TechCrunch

Another week, another Zero Punctuation. Not surprisingly, this week has Yahtzee taking on Modern Warfare 2. In a nutshell, he finds the gameplay a mixed bag, co-op fun as hell, and the plot and controversy beyond ridiculous. That sounds about right.

Remember the iTwinge, that crazy slide-on plastic sheath for the iPhone that would give you a physical keyboard by overlaying real buttons on top of the virtual ones? The 4iThumbs keypad is just like that, except it’s clear, rather than opaque black. Oh, and it requires you to stick a bunch of adhesive crap all [...]

Remember the iTwinge, that crazy slide-on plastic sheath for the iPhone that would give you a physical keyboard by overlaying real buttons on top of the virtual ones? This is just like that, except it's clear, rather than opaque black. Oh, and it requires you to stick a bunch of adhesive crap all over your iPhone.

Earlier this summer I traveled to Redmond to talk realtime and the cloud with senior Microsoft executives. In this conversation with Robbie Bach, President of Microsoft's Entertainment & Devices Division, I tried to delve into what "we inelegantly call Three Screens and A Cloud" from Bach's vantage point atop Xbox, Zune, Windows Mobile, Media Server, and related hardware. The subtext: Microsoft's nextgen realtime strategy at the cusp of consumer and enterprise.

ROBBIE BACH: For us, the cloud does a number of things. First of all, it enables us to create community. Right? I mean, the biggest thing -- people ask why is Xbox Live successful. Why do we have 20 million members on Xbox Live? And a good percentage of those people who pay us real money for a subscription every year. And some of it is about multi-player gaming, I will grant you. But a significant portion of it is about those people saying, "Hey, this is where I meet my friends. This is where we do things together."

And if you don't have a cloud set of services behind that, that gets actually quite hard. How do we do the types of things we're doing now where you and your friends will be able to watch a movie together and not be in the same room? That requires a set of cloud-based services behind it to enable that to happen in a rich and effective way. And, oh, by the way, talk and see each other at the same time. That's a pretty interesting experience and a pretty interesting trick. And that all happens through the work that we're able to do on Xbox Live.

So to me, the biggest thing that the cloud does in the immediate term is it gives us a social environment. It gives us the ability for people to do things together.

Peter Sunde, co-founder of The Pirate Bay, is now part of spiffy Web site Kvittar—“does not matter” in Swedish, according to the Google. It's a site that purports to do away with paper receipts. You need to sign up with a credit card.

I’m a big fan of people who do fun stuff with computers and so I am a big fan of this. These guys programmed 20 computers to play one note over and over. The resulting cacophony turns out to be a beep-boop version of the Tetris theme.

The project is simple, using the internal speaker of [...]

Japanese stationery maker King Jim announced the Pomera DM20 [JP] today, an ultra-compact handheld device that's based on a "less is more" concept. The so-called digital notebook, which is unfortunately Japan-only at this point, is only made for one purpose: It lets you make notes. No email, no web access, no gaming, nothing but writing texts or quickly jotting down your shopping list.

This morning we broke the news that Canopy Financial, no. 12 on this year's Inc. 500 list of fastest growing companies, is a complete sham.

And it's no surprise that today, everyone is trying to point the finger at everyone else.

The company's investment bank, Financial Technology Partners, which has represented Canopy Financial through at least two separate rounds of fraudulent fundraising, emailed to say:

This kit uses a CD-ROM drive and an Arduino board to build a clever robotic lock. This dude used a bolt to create the project and it's voice activated.

Well, that was quick. We just wrote about this thing today and suddenly it arrives at the house. I installed it and was quite impressed. The depth of the music improved immediately with plenty of bass and a richer sound. Turning it off makes the music almost tinny, which is odd.

If we applied Moore's law to the art of DJing, we would probably get something like Amidio's Touch DJ app. Gone are the software disk jockeys who replaced the original vinyl selectors. Now you can spin beats on your iPhone or iPod touch without listening to them. Wait, what?

If we were to make a “Amazing ideas” list and a “Things that have totally failed to take off” list, there would be at least one item that you’d find on both: mobile video chat. Blame the carriers for not agreeing on a standard, or blame the consumer populace for not pressing hard enough; either [...]

It’s a long video at a second shy of ten minutes, but don’t worry, the action starts early around 2:30. The best part is that the bloke doesn’t even know what a Rick Roll is. Oh, and what’s up with his couch?

Seth at PopMech went wild and started dipping a bunch of phones in liquid nitrogen. The resulting -55 degree bath cause phones to freeze, LCDs to dim, and buttons to stop. But, interestingly, it was hard to completely destroy a cellphone in liquid nitrogen.

This little controller is butt-ugly and crude, but I still want one really bad. Maybe Santa will bring me one.

Here’s the latest HourTime podcast, my little side project with Ariel Adams. Note, there’s a special surprise near the middle of the show so take a listen. Remember, head over to HourTime to drop your comment.

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As AOL prepares to spin off from Time Warner early next month, it is going through a slight rebranding. The AOL logo is changing to lowercase with a period (Aol.). The new branding campaign that is about to launch features the logo revealed as white space inside different images and pictures (see below).

The video above is a sneak peak of AOL's brand advertising campaign, which again reveals the new AOL logo over different images that the company wants to associate the brand with. The attempt here is to try to portray AOL as trendy, vibrant, and interesting—as far as artsy splashes, a headbanger and an acrobatic trio doing flips off one of their own manages to do that. The point is that AOL wants to reveal itself in unexpected ways.


It does need to reboot its image, I'll give it that much.

Is saying “I play Modern Warfare 2 for the single-player” the new “I read Playboy for the articles”? It might as well be. But get this: I play Modern Warfare 2 for the single-player. I stink at multi-player, so why even bother? That said, I know that many of you bought the game merely to play the multi-player, and thus have no idea what the single-player's story is about. Thank God for this video, then.

Go ahead and take that second helping of bacon-broasted mashed potatoes and high-fat gravy this Thursday, friends, because even if your tummy gets big and round like a steamed black bean bun, there's an app for that.

Fitness apps for all!
iPhone fitness apps have come a long way since Nike+iPod. The addition of GPS opened entirely new vistas for running and biking enthusiasts and the iPhone's video and audio capabilities made it fun to use the iPhone in the gym. Here are a few of my favorites.

Remember that hubbub a few weeks back about Seth MacFarlane's Family Guy advertising Windows 7? But the show was apparently deemed to raunchy so Microsoft replaced Family Guy with Warner Bros. Well, did you catch last night's episode? There was a Family Guy segment that certainly looked like an advertisement and was then followed by a regular Windows 7 commercial. Check out the video after the jump. It makes you wonder if there is more to come and the deal isn't dead after all.