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Filed under: Business, Web services

Local business finder RedBeacon wins TechCrunch50

Whether you love TechCrunch or hate it, you must admit that the TechCrunch50 conference does a decent job of generating exposure for startups. I had never heard of this year's winner, RedBeacon, before TechCrunch50, and I have no doubt that the publicity the company gets from the event will be at least as valuable as the $50,000 prize. RedBeacon is a local business finder that TechCrunch describes as comparable to OpenTable, but for booking services instead of making dinner reservations. You can enter the type of service you want, and it will give you a list of recommendations to browse, with reviews, hours and even how each business is rated on Yelp.

Like last year's winner, Yammer (a Twitter for businesses), RedBeacon is best described by comparing it to an existing product. At least this year's finalists, while derivative, seem like they fill important gaps in our online lives. Threadsy aggregates incoming messages from all your social networks. AnyClip attempts to beat YouTube and Hulu at showing you the specific movie scene you're looking for (although I have no idea how they're going to get that past Hollywood lawyers). Although it's not the most glamorous of the bunch, my vote would go to CitySourced, a mobile app for photographing and reporting issues like potholes to your city government. Not only does it feel like the freshest concept out of the final four, it also might do some civic good.

Which startup should have won TechCrunch50?


Filed under: Business, News

Netflix Prize Contest ends after nearly three years


The Netflix Prize Contest, a million-dollar challenge to improve the accuracy of the Netflix recommendation algorithm by 10%, has finally ended after close to three years. One team, BellKor's Pragmatic Chaos, claimed victory by showing a result of better than 10%, which kicked off a 30-day period where other teams would have a chance to top the leading score and win the million. That period has now ended, with another team, The Ensemble, apparently beating BellKor's Pragmatic Chaos by a fraction of a percentage point.

According to the leaderboard, the Ensemble submitted its potential winning entry just 20 minutes after BellKor's Pragmatic Chaos made its final test. The score is 10.10% for Ensemble and 10.09% for BKPC, but the results are now going to judges for testing and verification before the prize is awarded. As a condition of the contest, the teams agree to reveal their algorithms and make them available for Netflix to use in improving its recommendation system.

Filed under: Hardware, Windows, Macintosh, Apple, Microsoft

Windows XP boots on Intel Mac for realz

Windows XP on Intel Mac

You read that right. Colin Nederkoorn, the guy who's had $13,000 burning a hole in his pocket has handed the cash over to narf2006, having verified that his solution to getting Windows XP to dual-boot on an Intel Mac is authentic. Nederkoorn says that the solution will be posted shortly and that all further donations will go "into an account to sustain the open source project that will be launched with the initial solution." The dual-boot solution reportedly works on 17" and 20" iMacs, Mac Minis, and MacBook Pros.

Featured Time Waster

The World's Hardest Game 2.0 - Time Waster

So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do. Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game. The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...

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