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The Truth Behind Liveplace’s Photo-Realistic 3D World And OTOY’s Rendering Engine - 08/21/2008 01:33 AM

Last week we posted a video that presented LivePlace, a 3D world with an incredible amount of detail. The impressive technology behind it is called OTOY, a streaming platform that allows developers to generate movie-quality renders “in the cloud”, which can then be streamed to more modestly-powered computers and even mobile phones. For [...]

Songbird Releases Beta of Web-Integrated Media Player - 08/21/2008 12:35 AM

Later this evening Songbird, the open source web-integrated media player, will the unveil the .7 beta release of its software that introduces scrobbling to Last.fm, speedier track importing, and a more polished interface among a number of other features. The resulting application is a marked improvement over the last release we covered, but still [...]

Jackson Fish Market Does It Again With Another Beautifully Useless App - 08/20/2008 11:59 PM

I have no idea what these guys actually do to pull in revenue, but God love ‘em. Jackson Fish Market, the ex-Microsoft team that brought us They’re Beautiful and Tafiti, launched Elmore City Dance Club earlier today. The application, which was conceived, designed and built by the company’s summer interns (Tyler, Luke and Alex) lets [...]

Ten Startups Debut At TechStars Demo Day - 08/20/2008 11:22 PM

Editor’s note: The following on-the-ground report comes from Don Dodge, who blogs at The Next Big Thing and is a business development executive for Microsoft. He is in Boulder, Colorado today attending TechStars demo day. Much like Y Combinator (which had its own demo day last week) and LaunchBox (which also had [...]

OpenSocial Now Reaches 350 Million Users, And Growing - 08/20/2008 10:21 PM

Six months ago, OpenSocial was nothing but a list of promised partnerships. But the social network application platform backed by Google has made a lot of progress since then as those partners started to go live with their OpenSocial Apps. First there was MySpace and Orkut, then Hi5, and most recently Friendster. [...]

Intel And Yahoo Want To Bring Widgets (And The Internet) To Your TV - 08/20/2008 09:14 PM

Intel and Yahoo have announced plans for a new “Widget Channel”, a widget platform for consumer electronic devices running on Intel’s hardware. The platform will support a number of current technologies, including JavaScript, HTML, XML, and mostly notably Adobe’s ubiquitous Flash, which many current platforms on CE devices don’t support. The two companies [...]

Social Median Disregards 75 Years Of Securities Regulations With Sale Of Stock On Twitter - 08/20/2008 07:47 PM

SocialMedian founder Jason Goldberg wrote a Twitter message moments ago letting people know that they are raising a new round of funding, up to $500k, and to contact him if you’re interested. Great way to get investors, right? Exactly not - the whole purpose of the Securities Act of 1933 is to prohibit public offerings [...]

UserPlane Founder Peels Away From AOL To Found New Startup Tsavo - 08/20/2008 07:16 PM

Michael Jones sold Userplane, which provides text, voice and video chat software to websites to AOL almost exactly two years ago for around $40 million (the exact price was never disclosed). Now, almost exactly two years later, he’s left AOL full time to pursue his next startup: Tsavo. The team has set up offices in Santa [...]

CrunchGear’s Blogging Live From 37,000 Feet! - 08/20/2008 07:13 PM

Hey folks. I’m on American Airlines Flight #3 from JFK to LAX and working from 37,000 feet via Aircell’s Gogo inflight Wi-Fi service. Jump on over to CrunchGear for all the hot, live blogging action and review. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Make Perfect iPhone Mockups (We Can’t Help With The Actual App) - 08/20/2008 06:08 PM

If you’re looking to mock up an iPhone app during the design or coding process, a good place to start is the fully editable PSD file on teehan+lax that includes samples of most elements. No more excuses for sending us iPhone app ideas that look like hell. Just grab any five elements from the screen and [...]

Peter Thiel Joins TechCrunch50 for a One-On-One Interview - 08/20/2008 05:32 PM

We are super excited and quite honored to announce today that

Palm Releases Treo Pro - 08/20/2008 04:59 PM

Palm as just released their much anticipated - and leaked - Treo Pro, a Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional device with a touchscreen and UMTS/HSDPA GSM networking. The phone also includes G.P.S. and improved WiFi handling for better and easier WiFi hand-off. The new Treo is thinner than devices like the 800w and is targeted at the [...]

eBay: The Doldrum Years - 08/20/2008 04:32 PM

Can anything put the wind back in eBay’s sails? The once-iconic auction site is making cosmetic changes to its fee structure and moving away from the auction model to emphasize more fixed-price listings. But it’s hard to get excited these days about eBay. It seems that the Web has moved on and [...]

JustHackIt: It’s Like a Dating Site For Hackers - 08/20/2008 03:55 PM

Got that hacking jones, but can’t find anyone to hack with? Head on over to JustHackIt, a site aimed at developers that launched last night. It is a place for developers to find each other, work on projects, and maybe even start a company. Developers can post projects they want to do [...]

TripAdvisor Invests In Vacation-Home Review Site FlipKey - 08/20/2008 03:04 PM

TripAdvisor is in an expansive mood. In July, it acquired two small startups, VirtualTourist (user-gen travel guides) and OneTime (booking price comparison). And today it announced a majority investment in FlipKey, a guest review site for vacation home rentals. The amount of the investment was not disclosed. FlipKey launched only last March. [...]

Aircell’s Gogo Inflight Wi-Fi Service Going Live Today and CrunchGear’s Got a Seat - 08/20/2008 01:42 PM

Today, Aircell announced that their fleet of Boeing 767-200s will have the Gogo service enabled on flights originating from NYC’s JFK to LA, San Francisco and Miami. CrunchGear will have a seat on a flight to LAX today that leaves JFK at 12 PM EDT. Head on over there now for more details and the [...]

YouNoodle In The News - 08/20/2008 01:18 PM

The local ABC affiliate dropped by YouNoodle’s offices in San Francisco to get an idea of how useful their new startups valuation predictor is. ABC’s Sue Thompson interviewed CEO Bob Goodson on how the service works, and I dropped in for a cameo and a dose of healthy skepticism. We first covered YouNoodle in February way [...]

OpenClip Brings Real Copy And Paste To The iPhone, But It Isn’t The Solution - 08/20/2008 09:43 AM

It’s a shame, really. A team of developers have partnered to finally bring a legitimate copy and paste solution to the iPhone - one that can actually move data between different applications (previous solutions could only shuffle data within the same app). But as great as it is to see a team of [...]

Trilliant Raises $40 Million For Work On Smart Power Grid - 08/20/2008 06:00 AM

Trilliant, a company that works on the nation’s “Smart Grid“, has closed a $40 million funding round led by MissionPoint Capital Partners and zouk ventures. As part of the deal, Mark J. Lewis of MissionPoint and Anthony Fox of zouk will be joining the company’s Board of Directors. Smart Grid refers to the improved power [...]

Nrme’s Location-Based iPhone App Goes Live. But Will Anyone Use It? - 08/20/2008 03:35 AM

Last June we got a sneak peek at nrme, a location-based message service for the iPhone. The service behaves like a regional Twitter, but is geared towards sharing information rather than chatting - it’s sort of like a neighborhood bulletin board in the cloud. Instead of using a follow system, nrme makes all [...]

Songsterr: A Flash Guitar Tab Player That Might Rock, Someday - 08/20/2008 12:52 AM

One of the reasons why the guitar has become a staple in pop culture is its immediate accessibility. In lieu of standard notation, guitar players have developed tablature - a more intuitive representation of a song that uses numbers to indicate which fret on a guitar each note is played. Even the most [...]

WSJ Creates BlackBerry App, Opens Some Previously Paid Content. - 08/19/2008 10:28 PM

For those of you who read WSJ for the articles, the new BlackBerry-compatible WSJ.com Mobile Reader will open up the nasty walled garden that is WSJ.com. The application will be free and most of the content will be open, although there are plans to lock it down in the near future. The application will draw [...]

Real Estate Sites Are Holding Up, Despite The Housing Slump. Some (Trulia) Better Than Others (Zillow). - 08/19/2008 09:59 PM

The real estate slump may still be helping to drag down the economy, but real-estate sites like Trulia and Zillow seem to be holding up just fine. In fact, the number of monthly unique visitors to Trulia has more than doubled to 2.4 million over the past year, according to comScore. Zillow, in [...]

CrunchGear Featured Review: Meastro Dobel Diamond Tequila - 08/19/2008 09:34 PM

We’re a gadget blog, true, but that doesn’t mean we can’t get a mean drink on when we’re cornered. Luckily, Maestro Dobel was nice enough to send us a bottle of their $74.99 Diamond Tequila, offering us entree into a world that was once reserved for Jay Z and mortgage brokers between 2002 and 2007. Read [...]

Microspaces: Playing With Nested GUIs - 08/19/2008 09:12 PM

We’re seeing a lot of desktop metaphors moving to Web interfaces in the browser. The latest example to cross our inbox is Microspaces, a service in private beta that lets you organize Web pages in folder-like Microspaces. But unlike desktop folders, the contents are made up of Web pages, so they [...]