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Posts Tagged ‘taiwan’

The infinity pools of the computing industry, frameless laptop screens are expected in the second or third quarter of this year, according to DigiTimes. They’ll be a little more expensive than standard laptop screens, but those costs are expected to decline as production increases. According to the article: “The frameless LCD screens are made using reinforced glass substrates fitted onto magnesium-alloy or plastic lids, the sources said.

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Frameless laptop screens expected soon

Lian Li “spider” case seen creeping around Taiwan Heat powered arcade mugs The red TomTom EASE is probably meant to be a Valentine’s Day gift because it’s red Quick release $14 camera belt clip Canon keeps the PowerShot line alive with the SX210, SD3500, and SD1400 IS

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Daily Crunch: Pac Directions Edition

Location-based services continue their hot streak when it comes to funding, as Ambient Industries has received an extension to their seed round to build out their application Flook. Alongside this news, Flook is gaining a number of new features to expand it location-based discovery elements. The extension of the funding from Amadeus Capital Partners and Eden Ventures totals close to $1 million, we’re told. This is on top of the undisclosed amount they raised from the same investors in late 2008.

Flook is a location-based service that has both a web app and an iPhone app. It can probably best be described as a StumbleUpon for location-based discovery, as that’s pretty much how you use it. On the iPhone app, which launched a few weeks ago, users create “cards,” which contain a title, a picture, and a caption. You then tag the card in the correct category (“funny,” “art,” “food & drink,” etc) and when you upload it, Flook tags your location to it, so that others will find it. Users browse these cards on the main screen either by simply scrolling through cards near them or cards from people they follow on Flook. The cards you like the most, you can “collect” to view later.

Here’s a list of the newer features of the application being announced alongside the funding:

• Twitter: Cards can easily be tweeted, either from the web, or from your phone by enabling settings for those who want to use flook to interact with their other social networks.
• APIs: APIs are in closed beta as we are still installing the nuts and bolts, but we encourage companies with interesting applications and integration plans to contact us at info@flook.it.
• Flickr Import: This is a really cool way to auto-generate flook cards from geolocated flickr photos. Just tag your photo with one of our keywords (for example, flookfunny to make a funny card), and your photo’s title becomes your flook card’s title, with its description becoming the caption. At the moment this functionality is limited to a few people we really like – people with great content on the web that they want to share with their followers, enabling them to find their content when they’re out and about.
• New Content Partners: One of the first of our new partners is Ghost Signs (http://flook.it/community/ghostsigns/). Now, if you’re out and about in London you’ll easily be able to track down Sam’s great content – and use the back of the flook card to start a discussion on it. The Ghost Signs cards are examples of hand painted advertising on walls which are part of a wider collection held within the History of Advertising Trust Ghostsigns Archive. The archive opens for business on 19th March 2010. Flook helps Sam get the word out.
• Collection & Following on the Web: Hey, this is cool! We’ve increased the synergy of flook and its web-based interface. Now when someone emails you a flook card, and you follow the link to the web, you can collect that card for later, or follow its creator. This is a great way to make a great collection of stuff to do when you’re out and about with your iPhone.
• Translation: When not exploring our local area, we are feeding our imaginations by looking at the cards that flookers make all around the world. We have brave flookers starting communities in places as diverse as Taiwan, India, China and Australia. Up until now, we’ve been able to admire the photos, but I haven’t had a clue what people were flooking on about. But now you can just tap the card to bring up the HUD and hit the translate button to turn “G’day mate, this dunny is cactus” to “Hello my good man, I’m afraid this lavatory is inoperative”. Although this feature is in its infancy (you can’t translate comments yet), we think it has great potential. Soon, we think you’ll all be exploring Darkest Peru and Outer Mongolia with flook, and getting fantastic tips for places to visit from the locals rather than the same old same old from an expat guidebook author who probably doesn’t even speak the language.
• We love widgets! Now, if you have your own website, but love to flook, you can invite your people to follow you on flook with a handy widget that you place on your site.

Flook is an interesting way to find a variety of location-based information. It doesn’t emphasize the popular check-in model like Foursquare or Gowalla, or the game-heavy model like MyTown, and instead focuses on visual aspects. The new Flickr import ability seems like a great idea to extend this usage.

Two of Ambient Industries founders, Roger Nolan and Jane Sales, are perhaps best known for their work at Psion, where they contributed the code that would eventually become the Symbian OS.

See more of Flook in the video below or find the free app in the App Store here.

Acer Taiwan president Scott Lin told DigiTimes “that designing an iPad-like device would not pose any technical challenges for Acer, but said such a product does not fit into Acer’s business model.” Lin went on to say that it’d be tough to replicate the mojo that Apple has between a device like the iPad and the iTunes store. You can’t just copy the iPad without something like iTunes and the App Store, basically, and “few other makers, including Acer, have comparable experience in operating an online store.” I wouldn’t put it past Acer to come out with some tablet devices running full blown Windows operating systems, though. Perhaps even Android, too

Excerpt from:
Acer: We could totally make an iPad. It’s so simps. We won’t, though.

Lots of interesting commentary in the wake of Google’s bombshell blog post from yesterday about its decision to stop censoring its search results and possibly withdrawing from the Chinese market all together after being hit with severe cyber attacks on its core infrastructure. You can follow the conversation on Techmeme, but there’s one item that just hit the news aggregator that I felt compelled to set straight.

Thomas Crampton correctly notes that Baidu.tw, supposedly owned by Chinese search leader Baidu, is currently getting forwarded to the Google Taiwan homepage (albeit only when you put www in front of the domain name). But it’s false to assume that the site was hacked: the domain name never directed to a Baidu property and is even entirely out of the company’s control. There’s a number of ways you can tell.

Just to be clear, I’m not criticizing Crampton here. After all, the Baidu.com domain name was hacked just yesterday so his assumption isn’t that far-fetched.

However, a simple WHOIS search reveals that the domain name isn’t owned by Baidu but by another entity, either an individual or an organization. The identity (Zheng Xiaodo) and contact details that were given for registration are likely fake, and I seriously doubt the owner really lives in China.

The person who registered Baidu.tw, back in 2005, has used the generic contact e-mail address for at least 99 other domain names in the past. He or she signed up for a webmail account on Chinese portal 21cn.com, an ISP under ownership of a holding called Century Dragon Information Network, which can be perfectly done by anyone outside of the country.

Furthermore, this person used Malaysian registrar (Web.CC) to secure the domain name, and the nameservers that are currently configured for the Web address are also located in Kuala Lumpur, capital of Malaysia. For its other domain names, Baidu uses its own nameservers. It also uses taiwan.baidu.com for its Taiwan operations, although the site is currently offline.

Also, when you look at the cache for Baidu.tw, you can see that just a couple of days ago the domain led to Szhot.com, another domain name registrar.

Finally, when you go to Baidu.tw right now and click around (apart from the top menu), you’ll see that there was simply a change in domain name record settings, likely following the flurry of news about Google’s China stance and the role Baidu plays in all this from yesterday.

In conclusion: Baidu.tw was not hacked; someone is just trying to play a number on Baidu.

(Image via Thomas Crampton)

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A-DATA is looking to the future with the N002. The flash drive kicks it with both USB 3.0 and SATA II interfaces, which means that it must be fast. And it is, friends

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The A-DATA N002 swings for both the USB 3.0 and SATA II teams

Steam has been running a  huge sale the last few days, (Bioshock for $5, oh yes) but a Reddit user is urging gamers to look past the six headline titles and to indie games . He’s right. There are a bunch of games I’ve never heard of for only a few dollars right now. If you’re like me and already played-through MW2, Borderlands, Batman, and L4D2, spend $10 and pick up a couple of these.

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Don’t forget Steam’s indie games are on sale too

Most of the tech world now considers it a given that Google will be selling its own unlocked phone, called the Nexus One, to customers directly early in 2010. A few stragglers are still debating the finer points of the difference between Google working with handset manufacturers and carriers on a good Android experience v. them dictating the hardware specs and selling it directly to users. While they work that out for themselves we’re off to the next story – the Google Chrome OS Netbook (although we think Google has a few surprises left around the Nexus One, too).

Google has said from the beginning that they plan on working with select manufacturers to ensure a good Chrome OS experience for users when devices first hit the market next year. From an early FAQ: “The Google Chrome OS team is currently working with a number of technology companies to design and build devices that deliver an extraordinary end user experience. Among others, these companies include Acer, Adobe, ASUS, Freescale, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, and Toshiba.”

Most people assume that “working with” around Chrome OS means the same thing as “working with” around Android – lots of meetings to make sure the devices and software work together as well as possible. But sometimes those pesky hardware guys just don’t do things quite right. And when you’re competing against Apple, everything most definitely needs to be quite right.

That may explain why Google has, according to multiple sources, been talking to at least one hardware manufacturer about building a netbook for Google directly. As in Google gave the company a RFP with quite detailed technical specifications and has begun discussions on building it.

They’re not in any particular hurry and seem to be aiming for the 2010 holiday season, a full year from now. Our understanding is that Google intends to have the devices built, branded with Google, and then sell them directly to consumers. The only firm tech spec we’ve heard is that they’ll be mobile enabled, and likely tied to one or more carriers with a subsidy.

I’m dying to get my hands on that RFP and have been feverishly calling our contacts in Taiwan and China to see if we can get someone to quietly hand it over to us. In particular I want to know whether Google is going with an Intel Atom processor, the current leader in netbooks, or may be considering an ARM CPU. I’d be willing to bet one of our writers’ right hands that it’s ARM. And I’d even go out on a limb and suggest that they may very well be targeting Nvidia’s Tegra line. Those chips are outperforming Atom in every way, say some of the hardware guys we know. HD Flash video no problem (something the Atom can’t do), and at a fraction of the power usage.

What does that mean? It means next Christmas you may be getting a high performance Google branded netbook running Chrome OS for next to nothing. And if it’s running ARM, Intel is going to be freaking the hell out about it.

As an aside, if you need a netbook now, I’d recommend the Nokia Booklet 3G. It’s amazing, and you can get it for $300 with a 2 year AT&T data plan. Nokia may not be able to make phones anyone gets excited about any more, but that netbook is cool.

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Does getting every achievement in World of Warcraft mean you’ve “beaten” the game? I wouldn’t say so, but that seems to be the meme going around , with word that a man in Taiwan has ticked off all but one achievements in the game

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Did this guy just ‘beat’ World of Warcraft? (Answer: No.)

It was so close I could taste it. Two weeks ago we were ready to publicly launch the CrunchPad. The device was stable enough for a demo. It went hours without crashing. We could even let people play with the device themselves – the user interface was intuitive enough that people “got it” without any instructions. And the look of pure joy on the handful of outsiders who had used it made the nearly 1.5 year effort completely worth it.

Our plan was to debut the CrunchPad on stage at the Real-Time Crunchup event on November 20, a little over a week ago. We even hoped to have devices hacked together with Google Chrome OS and Windows 7 to show people that you could hack this thing to run just about anything you want. We’d put 1,000 of the devices on pre-sale and take orders immediately. Larger scale production would begin early in 2010.

And then the entire project self destructed over nothing more than greed, jealousy and miscommunication.

On November 17, our deadline date for greenlighting the debut three days later, the CEO of our partner on the project, Chandra Rathakrishnan, sent me an email with the subject “no good news.” Yuck, I thought. Another delay, probably with the screen that had been giving us so much trouble – capacitive touch at 12 inches isn’t trivial. And sure enough, the email started off with “no good news to update. updated hardware is still on its way , so that’s a timing issue. friday will be a challenge now.”

But the email went on. Bizarrely, we were being notified that we were no longer involved with the project. Our project. Chandra said that based on pressure from his shareholders he had decided to move forward and sell the device directly through Fusion Garage, without our involvement.

Err, what? This is the equivalent of Foxconn, who build the iPhone, notifiying Apple a couple of days before launch that they’d be moving ahead and selling the iPhone directly without any involvement from Apple.

Chandra also forwarded an internal email from one of his shareholders. My favorite part of the email: “We still acknowledge that Arrington and TechCrunch bring some value to your business endeavor…If he agrees to our terms, we would have Arrington assume the role of visionary/evangelist/marketing head and Fusion Garage would acquire the rights to use the Crunchpad brand and name. Personally, I don’t think the name is all that important but you seem to be somewhat attached to the name.”

And with that, the entire project self destructed.

Neither we nor Fusion Garage own the intellectual property of the CrunchPad outright. Fusion Garage has a team of 13 or so employees, currently working here in Silicon Valley out of a home they rented and in our office. Their team has mixed with our CrunchPad team, which is led by Brian Kindle, the former Vice President Hardware Engineering and Manufacturing at Vudu and an early hardware engineer at TiVo. Development expenses have been shared, and our team has spent time in Singapore and Taiwan, and their team has spent time here. We chose to work with Fusion Garage on Prototype C and the launch prototype after we finished Prototype B internally.

We jointly own the CrunchPad product intellectual property, and we solely own the CrunchPad trademark.

So it’s legally impossible for them to simply build and sell the device without our agreement.

We’re still completely perplexed as to what happened. We think they were attempting to renegotiate the equity split on the company behind CrunchPad, which was to acquire Fusion Garage. Renegotiations are always fine. But holding a gun to our head two days before launching and insulting us isn’t the way to do that. We’ve spent the last week and a half trying unsuccessfully to communicate with them. Our calls and emails go unanswered, so we can’t even figure out exactly what’s happened.

Yesterday Chandra sent an email saying “Following our phone discussion, I had another round of discussions with my shareholders. The shareholders are not willing to move from their position as they believe their stand is justified. On the other hand, there isn’t an alternative offer on the table from Crunchpad.”

My response: “We have not come back to you with any counter offer to the email you forwarded because you and your shareholders have communicated to us that moving forward without us is something that you consider to be a legitimate and legal option. In other words, your “counter” offer is theft of intellectual property.”

Ultimately there are two sides to every story, and they’ll certainly have their side. We will almost certainly be filing multiple lawsuits against Fusion Garage, and possibly Chandra and his shareholders as individuals, shortly. The legal system will work it all out over time.

Mostly though I’m just sad. I never envisioned the CrunchPad as a huge business. I just wanted a tablet computer that I could use to consume the Internet while sitting on a couch. I’ve always pushed to open source all or parts of the project. So this isn’t really about money. It was about the thrill of building something with a team that had the same vision. Now that’s going to be impossible. And I’ve also lost a friend – Chandra spent months in our office this year and, until a week and a half ago, was the kind of young, determined entrepreneur that I admire. I thought we’d be friends for the rest of our lives.

And what’s really sad about all this is the incredible support we were getting from companies and people around the world to launch this device. A major multi-billion dollar retail partner has been patiently working with us for months, giving advice on manufacturing partners and offering to sell the CrunchPad at a zero margin to help us succeed in the early days. They were also willing to pay for the devices on order instead of 30 days after delivery, a crucial cash flow benefit that would allow us to ramp up volume without putting ourselves our of business. They were even willing to fly the devices from China on their own planes to eliminate our shipping costs. Intel, which would supply the Atom CPUs to power the device, has assisted us repeatedly with engineering and partner advice, and gave us pricing that was ridiculously generous given our projected first year sales volumes. Other partners were eager to promote and sell the device for little or no benefit on their end other than “supporting the project.” We even had sponsors lined up to help us sell the device near our $300ish cost.

And money wasn’t a problem, either. We had blue chip angel and venture capitalist investors in Silicon Valley waiting to invest in the company since late Spring. We were simply holding them off until we launched, to eliminate some of the risk.

It’s a sad day at TechCrunch HQ. Hitting the publish button on this post, which makes all of this so…final…is a very hard thing to do. I’m enraged, embarrassed, and just…sad. The CrunchPad is now in the DeadPool.

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