Apple Talk

SAN FRANCISCO--Most of the new ventures launching at the TechCrunch50 conference are standalone Web sites, but not all. In years past there have been the few hardware launches, and this year is no different. Here are two new bits of hardware, and a new hardware platform that are gunning to make their way into your living room and office in the coming months.

iTwin is a two-piece bit of USB hardware that acts as a "cableless cable" allowing two computers to connect and share files as long as they have an Internet connection. There's nothing to set up, since both halves of the device are paired together and stay constantly connected. Users just plug it in, and can begin dropping files large and small into a shared folder.

The product will be available beginning early next year for $99, and comes with two paired sides that interlock when not in use. If users lose one of the two sides, they can lock down their account with an SMS message, or by disconnecting the other piece. They can also purchase an additional side, which can be re-paired.

ToyBots is a new gaming platform that lets toy manufacturers plug in their toys to an online network. Much like the Pleo, the personality of the toy can be altered by firmware upgrades, which are directly connected to the Web. Users can then play games and get feedback from their toy, as well as purchase and download new personalities and applications.

The company is hoping to get toy manufacturers on board as partners, and get them to start using the standard firmware profile across their entire line of toys. This would do two big things: let users re-use firmware or applications they've purchased for one toy, onto another, as well as keep money coming in even after a consumer has purchased a toy. … Read more

Finding the hot conversation keeps getting easier, but predicting what the next big trend will be continues to be a crapshoot. Palm and Federated Media have teamed up to create a new tool called Trend Tracker that does its best to figure out, what in fact the next top trend will be by analyzing items that are gathering buzz.

The system is a mix of tools that can help spot popular URLs and trending topics before they hit it big. But it's more about organizing that data in a simple-to-parse format.

Included are the current top 30 trending topics on Twitter, which can be stacked up against each other to see what's pulling in the highest percentage of tweets. Each trend is represented over a 24-hour time line, where you can see how each particular trend has gone up or down in popularity.

But 24 hours doesn't tell the full story, which is why the tool will soon expand to keep an archive that covers the last 10 or 30 days.

Along with the top 30 trends, Trend Tracker includes a "Pre Trend Watch" (emphasis mine) which tracks five up-and-coming trends that are about to break into the top 10 based on their velocity--the speed in which tweets on that particular topic are gaining in popularity. These are also marked in the trend archive with a little blue flag.

When I was looking at the tool last week, one of the most interesting things this picked up on was… Read more

Tech blog TechCrunch is hosting the third iteration of its annual startup show next week, where 50 brand new sites and services are slated to be launched. The show was started in early-2007 by TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington and entrepreneur and Weblogs Inc. co-founder Jason Calacanis as an alternative to the DEMO conference series. Instead of paying to be on stage (once selected) as is done at DEMO, companies selected by Arrington and Calacanis get to present for free.

Next week at the TechCrunch 50 conference, 50 new companies will take the stage and make a pitch, while about a hundred others--some new, some retreads from prior TechCrunch events, fight for attention on a paid show floor called the "Demo Pit."

How many of these companies that launched at a TechCrunch event have gone on to fame and glory? It was hard enough for these companies to make a mark when they were fighting for attention against dozens of other start-ups. It's even harder to continue momentum from a conference after the dust settles. Below are five that have done quite well, and five that haven't.

Mint

Mint made its public debut at the TechCrunch40 in 2007, where it won the audience choice award, netting it $50,000 in cash (that it didn't really need).

The site presents users with a bold option: give us your bank account, mortgage, and credit card information and we'll help you track how you're spending your money and give you tips and tools on how to save.

Since 2007, it's since gone on to raise two additional rounds of funding, bringing the total past $30 million. The site also has 1.4 million registered users. and claims to be "tracking $175 billion in transactions, $47 billion in assets and has identified more than $300 million in potential savings for its users." It's also won numerous awards, including a Webware 100 award in 2009, a "50 best websites of 2009" recognition from Time Magazine, as well a nod from PCMag's "Top 100 websites of 2009"

Postbox

Postbox, a Mozilla-based e-mail client that launched at last year's TechCrunch50 show, has done well for itself inside a year. For one, it's publicly available and fully out of beta--which is more unusual than it should be. It's also a paid and license-based product, meaning the company isn't just giving it away for free.

Earlier this year Postbox won a Webware 100 award in the communications category as voted on by CNET readers. It was also picked as Lifehacker's "Top 10 Up-and-coming products" shortly after its release.

Xobni

Another e-mail utility graduate, Xobni, came from the first TechCrunch show back in late-2007, when there were just 40 companies presenting. The product, called "Insight," was a plug-in for Microsoft's Outlook e-mail software, and could replace Microsoft's built-in search tool, as well as show users details on the frequency of those they were e-mailing with.

In the months prior to 2007's TechCrunch 40, Xobni had picked up a little more than $4 million in funding. The product, however, remained in private beta until mid-2008, after which it was opened up to the public. Then, in early January of this year, the company announced another round of funding, totaling $7 million, including Cisco Systems as one of the investors.

The company also released a paid version of its service in mid-July that costs $30 a year and adds extra features on top of the free product. It remains a product for the desktop version Microsoft Outlook only, although… Read more

Storage provider and collaboration service Box.net is launching a mobile extension to its OpenBox platform of application programming interfaces on Thursday. The updated platform will enable iPhone app developers to make better use of the service's cloud storage, giving users access to their files across mobile applications on the iPhone and soon other platforms.

The idea is that users will be able to save whatever they're doing on the phone to Box's cloud storage service, as opposed to their servers or the device itself. It's similar to the way the smartphone can natively send some … Read more

As a heavy Flickr user, half the time I'm accessing the site from my phone instead of my computer. So when Flickr got its very own iPhone application late Monday night (download link), I was excited to give it a spin. What I found though, is that despite some of its niceties, there are certain things you can only do on the mobile Safari version--many of which are important.

This in itself is odd. After all, native iPhone apps almost always do things Web apps can't, like store data locally, or make use of on-board hardware. This app does a little bit of both but is missing a few features that I think make viewing and managing your Flickr photos a more compelling experience in Safari's browser.

For instance, browsing photos cannot be done in landscape mode from the get-go. You're limited to viewing little thumbnails, then having to click on the image to load it again before being able to view it sideways. The need to do this every time there's an occasional photo in landscape mode can be a bit tiring, although you're encouraged to just stay in the full-screen mode. This isn't so bad if you're on a good connection, but if you're on EDGE, or a spotty 3G connection it, can drag on as it takes time to load each image.

But that's just a small quibble. My real complaint is that the app doesn't let you make any changes to photos you've already uploaded. For instance, you cannot rename a photo or video or give it a description unless you're uploading it. You're also unable to add tags or change its privacy level and licensing rights. This could get you into a sticky situation if you, say, uploaded a photo as public that you later wanted to change to private. Such an action would… Read more

This week marks the latest release in the Rock Band series (see our hands-on). It features one of the biggest names in music--The Beatles. It also features pack-in instruments that continue to look more and more like their real-life counterparts.

Rock Band was definitely not the first video game to necessitate special hardware, nor will it be the last. Below we've put together a list of some of the most innovative peripherals and hardware that have helped change the way we play games. Some went on to become big, while others failed or were martyrs to future incarnations that … Read more

Shoeboxed announced this week that it has improved the way it handles digital receipts sent to its online filing system. The company, which scans and hosts paper receipts, business cards and full-size documents, can now pick out specific information from forwarded e-mails containing purchase information, and put it into one of the system's 15 purchase classifications.

Like users would do with purchases on travel services like TripIt and Worldmate, simply sending the confirmation e-mail to your Shoeboxed address means that it gets filed along with the rest of your expenses. The goal is to make it easier for customers … Read more

Typing on the iPhone/iPod Touch's keyboard can be arduous. This is never more evident than when trying to bang out messages in several instant-messaging conversations at once. Shape Services, the makers of the popular IM+ instant-messaging app ($9.99 App Store link), have realized this, and are soon rolling out a new version of the app that includes speech-to-text, albeit at a price.

Taking advantage of Apple's recently released in-app payment system, 99 cents a month gets you the feature, meaning that the annual cost of continuing to use it is about $12 a year. Not bad … Read more

I'm always intrigued by backup tools for Web services that don't really need backup. TweetSaver is no exception. This paid service backs up (almost) everything you've ever posted to Twitter, along with private messages and replies from other users. It then adds an extra layer of utility on top of it, like a search tool that's limited to just your messages, simple sharing options for each message, as well as a way to assign a tag to each tweet for categorization.

Of course the usefulness of all of this hinges on Twitter being down and/or … Read more