It’s not easy being a wrestler. Inside the ring your pounding an opponent’s head against the corner post, but outside the ring it’s hard to meet people. Nobody really wants to be your friend. Not even on MySpace. They say their your friends, but they are not really your friends. Wrestlers aren’t stupid. They know everybody thinks they are just a bunch of clowns. That’s why the company that employs all the wrestlers you see on TV, World Wrestling Entertainment, created WWE Universe, a social network just for them and their fans. Okay, it’s not really a social network....
2007 person-to-person music downloads were worth a staggering $69 billion, and movie/television piracy continues to grow, says a new study. And all that free promotion didn’t cost them a penny. At least, that’s how Techdirt sees it. And I agree. Instead of embracing what might be the largest free marketing giveaway in the history of the world, the music labels instead sue their customers. And ask the social networks for handouts. Somebody over there needs to put their thinking cap on, quit screwing around and just give the damn music away for free with no lawsuit strings attached. Then use...
New York-based advertising firm MediaWhiz, never one to worry about gray areas when it comes to advertising, has launched a new product today called InLinks. It’s fairly straightforward - advertisers who want their sites associated with specific keywords simply buy ads. Links to those sites are then added to publishers sites whenever those words pop up in content. These aren’t ghost links like Kontera and others include in content - they’re full blown links without any notation (like a nofollow) that they are advertisements meant primarily for SEO juice. Content sites are paid a flat rate per month per ad...
Mobile advertising network Apptera has closed a $10.5 million funding round led by Alloy Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Walden International. The company is also announcing that David Karnstedt, Yahoo’s former SVP of North American Sales who has extensive experience in advertising, has joined its board. Apptera offers a suite of audio and visual advertising solutions for companies looking to place ads on mobile devices. The company is behind many of the voice ads when you hear on free 411 services, as well as the ads found on AOL’s Moviefone. The company estimates that its ads reach over 100...
We’ve had a blast playing SGN’s suite of Wii-like games over the last few months - iGolf, iBowl and iBaseball (basketball, tennis and boxing are coming soon). The apps are being downloaded like crazy on the App store, and no wonder - you get to swing your iPhone all over the place while you play the games. Now SGN is rolling out something a little different. iFun turns the iPhone into a Wii-like controller, but the actual games are played on normal desktop and laptop computers. The first title to launch is golf. If you don’t quite get it, see...
Social recommendation and personalization platform Plista, one of the companies in this year’s TechCrunch50 DemoPit, has secured an undisclosed amount of funding from Swiss Draper Investment Company. TechCrunch UK reviewedthe service after seeing it at work at the recent Web 2.0 Expo Europe in Berlin and called Plista basically a widget, API integration or Firefox browser plug-in which recommends content to users as they browse, based on collaborative filtering without the need for site cooperation. Its Greasemonkey script places a ratings box on each element of a site and rates it to your preferences. The recommendation engine works across sites,...
Eco Factor: Wrist exercise to generate power to charge mobile gadgets. Have you heard of pumping iron for a cause? I hadn’t, until I came across this hand grip charger for the iPhone and other mobile devices. Skin is what’s more on my body than any muscles, yet when cause becomes graver than self obsession, I wouldn’t mind flexing out my wrist to pump-in some energy to my phone. Mac Funamizu’s brainchild, this hand grip charger will come in handy for the instant charging needs where AC outlets are unavailable, more so this will be a hit amid the...
This is the image that comes up when people try to access Wikipedia.de, which used to be forwarded to Wikipedia.org. It reads: The county court of Luebeck (North Germany) has issued an order in the name of Lutz Heilmann, Member of Parliament (left party/post-communist) that the German Wikipedia (Wikimedia e.V.) must not allow linking its domain wikipedia.de to the Web site wikipedia.org, as long as the German language version of wikipedia.org makes certain statements. According to OhMyNews, these statements include Heilmann’s past as a member of the Stasi - the former official secret police of East Germany - as...
Today, I downloaded one of the dumbest, yet somehow most satisfying, apps to my Android phone. It is called the Punch-O-Meter. You grasp the phone (firmly) in your hand, tap the screen, and then give it your best shot. The app uses the phone’s accelerometer to measure how fast you can punch. After each punch, you get a score and a one-to-five-star rating. It is guaranteed to destroy your phone. When you start playing with it in a room full of people, everybody wants to try it. Especially anyone under five. When my two-year-old son insisted that I let...
The CrunchGear guys seem to cause more than their fair share of problems, and I’m always left cleaning up the mess. Today it’s Walmart who insist that the Black Friday circular posted on CrunchGear showing a $224 Wii package be taken down. First of all, it’s too late, it’s already everywhere. Second, Walmart claims both that the ad is copyrighted and otherwise proprietary information. But they also claim it is inaccurate, which suggests that it’s fake. I don’t see how it can be both. Whatever the case, we’re well within our rights to post this, so we’re leaving it up....
IntenseDebate, the enhanced commenting system that was recently acquired by WordPress’s parent company Automattic, has relaunched to the public (the service originally opened its doors in late 2007, but reentered private beta as soon as it was acquired). IntenseDebate has also released the public beta of its WordPress plugin, which includes a number of features that make it much more appealing to blog owners. The most important feature is two-way comment syncing, which copies all comments left on your blog through IntenseDebate’s system to your WordPress install. One common complaint about early versions of some comment systems, including InstenseDebate...
TechCrunch will host a party closing LeWeb conference next December 10th in Paris. About 600 hundred people will enjoy an open bar and live music in a relaxed atmosphere after two days of intense conference (All details are here). This party will be accessible to non participants to LeWeb and we’ll be selling 300 tickets (if you have a LeWeb pass you don’t need to buy a ticket. Just bring your pass with an ID). The first 50 tickets are now available at 30 euros (pricing will go up over time). If you want to keep track of upcoming ticket...
This week on the CrunchBoard we want to welcome Mirego and Brilliant2 to the new services and sales directories on CrunchBoard. They are great ways to reach the start-up community. While you are checking out these new directories, make sure to look at the latest job listing on CrunchBoard. Here’s some of jobs posted in the past week: UI / Usability Expert in Consumer Web 2.0Mirantis - Foster City, CA Business Development ManagerGreen Mountain Energy Company- Austin, TX Social Media Community ManagerMillions of Us -Sausalito, CA Online Marketing Specialist / Web Developerfrog design inc. - San Francisco, CA Advertising...
Dipping into that home equity line of credit to fund holiday gift purchases just doesn’t seem like such a good idea this year. As consumer spending dips, deals to entice purchasing should rise, right? Where there is fear there is opportunity. Tapping into recession fears, Yahoo Shopping just launched a new site in beta called Yahoo Deals that lists daily deals in different categories (computers, home & garden, clothing). It also offers online coupons, notices of storewide sales, and a place to browse through digital circulars. The daily deals are syndicated from sites like Amazon, DealNews, and Woot! The...
Yahoo’s top searches list and Google Trends are great if all you want is raw data on popular searches (possibly to figure out what content to create on your site). But Yahoo wants to do more with the data. Nicolas Scafuro, who leads the Yahoo Search Team for Latin America, says that his users want to know what’s popular, and they want to see it with pictures. They’ve launched Yahoo Pop, a new Spanish-language site that ranks the ten most popular searches by day, month and category and shows pictures associated with each search. The site is available for U.S....
Privately-owned PriveCo, which specializes in retailing “embarrassing” products online, has paid $1 million for the acquisition of the domain name vibrators.com (a little NSFW). PriveCo began selling private things out of a spare bedroom on a website called ShopInPrivate.com back in 1998, and has steadily grown to an operation with 12 separate retail sites whose warehouse ships 1500+ packages per week. This is how they justify the price of the domain name: It is an instantly recognizable name, Tied to products that people want to buy in complete privacy Customers will value PriveCo’s policies and services Competitor websites lack professionalism...
