Fly Or Die: Skullcandy ...

This shouldn’t be the first time you’ve seen Skullcandy’s Hesh headphones appear on TechCrunch , but I’ll forgive you if it is. As a refresh, I reviewed the cans last week and found that it really came down to like vs. love. They’re fine, but I can’t necessarily justify a $60-$70 purchase. John felt the same way when we sat down to chat about the Hesh headphones in this latest episode of Fly or Die. But it extends far beyond that. As John would say, “friends don’t let friends buy bad headphones.” There should really only be two choices: get yourself a cheap pair of earbuds that will last you six months, or if you really enjoy high quality sound, make a solid investment in a set of Grado or Sennheisers or “the upper echelon of headphones” and really enjoy yourself. Either way, mid-range headphones shouldn’t even exist in our book. They offer very little in sound quality and try to make up for it with style and brand cache, like Beats. Beats by Dr. Dre headphones certainly aren’t the best headphones on the market, but the following behind them is huge, based mainly on the fact that Dre’s name is behind them and they look cool. Beats is about status, and the very worst part is that Skullcandy doesn’t even have that going for it. We both give them a die.

First Look: Want To Kno...

A lot of you have come to depend on TechCrunch for your startup funding news — and hey, we’re happy to be the first place you come when you’re looking to see who’s raising money. Which is why this new site, WhoGotFunded.com , is both a blessing and a curse: On the one hand, it’ll be an awesome tool for those of us hoping to catch all the latest funding news first. On the other hand, it maybe makes my job a bit obsolete? Anyway, WhoGotFunded was first announced a few months ago, but it is now in private beta, and I’ve gotten a chance to check out the site. Touted as a one-stop shop for funding news, WhoGotFunded provides a list of the day’s funding announcements, which it gathers from Twitter, web news sites, and of course, the Securities and Exchange Commission. The site was founded by Digimind , which specializes in competitive intelligence, data mining, and social media monitoring. It expects to publish about 100 to 150 new funding deals a day, based on more than 2 million news stories that it analyzes every day. While it gathers information through text-mining technologies, WhoGotFunded also has what it calls a “human curation element” and hopes to open up to the community (a la Wikipedia) as a way to reduce the number of errors or false positives that might appear. It also shows detailed information about where the funding news appeared so that users can follow up and read more: So who’s the target audience? Well, people like me, who are all about knowing all the latest funding news as part of their job. It’s also targeted at investors who want to keep abreast of the market. To that end, it’s already signed up about 2,000 subscribers already, including many employees from some top VC firms in the U.S. and Europe. Once it comes out of beta, WhoGotFunded will offer tailored email alerts to let users know when a particular company closes funding, or when financing deals happen in a specific region or industry. While there’s always the opportunity to create value-added features on top of the platform, which many people would likely pay for, there are no plans for monetization right now — instead, Digimind is going to hold off until it sees what kind of reaction it receives from users.

PayPal Gets Its Own Sha...

The reorganizing and downsizing at Yahoo — and possibly the executive scandal at the very top of the pyramid — are leading to a wave of talent departures at the company: the latest in that story is that Douglas Crockford, a trailblazing Java guru most recently at Yahoo, is joining eBay’s payment giant PayPal. The news was announced by Bill Scott , PayPal’s senior director of UI engineering, on his own blog, yesterday. Scott himself had also worked at Yahoo years ago and joined PayPal six months ago from Netflix. “Welcome aboard Doug! Stoked to be working with you again ,” Scott yesterday. (It was a note I first saw via  HackerNews .) The news signifies the Yahoo story coming full circle in way: Yahoo’s CEO Scott Thompson, currently the subject of so much scrutiny over his past experience, himself comes from PayPal and has hired other executives away from his former employer in his strategy to rebuild the struggling internet giant. ( Sam Schrauger  coming on board in April to lead its new consumer commerce unit is one of the latest.) The departure is also ironic, given how Yahoo’s recovery should rest on the talent that it has working there. Looking ahead, the hiring raises some questions of what new products and services we might expect next from PayPal — with a focus potentially in three key areas where Java is used: featurephones, Android and web interfaces. So far there is little information on what he will be doing. “Part of a lot of changes happening at PayPal. Working hard to get the inside changes out to our customers,” Scott wrote of Crockford’s hire on Twitter earlier. Crockford, according to Wikipedia (he doesn’t do LinkedIn , didn’t like total strangers using it to reach out to him), was most recently a senior JavaScript architect at Yahoo. He has played a significant role in the development in Java-based technologies. These have included the development of JavaScript and related tools and the JSON  data format, as well as Yahoo’s User Interface Library. In the past he also worked at Atari, LucasFilm and Paramount.

uTest’s AppGrader Score...

uTest , a company known for providing a variety of testing solutions for desktop, web and mobile, is launching a new solution designed to grade mobile apps’ performance under real-world conditions, and then compare the app’s rating with that of its competition. The solution, for obvious reasons (i.e., desperate need ) is arriving first on Android, with an iOS version to follow soon. The app testing process takes just a few minutes, the company claims, and will then return a report grading the app on a scale of 1 to 100. In addition to the score, the report also details any issues discovered during the app download, installation and basic usage. To provide more context, the AppGrader report, as it’s called, also compares the app’s grade to those of the most popular applications in the Android Market Google Play store that are found in the same app store category. The system isn’t designed to replace the testing and QA work developers already do, of course, but is meant to function as more of a final step that can give more insight on how the app will run when actually put into the hands of users. Explains uTest CMO Matt Johnson, this “in-the-wild testing provides ‘last mile’ assurance that the apps work on real devices, under real-world conditions, in a wide variety of locations,” he says. However, there’s no reason why developers couldn’t continue to run AppGrader after the app’s launch, if need be, or as they continue to push out minor updates and tweaks to the app in question. To use the service, developers just upload the Android APK file to get started, and AppGrader will send out an email notification within a few minutes after the testing is complete. For apps that crash, developers will also be given the device-specific crash log for additional diagnostic details. For now, the service tests the apps on top Android devices, like the Samsung Galaxy Nexus/Samsung Galaxy S II, Google’s Nexus S, LG Nitro HD, Samsung Galaxy Tab, HTC Thunderbolt, Sony Ericson Xperia, Motorola Droid X2 and the T-Mobile My Touch. Apps are also tested on U.S. carriers AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint. Although all mobile developers could benefit from more testing tools, there’s more of need to address the Android developer base first. On Android, developers don’t just have to deal with an incredible number of device types in the wild, they’re also constantly challenged by OS fragmentation, too. According to Google’s own statistics , only 4.9% of users are running the latest version of Android (Ice Cream Sandwich), 3.3% are stuck on the version just prior (Honeycomb) while 64.4% are on Gingerbread, which was first released back in December 2010. The remaining 27.4% are running versions that are even older, if you can believe it. To put this in perspective, iOS users update to the latest version remarkably fast. (One report shows 38% hit iOS 5 within 5 days of its release, for example). It’s not entirely fair to make judgements about the users on either platform, however – iOS users have access to upgrades, while Android users, either due to carrier or OEM restrictions, often do not. But it does showcase the greater challenges that Android developers have to deal with when it comes to building apps for a number of handsets and software versions. uTest’s AppGrader is available now, from here .  The service is free, as the company expects it might entice users to try out the company’s other mobile testing products.

Waze Makes Its First St...

The makers of traffic app  Waze  are the latest company wanting to go beyond the phone and integrate more deeply with car hardware. It’s a natural move — if you use Waze, you use it when you’re driving. However, the whole dealmaking and integration process with automakers is long and complicated, so as a first step, Waze is looking at the “aftermarket” of devices that people can add to their cars. And it’s starting with  Pioneer’s AppRadio . We wrote about AppRadio in more detail last year, but basically, when you connect your Android or iOS phone to the radio, a limited set of your apps will be accessible through the radio touchscreen. Now that set of AppRadio-enabled apps includes Waze, at least if you’ve got the Android version. (AppRadio integration is coming for Waze’s iOS app too.) VP Community Geographer DiAnn Eisnor says Waze’s AppRadio functionality is essentially the same as the smartphone app’s — you can still get directions, look at real-time traffic data, and also let Waze collect data as you drive. However, the interface has been tweaked. For example, instead of simply freezing the keyboard when you’re driving ( Waze is big on hands-free interaction ), the AppRadio display makes the keyboard disappear altogether. Eisnor also says that real connected car integration is coming soon, perhaps as early as this fall. From her perspective, the exciting thing is the ability to tap into all of the car’s other sensors, so it’s not just tracking where you are and how fast you’re going. “This is milestone number one,” she says. Here’s the latest AppRadio ad, where you can see brief glimpses of the Waze integration. (If you don’t want to watch the whole thing, or you miss the Waze cameos, they start at 0:15 and 0:44.)