alfred

Among the crowded list of mobile applications, Google has added another to its portfolio, acquiring local recommendation app maker Clever Sense.

Clever Sense created released its butler-like app, named Alfred, for the iPhone in July. The app is designed to learn the kinds of restaurants that a specific customer likes, then recommend similar joints based on Web reviews and other analysis.

But it isn't just about matching a taste for Italian food with another pasta restaurant. Unlike better-known and more widely used rivals such as Yelp and Urbanspoon, Clever Sense uses artificial intelligence to find customers with similar tastes, … Read more

Faced with mounting legal bills, Julian Assange has agreed to a $1.5 million deal to write his autobiography.

"I don't want to write this book, but I have to," the controversial WikiLeaks founder told Britain's Sunday Times yesterday. "I have already spent 200,000 pounds ($307,400) for legal costs and I need to defend myself and to keep WikiLeaks afloat."

Assange told the Times that he would receive $796,654 from Alfred A Knopf, his U.S. publisher. A deal with British publisher Canongate would bring in around 325,000 pounds ($501,… Read more

Talk about hot foundation-on-foundation action.

On Tuesday, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation announced it was giving the Wikimedia Foundation--which runs Wikipedia--$3 million.

The money will go toward supporting "Wikimedia's organizational development and help to increase the quality of its content and the reach of its services."

Among other things, the announcement said the money would go specifically to a new Wikipedia feature called "flagged revisions," which will "allow experienced editors to publicly and visibly grade the quality status of articles--in effect, functioning as a kind of 'nutrition labeling' for Wikipedia content."

I … Read more

As more bored millionaires spend untold sums on movie-themed theaters, we're pleased to find that not all of them are based on Star Trek or Star Wars. (Just 99.9 percent.)

Yet none of these, in our humble opinion, can compare with the "Bat Cave" seen on Slippery Brick. The latest custom job by Canada's Elite Home Theater Seating provides an impressive subterranean atmosphere, from its dramatic lighting to ersatz stalactites.

As far as options are concerned, the sky's the limit (to mix a few metaphors). The bat-shadow screen cover, however, should be required.

For anyone who's ever listened to Oracle founder Larry Ellison talk about his company, or on any topic for that matter, it can be entertaining. The dude is humorous, has great punch-line timing, and at times will make outlandish comments that send his public relations team into major damage control.

So, it was painful to listen in on the company's audio Webcast (registration required) announcing its $8.5 billion acquisition of BEA Systems.

The tightly scripted press conference, which had Ellison reading off a piece a paper, conjured up images of a tiger in a tight cage. His … Read more

We tend to avoid computer mods on Crave, simply because we could spend every waking moment collecting examples at the expense of anything else. But there's always the exception that's just too good to pass up, whether it be a bomb mod or perhaps one for the holidays. And, of course, anything to do with our hero, Batman.

Here, an enterprising young man named Kevin Core has created a masterpiece in his "Tumbler Batmobile PC" with an AMD Sempron chip, seven "activity LEDs" and a remote-controlled model of the famed vehicle purchased from Wal-Mart, … Read more