While I kid a bit in the headline, this is actually pretty cool: Swatch, the largest manufacturer of mechanical watch movements in the world, has created a movement that is assembled entirely using automated systems. Why is this important? The watch industry was originally gutted by the rise of cheap quartz watches, making this piece quite ironic, and this means that more people will be able to own higher quality mechanical watches from a trusted brand.

The movement, called the Sistem51, is made of 51 simple parts and has a weight that winds the mainspring. It is made of a copper, nickel and zinc alloy called ARCAP and is anti-magnetic. It’s completely sealed inside the case (making it impossible to service) but a fact that ensures it can stay out of moisture and dust. Another cool thing? Quoth Hodinkee, who got a hands on, “instead of a regulator the special escapement is set by a laser during production and never needs to be touched again.”

Sure, the Sistem51 is basically a plastic watch that costs a little over $100 and will be sold at airports around the world. However, it is an impressive step forward for the company at a time when mechanical watches are making a resurgence. Swatch has been making mechanicals for a while, to be clear, but this is the first time they’ve reduced the price, manufacturing cost, and maintained quality in this way. While it’s easy to get much cheaper movements online (a tourbillon for $24, anyone?) it’s far harder to find a solid, high quality mechanical movement from a trusted brand.

It’s great to see some affordable watches come out of Basel this year and this is definitely step forward in terms of nanomechanics.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Say Media just announced that Owen Thomas, previously the West Coast Editor at Business Insider, has joined ReadWrite (a tech blog that Say acquired in 2011) as editor-in-chief.

I reported on Friday that Thomas (who’s an old boss of mine — he was executive editor at VentureBeat back when I was the assistant editor) was in talks for the position, though all Say representatives would tell me at the time was that they were talking to a number of candidates.

Formerly called ReadWriteWeb, the blog was founded by Richard MacManus back in 2003, and over the past decade it has been home to a number of great tech writers (including Frederic Lardinois, Sarah Perez, and Alex Williams, who are all currently writing for TechCrunch). Last fall, the company announced the new name, a new design, and the hiring of Dan Lyons as editor. Lyons left last month to take a position at marketing software company HubSpot.

In some ways, Thomas and Lyons are similar choices — they have lots of media experience (yes, Owen, that’s my polite way of saying that you’re old), but they can also be snarky and controversial.

“Owen is a brilliant writer with great experience covering every aspect of the technology industry,” said Say SVP and Editorial Director Kate Lewis in a press release. “He has a distinct point-of-view and a cleverness that makes his work resonate both inside and outside of his community.”

ReadWrite has also published its own blog post announcing the move, in which Owen is described as “a shockingly nice fellow.” I’m not sure I’d go that far, but he is actually pretty nice, and that does surprise some people, especially since he used to be the editor of Valleywag.

“One thing we’re definitely going to do is go back to our roots,” Thomas told me. In other words, he wants to explore the idea embedded in the company’s name — what it means now that “everyone is a participant, everyone’s a builder today.”

When Lyons joined as editor, he told us that he wanted to make ReadWrite more fun. I pointed out that people are probably expecting that from Thomas too, but he said, “I have my serious side, Anthony.” He added that he definitely wants to make sure the site has a sense of humor, and that sometimes being funny or snarky is the most appropriate response to tech news: “You have to laugh so you don’t cry.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

When we first heard about Daniel Epstein‘s plan to bring his Unreasonable Institute startup accelerator to the high seas with a 100 day, around-the-world sailing expedition called ‘Unreasonable At Sea,’ it frankly seemed like a pretty crazy idea. Let alone the risk of pirates (the real kind, not the entrepreneurial kind), there are so many possible things that could go wrong for the 11 startups aboard the ship — bad Internet connections, seasickness, homesickness, and the like.

So now that Unreasonable At Sea is more than halfway through its voyage (it started January 9th in San Diego and ends April 25th in Barcelona) we decided to check back in with Epstein for a TechCrunch TV talk yesterday morning to see how everything is coming along. For starters, the Internet connection is actually pretty solid, as we were able to see in the quality of our Skype chat as he was aboard the Unreasonable At Sea ship in the Indian Ocean just off the coast of Mauritius. He told us that everything else is going just as swimmingly (sorry, I can never resist making some kind of water pun when writing about this endeavor.)

Watch the video embedded above to hear Epstein talk about the perks of the journey so far, how the startup folks are mingling with the Semester At Sea students aboard the ship (and getting some work out of them too), what the biggest lessons and surprises have been so far, and what’s in store for the rest of the journey ahead.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Google today updated its Inside Search site, its homepage for all things search, with a handful of educational and interactive features that explain in layman’s terms how Google’s Search works. Did you know the web had over 30 trillion pages, by the way? Or that Google supports over 100 billion searches every month? Or that Google’s index is over 100 million gigabytes? If you find factoids like that interesting, you’ll probably enjoying a scroll through the new “How Search Works” live infographic, which also contains a few clickable links to charts and graphs showing things like the rise of spam, and milestones in Google’s spam-fighting techniques, among other things.

The update is something of a follow-up to last year’s detailed look into how Gmail works called The Story of Send. For the most part, it’s really high-level stuff here, designed to make the details of technology approachable and understandable to a more mainstream audience looking to gain a better understanding of what happens after they type into the search box.

The new sections of the site include not only the graphical explanation of Google Search’s inner workings, but also details about Google’s major algorithms and features, a list of Google policies, plus a 43-page document that explains how Google evaluates its results. (OK, that part might be a little more in-depth, I’ll admit.)

But the best part? The live spam slideshow. Here, you can see screenshots of spam Google has removed from its search results only minutes ago. Dozens upon dozens of them, in fact. It’s almost like getting a real-time view into Google itself, which is actually pretty fascinating.

Now if only we could see what people were googling for in real-time, we would really….wait…

Nah, that might be terrifying.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

We just reported that Apple’s iOS 6 saw an adoption rate of around 15 percent according to Chitika, and now Chartboost has provided numbers that back up that uptake. Chartboost is also seeing 15% uptake on its network, with users coming on board at an average rate of about 1 percent every two hours or so, with spikes around quitting time on Tuesday and picking steam again early Thursday morning.

Chartboost has also broken down the data by device, revealing that iPhone owners were fastest to adopt, with iPhone owners most eager to adopt at 17% after 24 hours, the iPad coming in second with 13% upgraded after Day One, and the iPod touch bringing up the rear with 9 percent uptake. That’s actually pretty much in line with what you might expect after seeing our chart yesterday detailing new iOS 6 features; the iPhone 4S gets the most out of iOS 6 by far (besides the as-yet unreleased iPhone 5), the new iPad also gaining quite a bit but not everything, and the 4th gen iPod touch (the only one currently available on the chart) bringing up the rear.

Now that both Chitika and Chartboost have tracked the same growth curve acting independently, it’s pretty clear that iOS 6 is the fastest-adopted mobile OS out of Cupertino yet. Let’s see if it can keep up that pace over the longer term.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

When Gidsy secured a $1.4 million seed investment earlier this year it wasn’t the clutch of high profile VCs and Angels that attracted everyone’s interest so much as the presence of Ashton Kutcher in the financing round, who seems intent on making Berlin his personal investment project after doing similar with SoundCloud and Amen among others.

If Airbnb sorts out your accommodation when you hit a city then Gidsy will find someone to help you do something there not unlike SideTour, Vayable or MyGuidie. But it’s not just limited to travel, as CEO and founder Edial Dekker explained to me this week at London Web Summit, but workshops or any activity.

And no folks, it’s not just his vast Twitter audience that Ashton is bring to the party says Dekker, who outlines in the interview below that Kutcher is actually pretty good a product and regularly flies the startups he’s invested in over the to US to shoot the breeze. Oh Ashton… you are spoiling them. Do it on Skype dude…

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Research In Motion announced the PlayBook 17 months ago. Then, eleven months ago, the company actually launched the product. It took them another 10 months to finally bring a native email and messaging app to the product. Now, almost a full year after the product hit stores, RIM is releasing a keyboard folio case for the struggling tablet. Oh, and it costs $120.

I’m fully convinced Research in Motion is stuck in some sort of time warp where hours equal days and days equal months. It’s the only logical explanation regarding the company’s product release cycle. That or RIM is run by ignorant executives that spend more time on the golf course than in the office. Maybe both.

The Playbook is a quality product ruined by an incompetent company. It feels great in the hand and the OS is actually pretty slick. But RIM clearly didn’t throw the proper resources behind the product’s development. It should have launched with apps that users expect from a BlackBerry device: email, messaging and calendar. Instead, RIM took its merry time to develop these key applications and just recently pushed them to the device. The tablet’s launch could have also benefited from a large offering of accessories including the keyboard folio that was just announced. It’s not like the idea of a keyboard case is novel. These sort of cases were around back when RIM announced the Playbook in 2010.

I’m sure the new keyboard case works well. RIM makes quality, but often overpriced, hardware. The company just doesn’t know how to launch them in a timely manner.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Naked-eye 3D displays, even large-sized models, are nothing special anymore, but they usually have a common problem: the 3D effect when viewing pictures isn’t as strong as with displays that require users to wear glasses. Professor Kakeya from Tsukuba University in Japan is trying to solve the problem.

The way his 3D display works is actually pretty simple: it uses multiple layers and lenses to boost the sense of depth perception. Professor Kakeya explains:

It forms images of objects at the front toward the front, and objects at the back toward the back. When objects at the front are in focus, those at the back are blurred, and when you’re looking at objects at the back, those in front are blurred. So a feature of this display is that it reproduces focal depth.

The resolution in the current prototype stands at just 200

Instead of giving us any more concrete details on when the Playstation Vita will see the light of day, Sony announced the availability of a new PSP model called the E-1000 at their Gamescom press conference today.

With it’s €99 price tag, Sony’s clearly gunning for the budget gamers, albeit only ones that live in Europe: while the E-1000 is poised to launch this fall in the EU, there’s no word that the bargain-priced portable will make its way anywhere else.

The E-1000 takes most of its design cues from older model PSPs, and with that comes the inclusion of a UMD drive. The design is actually pretty dang slick, with its matte black finish, but Sony had to cut corners somewhere. First thing on Sony’s chopping block is the WiFI radio; impulse Playstation Store downloaders will have to resort to transferring purchases from a PC using Sony’s Media Go software.

For those without an old PSP game library to fall back on, Sony has also announced the launch of a discounted line of UMD-based games. Games like Invizimals: The Lost Tribe, EyePet Adventures, and FIFA 12 are expected to launch along side the E-1000, but hopefully some… better… titles get the UMD treatment soon. Titles are priced to move at €9.99 a piece, but methinks cheapskate gamers may have better luck digging for games in the bargain bin.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Having old media digitized to get more space in the house, preserve them or simply make them portable isn’t exactly a new trend. But some startups, like Peggybank in the case of videos and photos, still find ways to stand out. And now a new company called 1DollarScan tries to do the same for books, documents, pictures and just about anything that’s printed on paper – through pricing.

1DollarScan is the US equivalent of a service in Japan called Bookscan, which is the largest of its kind in that country and hit several millions of US dollars in revenue within a year, according to the namesake company (in fact, the service is so successful that some customers in Japan currently have to wait for months to get their material digitized).

1DollarScan works in the same way as Bookscan: after receiving physical books or other printed material from customers, the company scans the papers, and converts them into PDFs or DVDs. That’s what similar services do, too, but as 1DollarScan’s company name suggests, prices start at just $1 (for ten photos or 100 pages in a book, for example).

The obvious idea here is to address a bigger market than competitors by making mass-scanning and digitizing more affordable. 1DollarScan tells me they are building on their experience in Japan and “radically” apply Toyota’s kaizen method to perfect operation and keep costs down in their “factory” in the US market.

Launched last week in the US, it’s too early to tell if 1DollarScan can deliver in terms of quality as well, but if it’s any indication, the Japanese parent company already filed for a patent to protect its (actually pretty impressive) device-specific resolution adjustment method (here‘s a video in Japanese that shows the scanning process). On its website, 1DollarScan says that digitized content can be viewed on all Android phones and tablets, essentially all iOS devices, the Kindle 3, Sony’s PRS-650, and the Nook.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch