TechCrunch

Well, Netflix streaming on the PS3 works. Of course, you need to use the special disk (can't just download the software eh? how quaint). But it appears to be working correctly. Check out the video inside, which demonstrates that it's working, and working smoothly.

Today is Droid day — an event that I, like many tech bloggers, have been looking forward to for quite some time. Unlike some people, I wasn't graced with a test Droid last week, so I was forced to go out and get one the old fashioned way: by getting to the store as early as possible, before the precious devices sold out. And while I was concerned about falling prey to a supply shortage, a part of me still hoped there would be many others like me, helping justify my early morning rise. These are my notes as I searched for the unexpectedly elusive Verizon Droid line.

5:30 AM. I woke up this morning to the soothing chimes of my over-priced alarm clock, took a look at the ungodly hour, and immediately sank back into my pillow. It wasn't until my second alarm (strategically positioned far out of arm's reach) kicked in that I remembered the task at hand: Droid day.

When news of the Litl Webbook broke out on Wednesday, I was pleased to learn that the company is located here in Boston, since there aren't nearly as many people in this area making actual hardware devices, as opposed to software and web companies.

I got a chance to sit down with CEO John Chuang for a thorough overview of the Webbook, so check out the video inside for some information about the design philosophy and user interface behind the $699 transforming internet computer.

Holy cats, Ford is going downmarket. Way down. Way, way down. Daniel Grossman, VP of Ford Motor Company, just announced to ONN the $650 car, which will be the least expensive, and cheapest, car available in any market. That's right. A car I can afford to buy on my salary. My wife will be so excited. Watch the video announcement after the jump.

Zynga CEO Mark Pincus said earlier this week that he intends to make sure his company's games don't include scammy offers in the future. Our full background on this story is here.

But what he didn't say in that blog post is that Zynga has been scamming users from the beginning quite intentionally as part of their revenue model. Rather, he pointed much of the blame at middlemen offer companies: "We need to be more aggressive and have revised our service level agreements with these providers requiring them to filter and police offers prior to posting on their networks."

Last spring, though, he gave a much clearer explanation to an audience at a Startup@Berkeley mixer, admitting that scamming users was part of Zynga's business model from the start. And it was all caught on video. I think everyone sort of knew that this was exactly Zynga's gameplan. But to hear it said so directly is just shocking.

The full 30ish minute video is here. We've taken the relevant section of the video, roughly starting at around the 10:40 mark, and embed it below. From the video:

I knew that i wanted to control my destiny, so I knew I needed revenues, right, fucking, now. Like I needed revenues now. So I funded the company myself but I did every horrible thing in the book to, just to get revenues right away. I mean we gave our users poker chips if they downloaded this wiki toolbar which was like, I dont know, I downloaded it once and couldn't get rid of it. *laughs* We did anything possible just to just get revenues so that we could grow and be a real business...So control your destiny. So that was a big lesson, controlling your business. So by the time we raised money we were profitable.

Reactions to John Cameron's next big movie Avatar, scheduled for release (almost) worldwide on December 18, can be called mixed at best. We've shown you two trailers already, and now Japan gets a third one with a handful of scenes not seen before.

My inbox is in pain. Almost immediately after I hit the publish button on last week's iPhone 3GS vs Motorola Droid Smartphone Showdown, a torrential blast of comments and questions has been barraging just about every communication inlet I've got. Phone calls. Twitter DMs. Lots, and lots, and lots of emails. Across the board, it all seems to indicate one thing: people want more.

We hear you. There are a number of worthwhile topics I simply didn't get a chance to touch on, and a few observations I've made since that are worth mentioning. For those, may we present: Round 2.

My inbox is in pain. Almost immediately after I hit the publish button on last week’s iPhone 3GS vs Motorola Droid Smartphone Showdown, a torrential blast of comments and questions has been barraging just about every communication inlet I’ve got. Phone calls. Twitter DMs. Lots, and lots, and lots of emails. Across the board, it [...]

In the Steven Spielberg movie Minority Report (yes, I make some reference to it about once a week), there's a scene in which John Anderton (Tom Cruise's character) is walking through an urban retail center and his eyes are getting scanned as he moves, which is serving up custom greetings and deals from retailers. It's both creepy and cool. But that movie is set in 2054, we're not there yet. But AT&T had a demo at its Tech Showcase today that is inching closer to that.

As you can see in the video below, the idea behind AT&T's system is that you can walk around a city with a phone in your pocket and get alerted when a nearby retailer has a deal for you. Users of Foursquare and soon Loopt will recognize this concept, but AT&T's idea is a bit different. By using AT&T's network as the bridge to be constantly updating your location (assuming, of course, you opt-in to such a feature), these retailers are able to push these coupons to your phone via SMS. Currently, something like Foursquare requires that you "check-in" to a place to see that there is a deal there or nearby.

Last month, I lashed out against cable companies and their cable boxes because they are junk. Absolute trash. The hardware is slow, the UIs are terrible, and the remotes are like Fisher Price toys. This is 2009, not 1989.

Today in San Francisco, AT&T held a Tech Showcase to show off some of the new innovations they are working on in their labs. One such thing I got a demo of was a way to use your iPhone to search television content simply by using your voice. While you may think something like this is less than ideal, it's fast and very accurate. Watch below as the demonstration goes from simple to more complex. And, of course, a regular touch-based remote is included as well to select things.

Microsoft has two new Windows 7 ads and, well, they are just like the first batch. A random regular person thinks that they designed Windows 7 when we all really know it was us nerds that posted every little Vista flaw on message boards and blogs. But we shouldn’t take all the credit. Regular people [...]

Ford just announced the inflatable seatbelt, intended to protect passengers seated in the back of the vehicle, where they are more vulnerable to head, chest, and neck injuries. How long will it be before our vehicles are filled with SecureFoam, filling our vehicles whenever we crash.

Zyxio is a Las Vegas based startup that we've been tracking for a while now. They've developed proprietary technology called SensaWaft that lets people control computers via air flow. As in, you can control a mechanical device, or a mouse pointer on a screen, or whatever, by blowing. How hard you blow, as well as minute differences in direction, are converted to commands.

The possible products from the technology are limitless. Combine this with voice recognition for less dangerous in-car computing. Or design applications to help the handicapped. You can get an idea for how the technology works in the video below.

The company is busy productizing the technology. But today they're launching a contest to crowdsource new product ideas. If you have an amazing idea for the technology, you can get paid to help them build a product around it. And if you just want to vote on ideas from others, you can do that too.

Go to BeAMindBlower and register for more details. Submit your idea in as much or as little detail as you like. Others can register and vote. At the end of November the company will take the top ranked ideas and put them to a final round of voting, which ends on December 13.

Did you know that Will Wheaton was in JJ's Star Trek? He just went public with the secret cameo voice overs and details the entire experience on his personal blog. If you're even the slightest Star Trek fan, click over and read the whole thing. It's awesome to me that he was so honored and humbled to do just voice over work in the new movie even though he played such a major part in introducing Star Trek to a new audience. The clip after the jump is apparently the only one in the film that's his unaltered voice.e.

Put all the Modern Warfare 2 controversy crap behind of you for just a minute and a half. Forget about the lack of PC dedicated server support and that you *might* kill civilians in the game. Just watch the official launch trailer and tell me you aren’t stoked about this game. Seriously.

The Japanese, I am told, really love their stationery. Pens, pencils, erasers, special paper, cases for everything — one trip to Muji, my favorite store, will confirm this. Unfortunately, stationeriphilia in the US is more of a high-class "my pen is made out of solid gold" affair. So when JetPens, an etailer for Japanese pens and miscellany, offered to send a couple of their favorite things, I accepted gladly. There's so much stuff there that I just had them select a few things at random — and this is what I got.

Beetle-tip highlighters? Auto-rotating mechanical pencils? It's a whole other world over there.

If I had one of these things, I'd never get any work done. Unless I was a rally driver, in which case I'll I'd be doing was work, work, work. Unfortunately (in this case at least) I'm just a blogger, so I don't won't be getting paid for zooming around the mountains in a cross between a tricked-out Subaru and a snowtank. Yes, I know there's no such thing as a snowtank, but you know what I'm talking about.

There isn’t many things cooler than the Electrobite. Maybe the Snuggy, but the Sunggy won’t score you major nerd points. This little guy will. Boing Boing took the homemade trilobite-shaped vehicle for a ride and you must watch the video.

There are plenty of companies out there that specialize in bringing websites to mobile devices by creating optimized sites, such as MoFuse, Jagag, ByteMobile, and many more. But with the fast growth of web use and apps in the mobile space, there's definitely room for more startups. Moovweb is entering this space with its offering, which helps brands create customized mobile sites for smartphones as well as develop mobile apps.

Moovweb launched earlier this year with a $700,000 investment led by Sun Microsystems co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim, with other angel investors participating. The startup focuses on helping brands and companies determine whether to create a mobile site or an app or both. Moovweb's technology promises to create highly optimized sites and retain as much functionality of a brand's site as possible. And where browsers are more limited, Moovweb will downgrade the experience.

Business intelligence is a service that is crucial to both big and small companies. Indicee is a startup that that helps users easily combine data from their business applications and generate reports using Indicee's cloud-based service. It essentially wants to bring bring reporting and analysis to the “masses” with a cost-effective solution to mashup business data.


Indicee also just completed a $6 million Series A round from Granite Ventures and Yaletown Ventures. Indicee's technology taps into data from business applications and content from productivity software such as Excel, and others and automatically builds reports and analysis for this data in the cloud. Users can ask business questions in plain English, which Indicee then responds with reports and visualizations that are produced from on-demand from data uploaded to the cloud.