Category: Tech news

So this is how it feels.

Last night I attended an event for a local startup that was very excited about an upcoming product launch and coming out of beta, making its service openly available to everyone. The official launch was scheduled for and embargoed until next Tuesday, but the event was meant as a celebration and an opportunity for writers to get a more in-depth look at the service, meet the founders, and talk to some of its users.

The startup is doing something really cool, and has a ton of users who love it. People keep coming back, a validation of its business model and the idea behind it. The big problem it faces right now is that it just can’t keep up with demand, but that’s a good problem to have right? Scale a bit more and the sky’s the limit.

There was beer and wine and a little bit of food. There was cake. Somebody drove a car with a pink moustache on the front into the middle of the office and some people hopped out and talked about their experiences with users. It was a joyous occasion, a time for everyone to relax and celebrate all the hard work they had been putting into it, to breathe a little, let loose.

Then, an hour later, someone posted about the event and the upcoming launch, and shit went sideways.

The Next Morning

I didn’t realize the embargo was broken until about 12 hours later. After the launch party concluded, I went to another event, and blissfully ignored all RSS feeds and emails. It was a good night. I got drunk. I danced a little. I went home and passed out. Then I woke up this morning and found this in my inbox:

“Ryan,

Thanks so much for coming last night. It was great to meet you.

I know John mentioned an embargo but given that the information is now already out there, please feel free to post as soon as you’d like. I’ve included the info we covered below – please let me know if you have any additional questions.”

I searched Google, found the offending post, and realized how late it was to follow up. It wasn’t like the thing had just been published. I would be following someone else’s story half a day later, and no one wants to do that. I wrote back, explaining this:

“This is really far from ideal. At this point, my inclination is not to cover, considering other reports were filed 12 hours ago.”

I heard back a few minutes later. Was there anything that they could offer, something to make the story relevant to the audience? Something to get some coverage? This was a really big deal for them, and they certainly didn’t give anyone permission to break the embargo, and is there anything they can do?

Probably not. I mean, how do you come up with a different angle for something as simple and straightforward as a product launch?

The launch that never was

In case you haven’t figured it out, I’m talking about Lyft. The ride-sharing service was launched by Zimride in beta about eight weeks ago, and it’s become really popular in San Francisco. Hell, it’s become really popular among the TechCrunch staff. Alexia, Josh, Kim, and I are all users. We all love the service, love what these guys are doing.

So I was conflicted. I really wanted to support them and get the word out. Sometimes you’re ambivalent about a startup, and so it’s not a big deal to just let that one go. But this was a product and a team that I like. I want them to succeed.

But I’ll be damned if I’m gonna follow someone’s story 12 hours after the fact.

Apparently I’m not alone. I’m sure I’m not the only one who got that email this morning. I’m sure other attendees did as well. I’m sure there were other writers who might not have even been at the event, but still were planning to write about it next Tuesday. Even so, do a Google News search for “Lyft” today, and there’s just that one story.

Sitting there alone, ruining it for everyone else.

Everyone hates embargoes

I’ve broken embargoes in the past. Everyone has. Ask any reporter, and if he tells you he’s never broken an embargo, you know that he’s lying. Sure, it’s not a mark of personal pride, but it happens. The two big times I’ve done it, both were me messing up the date a story was supposed to run on. Not even the time, but the date. Both times I ran the story 24 hours early. A whole fucking day.

So yeah, it happens.

The situation, of course, is more complicated than that. I write for TechCrunch, which famously has an issue with embargoes, or used to anyway. I still get emails from PR people asking me about our no-embargo policy, and I wonder if they even bother to read the site, or if they’ve worked with any of us recently.

For the most part, though, all the TechCrunch writers are cool with embargoes. I don’t know a single person here who doesn’t accept them and we generally all play by the rules.

But I’m also the newest guy here, and I’ve definitely been on the other side of things. It would drive me crazy when I’d write a story only to see it pop up on TechCrunch 15 minutes before the scheduled embargo time. Sometimes earlier. In those cases, I’d usually get a sheepish email from a PR person who may or may not have been complicit in the timing, explaining that oops, someone went early, I’m free to post whenever.

And then, as now, my response would usually be the same. I’d spike the story before following someone else’s broken embargo. What can I say? Reporters are a prideful bunch. No one ever wants to follow someone else’s story.

Epilogue

But you know, I think about how happy everyone was last night, the sigh of relief they must have been feeling. How they were this close to telling the world about the new Android app and opening up the service to everyone in San Francisco. How they are rapidly expanding their fleet. How awesome the culture of the service is. How extremely positive their early results have been. How important this event was for them.

I think about how proud they were, and how they wanted to share that with everyone else. How they invited us into their office to do so. Shared cake, shared wine. Laughed, smiled.

And I think about how the thing these people have been working toward all this time was kind of for naught. Yes, the product will still exist, and yes users will still eventually find out about it. But this is not how the story was supposed to play out. This was their big coming out party, and no one showed up.

It’s unfortunate how this all played out, and it makes me a little sad. More people should know about what they’re doing, should know about the team, should know about how cool the service is. But you really only get one chance to launch to the world, and it’s a shame that it all got ruined by one careless little post.

The Menlo Park-based company formerly known as iSwifter has announced version 2.0 of its cloud gaming platform to offer more content types and usage on clients beyond iPads. With today’s release of capabilities they describe as “any game, anywhere, instantly” comes a new name, the acronym Agawi.

Android tablets, Windows 8 tablets, smart TVs, Macs, and PCs will be able to stream games via cloud service. While the company’s first offering, the iSwifter Flash web browser app available in the iTunes store, is largely used by social and casual gamers, the new platform is aimed at publishers of mid-core and hardcore gaming titles. With the announcement Agawi is expanding its B2B offerings in the hopes of wooing creators of premier AAA games (which means it may not be long before games traditionally seen on GameStop shelves are available to gamers playing without consoles).

The company has developed both products with $500K in funding, much less than the $56.5MM that competitor OnLive raised and used to pay for data centers before closing and being sold recently. As opposed to companies that offer storage-based solutions, Agawi hopes that game publishers will pay licensing fees to use their technology and to reach new audiences through any third-party cloud service provider.

Co-founder and executive chairman Peter Relan says that cloud gaming will change gaming interactions in the same way that streaming has changed movie viewing, improving on the experience of going to a video store to rent a DVD. “The cloud gives you the ability to provide necessary capacity to users who want to have their content whenever and wherever they want it,” said Relan. He says the offerings will help publishers reach gamers who are currently underserved and who may prefer to play on tablet over PC.

With 30 people, Agawi has increased its engineering team and is triple the size it was when it launched the first version of the platform. The company was incubated through YouWeb, which helped launch mobile game network OpenFeint and social gaming company CrowdStar. It has received angel funding from Dave Roux, co-founder of Silver Lake, which helped sell Skype to Microsoft.

Agawi says that it isn’t emphasizing consumer-facing offerings with this release. The company stresses that it is looking more to interest publishers and developers than expand its overall user base of 3 million gamers. It will be announcing new partners for the updated version of the platform at the Cloud Gaming USA conference in San Francisco in early September.

You guys aren’t dummies, you know why we’re constantly posting about our TechCrunch Disrupt conferences. The conferences make us money, and this money allows us to hire even more writers to cover your (yes YOUR) startup.

Attendance is totally worth it, as you get access to our all-star speaker lineup, a fresh new crop of amazingly talented Startup Battlefield companies, and of course, all the writers we are hiring to write about your (yes YOUR) startup.

Also, watching a bunch of startups duke it out for the Disrupt prize of $50,000, the Disrupt cup, and all the accolades that come with it is thoroughly entertaining. Trust me, I used to FLY up from LA to cover this event back when it was called TC 50. *

Pro tip: Today is your absolute last day to purchase your Early Bird tickets, so I highly suggest plopping down your moola asap and then running up a 1K tab at one of the many, many Disrupt after parties, like a boss. People who want more serious information can view the entire agenda here.

Let me reiterate (always be closing, always be closing) this is the last time tickets will be at available at the Early Bird price of $1,995 — after today, they move up to $2,995 each. Seriously, don’t hesitate (always be closing) get your tickets NOW.

Again, IN CASE YOU MISSED IT (ALWAYS BE CLOSING): The last Early Bird tickets to Disrupt SF are on sale here. If you are interested in becoming a sponsor, opportunities can be found here as always.

*Disclosure: I’m super-biased because I now work at TechCrunch and these conferences pay my bills, and occasionally my bar tab.

Images via and via.

It’s no secret by now that Verizon plans to launch a device called the Galaxy Stellar in the near future — the short-lived EvLeaks Twitter account posted a picture of it before going silent — but a recently leaked image has shed a bit more light on the new mid-range device.

Expect the Stellar to hit shelves with a $99 price tag in tow, though exactly when that will happen is still up in the air.

There aren’t any specs to dissect just yet, but the image offers up more than its share of peculiarities to mull. Aside from keeping the oddly pointy chin seen in its predecessor the Droid Charge, the forthcoming Stellar seems to have yet another trick up its sleeve: starter mode.

The image offers few hints as to how starter mode actually works beyond claiming it’s easy to use, but it’s probably safe to expect a smaller number of reconfigured homescreens complete with handy shortcuts to commonly used features.

Interestingly, another device from a completely different manufacturer — the poorly-named Pantech Marauder — also has a “starter mode,” which raises an logical question. I thought the inclusion of a pared-down interface was thoughtful touch on Pantech’s part, but now that Samsung is getting into the game I have to wonder if Verizon is pushing the starter mode decision from their end. If so, that could mean that future Verizon smartphones may have similarly split personalities; representatives from the carrier haven’t yet gotten back to me on that.

Rounding out the package are some pre-loaded Amazon apps, that I think Droid-Life is reading a bit too much into. Verizon has historically loaded up their devices with the Kindle and Amazon MP3 store apps (which handily cover the “shop” and “stay entertained” angles played up in the copy), though I’m holding out hope the folks at Verizon buck the trend and pre-load the Amazon Appstore just to see what happens.

NiftyThrifty, an online, pre-owned, vintage clothing store, announced today that it has raised $2 million from Tribeca Venture Partners, Signal Ventures, Greycroft, idealab and Howard Morgan.

The Brooklyn-based company will launch in October as a membership website that sells vintage clothing. The company will target women exclusively at first, but will follow with apparel for men in a few months.

Topper Luciani, the company’s President, came up with the idea and pitched it to current CEO Mark Kingdon last year. Kingdon has been the CEO of Organic, Inc. and Linden Lab, the makers of Second Life, and an angel investor in Twitter and other companies.

Luciani was frustrated by the limitations of eBay and saw an opportunity to offer customers curated vintage clothing. The duo had three “very successful” flash sales on Fab.com. Kingdon says they learned a lot about their market from those sales.

Kingdon says the company will curate collections of 50-100 vintage pieces centered around themes (think holiday or weekend getaway, he tells me). NiftyThrifty will email users starting once a week then once a day then multiple times a day, as well as posting a thousand discoverable pieces on the site, with an average price around $50.

“We think it’s really important to have a daily dialogue with our consumers,” Kingdon tells me.

He adds that the company initially only set out to raise $1 million, ended up raising twice that and could have raised “a lot more.”

Kingdon notes that “the opportunity is massive,” citing statistics like an overall apparel market upwards of $300 billion and and $15-18B market for used clothing in the U.S.

He says their initial target audience is 18-34 year olds with “an urban style” and an appreciation for vintage clothes but lack of access to quality brick and mortar stores.

The company is currently sourcing merchandise and arranging it into collections in preparation for its October launch.

In theory, this Kickstarter project aiming to sell a sub-$2,000 MakerBot clone shouldn’t be that much of a big deal. The MakerBot Replicator, one of the first (and best) home 3D printers in the world, is an open source product, and as such, anyone with a little wood, some soldering experience, and a dream should be able to build one – or a hundred and one. But in practice the Kickstarted project, called the TangiBot, is nearly an exact replica of the MakerBot.

What happens when an open source project begets its competitors and, more important, what does it mean for the open source hardware ethos in general if people flock to copies at the expense of the original?

The TangiBot, built by Matt Strong, is supposed to be “a clone of a popular open source 3D Printer” with “the same performance and features at a roughly 33% discount.” He aims to sell it at $1,299 for a dual extruder model (so you can print in two colors simultaneously). Compare this to $1,999 for a dual-extruder MakerBot. Strong will find his savings by manufacturing in bulk in China, something MakerBot has thus far avoided. “Just to be clear, there is nothing illegal, sneaky or underhanded going on here. Everything is legal and fair. This is simply the way open source designs work. Welcome to the world of open source,” wrote Strong.

His initial Kickstarter proposal was problematic, not because it cloned the MakerBot, but because it mentioned MakerBot at nearly every turn. It was also an open-ended business project rather than a one-off product. Those problems have since been fixed.

“I’m not out to shoot down MakerBot, I’m out to bring 3D printing to more people,” said Strong.

“This design is well known, already out there, and tested so the consumer is getting the best experience,” he said. “If I use an open source design and I improve it I’m required to share it back to the community and that’s what I’ll happily do.”

This reminds me of the days of cloned PCs. If you were shopping for a computer between, say, 1989 and 1993 you faced a plethora of choices made by hundreds of OEMs, all selling essentially the same beige box with the same parts. Only a few companies made it out of this clone deluge alive including IBM, Apple, Dell, HP, and Gateway. The market contracted quite quickly before the dot-com boom and the little mom and pop computer stores closed.

Bre Pettis at MakerBot declined to speak to the problem of cloning but if his funding and 7-day backlog are any indication, these smaller shops are definitely not hurting his business. In fact, I suspect a copy of the MakerBot – potentially without the same manufacturing care and QA – could only serve to sell more “official” parts and supplies.

In truth, there is no official MakerBot to steal. The MakerBot itself is a riff on the original RepRap replicator and one of the founders of MakerBot, Zach Smith, was one of the founders of the RepRap Research Foundation. Bre and Zach formed MakerBot when they asked each other if they wanted to quit their jobs to build robots. As a result, MakerBot began as a business venture and less an overt open source endeavor, although plans for the MakerBot are free to all comers. As the founders wrote in an early blog post, “The thing that makes the community so powerful is that when you hack it, it is anticipated that you will share your findings with the community so that everyone can benefit!”

Another open source hardware project, Arduino, produces and sells the most popular micro-controller systems in the world. Anyone with some soldering experience could feasibly make an Arduino board, but “clones” from Adafruit and from the Arduino store make it far easier for hobbyists to tinker without investing too much time or effort into gathering equipment and tools. Like Linux consultants, the software is free but the work is what costs.

“Being able to copy or ‘clone’ open source and open source hardware (OSHW) is not only OK, it’s celebrated,” said Phil Torrone, senior editor MAKE magazine and creative at Adafruit. “OSHW has a goal of not only having good designs shared, but the desire to add value to the world when it’s shared and improvements are made.”

The TangiBot and other printers like it improves the 3D ecosystem by driving down costs and increasing demand. Ideally these clones will be compatible with the current MakerBot platform and users will be able to swap parts and add-ons. Every clone sold builds good will and trust towards the still-nascent concept of 3D home printing. These clones contribute to an open market rather than a walled garden just as a few decades ago every PC clone sold built the backbone of today’s computing infrastructure. History, as they say, has the tendency to repeat.

Adafruit founder Limor Fried doesn’t find much value in arguing about who is right in the clone wars.

“Oh really? There’s debate about open source hardware? I’m going to keep shipping open source hardware while you all argue about it,” she said.

Somebody at Amazon in Seattle just texted us a pic of this weird propaganda poster, posted in an elevator at Headquarters: A SECURE AMAZON BEGINS WITH YOU.

Basically, the message here is “Don’t talk to (or in front of) tech bloggers.” I’m assuming those two little Amazon employee locks (?) are discussing Amazon’s top secret Time Machine plans. And that Hamburgler guy looking all shady up there in the left corner of that Kindle is a tech reporter, who is trying to get the AMZN Time Machine scoop for his blog, “Tech Headlines.”

Hamburgler dude is obviously TechCrunch contributor Devin Coldewey, who somehow found out about the front-lit e-INK screen Kindle back in April.

So will these posters actually get employees to STFU before next month’s purported launch of a Time Machine that will take Amazon back to a simpler time before the iPad new Kindle ereader and an updated Kindle Fire? Seeing as though even this got sent to us, I’m going to go with “No.”

Also, if I ever leave TechCrunch, I’m starting a blog called “Tech Headlines.”

Are you a social media superstar, or is your Twitter feed just a soapbox for a soulless animatronic audience? StatusPeople is a humbling web application that reveals the percentage of followers that are fake or inactive. Obama has a whopping 31% fake followers (or 6 million of 19 million), Twitter queen, Lady Gaga, has 27%–which makes us feel like a people magnet with a comparatively tiny 20%. Twitter occasionally cleanses its universe of robots with a mass purge, but is clearly struggling to keep up a motivated army of spammers and purchased accounts.

“There’s a tremendous cachet associated with having a large number,” comedian Dan Nainan told The New York Times, after admitting to buying 220,000 fake followers. “When people see that you have that many followers, they’re like: ‘Oh, my goodness, this guy is popular. I might want to book him.” Presidential candidates Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney have both been accused of trying to appear more tech-savvy by buying their way to fame. It’s unclear whether Romney or someone else paid for his followers, but a massive spike in his social media popularity earlier this Summer was definitely at odds with his stagnant poll numbers.

Not all celebrity accounts with loads of robotic followers have scrupulously bought their way to fame. In many cases, famous people are a tempting target for spammers hocking their message via @replys, or are simply just popular with the roughly half of Twitter accounts that tried out social networking and never came back (numbers current as of 2011).

StatusPeople, and the headlines it’s generated, may drive more people to alternative metrics of popularity, such as Klout, which quantifies follower engagement in addition to volume. But, such measures are rife with inaccuracies.

In reality, maybe some robot love isn’t all that bad. When MIT developed one of the first artificial intelligence systems, ELIZA, some users began to show actual affection for the simple question-and-answer software. Or, you can always move to Japan, snag a robot girlfriend, and share your most intimate moments with your fake followers.

[Image Credit: Softicons]

Evernote CEO Phil Libin said today that he doesn’t spend a lot of time thinking about competition, but he admits that there has been one “age-old rivalry” — with pen-and-paper. Hearing about people who still take notes on paper is “infuriating,” Libin said, in part because he still does it himself.

“This is a fight that many people in the technology space have been fighting,” Libin said. Today, however, “we are announcing a cease-fire.”

Specifically, Libin, who was speaking at the Evernote Trunk Conference (where he also announced Evernote Business), brought Arrigo Berni, CEO of notebook company Moleskine, on-stage with him to announce a partnership on something called the Evernote Smart Notebook. The idea is to bridge the digital and analog worlds, allowing you to take notes physically, then import those notes into Evernote.

So the smart notebook uses specially formatted paper that allows it to work with Evernote. In the new version of the Evernote iPhone app, you can take photos of pages from the Moleskine notebook, and then they’re browsable and even searchable in the app. The notebook also comes with special stickers, which tell the app the notebook (the virtual kind) where each page should be saved.

Berni noted that the collaboration makes sense, in part, because Moleskine’s customers are often very digitally savvy. For example, in a survey, 60 percent of Moleskine customers said they also use a digital device to take notes. He also pointed to the “What’s in Your Bag?” Flickr group, where users, yes, post photos of what’s in their, and where Berni said it’s common to see bags that hold both Moleskine notebooks and iPhones or tablets.

Libin said they’ve been testing out notebooks in the Evernote office for the past couple of weeks, and they’ve encountered one problem — the notebooks are so pretty that you don’t want to write in them. His solution? “Order two.”

Evernote handed out free smart notebooks (the very first production copies, apparently) to all the attendees at the Trunk Conference. If the notebook can actually deal with my terrible, terrible handwriting, then I’m pretty sure I’m going to be hooked. You can preorder your own notebook here. The pricing will be $24.95 for a pocket notebook and $29.95 for a large notebook.

The overwhelming majority of web-based services today rely on Linux. More and more of these companies are joining the Linux Foundation, the “nonprofit consortium dedicated to fostering the growth of Linux.” The Linux Foundation provides a neutral ground for companies and users to discuss and collaborate on Linux’s development, so it makes sense for companies with large Linux footprints to get involved. Linux Foundation members include IBM, Intel, Google, HP, Oracle, and a raft of other names you’ll recognize. Twitter will be joining up next week.

With tens of thousands of Linux servers, Twitter will be joining The Linux Foundation to support its mission of promoting, protecting and advancing Linux. “Linux and its ability to be heavily tweaked is fundamental to our technology infrastructure,” said Chris Aniszczyk, Manager of Open Source, Twitter. “By joining The Linux Foundation we can support an organization that is important to us and collaborate with a community that is advancing Linux as fast as we are improving Twitter.”

Aniszczyk will be keynoting at the Linux Foundation’s LinuxCon event next week with a presentation titled “The Open Source Technology Behind a Tweet.” I’ll be there. You should be, too.

Also joining the Linux Foundation are Inktank, a company that provides development and support of the Ceph distributed filesystem, and Servergy, manufacturers of efficient Power Architecture ™-based, enterprise-class Linux machines.

YesVideo is best known for converting old videotapes and photos and giving users back a DVD with all their old home movies in a digital format. But it’s increasingly moving past digitization and into online storage. With that in mind, the company is now giving all customers an unlimited amount of cloud storage for content that they convert using YesVideo’s service.

YesVideo has been around for more than a decade, offering people a way to easily convert all their home videos and photos for the digital age. They simply drop off films recorded in any old format — whether that be 8mm, VHS, or Beta — at any one of a number of 34,000 partner retail locations, like CVS and Bartell Drugs, as well as Target, Kodak, and Ritz Camera. The company then digitizes that content for them in one of two production facilities in the U.S., typically in less than three weeks.

It used to be that once YesVideo converted all those images or videos, they’d send back a CD or DVD with all that content. Then they added the ability to store content online for a nominal fee, letting users access and share their videos and photos with a link to a webpage. Now it’s taking out that fee and giving out an unlimited amount of online storage free for users of the digitization service.

After a piece of content has been digitized, it’ll be available through a personalized share link, and can be accessed on the web, through social networks like Facebook, and soon even on mobile apps.

Users convert an average of 3 hours of video using the service, paying about $20 per videotape for the conversion process. But what’s really interesting is the amount of usage it’s seeing on the consumption side. Apparently people love watching and re-living those old home movies, as it sees viewership of 44 minutes per session on average.

While YesVideo has been operating since 1999, it’s taking big steps to move from storing media on physical media like DVDs, to making them available in the cloud. To help with that, Greystripe founders Michael Chang and Andy Choi recently took over key leadership positions in the company, and invested $5 million into it.

Evernote CEO Phil Libin just announced a new product aimed at small- and medium-sized companies (or small- and medium-sized teams within large enterprises) — appropriately, it’s called Evernote Business.

Libin describes Evernote as your “external brain”, and he says Evernote Business should serve as the external brain for your company. He says the product was built with four big principles in mind:

1. Very easy on-boarding: Every employee’s Evernote Business account can be connected to a personal account, and those personal accounts are automatically upgraded to Evernote Premium. There will also be tools that help people auto-register and join their relevant business groups.
2. Data ownership: Who owns the data created in Evernote Business? Libin says that the company settled on a “kindergarten playground solution — what’s mine is mine, what’s yours is yours.” So anything an employee stores in their private notebooks still belongs to them, while anything created in a shared company or team notebook belongs to the company. Apps that integrate with Evernote will be updated to reflect these new data ownership rules.
3. Business sharing: You will be able to publish content to a directory that’s viewable by everyone in your company. Libin says this kind of sharing is “what makes your whole business smarter.”
4. Dedicated support: For the first time, Evernote will be offering phone support, and each Business customer will have a dedicated “Customer Success Manager.”

Libin says Evernote will hold what is, for the company, an unusually long beta period for the business product. Interested companies can sign up for beta testing here, but general availability isn’t coming until December. The pricing will be $10 per user per month.

The announcement took place at Evernote’s second Trunk Conference in San Francisco. During his keynote speech, Libin also offered a contrast between where the company was during its first Trunk Conference a year ago and where it is now. He said that Evernote now has a workforce of 230, it has grown the number of API developers from 5,000 to 15,000, and the number of users has grown from 12 million to 38 million. (That even shows growth from the numbers Libin provided at LeWeb in June.) And he also announced a cool new product created with Moleskine, the Evernote Smart Notebook.

The Vizio Co-Star is the first Google TV box that features support for OnLive gaming as well as video services like Netflix, Amazon and YouTube. Sounds pretty awesome right? Here is another chance for three lucky winners to win one!

The Vizio Co-Star packs plenty of power in a petite package — it basically fits in the palm of your hand, as does the fancy, dual-sided QWERTY remote it ships with. Also, it’s a hot item that everyone wants. It sold out pre-orders in the first 12 hours it was available.

With special thanks to Vizio, we have three Co-Stars to give away. The giveaway starts now and ends next Friday, August 31st, at 9AM Pacific Time. You may only enter once, so be sure to follow the steps below closely. This specific giveaway is for U.S. residents only and you must be 18-years-old or over to enter.

If you want a chance at winning, all you have to do is follow the steps below.

1) Click on this link to sign up.

2) Then do one of the following:

– Retweet this post (making sure to include the #TechCrunch hashtag)
– Leave us a comment below telling us what your favorite TV show is

Here’s a little commercial of the Vizio Co-Star. Don’t mind the music.

Knoll’s ReGeneration desk chair. Photo: Ariel Zambelich/Wired

It’s difficult to get excited about office chairs. Especially now, with study after study claiming that sitting all day is killing you, and with every reputable source advising you to spend more time standing up and moving around than you spend sitting.

I’ve read all those articles, too, and I do plan on switching to a standing workstation very soon. I’ve even selected all the parts to convert my desk. So the irony is not lost on me that I’ve spent the last three months sitting in what is easily the most comfortable office chair I’ve ever used. It’s like a bad movie where the man meets the woman of his dreams on the eve of his wedding to another bride.

My little homewrecker of a desk chair is called the Knoll ReGeneration. It’s the furniture giant’s latest addition to its line of mesh-backed desk chairs with the Generation name — we reviewed the premium model last year.

Compared to the company’s previous Generation design, the ReGeneration is lighter, more compact, and less expensive. Knoll has also upped the treehugger quotient; the elastomer net on the back of the chair makes use of corn by-products, and the foam in the seat cushion is partially sourced from soy-based materials. The structural design is also very minimal, using as little plastic as possible and eschewing the shell that manufacturers commonly use to cover the innards. Almost half of each ReGeneration is made from recycled materials when you add it all up (44 percent if you choose the plastic base, and 48 percent if you choose the aluminum base, according to Knoll).

This eco-minded approach extends all the way down to how it’s packaged and shipped. It comes in two halves that squeeze into a remarkably compact box, and it weighs less than 30 pounds. The environmental gains here are obvious: more of the chairs can be stuffed into a shipping container, and it’s less impactful to get one delivered to your door.

Assembly is a no-brainer — just insert the barrel into the base, where it clicks into place — and adjustments are equally simple. Beneath the seat are the levers you’d expect for adjusting the height and seat depth, and for locking the reclining mechanism.

My favorite bit of adjustment, however, is the optional lumbar support found on the back of my loaner. It’s a rigid plate that’s split vertically down the centerline by what looks like an oversized plastic zipper. To adjust the point where the support is the stiffest, move the zipper up and down.

The optional lumbar support mechanism adjusts by way of a zipper-like slider that moves up and down. Photo: Ariel Zambelich/Wired

All of this flexibility in adjustment means there’s zero fuss in dialing in a comfortable, healthy position. Lean back slightly (as my doctor tells me I should be doing all the time while at my desk), and the curved back hugs your spine. In this ideal position, the chair props you up with just the right amount of stiffness while still allowing you to keep your back muscles relaxed.

More impressive is how the chair handles uncomfortable positions. I have pretty terrible desk posture — lots of slouching, leaning, and one-shoulder hunches — so I’m off-balance much of the time. The undercarriage feels springy when you’re just sitting normally and staying centered in the seat, but it gets more rigid when you list sideways or lean forward. Of course, you only notice this if you’re thinking about it.

To test the chair’s range of adjustment, I passed it around to a few office-mates of different shapes and sizes. I’m six feet tall, but my co-worker who’s almost a full foot shorter than me could also find a comfortable position in it — a first for her, since every other office chair she’s ever used has left her feet dangling.

I’ve spent most of my days in the past six years sitting in three chairs: a Herman Miller Aeron (with which you’re no doubt familiar), a Steelcase conference room chair, and a nameless hunk of cheap plastic much like what most of you are sitting in right now. The Knoll is closest to the Herman Miller Aeron in design, though it’s both smaller and more comfortable. The Knoll’s padded cushion is more comfortable and supportive than the Aeron’s diaphanous suspension seat, though not as breathable.

We sit on our asses all day, and our relationships with our chairs are more intimate than we’d prefer them to be. Even those of us who have joined the mass defection to the world of standing desks are still spending a not-insignificant portion of the workday sitting (a 70-30 split between standing and sitting is recommended).

Thus, a good chair is a sound investment, and logic dictates you should buy the best chair you can afford. The ReGeneration starts at $676 with arms, and $540 without. Certainly not peanuts, but actually on the affordable end when it comes to chairs as fancy as this one. Where desk chairs are concerned, we are a culture of connoisseurs, and this is a chair any connoisseur could appreciate.

WIRED Exceedingly comfortable, and adjusts to almost any body type. Back support is unrivaled. Fully customizable — there’s even a “task” chair configuration for standing desks. Compact, minimal design has several environmental certifications. 12-year warranty.

TIRED Base price climbs quickly once you add the options — which you must to get the lumbar plate and the articulating arms. Seat isn’t as breathable as a suspension web seat of competing designs.

The ‘high performance’ arms, which articulate on three axes, are an upgrade option.
Photo: Ariel Zambelich/Wired

Photo by Tyler Maddox for Wired

The promise of this new electric motorcycle is clear and simple: a top speed over 100 mph and a range in excess of 100 miles.

Achieving either would give Brammo’s Empulse R a marked advantage over any other production electric motorcycle to date. Doing both holds the potential to rocket the nascent form of transportation into the mainstream, creating a product that’s not just environmentally friendly and cheap to run, but also real-world, everyday practical and fun to ride.

Can the Empulse hit those magical numbers? Testing it on the roads around Brammo’s Ashland, Oregon, factory last week, it absolutely did. But, it achieved so much more that those numbers didn’t end up feeling like the real story. This thing doesn’t just serve as practical, fun transportation; it uses the benefits of electric propulsion to achieve real performance benefits over internal-combustion-engine sportbikes as well.

But why would you want an electric motorcycle when ICE bikes are cheap, fast and efficient? In America at least, motorcycles are frequently objects of leisure. Reducing the guilt of ownership and use while enhancing the image is a proven driver of desire. With the Brammo Empulse, you can have your performance and enjoy it safe in the knowledge that you’re not damaging the environment, too.

Formerly a maker of high-end, boutique performance cars like the open-wheeled, open-cockpit Ariel Atom and road-legal replicas of ’60s Lola race cars, it makes sense that Brammo wouldn’t stop at just making a practical motorcycle. The bike’s designer, Brian Wismann, rides what’s currently the fastest motorcycle in the world — BMW’s S1000RR — as everyday transportation and the company won the fledgling TTXGP North American Championship last year with its Empulse RR race bike, adapting lessons learned on the track to this production motorcycle.

When developing the Empulse, however, Brammo benchmarked the much more practical, but still fun Triumph Street Triple. This is intended to be a motorcycle that’s equally at home on city streets or carving up a mountain road. The Empulse’s riding position and chassis geometry are both based on Triumph’s bike, and Brammo targeted its outright performance too — a decision that might sound overly ambitious given the Empulse weighs 470 pounds and that its proprietary, liquid-cooled electric motor makes just 54 hp and 46.5 pound-feet of torque to the 416-pound Triumph’s 105 hp and 50 pound-feet.

Photo by Tyler Maddox for Wired

Riding the two motorcycles head-to-head on Ashland’s twisty, technical Green Springs Highway, it was the Triumph that had to work hard, using its extra power to keep up. That’s because the Brammo steers faster, holds a line with more stability and inspires considerably more confidence in its rider.

It achieves that through higher quality, fully adjustable suspension and lightweight forged-aluminum wheels, of course, but also the inherent benefits of an electric drivetrain.

On a traditional bike, heavy components like the gas tank, gearbox and cylinders are spread out over a larger area as defined by their necessary mechanical relationship. But electrics can keep their heavy batteries virtually anywhere and mount their engine and gearbox in the optimal location.

Brammo has maximized this advantage, squashing the drivetrain’s area into as centralized a position as possible, limiting the effect its weight has on handling. That’s a trick ICE race bikes and their road-going replicas are increasingly employing as well, but what the Empulse does that no ICE bike ever could is remove the impact reciprocating inertia and vibration have on handling and feel.