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Dancing To The Drumbeat Of HTML5, New Pandora Is Brilliant, Beautiful

Posted: 12 Jul 2011 05:00 AM PDT

Perhaps you noticed that TechCrunch went through a bit of a redesign yesterday. Well, we’re not the only ones undergoing a major facelift this summer. Another site you all know and love will soon look completely different. More importantly, it will soon function much better. It’s a change that will affect millions. Get ready for New Pandora.

Yes, after years of familiarity, Pandora will begin a massive metamorphosis on the web this week. At first, subscribers of the Pandora One service will begin to get access to the new site (on a rolling basis). And over the next several weeks, everyone will. The transformation is pretty stunning — and I mean that entirely in a good way. New Pandora is beautiful. I cannot think of a single thing I like better about the old site.

“I’ve been looking at it for seven years. I was ready to give it a fresh coat of paint,” is how Pandora head of product and CTO, Tom Conrad, sets up the change as we sit down to go over the new site. “We started on it about a year ago. But even earlier than that, we’d been talking about it. There were core navigation problems that needed fixing. At first, we had been talking about more incremental changes, with the site still operating in Flash. But then last summer, it became clear that browsers with full HTML5 capabilities had gained enough support. We realized we could do the full Pandora experience without Flash,” he says.

That’s right, another site once completely reliant on Flash is breaking the addiction.

“Back in 2004, web browsers didn’t natively know how to play music. There was QuickTime, Real Player, and Flash. Flash was so ubiquitous back then — it was an obvious choice,” Conrad says. “Fast forward to last year, everything was changing. I had begun to get worried about site performance on the client side. The backend is fast, but as we kept adding features, everything would slow down for users. If you try to load Pandora right now on the web with a moderate amount of stations, it takes something like 10 seconds. By any reasonable standard, it’s an eternity,” he continues.

Conrad then brings up New Pandora and shows me how quickly it loads compared to the old site. By my count, it takes 2-3 seconds and then music begins playing. It’s an insanely faster onboarding experience.

And the site itself is stunning, yet familiar. “We wanted the experience to be completely fresh. But we didn’t want to force our listeners to completely re-learn the Pandora experience,” he says, noting that while things look much cleaner, the same basic layout remains largely intact. “We keep many of the same progressions from the old site,” he continues. “There are a bunch of great features on the new site, but we continue to be really committed to the idea that Pandora wants to be a simple solution.”

Conrad says that it was also about a year ago, as mobile growth was exploding, that he began to realize that Pandora’s app for the iPhone and iPad were actually closer to the essence of Pandora than the web version was. So it should be no surprise that New Pandora takes its design cues from the iPad app Pandora first built last year (this is similar to the way in which “New Twitter” was influenced by Twitter for iPad).

You’ll notice that along the top of New Pandora, there’s now a music control bar that stays in place as you navigate through the site. This is key. “Content on Pandora is deeper than most people realize. We needed a better way to present it,” Conrad says, showing me that you can now visit any page on Pandora while your music continues to play. And unlike the old site, where elements would open in new windows or clunky Flash overlays, everything is fluidly displayed using HTML. This alone will drastically alter the way many use the service — it will likely be much more of a source of music information to aid discovery.

Then Conrad’s eyes really light up. “Oh! The back button finally works!,” he exclaims. Due to the limitations of Flash, Pandora has long been crippled by natural back button usage in browsers. But not anymore. Want to go back from where you just came? Just click the back button. Again, the music in the top control bar will keep right on playing.

Conrad is also clearly excited by the fact that you can share an actual URL now thanks to the HTML usage. Previously, you had to rely on the share widgets to dynamically create an URL that would work for the Flash-wrapped site.

Lyrics also now expand on the homepage of songs for the first time. And comments finally feel native to the site. “We’ve got millions of people leaving comments on the site, but they never got surfaced. We might see a real explosion,” Conrad says.

“Another core change is the way the station creation process works,” Conrad says, showing me that when you click in the new “Create a New Station” box, a drop-down appears to help you. As you type, you’ll get suggestions for stations to create. These include bands, artists, genres, even comedians. And it’s not just keyword-based. Pandora will dynamically serve you recommendations based on the music genome core, your own voting and listening history, and social elements of the site.

Speaking of social, that’s another key to this revamp. ”I wanted to use the clean sheet of paper as an opportunity to rethink how you interact with music socially,” Conrad says. “We have tried lots of different angles on social over the years. Email, profiles pages, commenting, embeddable widgets for MySpace. Twitter, Facebook — then deeper Facebook integration. It just felt to me that we hadn't gotten the formula quite right in all those attempts,” he continues.

With New Pandora, the social experience is much more central to the site. Right next to “Now Playing” is your “Music Feed” which shows you the activity for all of your friends on Pandora. Every like, every listen, every comment. It’s a bit like Apple’s Ping, but a Ping people will actually use because it captures what everyone already does on Pandora — again, mainly listen to music and give “thumbs up” ratings.

There is also a “My Profile” area to keep track of what you’ve been doing on Pandora. These profiles have actually existed for some time, but few used them as they were very static and uninteresting. Now they look great and are useful. Clicking on any users’ profile allows you to easily see their activity and to follow them. Their activity will then appear in your “Music Feed” stream.

When you click on the “Share” button for each track on Pandora, you’ll still have the standard options to send to Facebook and Twitter, but the default is now to simply share on Pandora itself. For example, you can share what station you’re listening to and send that right to your music feed for all of your Pandora followers to see. “Pandora now has its own follower/following system,” Conrads notes. “We talked to our listeners and found that the vast majority are very conscious about spamming their friends on their other social networks. They’re more reluctant to share than I would have imagined,” he continues. “My hope is that as people develop followers on Pandora itself, they’ll become more comfortable with sharing in general.”

“I like to think of sharing inside of Instagram as training wheels for the other networks,” Conrad continues. What he means is that people at first are only comfortable sharing images with their contacts within specific apps, but eventually the gain confidence and branch out to share with other social networks.

“What I’m excited about is that this environment is a starting point for us to further evolve the social aspects of music. You can imagine all types of content flowing through our feeds,” Conrad says. “We could port in when artists that you like have new albums, for example,” he says.

Conrad is quick to point out that Pandora still has private profiles as well. If you choose to make your profile private, you’ll basically be invisible to the service at that point, he says.

So what do all of these social endeavors mean for Pandora’s relationship with Facebook? After all, they were one of the initial Open Graph partners — and Facebook is about to launch their own entry into the music space, supposedly with a number of partners. “We’ve had a really, really close working relationship with Facebook for many years. We continue to talk regularly about things. Mark [Zuckerberg] himself has called me with ideas for how to make Pandora more social over the years,” Conrad says. “Clearly, Facebook is the center of the world for social today. We’ll continue to be a part of that.”

That’s all Conrad would give me with regard to Facebook. So I guess we’ll just to wait and see if they’ll be one of the Facebook Music launch partners.

Going back to HTML5, clearly Pandora is making a bet here that this is the future of the web. But that’s an easy bet to make at this point. Still, they’re thinking bigger too. “HTML5 is the only technology that has a shot at being a ubquitous solution across a wide range of computing experiences — tablets, TV, automobiles, etc. We still have along way to go, but it's possible,” Conrad says.

“I’m not ready to predict our answer for things like tablets will be HTML5 down the road. But it’s nice to have the infrastructure in place,” Conrad notes, while saying there’s still a lot to love about native apps as well. “We’re devoted to delivering the best possible experience.”

And while over half of Pandora’s listeners now come from mobile devices, Conrad notes that the web will always have a place in their heart — it’s where Pandora began. And now it’s where Pandora is evolving.

Again, to be clear, this initial roll out of New Pandora will begin with Pandora One subscribers first. The idea there isn’t to bring in more Pandora One subscribers, Conrad promises. Instead, they simple would like a smaller group to test the new site with (as well as reward those paying members). Pandora is also hard at work to perfect the advertising that will be the a part of the free version of Pandora, which most users use. You can expect this to be largely the same as it is now on the current Pandora site — large ads splashed in the background.

Conrad credits his “incredible engineering team” for pulling off this transition from Flash dependance to HTML5. And while it’s clear that the Flash addiction has been kicked, Conrad notes that they continue to have fall-back Flash elements for browsers not fully HTML5-compliant.

Conrad says the work on New Pandora really touched everyone at the company. There have been well north of 100 people working on this project by this point, he says. Compare that with the 8 to 10 people who built the original site. And remember, they were building this in secret while also going through an IPO!

“It’s the best work we’ve done,” Conrad says simply of New Pandora. Upon using it myself for the past several days, I have to agree. It’s brilliant.

You can find out more about New Pandora here.

Intel And Others Invest $2.6 Million In Mobile Entertainment Studio skyrockit

Posted: 12 Jul 2011 04:31 AM PDT

Mobile application developer skyrockit this morning announced that it has raised $2.6 million in new funding from Intel Capital with participation from Asuka DBJ Partners and former Linden Lab CEO Mark Kingdon.

skyrockit plans to use the additional capital to boost its existing entertainment products and services, which includes the virtual Zippo Lighter for the iPhone, and develop new applications.

The company works for carriers such as AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile, handset manufacturers, media companies and brands.

Another one of its services, ROMPLR, is a music remix platform for iOS and Nokia that currently has over 1.1 million users across more than 95 countries.

Skyrockit is based in San Francisco and was renamed from Moderati (previously Faith West) back in 2009.

The startup claims it has generated more than $300 million in revenue for its partners and more than 100 million pieces of its content have been consumed.

Panasonic Toughbook CF-H2: Awful Tough

Posted: 12 Jul 2011 04:28 AM PDT

The Toughbook has always been a tough sell. It’s always looked like a cross between a robot turd and the chest-plate for dirt-bike armor. It looks like they’ve improved this design considerably this time, offering a 1.7GHz Intel Core i5 processor with 2GB RAM and 160 GB hard drive with an optional 128GB SSD.

This rugged laptop weighs 3.5 pounds and has a 10.5-inch display. It can last 6.5 hours on one charge and supports twin batteries. There is also a built-in fingerprint reader as well as integrated port flaps.

This thing is a tank, to be sure, and can be dropped from about waist height without breaking. I’ve run over one before, and aside from a surface crack, it survived quite nicely.

It is available this month for about $2,400.

Product Page



Takabisha: Japan Gets World’s Steepest Roller Coaster (Videos)

Posted: 12 Jul 2011 04:11 AM PDT

If you plan to travel to Japan soon and you’re not among the faint of heart, you might want to visit the Fuji-Q Highland, an amusement park that just added a very special new attraction: the world’s steepest roller coaster. The so-called Takabisha [JP] accelerates to 100 mph, has a 43m drop and a 121-degree freefall.

The Japanese roller coaster beat the former record holder, the Le Timber Drop in France, which measures “just” measures 113.1 degrees.

Fuji Q Highland invested $37 million in the development of the Takashiba. One ride takes 112 seconds and costs $12.50.

This video shows what it’s like to ride it:

This time lapse video shows the Takabisha being built:

Oh By The Way, CloudFlare Raised $20 Million Last November

Posted: 12 Jul 2011 04:00 AM PDT

It’s a rare startup that closes a $20 million venture round and doesn’t bother to mention it more more than half a year. But Cloudflare, the almost-winner of TechCrunch Disrupt: SF 2010, did just that. They raised a healthy $20 million last November, on top of a more modest $2.1 million raised in 2009.

“We’re just now starting to spend the money we raised last year, CEO Matthew Prince told me yesterday, so we thought it would be a good time to announce it.” New Enterprise Associates led the new round, and previous investors Venrock and Pelion Venture Partners also participated, says the company.

The company, which offers websites a dead simple and very inexpensive content delivery network plus security and analytics platform, is on a tear. In May the websites using CloudFlare had 3.5 billion page views. Today their customers have 7 billion monthly page views, from 200 million unique users. And it’s growing about 50% per month. We’re also a customer.

That’s a significant portion of the entire online population. And that breadth of network, says Prince, helps CloudFlare keep sites fast and secure. “CloudFlare has stopped 2.1 billion attacks against its users' websites” says the company. They have twelve data centers around the world to optimize delivery and keep things humming.

The company also has positive gross margins, meaning their revenue pays for the actual cost of delivering the service (but not headcount and other real costs, yet). They charge just $20/month to run a site, plus $5/month for additional sites from a user. There are no bandwidth or additional costs. That’s a ridiculously small fee to charge, and the big CDNs like Akamai, charging massive bandwidth and storage fees, must be taking note.

PanAmp: A Clever iOS Music Player Replacement

Posted: 12 Jul 2011 03:53 AM PDT

It’s surprising that PanAmp even exists, given Apple’s penchant for refusing to allow apps that replicate current iOS functionality, but clearly someone at Big Cupertino let this app slide for a few good reasons. PanAmp is a music player replacement that allows you to create playlists on a fly, a feature that is sorely missing from the standard iOS player. It also adds a few bells and whistles to music playback.

The main interface is fairly basic. You can search, order by artist, album, or song, and view current playlists. To create playlists you simply flick a song to the right and to view more information on a song – including the album from whence it came – by flicking it to the left. Tapping a song brings up a cascade view of that song’s album.
IMG_0673 IMG_0672 IMG_0671 IMG_0670 IMG_0669 IMG_0668
To be clear, PanAmp is a music player replacement that has full access to your iTunes library and is AirPlay compatible. It is a shell for the current iTunes music interface and it even supports access through the lock screen.

The question is “Why?” Why would you replace the current iTunes music player? Why would you use this instead? I suppose if you found the current interface abhorrent, this would be a good replacement. However, I think the main draw here is the queue management that makes selecting items for ad hoc parties, events, and bat mitzvahs especially easy.

The app will be officially available on July 14 for iPhone. It will cost $2.99.

Product Page



Google Offers Beta Expanded From Portland To New York And The SF Bay Area

Posted: 12 Jul 2011 03:19 AM PDT

Following the debut of Google Offers, currently in beta, in Portland last month, Google is today launching deals for New York and the San Francisco Bay Area. Also starting later today, you can purchase, view and redeem a Google Offer of the day with the free mobile application Google Shopper 2.0 for Android.

The app will bring you nearby deals, even if you haven't signed up for receiving daily deals in the Portland, New York and the Bay Area regions by email.

Once you've bought or saved an offer, you’ll see it appear in the ‘My Offers’ tab in both the mobile app and when you visit the Google Offers site.

Google Offers will expand to Austin, Boston, Denver, Seattle and Washington, D.C. in the near future, the company says.

Fitview Gives Personal Trainers A Comprehensive Fitness And Coaching Platform

Posted: 12 Jul 2011 03:00 AM PDT

A new startup is launching today in the fitness tech space that aim to help personal trainers better connect with their clients and the general public. Fitview is launching as a comprehensive SaaS for fitness trainers to upload a fitness curriculum, keep track of client progress and more.

With Fitview, which was built by former Apple product architects, personal trainers can create groups for the client base, distribute news, results and updates to groups; schedule and share workouts and events; track attendees and performance; maintain client information; and message clients.

Users can also view and update personal workouts, track individual progress and goals and more. And Fitview comes with both mobile (iOS app) and web capabilities.

For background, Fitview has raised funding from a number of investors including the former CEO of Palm Ed Colligan. Founder Calin Pacurariu was a former director of developer solutions and Treo product manager from Handspring, and a product lead at Apple (his name actually appears alongside Steve Jobs' on a few patents). And FitView is already being used at a number of gyms including CrossFit.

I think there is actually a need for a platform like Fitview that allows trainers and clients to connect over the web as well as in the gym. For example, I’d love to to be able to access my workout schedule that I have with my trainer on the weekends so I could try to replicate it in my own gym.



Personalized Training Platform Gain Fitness Launches iPhone App

Posted: 12 Jul 2011 03:00 AM PDT

Gain Fitness, a startup that creates personalized workouts based on certified trainers' expertise, is launching an iPhone app today to allows fitness enthusiasts to access programs on the go. Founded by former Googlers, Gain Fitness launched to give users personal trainer quality exercise without the hassle of researching workouts or booking expensive trainers.

Not you gain bring these workouts into the gym with the Gain iPhone app, which costs $2.99 in the App Store. The app features 700-plus exercises (strength, plyometric, callisthenic, yoga), and unique workouts, custom-tailored to you. The startup is also announcing that Crunch Fitness founder Doug Levine has also joined its advisory board.

The new app will create workouts based on free time, fitness level, body, goals and other factors. And the apps will recommends exact exercises, sets, reps, and rests, so tracking is easy. And for those who are using the app for multiple workouts per week, Gain’s app will create a different workout every time to keep things fresh.

The beauty of Gain is that it democratizes the act of having a personal trainer. Hiring a trainer to give you dynamic, tailored workouts can be an expensive task. For $2.99 Gain is giving anyone the ability to access professional, high-quality workouts that are also personalized to your fitness goals, body type and more.



Daily Crunch: Warmth Edition

Posted: 12 Jul 2011 02:52 AM PDT

Ad Serving Technology Startup Adzerk Secures $650,000

Posted: 12 Jul 2011 01:10 AM PDT

Adzerk is in the midst of closing a $650,000 seed round from a mix of institutional and angel investors to build a “next generation” ad serving platform that includes features like real-time reporting, ultra-fast ad serving and network building support.

The company is raising seed capital from Great Oaks Venture Capital, Robert Senoff, Invite Media co-founders Nat Turner and Zach Weinberg, former Accipiter CEO and GM at Microsoft Brian Handly, Halogen Networks’ Peter Horan and Neil Patel.

Adzerk already counts Stack Overflow, StatSheet and a number of ad networks as its customers.

The startup grew from two niche ad networks – The Lounge and Ruby Row – which were run by James Avery, founder of Adzerk and also the co-founder of TekPub, a site devoted to helping developers learn from high-quality screencasts.

The additional capital will be used to enhance the platform to provide publishers and ad networks with more flexibility and control over their ad serving.

New iOS Gestures Point To Death Of The Physical Button

Posted: 12 Jul 2011 12:32 AM PDT

Even as purists complain about the rise of the capacitive i.e. “invisible” button, it seems Apple may be taking steps to remove them in further updates to iOS. Alongside the ability to drop apps anywhere on the screen – instead of just on a grid pattern – the new iOS Beta includes some accessibility functions that make it easier for folks with handicaps to access various phone functions. This includes the ability to add a virtual home button right on the screen.

Does this mean the next iPads and iPhones will eschew buttons entirely? Probably not. The button will be hard UI conceit to pry from the cold, clammy fingers of the average iOS user and, I suspect, we’ll see more of this in smaller, PMP devices rather than on full-bore devices like the iPad. Without a physical cue, no matter how innocuous, it’s actually quite hard to get around a flat touchscreen. Imagine whipping out your phone and not being able to tell if it was upside-down immediately. While this matters little on the software side, it matters a great deal for telephony.

Ultimately, all of these beta leaks are, at best, examples of what we can expect to see – and then probably not use – in the new iOS. Core functionality really won’t change, but it’s nice to catch a glimpse of what could be coming down the pike.

via Nowhereelse



Copygram Lets You Download All Your Instagram Photos

Posted: 11 Jul 2011 11:59 PM PDT

Like similar service Instaport, Copygram allows you to easily download all your Instagram photos into one .zip file. In addition the service provides a web interface for the popular photo-sharing app with the ability to search through other people’s Instagrams, download the pics from other users’s feeds as well as print them out through its partnership with SnapFish. You can also share any Instagram through a Copygram link.

Because Instagram has yet to figure out its online presence, web interfaces using its API are nothing new. Copygram (random typos notwithstanding) is the most comprehensive I’ve seen so far. In the nice days since its launch, it’s had over 130K images downloaded and over 540 archives “developed.” Also: It introduced me to the Instagram fanboy blog Instagramers, which is straight up really cool and dorky at the same time.

If any other fans wants to “go deeper” on the appeal of Instagram, you can read Nathan Jurgenson’s take in “The Faux-Vintage Photo Part III: Nostalgia for the Present.”

Kleiner-Backed Katango Organizes Your Facebook Friends Into Groups For You

Posted: 11 Jul 2011 09:03 PM PDT

Perhaps there’s something to these friend circle/list/groups after all.

As you’ve doubtless heard by now, Google recently launched a social network that revolves around one core idea: people want to share different things with different groups of friends. Of course, it’s an idea that isn’t all that novel — Facebook has allowed users to do just that via its friends lists, which launched years ago. And it’s barely been touched by their userbase.

But is the problem that people don’t care for this selective sharing, or that they simply don’t want to put the effort into building out their friend lists?

A hot new startup called Katango thinks it’s the latter, and it has the answer: it’s going to sort your friends for you, hooking into your Facebook account via Facebook Connect and automatically generating Lists based on your interactions with your friends and a host of other data. You can download their app right here.

The company has some strong credentials behind it — founded a year ago, it’s since raised $2 million led by an investment from the Kleiner Perkins S Fund (Bing Gordon is on Katango’s board). Cofounder and Chairman Yoav Shoham is a professor of computer science at Stanford; the other two cofounders, Michael Munie and Thuc Vu, are Stanford PhD grads. And they recently brought on Yee Lee as VP of Product, who was an early employee at PayPal, Slide, and founder at TipMobile and Crave.

So what exactly is Katango launching?

Today the startup is introducing step one of its plan: an iPhone application, which just went live on the App Store. Fire up the iPhone app, connect it to your Facebook account, and it will generate a handful of Friend lists based on a variety of factors: how closely you’re connected on the social graph, your stated geographies, and, most important, how you’re interacting with each other on Facebook. I haven’t gotten to try this out for myself yet, but if it works as advertised, the lists Katango produces should be surprisingly accurate. VP Product Yee Lee says that there will likely be some errors, but the friends that don’t fit in a given group can be easily flicked away.

Once you’ve created your lists in Katango, you can selectively share content to the friends in those lists in a handful of ways. The app gathers contact information from both your phone’s address book and Facebook. And you go to send a message or photo to a group, the app will send it via email, Facebook message, or push notification, depending on which contact information you have for them, and if they have the Katango app installed themselves.

But the iPhone app launching today is really a proving ground for the technology. Eventually Katango plans to let other services and apps tap into its algorithms, allowing them to integrate its auto-grouping functionality (this wouldn’t be a purely benevolent move, either — Katango would also be able to improve its algorithms from that additional data). And the Katango will eventually be on other platforms, like Android, and a web-based version of the app.

Katango is tackling an immensely challenging problem, but if they get it right, the resulting engine would be invaluable. I asked Lee if the company has gotten any offers from Facebook and Google yet. He chuckled, but did say they’ve talked to a couple of “big names in social”.

The iPad Was Built For Something Like StumbleUpon, Now They Have A Worthy App

Posted: 11 Jul 2011 08:56 PM PDT

Since its inception, StumbleUpon has always been one of the most perfect lean-back apps. Long before anyone even used that term, the StumbleUpon toolbar took various pages on the web and allowed you to quickly jump between them to find new things of interest. This concept seems perfect for a device like the iPad. Unfortunately the app just wasn’t very good. Until today.

StumbleUpon has just launched an entirely redesigned and rebuilt iPad app to finally bring the experience iPad users deserve. “I feel like stumbling is perfect for the iPad — for sitting on the couch. It never took off like we wanted,” founder Garrett Camp says, talking about the first iteration of their app for the iPad (which was built by a contractor). “We decided we were going to re-do it from the ground up. We re-did the interface. It’s much better than before. It’s almost like a black version of Flipboard,” he says.

And that’s a good comparison. Flipboard is often looked at as the pinnacle of media consumption design for the iPad sor far. But it’s mainly concerned with text. StumbleUpon’s app takes on both web pages and things like pictures, and videos, which have become vital parts of the stumbling experience — particularly on mobile devices.

Camp notes that mobile usage of StumbleUpon is soaring. On the iPhone and Android devices, the service is growing 35 percent month to month, he says (compared with 20 percent overall). Since the mobile apps launched last August, a full 10 percent of stumblers now visit that way, he notes. With this new iPad experience, Camp believes they can take tablet usage which is now hovering around 1 percent and at least triple it. Again, it’s a form factor that just seems natural for the service.

The iPad experience now has things like swipe-to-stumble, the ability to flick through content. And the app pre-loads content, meaning they look to see what you’re next stumble will be and they pre-load it so you can flick and see the new content instantly.

But the coolest addition in Camp’s view is the Social Bar. It’s a new gray bar that resides at the top of the app that shows the user who submitted the page you’re on and links to their profile. “Right now, you can’t easily access who liked the page. You might not know who it came from,” Camp says of the mobile apps. They’ve updated the iPad, iPhone, and Android apps to now all have this. “It’s a much more social kind of experience,” he says, noting that in the future, they’ll extend it to including friends’ comments and tweets, etc.

“I think we’ll now fit into other slots of people’s free time,” Camp says of the new iPad experience. “It’s just like the iPhone experience that people love, but it’s so much better on the big screen,” he says.

You can find the new StumbleUpon app for iPad in the App Store here.

Technicolor LED-TV Dreamcoat Is Fantastic But Somewhat Impractical

Posted: 11 Jul 2011 08:24 PM PDT


This brave fellow plans on wearing this thing at Burning Man, which you may know is in the desert. I can’t think of anything I’d like to be wearing less than a full-on labcoat loaded down with PCBs, batteries, and so on.


The TV plays NTSC video and it’s 160×120 (for smooth resizing of 320×240). The PCB is flexible, so no need to worry about breaking it when you’re twiddling with the knobs on your shoulders. The batteries last about an hour, which is probably longer than it will take this poor guy to die of heat exhaustion out there with this thing on.

[via Geekologie]


The TechCrunch Redesign: A Copy-And-Paste Hatemail Template

Posted: 11 Jul 2011 06:59 PM PDT

It is an absolute, hard-and-fast law that whenever a high profile site undergoes a significant redesign, the reaction from regular readers will be one of outrage.

Not puzzlement, not measured criticism, but full-on outrage — as if they’d woken up to discover that someone had crept in and rearranged the features of their wife’s face.

And so it was with some trepidation that I visited TechCrunch a few minutes ago and found that our much-vaunted redesign had “gone live”, complete with gigantic headline fonts, weird underlapping images and — oh God — a new logo. A new logo that, to my artistically untrained eye, looks like it was drawn with the sharpened tip of a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle.

Lead designer Dave Feldman posted a spirited, preemptive defense of the redesign here, explaining how it meets the demands of the “bold, raw, fast-paced” AOL-owned technology blog that is TechCrunch. I found Dave’s post fascinating, not least because I had no idea that someone called Dave Feldman worked at TechCrunch. (Hello Dave!)

As for the redesign — frankly, I’m not certain how I feel about it. I’m not sure if I like the fact that the top headline is yelling at me. I’m undecided whether the animated logo thing at the top is bold, raw or fast paced. And I’m really in two minds about the “ALSO ON AOL TECH” box at the bottom right.

But that’s kinda the point: it’s really far too early for me — or anyone else — to judge whether the new design is better than the old one. Like learning to use a new cellphone, it’ll take us all a few days to get beyond the newness of the thing and figure out whether it’s actually easier to use. And it’ll take even longer than that for us to have the objective measurements — page impressions, load times; crap like that — to determine whether the new look is a “success”.

And yet none of that should — nor will — stop you, our valued readers, from weighing in to tell us how much you hate every single thing about the new design. Some of you have already chipped in with useful feedback on Dave’s post, variously describing the design as “hideous”, “horrible”, “the worst redesign ever” and “not even in the same league as Gizmodo” (ouch). But what about the rest of you? If I know anything about Dave (and I don’t) it’s that, having worked for months on this new thing, he simply can’t wait to hear how much you hate the fruits of his (and his team’s) labors.

To make it even easier for you to share your thoughts, I’ve created a handy copy-and-paste note for you to customize and mail back. Simply paste the text into an email, check the boxes that apply, and then send it to becausewegiveashit@techcrunch.com.

You’re welcome!

<START COPYING HERE>

Dear TechCrunch,

Congratulations on your redesign. I just wanted to drop you a quick note to let you know that IT FUCKING SUCKS. Seriously, this is the ugliest piece of shit redesign I’ve ever commented on — and I’ve commented on hundreds: Gawker, Last.fm, MySpace and every AOL logo change since 1991.

Specifically, I hate the… (CHECK ALL THAT APPLY)

Oversized fonts [ ]
Obnoxious images [ ]
Links to AOL in the footer [ x ]
Incomplete meta tags [ ]

…but most of all I hate the new logo. Put bluntly, it… (CHECK ONE)

Sucks [ ]
Really sucks [ ]
Sucks balls [ ]
Sucks ass [ ]
Sucks both ass and balls at the same time [ ]

And what’s with all the… (CHECK ONE)

White space [ ]
Lack of white space [ ]

…?

I mean, I get that this is, like, the third time TechCrunch has been redesigned in its history, and that I’ve been complaining for months about how slow the old site was — but as a… (CHECK ALL THAT APPLY)

Professional designer [ ]
Self-important asshole [ ]

…I could have made this look so much better. What’s more, for reasons I haven’t entirely thought through, I hold…

AOL [ ]
Arianna Huffington [ ]
Rupert Murdoch [ ]
The Roswell Aliens [ ]

….responsible for this whole mess. You guys have really sold out. In fact — you know what? — this is the LAST TIME I’M VISITING TECHCRUNCH. I’m deleting you from my RSS feed. How d’ya like THEM….

APPLES [ ]
ANDROIDS [ ]

…?

Seriously, I’m gone.

Bye.

See ya.

Don’t try to convince me to stay.

Lalalala I can’t hear you.

Signed ____________________________

PS I love you guys!

<STOP COPYING HERE>

Samsung Wave 725 Specs Trickle Out, Bada 2.0 On Board

Posted: 11 Jul 2011 06:55 PM PDT

Back in April, three Bada-powered phones were leaked onto the web, only one of which had a name: the Samsung Wave 578. At the time, all we knew was that the trio would sport NFC chips, and that they all run Bada 2.0. Now, one of the mysterious unnamed handsets has been discovered in the Bada 2.0 SDK by BadaWorld as the Samsung Wave 725.

Specs include a 3.65-inch HVGA display with 320×480 pixels of resolution, a 5-megapixel rear camera, a VGA front-facing camera for video chat, along with support for NFC, WiFi and Bluetooth 3.0. The Wave 725 will run Bada 2.0, which, if you live here in the States, probably means nothing to you. But it should, because the Bada platform seems to be doing well overseas and we're excited to see how America receives the new OS. Bada 2.0 will bring with it multitasking, an enhanced UI, and better security.

We're not sure what pricing will look like on this bad boy, but from the specs, we can only assume that this handset will be somewhat wallet-friendly. Samsung plans to launch the Wave 725 in December.

[via Unwired View]

Red Bull Creation Spawns Wheelie Mobile, Spinning See-Saw, And Other Crazy Contraptions

Posted: 11 Jul 2011 06:51 PM PDT

Red Bull gives you wings, right? Well, apparently it also gives 16 teams the energy necessary to build brand new and quite random inventions as a part of Red Bull's annual Red Bull Creation event. In a nutshell, Red Bull throws out a secret theme at the very beginning of the weekend and teams are asked to create gizmos and gadgets that exemplify that theme, all in a matter of 72 hours.

This year, it was "Energy In Motion," and that's exactly what we saw there. From spinning see-saws to a "WPV" (wedgie-powered vehicle), imagination was certainly not lacking at McCarren Park in Brooklyn yesterday.

It would be almost stupid to try and describe what we saw there without images:

Maker: Innovative Thirst
Creation: A clay-powered mobile pod with suspended electricity-generating swing set.

Maker: NYC Resistor
Creation: A steam-powered off-road trolley car, with a nice bronze-style finish.

Maker: Hack RVA
Creation: A hacked up shopping cart that does its own hardcore poppa-wheelies, fittingly named the Wheelie Mobile.

Maker: Donner Party 2.0
Creation: A electric hybrid tricycle fitted with a dryer that also works as a humongous blender. Strawberry daiquiris anyone?

Maker: Team Doublewide
Creation: A robot called "The Amazing Cyclo." Think Johnny 5, but as a puppet, with an LCD face and a single wheel made of shoes for a foot. And a remote control, of course.

“Team Award” Winner: Techshop
Creation: A spinning see-saw that lifts riders 12 feet in the air, while an accelerometer waits for the perfect moment to trigger an attached Polaroid camera, ultimately grabbing amusement-park-style candids of the riders' faces.

Drum roll please! And the winner is…

Maker: 1.21 Jigawatts
Creation: Alright, this one's a bit more difficult to explain. Basically, 1.21 Jigawatts wired an enormous wooden hamster wheel into a wireless network and gave it its own phone number. According to its maker, the massive wireless wheel could receive up to 60,000 one-word text messages at the same time, and then print out the texts on the pavement by rolling along the ground. In all honesty, the only purpose of this contraption is to make people stop in their tracks, drop their jaw, and stare. Obviously, that's exactly what 1.21 Jigawatts created: a show-stopper.

Team Award winner Techshop went home with a brand new Makerbot 3D Printer, which creates little 3D sculptures from a scanned images (pictured below). 1.21 Jigawatts, Red Bull Creation's grand prize winner, left the show with $5,000 and four 40W Hobby Laser Cutters.

HTC Status Goes Up For Pre-Order On AT&T

Posted: 11 Jul 2011 06:30 PM PDT

The Facebook-centric HTC Status smartphone is now available for pre-order from AT&T, with an official launch date of July 17. We knew the Status (once the ChaCha) was officially headed to AT&T, and we had pegged the launch for July, but we didn't know pricing or availability details until today. The HTC Status will cost you $50 with a new two-year agreement, an understandably low price given the phone's old-school form factor and awkwardly small screen.

To be specific, the screen measures 2.6 inches, which is much smaller than almost any of the screens we've seen in the last year, and has a resolution of 480×320 pixels. On the back, you'll find a 5-megapixel shooter, along with a VGA front-facing camera for video chat up front. The Status runs Android 2.3.3 Gingerbread over an 800MHz processor. The phone comes with support for WiFi, Bluetooth 3.0 and a microSD card.

Additional specs include a 2.6-inch display offering 480×320 pixels of resolution, a 5-megapixel rear-facing camera, and a VGA front-facing camera for video chat. Running Android 2.3.3 Gingerbread, the Status is powered by an 800MHz processor and has support for a microSD card, Wi-Fi connectivity, and Bluetooth 3.0.

Clearly, those specs aren't exactly awe-inspiring — but wait just one second. Don't write the phone off just yet. The Status' claim to fame is its Facebook integration, which, had it not been stuck in an arguably craptacular phone, would be pretty freaking cool. Basically, whatever the user is doing at the moment, whether it be listening to music, flipping through pictures, or surfing the web, can be posted directly to Facebook by simply pressing that Facebook button in the bottom right corner.

That's all well and good, but the truth of the matter is that if you're more serious about your phone than you are Facebook, this probably isn't the device for you. On the other hand, it's probably a pretty budget-friendly option for a teenage son or daughter.

[via BrightHand]

Redesigning TechCrunch: We Picked This Logo Just to Piss You Off

Posted: 11 Jul 2011 06:09 PM PDT

It’s been months in the making. It’s taken innumerable twists and turns along the way. It’s survived an acquisition. It’s been a challenge and a privilege to coordinate. It’s my incredible pleasure to present the all-new, completely redesigned TechCrunch. With special thanks to our launch sponsor, Dell.

As Michael Arrington posted on Friday I’m Dave Feldman, and I’ve been acting as product manager for the TechCrunch redesign since the beginning of 2011. The project began last fall before AOL’s acquisition of TechCrunch. By December it needed product management — providing feedback and direction to the design agency (Code & Theory), defining product requirements, understanding TechCrunch’s unusually collaborative editorial process, determining information architecture, and ultimately coordinating the development and launch. Mike asked AOL’s Brad Garlinghouse for a product manager & project lead. He turned to AOL’s head of Consumer Experience, Matte Scheinker (my manager). Matte’s team specializes in “strategic projects” where additional product, design, and/or process expertise is needed. He agreed to take on the project and put me on the case.

TechCrunch is bold. It’s raw. It’s fast-paced. With 50 articles crossing the home page daily we couldn’t simply redesign the reader-facing site; we had to think about the CMS too. We wanted to support you, the readers, because you read every article we post. We wanted to give you better context across posts and topics, new ways to slice and dice content so you can dig into what interests you. We get a huge amount of RSS traffic and wanted to keep providing a full experience to those readers too.

We went through more rounds of wireframes and logos than I can remember. After our eighth rejected visual design I locked myself in a room with Code & Theory’s creative director and we tweaked, discussed and revised until we had something we both liked, a precursor to what you see here today.

The Site

This is a simpler TechCrunch. The carousel of featured posts is gone. In its place are featured articles pinned to the top of the river (look for the little pushpin icon) and features in the header when there’s not an ad. We’ve replaced the chaotic sea of social networking icons with a single, unified Share button. A consistent, site-wide look & feel means less noise distracting you from the content.

We’ve rolled CrunchGear, MobileCrunch, and TechCrunchIT into techcrunch.com/gadgets, techcrunch.com/mobile, and techcrunch.com/enterprise respectively, so it’s easier to reach the articles you want to read. (Some older posts from those sites may disappear for a couple days during the transition, but they’ll be back.) We’ve created richer ways to present articles: as you scan down the home page you’ll see a variety of layouts, each chosen by the author to best represent her work.

Today’s TechCrunch should be a little faster. We’ve built a new codebase from the ground up. We’ve batched HTTP requests, moved API calls server-side, and tinkered with the load order to improve performance. That’s just the beginning: starting next week we’re going to optimize the hell out of this thing.

I’ve seen a lot of comparisons to the recent Gawker redesign — mostly fear that we’d follow their lead. I think we’re all too hard on Gawker: they saw shortcomings in the traditional blog format and decided to try something new, something app-like. They got a lot of things wrong. But the core idea is an intriguing one, and I applaud them for taking the risk. That said, the Gawker approach wasn’t right for TechCrunch. If they ran away from the blog format we doubled down, addressing those same shortcomings by refining and extending it.

The CMS

One of my favorite things about WordPress is its extensibility. We’re on the same platform today as yesterday, but have built new tools for writers and editors. Featured and pinned articles get expiration dates, so editors don’t have to go back and manually un-feature things. Selecting a post layout is as simple as clicking a button. Automated resizing of images means faster load times and fewer distorted photos. And choosing which articles go on the home page is a single-click affair.

The Look & Logo

The new logo is our most controversial change. I love it, though that’s no accident: we went through many, many options with Code & Theory before finding one we liked. It’s bold, simple, and versatile. It works in any context — from a tiny monochrome icon to a mosaic on a poster. It fits the TechCrunch brand perfectly. And no, we didn’t build it in Minecraft. We used AOL Paint, which comes free on the AOL CD and has this sweet UltraLogoMatic2000 feature.

The overall look & feel reflects the bold, sometimes irreverent nature of TechCrunch. It doesn’t hold tea parties in the backyard or hang out with the black turtleneck crowd at the hippest art galleries. It's a design that breaks more news than its competitors, that loves the code junkies working 22-hour days to build world-changing products. It’s the first and only design Heather, Mike and I looked at and said yeah, that’s it. It screams TechCrunch.

I think of today’s release as a beta. There’s so much more to come: enhanced social features; ways to navigate across articles and dive into topics; new options for viewing posts; better navigation; and improved filtering of content. Even better tools for writers and editors. Vastly improved performance.

Ultimately TechCrunch is about the tech industry, the personalities who cover it, and the readers who track it obsessively. Above all this redesign is about providing the best vehicle for that. We’ll keep enhancing, refining, and revising to get it right. Stay tuned.

The Bowers & Wilkins C5 In-Ear Headphones Will Hold Your Ears In Sweet Harmony

Posted: 11 Jul 2011 05:49 PM PDT

Bowers & Wilkins has a new set of ‘buds that your ears are letrally crying to hear. Seriously, hear that soft hum? It’s your poor ears telling you to ditch those stock Apple earbuds and opt for B&W’s new hotness instead.

The high-end audio firm has always been known for its high-end sound but also high prices. The B&W P5 over-the-ear cans carry a $299 price. With that, the new C5 in-ear headphones are downright affordable with their $179 price – relatively speaking, of course.

As is the case with most things high-end audio, B&W didn’t announce the exact specs. Instead the press announcement drools on about the colorfully-named proprietary features: Micro Porous Filter and Secure Loop . The latter is easily deducted from the pic above to mean the ‘bud’s loop that wraps around the ear to keep it in place. The Micro Porous Filter is a clever name for the noise-isolating (note: not noise canceling) surround on the earbud’s tip. Yep, that rubber thingy.

Joking aside, the C5s likely sound like heavenly angels singing Coldplay’s greatest hits. B&W makes quality kits. Expect the new earbuds this August in the US and Canada for $179.

PayPal VP: Supporting Payments In The Physical World Is Critical For PayPal

Posted: 11 Jul 2011 05:17 PM PDT

eBay owned PayPal has been making some interesting acquisitions over the past few months that clearly show the direction of the company in capturing payments flow from digital goods, and physical products at a local level. The company bought local payments and advertising company Where for over $100 million in April, snapped up mobile payments company Fig Card and most recently shelled out $240 million for mobile payments company Zong. The payments giant is clearly serious about mobile and local payments and is buying its way into commanding the space. In terms of future strategy, PayPal believes that by 2015 digital currency will be accepted everywhere in the U.S., from local businesses to large chains.

Of course, this ambitious goal is easier said than done. Considering that PayPal is a digital product and doesn’t have built in reach to local businesses with point of sale systems, scaling to the local level is going to take a significant amount of work. We were able to chat with Sam Shrauger, VP of global product and strategy for PayPal about the company’s future strategy to dominate the ‘digital wallet.’

Shrauger tells us that PayPal’s plan is less about making the wallet digital and more about letting people take advantage of technology to use money better. As for making this a reality, Shrauger says that letting people use PayPal in the physical world is critical for the payments technology.

He explains that innovating in the payments space in the physical world is about giving customers mor options to pay, as opposed to offering a single technology. PayPal wants to add more ways your money can work for you, beyond just the payment itself. As for what that means, Shrauger declined the reveal the company’s plans but did say that PayPal would be launching new products later this year dealing with this issue.

There are two advantates PayPal has in its favor. First, the company now has over 100 million active users, which is impressive. And second, the company’s userbase is increasingly using mobile devices to pay for products. PayPal recently announced that it was upping the estimates of the amount of mobile payments transactions using the technology this year; doubling the estimate to $3 billion in mobile total payments volume (TPV) in 2011.

Payments in the physical world is going to be a big step for PayPal and I’m very curious how the company is planning to use its technology in this expansion. For Google, NFC and mobile phones are part of the gateway for payments in local, with the launch of Google Wallet. For Square, small businesses popularity and ease of use have been helping the mobile payments startup grow like crazy.

It’s not the first time I’ve pointed out that PayPal has an ambitious plan on its hands by becoming the digital wallet. And it should be interesting to see what killer technology the company has up its sleeve later this year.

Check out this video below in which PayPal President Scott Thompson challenges his employees to use only digital currency to pay for all of their purchases.

Formspring’s Marketing Moment Comes With Its First Promoted Question Of The Day

Posted: 11 Jul 2011 04:26 PM PDT

Social Q&A site Formspring, where more than 3 billion questions have been answered so far, had a marketing moment today. For the first time, the Question of the Day was a promoted question: “What do you think would happen if apes took over? #apeswillrise”

The question promotes the upcoming movie Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes, which is the prequel to the classic Planet Of The Apes hence the #apeswillrise hashtag). The question has been answered more than 76,000 times, which is a decent level of engagement for a one-day campaign. (You can see my answer above). It is on track to beat yesterday’s non-sponsored Question of the Day, which garnered 148,000 answers.

This is not the first brand campaign on Formspring, but it is the first promoted Question of the Day. Formspring uses the Question of the Day to keep up overal engagement with its users. Formspring is a service where people ask each other questions and spread those questions on Facebook and Twitter. It is close to hitting 3.5 billion answers, and now has 25 million registered users.



ROAR! Apple Puts Out The Call For Devs To Submit OS X Lion Apps

Posted: 11 Jul 2011 04:01 PM PDT

A Lion is quickly approaching. OS X Lion — aka OS X 10.7. Some are saying it will hit this week. Other signs point to next week. Either way, it’s coming very soon. How do we know? Apple has just put out a call to developers asking them to submit their OS X Lion apps for the Mac App Store.

The email message (pasted below) notes:

OS X Lion, the eighth major release of the world’s most advanced operating system, will soon be available to millions of Mac users around the world. Submit your Lion apps for review now so they can be on the Mac App Store when Lion ships this month.

A GM build of Lion was released to developers last week. By most accounts, it is solid and seems ready to go. The hold up now may be Apple’s preparations to ship new MacBook Airs (and perhaps even Mac Pros) alongside the new OS.

One key feature of OS X Lion is the Mac App Store. While the store has been available for OS X Snow Leopard since early this year, it will be fully baked into Lion. That is likely to make it the main way OS X apps are distributed. The fact that Apple is only distributing OS X Lion this way as well (though you apparently can also go to an Apple Store where they can download and install it for you) says all you need to know.

You’d think Apple will need at least a few days to start reviewing these Lion-specific apps from developers. You can be sure they’ll want a range of them ready for launch. Will there be enough time to review a bunch of them before the rumored Thursday launch? We’ll see.

Regardless, “this month” only has 20 days left…
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