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Palm Releases Treo Pro
John Biggs
3 comments »
Palm as just released their much anticipated - and leaked - Treo Pro, a Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional device with a touchscreen and UMTS/HSDPA GSM networking. The phone also includes G.P.S. and improved WiFi handling for better and easier WiFi hand-off.
The new Treo is thinner than devices like the 800w
and is targeted at the mobile professional market and is not an “iPhone-killer.” Instead it is part of a conscious strategy by Palm to release a series of “great” products in order to bring themselves back out of the doldrums.
I love Palm OS - WinMo not so much - and each iteration of the Treo seems to be a step in the right direction. Can these WinMo phones save the company? I’m not quite sure. HTC, Samsung, and even LG are all releasing low-end, powerful smartphones for the casual to high-use business user. The Palm Centro has the casual set sewn up right now but not for long - contracts run out and the iPhone is quite tempting to the folks who once loved the Motorola RAZR. Motorola and Palm both have a big problem on their hands and we can only watch and wait to see how this pans out.
The phone is available on Vodafone and O2 in Europe and will be available unlocked for $549 in the U.S.
Read the full release and view a video…
| Website: | palm.com |
Palm, Inc. is a leading mobile products company, creating instinctive yet powerful mobile products that enable people to better manage their lives on the go. The company’s products for consumers, mobile professionals and businesses include Palm®… Learn More
eBay: The Doldrum Years
Erick Schonfeld
21 comments »
Can anything put the wind back in eBay’s sails? The once-iconic auction site is making cosmetic changes to its fee structure and moving away from the auction model to emphasize more fixed-price listings. But it’s hard to get excited these days about eBay. It seems that the Web has moved on and eBay is stuck in still waters.
Don’t get me wrong. eBay is still a massive site and a cash machine. But once you reach 238 million visitors worldwide (comScore) and 26.4 billion pageviews a month, it’s hard to know where to go from there. Maybe that is why pageviews are actually down 15 percent year-over-year, and the stock is down 26 percent.
This is not about fixed price versus auctions. The main challenge eBay faces is that it is becoming easier and easier to find things to buy on the Web simply by searching for what you want on Google. During the early days of the Web, people needed a few big e-commerce sites they could trust and that could organize everything that was for sale online. That need was filled by Amazon and eBay.
But now people are comfortable trawling the Net for the best bargains, and eBay is no longerteh first place they go. Partly that is because eBay has done such a good job creating a semi-professional class of online sellers, that it is harder and harder to actually find bargains there. So online shoppers are going elsewhere.
Can eBay do anything to regain its lost momentum? Give them your suggestions in comments.
| Website: | ebay.com |
| Location: | San Jose, California, United States |
| Founded: | September 1, 1995 |
| IPO: | September 21, 1998 |
eBay is an online auction site where people buy and sell goods worldwide. Any item can be sold online as long as it is not illegal or it does not violate eBay’s Prohibited and Restricted Items policy.
eBay generates revenue by charging various… Learn More
JustHackIt: It’s Like a Dating Site For Hackers
Erick Schonfeld
9 comments »
Got that hacking jones, but can’t find anyone to hack with? Head on over to JustHackIt, a site aimed at developers that launched last night. It is a place for developers to find each other, work on projects, and maybe even start a company. Developers can post projects they want to do and search through postings from other hackers.
The site describes itself this way:
The idea: Outside of Silicon Valley, lots of hackers are interested in web startups but don’t have a plethora of available co-founders to start a company with. Even if you know other hackers, often there are times when you want to start a project but your friends are busy. So the idea is to connect people who want to build something RIGHT NOW. Ideas can be simple 1 page websites or complex Google competitors
It reads a bit like the personals section of Craigslist, but don’t let that turn you off. Basically, it is a bulletin board for hackers. The problem is that it is too simplistic. Once you start a project, then what? Who owns it, how are any revenues or shares in a resulting company/site divvied up?
JustHackIt doesn’t help to answer those questions.
TripAdvisor Invests In Vacation-Home Review Site FlipKey
Erick Schonfeld
8 comments »
TripAdvisor is in an expansive mood. In July, it acquired two small startups, VirtualTourist (user-gen travel guides) and OneTime (booking price comparison). And today it announced a majority investment in FlipKey, a guest review site for vacation home rentals. The amount of the investment was not disclosed.
FlipKey launched only last March. It covers 50,000 vacation rental properties in the U.S., which CEO TJ Mahoney says represents a $60 billion market. So it is a pretty big niche. FlipKey aims to become the reputation management system for vacation home rentals. Property owners can take review data in the form of a widget and place it on their sites or property listings. (See examples here and here).
TripAdvisor plans to include FlipKey reviews on its own network of sites, which attract 12 million visitors a month in the U.S., and 28 million worldwide, according to comScore.
Mahoney previously was a co-founder of Compete.com. Brightcove CEO Jeremy Allaire is an advisor to the startup. FlipKey raised $500,000 last December from angel investors, including Allaire, Care.com CEO Sheila Marcelo, and venture capitalist Nick Beim of Matrix Partners.
| Website: | tripadvisor.com |
| Location: | Newton, Massachusetts, United States |
| Founded: | February 1, 2000 |
TripAdvisor is a free travel guide and research website that offers reviews and information TripAdvisor operates sister sites in the UK, Germany, and France.
Apart from the obligatory reviews of hotels and other attractions, TripAdvisor has some… Learn More
| Website: | flipkey.com |
| Location: | Boston, Massachusetts, United States |
| Founded: | January 1, 2007 |
| Funding: | $500k |
FlipKey is a community driven travel site that helps consumers find trusted vacation rental homes throughout the world, by providing real reviews of verified vacation rental properties.
FlipKey organizes the reputation of vacation rental… Learn More
Aircell’s Gogo Inflight Wi-Fi Service Going Live Today and CrunchGear’s Got a Seat
Peter Ha
7 comments »
Today, Aircell announced that their fleet of Boeing 767-200s will have the Gogo service enabled on flights originating from NYC’s JFK to LA, San Francisco and Miami. CrunchGear will have a seat on a flight to LAX today that leaves JFK at 12 PM EDT. Head on over there now for more details and the full press release. Again, there will be no VoIP enabled on these flights nor will there ever be.
YouNoodle In The News
Michael Arrington
16 comments »
The local ABC affiliate dropped by YouNoodle’s offices in San Francisco to get an idea of how useful their new startups valuation predictor is. ABC’s Sue Thompson interviewed CEO Bob Goodson on how the service works, and I dropped in for a cameo and a dose of healthy skepticism.
We first covered YouNoodle in February way before it launched. It entered public beta last week, and now anyone can enter their startup information and see how the service scores it from 1-1,000 along with a dollar valuation prediction a few years out.
| Website: | younoodle.com |
| Location: | San Francisco, California, United States |
| Founded: | March 1, 2007 |
YouNoodle, in beta since March 2007, is a site that lets users follow start-ups that they are interested in. They claims to be able to predict the success of start-up teams based on analysis of historical data about qualities of the team’s… Learn More
OpenClip Brings Real Copy And Paste To The iPhone, But It Isn’t The Solution
Jason Kincaid
15 comments »
It’s a shame, really. A team of developers have partnered to finally bring a legitimate copy and paste solution to the iPhone - one that can actually move data between different applications (previous solutions could only shuffle data within the same app). But as great as it is to see a team of developers work together to overcome one of the iPhone’s shortcomings, it probably won’t see much use.
A few weeks ago, Proximi released a new text client called MagicPad that included copy and paste - a feature the iPhone has lacked and one that many users have been demanding for over a year. Copy and paste was achieved through a fairly intuitive interface, and while it may not have had the same polish that an Apple-designed solution might offer, it got the job done. Unfortunately, all copy and pasting was restricted to within MagicPad.
Now Zac White has developed an open source solution to the issue called OpenClip, a platform that will allow developers to include cross-application copy and paste. OpenClip makes use of a shared space on the iPhone that is accessible to developers and doesn’t break the SDK agreement, though Apple could conceivably reject apps that include it regardless. From Zac’s blog:
Basically, all you have to do to get the benefits is include a few classes and use the very simple API to copy data or paste data. The special part is cross application. Copy a cocktail in Cocktails and paste it into MagicPad (Video of this in action).
There are some limitations. This technically complies with all Apple agreements. It is completely possible that apps that use this wouldn’t get on the App Store. Not for any real reason other than it will eventually step on Apple’s toes. It is also conceivable that the technology this is built on will break in the future. The hope is that the update that breaks this also brings copy and paste support.
But even if the apps do get approval, Apple’s Mail and Safari applications will still be missing copy and paste. And while 3rd party apps are great additions to the iPhone, many users spend the vast majority of their time on the phone either searching the web or using email, where the functionality will still be sorely missed.
That said, the new initiative may well finally spur Apple to release its own solution. It’s uplifting to see these developers work together, but it makes Apple look like a withholding curmudgeon - obviously the phone can do copy and paste, so why not give it to us?
You can read more about the new initiative at MobileCrunch >>
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