Ajax Girl

We just covered the news on TechCrunch France. The iPhone will be launched in France with Orange at the price of 300 euros. It will be on the market the 29th of November and announced on the 24th of September during the Apple Expo in Paris. There won’t be any unlimited data plan and against all rumours it won’t have 3G capabilities. Here is a first picture of the iPhone provided by Orange with a French menu (operated in roaming mode though). Crunchgear has more

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/157387200/

Captchas are well known for keeping automated spammers out and letting humans in. However, ReCaptcha is a rather clever service using them to help digitize books scanned into the Internet Archive as well. It’s a project from the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon.

The Internet Archive is home to over 200,000 scanned copies of classic books. Some of them are gorgeously crafted, like this children’s book, but fancy styling can make it difficult for computers to translate the books into an indexable digital text. Much like a Mechanical Turk application, ReCaptcha uses humans to translate images of scanned words that a computer couldn’t understand. Notably, Mechanical Turk has been used in the searches for Jim Gray and Steve Fossett.

The scanned words are placed alongside a normal captcha widget so users decode both words at the same time. The word can be run by multiple people to cut down on errors. Catchas also offer the opportunity to convert a lot of words. ReCaptcha’s founders, Luis von Ahn and Ben Maurer estimate that about 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved every day. Assuming that each CAPTCHA takes 10 seconds to solve, it’ this is over 160,000 human hours per day (that’s about 19 years).

To harness all this time, ReCaptcha is opening their service through captcha widgets and an API. They also have a service for protecting email addresses posted online. You can protect your address by going here and entering it. ReCaptcha then gives you some code to paste your protected address to the web like this, n…@techcrunch.com. To get the address, click the three dots and answer the Captcha.

It’s great to see projects like this harnessing just a bit of our time to solve some important and complex problems.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/157376727/

An unconfirmed report has BuddyTV being acquired by Comcast. We’ve got requests for confirmation in with BuddyTV and are waiting for a response.

Seattle based BuddyTV is a television focused content network with a team of dedicated entertainment writers producing content that is complemented by users. The company took $2.8 million from Gemstar-TV Guide in July. Comcast previously acquired Fandango, an online movie ticket selling company that also ran a entertainment guide called Fancast.

If confirmed, it’s an interesting buy that fits more in the blogging acquisition space, placing the deal alongside the acquisitions of Weblogs Inc and more recently TreeHugger. Certainly BuddyTV’s mix of paid writers/ bloggers and user contributions highlights the value of content in a market where service/ product acquisitions usually get most of the press.

More if and when we are able to confirm the deal.

(via PC)

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/157320350/

Intel has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Havok , a provider of software and services used by digital media creators in game development.

Havok’s 3D software powers online worlds including Linden Lab’s Second Life, as well as a variety of console games on Xbox, Wii and PlayStation.

According to Intel, the acquisition will enable developers in the digital animation and game communities to take advantage of Intel’s innovation and technology leadership in the creation of digital media.

Well known games using the Havok platform include BioShock,” “Stranglehold,” “Halo 2,” “Half Life 2,” “The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion,” “Crackdown,” “Lost Planet: Extreme Condition,” “MotorStorm” and “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.” The terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

(via Metaversed)

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/157242718/

We’re not sure when it launched, but Fred Wilson has discovered that Seth Godin’s Squidoo has quietly entered the people search field with a new product called Squidwho.

Squidwho provides similar features to competitors including Wink, Spock, PeekYou and Zoominfo. Pages include a short biography, Amazon products (where applicable), YouTube videos, Flickr shots, latest news and RSS feed data from appropriate sites.

Each page is maintained my Squidoo Lens Guide and offers the same revenue share model as regular Squidoo pages offer.

It would be easy to question yet another company targeting people search in what continues to be a hot vertical, and yet by labelling Squidoo Lens’ under the Squidwho label it’s a logical step for Squidoo. The backend is already in place as are the would-be guides to create the information; in effect the new service is more branding exercise than something completely new.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/157230008/

This is coming in late on a Saturday, so we only have one side of the story so far. But Canadian startup TXTReviews, which allows people to get book and movie user ratings via text message, says they’re being shut out of Amazon web services.

In a message on their website, the company is actually saying Amazon has banned all mobile startups from accessing web services, but I can’t find any statement by Amazon on this, and the web services forum has no mention of it that I can find.

I’ve got a couple of emails in to Amazon to see if they’ll comment. As we’ve seen in the past, there are often two sides to these stories. Until we’ve heard from them, I’m not going to speculate any further on this.

TXTReviews founder Hussein Fazal says he’ll look for other data services to replace Amazon.

Other services we’ve covered roughly in this area are a rumored Toshiba service that would push blog reviews to shoppers who take a picture of a bar code and send it in, and a number of services that give pricing information via text message.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/157096489/