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If you’re a news junkie and you’re on Twitter, there’s a good chance that you’re following @BreakingNewsOn, an account that often actually breaks news before any other media organization does, ranging from political news to natural disasters and other noteworthy events from across the globe.
As one of the 16400 followers of the account, I caught an announcement last week about the impending launch of BNO News, an extension of the news service to a separate website and a Pledgie entry where people can donate in order to contribute to the launch. I was intrigued and got in touch with founder Michael van Poppel, who set up the account back in May 2007 when he first found out about Twitter and the potential of releasing short news announcements quickly to people opting into it.
The CES posts have been coming out like machine gun bullets at CrunchGear, so much so that even we can’t keep track of them. But that doesn’t mean you should miss the highlights, hands-ons, and sneak peeks that have been going on all day here in Vegas on the first day on the show floor. Here are a few noteworthy posts from today:
We got hands-on with:
Zerion Software has just released an iPhone version of the playground classic Rochambeau (aka Rock-Paper-Scissors). And while it has some of the worst music I’ve ever heard, it’s actually surprisingly cool. You can download the free app on the App Store here.
The game allows you to play against the computer (which is about as fun as flipping a coin and guessing heads or tails), or against one of your friends through network play. Using your phone’s network connection (Edge, 3G, or Wi-Fi), you can either tell the phone to pair you up with the first available random opponent online, or use use the AIM instant messaging network to play against your buddies. Players can customize how many rounds each match should last, and can also choose if they’d like to be represented by goofy cartoon characters like cows and chickens. And if you’re using AIM, you can use an integrated chat feature to talk smack during the game.
Seeing as everyone in the blogging world is scrambling to get up a Hands-on article on the Palm Pre, I’ll go ahead and say this now: if anyone claims to have gotten a true hands-on, they’re probably lying. We just got back from a post-announcement, closed doors Palm event where a handful of Pres were being demonstrated. While we could touch the phones, we couldn’t actually hold the phone, making it kinda tough to get a real sense of the phone’s weight and feel. Regardless, I still want one. Boy oh boy, do I want one. Read on for our experiences. (Video is on the editing rack, by the way - we’ll have it up momentarily.)
Now here’s something that will end up at the bottom of the toy box next Christmas. The Mindflex lets you control a floating ball around a little obstacle course. Air bumps and pops the ball through hoops and tubes and ends up frustrating you more than anything else.
Click through for a short video.
The votes for the Crunchies are in. But there were so many, 350,000, that we needed some extra help counting them. In the video above, Mike explains the voting procedures and reveals who we hired to count the votes to make sure nothing goes wrong. These guys are the best at what they do. (Okay, maybe the second best after this guy, but they were all we could afford).
All the votes are counted. We won’t announce the winners until the award ceremony on Friday night at the Herbst Theater in San Francisco. We have some great entertainment lined up, including more videos, the Stanford Mobile Phone Orchestra, the Richter Scales and a few more special guests. The after-party will be at City Hall, with DJ ZTrip, a game room, a photo gallery, and some gadget giveaways. There are still a few tickets left.
SoundPedia, a Pandora-like music startup that launched back in 2006, just got a brand new UI that puts its dated interface to shame. It’s too bad it may never see the light of day.
The site, which we once described as A Decent Pandora Substitute For International Listers (Pandora is US-only), has turned into a prime example of what can go wrong when founders lose interest, ownership changes hands, and thousands of miles separate designers from developers.
At a press announcement today at CES, Palm announced a brand spankin’ new handset: the Palm Pre. Running the much-gossiped new Palm WebOS (Not known as “Nova” afterall) and sporting a QWERTY slide-out keyboard below a 3.1″ touchscreen, this might just be enough to get Palm out of their slump.
Following the departure of Kevin Conroy from AOL, the product group is being reorganized. Ted Cahall is being named the new president of the product group. Cahall will be in charge of Mail, Truveo, Mobile, Toolbar, Safety & Security, Parental Controls, the AOL Client, Search, MapQuest, Global Publishing Technology and Relegence. This is a step up for Cahall, who previously was EVP of Platforms and Technologies (which included revenue-producing business units such as search, MapQuest, the commerce and marketplace channels, and Relegence as well as publishing technology to other divisions). He is now combining his previous responsibilities with oversight of the product group.
Some other shuffling is also going on. AOL Video, AOL Radio, Winamp and other properties are now under Bill Wilson’s programming group, and Userplane is now under Joanna Shields’ People Networks unit (Bebo). This reorg was a long time coming.
Below is the memo from AOL CEO Randy Falco to employees.
Today during an Industry Insider Series keynote at CES in Las Vegas, AMD CEO Dirk Meyer and OTOY CEO Jules Urbach announced that AMD has been working on what it’s calling the world’s “fastest supercomputer ever”, designed “to break the one petaFLOPS barrier and to process a million compute threads across more than 1000 graphics processors”.
The supercomputer, dubbed the “Fusion Render Cloud”, will run OTOY’s graphics rendering software, which as we reported last July, is intended to deliver high-end 3D graphics through the cloud by preprocessing them on servers before delivering them over the web to thin devices.
Socially-conscious Better World Books, a for-profit online bookseller that shares its revenues with literacy initiatives worldwide, released some pretty impressive holiday sales figures recently which we thought were worth sharing here.
etter World Books reports that its overall traffic increased 131% during the holiday rush, and that they saw a 500%+ increase in gift certificate sales over the previous holiday season. That translated into 194% revenue growth for the site in December 2008 (up until Christmas), compared to the year before.
We asked for some more details, and got some absolute numbers for the holiday sales:
CrunchGear is live at CES 2009 attending the Palm keynote at 11am pacific, 2pm eastern. What can we expect? New hardware, a new OS, and potentially a branding strategy that will move them far from everything we used to know about Palm.
Yet more evidence that the future of media is digital (in case there are still any doubters out there). In a report released this morning, boutique investment bank Jordan, Edmiston Group estimates that between 88 percent of the publishing and advertising industry’s revenue growth over the next few years will come from four sectors: Database & Information, B2B Online Media, Consumer Online Media, and Interactive Marketing Services. In other words, it will be coming mostly from the Web. In contrast, between 2001 and 2007, only 33 percent of industry growth came from these sectors. The other 67 percent came from traditional publishing businesses such as newspapers and magazines (formerly known as print media—the report does not cover TV, radio, or outdoor advertising).
To the extent that there will be any growth at all in the publishing industry, all you need to do is look at the multiples paid for different businesses to see where the growth is going to be.
At CES, Microsoft has introduced its second iPhone app after dipping its toe with the release of Seadragon Mobile last month. The name of the application is Microsoft Tag, and it enables users to instantly access mobile content, videos, music, contact information, maps, social networks, promotions, etc. simply by pointing the device’s camera to a custom tag.
If this makes you think about the principle behind QR codes, you’re not the only one. Like QR codes, Microsoft Tags are unique two-dimensial codes that can be used to open URLs or multimedia files. The big difference is the tech behind it: Microsoft Tag is based on a whole new technology developed in-house by Microsoft Research called High Capacity Color Barcodes (HCCBs), and offers a significant twist.
The Netherlands-based internet startup eFresh.com has secured €4.25 million (or roughly $5.4 million) in funding from one of the largest banks in the country, Rabobank. The company, which operates a B2B portal for the perishable industry, had previously raised an undisclosed amount of capital from private investors.
With the funding, Rabobank acquired a stake in the startup’s parent holding company, GET Holding, which was on the verge of filing for IPO recently but ultimately decided to hold off because of the economic downturn.
eFresh.com bills itself as ‘eBay for the fresh produce industry’, offering information services and a live direct trading platform for buyers and sellers of anything ranging from fruit (see example), meat, fish to flowers, eggs and dairy products. The company uses a bank-escrow service that allows traders to handle financial transactions directly with each other in real-time, and doesn’t take any commission on deals but instead makes money by charging membership fees (€899 a year) and advertising.
Evernote, which is up for a Crunchie award, rang in the New Year with an extra $4.5 million of cash from Russian investment firm Troika Dialog. A mid-December report had put the investment at $5 million, but the company did not actually close its B round until December 31. He is still trying to raise another $3.5 million tranche, but believes the current funding will hold the company through 2010. CEO Phil Libin says:
The rumors that circulated in the beginning of December were very premature—we still had unresolved issues and the closing was far from guaranteed.
Evernote turns photos and Web clippings into searchable notes, so you never forget anything. (At least, that’s the idea). It has gained 630,000 registered users since its public launch last year, with more than half of those on the iPhone.
In October we wrote “Joost Turns On Its All-Flash Website. Is Anybody Watching?” It turns out that yes, it appears that they are.
A year ago the online video site was a ghost town. Then in September, when the company moved away from the use of downloaded software to an all-browser video experience, viewership spiked. Compete says they had 550k U.S. visitors in November 2008. Comscore gives an even more robust 1.4 million worldwide monthly visitors in November (a chart below compares Joost to Hulu). Google Trends also say things are going well for Joost, and points to strong traffic growth in Northern Europe.
JibJab, a site popular for its parody videos and irreverent eGreetings, has closed a $7.5 million Series C funding round with participation from new investors Overbrook Entertainment (a production company co-founded by Will Smith) and Sony Pictures Entertainment, as well as existing investor Polaris Venture Partners. The company had previously raised around $9.4 million. The site generates a huge volume of traffic every year, and counts itself among the Top 100 most popular sites in the United States according to Quantcast (it currently ranks #73).
Over the holiday season JibJab recorded 60 million visits as users created 35 million personalized eCards on the site - figures that were likely boosted by the very popular ElfYourself videos that let you stick your face on a dancing elf.
At the Samsung press conference earlier today at CES 2009, Yahoo’s involvement with Samsung’s new HDTV line was revealed to be an integrated system of Widgets, based on a new Konfabulator engine. They went through it very briefly, but Flickr, news, finance, and other Yahoo services are fully available and integrated into an on-screen display, for use during usual TV watching. They call it Medi@ 2.0, a wholly buzz-oriented name, but you’ll probably just call it “Yahoo TV” or “The Stocks.”
Here’s a video of the interface in action — dramatized, it looks like, but a good indicator of what it should look like on your Samsung, should you choose to accept one.
Head over to CrunchGear for a few more pictures.
Google Street View may get a bad rap from some overzealous privacy watchdogs and conspiracy theorists, but it just helped police save a young girl who had been kidnapped over the weekend.
In the case, which involved a woman who allegedly kidnapped her granddaughter, Athol Police Officer Todd Neale managed to track down the missing girl by obtaining coordinates of her cell phone from the phone’s carrier. Neale contacted Deputy Fire Chief Thomas V. Lozier who worked with him in trying to figure out exactly where the missing girl was being held.
