http://geniusimpatience.com/blog For those that can't wait Mon, 23 Aug 2010 02:47:23 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Chatroulette, the service that lets strangers meet over video, has been taken down. A message reads "The experiment #1 is over for now. Thanks for participating - Redesigned and updated version of the website will be launched tomorrow." We've also heard, but haven't confirmed, that Napster founder Shawn Fanning has broken ties with the company and is no longer advising founder Andrey Ternovskiy.]]> http://geniusimpatience.com/blog/2010/08/22/chatroulette-taken-down-get-ready-for-chatroulette-v-2/ The title of this post kind of says it all. As pointed out by blockzuck.com, you can block anyone on Facebook except CEO Mark Zuckerberg. If you try to do it (we did), you'll get a message saying "General Block failed error: Block failed." This kind of thing is funny, and adds a little personality to the site. But Facebook is getting way too big and culturally important for things like this to continue. In 2005 it was cool for Zuckerberg to have a business card that said "I'm CEO...Bitch." And we can forgive early Facebook engineers from perusing confidential user data in their leisure time. But it's time for this company to go through puberty and start acting more like a teenager than a fifth grader. If you want to block Zuckerberg, you should be able to block Zuckerberg. ]]> http://geniusimpatience.com/blog/2010/08/22/you-can-block-any-facebook-user-except-mark-zuckerberg/ updated our units, but Motorola just shut down the fun by sending…]]> http://geniusimpatience.com/blog/2010/08/22/motorola-doesn%e2%80%99t-like-your-leaked-droid-x-android-2-2-update/ Flash sales sites like Gilt Groupe have proven to not only be a popular e-commerce experience, but also a profitable business model. In fact, Gilt is on track to hit $450 million in revenue this year, with rumors of an IPO swirling. But while Gilt pioneered clothing and accessory-focused flash sales, One Kings Lane entered the space last year as one of the first sites to go after the home goods market. Launched in April of 2009, One Kings Lane runs brand- and theme-specific sales, at least two to three per day, five days a week. During the 72-hour window that items are on sale, members have can move to purchase limited quantity of hand-selected home goods products at significantly reduced prices. Luxury items range from Ralph Lauren home accessories, to Missoni towels to Frette sheets. ]]> http://geniusimpatience.com/blog/2010/08/22/one-kings-lane-q3-sales-up-500-percent-%e2%80%98we%e2%80%99re-not-afraid-of-gilt%e2%80%99/ http://geniusimpatience.com/blog/2010/08/22/politics-sex-crimes-and-wikileaks/ http://geniusimpatience.com/blog/2010/08/22/google-tests-search-that-delivers-results-as-you-type/ http://geniusimpatience.com/blog/2010/08/22/bumped-in-gives-you-an-excuse-to-chat-up-fellow-commuters/ This week's episode of Speaking Of... is the CEO and founder of deviantART. One of the greatest things about TechCrunch is that they celebrate and reward each writer's own voice rather than forcing every writer to sing from the same hymn-sheet. They encourage differences of opinion. While deviantART isn't Erick Schonfeld's cup of tea, I'm definitely a huge fan. I have five pictures up on my wall that I've purchased from the site, and they're absolutely beautiful. Deviant recently passed the milestone of their 100 millionth submission or "Deviation" as they're called. I think that's pretty cool, but what I think is even cooler, is that they just celebrated their 10th year of being in business. I don't know how old Angelo is, but I imagine that's about 1/3rd of his life. For a startup entrepreneur, that's a very long time.]]> http://geniusimpatience.com/blog/2010/08/22/%e2%80%9cstop-being-weak-%e2%80%9d-an-interview-with-angelo-sotira-ceo-of-deviantart-com-tctv/ Skype is one of the most important work and social tools I use. It's nearly perfect. Except that you people are using it to drive me crazy. It's made my list of "can't live without" products for the last five years, and more recently the screen sharing feature has made Skype even more important as a productivity tool. What I like about Skype is that you can use it for chat, or audio, or video. It's an extremely versatile tool and most people in the startup world use it as their primary instant messenger application. It's nowhere near as popular as Windows Live Messenger with 303 million worldwide monthly users, or Yahoo with 79 million. But it's in a solid fourth place with 18 million users per month, according to Comscore (just the IM feature). The real number is probably far higher than that.]]> http://geniusimpatience.com/blog/2010/08/22/skype-etiquette/ http://geniusimpatience.com/blog/2010/08/21/apple-applies-for-patent-to-kill-jailbroken-iphones/