washington dc fly & drive - by george, it’s capitol fun
the hallowed halls of history. the hum and thrum of a city that reinvents itself with every administration. at least one thing’s a constant: washington, d.c. offers capitol fun!

includes: flight, rental car, taxes & fees 

from the sacr coeur to the beautiful banks of the seine, there’s no shortage of sublime sights to see in the city of light.. save now on airline tickets to paris, and savor the scenery-along with the world-class food and shopping. low fares on flights to paris

save even more when you book your paris flight + hotel together.

surf at del mar. shop at horton plaza. go wild at the zoo. book your airline tickets to san diego and save. low fares on flights to san diego

save even more when you book your san diego flight + hotel together.

find a picture of yourself looking straight at the camera and then go to yearbookyourself for a good laugh. the site morphs your picture into a classic looks from 1950 - 2000. a few of the ones that it created for me are in the image to the right (and the middle left one is my new facebook profile image).

it’s free and ad supported. full disclosure, i had that hair in the bottom left photo - that exact hair - in eighth grade.

crunch network: crunchgear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

swapping sites are nothing new (see dig n’ swap), but in japan we like to trade our junk via our mobile phones. that is what the japanese social sharing service sharemo is all about. the site’s ambitious idea is to contribute to overcoming japan’s throwaway society.

this is how it works: users can offer any item they don’t need anymore (dvds, comics and clothes are especially popular) on sharemo. if the item is useful to another member, it can be rented, used and then relisted. this procedure is repeated until one sharemo user decides to keep the item. the system keeps track of all actions and allocates points to active members, which can be donated or redeemed to rent items.

sharemo’s crucial point is the complete absence of money and the reliance on trust among the members. in japan at least, the concept pans out as expected: although the mobile site isn’’t actively being promoted yet, sharemo it already racks up 400,000 page views monthly.

sharemo is operated by enigmo, a company setting itself apart from other japanese web companies by an international mindset. their promotion networks rollmio and pressblog are successful outside japan already, and sharemo is set to follow suit in the mobile space. will this concept work outside of japan?

crunch network: mobilecrunch mobile gadgets and applications, delivered daily.

pandora made a bold political statement today, saying they’d likely shut down rather than continue to pay exorbitant fees to play music to listeners of its massively popular service.

radio stations pay different rates depending on how they broadcast music. terrestrial stations (normal fm/am stations) pay nothing, a tribute to their powerful corporate parents with limitless lobbying budgets. satellite stations pay approximately 1.6 cents per hour per listener. by 2010, pandora and other internet radio stations, which have few lobbying resources, must pay 2.91 cents.

pandora says they’re alread paying 70% of their $25 million in yearly revenues in royalty fees, and it is driving them out of business. other internet radio stations are even worse off.

for their part, the music industry says internet radio stations have no one but themselves to blame, and suggest they find more innovative revenue models.

the blatant discrimination between terrestrial, satellite and internet radio stations is ridiculous. but little is likely to change - large scale protests last year over royalty increases were mostly ignored.

pandora, our sacrificial lamb

perhaps pandora, one of the first companies i profiled on techcrunch, needs to be sacrificed before artists and labels to realize just how absurd their position is. in a free market it’s been proven that labels will actually pay to have their music played on radio stations, and payola almost certainly continues to occur in some form.

the fact is that pandora and other internet radio stations provide a valuable marketing service to artists and labels. as i wrote in march when billy bragg argued that bebo should pay musicians a portion of their $850 million aol payday, they are particularly valuable for unknown artists who just want more people to hear their music:

recorded music is nothing but marketing material to drive awareness of an artist. websites that bring that music to listeners are doing artists a favor. in fact, they’re doing them a favor that they should (and will) be paid for. young artists and songwriters in particular benefit from these services - until a few years ago they had almost no way to break into the mainstream without getting a label to promote them. now those walls are being torn down, and bragg has the audacity to complain about it.

for now the labels want to squeeze more revenue out of pandora and others. but when these companies start to go under and the bird in the hand disappears, they may regret their overly aggressive negotiating stance. it’s time for the labels to die, and anything that cuts off another revenue stream is at least partially good. i’m reluctantly willing to sacrifice pandora if it quickens the inevitable march of recorded music towards free. let’s just hope it doesn’t come to that.

crunch network: crunchgear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

as the world waits for the first android phone to appear in the wild (from t-mobile), questions are being raised again about whether google’s android ambitions will stop at cell phones. in a speculative, but well-thought-out piece, venturebeat’s eric eldon reports:

industry sources tell us that although android will indeed start as a mobile os, google intends to expand it to be a sort of universal operating system that will span set-top boxes for televisions, mp3 players and other communication and media devices and services.

if what eldon is hearing is true, that means that android could one day spread beyond mobile phones and set-top boxes to a multiplicity of devices. after all, if we are moving towards an internet of things, those things will need an operating system. in this case, however, the operating system will reside partially in the cloud, and applications written on google’s app engine, for instance, will work across devices and the web.

that is easier said than done, and android will have a hard enough time simply establishing itself on mobile phones. but the more devices android apps can work across, the more appealing it will be to developers and startups.

and for at least one other device, it does make sense. in fact, i’ve been hearing similar rumors in regards to a google set-top-box project that i first caught wind of last year. as far as i know, that project is still alive and is very android-like in its aspirations. as i wrote in my post in november, 2007:

if creating applications for set-top boxes was more like creating applications for the web, we’d be able to do a lot more things with our tvs—especially if those set-top boxes were also connected to the web. want instant messaging and caller id on your tv? no problem. want customized information widgets for the tv that scroll breaking news, weather, sports scores or stock quotes from sources you choose in your own ticker at the bottom of the screen? no problem. want to turn that annoying ticker off? no problem. want to control the camera angles on that basketball game? no problem. want to add the live video stream from your friend’s cell phone who is at the game? no problem. want to create your own video mashup of fight scenes from various movies that you can edit right on your tv and share with others on their tvs? no problem.

what other devices could android conquer?

crunch network: crunchgear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

today at wordcamp, a user and developer 1-day conference for the wordpress blogging platform, founder matt mullenweg announced impressive growth figures and reaffirmed automattic’s focus on fixing some of wordpress’s biggest weaknesses. the theme for the “state of the word”, mullenweg’s yearly keynote, was “strong,” and growth from both wordpress.com and wordpress.org (their hosted and self-hosted platforms, respectively) sure show it. here are the stats for wordpress.com over the last year:

• page views grew from 1.5 billion to 6.5 billion/month
• 1/3 of the page views come from vips like cnn and lolcats
• 120-160 million global unique visitors per month
• two million new blogs created for the year
• 35 million new blog posts (up from 20 million)

this growth is also seems significant versus wordpress.com’s main competitor, typepad. comscore numbers put us numbers at 20.9m uniques for wordpress.com against 7.2m on typepad.com, and internationally 97.8m vs. 16.8m. here’s the compete graph (which only measures us traffic):

and for wordpress.org (the self-hosted, open-source version), mullenweg announced today that there are 2.6 million active user-installed wordpress blogs in the wild. this figure is based on real data (not sampling), similar to mozilla accumulating browser stats. downloads from wordpress.org went over 11 million since last summer (up from 2.8 million the year before), thanks to over 11 new wp releases.

the focus for 2009? easier upgrades. their growth, mullenweg says, is not dissimilar from other popular products (he mentioned microsoft, osx, iphone, facebook platform as examples), and believes that good platforms need good self-updating systems. automattic has a three-prong strategy for better updates: better community awareness, working with webhosts, and adding automatic upgrades functionality to wordpress. mullenweg envisions the upgrade process to work just like firefox: one-click, with a list of plugin and theme incompatibilities generated. wordpress.org’s plugin directory (and a recently-launched theme directory) will help make this possible. many new features are also in the pipeline, including the much anticipated buddypress, but that a clean update system will remove one of the biggest thorns for wp users.

also up for 2009 is better security. their most recent release, 2.6.1, was an optional update (no security patches), which is a nice departure from their previous, critical ‘dot’ releases. wordpress has received a lot of flack for this recently: they were given a 2008 pwnie for mass 0wnage for numerous vulnerabilities that led to mass hacking.

crunch network: crunchboard because it’s time for you to find a new job2.0