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07 Sep 2011 00:06

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Tech: Michael Arrington to AOL: You guys said editorial independence!

  • cause Facing an editorial crisis caused by the announcement of something called the CrunchFund, AOL forced Michael Arrington to step away from his baby, TechCrunch, in an attempt to ease up on an apparent conflict of interest that gave Arianna Huffington fits.
  • reaction Arrington isn’t having that. Earlier today, he reiterated the editorial independence AOL was supposed to give him. He gave them three options: Keep TechCrunch editorially independent, sell the site back to the shareholders, or he walks. Boom.  source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

06 Sep 2011 10:49

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Tech: Have a problem with Google’s service? Contact The New York Times.

  • closed In what’s proven to be a fairly sketchy marketing tactic, some users of Google Places have taken to marking places run by their competitors as “closed,” causing much frustration among business owners who rely on that to let people know that they’re still open.
  • open In the past, Google has taken a hands-off approach to the issue, which has rankled business owners. In fact, it took a New York Times article for the company to take the situation seriously. You know, pretty much like this particular situation. source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

04 Sep 2011 16:42

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Tech: Is now the time to ditch your RSS feed? Possibly.

  • That’s what Ars Technica’s Jacqui Cheng suggests. “RSS was essentially created so that Internet users could stay up-to-date with every single posting made on a particular website,” she writes. “This was, of course, back in the day when every site on earth didn’t post 150 new stories per day, and your friend’s blog feed didn’t contain 60 cross-posted Twitter musings to crowd out the one real post per week.” We’re with her. Despite the fact that we follow a lot of news, keeping up with the grindy nature of an RSS feed is an exercise in force-feeding, and one a lot of people simply don’t have time for. In fact, just 6 percent of Internet users use RSS regularly, and somehow the other 94 percent don’t miss out on too much. We love our RSS readers, but if you choose to follow us on Twitter instead, we totally understand. Because we go months without actually checking into Google Reader, and days without checking into Pulse, because we already caught the important stuff on Twitter already. source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

03 Sep 2011 13:50

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Tech: CurationSoft: The latest tool on the content curation block

  • We have to parse through a lot of content quickly. So do lots of other people. In an influential post we like citing, Robert Scoble once put this point into strong emphasis, calling it a “billion-dollar opportunity.” Content curation’s biggest problem is that it always takes a lot of steps, and the app that figures out how to simplify the process is going to win. We’re, specifically, the target audience for this, so we have a lot of thoughts on the matter. The closest right now is Storify, though we’ve seen a lot of competitors show up with the express purpose of wooing Robert Scoble. The latest? CurationSoft. This Adobe AIR app allows you to easily drag-and-drop content from YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, or various blogs into your browser in a platform-agnostic way, which is pretty much its best trick. (Tumblr? Google Plus? WordPress? Works the same way.) From there, we worry a little. You can only do a single search at once, which seems like a step back in the age of multi-tab Twitter clients, and the pricing seems a little off ($40 for a single-user license? For just a year?) We think the idea is good, but the execution needs polish. Would like to see where this app is a year from now. Robert Scoble’s billion-dollar opportunity is still out there, kids. source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

02 Sep 2011 19:51

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Biz, Tech: Netflix’s crappy day: As its stock falls, a new competitor shows itself

Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

02 Sep 2011 13:13

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Tech: Michael Arrington, TechCrunch another example of incestuous tech ethics

  • As we wait to see just how involved Arrington will remain, as a media company that should supposedly hold up some sort of journalistic ethics, AOL is coming out looking quite sleazy.
  • The Atlantic Wire’s Rebecca Greenfield • Offering her take on the debacle revolving around Michael Arrington and TechCrunch. Here’s the issue we see, as outsiders: Michael Arrington has always been as much of a player in Silicon Valley as he’s been a journalist, so there’s always been a small conflict of interest there. But by making the “player” element a bigger part of his job title by creating a venture capital fund, he makes himself a target. But wait. Tech journalism is already incestuous and ethically broken. A few examples: Business Insider’s Henry Blodget was once a financial analyst barred from the securities market for fraud. The WSJ’s Kara Swisher is married to a female Google exec (which she discloses). And Gizmodo parent Gawker Media pays for stories that can draw millions of eyeballs to their sites. The difference is that AOL, which bought TechCrunch a year ago, is a big company that knows better. Or should. And the end result is that it makes AOL look really bad. source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

02 Sep 2011 00:24

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Tech: Blog design engine Ownzee cool, but could use some structure

  • It’s like a visual blogging app. Remember a few months ago, when we featured a service called Webdoc? Well, we had a lot of fun with that. We saw a lot of potential for the idea of allowing people to design posts on the fly (sort of a next-generation Tumblr or Storify), though the service had a few things we thought it could improve upon. Ownzee appears to be using better, less-cumbersome technology for its format. Here’s a roundup.
  • The good First off, the wide-screen format appears to be using a rich-text editor reminiscent of Aloha, and appears to be easier to use. You can do cooler things with more real estate, obviously, though we think the font palette is a little lacking. (No Helvetica?) It’s clear that, though it’s similar to Webdoc, it’s built from a stronger starting point. As they improve the service, this will prove beneficial.
  • The bad Unlike Webdoc, Ownzee appears not to support external HTML or CSS, which would extend the format a bit. However, this wouldn’t be an issue if the service offered easy-to-build templates, so you’re not reinventing the wheel every time. As a result, the format lends itself less to doing serious cool things and more to being a social meme-maker like Canvas. It doesn’t have to be this way, guys!
  • The unfortunate Sadly, The dealbreaker for us is the price — we like the idea, but wonder if charging a $5 monthly fee for this is the way to go. Unlike SquareSpace, you can only do so much with the format in its current iteration, which makes the technology, cool as it is, a little less-useful. Our suggestion: Make it freemium, then offer InDesign-style design tools (grids, rules, extra fonts) for a fee. source
  • » Overall thoughs: There is a market for a good, serious, on-the-fly design tool that takes the lessons from CMS tools like Tumblr and WordPress and converts them to a totally-visual HTML5-only format. The thing that we see right now is not that tools like WebDoc and Ownzee are bad ideas — far from it — but that their scope is too limited. These design tools, while quite advanced, lack structure and full context. If we were Ownzee, we’d be looking to offer ways to quickly structure designs – say, grids, good templates, solid themes and ways to prevent end-users from repeating themselves — that would give it print-design-style conventions. This is why Storify (which basically does this with social-media storytelling) is taking off. Just think how much better posts like these would look if end-users had starting points. We’d certainly use something like that.
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink
 

31 Aug 2011 21:48

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Tech: An iPhone prototype walked into a bar and … poof. (Yes, again)

  • 2 iPhone prototypes lost at bars; Apple workers probably shouldn’t drink source
Posted by samimain • 0 Comments • Permalink

30 Aug 2011 21:09

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Tech: Get this: Hewlett-Packard making more Touchpads to keep up with demand

  • The speed at which it disappeared from inventory has been stunning. We have decided to produce one last run of TouchPads to meet unfulfilled demand.
  • A statement from Hewlett-Packard • Revealing that the company’s late-round success with the HP TouchPad was enough that they’re going to produce more of them and sell them at fire-sale prices. Which is hilarious, and tells us all that the decision to stop selling them was perhaps a little too rash. Good work, HP! source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

29 Aug 2011 23:14

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Tech: Mario + Portal = Mari0, a game we absolutely want to play now

  • Continuing with our trend of posting all things Mario, this as-yet-released mashup of Super Mario Bros. and Portal pretty much puts the kind of twist on two different classic games that seems like magic in action. We approve. source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink
 
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