TC50: Clicker is a TV guide for the Internet age
Clicker, a startup launching at the TechCrunch50 conference in San Francisco today, says one of the problems with watching TV online is figuring out what’s on: Where’s our TV guide for the web? Clicker says it’s the first “structured, comprehensive and unbiased guide for online television.”
It’s raised $8 million from Benchmark Capital and Redpoint Ventures. It also has an upcoming distribution deal with Boxee, to let users search for content directly on their TV sets.
The… Continue Reading
TC50: Spawn Labs lets you play your console games on your laptop
We’ve seen more and more energy in the social and mobile games market, but if you’re looking for high-end games, you’ll still find them on consoles like the Xbox 360, mostly. A startup called Spawn Labs, which just debuted at the TechCrunch50 conference in San Francisco today, says it’s bringing the two worlds together.
The games themselves run on consoles like the Xbox and the Playstation 3, but you can play them on a computer with… Continue Reading
TC50: Toybots helps toys come to life with Internet connectivity
Toybots Woozees, which launched at the TechCrunch50 conference in San Francisco today, is a platform toy makers can use to build Internet connectivity and GPS tracking into their products. For example, an enabled teddy bear can use a built-in accelerometer to tell when you give it a hug, or a talking Elmo could be remotely updated with fresh sayings.
You can “tickle” a toy online and it will giggle in the real world. A grandmother can… Continue Reading
TC50: FluidHtml builds a more web-friendly version of Flash
Adobe’s Flash is a popular format for web developers because it allows companies to build pretty, interactive web apps, but it also comes with plenty of headaches. A startup called FluidHtml, launching at the TechCrunch50 conference in San Francisco today, announced a new web markup language, also called FluidHtml, which it promises has the richness of Flash while eliminating disadvantages.
Basically, FluidHtml says that Flash “doesn’t work the way the rest of the Internet works,” and… Continue Reading
TC50: iTwin allows encrypted, cableless file-sharing
iTwin, one of the startups launching at the TechCrunch50 conference in San Francisco today, is a hardware product that wirelessly allows two computers to share encrypted data from anywhere in the world. The founders call it a “cableless cable” because it connects two computers, without an actual cable.
You plug in one half to one computer and the other to another computer. After it syncs a private key, you can share files between machines even if… Continue Reading
TC50: Microsoft’s next attack on Google: Bing gets visual search
Microsoft continues its attempt to unseat Google as the king of search. Today, someone from the team behind its Bing search engine took the stage at the TechCrunch50 conference in San Francisco to announce the latest feature: Visual search.
The most obvious way to use visual search is when you’re shopping for products. So if you want to buy a new handbag, you could look at images of thousands of handbags in Bing, scroll through them… Continue Reading
TC50: Sealtale offers a personalized way to declare brand loyalty
The latest company to demo at today’s TechCrunch50 conference in San Francisco is Sealtale. There are people who love to tell everyone about the companies, products, and brands that they like. They’ll put stickers on laptops, pins on messengers bags, and so on. Sealtale brings this idea to the web, allowing users add badges to blogs and websites.
So let’s say you’re a fan of VentureBeat. You could find a VentureBeat badge on Sealtale and add… Continue Reading
TC50: ClaseMovil launches a virtual world for learning
ClaseMovil just demonstrated its new virtual world for education at the TechCrunch50 conference in San Francisco. The company is launching in Latin America and is pitching itself as a way for underprivileged students to stay competitive.
The ClaseMovil virtual world is presented as a place for children to play. Within the world, they’ll find educational videos and games. Teachers can then see the results of the activities to gauge how each student is progressing.
There are of… Continue Reading
TC50: Story Something creates personal stories for your children
Story Something, one of the TechCrunch50 companies kept under wraps until today’s live event in San Francisco (click here for a live stream from the show), lets you create a personalized story for your child that they can take with them anywhere.
The founding team says parents spend less than five minutes a day reading to their kids and that children love hearing about themselves as the main character in fairy tales. So the idea is… Continue Reading
TC50: With Penn & Teller, your iPhone does card tricks too
Magicians Penn & Teller are launching an iPhone application at the TechCrunch50 conference in San Francisco today. It’s a way for iPhone users to perform card tricks and, in the process, convince everyone that they’re friends with the famous illusionists.
Basically, you have your friend pick a card from a deck, then you give them your iPhone with the app turned on. The app looks like your standard SMS text message interface, where they’re putatively going… Continue Reading
Dean’s picks for the best of DEMO
The DEMO 2009 conference was in a familiar setting in Palm Desert, Calif., this week, but it was very different from past shows. The elephant in the room, as organizer Chris Shipley pointed out, was the weak economy.
That colored everything. There were fewer companies — 39 this time versus 72 in the fall and 68 a year ago. This meant I was able to spend more time with each company, meeting them at their booths… Continue Reading
DEMO: AppZero makes it easy to hop between clouds
Cloud computing offers a lot of advantages to companies that don’t want to run their own data centers. AppZero, one of the companies presenting this week at DEMO 2009, hopes to make it much easier for companies to move their sites and applications between different data centers.
Call it cloud hopping. The company hopes to save companies money on hosting and backing up data using its new virtualization technology, which adds an infrastructure layer so that… Continue Reading
DEMO: Primal Fusion connects your thoughts together
Primal Fusion is using semantic technology to help you with “thought networking.” What that means, apparently, is that it helps you gather relevant materials from across the internet in order to put together a term paper or research project.
The company is showing its offering at the DEMO conference this week. Here’s how it works: You enter a topic such as “social networking.” Then it presents you with a series of words that are contextually relevant… Continue Reading
DEMO: Promptu launches ShoutOUT iPhone voice-driven messaging/command system
The DEMO conference is never a kind forum for those trying to do voice recognition applications. That proved true again just now as Scott Maddux, vice president of product marketing at Promptu, tried to do a voice-command product demo at the show.
Menlo Park, Calif.-based Promptu has a new application, dubbed ShoutOUT, for the iPhone. The application recognizes your speech in your own words and converts the words into written text messages or voice commands for… Continue Reading
DEMO: SmartyCard lets kids learn stuff and earn stuff
SmartyCard has a smart way to get kids to learn via its reward-based quizzing approach. The company, which is showing off the service at DEMO today, runs a web site where kids can take quizzes to earn prizes that have been paid for by their parents.
It’s sort of like the carrot approach, getting kids to eat their veggies before enjoying dessert. The San Mateo, Calif.-based company sets up a bunch of multiple-choice quizzes — ranging… Continue Reading
DEMO: Gwabbit launches automated email contact manager
Contact managers are ripe for a makeover. As such, Technicopia is announcing a tool called Gwabbit today at the DEMO 2009 conference that could take the tedium out of updating your email contacts.
It’s arguable that this has already been done with the automated contact information collected by Gmail. But that only works for collecting the email addresses of people you’ve corresponded with. It does nothing to aggregate phone numbers, addresses and other contacts.
Gwabbit does this… Continue Reading
DEMO: BitGravity launches high-definition video streaming service
BitGravity is launching a digital video service today that allows its customers to stream high-definition videos over the Internet.
The BG Live service can stream live events in 1080p or 720p resolution (the same quality as high-end TV sets), according to the company’s announcement at DEMO 2009 today.
The Flash-based service does not require that customers download a viewing client, and Burlingame, Calif.-based BitGravity says the service is inexpensive and easy to set up. Perry Wu, chief… Continue Reading
DEMO: Coveroo lets you personalize your cell phones with laser imagery
At DEMO today, Coveroo is launching a service to personalize cell phones and other gadgets with laser imagery. Now you can have anything from the characters of Capcom’s Resident Evil 5 video game to Garfield etched onto the back of your phone.
Coveroo can render these images in color, stainless steel engravings, gold mesh, or glow-in-the-dark versions. You order one by going to the site, choosing a phone model, selecting the design you want, and then… Continue Reading
Utility Scale Solar aims to bring solar costs level with coal, natural gas
Utility Scale Solar, maker of tracking devices for solar thermal installations, plans to try out its technology with clients over the next several months, and is looking for $6 million in first-round funding to do it, reports VentureWire.
Based in Palo Alto, Calif., the company is in the last stages of developing single and dual-axis gearless tracking systems that it claims will increase efficiency and lower operation costs. It will use its new money to produce… Continue Reading
Netgear introduces more connected entertainment gadgets
Connected entertainment is clearly a big theme at the International Consumer Electronics Show taking place this week in Las Vegas.
Today Netgear showed off three products that make it a lot easier to use the Internet with consumer electronics gear.
Its first product was the Netgear Internet TV Player, which is enabled by the company’s partnership with
Mountain View, Calif.-based Verismo Networks. This little $199 set-top box will connect to a TV and give users access to hundreds… Continue Reading