The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘the-sexiest’

Billshrink has put together one of their handy charts comparing the total cost of the Google Nexus One, including the device cost plus carrier fees. The verdict? On the high end the Nexus One costs $2,580 over 24 months. The iPhone weighs in at an impressive $3780, almost 50% more.

The reason are AT&T’s iPhone plans v. the T-Mobile plan. Unlimited voice, data and text messages runs $100 on T-Mobile, and $150 for AT&T.

The chart, which also compares the Nexus One to the Palm Pre and Motorola Droid, is below.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

We’ve had a chance to play SGN’s Skies Of Glory WWI person-to-person dogfighting game for the iPhone. But now they’ve released this trailer for the game to really show off what they’ve built. Look for a launch date shortly.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Irvine-based mobile phone app developer Rock Software is launching an iPhone app called Mark Cuban’s Puzzle Palace. The app, designed for adults, is $0.99 and lets users turn images into puzzles.

Mark Cuban’s image is on the home screen of the app, and users can choose to turn some of his personal pictures into puzzles, or use your own. The app is available now at rockapp.com/cuban (redirects to iTunes).

You compete for fastest time to put a puzzle together.

If I had an iPhone I’d definitely buy this just to make fun of Mark the next time I run into him. Alas, I’m on a Droid, so I’m safe for now.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

This is, apparently, not a fake exchange. A young journalist comes to Aardvark user Ryan Asava for help. Things go downhill from there. If you never quite understood the service, you’ll get it now. Our previous coverage of the company is here. Thanks Marshall.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Here’s the thing I love about Reid Hoffman. There’s no “We-don’t-comment-on-rumors-and-speculation” BS with him. You ask him a question and he gives you an answer.

So you don’t need a bunch of words from me, just go to the jump and watch our final backstage interview of the conference where Hoffman talks about whether LinkedIn will buy Xing and whether it’ll file to go public this year.

Also, Hoffman names the three other tech companies he thinks can price pretty much whenever they want. (And lucky him, he’s an investor in two.)

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Google Docs has changed the landscape of computing office suites. By moving everything to the cloud, accessing documents is easier now than it ever has been. But unlike a lot of the other things Google is working on, Google Docs isn’t particularly social. Socialwok, a startup that won the demopit competition today at TechCrunch50 adds a great social layer to Google Docs.

Right now, if you want to share a document via Google Docs, most people do it by emailing it to other users. The process to do this is very clunky — even though Google obviously runs not only Google Docs, but a hugely popular email service, Gmail. If you try to IM a document to someone, you either have to make it fully public, or put a persons email address in to make sure they’re on a safe list for that document. Socialwok simplifies all of this immensely because its a social network that wraps around these documents.

But it’s not just Google Docs, it’s really a lot of Google Apps. You can see YouTube video, and Google Calendar events from Socialwok too. And Calendar integration is particularly nice because you can update and post items right from your stream.

If you are a FriendFeed user, Socialwok will look very familiar — the UI is nearly identical. The difference is that rather than having YouTube videos, tweets, and the like in your stream, you have all the various kinds of Google documents. This even includes the still-in-beta-testing Google Wave.

You can leave comments on these items (or if it’s Google Wave, pull in the whole Wave), as well as easily share via the various social networks including Twitter, Facebook and yes, FriendFeed. There is also a Twitter-esque, “What are you doing now” box to input messages.

Obviously, security has to be a concern here. Not all of your documents have to be shared with everyone in your Socialwok network. But there are groups you can create to limit document sharing.

Socialwok has a mobile interface that is just as robust as the web interface. They built the mobile website relying heavily on HTML5, so it works as well as Gmail’s mobile web app works, we’re told.

But what’s really great with Socialwok is that rather than having to sign up for yet another social network, you sign in to Socialwok simply by using your Google credentials (the ones tied to your Google Docs account). The company has been working pretty extensively with Google to get all of this working so seamlessly.

Simply put, if Google doesn’t buy these guys, they should seriously consider emulating many of the things they are doing or at least heavily promoting what they’re doing. (If there isn’t enough Google tie-ins for you already, all of Socialwok runs on Google App Engine.)

Until then, the business model for Socialwok is a freemium model. There will be a basic free version and paid subscriptions will get additional administrative features and dedicated support.

Watch more in the demo video below:

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Indian software company HealthHiway has raised $4 million in an unattributed round of funding from Greylock Partners. Based in Bangalore, India, HealthHiway provides web-based software to help hospitals, clinics, insurance providers, pharmacies and diagnostic centers collaborate on billing, patient records, x-rays and claims.

Launched in 2007, HealthHiway was started by the Apollo Hospital Group, one of the largest healthcare groups in India, and offers clients a number of software products.
ClinicConnect organizes patient registration and medical records, ClaimsExchange is an online claims processing system, and ImageConnect captures and processes radio images such as X-rays, CTs and MRIs that can then be shared.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

It’s as though Google doesn’t want you to use its new Chrome browser. If you try to install the Google Toolbar on Chrome, it practically suggests that you switch browsers. Chrome users are greeted with this message:

We’re sorry, but Google Toolbar 5 is only available for Internet Explorer and Firefox

Of course, Chrome is like a giant Google Toolbar that takes up the whole screen, so you don’t really need it. (The Toolbar offers Google search, bookmarks, search suggestions, Web history, and shortcuts to Google apps). But still that’s not the message Google wants to be sending to curious Chrome users.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Twitter has been undergoing a lot of design changes recently. But the update today may be the best.

(Yes, the CSS is completely borked right now. Yes, people are still finding ways to talk about it on Twitter. Maybe the Russians stole it?)

Here’s the new design when you’re logged out:

And here it is when you’re logged in:

Update: It looks like they’ve reverted back to the old design. Too bad, I liked the new one.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Update to the big ongoing Twitter outage that has brought the service down since at least 6:00 am California time today: It’s a DDOS attack. That’s way more exciting than run of the mill outages that have plagued the site since forever. Stay tuned.

Update: As of 8:16 Twitter is partially live again.

Update 2: Twitter has updated it’s status page saying the site is back up, yet they are still defending against the attack.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.