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Posts Tagged ‘michael-jackson’

As he came into the window It was the sound of a Crescendo He came into her apartment He left this stupid Michael Jackson glove watch for freaking $149 (act now and get a stupid free glove) on the carpet She ran Underneath the Table He could see she was unable So she ran into The bedroom She was struck Down It was her doom. Ulli are you OK, are you OK Ulli

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The White Glove watch: The dumbest thing you’ll see all day

Google has a problem. Despite having their hands in just about everything online, they’ve never been able to tackle what is a key part of the fabric of the web: social.

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If Google Wave Is The Future, Google Buzz Is The Present

I don’t know, guys, something about a Michael Jackson 3D video making its début at the Grammy Awards this year.

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Michael Jackson. 3D. Grammy Awards. Rubbish.

Gamers who’ve always wanted to own a PSP in pink, here’s your chance: Sony Computer Entertainment Japan today announced [JP] exactly that, a limited edition of their handheld system in so-called blossom pink. Needless to say that technically, this pink PSP 3000 isn’t different from a standard model

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Sony Japan to roll out a limited edition PSP and a new PS3 bundle

What is it about the dawn of a new year – and, in this case, a new decade – that inspires such an interminable parade of lists? The 100 best albums of the decade (The Strokes? Seriously?), the 30 best TV series of the decade (The Wire? Seriously?), the 10 most influential games of the decade (The Sims? Seriously?) – even the 10 best conservative movies of the decade (just — seriously?).

Apparently in the days between Christmas and New Year, the world stops demanding actual journalism – or writing. Instead, stuffed large with leftover turkey and re-gifted booze, we’re happy to accept any old rehashed crap, provided it’s appended with the words “…of the year” (2.5 billion results on Google) or “…of the decade” (72.8 million results).

But not so at TechCrunch. There’s a reason why we had more stories on Techmeme’s list of the ‘ten objectively biggest tech stories of 2009‘ than any other single news source, and that’s because – even in a week when no one is reading anything we write – we retain our passion for real journalism and impassioned campaigning, along with our hatred of lazy, crowd-pleasing bullshit.

Nah, just kidding. Here’s this week’s list of the best lists published on TechCrunch this past week…

2010: My Fifth Annual List Of The Tech Products I Love And Use Every Day
Arrington has been doing this for five years now: naming the 24 products and services he can’t live without, presumably so that his legions of fanboys can use the self-same apps and in doing so become even closer to their hero. Let’s just hope Foursquare’s servers can cope with the tsunami of new users signing up just to fake check-in at the Pyramids.

Snapstream’s Top TV Trends of 2009
Leena reports on Snapstream’s interesting – if utterly predictable – research into the most frequently used words and phrases on American TV in 2009. According to their findings, which are generated by analysing closed caption text from all of the major channels, this year’s top television obsessions were “Iran, Michael Jackson, Swine Flu, North Korea, AIG, Pirates, Hamas, (The) Inauguration, Ted Kennedy, and Balloon (boy).” In other “no shit” news, we also learn that over-exposed media darling Twitter was mentioned more frequently than Facebook, MySpace and other social media platforms. Twemendous.

Amazon’s Best-Selling Products of 2009
If you were in any doubt that 2009 was the year that ebooks finally reached their tipping point then consider Amazon’s list of best-selling products for 2009, as analysed by CrunchGear. Not only was the Kindle their best-selling electronic item but the utterly mainstream Dan Brown was the device’s best-selling author. What was it Clay Shirky said? Here’s comes everybody!

370 Passwords You Shouldn’t (And Can’t) Use On Twitter
From the depressing to the terrifying, Robin scored an interesting scoop this week by uncovering Twitter’s (not very well hidden) list of banned passwords. To save you the effort of paging through all 370 words and phrases, all you need to know is that there are no fewer than five euphemisms from vagina (not counting vagina itself, which is also there), but only two for penis (with penis itself curiously absent). The word ‘monkey’, meanwhile, is inexplicably on the list twice. Can’t be too careful with monkeys.

Ten Technologies That Will Rock 2010
And finally, while everyone else on TechCrunch was looking backwards, Erick whipped out his crystal ball and tried to predict what we’ll be looking back on this time next year. No surprise to see “the tablet” on the list, or Geo(location) or real-time search. In fact, no surprises at all: if Erick is right (and when is he not?) then 2010 is going to be the most dull and predictable year ever. I mean, HTML5 is going to rock 2010? Would it have killed him to have included hoverboards or robot maids?

X-ray sunglasses?

Cybergeese?

Come on!

…

Still hungry for lists? Here are twelve Lists That Didn’t Make My Top List Of TechCrunch Lists…

Six New Years Resolutions For Apple And The iPhone In 2010
Top Ten Mobile Voice Searches Of 2009
Flixster Users Name Top 2009 Movies
The Top 10 MobileCrunch Posts of 2009
The Best iPhone Apps Of 2009 (Appvee Edition)
Single Most Innovative Product of the Decade
Unexpected Success Stories
Biggest Losers in Tech
The best console games of the decade
PC Games of the Decade
The Biggest Product Flops of the Decade

…and of course…

JibJab’s Year In Review Plays Off 2009, With Help From Keyboard Cat

Have a great year! Of the decade!

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

Snapstream, a startup that makes a device that lets enterprises record thousands of hours of TV (from both satellite and digital cable sources) and search inside the recordings for keywords, recently launched a trending topics site for TV. Snapstream has released its top trends on TV for 2009, with the mention of “Twitter” used more often than Facebook, MySpace and other social media platforms. .

TV programs used the word “Twitter” in their programming three times more often in December 2009 than they did in late 2008 and January 2009, according to the data. SnapStream also released the top keyword mentions on TV, which are in order: Iran, Michael Jackson, Swine Flu, North Korea, AIG, Pirates, Hamas, (The) Inauguration, Ted Kennedy, and Balloon (boy). SnapStream also revealed that mentions of “health care” eclipsed mentions of “economy” towards the end of the year thanks to President Obama’s healthcare initiative.

SnapStream’s trending topics site lets you see the hot words (those that are ascending in mentions) and cold words (those that are descending in mentions) on national television. And you can also enter couple of keywords (up to 5) into TV Trends and you’ll get a graph showing you the relative frequency of mentions of those words on mostly-news national programs on ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX, MSNBC and CNN.

Snapstream crawls closed-captioning text for programs that they record. They filter out local programming, sitcoms, and sports and then cleans-up, analyzes and indexes data for the trends site. When you graph a keyword, the site will give you a view of excerpts of stories at selected points along the curve and you can also filter the results by network. For example, you can chart trends of the mention of “Twitter” on CNN alone.

As we’ve written in the past, SnapStream’s site isn’t updated in real-time (it is updated every 3-4 hours), which puts its topics at a disadvantage to Twitter and Google’s topics, that are close to real-time. But many of SnapStream’s top mentions did match Twitter’s top trending topics.

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

Cnet founder Shelby Bonnie and other angels have put another $2.5 million into Whiskey Media, which operates niche media sites such as ComicVine (comics), GiantBomb (gaming), and AnimeVice (anime). The company, which has been around since 2007, previously raised about $1.5 million in angel money as well.

Whiskey Media’s sites are wiki-like content sites in the vein of CrunchBase or GDGT, which built around structured databases which can be edited by the readers. (In fact, CrunchBase was inspired by Whiskey Media’s first site, now-retired PoliticalBase).

Mike Tatum, a partner at Whiskey Media, tells me via email:

This last year was an important year for Whiskey Media as we saw strong growth in our portfolio of sites reaching over 3mm uniques users by the end of the year. At the same time we were able to make the necessary investments in our publishing platform that will allow us to launch many more sites in 2010.

The company will use the money to launch more structured content sites on the same technology platform across different niche media, which is a popular strategy these days. Bonnie, for his part, is always thinking of new media models and thinks it’s time to kill the CPM.

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

Mobile search and general Web search are two different beasts, especially when it comes to voice search, which is becoming increasingly popular. The list of the top ten mobile voice searches below by mobile voice app startup Vlingo confirms that people are much more action-oriented when they are on the go. The top search, curiously, is “YouTube,” which suggests more people than you might think are watching videos on their phones. But the next two, “Facebook” and “MySpace,” are social networks, suggesting that people want to stay connected to their friends on the go, which is what phones were originally intended to do. “Twitter” is No. 6 on the list.

Facebook and Twitter are also on Google’s list of top searches for 2009, but that list is dominated more by news, entertainment, and celebrity related searches such as “Michael Jackson,” “New Moon,” and “Lady Gaga.” The Vlingo list is dominated by more specific, action-oriented searches such as “Weather” (Is it safe to go out?), “Movie Times” (What can I see right now?), “Yellow Pages” and “White Pages” (I need to call someone right now and want to avoid 411 fees).

Vlingo’s mobile voice apps are used by 3 million people worldwide across a variety of devices, including iPhones, Blackberries, Windows Mobile, and Nokias. Voice search represents about 20 percent of the usage of the apps, which can be used for speech-to-text dictation for emails and text messages as well.

Top 10 Mobile Voice Searches for 2009

1. YouTube
2. Facebook
3. MySpace
4. Weather
5. Movie Times
6. Twitter
7. Yellow Pages
8. MapQuest
9. craigslist
10. White Pages

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

Twitter has just released a collection of the top trending topics on the service for 2009. For the list, they’ve broken it down into: New Events, People, Movies, TV Shows, Sports, Technology, and Hash Tags.

In the post on the matter, Twitter’s chief scientist, Abdur Chowdhury, notes the number of ways that the Iranian election situation showed up on the lists. “#iranelection” was the number one News Event term with “Iran” coming in fourth, and “Tehran” coming in fifth. In Hash Tags, “#iranelection” was number two overall. Obviously, the service is pointing this out to illustrate Twitter’s important role in the crisis, but most of the rest of the lists are populated by popular, but much less significant, fare.

For example, “Michael Jackson” dominated the People list. Following his death, Twitter, and many other services on the web were brought to their knees as people turned to the web for information. “Harry Potter” topped Movies, while “American Idol” topped TV Shows. The “Super Bowl” topped Sports.

Technology was slightly interesting, as “Google Wave” was the top term for 2009. Ever since the service was first revealed over the summer, it’s been on the Trending Topics list pretty much constantly as people have been both talking about it and looking for invites. It’s interesting that most people still don’t seem to understand (or understand how they’ll use) the service, but apparently they love talking about it. Something else interesting is that “Snow Leopard,” Apple’s new version operating system beat out “Windows 7,” Microsoft’s new operating system.

But the most interesting things on the technology list may be what’s missing. “Facebook” is nowhere to be found in the top 10. That seems pretty hard to believe — might Twitter have scrubbed its rival (which later this week will allow for publishing to Twitter) from the results? Also interesting is that “iPhone” does not appear in the top 10, but “Palm Pre” does. And what is “Google Latitude” doing on there? I haven’t heard anyone talk about that in real life, let alone on Twitter. Maybe I’m following the wrong people. Or maybe they’re following me — and tweeting about it.

The Hash Tags list is also worth looking at. It seems there is no way Twitter could have published this list without some level of scrubbing since all the hash tags listed are actually appropriate. Twitter recently talked about the need to curate the Trending Topics area of the site, and it’s clear they remove certain things that they consider to be spam.

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In an age of user-generated content, the most viral videos are not made by the users, just passed around by them. Below you will find a list of the top ten viral videos of 2009, as tracked by Visible Measures, which counts not only plays on YouTube but also video shared across social networks like MySpace as well as MTV networks and Viacom. The list of the most watched internet videos 2009 below are nearly all music videos, with the exception of the No. 1 viral video, which is the trailer for the movie Twilight Saga: New Moon.  Visible Measures estimates that trailer has been watched more than 592 million times.

All the other videos in the top ten are music videos such as the one for Beyonce’s song “Single Ladies” (No. 2), and thus are also essentially advertisements for mainstream media content.  Even the two Michael Jackson music videos on this year’s list (”Thriller” and “Beat It”) no doubt helped sales of the deceased singer’s albums.  The one “amateur” video is Susan Boyle’s heartwarming American Idol performance, but the whole point of that show is to elevate amateur singers to mainstream status so I am not sure that counts.

Visible Measures list is determined by data from viewership of both officially syndicated video clips and viewer-driven social video placements. The data is compiled using its database analysis on more than 200 million Internet videos across 150 video-sharing platforms. Here is the full list.

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