Blancer.com Tutorials and projects

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.

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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.

When you follow someone on social investing site Covestor, you get to see all of their real trades. But now, for some superstar investors on Covestor, following them can also have financial implications. Earlier today, Covestor merged its main social investing site with Covestor Investment Management (cv.im), a separate service it launched nearly a year ago to allow individual investors to mimic the trades of professional and successful individual investors with a proven track record. Now, $100 million worth of executed tracked trades later, Covestor is folding the investment management service into its main site.

In fact, the entire site has been revamped. There is better search and more detailed investor profile pages. When you rank investment returns, you can toggle between the top tracked models which you can track with your own portfolio, and the top personal track records across the entire Covestor community.

By combining the two communities together, it will now be easier to market the tracked portfolio service and to promote the top Covestor investors into investment advisory roles. Currently, there are 70 portfolios which you can track with your own portfolio. The way this works is that you follow a portfolio, and every time that investor makes a trade, the information is relayed to your brokerage account where it is mimicked. Technically, the stock pickers aren’t managing your money. They are simply trading for their own account and selling you the trading data, which Covestor then helps you replicate in your account within two minutes of each trade. You really are following these investors in every sense of the word.

Competing social investing sites KaChing also lets you tie your brokerage account to the portfolios of the best stock pickers on its site. But unlike KaChing, all the data on Covestor is tied to real portfolios. CEO Perry Blacher thinks this makes a big difference. “There is nothing more credible than knowing this guy has skin in the game and he’s in it with me,” says Blacher. (Update: Apparently, KaChing now agrees. It also requires its professional investment managers to invest real money, which wasn’t the original plan). Ultimately, the site which attracts the best investors, and thus delivers the best returns, will win.

Covestor selects which investors can sell their data to users and pays a fee for each subscriber, which can range from $50 to $1000 a year—the investors set the price. Professional portfolio managers are also attracted to the service because it is a way to cut out some of the middlemen like Merrill Lynch and give them direct retail distribution. So a portfolio manager who usually requires a $250,000 or $1 million minimum investment, can set up an automated fund on Covestor to mirror their existing trades and reach smaller investors who only have $5,000 or $10,000 to invest.

“This is an open platform for people to compete and the best will rise to the top,” says CEO Perry Blacher. Covestor members build their reputations through their real-world investment savvy. They can even Tweet out each verified trade.

To qualify as an investment manager, however, there are three criteria. You must share your real trades, you must make available at least a year’s worth of audited trading history, and comply with Covestor’s trading rules such as staying away from illiquid stocks.

In order to follow along with a model portfolio, for now you have to open up an account with Covestor’s partner Interactive Brokers. But Blacher says more broker partnerships are on the way. “The brokers love this,” he says, “because we are busy generating trades for them.” With Interactive Brokers, each trade is only $1, which makes following an active trader more palatable for an individual investor paying for each trade.

Online privacy is a hot topic at the moment, especially when it comes to the browser and social networks. Online privacy company Abine is launching today to provide consumers with comprehensive tools to control and protect their personal information online. Abine has also acquired Firefox privacy add-on T.A.C.O., which is short for “Targeted Advertising Cookie Opt-out.” TACO allows any Internet user to opt-out from personally targeted advertising.

TACO will become part of Abine’s suite of privacy tools. The new version of the add-on has been upgraded both to allows you to opt-out of even more ad-networks and to block hundreds of other Web tracking technologies used by companies (including Google, AOL, Yahoo!, Facebook, and Microsoft), to collect, store and sell extremely personal information about individuals’ Internet activity. TACO 3.0 also added support for Internet Explorer.

Abine’s other privacy apps in its suite include a secure log-in app, a plug-in to protect your email and phone number, and an automatic form filling app. Privacy is a huge consumer concern at the moment, so Abine’s launch and acquisition of TACO is timely.

I love simple apps that do one thing and do it well. That is the definition of Treehouse, a new iPhone app made by the Y Combinator startup Fliggo. So what is Treehouse? It’s right there in the title: “Share Moments With Friends.”

Treehouse may be the most simple app I’ve seen yet to allow you to share photos (and videos) from your iPhone with your friends. You start up the app, take (or load) a picture/video, and upload it. From there, it will be placed into your friends’ Treehouse timelines where they can comment on it and “like” it. Each photo/video is also tagged with the location where it was taken.

Again, yes, it’s very basic, but it’s also very well done and fast. Sure, you could do this on Facebook, but your stream there likely has hundreds of other things going on — this is tailor-made for visual sharing and interacting. Treehouse also has a nice notification system to let you know what activity you’ve missed when you open the app — and yes, you can be notified through Push Notifications.

It strikes me that this kind of app is the perfect thing to share humorous photos with friends — such as Bros Icing Bros photos. If you have no idea what that is — well, just go here.

Treehouse reminds me of Radar, the photo-sharing service from Tiny Pictures (which was acquired by Shutterly in September of last year). But it’s even simpler and for now, iPhone-only. The plan is to eventually extend to the other mobile platforms though. Just as with Radar, the question will be how you make money with this kind of service. For now, the hope is just to build a strong user-base, obviously.

If you’ve heard of Fliggo before it’s likely because you’ll been following the story of Twitvid.io, which then became Vidly. Founder Chrys Bader had been trying to perfect the art of sharing video over Twitter (using things like HD video and even Chamillionaire), but while developing a Vidly iPhone app, he realized that it was time to branch outside of being Twitter-centric — probably a smart move given the recent upheaval in the third-party developer community. So he went back to his initial angel investors, got some more money, and built Treehouse.

Bader isn’t disclosing new new amount of money raised, but has confirmed that it’s an extension of their initial seed round from August.

You can find Treehouse here in the App Store. It’s a free download.

June 20th. That’s when AT&T gets the HTC Aria — a phone which, at least in my mind, is AT&T’s first to be powered by Android. What’s that you say? The Motorola Backflip was the first Android phone on AT&T? Sorry, I guess my mind has a tendency to block out tragic events.

With past sins forgiven, I was pretty anxious to check out AT&T’s second venture into Android territory. Our friends from HTC just so happened to be making a trip through my part of town. One quick jaunt over to their hotel lobby later, and I walked away with an Aria in tow. Expect a full review within a few days — but in the mean time, pop behind the jump for my first impressions.

Read the rest at MobileCrunch >>

There’s not a lot to say about Nintendo’s new handheld, unfortunately: our demos are limited to one minute, the lighting is bad, and of course the 3D effect doesn’t translate to pictures or video. But here’s how it felt to me.

The 3D effect doesn’t feel to me to be one of things popping out of the screen, but of depth behind the screen. Things certainly seemed to protrude a bit depending on how you looked and what the scene was, but by and large it felt like the 3D screen was a sort of window into a room, inside which everything was 3D. The 3D effect certainly is real, though.

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