The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘going-on-right’

We have multiple live streams going on right now, people, and it’s getting serious. My question is this: do you guys like watching the full press conferences or just the stand up afterward talking about all the goodies we already saw or a combination of both.

Read the original here:
What do you guys want to see?

I have a great prize (I don’t know what it is yet. Maybe it’s a headset or some iPhone cases.

View original here:
Contest: Guess what John just sat in

This is Monster Cables’ second line of remotes. The first were a candybar-style Harmony clone. Just like the rest of Monster’s line, it was expensive at $600, but yet nice.

See original here:
Hands-on with the Monster Cable MCC AV50

Location, location, location. With the growing ubiquity of GPS-equipped phones, there is a virtual land rush going on right now to put geolocation capabilities in every mobile app. Today, Mixer Labs, the folks behind TownMe, introduced the GeoAPI, aimed at developers who want to add geolocation features to their apps in a plug-and-play fashion.

The GeoAPI is built on top of what was previously called the TownMe GeoAPI, which offered a reverse geo-coder for lat/long coordinates and geo-database of 16 million businesses and points of interest. But now it is its own separate product, and with today’s release the GeoAPI now includes geo-coded Tweets and Flickr photos, improved search, a dedicated short URL (http//:geo.am) for location-specific links, an iPhone SDK, and better intersection data. You can find out more details here.

So a developer who wants to build their own Foursquare/Gowalla-type mobile app with check-ins and geo-Tweets can build it on top of the GeoAPI instead of assembling all the underlying data from scratch. Developers get up to 20,000 queries per day for free. They can also store their own data in the GeoAPI servers and run geo-queries against them.

To get a basic feeling for how this works, check out these simple demos for geo-coded Tweets and Flickr photos in San Francisco. You click on a neighborhood and it shows recent Tweets or photos taken from there.

Mixer Labs co-founder Elad Gil was the first product manager for Google Mobile Maps. He will find competition for creating a geolocation infrastructure for developers from SimpleGeo, founded by Matt Galligan (previously of Socialthing) and Joe Stump (ex-lead architect of Digg). Both Gil and Galligan will speak on the Geo Streams panel at next week’s Realtime CrunchUp, along with geo experts from Twitter, Foursquare, Google, and Hot Potato. (Tickets are still available). I’m sure we’ll be hearing a lot about which geo API is going to be better.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Just so everyone knows, there’s a Woot! Off going on right now.

Go here to read the rest:
Woot! Off! Alert!

Come on, people. You’re probably aware of the big Hotmail scandal going on right now, what with some 30,000 account names and passwords having been leaked over the past few days.

See the original post here:
Dear friends: Please stop falling for phishing attacks

There are some modders out there whom I would accuse of having too much free time. Whoever made this latest iPhone tweak would certainly be among them. This device was found in the Netherlands.

Original post:
Cocaine. There’s an app for that.

Google has just launched a new “search options” feature on its main search page. When you click on “Search options” you can filter your search by different types of results (videos, forums, and reviews), by time (recent, past 24 hours, past week, past year), as well as seeing related searches, a “wonder wheel” view, or a timeline view.

At Google’s Searchology event, which is going on right now, Marissa Mayer listed the following as the hardest unsolved problems in search:

- Finding the most recent information
- Expressing that you want just one type of result
- Assessing which results are best
- Knowing what you’re looking for
- Expressing your searches in keywords

Notice that real-time search is the No. 1 problem. (Twitter and a bunch of startups from OneRiot to Tweetmeme are also working on it, with the latter two launching their own real-time search efforts today). And it certainly is a problem for Google, even with the new recent results option. Try searching for any of teh top trending results on Twitter right now like Miss California (vs. Twitter search results) or Star Trek (vs. Twitter results), and you don’t even get any Twitter results on Google.

While real-time search is still a big problem, it is not the only problem. Some of the new options address the difficulty of searching back through time. The recent results get as real-time as Google can get, but you can also expand the timeframe. And you can look at an actual timeline of results, which looks for dates within results and then places them chronologically (this is sort of hit or miss—just because a date is mentioned in a text does not mean the entire result is about or from that period of time). Google now also lets you see related searches as an option. And the Wonder Wheel is more of a visual aid to see how different related topics are clustered together. When you click on any spoke of the wheel, it then causes that search term to be at the center. We’ve seen many of these techniques in the past, but Google is giving them a higher profile by putting them in its main search page..

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Tweetmeme, a service which tracks the most retweeted messages, has been growing fast and getting a lot of buzz as the best way to discover hot items on Twitter. So naturally, they want to get into the search game as well. But simple tweet search, others like Scoopler and Twitter itself have covered, so the decision was apparently made to get into the new buzzworthy Twitter search game: Content search.

Yes, the second company within the last hour has launched a Twitter link search engine. Tweetmeme’s launch follows shortly after OneRiot’s offering which launched this morning. And both follow news last week that Twitter itself is working on the same feature. As an outsider, it would appear that a few of these companies are tripping over themselves to do this real-time content search before Twitter gets into the game — or worse, Google (which is also having its own search event today). But both claim to have been working on this for a while.

So how does Tweetmeme search stack up? Well, as far as I can tell this morning, both OneRiot and Tweetmeme are having launch issues. Certain functionality doesn’t work on either, so it’s hard to do a proper test. But as best I can tell, the two are slightly different. Tweetmeme seems to be more interested in relevancy of the links being tweeted out (something which it has always been good at thanks to its retweet data), while OneRiot is more apt at content coming in real-time. Tweetmeme does have an “Age” sorting feature, but it doesn’t auto-update the way OneRiot’s does.

But Tweetmeme claims it indexes videos and images as well, while OneRiot offers the indexing of Digg links on top of Twitter links. Tweetmeme founder Nick Halstead claims Tweetmeme is indexing over 15 million links right now, while OneRiot general manager Tobias Peggs tells me they’re indexing over 2 and a half billion links. If you look in the comments of our earlier story, you can see the two of them playfully sparring with one another over their respective offerings. I think we’ll let the two duke it out for a while and get their search offerings in order a bit more before we declare a winner here.

The only thing that is abundantly clear is real-time search of content using a social layer is hot as hell right now. Everyone appears to be trying to stake their claim and yell “FIRST!” I don’t care about “first,” give me “best.”

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Can you find Missouri on a map? How about on a map without any state boundaries? Try the USA Trivia Map game above. It gives you 15 seconds to find each state by placing a pin on a satellite map of the U.S.A. If that is too easy, then try the CrunchFood map game below, which requires you to correctly identify eating spots in Palo Alto, CA near TechCrunch headquarters. Or you can try to Pin The VC, by locating venture capital offices on Sand Hill Road (I have trouble telling them apart even when I am driving around).

All of these map games were made on UMapper with its new GeoDart game creator. GeoDart lets you pick a map (choose from Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, CloudMade and OpenStreetMap), add locations, and give it a title, description, and rules. Then you can publish it and share it.

The games typically require players to find locations on the map, and then it tells gives out points based on how close they get. Here is a video describing how to make a map game with GeoDart:

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0