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| President Obama, Where’s Our CTO? Posted: 10 Apr 2009 03:17 PM PDT
President Obama incorporated technology into his election campaign in an unprecedented way, became known as the YouTube president within the first week of being elected, and seems to be forward thinking in his views on innovation and technology, which is why we endorsed him last year. But now we are almost four months into his tenure as President and leader of the free world, and the Obama administration has yet to name a Chief Technology Officer. They have, I should note, appointed a Chief Information Officer, Vivek Kundra, the former CTO of Washington D.C., whose office is being investigated by the FBI for bribery and money laundering (which apparently occurred when he was the boss). Still, it's confusing as to why the President is taking his sweet time to appoint a CTO, when there are clear issues that a CTO could be working on. For starters, there are tech-centric issues like the FCC's National Broadband Plan to give all American's high speed internet access, and the DTV Delay Act, which was signed into law in early February. There's the Open Government initiative, through Change.gov, which seems to be in a stalemate. And certainly a CTO could lend his or her expertise and leadership in incorporating technology into the President's health-care, education and energy initiatives. Take a look at the technology issues page of the White House's website for a more extensive to-do list awaiting our future CTO. And there's definitely no dearth of talent for this position. The names that have been bandied about for the position even before President Obama was victorious in November include Bill Gates, Microsoft founder; Padmasree Warrior, Cisco's CTO; Eric Schmidt, Google CEO and longtime Obama supporter (but he apparently said no to the job); Vint Cerf, the so-called "father of the internet" and VP at Google; Lawrence Lessig, Stanford Law professor and founder of the school's Center for Internet and Society; Ed Felton, Princeton computer science professor and founder of Princeton's Center for Information Technology Policy; Jeff Bezos, Amazon's founder and CEO; and Steve Ballmer, Microsoft's CEO. Perhaps the Obama administration is being extra careful not to make another "Kundra" mistake and is carefully evaluating the backgrounds of each candidate. But this should hardly take 5 months. Regardless of what the holdup is, we need someone with true technology smarts in the White House soon. I mean, how hard can it be to find a technology exec that has paid his or her taxes? Give us your favorite candidates for America's CTO in comments. Or take our poll. Who should be the CTO of the USA? Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. The rest is here: |
| Current TV Cancels $100 Million IPO Posted: 10 Apr 2009 03:16 PM PDT
Current Media, the media company backed by former Vice President Al Gore, has cancelled the $100 million IPO that it originally announced in January 2008. In a document submitted earlier today, Current TV attributed the IPO’s cancellation to the current economy:
The media company is best known for cable channel Current TV, which is broadcast internationally to 59 million homes with markets in regions including the United States, Italy, and the UK. Current also has a strong web presence, tapping into popular social media services like Digg and Twitter for special events like the 2008 presidential election. The network’s social media efforts during the election were deemed a success by the company, but it was still hit by layoffs in November, when it said that the IPO was being “put on hold”. Current says that there have have been no further layoffs since then, and that the direction of the company has not changed. Via PEhub Information provided by CrunchBase Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 Read more: |
| Posted: 10 Apr 2009 03:01 PM PDT
You've seen the second commercial from Microsoft's Laptop Hunters series, right? You know, the one where G-diddy picks up the HP HDX 16 over a MacBook Pro. I won't get into the PC vs Mac argument, but Giampaolo chose poorly because he didn't know what he actually wanted. Specs on our review unit are as follows: Performance We use Primate Labs Geekbench for benchmarking and the HDX 16 scored 3179 overall. Just to give you a frame of reference, the last-generation MacBook Pro with the same processor scored a 3671 on Geekbench. The complete breakdown can be found in the gallery. Because of the fancy graphics card from nVidia I used 3DMark03 to see what sort of score we'd get out of it. The GeForce 9600M GT managed to score a 12,847. I played a few minutes of Sega's Iron Man and it was pretty smooth. Start up takes approximately 66 seconds while shutting down is about 40 seconds. Battery Life This where the HDX 16 underperforms and it's something that should weigh heavily on your decision making process. Off the charger, the HDX 16 gets roughly 58 minutes during Blu-ray playback. For our "real world" test, I cruised the web for about three minutes, literally, and watched 26 minutes worth of Chuck on Hulu, which amounted to one hour and 27 minutes off of the remaining battery time under HP's "balanced" power plan. You'd expect more out of the 6 cell battery compared to others in the market, and we suspect the HD screen is juicing it for all its worth. Hardware • Dimensions - 14.9×10.0×1.70 inches and a whopping 7.06 lbs. It's not portable and hurts my back. Screen HP's 16-inch HD screen is brilliant, but it's far too glossy and I spent more time primping my hair than watching Chuck. It handles Blu-ray playback just fine with brilliant colors and sharp lines. Conclusion As a multimedia machine, the HDX 16 performs admirably, but the lackluster battery life and size make us long for something leaner and meaner. It can also get quite loud during graphics intensive processes, like, watching videos or playing games. But as a stationary machine (ie: plugged in) with a Blu-ray drive and HD screen it's more than capable of keeping a multimedia junkie happy. HP HDX 16
[via CrunchGear.com] |
| AT&T launches Samsung a657, doesn’t have QWERTY Posted: 10 Apr 2009 02:51 PM PDT
For those of you who prefer to abuse the heck out of your phones, AT&T has launched the new Samsung a657, featuring a plain old keypad. Nope, no QWERTY for your outdoor texting adventures. The a657 features a robust candybar design, with lots of rubber grips and coating to protect it from more wear-and-tear than suffered by a normal cell phone.
Built to military specifications, the a657 features GPS, A2DP Bluetooth, and meets military requirements for shock, vibration, dust, water, humidity, solar radiation, altitude and temperature effects. There’s also a built in flashlight for the search and rescue you’ll have to do when your wife loses her pathetic non-commando cell phone in a dark movie theater. The phone will be able to survive really whatever you dish out. For anyone who has a habit of dropping phones in water, or just dropping and breaking phones in general, it might be time to give up the iPhone and go with something a bit more durable. Currently it’s only available through the AT&T business channels. [Via IntoMobile] Relevant Entries on SlashGear
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| Apple counting down to 1 Billion Apps, Win $10k iTunes card, other prizes Posted: 10 Apr 2009 02:30 PM PDT
Apple is counting down to the 1 BILLIONTH download of an application on the iTunes App store. Every application you download enters you into the contest to win a $10,000 iTunes gift card, an iPod Touch, a Time Capsule, and a MacBook Pro. You’re allowed 25 entries per day, or you can fill out an entry form HERE to enter without downloading an App.
So there’s no confusion, here’s the official wording:
The iTunes App store for iPhone and iPod Touch was released last year and has quickly surpassed multiple milestones, including over 50,000 applications and now apparently nearly a billion downloads of both free and paid apps. So is that $10,000 iTunes gift card Apple’s version of a stimulus package? Anyone know how that will affect inflation of iTunes’ song prices? Will we see a price jump to $1.29? Oh wait… [Via Apple] Relevant Entries on SlashGear
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| Elevator Pitch Friday: Smallaa Lets You Sort Your Activity Stream By Topic (Invites) Posted: 10 Apr 2009 02:22 PM PDT
It is becoming clear that activity streams are taking hold as the default communications interface across a wide variety of social networks and media, from Twitter to Facebook to FriendFeed to Bebo and beyond. Yet the more people we try to keep track of in one consolidated feed, the more noise we have to deal with that increasingly threatens to drown out those golden information nuggets we all seek. So it is appropriate that today's Elevator Pitch comes from Smallaa, a startup that aims to help people sort and categorize their streams by interests. Smalla is still in private beta, but TechCrunch readers can sign up with the promotion code c3p0. When you sign up, you can bring in your FriendFeed stream. (Integration with Facebook is scheduled for April 23, and then Twitter will come after that). Your regular FreindFeed stream appears in a column on the right. You also pick what interests you want to follow. For instance, I picked "Internet Startups," "Technology," "Google," and "Unusual Things." I could have also picked "best Photos," "Pets," "Formula 3 Racing," "home," or I could have created my own topics. Those selections create an interest stream on the left. This is the main Smaalla stream. There are two ways you can inject something into the Smallaa stream. You can add it directly as a comment, link, video, or picture and assign it to an interest category when you place it into the stream. (Smallaa asks "What's going on in your interests?" That could probably be clearer. A simple, "What are you intersted in?" would do.) The second way to inject items into the Smallaa stream is to assign them directly from the FriendFeed stream on the right (which will expand in the future to include Facebook and other streams as well). For instance, Robert Scoble just wrote a post and did a video trying to explain why Mike is wrong about FriendFeed because of its superior mechansims for picking out signal to noise compared to Twitter. Scoble is particularly enamored with FriendFeed because he can pick out what's interesting based on how many comments an item gets or how many people liked it. Yet with Smalla, I can simply grab the link to Scoble's post from my FriendFeed stream and assign it to my "Technology" interest in Smallla. I trust what Scoble has to say about technology, so I pay attention to that, but I can ignore his comments about how awesome it is to live in Half Moon Bay. Now, everybody in Smalla following with an interest in technology will see that link to Scoble's post and any comments I have about it (unless they choose to view only items from people they follow in Smalla). The relationship between Smallaa and other services is reciprocal. When I add a post to Smallla, it appears in FriendFeed as well. And whenever you assign an item from a friend in another service, it prompts you to invite them to follow the particular interest you are assigning their item to in Smallla. Finally, as another way to figure out who to pay attention to, for each item in your Smallaa feed, it shows you how many people are following the person who posted it in that category. So again, to pick on Scoble, he might quickly gain the most followers in technology but not so many in fashion. Hopefully, this would create a reinforcing feedback loop which would encourage Scoble to write and share more about technology and less about his favorite pair of pants. Or as Smalla CEO and founder Tim Lai says in the Elevator Pitch video below, it would be great to follow what Bill Clinton has to say about "politicians or giving public speeches without ever being distracted if he has anything to say about honesty and family values." Lai built and sold his first software company in Hong Kong, an enterprise document management company called Paradigm, before moving to California. He has invested $3 million of his own money to start Smalllaa. His pitch would probably have been less confusing if he explained why he is sitting in a racing car at the beginning, but he comes around to that in the end. If you would like your startup to be featured on TechCrunch, submit your Elevator Pitch. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors Here is the original: |
| Two potential Palm Pre launch dates, as soon as May 17th? Posted: 10 Apr 2009 02:17 PM PDT
In addition to the emails circulating internally at Sprint, there seems to be new details about the launch date of the Palm Pre. First, employees are saying that there are now vacation freezes for the month of May, which is out of the ordinary. There is also information that Palm and Sprint will be launching the Palm Pre on Sunday, May 17th. This is a preliminary launch date, and if the Pre demand is higher than the supply, Sprint will be moving the launch date to June 29th.
Basically, if the excitement for the Pre is greater than Palm anticipated, the fans will have shot themselves in the foot and caused a delay in the release of Palm’s savior phone. This is only going to happen if Palm is unable to produce and manufacture more Pre phones than there are people that want it. Here’s to hoping that Palm anticipated correctly. The May 17th launch date would fit predictions based on recent new phone releases by Sprint, and would fall well within the promised Q2 release window. A June 29th launch date would be a disaster, as it would be well after Apple’s WWDC on June 8th, and whatever iPhone related news is announced can only hurt Palm’s chances of success. In short, the fervor over the Pre might end up backfiring and hurting the device itself. Hopefully, the people who are excited for the Pre won’t be swayed by iPhone news, and will be buying a Pre anyway. Customers that aren’t already planning to buy an iPhone at the next update probably aren’t the type to follow technology to begin with, so they can still be swayed to the Pre. Here’s to hoping for May 17th. [Via MyPre.com] Relevant Entries on SlashGear
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| CrunchDeals: Dual iPod/iPhone charging station for $29 Posted: 10 Apr 2009 02:00 PM PDT
Let's say you've got his and hers iPhones. Wouldn't you want both those iPhones to be together while they're charging? If so, this adorable charging station from Griffin allows you to charge two iPod devices at once. If you're a swinging bachelor or bachelorette living the high life, you could also charge one iPhone and one iPod. Or two iPods! The list price is $44.99 but it's currently available for $29.21. If you've got an entire family of iPod owners, there's also a four-device version for $43.24, marked down from $72.75. Griffin Powerdock Dual-Position Charging Station [Amazon via dealspl.us] Continued here: |
| Tesla’s Elon Musk Calls NY Times Writer Stross “A Huge Douchebag…And An Idiot” Posted: 10 Apr 2009 01:48 PM PDT Undoubtedly Tesla isn't going to be happy about this video getting attention, but I think it's awesome to see CEO Elon Musk take a stand against the company's many detractors. Last November New York Times writer Randall Stross trashed Tesla as a rich man's car that the government should shun. "Only the Rich Can Afford It. Should Taxpayers Back It?" he wrote.
Later, the article was much edited after well deserved criticism. Stross also corrected errors suggesting that Tesla's loan requests were for the $109,000 Roadster, when in fact they were to be used for the $50,000 Model S, their most recent and much more affordable all-electric car. That rewriting, though, apparently hasn't appeased Musk. In an interview last week (video above) with Yahoo TechTicker, Musk calls Stross a "huge douchebag…and an idiot" (skip to the 40 second mark) and says "What is he doing picking on an electric car company? Why would he pick on the little guy who is trying to do good when you've got egregious waste of money in the tens of billions occurring in Detroit?" Musk also points out that Tesla investors only make money if the loan is repaid, and that Tesla has applied for just 1.5% of the $25 billion appropriation. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. Here is the original: |
| Google Earth Flythroughs Come To The Browser Posted: 10 Apr 2009 01:36 PM PDT
Earlier this week the Google Earth team released a new plugin that allows users to view Google Earth tours directly from their web browsers. These tours, which were introduced in the 5.0 release of Google Earth in February, allow users to create virtual flythroughs through any location on Google Earth, which can lead to some pretty impressive results. Google has compiled a handful of the best tours in this gallery, which includes a reenactment of the historic Flight 1549 landing in the Hudson and a whirlwind tour through San Francisco. The plugin weighs in at a hefty 30 MB (80 megabytes after installing on a Mac), so it can hardly be considered lightweight. But the functionality is impressive, and could definitely be used in a variety of innovative ways now that the tours have been freed from the Google Earth desktop client. I image news organizations could use the tours to help liven up online reports (tours can include audio voiceovers), and travel companies could use them to help showcase where their tour packages will take their customers.
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