The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘trip’

This seems a bit odd, but here’s another take on alternative power; Dutch designer Joris Laarman came up with a concept for a desktop lamp that glows from bio-luminescent hamster ovaries. Seriously, I’m not making this stuff up

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Desktop lamp powered by hamster cells

There’s a myth out there that technology will ruin soccer, what Pelé (and others) once called “the beautiful game.” Let me ask you something: is this Cristiano Ronaldo free kick any less beautiful because he’s wearing the latest Nike boots?

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Why are we so afraid of technology ‘ruining’ soccer? It’s not like technology hasn’t been all over the sport since its inception.

The U.S. needs to be more welcoming of startup founders, no matter where they were born. But the illegal immigration debate is so politically sensitive that startup founders, who create tons of jobs, get lumped in with migrant farm workers and the discussion sort of comes to a crashing halt there. Now is the time for us to rally, though, and avoid this type of situation. There is real momentum behind the Startup Visa Act, and there’s a realistic chance that, for once, our government can do something to actually help the innovation ecosystem in Silicon Valley.

On Thursday 20 or so Silicon Valley entrepreneurs will travel to Washington D.C. to talk with government officials about the Act, introduced last week by Senator John Kerry (D-MA) and Richard Lugar (R-IN), and drum up more support. Venture capitalist Dave McClure is organizing the trip.

The Startup Visa Act of 2010 would create a two year visa for immigrant entrepreneurs who are able to raise a minimum of $250,000, with $100,000 coming from a qualified U.S. angel or venture investor. After two years, if the immigrant entrepreneur is able to create five or more jobs (not including their children or spouse), attract an additional $1 million in investment, or produce $1 million in revenues, he or she will become a legal resident.

What can you do to help? Tweet @2gov supporting #StartupVisa exactly at 10 AM Pacific on Wednesday March 3rd (tomorrow). Your messages will be collected and delivered during the group’s visit to the White House on Thursday. They’re hoping to get 5,000 tweets. I’m pretty sure we can do better than that.

Do you live an extreme lifestyle? Do you climb mountains by day and fight baddies by night? Do you enjoy such activities as Bigfoot hunting, Yeti racing, or Sasquatch breeding?

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The Olympus Stylus Tough 8010 & 6020 are begging for pain and suffering

Olympus isn’t new a new player in the megazoom game. The camera company’s megazoom line is older than some Jonas Brothers’ fans. And it shows

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Here’s the Olympus SP-800UZ & SP-600UZ megazoom cams

Pageonce has quietly built a solid business by aggregating its user’s various online accounts into one place. They’ve got over 1.3 million registered users and recently raised a $6.5 million Series B round. And though Pageonce hardly gets neither the fame nor the fortune of its competitor (Mint), it is still a very solid way to manage your online accounts. Unlike Mint, which focuses on personal finances, Pageonce’s goal is to provide you with a one-stop view of all of your online accounts, including financial, travel, e-mail and social networking.

Though a single web interface for all of those accounts may be unnecessary, it is a perfect service for mobile devices. Specifically, the Pageonce iPhone App - “Personal Assistant” - is done extremely well, and I still use it to this day. It blows Mint’s iPhone App out of the water.

Today, Pageonce launches TripTracker [iTunes Link]. This is a free iPhone App ($1 removes the ads) that enables you to keep track of all of our trip itineraries - hotels and flights specifically - on the go.

Last summer, we wrote about the launch of a new service from Google called City Tours that marked the search giant’s first foray into the travel space. The service isn’t exactly flashy, but it’s quite practical: tell it what city you’re visiting, and it can generate an optimized travel itinerary featuring a number of landmarks within walking distance. Unfortunately it had a few shortcomings. For one, its directions were all based on distances “as the bird flies”. In other words, it was up to you to figure out the best way to navigate between these landmarks, because Travel Tours would sometimes direct you to walk directly across a river.

Today, Google is releasing an updated version of Travel Tours that takes advantage of the Walking Directions built into Google Maps, which means you’ll be able to rely on them even if you’re not capable of scaling a building in a single bound. You can see the difference in the images below.

Google’s blog post on the release also notes that you can now import Google ‘My Maps’ into City Tours. My Maps, which launched back in 2007, allow you to manually tag your own points of interest on a Google Map. This means you’ll now be able to build out a map of all the landmarks you’d like to see on your trip, then import those into City Tours to get an optimized itinerary.

The service remains in Google Labs.

New Version

Old Version

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We knew that the holidays were going to be super busy for iPhone developers — in a good way. Gaming community platform PlayHaven and mobile ad exchange Mobclix released data yesterday saying that iPhone game usage is likely to set record in the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day, called a “Game Rush,” with usage 28 times greater than the same weekly period last year.

One developer, Oliver Cameron of Taptivate, the developer of Voices (an application that morphs your voice into different sounds like Darth Vader, Chipmunks, etc), sent me an email saying that sales have been through the roof for them, and their app is now in the 44th spot because of the “Game Rush” as they’re calling it. It’s one of those “it’s stupid but fun” kind of apps that usually move well when people are looking for quick apps to download.

Cameron mentioned that sales were as high as 18,769 downloads of the $0.99 app on December 25th. So if you do the math, that’s $18,581.31 in sales, not including Apple’s 30% cut. If you included Apple’s cut, the app made $12,688 in one day. Those are some pretty crazy numbers, regardless. Check out a graph of Voice’s sales numbers below as well.

The app in total has made a little more then $250,000 sales, which got me thinking: If this app is #44 on the App Store, imagine what the number one and two apps were doing (Skee-Ball and Live Cams). We also just spoke with Colin Smith, Vice President of Freeverse, which said that their application, Skee-Ball sold 47,926 units — which is about 10x what it did the previous Friday. Another one of their apps, Flick Fishing, sold 31,741 units on Christmas day.

We’re also hearing that an app which has been one of the most popular since the launch of the App Store 18 months ago, saw its downloads on Christmas Day double its previous record for a single day.

All of this could well point to the possibility that Apple itself set a record in the amount of iPhones and iPod Touches sold during the holiday season.

Update: More numbers are coming in. Lima Sky’s Doodle Jump, which just hit the 1 million download mark about a week ago, managed to sell 80,000 units on Christmas day alone. Two days prior, they were pushing around 15,000 per day; two days later, they were hovering around 35,000. All in all, they sold 197,821 copies between 12/23 and 12/27 – at .99c a pop, we’re calculating that they took in just shy of $139,000 after Apple’s cut.

Update: Even more numbers to report as Tapulous, developers of the popular Tap Tap Revenge series, check in with good news. They’ve pulled down over 2 million installs of Tap Tap Revenge 3 since going free last Wednesday, 700,000 of which came on Christmas day. Between Tap Tap Revenge 1/2/3 and the Metallica/Lady GaGa editions, Tapulous now has 5 applications in the Top 100 grossing apps.

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That didn’t take long. Less than half an hour ago we broke the news that Google was in the process of acquiring AppJet, the startup behind the powerful real-time document editor EtherPad. The official EtherPad blog has just been updated confirming the news.

As we reported earlier, we’re hearing that the acquisition price was in the low eight figures. The EtherPad post also says that they will be joining the Google Wave team, which is based out of Australia. CEO Aaron Iba, President & Chief Scientist David Greenspan, CTO J.D. Zamfirescu, and COO Daniel Clemens are all making the trip down under.

If you’re an EtherPad user, you’ll want to check out the company’s blog post for instructions on exporting your data. The service will continue to operate through March 2010, but no new free public pads can be created, and the company isn’t allowing new customers to sign up, either.

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

It seems that every day there’s a new travel site looking to streamline the process of planning out your itinerary. And for good reason: trips, even the fun ones, are usually a total pain to plan. Those problems are only magnified when you’re trying to plan a trip with more than one person. Duffel is a startup that launched from TechCrunch50’s demo pit that’s looking to help. It’s giving users a straightforward, visual way to plan out their trips using a tool that’s long since proved its utility: a bulletin board.

Of course, as an online service Duffel’s bulletin board is virtual, but many of the concepts stay the same. To get started, first you tell Duffel what city you’re going to be traveling to. The site presents you with a virtual bulletin board populated with a handful of suggested activities and places to stay, each represented by a small note card. From there, you can add your own ideas manually (you enter a title, notes, and URL) or you can use the site’s bookmarklet to quickly save things from across the web to your Duffel.

The bulletin board is meant to serve as a central pool of all of the activities, restaurants, and modes of transportation that you’re considering. You can invite friends to brainstorm their own ideas and add them to the board. Then, when it’s time to actually plan out your trip, you can drag and drop each activity onto the timeline at the left side of the screen. To help plan out your activities, Duffel will automatically plot their location on a Google Map so you can see which items are closest. And when you’re ready to embark on your journey, you can print out an itinerary, which is automatically populated with information about the places you’re visiting. If you think your trip is particularly good, you can share it with the public. Likewise, if you can’t seem to find anything you want to do, you can browse the directory of trips shared by other users.

The site is well done, with a clean design and refreshing simplicity. But there are some features it lacks that competitors do have, like the ability to generate an itinerary with an hourly schedule (on Duffel everything is just listed by day, though some people may prefer it that way). More importantly it’s in a very crowded space — there are many travel sites out there, and even sites that help generate an itinerary for you aren’t very novel. Competitors include Nile Guide, GoPlanIt, Offbeat Guides, TripWolf and a host of others. Granted, there’s room for more than one player here to succeed, but Duffel is going to need to find a way to rise above the crowd.

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