Rafe's Radar- Page 2

News360 news reader app massively improved, business model not so much

Last August I covered the news-reading iPad app, News360. I liked the tech, but after I reviewed it, I never used it again. That was as I predicted. It just didn't grab me.

The new one does, though. It shows how much difference a good, clever interface can make for a product.

As before, News360 pores through your declared interests as well as what you post for others to see on Facebook, Google+, and Twitter, and what you save for yourself on Evernote. From this analysis it comes up with a bunch of channels and topics within the channels … Read more

Cloze gives relationship scores to everyone you know

Has it come to this? Do we need corporate CRM tools to manage our individual relationships?

The startup Cloze has launched a utility that scores every relationship you have with your e-mail contacts, based on when and how you communicate with people. The scores look like Klout numbers, but they're personal to you. Cloze uses those scores to rank your people, flagging the top-scorers for followup when you don't respond to their messages. Creepy? Maybe. But fairly handy.

Cloze was designed as a work tool. Founders Dan Foody and Alex Cote said they wanted to create … Read more

Google I/O dissected on Reporters' Roundtable

We're recording this Roundtable on the final day of the Google developers conference, Google I/O. From my perspective as a jaded and grumpy tech journalist, it has been a pretty cool conference. Google launched its own 7-inch Android tablet, a new living room entertainment streaming appliance called the Q, Chrome for Apple's iOS, a competitor to Evite called Google+ Events... and that's just the shipping products. We also saw wing-suit skydivers wearing Google glasses jump out of an airship hovering over Mosone Center and glide to a landing on the convention center roof.

So there's a lot to talk about, and I've got two great guests to run down the important topics that came out of the Google I/O conference:

In the studio: Stephen Shankland, CNET News senior writer and alpha geek. Via Skype: Esther Dyson. Dyson is an investor in Internet startups in the U.S. and elsewhere, on the board of Airship Ventures (the company that took the Google wing-suit jumpers up), and former chair of the Electronic Fronteir Foundation and of ICANN.

Subscribe: iTunes (MP3) iTunes (640x360) Podcast RSS (MP3) Podcast RSS (640x360)… Read more

What Airtime needs: A wish list

Confession time: I loved Airtime, when it launched Tuesday.

This was after I was prepared to hate it. A little more than a day later, I've settled in the middle. I'm ignoring it. I wish it was better, and until it is, I can't really recommend it. But it has potential. Here's what it needs.

Friends-only mode (Updated!) Airtime is a very good person-to-person video phone app for connecting to Facebook friends. I like it better than Facebook's. But if you run it, you're always visible to the system for random connections from people … Read more

Hands-on: Airtime won me over

I was prepared to hate Airtime, the new video chat service that connects you to both friends and strangers. The last thing I need in my life is random, time-consuming video chats with distant friends of friends. And for connecting with people I already know, I have instant messaging, Skype, and the phone.

But the moment I fired up Airtime for the first time, an old friend called me and blew me a kiss. Made my morning. Then, a few minutes later, when I pressed the random "Talk to Someone" button , I got connected to Lee Jacobs of … Read more

After more than 30 years, Grid Beam modular construction system comes to market

This year at the San Francisco Bay Area Maker Faire, trying to juggle my own interests (talk to cool people) and my 5-year-old son's (build or break stuff), we both hit paydirt at the same time when we stumbled across the Grid Beam exhibit.

My kid spent 45 minutes in the hot sun inventing and screwing together a life-size car-like contraption, and I got to dive into the minutiae of the product with its creators, Phil and Richard Jergenson.

Grid Beam is Erector Set meets IKEA. The hardware is standard 2x2 wood beams with holes drilled through every 1 1/2 inches (which is the actual width of a 2x2 beam), and standard furniture bolts that will be familiar to anyone who's ever assembled a futon frame.… Read more

Meet Ark, the social friend-finder that should stay independent

Nobody should own Ark. TechCrunch reported today that the well-seeded people search startup rebuffed a probe from Facebook to acquire the company. Thank goodness.

Ark is yet another stab at an old unsolved need: A site that searches all the social networks to find the people you're looking for. This is most notably not something that Google can do, as Google cannot search within the structured and closed databases of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and so on. (It should have better luck with Google+, assuming you're logged in.)

Previously I have covered companies like Spock (now iSearch), which aimed to do a similar thing. … Read more

Should you buy Facebook stock? Roundtable panelists discuss

As Facebook was trading as a public company for the first time today, we assembled a group of tech and finance experts to talk about the new stock. Is it worth buying? What will it do for technology overall? Can Facebook compete on mobile? Our panelists to debate these and related topics:

Jill Schlesinger from CBS MoneyWatch.com. Jill can help us sort out the pros and cons for investors interested in buying into this mega IPO. Andy Rachleff, CEO of Wealthfront, an Internet-era investment advice service. Andy's a venture capitalist at Benchmark Capital. He also teaches entrepreneurship at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He wrote about Facebook's IPO on CNET News in February. Tom Merritt, host of Tech News Today on the TWiT network. Tom takes the pulse of the tech world every day on his show. Paul Sloan, the main guy covering the Facebook IPO at CNET News.

Subscribe: iTunes (MP3) iTunes (640x360) Podcast RSS (MP3) Podcast RSS (640x360)… Read more

Facebook acquires social gifting company Karma

When I wrote in my review of Karma in February, "you'll be using this soon," perhaps I should have said, "Facebook will be buying this soon." Because that's what the company just did. As the Nadaq public market closed on Facebook's first day of public trading, the social network bought the small social gifting company.

Karma announced the acquisition in a blog post that doesn't say much other than revealing the acquisition. But we like Karma. CEO Leo Linden gave us a walk-through recently:

A gift-giving service like Karma might look like … Read more

Google Knowledge Graph hands-on: The Web's tail is long indeed

I got the magic cookie to turn on the new Google Search Knowledge Graph feature yesterday.

My searches now ping Google's 500-million-strong database of "things." So in addition to standard list-of-links search results, I get sweet data, beautifully packaged -- when there's a Knowledge Graph hit -- in place of an empty sidebar or one filled with ads.

Except for when I don't get the Knowledge Graph, which is most of the time.

It turns out that searching for "things" isn't something I do a lot of the time. If I were … Read more