Weplug is a new social networking site out of France that aims to combine the ideal parts of Twitter, Facebook, and geo-location. The site has just entered public beta, and is available on the iPhone at the same URL. Weplug has a clean interface and full featured (if somewhat generic) social networking functionality. Users […]

Weplug is a new social networking site out of France that aims to combine the best parts of Twitter, Facebook, and geo-location. The site has just entered public beta, and is available on the iPhone at the same URL.

Weplug has a clean interface and full featured (if somewhat generic) social networking functionality. Users can add their current status and location to a “lifestream” (basically a list of recent activity), which is syndicated to others through “friendstreams”. It’s all pretty familiar stuff for anyone that’s used Facebook for any length of time, but there are a few key differences.

For one, Weplug promises to release an API that will make its micro-blogging platform accessible to outside programs and devices (think Twitter). Weplug also plans to include auto-location features on its iPhone version of the site. Auto-location doesn’t work yet, but Weplug’s developers intend to use the iPhone’s triangulation feature (and eventually GPS, when it becomes available).

The site is still very much a work in progress. The basic social networking functionality works well enough, but the promised autolocation feature and Twitter-esque API are still a ways off. It’s hard to gauge how well Weplug will do abroad, but to stand a chance stateside its going to need to implement these features soon. As it stands now, Weplug is a nice looking site that few people have a reason to use.

Weplug sprawls a number of well-established spaces. Their competition includes Loopt in the social GPS market, Twitter in micro-blogging, and a plethora of social networking sites.

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By Luke Anderson There are dumb ideas out there, then there are really dumb ideas. This product would fall in the latter category. This is the My Pee Bottle, guess what it’s for. February 2007, our then two-year old daughter, Sofia, contracted Rotavirus. Though she recovered within a couple of weeks, I was panicked. I became extremely […]

By Luke Anderson

There are dumb ideas out there, then there are really dumb ideas. This product would fall in the latter category. This is the My Pee Bottle, guess what it’s for.

February 2007, our then two-year old daughter, Sofia, contracted Rotavirus. Though she recovered within a couple of weeks, I was panicked. I became extremely fearful of all toilets and wanted to make sure Sofia had limited exposure to public restrooms. I was particularly mindful of continued good hygiene and simultaneously desired a simpler, cleaner, and more-efficient way for Sofia to use the potty when we were out.

Okay, I get the reason that this was created, but I still don’t see a practical use for it. Seriously, who wants to carry around a bottle that’s been peed in? Also, if this is meant for young children, do you really think it’s good to teach them to pee in a bottle just after you’ve potty trained them? I’d think that would have some negative effects on the kid.

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EA-Land, the service previously known as The Sims Online will shut August 1, despite a much hyped revamp announced late February. The Sims Online was generally regarded to be a failure for EA, with the company unable to turn the success of The Sims franchise into an online hit. The service wasn’t helped by a complete […]

EA-Land, the service previously known as The Sims Online will shut August 1, despite a much hyped revamp announced late February.

The Sims Online was generally regarded to be a failure for EA, with the company unable to turn the success of The Sims franchise into an online hit. The service wasn’t helped by a complete lack of customizable features (outside of the usual Sims customization tools) and EA charged for access.

The new (but now never to be launched) EA-Land was to be EA’s second shot of success, and promised Second Life style customization and land ownership, with a free client and free to use service.

EA didn’t provide a full explanation for the shutdown, only saying that “The lifetime of the game has drawn to an end, and now we will be focusing on new ideas and other innovative concepts in the games arena.”

Paying users of the Sims Online are being offered a $15 gift voucher and three months premium access to Pogo.

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By Andrew Liszewski Ever wonder what it would feel like to be in the driver’s seat of an RC car as it races around your house? While you can already buy remote control vehicles that feature a built-in video camera, I like the fact that this standalone wireless camera is small enough to use with even […]

By Andrew Liszewski

Ever wonder what it would feel like to be in the driver’s seat of an RC car as it races around your house? While you can already buy remote control vehicles that feature a built-in video camera, I like the fact that this standalone wireless camera is small enough to use with even the miniature Bit-char G RC cars that were so popular a few years back. The camera unit features a 2.7 megapixel color CMOS sensor and a rechargeable battery that’s good for about 45 minutes. Given it’s just under an inch and a half on its longest side, that’s pretty impressive. It’s able to transmit the 1.2GHz video signal about 98 feet to the included Morse type s receiver, which can then be connected to a television set with a composite video cable.

The mini video camera also features a waterproof case allowing it to be attached to an RC submarine or boat without the fear of H20 ruining your fun, and you can get it from the Japan Trend Shop for $269.

[ RC-12 Wireless Mini Video Camera ] VIA [ Ubergizmo ]

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Silicon Valley-based startup Mint, which provides a service that lets users manage their checking, savings and credit card accounts online, will launch a new product on May 6 that let’s users track virtually any type of investment account as well. Users will now be able to manage all of their financial assets on the Mint […]

Silicon Valley-based startup Mint, which provides a service that lets users manage their checking, savings and credit card accounts online, will launch a new product on May 6 that let’s users track virtually any type of investment account as well. Users will now be able to manage all of their financial assets on the Mint site. With this change, Mint says, 6,500 US financial institutions: 2,520 banks, 1,621 credit cards, and 2,381 investment accounts are supported.

Brokerage, IRA, 401k and 529 assets can be managed. For now, only student loan accounts and mortgages are left off, although support for those types of accounts is coming soon. The site will show all your buys, sells, dividend distributions, etc. across multiple accounts. Dive into a single account or equity for its individual performance. Account performance v. the S&P and other indexes is graphed, and account charges are also shown.

There are some things you still won’t be able to do with Mint, such as stock trades, bill payments and funds transfers. Mint CEO Aaron Patzer says those features will eventually be added, with a focus on bill payments first. Funds transfers and stock trades are a little stickier, though, and may eventually require state and/or federal regulation of the company.

Investments will soft launch on May 6 for very active Mint users and roll out from there. Anyone who wants to be in the beta right at launch (whether they are a current Mint user or not) can sign up at mint.com/techcrunch and will be added on May 6.

Other services, including Cake Financial (another TechCrunch40 startup) Vestopia, Covestor, and UpDown also offer investment tracking.

We’ve been tracking Mint since their launch at TechCrunch40 last year. The 20-person company has now raised $17 million in venture capital and has 230,000 registered users (40% of which are active, Patzer says). 10,000 new users sign up each week (13,000 last week)

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Microsoft does not like to be rushed. Everyone is waiting for its next move, now that the deadline it set for Yahoo to accept its takeover bid expired last Saturday. And everyone can keep waiting. Nevertheless, preparations are being made for an announcement this week from Microsoft on what it will do […]

Microsoft does not like to be rushed. Everyone is waiting for its next move, now that the deadline it set for Yahoo to accept its takeover bid expired last Saturday. And everyone can keep waiting. Nevertheless, preparations are being made for an announcement this week from Microsoft on what it will do next.

Out of its various options, the two most likely are either to go hostile with the bid or to walk away. Chief financial officer Chris Liddell signaled as much during last weeks’ earnings conference call, where he also discounted the possibility of a higher bid:

The strongest argument that we should increase our bid because we have the ability to afford to is not one I favor. We have yet to see tangible evidence that our bid substantially undervalues the company. In fact we see the opposite.

That might have been posturing, but I don’t think so. Last week, Citi analyst Mark Mahaney put the odds of Microsoft going hostile at 40 percent, and of walking away at 10 percent. In the event of a hostile offer, Microsoft could either try to go directly to shareholders and ask them to tender their shares or engage in a proxy battle to replace Yahoo’s board of directors. A tender offer would trigger Yahoo’s poison pill and get really messy and high-priced. (For an excellent discussion on how all of this would work, read Marc Andreessen’s post on the subject).

All signs point to a coming proxy battle. Microsoft has picked its alternate slate to replace Yahoo’s board of directors. And it has gathered around itself a group of advisers known for their bare-knuckle M&A tactics. Who is this group of reservoir dogs that Microsoft would bring to a fight to take over Yahoo’s board? They include:

—Morgan Stanley. Investment bankers Paul Taubman, Drew Guevara, Thomas Whayne, Chuck Cory, and Rob Kindler are on the crew assigned to Microsoft. Taubman heads up Morgan Stanley’s entire global mergers and acquisitions group (but he also had the dubious distinction of advising Time Warner on the AOL deal).
—The Blackstone Group. Jill Greenthal is advising from this high-powered investment bank that specializes in M&A, among other things.
—Joele Frank. She’s the person you call when you are doing a hostile takeover and you need special public relations for the occasion. That is what she does: hostile PR. She’s good and she’s fierce.
—Innisfree M&A. A proxy solicitation firm that handles the logistics of a proxy battle.

These are all veteran fighters who don’t mind getting a little blood on their hands.

They’ll be up against Yahoo’s investment bankers, led by Goldman Sachs (Lehman and Moelis are also advisers). We’ve also heard a rumor that low-key M&A consulting firm MacKenzie Partners is helping Yahoo. (But judging from all the dead links on their Website, maybe it is Yahoo who should be helping them)

Watching from the sidelines will be Google, with their back-up man Frank Quattrone at Qatalyst and his old partner George Boutros at Credit Suisse.

Should Microsoft walk away or unleash its reservoir dogs?

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By Andrew Liszewski Got a stack of NES carts at home that you’ve been dying to play while traveling? I didn’t think so. Given the capabilities of the PSP and even the DS, I’m kind of surprised anyone would even want a portable way to play old NES carts when they can be so easily emulated. […]

By Andrew Liszewski

Got a stack of NES carts at home that you’ve been dying to play while traveling? I didn’t think so. Given the capabilities of the PSP and even the DS, I’m kind of surprised anyone would even want a portable way to play old NES carts when they can be so easily emulated. But the FC Mobile portable system does just that. It looks like a slightly fat, overly curvaceous version of the Game Boy Micro, but that’s mostly because of the slot on the back designed to accommodate NES cartridges.

You can either play the games using the FC Mobile’s 2.4 inch LCD color screen, or use the included AV adapter cable to hook it up to a television and enjoy all that 8-bit goodness on your hi-def display. It’s powered by 3 AA batteries, comes in a red & white or silver & black color schemes and appears to only play North American NES games.

Unfortunately the only place to pick one up right now is on eBay, where they range in price from around $30 to $60.

[ FC Mobile NES Game Portable LCD System ] VIA [ technabob ]

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MTV has partnered with Oddcast to provide avatar-centric Voki Playgrounds for some of their most popular shows. Visitors to these so-called playgrounds (really just a fancy word for sub-sites) can create customizable avatars that mouth your recorded voice online. The avatars can be viewed on the sub-sites, emailed to friends, or embedded elsewhere like […]

MTV has partnered with Oddcast to provide avatar-centric Voki Playgrounds for some of their most popular shows.

Visitors to these so-called playgrounds (really just a fancy word for sub-sites) can create customizable avatars that mouth your recorded voice online. The avatars can be viewed on the sub-sites, emailed to friends, or embedded elsewhere like MySpace. Users are encouraged to create vokis for the shows Pimp My Ride, The Hills, and perennial favorite The Real World.

The avatars come from Oddcast’s Voki platform, which can analyze voice messages left by users and animate their avatars’ lips accordingly. It’s not very convincing, but it’s not meant to be perfect. If you want to respond to someone’s voki, you can do so by clicking on a button from within the voki widget.

While Oddcast already has a number of big-name clients, the MTV demographic is especially valuable in the avatar market - it won’t be long before we see these tricked-out avatars flooding MySpace. MTV hopes to eventually monetize the playgrounds by selling digital goods that will allow users to further accesorize their avatars, though a pricing model has yet to be defined.

This space is growing increasingly crowded with newcomers like Gizmoz and Fix8 competing with Oddcast, which has been around for nearly a decade. And while the new 3D animations we’ve been seeing lately are impressive, the likely victor will be the one that can target and monetize their avatars most effectively - a fact that makes this deal especially important for Oddcast.

Here’s a sample:

Get a Voki Now!

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By Evan Ackerman I haven’t been this excited for a video game in, I don’t know, forever? It’s been a long, long time coming, but Will Wright’s epic, epic bacterium-to-universal-domination game Spore is… Um… Still not ready to go. But the good news is that the Spore Creature Creator, the core of Spore if you will, […]

By Evan Ackerman

I haven’t been this excited for a video game in, I don’t know, forever? It’s been a long, long time coming, but Will Wright’s epic, epic bacterium-to-universal-domination game Spore is… Um… Still not ready to go. But the good news is that the Spore Creature Creator, the core of Spore if you will, is going to be release stand-alone in June. The retail version will be $10, or you can try out the demo version, which allows access to only 25% of the available body parts.

I got to try out the Creature Creator at Yuri’s Night, and it was very easy and very, very fun, with almost unlimited possibilities for designing both the simple and the complex. From what I saw, little kids were by far the most creative, able to sit down and (with zero practice) create some of the most awesomely bizarre life forms. Adults, on the other hand, seemed very concerned with practicality and mostly made creatures that resembled dinosaurs. Check out a few pics of took, after the jump.

The full version of Spore, BTW, is set to be released here in North America on September 7.

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Shopping on eBay is more like navigating a street marketplace than visiting a department store. Disparate vendors sell their wares without any real coordination. As a result, buyers must visit each and everyone of them to ensure that they’re getting the ideal deal. And with each visit, they have to cope and make sense of new […]

Shopping on eBay is more like navigating a street marketplace than visiting a department store. Disparate vendors sell their wares without any real coordination. As a result, buyers must visit each and everyone of them to ensure that they’re getting the ideal deal. And with each visit, they have to cope and make sense of new advertising spins and types of service.

Wigix launches in public beta today with the intent to standardize on the internet marketplace listings, and consequently make it easier for consumers to find the products they desire. Its SKU-based system (SKU, as in the fact sheets used to describe inventoried items) forces sellers to group their goods with others who are selling essentially the same product. This allows buyers to get a more complete overview of their options, and it allows for many other opportunities as well.

For example, with the SKU system, buyers and sellers can search for item listings using more intelligent search. Type “ipod” into Wigix’s search, and it will automatically recommend all the possible iPod models that one can sell and purchase through the site. The search results don’t show actual items for sale, but types of items (”Apple iPod pic 160GB” or “Apple iPod mini 4GB”). It’s only once you click on one of these results that you can see who’s selling it.

Each SKU page shows not only the current sellers but general overview information for the product as well. This includes the current market value, the recent changes in that value, reviews, specs, and more. Users who own the product but haven’t officially put it on sale can list themselves as owners just in case someone wants to come along and make them an offer they can’t refuse. This Zillow-make-me-move-like feature should change the way many people view their possessions (not just dead items but stores of exchangeable value).

Wigix can also track how prices for goods change over time, which in addition to the bid/ask aspect of the site, makes it operate very much like a stock exchange.

The service’s biggest hurdle, of course, will be to draw enough vendors and shoppers away from eBay. It’s hoping its pricing structure will produce the right incentives to do that. There is no cost to list items under $25. Between $25-100, the site takes one dollar from the buyer and one from the seller. And for more costly items, it claims an additional 2% of the sale price.

Wigix also supports its operations by running targeted advertisements on SKU pages, such as ones for items on Amazon. Since Wigix is a place only for identifiable goods (no collectibles here, at least yet), it’s simple to serve up ads for the same products found elsewhere on the net.

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