Back in November, at our Realtime CrunchUp event, I sat on the geolocation panel with members of Twitter, Foursquare, SimpleGeo, GeoAPI, Hot Potato, and Google. At one point, I raised the question if location was going to be the next battleground between startups large and small, much like social identity plays (Facebook Connect vs. Google Friend Connect) and status updates (Twitter vs. Facebook). All of the panelists indicated that it wouldn’t be, because they could all get along. How sweet. Sadly, I don’t believe them. I believe they might think that right now, because it’s still very early in the game. But it’s still a game, and people are going to play to win.
I’m sure some of them would counter that because location data is fairly standard right now, and moving easily between services, all of them will win. But that’s not true either. While location, as a whole, will win, there will be individual companies that end up ahead of others in the space. More to the point, there will be one or two services that people will go to for their social location data. That’s what we’re moving towards. And the bigger companies are starting to realize it. That’s why today we saw what
Have you ever wondered why the coffeemaker in your kitchen doesn’t have a subwoofer attached to it? Us too! And if you’re going to put a sub on there, you might as well include a Mac mini, right? And when you really think about it, isn’t the only case worthy of holding all that stuff an iMac DV? It just makes sense.
That’s why, we’re guessing, tinkerer Klaus Diebel put together this incredibly useful device that will make your coffee, play some thumping tunes, and do your computing tasks as well. He tells us it was something like that — he really enjoyed the look of the gumdrop iMac, and has experimented with it a few times, creating both a mailbox and a birdhouse from the computer’s case. And this one just sort of snowballed — when he found that the Mac mini’s optical drive slot fit perfectly with the iMac’s slot, without any alterations at all, it had to happen.
Due to hit the Cydia store momentarily, Matthias Ringwald’s BTstack Keyboard app allows users to type text into any iPhone application using an external Bluetooth keyboard. Built on the open source BTstack project, BTstack Keyboard runs a daemon in the background of any jailbroken iPhone 3G, iPhone 3GS or iPod touch with Bluetooth support. As you type text on the keyboard, the daemon generates synthetic keyboard tap events; the effect is the same as if you’d typed that text using the on-screen keyboard.
You will need to install BTstack and the BTstack Keyboard packages on a jailbroken 3G or later iPhone or 2nd generation or later iPod touch. The software has been tested with an Apple Bluetooth keyboard, a Think Outside Stowaway Universal keyboard, and a Palm Wireless keyboard. There’s no reason to think it won’t work with any standard Bluetooth keyboard, i.e. one that uses standard BT protocols.
Human-powered mobile answers service ChaCha has raised $7 million funding, according to an SEC filing. The company has confirmed the funding but declines to name investors. This brings ChaCha’s total funding to nearly $70 million.
ChaCha has been the subject of a little bit of ridicule at TechCrunch since its launch, thanks to its entertaining snafus and some issues with its business model. Despite its various problems over the years, the company has been able to raise a boatload of money adding $4 million to the pot earlier this year.
In Mac OS X (and back into OS 9 history), a creator code is a hidden value attached to a document and bound to a preferred application, allowing the OS to know which application to use for opening that file. This is particularly helpful for filetypes that have multiple valid ‘target’ apps (JPEG, PDF, etc.); the creator code lets Preview ‘own’ its PDF or image files, TextEdit automatically open its text files, and so on.
Those who are familiar with the process are already (painfully) aware that Snow Leopard ditched this system a while back (some great details at Ars Technica). For many users — especially Windows switchers — the new method is an improvement, allowing a more standardized response to double-clicking a document file that’s driven by the file name extension (.doc, .html, and the like). If you’re in the former group, though, and missing your creator codes, the developer behind PageHand has a treat for you: LaunchCodes.
What a crazy 10 years, right guys? It’s really flown past; the highs, the lows, the stuff in the middle that didn’t seem very impressive one way or another. For our final Engadget Show of the decade, we asked site founder Peter Rojas to join us for a look back at our picks for the most important and / or interesting gadget developments since 2000. A hardcore crowd came out just after a gigantic snowstorm to witness the proceedings, and now you get your chance to see how it all went down. This is a long one folks, so grab some popcorn and settle in for the show!
Note: The HD download below is on its way, so hold tight. The iPhone / iPod version and RSS versions are all fine.
Telefonica (NYSE: TEF) is buying up VOIP provider Jajah for $206 million in cash. The company—which had raised $35 million in venture capital funding—had been up for sale for more than a month now and several companies, including Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) and Cisco (NSDQ: CSCO) had also been said to be interested. In recent days, however, there were reports that Telefonica had beat out those two companies in the bidding.
In a release, Telefonica says that it will offer Jajah’s services to “customers wishing to extend their communication experience”—beginning in Europe, where it operates under the name O2. It will retain the Jajah brand.
It’s a problem worthy of an episode of Intervention. Yes, I’m ashamed to admit that my wife is addicted to the Live Cams app on her iPhone.
It all started when she was searching for new apps in the App Store, and she noticed a little app called Live Cams [US$0.99, iTunes Link]. It sounded innocuous enough — the app provides a way to search, browse, view, and in some cases, control live web cams all over the planet. At a price of less than a buck, Live Cams couldn’t harm anything or anybody, could it? We were both sure that the developer, Barry Egerter, couldn’t have any evil intentions, so she bought Live Cams and installed it on her iPhone.
Well, Rupert Murdoch is going to love this. More people around the world get their news online from Google News than from CNN or the news properties of the New York Times. In November, 2009, according to comScore, Google News attracted 100 million unique visitors worldwide, making it a larger news site than CNN (66 million) or the combined properties of the New York Times (92 million). But do you know who is even larger? Yahoo News, with 138 million unique visitors worldwide. Funny how you never hear Murdoch complaining about Yahoo News.
Still, the top two sources of news online are Yahoo News and Google News, followed by the New York Times sites and CNN (China’s QQ.com News would come in fifth with 53 million visitors a month, followed by the BBC and MSN News with about 48 million each?the Wall Street Journal Online is way down the list with only 6.8 million).
Six months ago I wrote about a startup called Shopkick (it was then called MOBshop). The company won’t disclose much of what their eventual product will be, but they’ve attracted some of the most high profile investors in Silicon Valley: Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Reid Hoffman.
Here’s what CEO Cyriac Roeding will say about Shopkick which is scheduled to launch in 2010: they aim to aims to bridge the gap between the mobile phone and the physical shopping worlds.