop foreign readers downloading it, which would breach W&N’s contractual rights. As I explained to my agent, owning the US rights to the ebook is pointless if I can’t do anything with them without pissing off my publisher. It was that point that he made his brilliant suggestion. The kind of suggestion that makes all those 15%s worthwhile… “Why don’t you do it anyway?” “What do you mean?” “I mean, you’re allowed to publish it in the US, so why don’t you just do it? If some people in the UK or Australia download it, then so what? It’s not your fault; it’s W&N’s fault for not having a global ebook strategy. And anyway, they should be delighted at the publicity.” They really should. So what if a few people outside the US download the free version? If they haven’t bought the book by now they almost certainly weren’t going to. And who knows, if they like the ebook they might be encouraged to buy a hard copy either for themselves or as a gift for a friend. They’re certainly more likely to pre-order the next book – which is what really matters to W&N at this point. The only question was how W&N’s legal department would feel about my agent’s advice. “I didn’t say it was my advice, I just said there’s nothing they can do to stop you.” Semantics. I emailed my publicist to ask her, hypothetically, what would happen if I somehow convinced a US-based publication to allow me to give away the ebook of Bringing Nothing – strictly to North American readers, of course – but with no real way to stop anyone else in the world downloading it. Her reply – after speaking to the lawyers – was brilliant: “The consensus seems to be that we can’t exactly stop you. But I’ve been asked to remind you that Hachette policy is not to offer free ebooks and all our ebooks are DRM protected. So there you are. Reminded.” Just another reason why I love my publicist. All that remained was for me to somehow convince a sufficiently popular US site to act as a patsy for my dastardly, egotistical plan. I sent an email to TechCrunch CEO Heather Harde, setting out my case and asking if TC could be that site. I was expecting it to be a tough sell, and I was right. “YES!” she argued. And so here we go. The entire ebook of Bringing Nothing To The Party – True Confessions of a New Media Whore: my egotistical Christmas gift to you, and your reward for enduring my weekly attempts to convince you to buy it. The main PDF download is here, there’s an HTML version (with linked footnotes) here and an entirely impractical DocStoc version below. The ultimate TL;DR. It’s published under a Creative Commons (Attribution-Noncommercial) License, so by all means re-distribute it however you see fit, as long as you link back either here or to PaulCarr.com. Also, if you do repost it anywhere, make sure you let me know the link either in the comments or on Twitter so I can say thank you. As an added incentive, I have ten copies of the paperback edition sitting on my desk and this time next week I’ll choose ten random re-posters and send each a specially customised copy. Finally it’s worth saying that, for all of my ego, the book is actually quite a hard thing for me to give away: its 275 pages tell the story of a very strange few years of my life – years that cost me my career, my reputation, the love of my life, and very nearly my freedom. In other words, it’s a real feel-good Christmas romp. I really hope you like it. (Update: a few Sony Reader users have reported font problems with the PDF. Aaron Quigley has created a revised version using different fonts, which is available here) Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
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| Each And Every Person With An iPhone Owes Me 100 Nazi Scalps Posted: 19 Dec 2009 05:58 PM PST
In Inglourious Basterds, Brad Pitt’s character, Lt. Aldo Raine, gives a speech to the group of soliders he’s recruiting for a special mission: “Each and every man under my command owes me one hundred Nazi scalps. And I want my scalps. And all y’all will git me one hundred Nazi scalps, taken from the heads of one hundred dead Nazis. Or you will die tryin’.” The speech is the driving force behind 100 Nazi Scalps, a new side-scrolling iPhone game that has just gone live in the App Store. The goal is very simple: Collect 100 Nazi scalps before you are killed. Using an array of different weapons, you must kill the Nazis coming at you, and use either a knife or a club to take their scalps once they’re dead. Morbid? Sure. But remember, these are Nazis. And Apple, which is famously cautious letting certain types of content into the App Store (well, sort of), apparently had absolutely no problem letting this game in (with a 17+ rating). Oddly enough, it looks like Apple has pulled the Mein Kampf app that it previously made available. Meanwhile, it was actually a piece of content related to Inglorious Basterds that contributed to Someecards app originally being rejected. 100 Nazi Scalps creators also don’t shy away from the fact that the game is clearly influenced by Tarantino’s movie. In an email, they write, “This quality side-scrolling arcade game was inspired by a long-expected movie by Tarantino 'Inglorious Bustards'. And although it is not affiliated with the movie, provides its fully own characters and unique plot, the game immerses players in that "killing Nazis" atmosphere so popular these days.” Fair enough. And though there isn’t much to the game, it seems well worth the $0.99 price to get 5 full levels of Nazi killing. Find 100 Nazi Scalps here in the App Store. By the way, if you’re interested in more Nazi-killing fare, Wolfenstein 3D is also available in the App Store in its full FPS glory. See 100 Nazi Scalps in action in the video below (if you don’t like cartoon violence, then the video is NSFW). Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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| MacStories Is Giving Away $10,000 Worth Of Mac Apps Posted: 19 Dec 2009 04:00 PM PST The Mac community and TechCrunch love giveaways, but nothing beats the MacStories giveaway. MacStories is giving away over 450 licenses to Mac and iPhone applications, that total to over $10,000. Crazy, right? The event, which is run by Federico Viticci, is called “The Christmas Apps Tree” and features interviews with designers, bloggers and developers, plus some cool guest posts and of course the big giveaway. Imagine one person having over $10,000 worth of Mac applications for almost nothing at all. All you have to do follow MacStories on Twitter (@storiesofmac) and tweet the following message:
You’ll also have to leave a comment on the blog post with a link to the tweet, and which apps you like the most. The contest ends on Tuesday, December 22nd, so get your tweets and comments in before time runs out! Oh, and if anyone can beat this giveaway — let us know! Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
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| Avatar Is Like The iPhone Of Movies Posted: 19 Dec 2009 11:47 AM PST
What do I think? I think I’m going to go see it again this weekend at an IMAX theater. Because the movie is awesome in 3D, but I want to see it in 3D on a 50 ft by 70 ft screen. Movies will never be the same after Avatar. Like the iPhone in the mobile world, this movie disrupts an entire industry. I didn’t know much about the movie until I read an article about it in Wired on a flight to Europe last week. A movie James Cameron has been working on since 1994, but he had to wait until technology caught up with his dream, and he invented a new kind of camera along the way. The amazing thing about Avatar isn’t the story – it’s simply a passable tale that’s part Pocahontas, part Dances With Wolves. But it’s a story played by ten foot tall blue people with tails who fly around on miniature dragons and generally kick ass. And suddenly the special effects in every movie you’ve ever seen seem trite in comparison. Jurassic Park type special effects, which seemed so awesome in the 90s, are now laughably dated.
The movie grossed just $27 million in its first day at the box office, which pales in comparison to Twilight Saga: New Moon ($72 million) and Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen ($62 million). But don’t forget that Cameron’s Titanic made just $28.6 million on opening weekend. And that movie did ok in the end. Avatar, like Titanic, is one of those movies you’ll want to see over and over. But don’t wait for the DVD. This is a movie that has to be seen in 3D. And for that you have to go to the theater. Go see it, you’ll thank me later. See the high definition trailer here. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
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| B&N Confirms Nook Shipment Delay, Says Only “very small percentage” Affected Posted: 19 Dec 2009 11:37 AM PST  The Barnes & Noble Senior VP of Corporate Communications and Public Affairs, Mary Ellen Keating, just confirmed to us that indeed some Nook orders were pushed back again. She claims that only a very small percentage of customers will not receive their Nook before Christmas though. B&N apparently offered affected customers both a holiday certificate in case the Nook was a gift and the $100 BN.com gift card we learned about from a commenter yesterday. It's hard to feel sympathetic to B&N. The bookseller obviously misjudged customer demand from the start, but inventory and supply management should have seen this latest shipping problem a lot earlier. Our tipster ordered his Nook back on November 12th and saw his order constantly pushed back at the last minute, which was no doubt a ploy by B&N to keep cancellations down to a minimum. All it takes to keep most consumers happy is timely, honest communication, not emails days after the delay is obvious.
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| Google To Acquire DocVerse; Office War Heats Up Posted: 19 Dec 2009 10:41 AM PST
Docverse lets users collaborate directly on Microsoft Office documents. Appjet, another recent Google Acquisition, has a related product called EtherPad, although that team is reported to be working with Google Wave and the EtherPad source code has been released to the community. DocVerse is a product Google is likely to keep. The company was founded by Microsoft veterans Shan Sinha and Alex DeNeui. Shia drove product strategy for SharePoint and SQL Server, $1.6B and $3.0B products, respectively. DeNui ran Microsoft SQL Server's web strategy. With DocVerse Google will have a direct software connection to Microsoft Office, allowing users to collaborate real time on documents. Microsoft is also moving in this direction with Office 10. In effect, Microsoft is countering Google Docs with the new Office. And Google is countering that move with the acquisition of DocVerse. For more on this fight, see Imitation Isn't Always Flattery: Microsoft Previews Google Apps Killer To Beta Testers. DocVerse has raised just $1.3 million, in 2008, from Baseline Ventures, Harrison Metal Capital and Naval Ravikant. The deal has not yet been finalized, says our source, but is past the term sheet stage. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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| Posted: 19 Dec 2009 09:19 AM PST There’s no shortage of wine-focused iPhone apps that help users access listings, varietals and recommendations on the go. Wine.com, a popular wine retailer with a fantastic domain name, is launching its own free iPhone app to help wine lovers everywhere find the perfect bottle. You can research and buy from Wine.com's database of 45,000+ wines, save them to your “cellar” to keep track of what you like and buy, create wish lists and more. The app also provides nifty recommendation lists, such as “90+ Point Rated Wines Under $20.” There are definitely practical uses of the app, which could be useful when you're out at a restaurant and need more info on a particular wine, or want to compare prices and see how much the wine has been marked up. Wine.com also recently released its API for third-party developers to create and enhance wine applications connecting to the site's e-commerce and wine database platform. The online wine industry is steadily growing with wine-related startups raising significant amounts of funding. Online wine store and community Vinfolio got a $4.5 million infusion recently and social wine review site and retailer Snooth raised $1 million earlier this year. And the newly re-launched Corkd has added a social stream and a new business model. In makes sense for these sites to venture into the mobile space to engage wine lovers on the go. Vinfolio and Snooth both have iPhone apps. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
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The hundreds of web and desktop clients built for sharing, backup or on-the-fly synchronization of digital files that have sprung up in the past ten years have made the whole concept of having the cloud at least partly remove your computer hard drive’s reason for being largely a commodity. 
I’ll say it right off the bat: there are tons of ways people can communicate from iPhone to iPhone, not in the least by simple SMS or, you know, calling each other. 
In 2006 
“So that’s your advice is it? As my agent? On the week my book comes out in paperback, I should produce my own pirated version and give it away free? Why don’t I just punch my publisher in the face? That would be less work.”
When I was growing up, one of the most popular PC games was Wolfenstein 3D. It was a great first-person shooter in general, but let’s be honest, there was one reason that everyone really loved it: The goal was to kill Nazis. Fast forward to this year, one of the most popular movies in 2009 has been Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds. It’s a great movie in general, but again, let’s be honest: People love it because it’s about killing Nazis. And a new iPhone game follows in this timeless tradition.
I’ve seen Avatar twice now, which is saying something when you’re talking about a nearly three hour movie that was released 36 hours ago. But we lined up on Thursday night for the first midnight showing. And then I saw it again yesterday at the
There’s no point in the movie where you can really tell the difference between real imagery and CGI. You become completely lost in the world of Pandora, the setting for Avatar. And if you thought 
Google, which is currently on 
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