CrunchGear

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• Reminder: TechCrunch/CrunchGear Meetup In Taipei Tomorrow, October 5
• Good idea: automated phone recycler that gives you store credit
• Micathermic Heaters: Do they work well?
• Psystar shuffles its counsel – in other news, that lawsuit is still happening
• Palm defies USB authorities, restores iTunes compatibility for Pre
• Oh dear: There will be a movie based on the game Spore
• Darth Vader on the highway
• Google Maps for iPhone now serving up ads
• How Microsoft will lift us out of the IT-spending dumps

Reminder: TechCrunch/CrunchGear Meetup In Taipei Tomorrow, October 5 Posted: 04 Oct 2009 01:54 AM PDT I'm in Taiwan now and as announced last week, there will be a TechCrunch/CrunchGear meetup tomorrow (Monday, October 5) in Taipei at 7.30pm (open door at 7pm). We are holding the meetup with our partner and co-organizer Chili Consulting, a Taipei-based innovation strategy firm. Every guest should have received the invitation by now, and please remember the venue changed (the schedule remains the same though). Thank you very much for the incredible interest in the meetup, which is sponsored by Taipei- and San Jose-based hardware maker IPEVO.

Good idea: automated phone recycler that gives you store credit Posted: 03 Oct 2009 04:30 PM PDT While gadget recycling services like Gazelle are handy and more people should take advantage of them, this in-store “ecoATM” is perhaps an even better idea. You put your old phone in there, identify it, and it checks for signs of wear. You get a quote on the spot, redeemable in store credit or whatever — or if it’s not worth anything, you can have it safely recycled and they’ll plant a tree on your behalf. The first ecoATM, installed in a furniture store in Omaha (???), appears to work fine, having bought over 20 phones on its first day. I imagine if they’d installed it at a Best Buy or in a mobile retail store, they might have gotten a bit more, but they consider it a success and that’s what matters. They’ll be rolling out more over the next few months — check back later to see if one’s coming up near you.

Micathermic Heaters: Do they work well? Posted: 03 Oct 2009 02:48 PM PDT Fall is here, don't get me wrong. It's NOT time to start thinking about winter yet – no sir. However, let's start thinking about winter. I live in an old apartment in Boston and the radiator in my office is half the size of all the other radiators in my place. As such, it doesn't put out much heat in the winter time and I've had to resort to space heaters (which I'm not too fond of) and Snuggies when it gets cold. These micathermic heaters have caught my attention, though. They're kind of like space heaters but they're super thin and can be wall-mounted. I saw this particular one in the SkyMall catalog today and wondered if anybody that's reading this post either owns this exact model or one like it. The product description says the following: Energy-efficient Micathermic Heater uses less electricity because it makes you comfortable sooner. Micathermic heater uses 80% convection and 20% reflective heat to quickly warm all the air in a room so you’re more comfortable immediately. Silent operation and a 12-hour digital timer make this heater ideal for the bedroom. Includes adjustable digital thermostat to maintain desired temperature, and heats up in about a minute. When room temperature reaches the desired level, the ECO function automatically cuts one-third of the power usage. Automatic overheat and tip-over safety shut-off. Includes casters for portability, but they can be removed so the panel can be mounted on a wall, if desired. Wonderful, yes, I like where this is going. This model can apparently heat a 150 square-foot room – the exact size of my office. It all sounds a bit too good to be true, though, especially at $120. So my question to you, if you'll humor me, is how well do these things actually work?

Psystar shuffles its counsel – in other news, that lawsuit is still happening Posted: 03 Oct 2009 01:32 PM PDT Nobody expected that this Apple-Psystar affair would be rapid or easy, but at this point it’s positively interminable. Psystar has just switched out a lawyer, who probably just about keeled over from constantly parrying Apple’s well-founded injunctions against his client’s business. Here’s hoping Mr. Welker takes a well-deserved vacation. Even reporting this may be making too much out of it; it’s stated that he never received any money from Psystar and didn’t even have any direct communication with them. Perhaps the firm they do work with hired him as a jackal, poring through law-books in an effort to find fresh allegations to throw at Apple. After all, every day they aren’t shut down is one more day they’re selling hot Macs.

Palm defies USB authorities, restores iTunes compatibility for Pre Posted: 03 Oct 2009 01:22 PM PDT Oh dear - it's on now. Either Palm's making a stand — or they've stepped in it big time.

Oh dear: There will be a movie based on the game Spore Posted: 03 Oct 2009 01:16 PM PDT Here’s the latest movie based on a video game that’s sure to be horrendous: Spore will be turned into a movie, ladies and gentlemen! Only five people will be allowed in the theaters at a time in order to prevent piracy, jkjk! Right, so 20th Century Fox picked up the rights to make the movie, and Robots director Chris Wedge is currently penciled in to direct. Greg Erb (he wrote Rocketman, which I liked as a youth) and Jason Oremland (who doesn’t seem to have done much of any great import yet) will write the movie. They were also involved with the upcoming Disney movie The Princess and the Frog. I wonder what that’s about… Nowhere do I see Will Wright, the game’s creator, being involved. That’s not to say that he won’t be involved, but you figure that a man so important as Will Wright would at least get a mention of being involved. One thing’s for sure: it cannot be any worse than 2012.

Darth Vader on the highway Posted: 03 Oct 2009 11:48 AM PDT This is not the car he was driving. Despite cutting a impressive figure at 2.02 meters, having the finest weaponry and starfighters Imperial credits can buy, and controlling the Force, it seems that Darth Vader has gotten stuck on the side of the road. Dave Prowse was the physical form of Darth Vader for the original Star Wars trilogy, with James Earl Jones as the voice. The BBC reports that Lord Vader was en route to the 501st UK Garrison’s (which ironically is dubbed “Vader’s Fist”) reunion at the National Space Center in Leicester when his car broke down. Traffic officers assisted Lord Vader in getting from the M1 in Northamptonshire to the event. Officer Chapman later remarked, “Meeting Darth Vader is definitely one of the strangest situations I’ve been in.” The car that Lord Vader was driving also has a interesting bit of history to it. The Mercedes was previously owned by actor Kenny Baker. At only 1.12 Imperial standard meters (which are identical to Earth measurement units), Mr Baker was the man inside R2-D2 for the original trilogy. Lord Vader told the BBC, “He used to keep a little ladder inside the boot so he could climb up and put his suitcases inside. When he had finished, he’d put the ladder back and used a cord to shut the boot. I decided to leave the cord there as a reminder of the car’s previous owner.”

Google Maps for iPhone now serving up ads Posted: 03 Oct 2009 10:00 AM PDT The free ride is over, ladies. Go ahead and fire up the Google Maps Apps for your iPhone (or iPhone touch), and you may well run into something you've avoided for so, so long: an ad. That's right: Google Maps now shows advertisements. Things fall apart.

How Microsoft will lift us out of the IT-spending dumps Posted: 03 Oct 2009 09:00 AM PDT I was on a panel a few weeks ago with Rob Enderle a few weeks back and he was asked by an international journalist what he expected in terms of financial news in the next few months. He made a very interesting point that, being an Apple fanboy, I ignored at the time. He said that Windows 7 would drive a whole new wave of hardware buying and inflate (in a good way) IT spending. I filed this tidbit away next to my thoughts of maybe one day buying a Zune, but then I cracked open the HP Envy 13 and thought back on my own recent experience with Windows 7— and what he’s saying makes sense. A few calls later and I found that a number of IT guys I know are genuinely excited about installing Windows 7 in their shops, guys for whom Vista didn’t even register. We’re about see an IT renaissance, and it will be driven by Microsoft. Remember: Apple may change the way we think, but Microsoft changes the way we spend. Windows 7 is a solid operating system with lots of great IT-oriented features, including an XP emulation mode, an imperative for skittish IT guys. It also runs fairly well on smaller notebooks (although Envy wasn’t technically a netbook, at least by HP’s emphatic definition, it’s still thin and light) and it has most of Vista’s eye-candy with none of the distrust most users had when they saw Vista’s eye-candy when it first came out. Harbinger of things to come. There are three forces at work here. First, there is the IT shop. They haven’t upgraded their machines since XP. XP was, at best, 2001 technology and by 2006 over 400 million desktops running the OS. Assuming that even half of those were paid XP seats at major corporations, and you understand that this monster would not just roll over and die. It costs money to upgrade — money companies did not have in late 2007 through all of 2008. Now, with a bit of a loosening in the credit markets, IT departments are going to be upgrading en masse, causing a surge in PC sales and sales of attendant products like drives, memory, and monitors. Second, consumers are just about done with netbooks. This is an unpopular opinion, I know, but as evidenced by the Envy, the underpowered netbook will be replaced by a more powerful, slightly more expensive mid-tier model that will appeal to everyone, businesses included. Instead of a 15-inch Dell monster, road warriors will carry lighter Windows 7 machines with low-voltage but highly optimized components. Netbook advocates cite cloud storage and a lightweight OS, but when Internet Explorer takes forty seconds to load GMail because you’re running a single core Atom, you’re going to have upset customers. It’s getting harder and harder to go from a peppy computer to a slow one simply because the difference in speed is so staggering. The netbook will remain but it won’t be anybody’s every day computer. Finally, it’s time for an gamer upgrade. The holidays are upon us, there are no new consoles to buy, and a new cohort of PC gamers is appearing: kids who grew up on powerful consoles like the XBox 360 and the PS2/PS3 family, kids who started gaming perhaps at age 10 and are now 16 or so, who are looking for a bit more power. Windows 7 will give them that slight perceived boost and, since it will come with new machines, it will increase the install base by accretion. As much as we slobber all over Apple, Microsoft makes the world go around. Google or no Google, the desktop belongs to Redmond and Windows 7 is one of the building blocks of a strong future economy. Here’s hoping they can maintain their Office hegemony but even if they don’t, there’s always Google Wave.

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