Rafe's Radar

Microsoft launches Bing 'Visual Search'

You see that headline? "Visual Search" is in quotation marks because Monday's announcement at the TechCrunch 50 conference about Bing's new search feature is a bit of a canard.

What Microsoft is launching is very cool, mind you. It's just not, strictly speaking, a search feature. At least not a general one.

The new feature shows you pretty Silverlight-powered fly-in thumbnail images for only 50 specific search results (it will be expanded in the future), such as "Digital cameras," "New cars," "MLB players," and "Top songs." As … Read more

Reporters' Roundtable Podcast: Jobs is back

On September 9, Steve Jobs returned to the public eye in his first major launch announcement since his medical leave and subsequent liver transplant surgery. At the event, he announced a new line of iPods, new digital formats for music and videos, and, sadly, nothing from the Beatles. Rafe Needleman hosts, with Donald Bell, Erica Ogg, and Greg Sandoval.

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In this first episode of the new Reporters' Roundtable, I talk with Apple experts at CNET about the 9/9/09 Steve Jobs keynote. Read on if you want the raw show notes, but click the audio or video stream to get the real content. … Read more

TimeBridge: No place to hide from our meetings

The meeting scheduler utility TimeBridge is growing up and expanding its mission. No longer just a schedule helper, the service is getting more tools to keep meetings that have already started running on time.

The company is still selling an online meeting product, based on DimDim. It's adding now a tool to let attendees collaborate on the agenda beforehand (I doubt it will ever get used, people are too lazy), and more importantly, it's getting a nag feature that will let a meeting organizer set the service to ping people via SMS or e-mail right before a meeting … Read more

Google Voice and Gmail are sort of merging

Two new little Google Voice features just made their way into Gmail. A new option lets text messages sent to Google Voice show up as e-mail messages in Gmail. You can reply to messages from Gmail, too, which makes it a nice platform for carrying on a text message conversation.

Also, there's a new Labs feature in Gmail that lets you play your Google Voice voicemail messages from inside the Gmail viewer. Previously, Gmail would send you the text transcript of your message, but if you wanted to play the audio file, it would open a new browser window … Read more

TweetDeck gets updates, MySpace support

The new 0.30 version of TweetDeck, due out Wednesday, supports MySpace. Maybe it's me. Maybe it's my demographic. But who the heck cares about MySpace?

The MySpace addition to TweetDeck, though, shows how much CEO Iain Dodsworth wants TweetDeck to become, in his words, "a browser for the real-time Web."

I like TweetDeck a lot. I use it and Seesmic Desktop in equal proportions. But I'm not sure I want my Twitter client to get all fancy and over-ambitious. Twitter is hard enough to manage even with a good, clean client. If TweetDeck adds … Read more

Subvert the HR department with Workscore

Workscore, set to launch tonight, lets you build a "social resume," a profile of your skills, with ratings from the co-workers you've invited to comment on them. Once you have enough ratings, you can send private Workscore links to the people at the companies where you want to work.

Essentially it lets you collect performance reviews from people you trust, and then share the results (the aggregate scores) when you're looking for work. It challenges the traditional, top-down, by-the-book human resources organization in which workplace performance ratings are created (usually grudgingly) by managers, and collected by … Read more

Does your reality need augmenting? Try these apps

Reading the news about a University of Washington professor's experimental electronic contact lens, I wondered if my dream of the ultimate personal technology has finally moved from over the horizon to in sight. Here's what I want: to be able to walk into crowded cocktail party, and know exactly who I am looking at -- each person's name, last time we met, and other information pertinent for a pleasant social interaction. I want that information beamed into my field of vision, in text floating over their heads, like the health indicators over the bad guys in a … Read more

The Real Deal 177: Home security cameras

Rafe Needleman and Brian Cooley (a.k.a. the Cat Master) discuss the best hardware and software for monitoring your home when you're not there. Plus, your questions answered!

Subscribe now: iTunes (audio) | iTunes (video) | RSS (audio) | RSS (video)… Read more

No money? AffordIt can get you a PS3, anyway

Want a PlayStation but don't have the cash for it, nor a credit card to charge it on? You can get the device delivered to you nonetheless at the low, low price of just $120 down, plus $13 a week for 24 weeks, from a new business called AffordIt.

Now, if you do the math, you'll discover that buying something through AffordIt is a staggeringly bad deal. That PlayStation (a refurb, mind you), will cost you $432 if you pay it off, compared to the $299 price on Amazon.com for a new unit with the same specs. … Read more