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Posts Tagged ‘meet-up’

We’ll have a nice, old timey meet-up in Hong Kong this Friday, December 4 at 6pm at the California Bar 30 D’Aguilar Street Hong Kong. I’ve set up a Plancast event for us so watch that for any changes.

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Hong Kong Meet-up is Friday at 6pm

Autom, the fat-fighting robot, is coming in 2010 Donkey Kong plus Star Wars equals the nerdiest shirt I’ve seen in a long time Cabling as art form It’ll linger for a week: Japanese security system sprays stinky smell on thieves Wham: FlipShare video is handled by Mossberg

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Daily Crunch: Stinkbot Edition

Sorry for the short notice but I thought it might be fun to toast to Turkey Day and the launch of our our Gift Guide.

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Reminder: New York Meet-Up is tonight, meet the CrunchBoys and Cali Lewis

Hey, all: I, John Biggs, will be in Israel from the Sept 5 through the 10th. I’d love to meet up with some great start-ups in the Jerusalem/Tel Aviv area. I’m most interested in the great gadgets coming out of there but I’m happy to sit down with local folks to talk web services.

Here’s what I’m thinking: I’d like to have an informal event on Tuesday, September 8. I don’t know where it will be - suggestions are welcome - and if you’d like to sponsor an hour of drinks, please let me know. Either way, RSVP to john@crunchgear.com with the subject line “RSVP ISRAEL.” I’ll keep a mailing list and let you know where/when we’ll hold the even on Monday morning.

The Walt Disney Company has agreed to acquire Marvel Entertainment in a stock and cash transaction, the companies announced this morning. Under the terms of the agreement and based on last week’s closing price of Disney, Marvel shareholders would receive a total of $30 per share in cash plus approximately 0.745 Disney shares for each Marvel share they own.

Based on the closing price of Disney stock on Friday, August 28, the total transaction value is $50 per Marvel share or approximately $4 billion.

Under the deal, which has been approved by the boards of both companies, Disney will acquire ownership of Marvel including its portfolio of over 5,000 Marvel characters. That portfolio includes many familiar names like Iron Man, Spider-Man, X-Men, Captain America, Fantastic Four and Thor.

Says Disney CEO Robert A. Iger in a statement: “We believe that adding Marvel to Disney’s unique portfolio of brands provides significant opportunities for long-term growth and value creation.”

Ike Perlmutter, Marvel’s CEO, added: “Disney is the perfect home for Marvel’s fantastic library of characters given its proven ability to expand content creation and licensing businesses. This is an unparalleled opportunity for Marvel to build upon its vibrant brand and character properties by accessing Disney’s tremendous global organization and infrastructure around the world.”

Mr. Perlmutter will oversee the Marvel properties, and will work directly with Disney’s global lines of business to build and further integrate Marvel’s properties.

Marvel stock is surging following the news, up 10+ points at the time of writing (+27%), while Disney’s is down a little (-0,5%).

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

We the people of CrunchGear would like confirm a quick, informal meet-up today at 7pm at the View Lounge at the San Francisco Marriott . The meet-up will include drinking, talking about the iPhone 3G S, and the fondling of the Palm Pre , allowing you, the reading public, to try the cellphone of the moment before the next cellphone of the moment comes out.

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CrunchGear San Fran meet-up is on like Donkey Kong

I’m pleased to report that no one dressed up in coveralls and hats at the TC/CG Helsinki meet-up at A21 . The turnout was fantastic - about 100 or so folks at 8pm on a Tuesday - and everyone either worked for Nokia, contracted for Nokia, or sold their children into servitude in Nokia’s diamond mines in the heart of Northern Troll country.

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The Helsinki Meet-up: The Aftermath

I’ll be in Helsinki next week and I’d like to plan a very informal meet-up on Tuesday, April 28 at about 7pm. All those Finns in favor, please email me at john@crunchgear.com with the subject line “RSVP HELSINKI.”

We’ve decided to have the meet-up at A21 on Annankatu 21 [Google Map]. PLEASE RSVP ASAP so I can offer them a head count.

Best of all, F-Secure, the anti-virus people, will be sponsoring an hour of drinks from about 7pm-8pm. Anyone wishing sponsor another few hours should email me.

N.B. If you have a start-up to discuss, please have some information handy, preferably in electronic form. It will probably be hard to do demos unless they’re on a mobile phone, but if you contact me beforehand we can probably sit down to look at your product on a laptop.

DVICE has an excellent video showing the difference between text-to-speech and what us humans call “neurons-to-speech.” As evidenced by this brief scene from Blade Runner, acted out by an iPod Shuffle and a Kindle 2, we find that the Authors Guild is as crazy as a sack of beetles in a windstorm.

TTS hasn’t improved for one good reason: the human voice is just fine for reading out text and through the use of simple synthesis - Garmin, for example, uses a nice Australian woman to synthesize everything its GPS devices have to say - you can say almost anything you want. Although you’ll get a few clinkers in there where the software can’t quite translate a phoneme, it’s mostly correct.