Category: Tech news

Most musicians (like me!) are the starving kind, forgoing sustenance to pick up a used Marshall JCM 900 or Fender Twin for a guitar amp. But for the rare guitar player who is flush and of discerning taste, the Matchless Independence 35 amp provides lush tone for a wide variety of music.

Plugging into the Independence is the sonic equivalent of sliding into a plush Bentley for a joyride. Everything exudes luxury and extravagance from the smooth-yet-rugged exterior tolex skin, to the military-grade power switch, to the lighted faceplate and front panel. Even the ¼-inch inputs feel decadent as they grip your guitar cable and snap it into place.

Aside from the slick construction, this amp’s No. 1 selling point is detail. When playing chords, every note shines through, even under heavy distortion. If you use pedals, you’ll hear colors and details in them that you never knew were there. Now you don’t need that J to get the most out of your tone.

Like a girlfriend going from sweats to a cocktail dress, guitars you’ve grown tired of sound sexier than ever, and your favorite axes achieve tonal nirvana. This is the product of sheer craftsmanship: The Matchless is all hand-wired point-to-point, and the transformers are hand-wound, which gobbles up roughly 16 hours of labor by Matchless employees for each amp they build.

The Independence is Matchless’ first three-channel amp, and it can handle anything you throw at it, from sweet country twang, to shit-your-pants metal. The first channel offers warm and pristine clean tones. Add the second channel for anything from a slight crunch to grin-inducing distortion. The third channel offers yet more fuzz and drive to sculpt your sound. With these channels, bass and treble EQs, a cut knob and master volume, one is hard pressed to not find several unique and creative settings.

In short, going from a low-end Peavey or even a midrange Fender amp to the Independence can feel like going from a Huffy to a Haybusa. While this quality is in the eye of the beholder and all of its many biases, several veteran sets of ears agreed that this tone is something special. And it’s not only a joy to hear, it inspires new ideas and instills confidence in your playing.

Unfortunately, the Independence 2×12 combo also resembles a Bentley in its incredible mass. It weighs a spine-fusing 73 pounds. I literally almost threw up carting it around (granted, I myself weigh 130 pounds). My back wails at the thought of taking this thing to gigs and loading it in and out. You’ll need a roadie to do this for you, if you still want to be able to stand on stage.

And a lot of people who own Matchless amps can probably afford a roadie. That’s because this baby will set you back over $4K (only $3,826 if you forgo its fabulous reverb unit, which I wouldn’t recommend). Sure, it’s likely worth every penny, but that’s still a lot of pennies when amps at half the price will probably do just fine.

On the other hand, the Independence is an absolute tank, so if you’re a regular touring musician and you add up all your repair costs over the years for your cheaper amp, you may just about break even. Or at least that’s how you can rationalize it in your head. As for me, I’m wondering if Matchless will believe it got lost in the mail.

WIRED Pumps your sounds up so well, you feel like a better guitar player. Tons of tonal options and distortion levels to play with.

TIRED A monster in both size and weight. Prohibitively expensive for most guitar players. Doesn’t always cut through other instruments in a cramped practice space setting.

Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

There’s this weird slit in the side of my MacBook Pro. It almost seems like a credit card swipe, or a receipt dispenser, or an air vent, or something. Oh wait. That’s an optical drive. You’ll forgive me if I wasn’t sure. You see, I’ve never used the thing.

This dawned on me the other day. I’ve owned this computer for months now and I have never had the need to insert a compact disc or DVD into this computer to do something. Not once. And going forward, I can’t imagine a time where I ever will. Okay, maybe if my computer dies. But even then, I would probably just take it into an Apple Store and let them deal with it.

So this drive is a huge waste of space. Without it, this great machine could certainly be much more svelte. What I want, of course, is a MacBook Air. But Apple seems to have been neglecting those recently. If the latest rumors are true, come Wednesday, that could change.

The most recent rumors have Apple releasing a new, smaller MacBook Air that would have an 11.6-inch screen (versus the current 13.3-inch one). The thing may weigh in around 2 pounds (versus the current 3 pounds). And it may even have a new sort of solid state memory system that would allow it to be even thinner than normal, and faster to boot.

This is exactly the type of system I want.

I’ve been spoiled in recent months. I bought my current 15-inch MacBook Pro a little bit before the launch of the iPad. It’s a fantastic machine, but the iPad has changed the way I view it now. The thought of carrying around a 5.6 pound machine when I could just carry around a 1.5 pound iPad makes me groan inside a bit. 2 pounds? I can do that.

Why not just carry around the iPad? Because as great as it is, it’s still not nearly good enough to use professionally on a daily basis. Even if I were to carry around the keyboard accessory, it’s lacking some of the intensive multitasking properties I require to write about important things like iPhone subway bands.

That said, I also definitely don’t need all the power this dual graphics cards i7 MacBook Pro offers. I need something in-between the two. Again, this new MacBook Air sounds ideal.

A couple days ago, Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster said that the original MacBook Air missed the mark because Apple underestimated how many people wanted an optical drive on their machine. I don’t know. To me, the MacBook Air was always interesting but it seemed far too underpowered for its relatively high price. Apple eventually cut the price, but it was still probably too much money. Rumors for the new version suggest a much cheaper price. That could be very interesting.

A lot of people bitched and moaned when Apple first unveiled with Air with only an optional optical drive add-on. But the fact remains that this is the right move, and Apple is simply a little ahead of the curve (as they were with floppy drives, etc). These drives take up way too much room and are increasingly seldom used. Backups are done via USB or Firewire (or the Internet). Software installs can now be done over the Internet or via USB. Movies and music? Same thing. The optical drive is dying. And fast.

Going forward, I suspect the majority of my computing will be done on the following devices: iPhone, iPad, MacBook Air (and perhaps a ChromeBook, or whatever Google will call their Chrome OS notebooks). It’s becoming all about ultra-portability. As Apple CEO Steve Jobs famously said recently, PCs will become like trucks. Desktop computers and these larger laptops will still be around for utilitarian purposes — but I don’t want to have to sit behind one all day. Or worse, have to carry one around.

I want a system that instantly boots. One that’s always connected to the Internet (that could be another interesting play for the new MacBook Air — 3G built-in). One that lasts for a very, very long time. And one that I don’t think twice about carrying around.

Even this relatively new MacBook Pro that I use is starting to feel like one of those old camcorders that required you to carry around a VCR in a bag in order to record something. It’s time to cut out the VCR — in this case, the optical drive. It’s time to continue the march towards portable computing. It’s time to lighten the load.

Birthdays have always been a big deal on Facebook, driving users to pile onto eachother’s Facebook profiles to leave good wishes and doodles of cake. But more and more, users are looking to channel this goodwill into something a little more special using Birthday Wish, a service from the philanthropic startup Causes that makes it easy to ask your friends to donate to charity in honor of your big day.

Today, we’ve gotten word that the service has set a new record: Dave Morin, a long-time former Facebook employee who is now CEO of stealthish startup Path, managed to raise over $10,000 in 24 hours, which is the fastest-growing Birthday Gift ever (the total totally is now up to over $11K).  He’ll be donating the proceeds to UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital in San Francisco, and if you’d like to participate you can find his Wish here. Morin’s success with Birthday Wish is awesome news, but it’s also important for another reason: it shows how some recent tweaks to the Causes platform are beginning to take off.

Over the summer we reported that Causes was moving away from existing primarily as a Facebook canvas application that lives on Facebook itself, toward a Connect-enabled site on Causes.com.  Causes CEO Joe Green says that since the change two months ago, Birthday Wish has been raising twice as much money per day (up to $20,000 a day from $10,000).

He expects that number to keep growing. Green says that over the last few months Causes has primarily been focusing on helping each Birthday Wish campaign drive more donations, but it hasn’t been doing much to boost the total number of wishes being created (in other words, to boost awareness). That’s going to change soon, he says.

The site is also going to begin rolling out some new features, like a ‘sidekick’ system where one friend is supposed to help promote your Wish as much as possible. There’s also going to be listings of the top donor, most recent donor, and so on — Green explains that the site is working on getting these social dynamics fine-tuned for helping you raise money from friends, which is tricker than what you’d find on a basic social game. You probably won’t be able to raise quite as much as Morin (who has a large online presence), but everyone should benefit from the changes.

I also spoke with Morin about the success of his Wish. He’s thrilled, explaining that he’d set a goal of $10,000 by the holiday season – which he reached in one day. He attributes some of this success to the aforementioned optimizations that have been made to Causes (he says he’s being running Birthday Wishes for three years, and the amount raise has doubled or more each year). Here’s a portion of his letter to friends, in which he explains why he is doing this:

Health has been an important dedication of my family for decades.

I have dedicated my life to entrepreneurship, helping other entrepreneurs, and the creation of better social networking technology to help cause positive change in society.

Because of this I have been working for over a year in partnership with Ron Conway, Marc & Lynne Benioff, Joe Green, and the team at UCSF towards the creation of a social media movement to support the new world class UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital here in San Francisco.

Because of my family’s dedication to family health for decades, this organization is particularly important to me because it is going to set a new standard of health care for children and their families.

My personal goal is to raise more than $10,000 through the holiday season. And to recruit more than 50% of my friends on Facebook to join this important cause.

An SEC Form D filed today revealed a few new things about “Godfather of Silicon Valley” and much lauded angel investor Ron Conway‘s SV Angel fund namely that it is going after more, raising the fund’s target to about $30 million, and also closing in on an almost $9 million update today.

This latest Form D filing is an amendment from the first time SV Angel filed this Spring and it refers to a $22,805,000 in total new funding vs. in $13,865,000 in April. A little handy subtraction reveals that SV Angel just wrastled up another $8,940,000 to be specific.

And just like we predicted in February, it seems as though triple threat Facebook, Google and Twitter investor Conway and partner David Lee have had no problem finding investors for Conway’s own fund, which marks a departure from only investing his own capital and his previous investments through Baseline Ventures.

Some of the pretty hot startups SV Angel is currently invested in include Hipmunk, Wavii, Bit.ly, Flipboard and BankSimple.

Thanks: FormDs

Maybe it is a good thing that Twitter co-founder Evan Williams is no longer CEO — he now seems to have time to do things like answer a boatload of questions from users on Twitter. For about an hour today, Williams did just that and provided some interesting insights into New Twitter and what types of possibilities are out there for the service in the future, feature-wise.

I went ahead and curated a list of his best tweet replies, but I’ll spell the answers out in a simplified manner below. According to Williams:

• Twitter is working on a way to show entire back-and-forth conversations in the right-pane on New Twitter. Currently, they only show one tweet that a tweet is replying to.
• Many of the New Twitter ideas will find their way into the various mobile interfaces.
• Williams agrees that the new URL structure for Twitter isn’t pretty, but it’s needed to keep things fast.
• There are no plans for a way to make individual tweets private on a case-by-case basis.
• Twitter is thinking about an option to put DMs and @replies in the main timeline.
• There will eventually be a DM alert of some sort on the site to show you when you have a new message.
• Twitter.com will eventually use the User Streams API (real time updates).
• The Settings page will soon get an update to look like the rest of New Twitter.
• There are no plans to ever put any time of media in the tweet stream itself.
• Twitter may experiment with live-updating feeds instead of having the new tweet alert.
• There won’t be a Twitter movie — unless it’s an animated musical.
• “Also followed by” and “You both follow” are coming back — Twitter is figuring out how to re-implement them.
• Twitter is trying to think of a way to make it easier to see who has retweeted you.
• Williams likes that the right pane is the same size as the stream — he actually wants it wider.
• Twitter plans to keep on changing things up regularly — this redesign is not the end.
• Williams would like to see more stats for users on the front-end.
• Twitter is thinking about allowing users to change the color of the black top bar in New Twitter.
• New Twitter decodes all shortened links.
• Retweeting with comments is not coming.
• A new Tweetie for Mac is not coming anytime soon.
• The Fail Whale exists on New Twitter, but they’re working hard to keep him out of the waters.
• Twitter not currently working on a profile picture cropper.
• Animated avatars will not be allowed. Twitter finds them “distracting”.
• New Twitter will have Posterous support in the right pane soon.
• Tumblr and img.ly might be getting support soon as well. Twitter is working to add “many more” media providers.
• The ability to shorten a link on twitter.com is being worked on right now.
• Twitter is thinking about a “mute” button to block users temporarily (like Brizzly has).

In the current issue of the Atlantic Monthly, contributing editor Michael Hirschorn rails against the “commodification of facts” caused by social media.

Specifically he’s irked by how Twitter, Wikipedia and the rest have made it possible for right wing (in most cases) commentators to create their own set of facts to support their agenda.

“The communal void allows the emergence of an Andrew Breitbart on the right and, occupying far less morally compromised space on the left, a figure like Julian Assange, the mastermind behind WikiLeaks (no affiliation with Wikipedia)… While Breitbart unapologetically conducts his information warfare à la Sartre via Malcolm X—by any means necessary, including blatant falsehoods—Assange uses “truth” as a weapon while assuming that context will be provided by the commons…”

Coming as it did in the same week that Paul criticized a disingenuous anti-Meg Whitman attack ad (leading to TechCrunch’s resident socialist being labelled an evil Republican fanboy by commenters) Hirschorn’s persuasive essay struck a chord with us. So you can imagine our delight when the man who the NY Observer called “Mr Bad Taste” agreed to be join us (along with his son, Paul, and his dog, Clover) to explain why social media is evil and how “most Americans will believe any shit they see online…”

Video below.

Talk about burying the lead. For your Friday reading pleasure, the latest memo from “fearless leader” Carol Bartz, talking up how far the company has come and how the outage just proved how important Yahoo is.

Read it for yourself:

“There sure are a lot of folks writing about us. There are some pretty incredible stories out there.  I’m not letting it distract me, and you shouldn’t either. Because the really incredible story to me is how far we’ve come to build a better Yahoo! – something you’re all making a reality.

I’ve been traveling the last four weeks to New York, Atlanta and Washington DC, seeing customers, partners and visiting our offices. I want to call out the U.S. Account Management folks who have been working non-stop to transition our advertisers to Microsoft’s Ad Center. Microsoft should be powering paid search in the U.S. and Canada by the end of this month, right on schedule. Our Yahoo! transition team under Mark Morrissey deserves the BIG THANKS for steering us through this important transition.

I met with the News product and engineering teams yesterday. On Monday, we’re going Alpha in four countries on a totally new platform for global News. We’ve had nine different News code bases around the world and haven’t brought up a new country in two years because of the complexity! With “new” News we can bring a new site up in a month. To compose a new page it used to either never happen, or took engineering and editorial weeks. Now it only takes FIVE minutes with just the editor. Why am I going into this detail? First, I’m really, really proud of the Media and Content Agility Platforms teams. They started in July ‘09 and have delivered a kick-ass product on time. Secondly, I want you all to know that this is the new Yahoo! – great technology driving great content for a great user and advertiser experience. No one will stop us!

Now after all that happy talk, we have a lot to do. Change is very hard but no company or no one person can stay the same. Let’s all look out the windshield, not the back window. That’s how we move forward.

OK, Yahoos, that’s all for today.

Your fearless leader,
Carol

P.S. – You all know Front Page was down yesterday. Our teams worked hard and got it fixed fast. And looking on the positive side, I thought you should see some of the comments. Several outlets indicated their surprise at such a major issue with one of the world’s largest Websites, noting the importance of Yahoo! to the daily lives of users and the fact that Yahoo! is never down.

•                   “Yahoo.com was offline this PM. Friends/readers wrote to us, underscoring the site’s continued relevance.” – Tweet from a Wall Street Journal reporter

•                   “The people have spoken, bring us back our Yahoo!” – The Next Web

So remember, Yahoo! is still an important destination for folks on the Web. Let’s give them the best experience we can.”

There is a very excited startup out there called Baydin that is about to close it’s first angel round of financing. One of the investors, at least, is Dave McClure’s 500 Startups.

How did they get McClure to invest? By giving him a ride from a meeting to his mechanic.

Then, my girlfriend noticed Dave’s tweet that said he was looking for a ride to his mechanic. Anyone who picked him up could pitch him on the way. Figuring dignity is for the unfunded, I threw on yesterday’s clothes, hopped on 101, and headed over to Buck’s to give Dave McClure a lift.

The pickup happened, although CEO Alexander Moore seemed a little annoyed that McClure was on the phone for the first part of the ride. But by the end of the “meeting” Dave was hooked and committed to invest $50,000 or $100,000.

I spoke to McClure today about this. He says he’s done this two other times – once in Seattle and once in Boston – but this was the first time he’s made an investment.

“You did this without any due diligence or research into the company,” I asked. His answer – “Yes, but I had a referral from someone.”

“Do you feel like you have an obligation to invest when you get a ride from someone?” I asked Dave. “Psychologically speaking, that’s probably accurate,” he said.

Ok. My last words to Dave included a pointer to UberCab, which we wrote about last night. It might be a less expensive way for him to get around town in the future. Meanwhile, if you’re a startup and you need cash fast, just start following Dave around wherever he goes, and hope that he needs a ride.

RockYou, a social network app developer that also has an advertising branch, has had substantial layoffs this week, we’ve just confirmed. The company says that it has “restructured the organization” in the last couple of days, and that going forward it is going to focus exclusively on social games, where it “sees the largest opportunity”.

A company spokesperson declined to comment on how many people were laid off (the best I could get out of them was that it was less than half the company) — we’re working to get a more specific number. RockYou has been very well funded, with over $125 million raised to date. It recently closed a $10 million round in June to boost its presence in Asia.

RockYou will continue to work on its advertising initiatives and will be directing most of its resources at developing social games. It won’t be shutting down its established non-gaming properties, which include Pieces of Flair and SuperWall, but it won’t be supporting them to the same extent that it has been up until this point.

It’s been a bad year for RockYou. Less than twelve months ago, the company had all of its 32 million accounts hacked.

RockYou arch-rival Slide was acquired by Google in August for $228 million.

Maybe it’s time for the great salesman to hang it up. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer spoke at a computer science school this week and was asked in a roundabout way, why someone would want to work at Microsoft when there are so many more exciting companies out there, like, say  Apple.

Ballmer tap dances for four minutes, the moderator hops in and notes that one-third of the school’s graduates go to Microsoft, which isn’t that surprising given this talk was held at the University of Washington and Microsoft is by far the biggest tech company in the state. That’s like auto companies saying because a lot of people in Detroit have jobs with them, they’re still on the cutting edge.

Finally Ballmer gets to the answer of why Microsoft is exciting: Windows…and….phones. He doesn’t even sound like he’s convincing himself. Let’s hope for the sake of shareholders the pitch to customers is as dynamic as it used to be. [Drinking game bonus: Drink every time he says “Best and the Brightest”]

Reid Hoffman was my guest on Ask a VC this week, although he still considers himself more of an entrepreneur than a VC and did the call from LinkedIn, not Greylock. Oh well at least the question asking and answering was as advertised.

Among the questions he answered were who Facebook’s biggest competitive threat would be, why Google has failed in two attempts to build a social platform and whether the latest will succeed, whether micropayments can work for categories other than games (Hint: News media, we’re still out of luck), the few investments he’s made outside the United States and why he doesn’t do more and how his value add is different when he’s wearing a VC hat and when he’s wearing an angel hat.

We also play a fun game: If LinkedIn is the virtual office, Facebook is the virtual backyard BBQ, MySpace is the virtual nightclub, what are the real world analogs for Ping, FourSquare, Gowalla and Zynga?

The video is below.

A little more than a week ago, it was reported that MacBook Air retail supplies were dwindling. This has historically indicated a new product or refresh, and now there is chatter suggesting that the new version will indeed be the 11.6″ version we heard about back in July.

A source credited with “pinpoint accuracy” in the past by Apple Insider claims that the new 11.6″ laptops have been in manufacture for about a week. But will it simply be a smaller version of the existing laptop, or something new? I’m going to go with new.

Continue reading…

Google tried yesterday to convince the world that it is no longer a one-trick pony (or won’t be forever). It revealed for the first time during its earnings call some pretty big revenue numbers in businesses other than core search advertising. It’s annualized revenue for display advertising (including YouTube and DoubleClick) is now running at $2.5 billion; mobile search is $1 billion (oops, that’s still search). Some people don’t buy it. But as Google CEO Eric Schmidt told an audience today at MIT: “Anything that is $1 billion is good.”

The real story from yesterday’s blow-out quarter is not so much that Google has learned any new tricks, but rather that the one it knows is still a pretty good trick. And Google is playing that trick for all it’s worth. Towards the end of the earnings conference call, CFO Patrick Pichette offered this garbled metaphor: “When you see a hockey stick, pour on gas on that fire.”

In a note today titled “Fuel on The Hockey Stick,” Citi analyst Mark Mahaney included a table showing the growth in U.S. gross revenues, which I’ve charted above. Google’s U.S. gross revenues grew 26 percent in the third quarter, compared to growth of 22 percent, 11 percent, 4 percent, and 2 percent in the four previous quarters, respectively. New search ad formats such as comparison ads and product listings are showing 10 to 30 percent better clickthrough rates than plain-vanilla paid search ads, and are helping revenues.

Display ads and mobile may not yet count as another trick, but by next year they could start to be material. Google offered up the numbers more to signal what is coming and to help analysts with their “Jedi Guesstimation skills,” in the words of senior VP of product management Jonathan Rosenberg. Since Google doesn’t give official guidance on future results, these snippets of information are all they have to go on other than the official quarterly results. Mahaney now estimates that 10 percent of Google’s revenues next year will come from display, YouTube, and mobile.

Today, Schmidt also offered up this additional piece of advice: “A simple rule for those of you who are CEOs: rising revenues solves all problems.” In the end, it really doesn’t matter to investors where the revenues and profits come from, as long as they keep going up. Maybe if they keep pouring gas on that hockey stick, it will turn into another pony.

Photo of actual pony on Google campus, circa 2007, courtesy of Kevin Marks:

Rob Morris just showed me this very cool gestural guitar interface that allows you to control a guitar with your iPhone. You can modify the sound by moving the guitar around (think Star Power in Guitar Hero) and you can even shred on the iPhone while the guitar twangs away.

No, you can’t buy one. And Rob’s not selling his rig. I guess you can just follow these guys’ lead and start your own iPhone band.

Read more…

You might be looking at your significant other right now thinking, “Why can’t you be cooler, hotter, more understanding, less understanding, more fun, less fun, better with people, more discerning, more fashionable, less fashion-obsessed … Well actually, why can’t you be more like me?”

From the folks that brought you YouTubeTimeMachine and in the same vein as ManBabies.com, we present to you this concept taken one step further, I’mdatingmyself.com a site created by Justin Johnson that allows you to (um, self) indulge your wildest onanistic Photoshop fantasies.

Some of our favorites below. Happy Friday.

Via: MyModernMet