Snippets Of Internet Show: June 2010

First 720p videos from iPhone 4 hit YouTube

Truly a blockbuster. Maybe this guy should move to some place where they have… you know, objects.
Really, though, it’s not bad. Obviously you’re getting a ton of smear and skew, as you will with any “HD” device of this size, but it’s also just as good as any $100-$150 pocket cam you’re likely to find. We’ll have our own video and image quality tests in our full review, of course. Watch on YouTube

iFixit tears apart the iPhone 4 in graphic detail

iFixit is legendary for taking things apart. They are famous for going to great lengths to get the latest in technology, and then tear it apart. The iPhone 4 is no exception, as their person took a 16 hour plane ride as well as packed a tent prepared to sit and wait for the phone. Ironically, FedEx delivered the phones two days earlier then expected, and they didn’t have to send anyone to Japan.

Inside sources close to the matter have said that the build costs of Kinect are near $150. When you add up all the time to write the software and the costs of the hardware, it gets expensive. This has many people at Microsoft concerned.

It’s not often that I get to leave my phone at home. More often than not, it’s an accident. However, when I do it on purpose, it’s a deliberate act of self-denial — I know, I’m so selfless! Seriously, though. I do fully disconnect myself when I know something or somebody requires my full attention, but how, oh how can I broadcast that fact to the world so they can adore me for it? …Aha!

The Linux Foundation ran a t-shirt design contest back in March to kick off the grand opening of the new Linux.com store. More than 100 designs were submitted, and of these six were selected as finalists. Almost eight thousand votes were tallied, and the community-selected winner, with 57% of the votes, is Mr. Said Hassan from the Gaza Strip, who designed “The People’s Product.” Shirts with this winning design are being produced now, and will be available for purchase at the Linux.com store soon-ish.

The Dell Streak is set to be released here in the states sometime soon — we hear the end of July. The 5-inch tablet/phone/EVO-eater will no doubt launch to a ton of criticism about it’s large stature and whatnot. Love it or hate it, this is what the retail packaging will likely look like. Think Jabra headset packaging, but with a very large touchscreen instead of a bluetooth headset suspended in a clear acrylic casing.

Rejoice user! Devin won’t be keeling over from ~~auto-erotic~~ asphyxiation after all. The TRON controllers that he saw at E3 and threatened to hold his breath over? Well, they are going to be for sale. To be honest, I haven’t considered replacing my stock Xbox 360 controllers until this point, but now I’m afraid I have no choice.

If you’re a nostalgic person, and you enjoy novelty watches, I can only imagine the levels of joy you’re feeling right now. This Mixtape watch from EOS features not only the classic cassette tape look, but the classic mixtape motion. The tape dials actually spin, which I suppose reduces battery life — but so what?!

Inside Network’s

AppData

is a goldmine of information about third-party applications on Facebook. With it, you can see stats like: FarmVille has 63.9 million monthly active users — making it nearly three times as large as the number two app on Facebook, Texas HoldEm Poker (also a Zynga game), which has 28.5 million monthly active users. But there was always something a little wonky about certain areas of AppData’s data. For example, they showed that Facebook for Android only had 67 monthly active users — yes, 67. But something happened this past week that seemed to correct the data, and it exposed one new massive Facebook app: Twitter.
As Inside Facebook (another site under InsideNetwork) noted

yesterday, some change Facebook recently made appears to have corrected the stats for a number of apps. The aforementioned Facebook for Android shot up to 4.7 million MAU from its 67 — a 7 million percent increase. The other big increase in the top 10 gainers? Twitter, which went from it’s previously reported

number of just over 400,000 users, to nearly 7 million — a change of over 1,300 percent. And the app still appears to be growing pretty fast. The Twitter app’s own page on Facebook now confirms this new number.

Opera Software

has struck a deal with Russia’s federal mobile operator OJSC MegaFon

under which MegaFon’s special package “Unlimited Internet with Opera Mini”

will be distributed to all Russian territories.
That may not sound like much at first glance, but you have to consider that MegaFon boasts over 53 million mobile subscribers, spanning all seven Federal Districts of Russia.
Furthermore, MegaFon serves some 39 percent of all mobile Web traffic in Russian territories, according to recent research (it was first in Russia to run a 3G network based on UMTS). The operator says internal statistics have shown that Opera Mini subscribers effectively generate twice the traffic than any other MegaFon user.

When Twitter bought Atebits, the company behind the excellent iPhone Twitter client, Tweetie, there was some concern it would slow down development of that app. Luckily, it doesn’t look like that has happened. As today, Twitter for iPhone version 3.0.1 has just launched, and with it comes suport for both iOS 4 and iPhone 4.
In fact, while other huge apps on the iPhone, such as Facebook, lag behind in supporting the newest iPhone functionality, Twitter is one of the first to implement some of the useful new features.

Earlier today Inside Facebook posted a very interesting interview

with Facebook founder/CEO Mark Zuckerberg

. The conversation touched on a range of topics including the proliferation of social gaming, the argument for instituting Facebook Credits across all games, and why Zuckerberg is no longer afraid of Twitter. It also shed some light on Facebook’s revenue numbers: Zuckerberg said that estimates

that Facebook would make between $1 and $1.1 billion this year “are not so far off in either direction that it’s causing us any pain…”
So what did he mean by that? Zuckerberg says that revenue estimates last year were lowballing Facebook’s revenue stats to the point that it was hurting the company. Now that’s changed, at least to the point that Facebook isn’t seeing any adverse effects from analyst guesses.

This morning, Inside Facebook posted a great interview

with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg

about the state of the company. It’s worth reading in its entirety for thoughts about the Platform, Credits, gaming, and the company’s financials. But one thing that caught my eye in particular was his thoughts about Twitter.
Over the past year and a half, Facebook has been under a lot of criticism that it is drifting away from its core service and into a more Twitter-like state, where short status updates rule and all information should be public. When Facebook failed to acquire the company in late 2008, Twitter’s influence on the look and feel of Facebook became more and more apparent. But Zuckerberg says that the time of Twitter infatuation is now over.
“As good as I think they are, I think I personally just paid too much attention to it,” Zuckerberg tells Inside Facebook’s Justin Smith. Why was he so focused on the rival? Their growth rate — it had Facebook worried.

Earlier this month, Apple unveiled a new site to showcase HTML5. On it, Apple showed off a number of impressive web demos coded using only HTML5 technologies. However, at least on the main page, these demos were restricted to working on only Apple’s Safari web browser. So now Google is countering with its own HTML5 site — called, get this, HTML5Rocks

.
Google and Apple are arguably the two biggest companies attempting to push HTML5 forward. Notably, both also dominate updates to the WebKit rendering engine (with both Safari and Google Chrome use). But both also seem a bit at odds with HTML5 because both have popular mobile platforms that use native applications not coded with HTML5. In recent weeks though, the two companies (which are in the middle of a war with one another) seem to be trying to show that each is fully committed to the open web.

Google Translate

is also known for its occasional snafus. For example, an English to French translation of “videos on Vimeo” previously resulted in “des videos sur YouTube.” Another example of a wonky translation took place when Kai-Fu Lee, president of the search giant’s China operations, left the company.

Today’s questionable result comes from an English to Italian translation

of “call us for free.” The phrase returns in Italian as “Telefonare gratis con Skype.” The reverse translation results in ‘call us for free.’

I’ve always had a soft spot in my necrotic heart for Sonos

. In the face if iPods, Zunes, mobile phones, and everything else, they’ve kept pumping out great, compact products for folks with big houses. They’ve never pretended to be too high-class for the rest of us yet you basically use their products to create soundscapes, just like Disney World, Vegas, and the haunted house I made in my basement as a kid.

Sonos just announced their iPad app – probably available in August – that allows you to control your Sonos system on the iPad’s bright screen. The app allows you to browse your iTunes and Sonos collection, pick radio streams, and even set different rooms with different playlists. When I tested the Sonos kit I used to like to make my bathroom, for instance, the Drum’n'Bass room to ease evacuation.

Video after the jump.

The latest streaming music service to launch is Rdio

, which is backed by the founders of Skype. It lets you stream 5 million songs from all the major labels (some key indie bands are missing though), create playlists, and find music through other people. The problem is that it is rolling out slowly. You need an invite just to try it out.
Well, we just got 1,000 invites for TechCrunch readers. Just click here

and use the code “RDIOTC01″
The invite is only good for three days, after which you need to subscribe for at least $5 a month to keep listening. But it’s wor

I’ve been thinking this for a long while: Amazon won the ereader war. They were first to market – not officially, but in terms of mindshare, they offer a software package that is compelling on almost every mobile and desktop platform, and they have an entrenched user base already invested in their product. Nothing else comes close. No matter who you are, no matter what you think about ebooks and their future, Amazon owns the mind share – and the market share – and everyone else is doomed. Maybe I’m being a bit overly pessimistic, but I’m trying to make my point abundantly clear: everyone else in this space is playing a distant second to Amazon and its Kindle store.

First, don’t take my word for it. Om made a similar point

and even offers a numbered list of reasons why including, but not limited to:

1. The Kindle

App has made the Kindle “device” a obsolete for many early adopters.
2. Kindle was first with a popular and interesting solution to ebook reading. Say what you want about Sony and their Reader line: nobody beats the Kiz.
3. It’s all about software now, and Kindle rules the roost.

YouTube has just announced that it will now offer full-length, current episodes of a suite of World Wrestling Entertainment-related programming. The deal includes episodes of Friday Night Smackdown, WWE NXT, WWE Superstars, and ECW. I don’t know what any of those are, but I assume they all involve tights, big hair, and burly guys fighting. You can find all of it on the WWE’s official channel

This sort of content may not pique the interest of a huge number of TechCrunch readers (I can honestly say I’ve never watched a WWE event in my life) but the deal is significant: this is the one of the first times YouTube has offered so-called “catch-up” primetime programming.

These aren’t new rumors, exactly: we heard Hulu bought a ticket to Xbox-town a week ago, and of course the pay model has been a long time coming. In fact, it was supposed to launch a couple weeks ago. We heard there was a delay, and now “sources” are saying the move to pay (and to other devices, including the iPad) will happen “in the next month or two.” What! That’s as specific as they could get? Some source! Reuters would do better to read CrunchGear.

Apple’s A4 ain’t that special

I really don’t understand what the big deal is about the A4. ARM designed the chip, Apple customized it, and Samsung built it. How is that any different from any other phone or device manufacturer?

The A4 variant (an unfortunate name considering the A* naming convention in ARM chips) is just an A8-based chip with a setup specific to the iPhone or iPad’s PCB layout and processing needs. Apple doesn’t have fairy dust to sprinkle on it to make it anything more than that.

That said, however, there’s a lot more to a device than making the right hardware decisions. The Samsung Wave, it has been revealed, uses a very similar Samsung-made (obviously) 1GHz ARM A8 processor, putting it as near Apple’s A4 as can be. But do you think you’re going to have a similar user experience? No, silly! So much depends upon the UI designers and coders that the processor is really only a secondary consideration.

Short version: A plain-looking, but robust drive for the security-conscious interface fiend in us all. Or at least those of us with cash to spare. Read More

WWE finally has a YouTube account (and with full episodes)

I must be seeing things… is that an official WWE YouTube page, and one that already has last night’s episode of Monday Night Raw online? This is so unlike WWE, embracing technology. They must have hired someone new in recent weeks, someone who told them that, you know, the Internet isn’t merely for “geeks” anymore.

Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker comes out today in North America, and in 10 days in Europe. (It came out in Japan about two weeks ago.) Famous Japanese video game magazine Famitsu gave it a 40/40, so we can safely assume it’s not bad at all. Also not bad, probably? The Astro A30 gaming headset. Konami helped the Astro team design the headset, dontcha know?

When Casio’s rugged digital camera, the Exilim EX-G1, came out last year, it received great reviews (for example, from us). And it appears as if the 12.1MP device sold really well, too, as Casio today in Japan announced [JP] two limited edition colors (the EX-G1 GN in green and the EX-G1 SR in silver).

Did you miss the premiere of that John Hillcoat-directed Red Dead Redemption short film the other day? Do you not know how to use BitTorrent or Usenet? Then I have some good news for you. By clicking “Read More” you can see the entire thing! There’s no real spoilers so no worries there.

If you’re the excitable type, you may want to try the iOS 4.0 Gold Master right now. This is probably the most dangerous thing you can do to your phone aside from run over it with a car, so don’t say we didn’t warn you. There are many sources, obviously, so do a Google search.

Many times during the day, I look at my watch. It’s a rather easy thing to read. Its functionality and simplicity has remained for years. However, that notion wasn’t good enough for one company, namely Tokyo Flash.

Part of the draw of Crysis 2 is that it’ll run just as well on your Xbox 360 or PS3 as it will on my PC. That’s what CryTek, the game’s developers, told the gaming press back in April. I saw the Xbox 360 version in action that day, and yeah: it looks insane for an Xbox 360 game; hard to believe it’s running on five-year-old hardware. But now you can look at the game in action for yourself~!

This morning, my colleague Jason Kincaid wrote a very good and very level-headed post about the new iPhone (and the new iOS 4 software) from the perspective of an Android user. I’m going to come at it from the other angle.

Recently, I’ve written my takes on both the Nexus One and the EVO 4G from the perspective of an iPhone lover. Obviously, I don’t have an iPhone 4 yet, and so this isn’t a full review, but after the keynote yesterday we did get some hands-on time with the new device. So I figured I’d write down my initial reaction after playing with the new hardware for about 20 minutes or so. Before I go any further, I’ll save you the suspense: it’s awesome.

Editor’s note: Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of salesforce.com, really loves Japan. And if you are a startup founder or tech executive, he thinks you should too. He explains why in this guest post, culled from observations from his most recent visit.

Thousands of people lined up last week to buy iPads. And, if you didn’t notice them, it’s because they were in Tokyo.

I’ve been living in Japan for the past three weeks and couldn’t miss the madness

around the introduction of the iPad here. I couldn’t believe the demand for this new “magical” computer. After all, this is the country that developed and built some of the world’s most popular PCs—and now the iPad, which was designed somewhere else, is revered. It’s bowed to. (Reportedly, about half of Japanese business and technology magazines are featuring the iPad on their covers.) I expect that out of the 10 million iPads sold this year, at least 500,000 to one million will be sold in Japan.

Something else amazing in Apple-mania happened last week. Apple’s market cap passed Microsoft. I suggested in a post last April, “The end of Microsoft. A door opens to a new cloud”

, that this seminal event was about to happen. Steve Jobs described it as being “Surreal”. I agree. It is surreal—both unbelievable and fantastic. This is a milestone that signifies a dramatic change of computing: Windows is on the decline, and new technologies such as iPads and iPhones, Android and Google Search, and Cloud Computing are on the way up.

Ever wonder what a week as the No. 1 free iPhone app in the App Store translates to in downloads and ad revenues? One of the employees at mobile ad management platform Burstly

created an app called Air Horn,

which simply makes a very loud horn noise. The app, which had been out for over 6 months and had zero marketing dollars spent to promote it, recently hit the No. 1

spot on the Free App list.

Developed in less than three hours by Alex Miyamura, Air Horn was at the top spot for 8 days and just dropped to no. 2 this morning. Over the past week, Air Horn has made $20,000 from advertising (ad banners) and in-app purchases.

Caffeine: Google Finally Brews Its New Pot Of Web Results — 50% Fresher

In August of last year, we wrote about Caffeine, the codename for Google’s latest iteration of its search product. The idea behind it was simple yet encompassing: to “push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions.” Back in December, it looked just about ready, but never came. Today, it’s finally ready to roll.

In a post

on the Google Blog, the company is saying that the new web indexing system is complete. Significantly, it provides “50 percent fresher results for web searches than our last index, and it’s the largest collection of web content we’ve offered.” Basically, you’ll now be able to find more current links faster than ever before.

Today, Twitter has expanded the testing of its own URL shortner — which is now using the t.co domain. The expansion (which will eventually be available to all Twitter users) is interesting in terms of what it means for the URL shortening ecosystem. But it also should be interesting from a broader perspective to the entire ecosystem because it opens up some new possibilities, such as content recommendation.

Twitter developer Raffi Krikorian notes

as much in the Twitter Development Talk Google Group today. Specifically, he writes, “we want to be able to build services and APIs that can make algorithmic recommendations to users based on the content they are consuming.” This will be possible because Twitter will be keeping track of all clicks (as they note, “in aggregate and not identifiable manner”).

Exalead

, the search engine that (no kidding) underlies Friendster

and has been behind French government attempts to build a platform to rival Google (yes), has been acquired by Dassault Systèmes, a leader in 3D software for big company processes for about €135 million ($161.5m).

Exalead was also key member of Quaero

, a technology consortium with a five-year budget of €199 million, funded by the French government to develop multimedia search tools. Where is Quaero now?

Big changes are coming to Twitter links. In a post just published

on the Twitter blog, the company has announced that it will soon be using a new official link shortening service t.co to wrap all links shared on Twitter. Starting some time this summer, every time you share a link through either the Twitter web client or a third-party, it will be wrapped in a link with the format t.co/******.

So what does this mean for the Twitter ecosystem? Twitter VP of Product Jason Goldman

says that the feature serves three purposes. First, it’s going to help Twitter crack down on spam, as the service will be able to accurately monitor the distribution of each link, and it can warn users when it thinks a link may be malicious. Second, it will allow users to better understand where links are going (more on that below). And third, it will help Twitter with analytics, which is related to its Promoted Tweets. Goldman says that Twitter is pre-announcing the feature, which is currently only active with three accounts, to give the developer community a heads up for what’s coming.

In case you still had any doubts that Yahoo and AOL are pursuing the same strategy when it comes to building a media brand online, all you have to do is listen to the two executives running the respective content businesses of each company. Yahoo Media VP James Pitaro and AOL Media president David Eun were both on a Future Of Media panel

together in New York City today, but they sound like they work for the same company.

Back in September of last year, Google unveiled an early look at an interesting (and rather hilarious) new project: Chrome Frame

. What it does is take Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser and basically turn it into Google Chrome via a plug-in. Today, that plug-in has progressed enough that Google is graduating it to full beta status. “We think it’s really stable,” engineer Alex Russell tells us in noting the move to beta.

To use Chrome Frame, all a user has to do is go here and install

the plug-in on either IE6, IE7, or IE8 running on Windows 7, Vista, or XP. For developers, it’s even easier to target these users: they just have to include a meta tag in their sites’ code and their pages will start to render in IE (with Chrome Frame installed) just as they would in Chrome itself.

If you’ve been to San Francisco in the past few months, you’ll know that the entire city is plastered with iPad advertisements. The situation is even more out of control now that it’s WWDC week and thousands of Apple developers are in from out of town. So one rogue group of artists decided to have a little fun.
The group Freedom From Porn

has been going all around the city and altering the iPad ads to add a little porn to them. To be clear, these aren’t really explicit additions, instead, they’re more subversive. For example, see the Steve Jobs’ Facebook page below.

A pair of reports from Reuters today spell out some of the latest moves that electronics manufacturer Foxconn has made in response to a tragic wave of suicides at its largest Chinese factory. The spate of suicides has brought heat against both the manufacturer and its clients, which include Apple.

First, Reuters reports

that according to Chinese news agency Xinhua, posters have appeared at Foxconn’s Shenzhen plant saying that it had “concrete evidence” that some of the suicides were motivated by the 100,000 yuan ($14,640) payout victims’ families were receiving. The posters reportedly go on to say “The act is wrong. Life is precious. To prevent such tragedies, Foxconn is to cease releasing compensation other than that provided by law”.

It’s amazing what an on-stage Steve Jobs mention will do.
Everyone has been buzzing

today after Pulse

, the awesome news aggregator, was pulled from Apple’s App Store after the New York Times apparently complained about their use of content. But what’s really odd about this is that just 24 hours ago, Pulse was highlighted on stage by no less than the Apple CEO himself as a great new app for the iPad. Jobs and those running the App Store seemed to be on a completely different page. Not anymore.

Yesterday, Microsoft launched a new wave of commercials aimed at educating consumers of their risks online. The ads, which debuted on FOX last night, can be watched here.

As Brandon LeBlanc writes

on the Windows blog,

To prove just how vulnerable your personal information is, Internet Explorer 8 re-recreated notorious internet scams–live, off the web– in the most street-smart city in world: New York. We used hidden cameras to film reactions of real people. In the first spot we asked people to provide very personal information in order to open a new bank account which would give them a cash reward of $500. We learned that, just as it is online, it can be hard to tell the difference between the scammer and the real thing. We filmed a lot of people and nearly all of them were convinced our “bank” was the real deal.

IE9 Responds To Safari 5 With A Side-By-Side Hardware Acceleration Video

Yesterday, Apple released the latest version of its web browser, Safari 5. In their release notes, they highlight not only new features, but also the fact that it’s faster than the latest versions of Chrome and Firefox. One competitor they didn’t mention was the most-used web browser in the world: Internet Explorer. Today, Microsoft has responded to that.
In a post

on their Blogging Windows blog, the IE team has posted a video showing the latest version of IE, IE9 (still in beta testing), running against Safari 5. The result? IE smokes Safari. It’s not even close.

Twitter COO Dick Costolo offered some updated stats at the Conversational Media Summit

today in New York City. Twitter is now attracting 190 million visitors per month and generating 65 million Tweets a day. “We’re laying down track as fast as we can in front of the train,” says Costolo. These numbers are up slightly from 180 million self-reported unique visitors per month back in April, and 50 million Tweets per day in February.
The number of visitors to Twitter.com is not the same as the number of registered users. (ComScore, in contrast, estimated 83.6 million worldwide unique visitors to Twitter.com in April and 23.8 million U.S. visitors in May, see chart below). Most users, says Costolo, don’t Tweet at all, but rather use Twitter as a consumption media. How many of those 65 million Tweets are automated spam is not clear.

JackRabbit Systems

, a developer of a white-label online travel bookings software, has raised $1.33

million in funding from Kickstart Seed Fund

and Sun Mountain Capital

. This brings the company’s total funding to $3.7 million
JackRabbit’s main software, BookDirect, allows any website to embed a direct hotel booking system on their sites. Similar to Expedia, BookDirect gathers rates and availability information from lodging properties, and displays that information to consumers looking to book rooms. Consumers can then click from the search engine to the lodging property website to complete the booking.

Let’s annotate

just released their iPad version

for real-time collaboration for PDFs. The service is still in alpha and takes full advantage of the iPad’s HTML5 capabilities. The app practially runs within the iPads browser and also let’s you make use of native iPad elements such as multi-touch.

The iPad version was built upon their existing Web application, that comes in three different pricing models depending on the number of collaborators and storage space. It’s also fully built with HTML5 and aims to take out the hassle of sending large junks of PDFs over the web. Sounds familiar? Indeed there are various apps out there, most notably Scribd, Issuu or Google Docs.

OnStar

has struck a deal

with Google to integrate Google Maps into all of its navigation systems. OnStar users can now use Google Maps to get directions to a destination and then send those destinations to OnStar’s Turn-by-Turn Navigation Service in their vehicles.

The Google Maps option will be available on all current Turn-by-Turn capable GM vehicles starting with the 2006 model year and also will integrate with OnStar Destination Download to send destinations directly to the vehicle’s screen-based navigation system.

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