Category Archives: Weekly Roundup

Week of 11/21/11 – Tech News Roundup

It was a light news week because of the Thanksgiving holiday.

Here’s the video for the new Google Search iPad app:

Week of 11/14/11 – Tech News Roundup

Apple and Google made major music announcements this week. Apple finally rolled out iTunes Match and Google made Google Music available to everyone and opened up a Music Store. Amazon started shipping the Kindle Fire.

Google Music

The introductory video from Google:

 iTunes Match

iDownloadBlog.com created this iTunes Match Ultimate Walkthrough.

Kindle Fire

Amazon shipped the Kindle Fire earlier this week. Kevin Tofel from GigaOm has a good write-up on the mixed reviews for this product.

Positive reviews:

Negative reviews:
Other news this week

Week of 11/7/11 – Tech News Roundup – Google launches Google+ Pages

Google launched Google+ Pages to allow companies and brands to connect with their customers. Danny Sullivan (SearchEngineLand) wrote a thorough overview. You can create a new Google+ page here.

This is the introductory video from Google:

Many people were excited about this announcement, but there were some critics. Some common complaints were:

  • It’s not designed for large companies who have multiple people managing the account (Robert Scoble)
  • It’s too easy to claim a brand that isn’t yours (ITWorld)

My take? Hopefully the Google+ team is listening closely and will address these issues in the near future.

If you’re looking for companies & brands to circle on Google+, just type in “+” followed by the brand name in the Google+ search box. Here are some brands that I’ve circled:
Google+, This Week In Tech (TWiT), TechCrunch, ReadWriteWeb, Mashable, NPR, NPR Fresh Air, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, WIRED, San Francisco Giants.

Other Tech News This Week

Week of 10/31/11 – Tech News Roundup

This was a heavy week for new product launches and major revisions of existing products.

After months of private beta, Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz launched Asana, a collaboration tool. From the blog post:

Asana is a modern web application that keeps teams in sync, a shared task list where everyone can capture, organize, track, and communicate what they are working on in service of their common goal. Rather than trying to stay organized through the tedious grind of emails and meetings, teams using Asana can move faster and do more — or even take on bigger and more interesting goals.

Milk (Kevin Rose’s new company) launched their new iPhone app called OINK. This app allows you to rate anything: a hamburger in a local restaurant, a TV show, your favorite tea, a salad, etc.

Massive Health, a mobile health startup that had been in stealth mode for several months, launched an app called The Eatery. Someone on Twitter described it as “Hot or Not for your Mac ‘N Cheese”. You post photos of your food and people rate the food on a scale of 1-10 with 10 being the healthiest. The Eatery keeps track of your food scores and gives you a rating of how you’ve been eating this week.

Ex-Engadet editor Joshua Topolsky launched a new gadget site from called The Verge.

Yahoo launched a couple of iPad apps: Livestand  (Flipboard competitor) and IntoNow (video discovery).

Apple released GarageBand for the iPhone. ($4.99 on iTunes)

Jawbone started selling the Up – a $99 wristband that tracks your fitness and your sleeping habits. Up includes an iPhone app that tracks your eating habits by encouraging you to take photos of your food and asking you how you felt a couple of hours after eating.

Sphero, a robotic ball that you can control using a smartphone – is available for pre-order ($129).

The Ball. Evolved. from GoSphero on Vimeo.

And finally, Google made a couple of Gmail announcements. First, they rolled out a new, cleaned up version of Gmail. Overall, the new design was pretty well received, although some people complained that the spacing of messages was too wide. If you prefer the spacing from the old design, you can change it using the Display Density setting.

The other Gmail announcement was a mess. On November 2nd, Google announced their rumored Gmail app for iPhone. Within minutes of the announcement, people were complaining about an error message that shows up when you log in. There were also complaints that the app itself was underwhelming. Google ended up pulling the app from the App Store and almost a week later, the app still isn’t available, causing some people to wonder:

Other news this week:

Week of 10/24/11 – Roundup

Tech News

It was another dismal week for Netflix. The stock dropped 35% after announcing that they lost 800,000 subscribers and projecting that fourth-quarter earnings would be below expectations. Henry Blodget (Business Insider) says: Sorry, but this Netflix collapse is overdone.

HP announced that it will keep it’s PC division but there was speculation that they would shut down the webOS division. The head of HP’s PC division this was an unfounded rumor.

Google announced an update to Google TV and there were rumors of a Siri-powered, integrated Apple TV coming in 2013.

The New York Times published a very touching eulogy of Steve Jobs written by his sister Mona Simpson. A must-read.

Death didn’t happen to Steve, he achieved it.

– Mona Simpson, A Sister’s Eulogy for Steve Jobs

People aren’t happy about Google’s plans to discontinue the social features of Google Reader.

Flipboard, the popular news/social reader application for tablets, is about to get some competition from Google (Propeller) and Yahoo (Livestand).

Benchmark-backed Nextdoor launches a private social network for neighborhoods.

Y Combinator held their Startup School. Mark Zuckerberg, Paul Graham, and Marc Andreessen all spoke.

Mark Zuckerberg interview at Y Combinator Startup School

Apps

Television / Movies

Sports

David Freese’s Game 6 walk-off home run:

The Week Ahead

The Groupon IPO is scheduled for Thursday, November 3rd. Before you consider investing, read this piece by Nicholas Carslon (Business Insider): INSIDE GROUPON: The Truth About The World’s Most Controversial Company