The End of Drunken Emails
Google Labs has just added a feature to gmail that is designed to stop you getting drunk and speaking your mind to people via email in ways you may later live to regret. Mail Goggles, when enabled, will check that you’re really sure you want to send that late night Friday email after several pints. And what better way to check than by making you solve a few simple math problems after you click send to verify you’re in the right state of mind?
By default, the app is set to active late night in the weekends when activated, but you can adjust for daytime hours if you’re an alcoholic, or on the brink of a nervous breakdown.
fring
fring is a VoIP application that lets you use Skype, MSN, Google Talk, ICQ, Twitter, Yahoo!, and AIM clients to chat and instant message. Well, the good news is that fring is available now for free in the Apple App Store and can be loaded on your iPhone without any jailbreaking required.
fring will run on your iPhone or iPod Touch and works over the WiFi network. You can even make SkypeOut calls with fring so if you are traveling fring may be the application you want to make low cost and free calls on the road.
More iPhone apps
SGN’s Wii-like Golf And Bowling Games
No surprise that SGN’s iPhone games are doing so well – they’re fun to play and they’re free. iGolf is at no. 7 on the top ten apps list and has, the company says, more than 1 million downloads. The newly launched iBowl is at no. 8.
popular use), Fring also lets you chat (and call, where appropriate)
friends over MSN, GoogleTalk, AIM, Yahoo, Twitter, ICQ, and of course,
Fring’s own service.
M2E
The M2E (Movement to Energy) kinetic battery converts the kinetic energy of someone walking around to clean energy. M2E claims that 2 hours of light movement can charge about 1 hour of talk-time in a cellphone, and the plan is to make the travelling battery available to a variety of mobile and portable devices. Planned for release mid to late 2009.
Norway: Doesn’t Like iTunes
ZDNet reports that Norway’s Consumer Ombudsman is taking Apple to the government’s Market Council in an effort to force the company to open its iTunes store to all mp3 players…
Good luck – Europe has been trying to collectively force Apple’s hand with this for two years now – however, Apple ha until early November to respond to the complaint and talk DRM shop with Norway Authorities. A binding legal decision from the Market Council won’t be available to next year, however.
Seedcamp
Seedcamp, is the European-wide competition for seed-stage startups, each winners gets €50,000 seed funding from Seedcamp’s conglomerate of venture backers, but the stake in each startup varys, along similar lines to the Y-Combinator model. This year a record seven winners were named rather than the five originally set out to award.
For a full write up check out Check out TechCrunch UK for a fuller write-up but the winners were:
BaseKit (UK)
This is a deceptively easy way to create complex web sites and applications, which saves time building simple apps and demos.
Kyko (UK) (no site yet)
Currently in stealth mode, but from what I’ve seen it’s pretty good for a 21-year old founder.
Mobclix (US)
A “comscore with an ad network for iPhones apps” said the judges.They were also a TechCrunch 50 company. They are considering moving to Europe where the mobile scene is hot right now.
Soup (Austria)
This is Tumblr for the rest of us. It has a Twitter-like interface enabling feed imports/ lifestreaming, bookmarklets, you name it.
Stupeflix (France)
This is similar to Animoto but where that site takes hours to convert video Stupeflix does it in real time on a massive scale.
Toksta (Germany)
This is white label IM and video for social networks, so socnets don’t have to create it themselves. This adds stickiness and increases user activity.
uberVU (Romania)
uberVU keeps track of context from all over the Web (responses, comments, trackbacks, diggs, etc.) around a story so you can see what people are saying about it on different sites and services. The founders say they are “mapping the conversational graph” – pretty cool stuff for three guys from Romania, not known for many startups.
Hive Logic Enkoder
You guys may aready know about this, but it was news to me. The Hive Logic “Enkoder” is a really handy little utility that converts email addresses into encrypted Javascript code which hides them from bots and scrapers, but keeps them visible to humans. Run the enkoder to generated the javascript code and paste it into your sites. No more ugly name [at] email [dot] com addresses!
Hack the Debate: Current TV & Twitter
Current TV and Twitter have teamed up for the first time around the US presidential debates. Viewers comments, dispatched via real-time Twitter messages/tweets, will be placed over major portions of Current TV’s coverage of the upcoming debate series over and Obama and McCain..
More here.
The Rise and Fall of Muxtape
Justin Ouellette, the head honcho of one of my favourite, now dearly departed, websites, Muxtape, recently intimidated into non-existence by the RIAA, tells all about its conception and crash here.
Makes for interesting reading, especially the part when Ouellette describes a meeting he had with EMI about the future of Muxtape:
“I walked into a conference room and shook eight or nine hands, sitting down at a conference table with a phonebook-thick file labeled “Muxtape” laying on it. The people I met formed a semi-circle around me like a split brain, legal on one side and business development on the other. The meeting alternated between an intense grilling from the legal side (“you are a willful infringer and we are mere hours from shutting you down”) and an awkward discussion with the business side (“assuming we don’t shut you down, how do you see us working together?”). I asked for two weeks to make a proposal, they gave me two days.”
It’s this kind of mentality that suggests that models like Muxtape remain an unknowable center of growth or diversification for major labels…
And being backed into a corner, Muxtape’s future now lies in a redesigned functionality offering upload and hosting direct to bands. Which, as much as it pains me to say it, is shit.
Ah well, at least there’s still Mixwit, which I’m listening to while writing this; check out this hip hop listing, it’s a good ‘un.
G1 Google Phone
Today T-Mobile G1 with Google announces the T-Mobile G1 $179. The first phone powered by Android, an Google’s mobile software platform. The T-Mobile G1 included a 3-inch touch-screen and a slide-out QWERTY keyboard and a one-handed navigation button. It also has a 3-megapixel camera, GPS, Wi-Fi, GPS, 3G radios. It features let you experience web service that includes popular Google services such as Google Maps Street View, Gmail, YouTube and others. The T-Mobile G1 will launch on October 22 for $179 with a two-year contract.
Portable Content 