Can’t afford a ticket to China to go visit the Forbidden City? Well, now all you need is your computer. IBM, which is a big believer in virtual worlds, and China’s Palace Museum have created an exact replica of the 178-acre Forbidden City. After working meticulously for three years to recreate every building and thousands of major artifacts, the virtual Forbidden City is now available for download (for Windows, Mac, or Linux). It’s free, although, I warn you the Mac version, at least, is a massive 275MB file.

Once inside, you can choose an avatar, dress him or her up in Qing Dynasty-era robes, take virtual tours, play Go with computer-controlled characters, call up maps, explore buildings and objects that allow you to click for deeper information. The virtual world was built on a gaming platform from Garage Games called Torque. ( I guess OpenSim wasn’t good enough. No word on whether it will be interoperable with Second Life).

Here is a one-month stock chart comparing Apple (down 40 percent), Google (down 20 percent), Yahoo (ditto), and Microsoft (down about 10 percent). Microsoft is holding up best. If Yahoo keeps diving, what next?

Discuss among yourselves.Source:TechCrunch

The current market gyrations have investors running everywhere seeking advice. What better time to launch a newswire culled from the latest posts of financial bloggers? That’s the idea behind Wikinvest Wire, which has just been launched by the user-edited investment site Wikinvest. Except that it is not really a newswire in the traditional sense. It is more like a contextual recommendation system for the blogs invited to participate.

Wikinvest Wire is starting off with 100 financial blogs, including Confused Capitalist, Money Morning, College Analysts, The Mess That Greenspan Made, Financial Armageddon, and Old School Value. All told the blogs attract about one million unique visitors a month. Wikinvest is also in the process of syndicating the Wikinvest Wire to mainstream media sites, where links will appear on their stock pages. Wikinvest Wire is invite-only, but interested bloggers can apply.

The Wire will exist primarily on the participating blogs themselves, on Wikinvest topic pages, and on the yet-to-be-named media sites. For each of the 100 financial blogs, at the end of each post three links will appear to posts from other blogs in the network discussing the same stock or financial topic (such as “Google (GOOG),” “bailout,” or “credit default swaps”). The contextual links will also appear on relevant pages on Wikinvest and other stock and financial sites. (See screenshot). In this sense, it is similar to contextual recommendation systems like Sphere, OutBrain, or BlogRovr, which all append recommended links at the end of blog posts or news articles using a variety of methods.

But today, based on the calls I’ve received from CNET and the San Jose Mercury News, we’ve actually been sued. Earthcomber, the holder of a very shaky mobile patent, first sued Loopt last week, and yesterday added us in an amended complaint. They didn’t even bother with making nasty threats before they filed the complaint. They just sent it into the court and started making calls to the press.Source:TechCrunch

Our co-editor Erick Schonfeld had the chance yesterday to discuss the significance of MySpace Music and free, ad-supported music in general on WYNC’s Soundcheck, a program produced daily by New York Public Radio.

He was joined by Farhad Manjoo, a columnist for Slate, who took issue in particular with MySpace Music’s user interface. Erick argued that, regardless of its execution, the service represents a step in the right direction and marks an important shift toward ad-supported streaming. The music industries are watching this experiment, and if it turns out well, they will likely extend the free streaming model to other services.

Listen below.Source:TechCrunch

Want to follow every Tweet, blog post, YouTube video and Flickr photo put out by the Obama or McCain camps? Now you can follow the campaigns in a handy Dipity Election Center timeline. Using its latest Dipity 2.0 timeline mashup, the Election Center places each entry on a timeline that you can scroll through. Click on an entry, and a box opens to show you more detailed information. You can also leave a comment.

Each timeline can be embedded as a widget anywhere on the Web. And you can see everyone’s comments from any widget. The idea is that Obama supporters will put the Obama widget on their MySpace page or blog and that McCain supporters will do the same on theirs. I’ve embedded both widgets below. You can see by the larger number of entries for the Obama campaign that it is making better use of social media to get its message out. (At least that was the case when I looked at the timelines—see screenshot).

A tipster informed us this morning that Twitter’s search engine (formerly known as Summize before it was acquired this summer) has been showing tweets in its results that don’t actually exist on Twitter itself.

These “phantom” tweets all contain the message “What a day “What a day Oct” or simply “what a day TechCrunch

Poptent, a startup that crowdsources advertising to the public, has just launched in public beta. The site allows advertisers and brands to post requests for an ad, which are then produced and submitted by the pool of small studios and videographers that make up the site’s members. Poptent is a sister site to XLNTads (also launching today), which focuses more on the brand marketers rather than video creators.

Poptent CEO Neil Perry says that while Poptent is designed to encourage submissions from its thousands of members, it isn’t going for the “YouTube crowd”. Instead, it’s focused on catering to small but professional teams capable of producing TV-quality ads.
Source:TechCrunch

No, Microsoft is not getting into the car-wash business. But it is releasing “Touchless,” multitouch software from Microsoft Office Labs that uses a regular Web camera and everyday objects as input. You can think of this as a low-end version of its Touchwall technology, which uses more precise lasers to detect movement and objects. The software developer kit is available now under an open-source Microsoft Public License. The SDK only works on Windows (what did you expect?).

Like Microsoft Surface and Touchwall, the Touchless software makes it possible to create applications that turn hand gestures and physical objects into an input device like a mouse. Touchless detects both the size and location of “color markers” (which can be fingers, toys, pens, M&Ms) as they move through space. Microsoft engineers Ian Sands and Chris Pratley have created four demos to showcase the technology:

As Research in Motion prepares to open its Blackberry Application Center to answer the iPhone’s App Store, an unaffiliated startup called the BerryStore has already launched a competing app store for Blackberry Apps. What makes it better than the official BlackBerry App Center (besides the name), is that apps in the BerryStore work across both old and new BlackBerries alike (not just the upcoming BlackBerry Storm), and across carriers. The BlackBerry App center, in contrast, is designed to be a carrier-specific store, with different apps for different carriers.

AYou can download the BerryStore as an app itself by visiting www.berrystore.com on your BlackBerry. (The App Center will require users to download apps through their Blackberry browsers, which is not the best experience). Already there are about 40 apps in the store, ranging from Loopt, 3Jam, and TwitterBerry to Obopay, Citysense, and Google Mobile. All of them are currently free, although the company plans on offering paid apps in the future. Developers can get more details about how to submit apps or the BerryStore here.

Below is a list of each app currently in the BerryStore with a short description:

Yes and no. It’s clear that AOL’s parent company, Time Warner, wants this deal more than ever. What isn’t clear is whether AOL’s assets will fix any of Yahoo’s problems.

The deal structure that is currently being discussed is Yahoo’s acquisition of AOL (content, services and advertising), minus their subscription dial up business. That plus a couple of billion dollars in cash from Time Warner gets them approximately a third of the combined entity. Time Warner’s AOL headache is gone, and they have a stake in the world’s most valuable chess piece in the Google/Microsoft search and advertising war.Source:TechCrunch

It’s a blood bath out there this morning. The S&P 500 is at a four-year low as the credit crisis keeps getting worse, despite the passage of the government’s $700 billion bailout plan. The market is taking tech stocks down with it. Google is down 4 percent to $368, its lowest point since 2006. Apple is down 6 percent to $91. Microsoft is down nearly 5 percent to $25. Amazon, Yahoo, eBay—all down.

Already as I write this, there seems to be somewhat of a rally going on in some of these stocks (particularly Google). But if the economy falters, tech stocks won’t be a safe haven for investors, even if they are cash-rich and not as exposed to the credit debacle as companies in other sectors.

Only three months after the British newspaper publisher The Guardian Group bought Rafat Ali’s ContentNext Media and his collection of blogs for a reported $30 million, one of those blogs is sputtering badly. The blog in question is contentSutra, the Indian counterpart to its bigger and better known brother, paidContent (both cover the business of digital media). Until recently, contentSutra was ContentNext’s second biggest blog, even beating out mocoNews.

But if you look at it now, traffic has dropped off a cliff. Posts are sporadic, and mostly consist of news roundups or the occasional post from the editors at paidContent. ContentNext and the Guardian are currently in talks with media companies in India for possible syndication and cross-promotion deals. Rumors are going around that ContentNext has been in talks with HT Media (publisher of the Hindustan Times), 9.9 Media, and others. We also received a tip that the Guardian is trying to unload contentSutra all together, but Rafat Ali says that is not true.

In any event, the site is not doing as well as it once did. The editor who built up contentSutra for two years, Nikhil Pahwa, left at the end of May, and launched his own competing blog, Medianama, a month later on June 27.

The weird thing is that is right around the same number that McCain is getting in the latest tracking polls (Obama is tracking closer to 50 percent support). If you want some real helpful stats and links, check out Google Director of Research Peter Norvig’s Presidential Election 2008 FAQ page. He’s got links to all the latest polls, election prediction markets, truth scorecards, and studies measuring media bias.

Or you can just buy a mask. I’m not sure if they’ll let you in the voting booth with that, though.

When we commissioned the statuettes for the Crunchies Awards last year, we hoped to create something a little more memorable than the typical plastic tombstone. We opted for a plastic monkey holding a bone aloft instead. While it does have a certain menacing quality to it, we never expected anyone to turn it into weapon.

But now you can find “The Crunchie” in the online game Duels. Our award has been re-stylized as a deadly mace with a power rating of 631 (which is massive, a run-of-the-mill mace has a power rating of 50 or less). There appears to be only one, and it is owned by a player named Loki (aka Andrew Busey, CEO of Challenge Games, the maker of Duel). You don’t want to mess with him. He’s got a Crunchie.