Biggs is the East Coast Editor of TechCrunch.
Biggs has written for the New York Times, InSync, USA Weekend, Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, Money and a number of other outlets on technology and wristwatches. He is the former editor-in-chief of Gizmodo.com and lives in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. You can Tweet him here and G+ him here. Email him directly at john@techcrunch.com.
As lovers of technology and slaves to the news cycle, we all get caught up in the next new thing. The cynic in me notes that the 43rd anniversary of the moon landing – an occurrence that changed the course of history with a completeness and intensity that few warmongers have ever been able to induce – is just another moon landing anniversary. It isn’t the 25th or the 50th or the 100th. It’s just something that happened 43 years ago today at about 8pm UTC. In short, two men – born helpless as the rest of us – through time, training, and sheer will, were thrust into space by the greatest minds of our generation and then stepped onto a lunar soil that the New York Times reported as being fine and powdery.
Why, then, commemorate this date? Because, aside from World War II, the space race was the thing that put us firmly on the path of technological advancement we are taking today. Had we not dared when we did, at a time when our technology was woefully primitive, I wager that we would still today think the moon and the stars were out of reach. → Read More
Microsoft capped off decades of regular growth with their first down quarter in history. This news, coupled with a number of stories regarding Microsoft’s bureaucratic malaise and slow Windows Phone handset sales point to the company essentially losing the hearts and minds of their most ardent supporters.
Microsoft had many wins. The Xbox is a notable success and Windows 8 could lead to a sea change in user interface and user experience. However, given the steady stream of duds popped out by MS over the past few years – Zune, C#, Vista, and the Kin phone family (not to mention their insistent failure to capitalize on touch or web infrastructure servers) – it’s not hard to see why the bloom is off the Microsoft rose. The company is huge – 94,290 according to the official ledger – and as Kurt Eichenwald notes in Vanity Fair, the company’s strange bell curve ranking system has frustrated their best and brightest engineers. Freshly minted MBAs and CS majors have been shown, time and time again, that there is no value in going after Microsoft millions when Google and the rest of Silicon Valley is right down the coast. → Read More
The three-month long DreamIt Ventures accelerator program is landing in Austin in December, running for a full three months before unleashing the chosen startups on the crowds at SXSW in March 2013. DreamIt is also running events in Philadelphia and New York. This additional program will be run by Austinite Kerry Rupp.
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If you couldn’t tell from the massive e-sales of a tale about a young lady who loves to love the wrong man, ebooks are massively popular, doubling in 2011 to completely surpass sales of hardcover adult fiction.
The Book Industry Study Group released their poll of 2,000 publishers yesterday, announcing that book sales declined 2.5 percent in 2011, down to $27.2 billion from $27.9 in 2010. Ebooks brought in $2 billion in 2011 while most revenue still came from print.
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Although I worry that these guys might get sideswiped by Apple when it comes to charging ports, here’s the Chargecard, a super slim battery charging cable for your iDevices that folds up into itself for maximum portability.
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During our recent road trip through the American Southeast, a few things popped out at me. First and foremost, real innovation and entrepreneurial energy is coming out of the places you’d least expect. The secondary lesson is a bit more interesting and could change the way we traditionally look at startup incubators and accelerators. It’s an idea posited by Manoj Govindan, a partnership executive at Bank of America in Charlotte, North Carolina and I’m calling it the “cauldron”.
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Some folks we met in Charlotte had a mission: they wanted to win a contest (sponsored by Red Bull) for the coolest Arduino project in the land. I think they may have nailed it. The project, built by engineers and designers for Edison Nation, turns an ordinary desk into a booze-infused party zone when the clock hits five (or when you slap the Swingline stapler.)
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Notice anything weird about your email inbox? If you said there wasn’t as much spam lately that’s because researchers at FireEye and the venerable SpamHaus have essentially shut down the Grum botnet by marking and banning IP addresses. The botnet was responsible for 18% of the world’s spam and had lassoed 560,000 to 840,000 computers using a rootkit.
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For decades, publishing consisted of two distinct landmasses separated by a deep, impassible chasm. On one side you had kids from Yale who became Associate Editors at the big six – the big houses – and then brought in their friends to write alternately blissful and horrible prose. Then, on the other side, you had everyone else. With the rise of the e-book market, however, a land bridge is growing between the two, built on copies of self-published techno-thrillers and religious self-help titles – and some great books are making it across. → Read More
Prototype 035: it sounds like a nail-biting action RPG but it’s actually one of the first iPad prototypes, built years before the iPhone, and laid by the wayside as Apple kept experimenting with new form factors. The iPad in question, according to a great bit of digging by Yoni Heisler at NetworkWorld, is the one that Jonathan Ive remembers as being the true precursor to the first iPad model. → Read More
Disrupt has long been the birthplace of software startups – but that’s changing. With the launch of Hardware Alley at Disrupt NY, we’ve inaugurated a very cool opportunity for hardware startups to grab a little Disrupt floor space and we’re doing it again in San Francisco.
Hardware Alley happens on the last day of Disrupt and lets you get into the event at a discounted rate for one or all three days. Smaller startups should contact me directly at john@techcrunch.com but if you’re funded, ready to rock, and interested in holding court with some of SF’s preeminent VCs and thinkers, head over here to buy tickets. → Read More
Intel released their 2012 Q2 earnings today, reporting revenue of $13.5 billion, up 5% from last quarter. PC market growth rose 3% to $8.7 billion. Intel blamed the slow-down on users waiting for Windows 8 before investing in new hardware.
The Data Center group saw revenue of $2.8 billion. Intel’s earnings per share were flat, rising 1 cent over last quarter. → Read More
What’s the first thing you think of when you hear watersports? For me, it’s fishing and wake-boarding, but the term means different things to different people. That’s why WaterplayUSA exists – to help watersports fanatics get wet and wild on vacation. Whether you’re into jetskis, sailboating, or scuba, these guys are ready to splash you all over.
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One interesting manufacturing start-up we met in Durham last week was Bound. This small printing company offers notebooks in multiple styles (including a vegan leather Moleskine-esque number) but with a twist. You can, if you so desire, have something different printed on every page. You can make a little notebook for just a range of dates or add a map, some tic-tac-toe boards, and a musical staff. You can pop in an iPhone design template or some graph paper.
I met the CCO, Michael Faber, in Durham and he introduced himself by saying “I heard you’re an asshole” which, while true, was quite hurtful. Luckily, he followed up by showing us his great little notebooks and the fistfight that was brewing between us turned into a video interview. → Read More
Squarespace makes it easy for design- (but not tech-) savvy users to build beautiful websites. The service has been around since 2003 but recently received a full overhaul called Squarespace 6. The resulting experience – a WYSIWYG system so complete that it may give pause to some code lovers out there – is quite amazing.
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One pet peeve I had with the Sonos system was the quality of the UI on high-res screens. While it is, after all, just a remote control, the app was Sonos’ outward-facing experience and needed to be flawless. Now it is.
The company just updated its iPad app to support Retina screens (no similar update for Retina MacBooks, sadly) and you can also change the Sonos volume by clicking the volume buttons on the iPad. Both are minor changes, but they are important in creating a smooth and consistent experience. → Read More
You deserve a break today, indeed. Augmented reality pioneer Steve Mann visited a Parisian McDonald’s with his family earlier this month. Mann has a system called the EyeTap physically installed in his skull that records photos and video, and can display augmented reality data directly in the user’s line of sight. Upon ordering, McDonald’s employees at 140, Avenue Champs Elysees, Paris accosted Mann and tried to tear the glasses out of his head.
That was after he ordered something called a Chicken Ranch Wrap. → Read More
Donald J. Sobol, author of the acclaimed Encyclopedia Brown series of children’s mystery books, died last Wednesday of natural causes. He was 87.
The author released his first book in 1963 after receiving dozens of rejections. The series went on to sell millions of copies around the world and helped children become amateur sleuths, and, more important, taught them to question and quest through the mysteries around them.
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Reviewing a drive isn’t very exciting. What can you say? “It contains a storage medium, is small, and surprisingly light.” Thankfully, the Buffalo MiniStation Thunderbolt can add one important point to that litany of mundanity – a Thunderbolt port and cable that jacks the read and write speed up to amazing levels – thereby turning a ho-hum review into a real barn-burner.
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We all have a horror story: you picked a mechanic from the phone book, made an appointment, took the car in for a minor repair, and got it back with three wheels missing and the roof on fire. That’s why John Formento, Jr. and his dad created OnlineMechanix, a scheduling system and discovery engine for local mechanics.
The site currently serves 700 repair shops and allows users to find shops in their area and schedule appointments online. Sadly, consumers have been slow to adopt the service (but that could change as the company begins a marketing push with some viral videos). They’re experiencing 100% growth in mechanic sign-ups, however, which suggests they may be on to something.
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