Category: Tech news

We told you this was coming: Swype has just made it possible for any Android handset owner to download their innovative touch-screen enabled text-input application straight from the website. Which means a whole lot of people can henceforth start challenging that Guinness World Record for speedy textin’.

Up until today, Swype came pre-installed on only a fraction of available Android phones (including the all new Motorola Droid X) due to its licensing business model, although the company did open up to 25,000 eager beta testers a couple of months ago – most of whom seem to have completely fallen in love with it.

Well, anyone can download it now, but only for a limited time (a couple of days) and with a somewhat limited feature set. Important: it won’t work if you have a phone that came pre-installed with Swype and support will be via Swype’s forums only.

Product: Lumix G10

Manufacturer: Panasonic

Wired Rating: 7

The Micro-Four Thirds genre is growing up.

No longer the pricey young upstart, the format is expanding its reach to the budget-conscious masses. Case in point: Panasonic’s Lumix G10.

The G10 is meant for a shooter who wants to escape from the point-and-shoot world and play with interchangeable lenses, but who doesn’t want a bulky, prism-bound DSLR. Built around the larger 12-megapixel Micro-Four Thirds sensor, it delivers a bump in image quality and creative control.

The G10 looks and feels like a mini-SLR. Its pleasingly tactile, rubberized body is easy to hold and shoot with just one hand, because all the key controls (except the pop-up flash release) are within the reach of the right thumb and forefinger.

Panasonic’s two marquee features, Mega Optical Image Stabilization (Mega OIS) and Intelligent Auto (iA), are prominent parts of the G10. Mega OIS is built into the Lumix lenses like the 14mm-to-42mm, f/3.5-to-f/5.6 we used in our tests with the G10. The three modes — constant, shutter-activated and panning — do an excellent job of compensating for low-light and longer-shutter-speed shooting.

Intelligent Auto is Panasonic/s full-auto mode, and the G10 gives it a dedicated button next to the mode dial. When you’re too flustered to focus, just press the red iA button and fire away.

Consistent with its forbears, the G10’s unaltered stills are balanced and well-exposed with even tones and good saturation. Lower ISO enlargements were quite sharp and satisfying.

But like most of its peers in this price range, the G10’s high-ISO performance is iffy. Larger prints of images shot above ISO 800 get noisy and are noticeably fringed.

If there’s any situation where the G10 really struggles it’s definitely low-light focusing. It’s unrealistic to expect this camera to do the work of a faster-focusing, higher-frame-rate DSLR, but the shortcoming is still disappointing.

On the moving-image side, high-definition video tops out at 1280 x 720 at 30 fps, and the performance was good although not great.

For us, Panasonic’s biggest blunder with the G10 is the electronic viewfinder. The tiny, low-resolution peeper is grainy and frustratingly superfluous.

That said, the G10 ably proves itself in the field like its Lumix G brethren. Apart from a couple of obvious shortcomings, it should satisfy the budget buyer with the burning desire to make better pictures.

WIRED Looks and feels like a mini-SLR. Lightweight and easy to use with one hand. Comfy tactile finish and good ergonomics. A credible, beginner, interchangeable-lens camera. Dedicated iA button for no-brainer shooting.

TIRED Pointless electronic viewfinder. Decidedly average auto-focusing in low-light conditions.

AT&T has had a rough day. First there was the massive system failure during the iPhone 4 pre-orders. Then it was revealed that private customer data may have been exposed during the fiasco. So maybe we should give them a break, right? Nah.

As you may have heard, TechCrunch recently moved into a new office. It’s a great spot in San Francisco; we love it. That said, it happens to reside on planet Earth which basically assures that we’ll have no reliable AT&T coverage. Sure enough, we don’t. I mean absolutely none — can’t place calls, don’t receive them. As an old pro in the SoMa area of San Francisco, I’m used to this. But some of my coworkers aren’t and would prefer to use their phones as actual phones from time to time. So we needed a solution.

That solution, everyone has been telling us, is the AT&T 3G MicroCell (basically a mini cell tower that you put inside your office). I was against getting one because I’m still absolutely enraged that AT&T expects its customers with shitty service to pay for this thing — and $150, no less! We pay AT&T $100 (or more) a month for their service that doesn’t work and they want to charge us more to fix it. Brilliant.

But whatever, I’m a team player. I’ll suck it up and swallow my pride so my coworkers can make calls. So we tried to buy one today. Guess what? AT&T won’t sell it to us.

That’s right, not only does AT&T service not work in our office, but they won’t sell us their proposed solution. Why? Apparently it needs to be attached to an AT&T phone with a billing address that matches our office address. I would assume this has something to do with AT&T wanting to know where you’re using this thing (it also has GPS that you must activate) — because heaven forbid we bestow actual AT&T coverage to somewhere besides our office. It may also have something to do with emergency 911 rules — but that’s not what they told us, and I can’t find that anywhere on the site.

AT&T: Will you please give us your damn rip-off fix-it box? Sorry, did I say “give us”? Silly me. I meant: Will you please sell us your damn rip-off fix-it box? We promise not to take the thing on a cross-country tour giving actual AT&T coverage to those already paying for it. We just want to make some damn calls. In our office. It’s actually kind of important for what we do.

Well that didn’t take long. Not even 24 hours after the iPhone 4 became available online for pre-order, it is completely sold out. Earlier today, reports had AT&T being out of the device. Now the Apple Online Store is out of them too. They’ll still let you pre-order one, but you won’t be getting it on June 24 (launch day). Instead, Apple is saying the next batch of phones will ship by July 2.

The fact that Apple blew through their entire first run of iPhone 4s in something like 20 hours is impressive any way you slice it. But it also begs the question: how fast would the device have sold out if the pre-order system actually worked today? I don’t think it’s a stretch to think the iPhone might have been gone twice as fast.

As we covered last night, when the iPhone 4 first went up for pre-order on Apple’s website, there were massive failures in the system that prevented people from completing their orders. Those failures carried into this morning and even this afternoon and people still were having difficulty ordering the phone. Some were able to order it from AT&T’s site, others weren’t. Some were able to order from the new iPhone Apple Store app, others weren’t.

The system seems to be running smoothly now, but again, if you place your order on Apple’s site, it will state that you phone will ship after launch. The July 2 date currently listed is just 8 days after the current June 24 launch — but that’s also the ship date, so it could arrive a few days after that.

Right now, if you’re hoping for an iPhone 4 before July, your best bet may be to hope Apple releases the elusive white iPhone 4 (which didn’t go up for pre-sale last night) into the wild before then. Or hope that Apple saved a few to sell in stores to those that didn’t pre-order.

4G is in the air! Or, at least for T-Mobile, 4G speeds are in the air. While T-Mobile isn’t technically allowed to pitch their HSPA+ network as 4G, its speeds can exceed that of the networks that some carriers (read: Sprint) have been toting as 4G for the last few months.

This morning, T-Mobile is officially debuting their HSPA+ network in 15 new cities, from Los Angeles, CA to New Orleans, LA.

Read the rest at MobileCrunch >>

So now that we have this big, amazing office in San Francisco, directly across from the Caltrain station (read: commuter friendly) and a stone’s throw away from AT&T Park (go SF Giants), we need to fill it with more great people. We’re hiring. Lots.

Join us and our modest goal of world domination. We love what we do. You can too.

Lots of other jobs around the world are listed on CrunchBoard.

Here are the top roles we’re currently recruiting for TechCrunch:

• Product Lead
• Community Manager
• Rails/PHP Hacker
• Conferences & Events Director
• Conference Program Chair
• Graphic Designer
• News Room Interns
• Green Tech Intern
• CrunchBase Summer Interns

On the heels of Zynga’s $150 million investment from Japanese media firm Softbank Capital, Japanese gaming company DeNA has announced a $27.5 million fund to make investments in the social gaming community. DeNA holds an 83.3 percent stake in the new fund, which is called Incubate Fund No. 1 Limited Partnership. Other investors include a number of private Japan-based investors.

DeNA says the main objective of the fund is to find and invest in companies that merge social media with game development. The fund will seek to invest in ventures that are at the seed level or higher stages. DeNA will also invest in game developers that can be included in their mobile gaming platform, Mobage-Town. A few months ago, DeNA also announced a strategic partnership with Yahoo Japan with plans to launch a PC-based social gaming platform, called Yahoo Mobage, later this year.

While the new vehicle will surely make investments in Japan, the fund could be a way for DeNA to establish more of a presence in the U.S. gaming market as well. The company owns an 20 percent equity stake in gaming company Aurora Feint and is getting serious about expanding into the U.S. DeNA plans to launch a social gaming platform in a number of English-speaking countries, and develop games for Facebook and other social networks. And DeNa just launched a global mini-gaming social network for the iPhone.

DeNA is seeing record revenue and impressive profits from its games in Japan, so a global expansion could make the company more of a global gaming giant.

It’s officially on. That is the motion control wars and, don’t hate, but Nintendo isn’t one of the combatants. Nope, this war is clearly between Microsoft and Sony. It’s the Kinect vs the Move. Full body tracking vs 1-1 controller tracking. This is going to turn out great for you, me, and both Sony and Microsoft.

As you may have noticed, Twitter had a rough night last night. It was completely down, mostly down, or just extremely buggy for several hours. And in fact, this entire month has been Twitter’s worst month in nearly a year, Twitter’s head of communications, Sean Garrett, writes on the Twitter blog today. Why is that? It’s a combination of factors, according to Garrett.

First of all, as Twitter noted a few days ago, their internal network needs to be overhauled pronto — and they’re working on that. The problem is that they’re also seeing record usage numbers — in part thanks to the world’s fascination with the World Cup tournament currently going on in South Africa.

“We were well aware of the likely impact of the World Cup. What we didn’t anticipate was some of the complexities that have been inherent in fixing and optimizing our systems before and during the event,” Garrett writes.

Garrett cautions that the next two weeks could be bumpy as well — more periods of total downtime are expected. He says Twitter will not do the work that will likely cause downtime during the World Cup matches themselves.

He also links to the Pingdom report showing Twitter’s downtime over the past several months. As you can see, even with the big outages, they’re at 98.48% uptime. That said, that is well over of 5 hours of downtime for a service that many people rely on for various forms of communication in this day and age. For comparison’s sake, in February 2010, Twitter only had 50 total minutes of downtime — and in November 2009, it was only 22 minutes. But let’s not forget the Summer of 2008, when Twitter was literally down for just about a day’s worth of time some months.

Man, some of those posts were fun.

[photo: flickr/nathanf]

Editor’s note: This guest post is written by Kevin Mahaffey, CTO of Lookout Mobile Security.

The iPad security breach last week potentially exposed the emails of 114,000 AT&T customers, but that is not the only information that could have been discovered by clever hackers. iPad owners will be surprised to know that the data breach revealed far more personal and sensitive information than is generally known. Reports initially said only email addresses and ”ICC-ID numbers,” a seemingly unimportant identifier, were leaked. But those ICC-ID numbers reveal a lot about users, their identity and their location.

In fact, just a little fifth-grade math will allow you to turn the seemingly innocuous ICC-ID number into the more sensitive and generally protected “IMSI”—International Mobile Subscriber Identity. (You basically rearrange some digits). This number is unique to each SIM card and can be used to determine:

• a person’s approximate location—you could track them to see where they are in real-time
• a person’s associated phone number
• and, in some cases, a person’s physical address.

Security researcher Chris Paget goes into more technical detail on the security hole and how it can expose the personal information indicated above. Once you have the IMSI, you can get the phone number, which potentially exposes more data such as a subscriber’s address and physical location. Suffice it to say that this vulnerability reveals a far bigger security risk and presents a new challenge that carriers and device makers should address right away. Carriers need to clearly separate what is public and what is private. Public identifiers like ICC-ID should not allow someone to retrieve private information.

Cyber criminals or hackers would only need to do the same mathematical conversion that we are able to do to expose this highly personal information.

Last night, as we waited to pre-order the new iPhone 4, Apple had a surprise for us: a new Mac mini. Never having owned a Mac mini, normally this wouldn’t get me excited. But this one is different. This time, Apple decided to include a HDMI port and is highlighting the fact that you can easily hook it up to your HD television. In other words, it’s like an Apple TV on steroids. And it looks like Apple knows it.

If you go to the Apple Store website right now, you’ll notice that every big piece of Apple hardware is highlighted except one: Apple TV. If you’re looking for it, you’ll either have to do a search, or you’ll want to look way over in the lower left hand corner under “For iPod.” Yes, Apple is now classifying the device they’ve famously belittled as a “hobby” for so long as an iPod accessory. Ouch.

Apple’s decision to add a HDMI output and highlight the TV-hookup capabilities of the new Mac mini is made more interesting by the recent rumors that they’re working on a new, cheaper cloud-based version of the Apple TV. It’s not clear when such a product would be ready to go, but you can bet that Apple is going to use the next few months to see how the Mac mini sells as a living-room compatible device.

And how it sells could make a significant impact on Apple’s future forays into the living room. At $699 (for the cheapest model), the Mac mini is well beyond a price point that most people would be willing to pay for a set top box. Hell, most people didn’t seem willing to pay the $229 that the Apple TV sells for. Earlier this month, Apple CEO Steve Jobs was quoted as saying, “no one is willing to buy a set top box,” when explaining the Apple TV’s lack of adoption. What he really means by that is that no one is willing to buy a set top box at the high hardware margins that Apple is accustomed to. But with the Mac mini + HDMI, they’re offering much more than they ever have before — so this may well be a bit of a test for Apple.

The rumors about the new Apple TV have the price at $99. That seems like a decidedly un-Apple price for such a piece of hardware. But now that they’re seeing main rivals Google and Microsoft entering the living room in a very real way, they may feel they have no other option. I still bet that eventually Apple forgoes the set top box route altogether and makes an actual television; a device which people are used to spending much more money on. And a device which (thanks largely to the cable companies) has an awful user experience.

I also think Apple may be pleasantly surprised by the number of people who buy a Mac mini for their high-end home entertainment centers thanks to the HDMI addition (people have actually been doing this for a while, but had to use converters — it was more of a pain). Had they included a Blu-ray player in the mix, the thing might have done even better. But Apple has made its position clear: physical media storage formats are dying — it’s iTunes or bust for content.

And seemingly for now in the living room, it’s Mac mini or bust for Apple.

[thanks Ajai]

I just heard from Swype, the creators of an amazing touchscreen mobile application that allows text entry way faster than via normal virtual keyboards. They’ll be making the Android version of the their application available to anyone who wants it tomorrow.

Don’t believe the hype? Check out this article about a Swype user blowing out the Guinness World Record for texting speed. Or just watch some of the videos below, including a never before released interview I recently did with Swype CEO Mike McSherry.

Until now you’ve had to buy a device that had Swype pre-installed to use it (there are six devices now, lots more coming soon and 50 by end of year). Or one of the lucky 25,000 people who grabbed a timed beta of the Android app late last year. But tomorrow you’ll be able to visit the Swype website and download the Android application directly.

You’ll be able to download the app tomorrow morning at http://beta.swype.com/. We’ll update this post and let you know as soon as it goes live.

Infectious ran a contest for cool, community-designed graphics and came up with a set of iPad skins the I actually like. My fave? Probably the Gameboy model, shown above, or the pink Vader model that proves your manliness without being too overbearing.

Read more…

>>Groupon Clone Script<<

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In the last year, group-deal sites like Groupon and LivingSocial have surged to success.  Now that it’s clear that this is a market that isn’t going away any time soon, we’re starting to see businesses being built around these deal sites. Today sees the launch of a new startup that’s doing just that: it’s called CoupRecoup, and it’s looking to become a sort of secondary market for deal sites, allowing users to sell off the coupons they’ve purchased but don’t think they’ll get around to using.

The appeal of the site is obvious: Groupon and similar sites offer very tempting deals that people are likely to buy impulsively. Thing is, they also expire — CoupRecoup gives them a way to make back at least some of their money. To get started, you enter the original URL of the deal you’re selling, your asking price, and your email address (you don’t need to make an account). The site will let you sell coupons purchased from any site, and for the bigger sites, like Groupon and LivingSocial, it will automatically scrape information that’s relevant to the coupon you’ve posted (data like its original price and description). CoupRecoup doesn’t charge anything for this — in the future it may consider adding transaction or listing fees. Update:: It’s worth pointing out that Groupon actually lets you get a refund on its coupons, no questions asked, though other deal sites may have less liberal return policies.

CoupRecoup is a good idea in the sense that Groupon and similar discount sites are quickly catching on. But it also faces a lot of hurdles. First, there’s the issue of whether or not these coupon services will actually allow users to resell their coupons. Founder Aren Sandersen says that at this point the Terms of Service of these deal sites tend to be vague, and that it isn’t even clear if they can legally prohibit people from reselling their coupons in the first place.

There’s also the issue of actually exchanging these coupons. Like Craigslist, CoupRecoup doesn’t handle transactions — once you’re paired with someone selling a coupon you want, you figure out how you want to exchange the money and the coupon. Assuming you trust the person you’re interacting with that’s easy enough (you can Email or fax a coupon, and send money via PayPal, for example). But with coupons there may be a greater risk for fraud than you’d have with physical goods, because it’s so easy to duplicate or simply not forward your coupon after receiving the money. Sandersen says that the startup will be keeping an eye on this and may implement a system to help facilitate transactions in the future. In the shorter term, the site may add an eBay-like reputation system.

I suspect CoupRecoup will be quite controversial (assuming it can gain traction). In particular, I’m wondering how the vendors offering these deals in the first place will respond — they may be happy that they’re drawing new customers, but they may have also factored in the fact that some people wouldn’t redeem their coupons when they originally priced them; CoupRecoup could impact the redemption rate.  It’s also possible that prices on CoupRecoup will actually be higher than what they originally sold for on Groupon, as dealhunters buy up all the good deals and attempt to sell them at a profit.

When Google TV was announced at Google I/O there was a lot of excitement surrounding it. Unfortunately, there were also a lot of questions. And the glitchy demo they did on stage certainly didn’t help matters. Today, Google has released a simple two and a half minute video to explain the service and show exactly how it works.

This video makes the value proposition of Google TV much more clear. They probably should have just shown this at I/O. It’s really about having the Internet (and Android apps) in your living room alongside your existing television set-up. (Though unstated, it’s also obviously about ad-reach.) This differentiates it from competitors like Apple TV and Xbox 360 (though they all will battle for the living room). Watch the video below.