Common Paradox Tech Blog

There are no shortage of location-based services launching this week at SXSW in Austin, Texas. Many of them allow you to “check-in” places to let others know you are there. So how do you differentiate between then and decide which to use? Well, here’s one good way.

CauseWorld, is a free iPhone and Android app that lets you check-in places, but it has an added real-world bonus: big brands give money to charity when you do so. And this week at SXSW, CauseWorld is teaming up with TechCrunch to offer double point (which they aptly call “karma”) when you check in to one of over 50 venues around Austin (I’ll paste the full list at the bottom of the post), including the Austin Convention Center (where SXSW is held).

There are no shortage of location-based services launching this week at SXSW in Austin, Texas. Many of them allow you to “check-in” places to let others know you are there. So how do you differentiate between then and decide which to use? Well, here’s one good way.

CauseWorld, is a free iPhone and Android app that lets you check-in places, but it has an added real-world bonus: big brands give money to charity when you do so. And this week at SXSW, CauseWorld is teaming up with TechCrunch to offer double point (which they aptly call “karma”) when you check in to one of over 50 venues around Austin (I’ll paste the full list at the bottom of the post), including the Austin Convention Center (where SXSW is held).

If you head over to YouTube right now, you may find that the videos on the homepage are significantly better than usual. Well, maybe not — but at least they’ll have a strong bias for startups, Silicon Valley, and the tech industry in general. That’s because YouTube has invited us to be part of their ‘Curator of the Month’ program, which means we got to submit a playlist of our favorite videos, which will be shown on the homepage throughout the day. You can find our full list of choices right here.

To build the playlist, we polled the whole TechCrunch crew for their favorite clips, which range from JESS3’s State of the Internet to a Jeff Bezos talk on minimizing regret. There are a few oddballs in there too, like this bizarrely catchy song about Excavator Trucks (a favorite of TC co-editor Erick Schonfeld’s kids).

The web has no shortage of URL shorteners. In fact, there are so many that they’re all kind of blending together and I have no idea where to turn beyond the de-facto one Twitter uses, Bit.ly. But today, a new one has piqued my interest.

ShadyURL (made by Wonder-Tonic) is awesome because well, it creates shady URLs. Rather than focusing on making a URL as tiny as possible to spread on a site like Twitter, ShadyURL takes a regular web address and converts it into something that looks as sinister as possible.

As you may have noticed, TechCrunch was down for an extended period of time this afternoon. In case you haven’t read about why yet, it’s because WordPress.com suffered through some 110 minutes of downtime, as WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg has explained just now on the company’s blog.

TechCrunch is one of the millions of blogs hosted on WordPress.com (not to be confused with sites that run the WordPress software but are hosted elsewhere). All told, some 10.2 million blogs went down — wiping out some 5.5 million pageviews, WordPress estimates. This was their worst outage in 4 years.

Just like the rest of you, we’re still getting the hang of Google Buzz, the new FriendFeed-like service that Google integrated with Gmail two days ago. There are still plenty of kinks to work out, but Buzz has a lot of potential, and we’re doing our best to embrace it as quickly as possible — our crack developer Andy Brett even put together a Share to Buzz button before Google did. Now we’re establishing an official TechCrunch presence on Buzz, which you should follow if you’d like to receive the latest tech news from the convenience of your Gmail inbox, Buzz style. To try it out, head to this page and hit “Follow TechCrunch”.

You’ll be able to see a stream of our latest stories, and you’ll get the benefits of Buzz, including real-time commenting, Likes, and all the rest. We’ll also be getting a bit more creative with our Buzz feed once we’ve kicked the tires a bit.

There’s good news, and there’s good news in the latest leaked figures on Kindle ownership. While Amazon is a bit tight-lipped on the subject, with Jeff Bezos only admitting to “millions of people” owning Kindles, TechCrunch is reporting the number of those millions to be three.

Michael Arrington, who’s checked with this “amazingly accurate” sources, reports that the three million number was hit sometime in December, before the release of the global Kindle, and Amazon’s “free” Kindle offer.

Why double-good news? First, because this gives Amazon a distinct early market presence, which can have a snowball effect. (If all you see are Kindles, why by a Nook?) Second, because Amazon might well need this presence to weather the introduction Apple’s iPad into the market. For no other reason than its cachet value, the iPad will sell, and when the initial frenzy is over Kindle has a good chance of still being there.

Image Credit: Amazon

I’ve enjoyed using Google’s Chrome browser ever since it was introduced back in September 2008, albeit using other browsers alongside for different purposes. With the launch of Extensions for Chrome, the need to occasionally fire up Firefox or Opera has diminished, and I doubt I’ll be using any browser other than Chrome much in 2010. Just to drive home the point that Google Chrome Extensions, though still in beta, is a crucial feature for the fledgling desktop browser.

And now self-proclaimed TechCrunch addict and student at Illinois Institute of Technology Viggnesh Kandasamy has hashed together a basic extension designed to let Chrome users stay on top of what gets published on here. More reason to love Chrome Extensions (and more reason to love our fans).

The Mac community and TechCrunch love giveaways, but nothing beats the MacStories giveaway. MacStories is giving away over 450 licenses to Mac and iPhone applications, that total to over $10,000. Crazy, right?

The event, which is run by Federico Viticci, is called “The Christmas Apps Tree” and features interviews with designers, bloggers and developers, plus some cool guest posts and of course the big giveaway.

Another day, another Rackspace outage. The hosting company had a complete and total failure today that took down a number of big sites on the Internet, including ours. This has been happening all too often in recent months, including downtime just last month.

The failure apparently originated in the company’s Dallas-area server farm. But unlike previous times, this does not appear to be a power issue, the company says. Some other sites that are currently affected include: 37signals, Brizzly, Scoble’s blog, all of the sites hosted by Laughing Squid, Tumblr custom domains.