Ajax Girl

YouTorrent is a fairly new BitTorrent search engine that has been getting positive reviews of late, so I gave it a shot.

The premise is simple: YouTorrent is a meta-search engine that indexes torrents from other sites (such as btjunkie, The Pirate Bay), then prioritizes the results based on the number of seeds and peers each torrent has. For example a search for something like Cloverfield offers multiple results but most importantly provides the torrent with the most participants first. For those not familiar with BitTorrent, the more seeds and peers a Torrent has, the faster the file will likely download.

As a meta-search engine YouTorrent doesn’t discriminate against legal and pirated content (yes, there is legal content on BitTorrent) so it’s a case of anything goes, and this is both a strength and a weakness. If you do frequently download using BitTorrent you’ll love YouTorrent, it’s quick and the results it gives negates the need to use other sites when searching for Torrents. On the other hand YouTorrent efficiently facilitates video piracy; sure, there’s an ongoing legal argument as to whether a search engine can be held liable for indexing pirated content elsewhere, but that didn’t help TorrentSpy when the Feds came knocking. The site is hosted in the Netherlands and has a Moniker hide your details service running on the Whois record, but chances are if the owners are in the United States, it’s probably only a matter of time until the MPAA or RIAA sends in the lawyers, so give it a shot while you still can.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/219667064/

Thank you to everyone who attended the first Crunchies event last night to honor startups in categories ranging from “best business model” to “best time sink” (pictured right is Toni Schneider, CEO of Automattic/Wordpress, showing off his award for Best CEO).

If you were not one of the 900+ people to attend the event live last night in San Francisco, you can watch a video of the entire event that Mogulus recorded here. People are still uploading photos, but you can see them on Flickr under the tag “2007crunchies.”

Congratulations to all of the winners, as well as all of the nominees. It is my honor to have covered most of them since they’ve launched, and to see how well they’ve done is awesome.

And thank you to our co-producers, GigaOm, ReadWriteWeb and VentureBeat. Having this be a multi-blog event was an important step, and shows how blogs can compete hard for stories and still come together to collaborate when it is good for the community.

Media Coverage

Lots of blog coverage continues to roll in. Mainstream media was also all over the event. Alice radio, which hosts the no. 1 local morning show, kicked things off with two on air mentions. ABC and Fox covered the show locally and ABC also covered it nationally during the 11 pm news (see video clips above). NBC also covered the event - we’re uploading clips now.

Highlights

The highlight of the event for me was the best gadget category. John Biggs from CrunchGear recorded an overview video that was a crowd pleaser (see video below).

Apple won the award for the iPhone. But we simply could not get anyone from Apple to attend and accept the award. Fake Steve Jobs stepped in and recorded a video accepting for them. I’ve seen the video at least a dozen times now, and laugh harder every time I watch it:

The live performance by the Richter Scales of their Here Comes Another Bubble song was another highlight. I wish we could have ended with them, but their schedule forced them to go very early in the show:

Thank You

Thank you to the sponsors of the 2007 Crunchies who are underwriting the event and making it possible to recognize outstanding contributions in our industry. Award Benefactors: Adobe, Charles River Ventures, The Founders Fund, The Mayfield Fund, Microsoft, Our Stage and Sun Microsystems. Thank you also to our Program Sponsors, including Ask, Framr (an ecommerce start-up offering custom picture framing, launching tonight), Lotus Vodka, Intel Capital, Lehman Brothers, Meevee, RealTimeMatrix’s Vortex, Searchles, our official live streaming partner of the night Mogulus, our official ticketing sponsor amiando, WeBreakStuff for design and MediaTemple for hosting.

And thanks as well to everyone who worked hard on the event from the participating blogs. In particular, Heather Harde, our CEO, put in a heroic effort to get everything in place moments before the event began, and the teams from all four blogs really pitched with multiple all-nighters the last couple of days in to make the night go well. Special thanks to video blogger Sarah Meyers for giving us three straight days of her time to work through all of the video work for the event.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/219605979/

Google is said to be preparing to launch a massive repository of science data at research.google.com.

The project, known internally as “Palimpsest” will become a home for terabytes of open-source scientific datasets built on the data visualization technology from Trendalyzer.

According to a Wired report, the storage will be free to all scientists, access to the data will be free for all and the new site will have YouTube-style annotating and commenting features.

Two planned datasets are 120 terabytes of data from the Hubble Space Telescope and images from the Archimedes Palimpsest.

We thought Google knew everything, now it will know even more.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/219554147/

I just got word that Yahoo is testing the integration of Delicious user generated bookmarks into Yahoo search results pages. Some users will see the Delicious icon as part of their normal search results, which tells them how many people have bookmarked those pages, as well as the tags people have supplied for those pages.

An example is here, and I’ve included a screenshot.

I have previously written that Delicious search is one of the best ways of searching for things when a standard search doesn’t pull up what you are looking for. After Google, it is my favorite “search engine.” Adding this information into Yahoo search is a great idea.

What isn’t clear is if Delicious results are impacting search rankings, or if Delicious data is simply being integrated into the existing rankings.

delicious

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Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/219503758/

Our last Crunchies report for the night until we get the various recorded segments from the official Crunchies archivists Revision 3 (you can see the archived live stream when its available from Mogulus here).

Brevity was the soul of wit tonight with the awards ceremony staying at around 2 hours, exactly as planned, and a decent effort considering there was 20 awards given out tonight. Read the full list of Crunchies winners here.

After the event Award attendees, those that couldn’t get tickets to the main event, and a couple of gatecrashers moved upstairs at the Herbst Theatre to drink beer from metal bottles and mingle with the many startups in attendance.

If you’re not interested, don’t click the “read the rest of this entry” button you’ll see if you’re reading this post on the front page, but some photos from the party as follows, including how Valleywag sneaks up on people for a shot. Also check out the Crunchies on Flickr here for more photos.

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Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/219301632/