If Apple’s sat back and let the iPhone hacking community do its thing in peace (well, relative peace) so far , this little gem just might be what the doctor ordered to stir up the crap. Crackulous — available now in beta form through Cydia — claims to be able to strip the protection off most apps downloaded from the App Store, meaning that just a single user needs to take the plunge and buy a target app once to get it busted and into free circulation. You need a jailbroken iPhone to get Crackulous loaded, naturally — you’ll see Apple make a Windows Mobile-powered device before you’ll see Crackulous in the App Store — but seeing how PwnageTool is dead simple to use, this puts most users just a couple graphical tools away from foolproof piracy and the golden opportunity to take a few hard-earned bucks out of a programmer’s pocket. [Via Funky Space Monkey ] Filed under: Cellphones , Handhelds Crackulous released, promises to bust iPhone app protection scheme originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 02 Feb 2009 01:55:00 EST.

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Crackulous released, promises to bust iPhone app protection scheme

Here’s the thing about batteries: they store energy. Lots of it. Channeled correctly, that energy does really awesome things for us — but channeled chaotically, and… well, you know where this is going, don’t you?

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Exploding cellphone kills Chinese man

By Evan Ackerman Designed by Ettore Cimini of Lumina Italia, the Ra desk lamp takes the prize for piece of furniture my pet snake would most like to have sex with. It’s sexy enough to get me pretty turned on as well, with those two sinuous and rather dangerous looking arms.

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Lumina Italia Ra Desk Lamp

YouTube wasn’t the only Internet company making a splash at the World Economic Forum at Davos this last week. Facebook’s Randi Zuckerberg was busy bringing a dose of reality into the elite discussion sessions.

Zuckerberg arranged for Facebook polls to be conducted during twelve key sessions. In one poll, during a session called Advice to the US President on Competitiveness, Facebook users were asked if the stimulus package is on target. 120,000 responses were recorded in twenty minutes. 59% of respondents said “no,” 15% said “yes” and 26% said unsure.

The poll results were displayed prominently above the panelists, including Rupert Murdoch (CEO News Corp.), Ellen Kullman (CEO DuPont), Duncan Niederauer (CEO NYSE Euronext), David Rubenstein (Managing Director, Carlyle Group) and Ronald Williams (CEO Aetna). The panelists largely approved of the stimulus package in their comments before the poll results came in. Facebook users obviously disagreed (the entire session is embedded below).

World Economic Forum officials I spoke with yesterday were delighted with the polls, clearly excited that they could bring in direct, real time feedback to the sessions.

Facebook polls can no longer be created by users, but Facebook continues to use the product directly. Perhaps their experience at Davos will convince them to re-open the product.

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Facebook Polls Bring Reality To Davos Elite

By Evan Ackerman As you may or may not have heard, that frankly spectacular 1,500 megapixel image of President Obama’s inauguration was taken with little more than a Canon PowerShot G10, a 15 megapixel compact digicam with a 5x zoom that costs all of $260 brand new. The little more that it was taken with was the GigaPan Epic Imager mount. The GigaPan is a robotic hand of sorts that completely automates the creation of one gigantic panoramic image out of a bunch of smaller images, a process which requires a precise hand and a lot of patience (which the GigaPan has in spades)

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GigaPan Epic Imager Bumps Your Compact Digicam To 1500 Megapixels

Whoa, vaquero — calm your jets. This is just a projection , which may or may not prove to be indicative of reality. That said, there’s still quite a lot here to discuss, particularly since we’ve been hearing so much hubbub over the supposed explosion of digital distribution . Media Control GfK International has forecast that sales of Blu-ray Discs will increase some 150 percent to $2.9 billion, up from $1.1 billion in 2008

Excerpt from:
Digital distribution not expected to rule packaged media anytime soon

The Super Bowl is perhaps the one television event where people actually look forward to the ads because so much effort is put into each one. And every year, there are a handful of standouts. You can watch the ads plenty of places online, including on Hulu. You can even watch Hulu’s own Super Bowl ad on Hulu, which oddly enough is preceded by a regular Web video ad. That just seems wrong to me on so many levels, especially since Hulu itself (which is partly owned by NBC) probably didn’t have to pay for the spot

I guess you could argue that some of these commercials are now entertainment in their own right, and thus deserve their own mini-commercials. The Hulu spot with Alec Baldwin (above) is certainly one of the better ones. He delivers the line:

They say TV will rot your brain. That’s absurd. TV only softens the brain, like a ripe banana. To take it all the way, we’ve created Hulu.

There were also lots of ads that poked fun at the economic downturn, including an ETrade ad with talking babies and a Cash4Gold.com ad starring Ed McMahon and and MC Hammer. To get people to come into its restaurants, Denny’s decided to offer free breakfast to everyone in America on Tuesday. But my favorite is this one from Monster.com which asks, Need Another Job?

CareerBuilder hit the same theme, but wasn’t quite as funny. In fact, CareerBuilder’s ad which repeatedly shows a woman miserable with her job screaming in her car, is downright depressing.

Then, of course, the trailer to the new Star Trek movie debuted as well, which I will embed below just because I know you will watch it (the trailer for Transformers 2 will also be popular).

Which was your favorite Super Bowl ad, and why?

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

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Hulu’s Super Bowl Ad Comes With An Ad

Didn’t take three seconds out of your immensely busy schedule to enter your name to win an 8GB Cowon S9 portable media player? Fret not, as we’re reminding you to do so right this moment.

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Reminder: Cowon S9 giveaway ends tomorrow!

Continuing my series of interviews with interesting personalities at the World Economic Forum at Davos: Here’s a 6 minute talk with Etsy founder Robert Kalin on the state of his four year old business. Robert Scoble helps with the interview.

28 year old Kalin, who coincidentally looks a lot like Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, talks about how he’s grown the person-to-person ecommerce business despite competing directly with eBay. Etsy focuses on hand made items, and has a rabidly passionate community of buyers and sellers (also, 97% of Etsy users are women). Kalin also eats his own dog food – most of his clothing was purchased from the site, he says in the interview.

$100 million worth of goods were sold on Etsy in 2008. The company is generating over $1 million/month in revenue, Kalin told me.

We first covered Etsy in late 2005. Since then the company has raised over $30 million in financing, and counts Jim Breyer as a board member (he’s also on the board of Walmart, Facebook and Marvel).

The full transcript is below:

Michael Arrington: All right. So we have cornered Robert Kalin, the founder of Etsy and Robert Scoble just won’t stop calling me [indechiperable]

Robert Scoble: No, I won’t. [laughs]

Michael: And we are officially in the hallway, which means we can be on record, which is great. I wanted to talk to you a little bit about Etsy, because I’ve been actually writing about the company since I think 2005.

Robert Kalin: Yep, you were the very …

Michael: We never met and you had a lot of success since then.

Robert K: Yeah, you were the very first person to write about it on the blog.

Michael: When was that? When did you launch?

Robert K: I launched in June of 2005.

Michael: How old were you then? 16?

Robert K: I was 20, actually. I age in two year increments. [laughs] I have a portrait in the attic that ages for me.

Michael: So you were 20 years old…

Robert K: No, no, no, I was 25 and I launched it and so I’m 28 now.

Michael: OK and what is Etsy?

Robert K: Etsy, the standard pitch, online marketplace for handmade goods. There’s also pictures and supplies so it’s just basically a P2P marketplace. It’s really about the stories that the items tell that you buy. So…

Michael: Handmade goods. How big is the market for handmade goods?

Robert K: It was about $100 million last year.

Michael: How much of that did you have?

Robert K: I mean, that’s just on Etsy.

Robert S: So, handmade goods period if you think back?

Michael: $100 million worth of goods were sold on Etsy in 2008.

Robert K: A little bit less than that, but yep. So that’s the general size… Again a lot of people…

Michael: What’s the most popular thing that gets bought?

Robert K: My favorite categories are art and music but the most popular stuff on the site, because it’s 97% women– the user base, jewelry is the number one selling category. And behind that there is also a really vibrant P2P side of it.

Michael: Is it all really crappy handmade jewelry?

Robert K: Oh, come on, crappy and handmade are in my mind oxymoronic because any class of goods, the most expensive stuff …

Robert S: I’m learning a great interviewing technique here, just slam the interviewee [laughs]

Robert K: It’s all handmade. Right, like suits. We’re the most expensive suits? Handmade suits.

Michael: So just because it’s handmade jewelry it’s nice?

Robert K: No, anyone… you can’t make these generalizations across the whole market.

Michael: Is it just like braided beads and like is it silver…

Robert K: Oh, no. there is very, very fancy metal smithing going on.

Michael: Huh. Have you ever bought anything on the site?

Robert K: [laughs] Have I ever bought anything on the site?

Michael: You’ve never bought anything on Etsy, have you?

Robert K: I’ve bought most of what I own. I am actually trying to curate my entire life pretty much with handmade stuff. No, I just bought…

Michael: Really?

Robert K: One of the things I was waiting for …

Michael: Is everything you’re wearing bought on Etsy today? Anything you’re wearing?

Robert K: A lot of it is. I mean, the shirt, the undershirt…

Michael: The shirt?

Robert K: The stuff you can’t see, the underwear…

Michael: The jacket?

Robert K: Ah, thrift store.

Michael: OK.

Robert K: But you know, similar aesthetic. No, when I started Etsy I was waiting for a luthier to show up because I wanted to buy a guitar on it. So lo and behold about a year after I started the site, a guy named Armor Guitars, James in Springfield, an hour above national in Tennessee– and actually we have a feature called “Alchemy” where you can specifically request people to make things for you. So I requested that he make me a guitar. I went down and visited him while he was making the guitar. But the scope of what is handmade is huge, I think.

And especially in times like this. We just had record month, after record month, after record month. Even when the economy is doing what it is doing…

Michael: What are you doing now, a million a month you said in gross merchandise sales?

Robert K: Oh no, GMS per month now is…

Michael: I’m sorry, a million a month just in fees.

Robert K: Right, total revenue, because we have three different revenue sources. We don’t disclose the exact amount, but yes.

Michael: What are those revenue sources?

Robert K: There’s 20 cent listing fee, a 3.5% sales fee and then we run our own in-house advertising program called the Showcase. So those three things constitute our total revenue stream.

Michael: OK. And you have raised you said $35 million?

Robert K: Yeah, we had angel money from Caterina and Stewart and actually Joshua Schacter from del.icio.us as well.

Michael: The founders of Flickr and Joshua Schachter.

Robert K: It was kind of like right after they sold their companies, which was really painful to me. I invested in Etsy, and then the first VC round after that was led by Union Square Ventures with Fred Wilson joining the board. And then once… you know, I always wanted to do things in stages. So once we really built a solid business off that I went to kind of the standard [indecipherable], did that whole show out there and ended up going with Accel with Jim Breyer and joining the board.

Michael: So Jim Breyer is also on the board of what? Marvel?

Robert K: Wal-Mart and…

Michael: Wal-Mart and…

Robert K: FaceBook …

Michael: FaceBook. So you’re in good company there.

Robert K: Yeah, I mean, it’s interesting because he speaks in the “we” as so many different companies.

Michael: Does he ever mistakenly call you Mark? There is a resemblance. [laughs]

Robert S: Yeah, I had to look over the table twice. Haha.

Robert K: I think he’s a little bit more of a keen observer than that, so no, he’s never gotten us confused. That’s for sure.

Michael: So what does eBay think about a this whole thing?

Robert K: We have pretty friendly relations with them. Even early on, I’ve been asking them for advice and some of the people say that a lot of the spirit that eBay had early on they see really evident in what Etsy is doing now.

Michael: How many of your 60 employees used to work at eBay?

Robert K: I don’t think any. No, this is the other benefit of being an east coast company is that we’re hiring from a completely different talent pool. We actually did. We had one. A guy who came in as V.P. of Engineering. And he lasted three months and then said he was going back to work at a big company. He tried…

Michael: He couldn’t take your autocratic management style?

Robert K: Couldn’t take the non-autocratic style of getting things done I guess. It’s been interesting to see how the culture shifts as you grow with more people as well.

Michael: What’s the average transaction size on the site?

Robert K: $15 and people buy two things on average at once, so about $30 a checkout.

Michael: They buy two crappy pieces of jewelry at one time?

Robert K: Oh, come on Mr. Arrington.

Michael: No, honestly I haven’t been on the site since I wrote about it the last time and I’m going to go on it in a second.

Robert K: What do you like to buy? What do you value in life? Fine cheeses? Fine suits? Fine wines? Cars? Women?

Michael: I’m not that much of a material guy. I value friendship. Can I buy friendship on the site?

Robert K: Yes, that’s a big part of shopping on Etsy. You get to… [laughter]

[Cross talk]

Robert S: How much of the $15, how much do you get to keep?

Robert K: There’s a 3.5% sales fee on the site. So our goal there is to keep it low, especially below eBay because logically we’re competing with them, so we undersell them in price point. But if you search for jewelry on Etsy now, there’s about ten times as much jewelry on Etsy as there is on eBay. So the volume…

Robert S: My ex-wife was an eBay power seller and she hates eBay. She’s moved her jewelry store, actually she sells jewelry and it’s pretty nice jewelry. She’s moved it off of eBay. There’s a whole trend going on out there in your favor.

Michael: Hey, hey, this is my interview.

Robert S: Why?

Michael: Because I have the camera. [laughter]

Robert S: Well that doesn’t matter. [laughter]

Michael: Robert, thanks very much for your time. I appreciate it, except for that one thing that we’ll cut out and people won’t have any idea what I was just talking about.

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Davos Interviews: Etsy Founder Robert Kalin

Remember all those Clevo laptops revealed last month? While we’re expecting more information at CeBIT 2009 , those crazy Canadians at Eurocom have gone ahead and spilled the beans on the 17-inch D900F. As conjectured, the 11.9-pound behemoth’s packing an equally-mighty Intel Core i7 processor in 2.66, 2.93 and 3.2GHz varieties. It’s also got three 500GB hard drives totaling 1.5TB of space, 8GB DDR3 RAM, an NVIDIA G280 GPU, and a Blu-ray burner

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Eurocom lays claim to Core i7-equipped Clevo D900F