OnLive, the ambitious games-on-demand service that is in beta testing now, went through a bit of a media tempest today.

Blogger Ryan Shrout of PC Perspective managed to get a password to test the company’s games on demand service. And it turned out to be a bad experience. Shrout wrote about it and a number of sites piled on, saying that the OnLive service clearly didn’t live up to its billing. Ars Technica wrote, “Is anyone surprised?” Only one thing was that the test that Shrout conducted wasn’t fair. The company says he was too far away from its servers to do a good test.

The service is supposed to enable you to play high-end games on a low-end computer. It does so by doing the heavy duty processing in a data center, much the way other cloud applications work. Then it sends video over a broadband connection to display animations on a gamer’s computer. If all works fine, then the video and game play should be smooth, much like playing a game on a console or a high-end PC. (more…)

Crispy Gamer, a game media company that raised $8.25 million, self-destructed today. The company’s board of directors fired all of the online game site’s editorial staff. Then its chief executive quit in protest, according to the game new site Joystiq.

Just a month ago, Crispy Gamer bought GamerDNA, a social networking service for gamers, to increase engagement with its community. But now the company has imploded. Staffers affected include writers Kyle Orland, Scott Jones, John Teti, Evan Narcisse, James Fudge, Ryan Kuo, Managing Editor Elise Vogel, and Chief Marketing Officer Anne Mischler. CEO Chris Helder quit; and co-founder John Keefer had left earlier (back in September) for Game Politics. (more…)

Everyone is awaiting Apple’s tablet device. Some people (like me) won’t shut up about it. Others (like Paul) won’t shut up about shutting up about it. And while no one is exactly certain what its main use will be, there are no shortage of signs pointing to a definite role as a new way to consume written media. And several old-school publishers seem to be tripping over themselves to get on board the device as print media continues to wither. Personally, I’m excited about the possibility of a resurgence of long-form journalism. And while I’m skeptical as to just how well any device can change our growing collective desire for faster content over better content, I hold out hope because of the way I currently use my Amazon Kindle.

The Kindle, while not the Apple Tablet, is an excellent device for doing one thing: reading. And when matched with the super-fast bookmarking service Instapaper, it’s perhaps the ultimate long-form article reader. And an update this week made it ever better.

On Monday, Instapaper creator Marco Arment announced that he had significantly upgraded Instapaper’s support for the Kindle. This update made articles saved to Instapaper and transfered over to the Kindle (either wirelessly or by USB-sync) more Kindle-like, which is to say, formatted in a way more much like periodicals are when bought on the device itself. That means that you can now use the Kindle’s buttons to more easily navigate through Instapaper articles you’ve saved to read on the device. (more…)

Chomp, which is like a Yelp for iPhone apps, took a big bite out of iTunes app store in its first week, accumulating 110,000 reviews through its iPhone app since launching last Monday.

Chomp lets you make simple app recommendations and then studies your tastes to help you find other ones. The problem with the existing app store is that there are more than 100,000 different apps, making it overwhelming to find useful ones that fit your needs. Chomp makes the review process fairly lightweight — you “like” and “dislike” apps with heart and broken heart icons and you can add tiny 60-character long reviews. For the 111,000 number, Chomp counted the like and dislike votes as reviews, and declined to disclose its actual download numbers.

The four-person team behind Chomp got it into the top 25 free apps for social networking in the iTunes store, which helped propel more downloads throughout the rest of the week. CEO Ben Keighran said the company relied on press and “organic growth” to nudge the app into the top 25 list, not on advertising. Getting Internet personalities like Digg founder Kevin Rose and iJustine also helped, he mentioned.

The company has raised $565,000 in angel funding from Ron Con (more…)

Apple’s tablet has provided no shortage of rumors. Everything from design specs to pricing have flooded the internet from various media outlets and sources. As the mysterious January 27 “special event” comes closer, many wonder if the rumors of will finally be answered. To gain a better perspective on the scope of rumors, we’ve put together a snapshot below of the most recent speculations.

I can’t think of anything more that defines a product like its name. With Apple’s tablet, several speculations have surfaced on just what this mystical device will be called. The Street’s Scott Moritz spotlights Apple’s past attempt at an “e-notepad” dubbed The Newton and subsequently refers to the new Apple table as The Newton II. Several more popular names to surface have been the “iSlate” and the “iPad” – derived from the tablet’s generally assumed appearance as a flat touchscreen device.

Many discussions have surfaced around the design of Apple’s tablet, which will have a major effect on how the tablet is used by consumers. Today, Apple Insider’s Kasper Jade highlighted some speculation from several sources that the tablet will in fact have similar features to the original iPhone apart from a larger screen, including an aluminum shell and identical buttons. A rendering provided by a Flickr user Fotoboer.nl shows what the sources say a close match to the actual tablet, except the missing home button and volume toggle. (more…)

App discovery is a problem on smartphones. The way I find apps is from friends? recommendations. Sometimes I’ll peruse the list of top downloads or search for something that sounds useful. But sometimes I don?t know what I want, or could never dream of my phone having a function that an app allows.

Take ShopSavvy, for example, available in the Apple AppStore and Android Market. When you’re out shopping, ShopSavvy lets you scan a barcode with your phone to finds prices on the same item in other local stores or on the web. A friend of mine got a head massager for Christmas. I wanted to know where to find one. A quick search with ShopSavvy led me to a $3.99 product on Amazon.com. This’s something I would never have dreamed my phone could do. And I only found out about it by word of mouth.

But what about when you’re the most app savvy of your friends? How do you discover new apps for your phone? Do you riffle though the AppStore or Android Market and take on an app at a time, looking for the next mobile godsend? The best way to find new apps is to use one of the 20 or so directories out there that try to make sense of the thousands of apps. I’ve thumbed through these directories over the last week. Here are my top picks: (more…)

Google posted better-than-expected results today as it continued to experience strong growth in its core search business, thanks to a stronger-than-expected holiday shopping season.

Revenues for the fourth quarter were $6.67 billion, up 17 percent from a year ago. Earnings were $1.97 billion, up from $348 million a year earlier. Earnings per share were $6.13, up from $1.21 a year earlier. Non-GAAP earnings per share were $6.79, up from $5.10 a year ago. Analysts expected non-GAAP earnings of $6.48 a share for the fourth quarter, according to Thomson Reuters. Revenue was expected to be $4.92 billion.

Those results should cheer investors. eBay reported solid earnings yesterday, and comScore said that online holiday sales were up 5 percent compared to a year ago. comScore said that Google had 65.7 percent of the U.S. search market share in December, up from 65.5 percent in November. (more…)

Social media dashboard Seesmic launched its new social media dashboard, Look, at an event today in New York City. We already wrote about Look, but at today’s event we learned new details on partnerships with Red Bull, Kodak, and the Huffington Post partnering to create customized content channels featured in Look.

Seesmic might have found a potentially lucrative business model by selling interactive advertising space to brand marketers.

?Realtime is the new primetime,? social marketing firm Edelman Digital’s director of insights Steve Rubel remarked in his keynote.

Look is an attempt to simplify social media consumption for the masses, creating a viewing environment appealing to advertisers and content creators. As content creation grows at staggering rates, Seesmic is attempting to make Look both a social media dashboard and aggregator. (more…)

Myfab, which sells furniture on-demand online, will be launching a US version of its site on February 1. The site already exists in France, where it was first launched in April 2008, Germany, Belgium, and Luxembourg. The US site will initially offer shipping only to California, with the 48 contiguous states added in the 4-6 weeks after the soft launch. In anticipation of the launch, the Shanghai, China company opened a US office in San Francisco in November.

Myfab sources high end furniture directly from the factories in China that supply furniture to high-end European retailers. The site allows users to vote on designs and will produce the most popular ones on demand, eliminating inventory, transportation, showroom, and catalog costs, resulting in Myfab’s prices being 50 to 80% lower than comparable retail prices. (more…)

Today, Legal River and General Counsel, P.C. released a Terms of Service Generator and a Privacy Policy Generator for startups and small businesses.

Legal River’s tools are meant to keep costs low for entrepreneurs as they set up a business; typical terms of service documents can otherwise cost thousands of dollars. An entrepreneur only needs to fill in some basic information, such as the name of the company, information the company receives from a customer (for the privacy policy), and business structure (for the terms of service). The appropriate document is returned to the user online almost immediately, along with a version in HTML code, and the relevant policy is also emailed to the email address provided. Both tools are hosted on Legal River?s site and were developed by General Counsel, P.C. (more…)