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Bike commuting means bike theft. You need a good lock. We used a hammer, bolt cutters, and a Dremel rotary saw on these (way beyond what most thieves would deploy) to see how they’d hold up.

1. Kryptonite New York Legend 1590

The 15-mm-thick hardened-steel links on this 10-pound beast slide uncooperatively when you try to violate them. Bust the plastic off the dead bolt and it reveals a scarier-looking steel shackle. The Dremel took a battery-killing 15 minutes to get through one link, and we still needed a second cut to slide the neighboring link out. Your bike is safe.

WIRED Cylinder has a drill-resistant protection system. $4,500 antitheft protection.

TIRED Literally heavier than some bikes.

$179, kryptonitelock.com

2. Blackburn San Quentin

Like any U-lock, this presented a tantalizingly long expanse to work with, but the hexagonal profile of the 18-mm-thick alloy steel makes it hard to find a good angle. The saw got through in about eight minutes, but we’d have needed a second cut to remove the thing: It locks on both sides. And by that point we didn’t have the juice to go full-power for another eight minutes.

WIRED Smooth locking mechanism. $4,000 antitheft guarantee.

TIRED Liner on inner surface only; not really paint-job friendly.

$90, blackburndesign.com

3. Trek U-Lock LS

Our bolt cutters and hammer got nowhere against Trek’s 13-mm hardened-steel shackle. But the big 11.5-inch-long U, which makes for hassle-free hitching, offers plenty of room for sawing. In four and a half minutes, we were clean through with the Dremel and sliding off the opposing piece; unlike the Blackburn, this locks on only one side.

WIRED Light and intuitive. Spare design makes it the best-looking of the group.

TIRED Antitheft protection runs to only $1,500.

$60, trekbikes.com

4. Kryptonite HardWire 1518

Cables are deterrents, not defenders. Even Kryptonite gives the HardWire a 5 on its 12-point security scale. The lock can withstand a hammer attack, but so what: A pair of 24-inch bolt cutters (far from the biggest available) got through the 15-mm braided-steel key cable in two minutes. The Dremel took 30 seconds.

WIRED Light, flexible, and portable. Six-foot length reaches both wheels.

TIRED For friendly areas only. It’s about as daunting as a licorice whip.

$53, kryptonitelock.com

5. OnGuard 5023L Rottweiler

While OnGuard makes some of the best chain locks, this armored cable is more practical in terms of weight, even at 7 feet long. It’s a 30-mm twisted-steel cable inside a length of steel vertebrae wrapped in a vinyl cover. But cut through the coating and you see the Achilles’ heel: gaps in the vertebrae that expose the cable. The Dremel took it out in less than three minutes.

WIRED Built-in light on one of the keys. Recessed ball lock resists crowbar attacks.

TIRED Price. Theft.

$135, onguardlock.com

6. Master Lock Street Cuff 8200D

The clever pivot point in the middle makes it hard to get any leverage with a tool. Unfortunately, the steel closures (which are small enough to limit your anchoring options) aren’t very thick. They resisted our saw for all of two minutes. Worse, it took only a couple of hard whacks with the hammer to bust open the locking mechanisms.

WIRED Light and compact. $3,500 antitheft guarantee. Might actually work as handcuffs.

TIRED Looks tougher than it is.

$62, masterlock.com

In the age of Pirate Bay, physical knockoffs seem almost quaint. But they’re still plentiful and plenty cheap. And they’re still inferior to the real thing.

1. Beats by Dr. Dre Tour Earbuds (NOT!)

While knockoffs of Monster’s Beats headphones are reportedly common in Hong Kong, it took craigslist and a street-corner meeting to snag a pair in New York. The packaging, smaller and shoddier than the genuine article, was a clear indication these were fake, but the phones themselves looked so much like the originals that we had to mark them to tell them apart. As long as we limited the music to low-bitrate MP3s and tinny pop (i.e., when sound doesn’t matter), the quality was tolerable though hollow. But on anything with rich mids or bass, the fakes overcooked it into a distorted mess.

WIRED Good gift for music … likers.

TIRED Less depth and nuance than Glenn Beck.

$45 (vs. $190)

2. Ray-Ban Original Wayfarer (NOT!)

Bogus designer shades are a staple in New York’s Chinatown, where we got these. The Wayfarer styles are generally more convincing than the Louis Vuitton and D&G knockoffs, but they’re still way janky. The brittle plastic feels dependable only if you’re comparing it with the flimsy hinges. They’re lighter than true Wayfarers, which actually made them more comfortable. But don’t leave them alone with your keys; the lenses might as well come prescratched.

WIRED Three for $12! Great for your Risky Business costume.

TIRED Performance optics? We couldn’t wear these retina-manglers for five minutes without getting a headache.

$4 (vs. $195)

3. Omega Seamaster Planet Ocean Chrono (NOT!)

We got the sidewalk vendor down $5 to $70, but that’s still $6,030 less than the asking price for the real thing. The fake retains the original’s self-winding internals and deep-sea-diver design. But the rubber strap is flimsy, there’s no date window, and the bezel and numbers were already faded from the sun. Only the time-adjustment knob works the same way as the one on the original; the helium-escape valve on the fake is purely cosmetic.

WIRED Survived 12 hours in a pot of water. (Authentic Seamaster is water resistant to 600 meters.)

TIRED No luminescent hands. Strap feels like it wouldn’t make it through a vigorous handshake.

$70 (vs. $6,100)

4. iPhone 4 (NOT!)

They must have spent dozens of minutes thinking up the name of the HiPhone 4, and about as much time building it. This one came from a Texas-based eBay seller and arrived direct from Beijing in a week. That was the only positive experience. The touchscreen is the least responsive we’ve experienced, and several of the app icons are purely decorative. It has two SIM card slots and boasts GSM compatibility, but we couldn’t get cell or data service despite trying multiple carriers.

WIRED What antenna-gate? It has a pullout for FM radio!

TIRED Reception indicator shows four full bars before you’ve even inserted a card. Sync with iTunes? Yeah, right.

$124 (vs. $699 for 32-GB, no-contract iPhone)

Smartphone designers generally follow the same credo as ballerinas and runway models — you can never be too thin.

But Dell has taken a different approach with its newest Windows 7 Phone, the Venue Pro. Even though it’s both agile and beautiful, the Pro is quite the fatty.

At 6.8 ounces, it’s heavier than the iPhone 4, Motorola Droid and even the HTC EVO. The primary culprit for this heft is the Venue Pro’s useful slide-out QWERTY keyboard.

A likely second is the Pro’s delightfully large and chromatically rich 4.1-inch, 800 x 480 AMOLED touchscreen. Everything else on the handset is efficient and understated — from the flush volume rocker to the succinct Back, Home and Search capacitive buttons.

Though the weight and dimensions temper some of that new gadget razzle-dazzle, it’s ultimately a worthwhile trade-off. In a sense, the Pro seems less like a slate-y smartphone and more like the feature-rich, productivity-minded pocket PCs of yesteryear.

Though this style of mobile productivity has fallen out of vogue (or at least changed shape), injecting bits of that DNA into an inexpensive and streamlined smartphone was smart on Dell’s part. Maybe it’s the minimalist chrome accents, but this form factor just feels more capable — if not a little self-serious.

Fortunately, this air of superiority is largely deserving. Though packing a strangely generic “1 GHz processor,” the Pro deftly whipped through Microsoft’s animation-heavy Windows Phone 7 OS with hardly any problems. Sifting and swiping through the busy menus was buttery smooth, and we hardly experienced any stutters or lag when it came to launching apps.

It’s also worth noting that the Pro’s large display is especially well-suited for these tasks. We’re not necessarily fans of the multiscreen asymmetry of Windows Phone 7’s menus, but we can’t deny that the Pro presents them well.

Overall, productivity and play were probably the biggest highlights for us. No mobile OS has truly mastered the elegant simplicity needed for mobile document editing, but the Pro brings some interesting things to the table. The slide-out QWERTY keyboard makes a solid bedfellow for Microsoft’s spartan Word app, and the Pro’s extra screen real estate makes tinkering with Excel bearable.

Gaming proved to be a delight, thanks to baked-in Xbox Live support and a decent helping of pro-level titles, courtesy of the service’s long established software library. A D-pad akin to the Motorola Droid and a better battery could’ve been ante-uppers for the overall gaming experience, but we’re happy enough with the Pro’s general competency to overlook it.

Despite all these high points, the Pro is decidedly mediocre as a basic phone. Though voice quality was good, the phone had a puzzling habit of jumping between T-Mobile’s 2G and 3G networks in the middle of tasks — or just dropping down to no signal at all.

Our experience using the speakerphone was similar: workable, with light distortion at very high volumes, but ultimately nothing to write home about. Paired with its lacking battery, it’s hard for us to endorse the Pro for power chatters or hardcore road warriors.

We’re the first to recognize that Dell has had a bumpy start when it comes to next-gen phones. But even with its shortcomings, the Pro’s marriage of business, pleasure and solid design makes it an attractive contender — especially at its sub-$200 price point.

WIRED One of the most well-appointed WinMo phones to date. Tough Gorilla Glass screen takes all kinds of abuse. Comfortable, idiot-simple QWERTY keypad. Snappy boot time.

TIRED Not exactly pocket-friendly. Craptastic camera performance in low-light settings. Hand-offs between apps and the web are still jarring. Slightly curved display is a smudge magnet. Trickle of WinMo apps limits potential.

See Also:

• Samsung’s Windows Phone 7 Packs Intuitive, Visual Punch
• What You Need to Know When Buying a Mobile Phone
• Sony’s Newest Android Phone Is a High Dose of Can-Do

When it comes to public-facing web analytics, basically, they all suck. We in the press are sometimes forced to use tools like Alexa and Compete for comparison’s sake, but using either for absolute numbers is extremely flawed and basically worthless. Naturally, those companies always disagree with us when we say such things. But a new bit of information may put that disagreement to the test.

The Compete chart for Compete.com is perfect. If the chart is to be believed, Compete is in a total tailspin. According to their data, they’ve dropped from about 750K unique visitors in January 2010 to roughly 250K in December 2010. The numbers for total visits are even worse (dropping from 3.25 million to about 750K). Both have been in decline every month since March. And neither shows signs of stopping.

For all I know, these numbers are correct. But all I have to go on is what Compete is telling me. And something tells me that Complete themselves will dispute them, just like every single other site on the planet does when you use Compete numbers in a blog post.

For what it’s worth, Alexa doesn’t seem to have enough data to rank themselves. How convenient. Or sad.

Update: And here are the numbers from comScore (a much, much more reliable service) showing a similar plunge in U.S. numbers (below). But as you can see the absolute numbers are far different.

[thanks David]

You’re probably getting tired of going back to Hallmark time and time again for the same staid cards you’ve been sending granny for years, and I’d be surprised if you’re not running out of occasions that demand a card bearing a cheesy one-liner or a sappy stanza of poetry. Thankfully, YC-backed Chirply, which launches this week, is breathing some new life into greeting cards — and notebooks, and wrapping paper — by creating a crowd-sourced community where designers can submit fresh ideas for paper goods. Users like you can then vote on your favorite designs, whereupon the ideas that receive the most votes are made champion and turned into real, live products and printed by the Chirply team.

But Chirply isn’t just copy-and-pasting ye olde crowdsourcing model onto the paper industry, it’s offering crowdsourcing with a financial incentive. The designers whose ideas collect the most votes are awarded a $300 prize, plus an additional 10 cents for each item that is printed with their design. Compared to Hallmark, which doesn’t accept unsolicited artwork for their greeting cards and pays their staff and commissioned designers a flat fee with no opportunity for royalties, Chirply is opening the playing field to budding designers out there looking to see their ideas brought to life. What’s more, according to the Chirply founders, as sales increase, so too will the size of the prizes, so they can finally put those studio art degrees to work! For money!

Though Chirply co-founders and brothers Gagan and Neel Palrecha have tech backgrounds — Gagan was an early employee at Loudcloud and an Engineer at Vontu — they told TechCrunch that they were booking bands in their basement beginning in high school and even founded a record label, so they know what it is like to support artists. Or in this case, designers.

Even so, the Palrechas know what they’re up against, telling us that Hallmark spends $60 million a year on design for their cards and companies like Threadless have made a buck or two on the crowdsourcing clothing space: “Sure, paper in general is not sexy, which is why a vast majority of crowdsourced companies go after t-shirts, but the greeting card industry is a $10 billion industry in the U.S.,” Gagan told TechCrunch. Though Chirply has some competition in the big picture from sites like Minted and Tiny Prints—Minted, for example, specializes in selling bulk greeting cards. Chirply, on the other hand, views the paper goods space as a green field. Those competitors that do exist have either found their niche, specializing in wrapping paper, or selling greeting cards in bulk.

Chirply also hopes to beat their competitors by offering competitive pricing, quality design, and heavier stock. Their cards will sell for $4 a piece and $30 for a set of 10; compare this to Papyrus, for example, which sells similar cards for $6 to $10. While Papyrus does offer a selection of cards for under $4, the cardstock is cheaper and the choices consist mostly of re-hashed Hallmark designs. Not to mention, if you’re green-sensitive, all of Chirply’s products will be post-consumer waste and green to the gill—and if you’re a design snob, you’ll be happy to know that they’re printing their cards on 120 lb stock, instead of the usual 80 lb. Now that’s beefy stock.

Chirply plans to eliminate high overhead costs by avoiding brick-and-mortar stores, conducting all business online through their website. Their paper products will be both tangible and digital, but don’t expect their stores to be anything but the Internet kind.

This week’s Chirply launch will open up the forum to design submissions, and submissions will be open to the general public (and on-going) from there on out. They will also be offering more exclusive products and contests, like one featuring designs by a certain to-be-named comic book company that will launch in the near future. Palrecha wouldn’t tell me which one, but I’m hoping I’ll be able to send my dad a Mr. Freeze card sometime soon.

Lastly, though you may spend most of your time punking your friends with Someecards, Chirply will allow you to vote on the best in-card slogans and have custom messages printed on your cards so that your boot-strapped startup can send those customized holiday cards to local VCs and angels. Just in time for Valentine’s Day!

It’s official. Palm’s new WebOS state is device is called the Palm Touchpad. It has a 9.7-inch screen, front 1.3-megapixel camera, and comes in 16 or 32GB models. It runs a 1.2GHz Snapdragon Processor processor and the screen resolution is 1024×768.

Designed by the “hundreds of talented programmers” on the WebOS team, the TouchPad is HP’s second slate of the new decade, the first being the HP Slate 500.

Read more…

Back in October of last year, we wrote about Sparrow, a beautiful new mail client for the Mac. But whereas most mail clients are now web-based, Sparrow decided it was time to focus on making a great native email experience once again. And today that gamble appears to be paying off. Sparrow 1.0 has just launched in the Mac App Store and it has immediately shot to the number one paid app in many countries around the world, including the U.S.

And that feat says a lot for Sparrow, considering the app is $9.99. But it’s absolutely worth it. As we wrote in our initial review, Sparrow is a Gmail-centric client that brings a Tweetie for Mac (now Twitter for Mac) look and feel to email. At the time, it was still in beta, and we noted that there were some performance issues. But most of those have now been smoothed out and a whole range of new features have been added, including full support for Gmail labels.

And you might also notice that they’ve dropped the “for Gmail” line from their logo. That’s because while the product remains Gmail-only for now, version 1.1 (due soon) will offer IMAP support for the other major mail services as well. So it will be able to be a full-featured mail client.

And there’s more good news for Sparrow today — they’ve raised funding. The service has raised a seed round of funding from Kima Ventures, the French venture capital firm that has backed Paper.li, Rapportive, and others. Sparrow co-founder Dom Leca declined to disclose the amount of the raise, but is very excited about the possibilities the money will allow for.

He should also be excited about the possibilities that the money they pull in from the Mac App Store should allow for. While there have already been some Mac App Store successes (Evernote jumps to mind), if a small indie app maker selling a $10 mail client can be a breakout hit, it will give a lot of other developers hope for the potential of the store.

You can find Sparrow in the Mac App Store here.

Hot on the heels of the Touchpad, we have Palm’s new WebOS phone, the HP Veer. It’s about the size of a credit card, but has all the functionality of a full webOS device. It’s got HSPA+, 8GB of storage inside, and a Snapdragon 7230 CPU running at 800MHz.

Read the full story over at MobileCrunch…

Many startups and companies have tackled realtime communications in a group setting, including Yammer, Google, Yahoo, and even Facebook. And now there’s one more jumping into the mix. Today, Y Combinator-backed Convore, the brainchild of Pownce founder Leah Culver, and Mochi Media developers Eric Florenzano and Eric Maguire, is launching a dead-simple group communication platform that is definitely worth a look.

Convore allows anyone to create a group (both public or private) and invite members to join via email. Invited users can click on the sent link (here’s a special TechCrunch group), and create a profile and join. You can also connect via Facebook and Twitter.

The interface is similar to a FriendFeed group, complete with realtime functionality. It’s part chat, part email thread, and part forum. Within a particular group you can create a topic, and start a conversation around that subject. The conversation is persistent so you can leave the site, then come back later and catch up on messages you missed.

For example, the current Y Combinator founders are using Convore within a private group. Usage of the platform surged during the night of the recent Yuri Milner and Ron Conway announcement regarding the Start Fund.

The incubator’s founders were first chatting on Convore and guessing what the announcement would be about. The conversation evolved to asking each other who had taken the deal and whether anyone wasn’t going to and why. The advantage of using Convore in these situations is that this type of chat-like communication and conversation is more suited for the startup’s interface as opposed to a mailing list or even a Yammer-like application.

Culver tells us that Convore is also designed to be a group discovery platform, where users can search for and find other topic groups that interest them. She adds that the founders took inspiration from FriendFeed groups and 37 Signals’ Campfire but wanted the application to be a mix between real-time chat and a forum that is easy to use.

If you take the time to use Convore, you’ll notice that updates are posted really, really fast. The platform is essentially updating in realtime. And what’s impressive is that the founders built all of this technology in-house.

Oh and in case you were wondering, Convore did accept the $150,000 from Milner and SV Angel.

A Richard Branson- and Khosla Ventures-backed biofuels and biochemicals maker, Gevo, raised $170 million, netting an estimated $95.7 million after expenses and underwriting discounts, in an initial public offering yesterday.

The company’s technology and chemical processes use yeast biocatalysts to make isobutanol from sugar. Gevo’s biofuels and biochemicals will offer an alternative to petroleum-derived butanol, and in some cases, other biofuels like ethanol.

Gevo’s isobutanol, according to the company website, could be used: as fuel that’s compatible with gas tanks, in jet biofuels for military and commercial use, blended fuels, and to manufacture industrial coatings, solvents, textiles, fibers and plastics.

In September 2010, Gevo acquired a Luverne, Minnesota ethanol production facility, and expects to begin commercial production of isobutanol there in the first half of 2012.

The company is now trading on NASDAQ as GEVO. Shares were up 11% at mid-day trading following the IPO.

SpeakerText, a scrappy startup that automates video transcriptions through a combination of clever algorithms and crowdsourcing, raised $600,000 from a group of angel investors led by Mitch Kapor. The other investors include Dave McClure’s 500 Startups, Crowdflower CEO Lukas Biewald, Roy Rodenstein, Chris Yeh, and ex-Googler Georges Harik

The challenge most publishers face with video is that it is still hard to find. SpeakerText addresses this issue by automatically transcribing every video in a SEO-friendly format so that videos turn into searchable transcripts. The videos are put through a speech-to-text engine to start, and then broken up into chunks which are sent to remote online transcribers who fix any errors.

The transcription is synced to the video so that if you click on any word or sentence, you get taken to that exact spot in the video. Viewers can also share quotes with links to those spots via email, Twitter, or Facebook. It works pretty well. We tried it for the videos at our last Disrupt conference. I’ve embedded one below with an interview of Kevin Rose.

It’s time. It’s been nearly 9 months since HP acquired Palm back in April of last year, and they’re finally ready to show what they’ve been working on behind the scenes ever since.

We’re live in San Francisco, bringing back all the up-to-the-second details as they happen. Join us for our liveblog after the jump.
Read the liveblog at MobileCrunch >>

It’s official: HP/Palm is releasing a new tablet called the Touchpad. Precentral has some hot news about this new 10-inch Palm slate. It is a touchscreen device running WebOS. It weighs 1.5 pounds and 13mm thick and has a front webcam as well as up to 64GB of storage.

Robert Scoble, of all people, also leaked something about the “littlest phone” he’s ever seen, a new Palm Phone that is as big as a pebble.

Read more…

Twitter’s greatest strength is also often its greatest weakness: it’s a simple, constantly-updating stream. This keeps information fresh and flowing, but it also means that if you step away for a few hours (or even a few days — crazy, I know), you’re likely to miss a lot. And it means that scanning your Twitter stream can sometimes be tedious. A new product launching from my6sense today aims to alleviate both those issues.

The my6sense Chrome browser extension takes your tweet stream and completely rearranges it. If that thought scares you, fear not, this is done in a new tab area that the extension creates on Twitter.com. This area holds a stream sorted by tweets that are likely to be most relevant to you. These tweets can be hours (or even days) old, or they may be brand new. It all depends on the relevancy.

So how does my6sense determine this relevancy? A number of ways. The links you click on, the tweets your favorite, the tweets you retweet, the author of the tweets, the keywords in those tweets, etc. It all is monitored by this extension and then used to serve tweets back to you. And it works well. Once the extension got a sense for what I was interested in, pretty much my entire stream became Apple news. Perfect.

The concept is an extension of the mobile applications that my6sense makes for the iOS and Android platforms. Those take into account a few different social signals (Twitter, Facebook, Google Buzz, etc), and gives you a stream of information you’re likely to care about. And that works because when you’re on the go, you may not have time to read through all of your social streams. Again, it’s the same sort of idea here, but parsing only the ever-flowing Twitter data.

The idea is a good one. A lot of users would value a way to surface tweets based on relevancy rather than simply time. There have been whispers of Twitter themselves working on similar concept as well, but they would likely focus on user relevancy, rather than tweet relevancy. And the truth is that my6sense hopes that Twitter.com is just another stop for their technology.

The Israel-based startup hopes to spread their attention graph across the web to all kinds of different sites. VP of Marketing, Louis Gray, cites Quora as on particular treasure trove of data they’d love to get their hands on.

You can find the Chrome extension here, and the plan is to release a Firefox extension shortly as well to bring the same functionality to a larger segment of the web.

We’ve covered TechCrunch 50 company Jibe (formerly LocalBacon), which is a next-generation job board that leverages Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter to help job seekers find the best positions in the job market.

Jibe has signed up 25 percent of the Fortune 50 as clients and is announcing that the site has grown 454 percent since the start of 2011, surpassing more than one million monthly job views. In January alone, more than 540,000 job seekers visited JIBE to apply for jobs at Amazon, Bank of America, Intel, AT&T and Merck.

On Jibe, job seekers sign in with Facebook Connect. The platform will then pull in their work and education history from their Facebook profile and from LinkedIn to pre-populate their Jibe profile. Then for every job posting, they can see if they are connected to anyone at that company. Jibe allows members to message those people directly to ask for a recommendation or job advice. Jibe uses a credit system that allows applicants to apply for jobs. Applicants can earn credits by linking their Jibe account to their various social networks, broadcasting their job search, sending private messages through the system, or updating their work history profile.

On the enterprise side, Jibe allows companies to add a social layer to the evaluation and vetting process. And Jibe, which has raised $875,000 in seed funding, says that large companies like Amazon, MTV and HP are adopting Jibe because it can be easily integrated into existing recruiting software.

Job boards are dying as social networks like LinkedIn and Facebook (i.e. BranchOut) take over professional networking and job search. But Jibe actually combines a job seeker’s LinkedIn and Facebook social graphs, which helps the site stand out from competitors.