BANGALORE, INDIA -- It’s almost as if Russian cell phone carrier MTS has bought the naming rights to Bangalore. I half expected my immigration stamp to read “BANGALORE! ™ BROUGHT TO YOU BY MTS.” The carrier recently launched service in the uber-competitive Indian telecom market and has erected billboards every twenty feet or so. I have never seen so much advertising by one company in one space. They all sport an agro looking dude with his face twisted in some rebel-yell while he does inscrutable things with robots and mechanical arms holding different tech gadgets.Why have these ads made such an impression on me? Because I’ve spent a week sitting in stopped Bangalore traffic looking at them. Ironically one keeps boasting: CONGESTION-FREE MOBILE NETWORK. Sitting still and listening to the honking of cars, mopeds, bikes and rickshaws all around me, it’s an easy guess that, if true, MTS could be the only thing congestion-free in India.Now that India has one of the world’s best mobile infrastructures, it needs a decent road infrastructure. And a smart entrepreneur needs to come up with a modern fix.
First of all, yes, everyone on Twitter now should have access to the new Retweet functionality. Currently, only Twitter.com and a handful of clients support the new mechanism. But did you know that you can also trigger the new Retweets via SMS?As the Twitter mobile account noted earlier tonight, if you simply send "RT USERNAME" to 40404 (at least in the U.S.) it will automatically retweet the last tweet of whatever username you entered has sent. And yes, it will be a new-style Retweet.
Yammer, a twitter-like service for closed groups, continues to add new features that I wish Twitter would implement as well. In the last day or so they added a simple notification for unread messages that syncs across the many ways users can access the service (mobile, AIR, browser). The notification is available through the Yammer API as well.Twitter needs something like this. Various Twitter clients built by third party services try to do it on their own, but without the feature at the API level it only works if you access Twitter just from that client.Yammer has consistently pushed new and useful features quickly to users. If you don't use Yammer at your business, you should. We've been fans of the service since launching at TechCrunch50 in 2008. It has replaced email for most of our in-office communication. And the service is very reliable, other than the occasional service outage while their CEO David Sacks is off playing poker in Vegas.The company is also getting more serious about the Android platform. Until recently the only Yammer app for Android was created by Nullwire. Yammer acquired the product from Nullwire and will now develop it in-house. You can download it here.
Okay, we've uncovered Engadget's big secret: Surprise, redesign! (No, sadly, it's not a golden heffer or starchild or iPhone-killer.)The new look is quite magazine-like. Look for it to go live shortly.
This message currently graces every page on Engadget. Not sure what they're up to, but it's promised to be "awesome awesome stuff," editor-in-chief Joshua Topolsky tweets.In fact, beyond the in your face teaser promising that, "What's next is coming now. Stay close.", Topolsky has been tweeting teasers all night. So Techmeme founder Gabe Rivera decided to respond (below):
The common portable media player has a tough existence. It's expected to handle many tasks well, while being rugged enough to withstand daily (ab)use. It's expected to look nice, it's expected to provide more-than-decent battery life, and it's expected to provide a simple enough interface that it can be operated almost exclusively while on the go. If the world's greatest mom were a consumer electronics device, she'd be a portable media player.And while there's no shortage of portable media players in existence, here's a quick list of some worthy gift options (in no particular order).
Remember the flurry of new features Bing rolled out last week? Bing announced Wolfram Alpha results for nutrition searches, more in-depth weather results, enhanced hover previews, better maps, and turned MSN Video into Bing Videos. Well, it turns out it is also quietly launched another feature which highlights the latest posts from news sites.If you do a search for "TechCrunch" or "New York Times," for instance, underneath the summary information and deep links there are the three latest headlines under "Latest posts."
There are a host of directories of iPhone apps on the web as well as applications that make personalized recommendations of apps, such as Chorus, that might catch your fancy. Mplayit enters this space hoping to combine these two ambitions into one, comprehensive Facebook app. Mplayit's directory of iPhone and mobile apps includes all 100,000 plus iPhone apps and a smattering of other mobile app as well. Each app has a dedicated page where Mplayit will post videos of the app (created either by the developer or pulled from YouTube), a detailed description of the app and reviews. You can also click to buy the app from Apple's App Store (from which Mplayit receives a affiliate fee).
SharedDoc is an online document platform that lets anyone upload a document online and then share the file to a community, so they can add comments. We have 500 free invites for TechCrunch readers here. Once you upload a Word or Google Docs document to SharedDoc's platform, you can send email invites to a friends or colleagues to comment on the document. In order to comment, a user needs to set up an ID. Users can then highlight portions of the the document where they'd like to leave a comment and post their input.
Every few weeks Internet dating site OkCupid uses the power of anonymized data to share a few truths about the online dating scene and human nature in general. To be sure, these reports are often highly controversial and aren't going to be showing up in scientific literature any time soon, but they're generally interesting (and often amusing) reads. The latest report to come out addresses 'Your Looks And Your Inbox', charting the number of messages users receive in relation to how attractive other members rate them.Some of the conclusions aren't surprising. The "most attractive" women receive five times as many messages as the average female does, with 2/3 of all male messages going to the top 1/3 of women. And women tend to favor the most attractive men, though the ratio is less extreme. But there are a few interesting phenomena.
This story just screams amateur hour, although I can't figure out exactly who's the amateur. Maybe everyone. A CEO says too much in an interview and gets fired. Lawyers go after the blogger to get content removed. And a partner is pissed off. Not bad for a day's work.It involves TweetPhoto, a service we've been writing about since last April. The company has had their rite-of-passage fight with Apple over an iPhone app, and they've done a deal with Kodak that got them some additional press. But until now, no serious drama.TweetPhoto (now former) CEO Dan Caulfield did a 23 minute podcast interview with Frank Peters earlier this month. He apparently said too much in the interview, disclosing confidential information about partnerships. He was fired by the company for the transgression. That's enough drama to make me want to listen to the podcast. But it gets better. The company also had its lawyers fire off a letter from its law firm to Frank Peters, demanding that he remove the podcast.Just to be clear, a company is threatening legal action against a blogger for posting an on the record sound recording of the company's CEO.
For the last 20 years I've been playing racing games here and there, and when they started becoming realistic (i.e. the cars weren't square and the engine noises weren't square waves), the enormity of the sound challenge never really struck me. Engine, road, and tire noise, plus accurate doppler effects, different crunches and thunks for impacts... the list goes on. As if that wasn't enough, you have to worry about engine noise contaminating your samples.So it's no wonder that some game designers from Microsoft jumped at the chance to use a Tesla for recording game audio. No engine noise and careful mic placement means you can get tire squeal, or any other audio component of driving, almost completely isolated. Now, I know you guys aren't really that hot for the details of audio production, but I know you like fast cars. And it actually is pretty entertaining to see a Tesla with so many big hairy mics on it that it looks like a pussy willow.
Well done, Apple. You've finally done it. You've got the world bending the knee for a device they've never seen, and which you deny exists. Condé Nast has declared that Wired will be Apple tablet-compatible by mid-2010, although they admit that Apple hasn't actually told them how they might go about doing that. While this isn't exactly comparable to adjusting office doorway heights in case someone hires a Yeti, the parallels are clear.Of course, it's not so strange to want to streamline your product for tablet access. Make sure column flex doesn't break the layout, don't put critical links in rollover menus, that sort of thing. But if the Apple tablet is anywhere as interesting as people hope it will be, I doubt you're going to be reading Wired in a browser anyway. Quixotic would be too kind a term for what they're doing; not only are they tilting at windmills, but the windmills don't officially exist.
Cisco has confirmed that the next version of the Flip Video camera, everyones favorite tiny video camera, is getting Wi-Fi. The model is described as having "a large screen that slides to reveal the record and menu buttons underneath."Pocket-lint is also reporting there won't be a touchscreen. You can, however, upload video that you take over Wi-Fi.
