http://techcrunch.com/april-fools-shenanigans/ It’s time for April Fools 2010! We’re constantly updating this page with new April Fools jokes as we find them. If you spot a good one please leave it in the comments. Thanks! Some of our favorites include (see below for complete list with ratings): YouTube YouTube: who cares about HD when you can watch your videos in text. You can opt to watch a video in TEXTp or text only mode. Pretty neat. Google Goes Nuclear Techcrunch reports that Google is getting serious about nuclear research, and is building a uranium enrichment plant. Some experts say it’s for energy, other say it’s a nuclear deterrent against the China threat. Groupon “Now, in a surprising inversion of their model, Groupon will shepherd the individual buying power of the elite few. Presenting Groupöupon, an invitation-only, private sales site offering designer apparel and accessories to the consumer elite.” More on Groupöupon by Erick Schonfeld. Auto Windscreens First Prescription Windscreen Launches! (video) Google Goes Nuclear Techcrunch reports that Google is getting serious about nuclear research, and is building a uranium enrichment plant. Some experts say it’s for energy, other say it’s a nuclear deterrent against the China threat. CrunchPad Kit Forget the iPad, Mike Arrington reveals the CrunchPad Kit. It uses the finest F.U.J.J. technology. There’s a how-to video. The Register “In a sign of newspaper industry consolidation, rival publishing groups Associated and the Guardian Media Group are to join forces, sharing a common editorial production facility. Using the latest technology, a single team will produce stories for both groups flagship titles, the Daily Mail and the Guardian, in a process that will be largely automated.” Aviary Editing software startup Aviary is launching a new marketplace: A Bird Store. The marketplace will only feature the world’s rarest birds, with pricing set at upwards of 7 figures. Google Chrome Google is “unmuting the web” with a Chrome extension that allows for audio feedback as you browse to web pages and interact with the browser. NYTimes NYTimes will start daily publishing on the iPad. Facebook And Zynga Facebook and Zynga are teaming up to launch a new ‘Relationships’ feature on Facebook that uses game mechanics to synthesize romance. Complete List: Google Wave Google announced Google Wave wave notifications for Google Wave. See the details here – Google will send an actual human to you to tell you when there ’s a new Wave in your inbox. Our Grade: B- (bonus points for the video) YouTube YouTube: who cares about HD when you can watch your videos in text. You can opt to watch a video in TEXTp or text only mode. Pretty neat. Our Grade: A Google Goes Nuclear Techcrunch reports that Google is getting serious about nuclear research, and is building a uranium enrichment plant. Some experts say it’s for energy, other say it’s a nuclear deterrent against the China threat. Our Grade: A+ CrunchPad Kit Forget the iPad, Mike Arrington reveals the CrunchPad Kit. For less than $50 (plus $5 shipping & handling, you can turn any laptop into a high-tech CrunchPad device. It uses the finest F.U.J.J. technology. There’s a how-to video. Our Grade: A++ Google Search Google really has their nerd on today and I love it. Search anything on their main search engine, and instead of telling you the amount of time it took to run your search it will use an arbitrary term like “jiffies” or “epochs.” Update: Google has renamed itself as Topeka. Our Grade: D- Google Books In Google Books there’s an option to see the text/images in 3D. Our Grade: B GoogleDocs GoogleDocs takes cloud computing to the next level. Upload anything, literally: “Store your keys, remotes, rail passes, and other objects you commonly lose with Google Docs, and you’ll never have to worry about finding them again. “ Our Grade: B+ Starbucks Starbucks is now offering “micra” and “plenty” (128 fl. oz – think popcorn bucket) sizes. “Whether customers are looking for a large or small size, the Plenta and the Micra satisfy all U.S. and Canada customers’ needs for more and less coffee,” said Hugh Mungis, Starbucks VP of Volume. “Our size selection is now plentiful.” Our Grade: B+ Wikipedia Check out Wikipedia’s main page. Featured article is one on “wife-selling.” “Excerpt: “Along with other English customs, wife selling was exported to England’s American colonies, where one man sold his wife for “two dollars and half [a] dozen bowls of grogg.’” Our Grade: A Groupon “Now, in a surprising inversion of their model, Groupon will shepherd the individual buying power of the elite few. Presenting Groupöupon, an invitation-only, private sales site offering designer apparel and accessories to the consumer elite.” More on Groupöupon by Erick Schonfeld. Our Grade: A+ Google UK Google UK is offering an app for the Android that will translate animal speech. As the site explains: “Translate for Animals is an application for Android phones that recognises and transcribes words and phrases that are common to a species, like cats for example. To develop Translate for Animals, we worked closely with many of the world’s top language synthesis teams, and with leaders in the field of animal cognitive linguistics, including senior fellows at the Bodleian Library in Oxford.” Video included. Our Grade: A- Google Japan Google Japan released a 9-panel keyboard drumset with Japanese characters. As CrunchGear John Biggs writes: “Google Japan just released their new drum-based interface to type in Japanese. No longer will you be confounded by the spelling of Hari Kari and Toyota!” Our Grade: B- Hulu Secret documentary: “Hulu Confidential For Internal Use Only.” Exposes their “alien plot” conspiracy. Includes a cameo from Dan Lyons (aka Fake Steve Jobs) and UCLA Professor Fabian Wagmister. More on Jason’s post. Our Grade: B+ Reddit On Reddit everyone gets to be an Admin today. Our Grade: B Kodak Introducing smelly photographs. Kodak’s aromaphotography will let you smell the image you’re looking at, all thanks to the latest breakthroughs in “ Neuro-Optic-Nasal-Sense Imaging.” Our Grade: B The Independent The Hadron Collider II finds a new home: the Circle Line. “London Underground is in talks with the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (Cern) about the possibility of using the 23km tunnel of the Circle Line to house a new type of particle accelerator.” Our Grade: C Clicky A combo of Foursquare and analytics. Clicky will tweet your online location when you visit a website with a Clicky tracking code installed. Our Grade: B Socialtext Enterprise Chatroulette. Randomly interface with anyone in your company. Our Grade: B CollegeHumor Initially redirects you to a screen that says “Attention your IP address “ XXX” has been logged by the US Department of Information….the website you were trying to access, www.collegehumor.com, is currently under investigation for harboring un-American sentiment and will remain offline until an official review can be conducted….” Our Grade: A- Atlassian Another ode to Foursquare. Atlassian is pitching Fourwalls, “a location based service for developer check-ins” (and only developers). 99% of the locations seem to be cubicles and restrooms. Our Grade: A- Qualcomm Mirasol’s display devices are causing butterfly attacks. Video Included. Our Grade: B- Google Maps Australia Driving directions in Aussie-speak. Like “chuck a right,” “ya want to take, ” “catch exit.” Our Grade: B XKCD Neat unix command prompt for the webcomic. Let’s you direct the comic by typing next, prev, first, last, etc. Look for easter eggs on the site. Our Grade: A- TripAdvisor Announcing their first reviewer from space! Psyche. Our Grade: C- Funny Or Die Justin Bieber has bought Funny Or Die and now its Bieber or Die, “anything that’s not Bieber Dies!” Bieber mania on the home page. Our Grade: A- Easy Projects .Net Because digital is so overrated, “Easy Projects .Net is now a paper based management tool,” billing itself as the easiest all-in-one project management stationery. Our Grade: B ThinkGeek.com A few amusing products for sale at ThinkGeek. If you’ve always wanted a plush bacon doll or canned unicorn meat, well today is you lucky day. Our Grade: B+ Guardian Maybe all we need to solve the country’s broadband issues are more ferrets. Guardian reports that “Specially trained ferrets are being used to deliver broadband to rural areas following groundbreaking techniques used by an Internet provider.” Our Grade: B Moo Moo is revolutionizing the business card industry. They are rolling out business cards with the back as the front, and the front as the back. Yes it is exactly what it sounds like. “Now with our exciting new updates, your contacts can marvel at the length of your phone number, or your twitter username before they even look at your images!” Our Grade: B ArmorGames.com Come on guys can we get past one April Fools without RickRoll’D. Click on their homepage’s top banner, which says “Click here to DISABLE our April Fools Day Prank,” and immediately regret your decision. Our Grade: C Train Signal Microsoft Windows 3.1 Training Video. 80% of this score is based on the narrators awesome sweater. Our Grade: B+ ZDNet.au ZDNet.com.au says Google will pull a Google and leave Australia because of its “evil”filter. Quoting “Eric Schmidt,” the article says: “‘We’ve already left China. That was clearly not a bluff and besides I couldn’t take the food anyway…Oh yeah, and our company motto is always… I mean never … wait, it’s ‘Don’t Be Evil’. So we just can’t be part of it.”‘ Our Grade: B- Funambol Funambol is launching a semi-hostile takeover attempt of Apple. Our Grade: C Guardian (2) “Web giant Google has chosen Leeds as the UK pilot destination for testing a river-based version of its popular Google Street View service, I can exclusively reveal.” Our Grade: B+ 4chan 4chan just tweeted a link to their new website, version 2.0, now with Facebook Connect! Our Grade: C Grooveshark “Unfortunately, due to damages caused by recent natural disasters near Grooveshark Headquarters, our bills have gone through the roof. This means that–despite our best efforts–we’ve had to implement a new way of boosting revenue: every now and then in between songs on Grooveshark, you’ll hear a brief ad from one of the big partners we’ve teamed up with to launch this new advertising system.” Our Grade: B- Auto Windscreens First Prescription Windscreen Launches! (video) Our Grade: A Razer “Now you can go all night long (and longer) with the Razer Venom. Scientifically proven to boost your senses and take down any signs of fatigue, you will now be able to clock up to over 100 hours of gaming time in one sitting.” Our Grade: B- Ben & Jerry’s Virtual ice cream! (just lick your screen) Our Grade: B+ Foundry Group Foundy Group is moving to Twitter for deal evaluation. Our Grade: B- Little World Gifts They’ve launched a new 3D printer iPhone accessory with dock connector so “ you can *really* play with your gifts!” Our Grade: C The Register “In a sign of newspaper industry consolidation, rival publishing groups Associated and the Guardian Media Group are to join forces, sharing a common editorial production facility. Using the latest technology, a single team will produce stories for both groups flagship titles, the Daily Mail and the Guardian, in a process that will be largely automated.” Our Grade: A+ Pocket-lint “Canon, Olympus, and Nikon unveil App-e-ture: the app store for your digital camera” Our Grade: B- CERN CERN says high energy collisions reveal a paleoparticle: “The news is historic, or rather “prehistoric” to be more precise! It has taken two physicists studying the collisions at 7 TeV in the centre of mass on 30 March only two days to make an astonishing discovery. From their precise analysis of four events, Alain Grand and Ricarda Owen have found evidence of a new, massive neutral particle thought to have existed in the very early Universe.” Our Grade: A- Google Voice Google introduces Standard Voicemail Mode (TM). Our Grade: B Techjoomla “For the past one year our team here at Techjoomla has been working on a super secret project which involved some very critical work in integrating some of the best CMS systems available today in the Open Source world.. You must have read about many articles, blogs which discuss what is better : Joomla, WordPress or Drupal. Its always a competition between these three.” – so they’ve introduced JooPressPal. Our Grade: B- OnWindows Microsoft, Apple and Jay-Z are partnering. Our Grade: C iwantoneofthose They’re selling a Pad-Dock iPhone to Tablet Converter Our Grade: B+ Google Mobile Search “Well, I’m happy to announce that for those of you who turn to Google in search of, “where am I,” we finally have a better result. Starting today, just go to Google.com on your phone in the US, search for “where am I”, and wonder about your own whereabouts no more.” Our Grade: B+ Xfire Xfire is taking it old school. Our Grade: C Hull York Medical School The Hull York Medical School has been selected to pilot a new course for trainee doctors — preparing them for the challenges of the next generation of medical practice. Its focus will be on diagnosing and treating disease in extraterrestrial life forms. Our Grade: B- World of Warcraft A bunch of fake announcements on the main website. Our Grade: B- Twittercism “Twitter Announces ‘Pay As You Tweet’ Subscription Plan For All Users (And Will Backdate Your Invoice)” Our Grade: C iFart “The makers of iFart Mobile, one of the most popular iphone applications of all time have announced a major technological breakthrough in the iPhone platform. iFart’s developers created an “olfactic framework” which works inside Apple’s SDK and enables them to release digital scents via the iPhone speaker.” Our Grade: B+ The Escapist “PopCap Announces a Mind-Blowing New Bejeweled“ Our Grade: C Helium “After much deliberation and feedback from the steward community, we have decided that the rating algorithm will be tweaked to favor writers based on how much of their earnings they’ve contributed to our newest charity partner: “The Helium Development Team’s Beer and Pizza Fund.”“ Our Grade: C PostRank “PostRank implemented a Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) model using Gibbs Sampling techniques for parameter estimation of DoucheRank in combination with a KNN (K-Nearest Neighbors) content clustering analysis and a couple of colliding protons to determine your DoucheRank™.” Our Grade: B+ Indeed “After leaving an entire continent out in the cold, we are pleased to announce the launch of Indeed Antarctica. This makes Indeed the first website to offer job search in all 7 continents!” Our Grade: B- Google Maps StreetView Shows an option for 3D viewing. Our Grade: B- Info-Tech Info-Tech Research Group is offering IT professionals (and anyone else with a brain) some advice on surviving the inevitable zombie apocalypse. Our Grade: B- DailyBurn DailyBurn introduces the iPad Fit Series. Our Grade: B+ MediaSmartServer.net / HP “With the new MediaSmart Server Bling line of Windows Home Servers, HP is making the move to differentiate their servers from the competition not only with more features in the software but also with more sparkles in the hardware.” Our Grade: B- RackSpace “After last week’s announcement to cancel mail delivery on Saturdays, the Postal Service has decided to route all conventionally delivered Saturday mail over the internet. They have chosen Rackspace Email & Apps as their email hosting service provider for dependability and Fanatical Support.” Our Grade: B+ WebWorkerDaily The WebWorkerDaily blog writes that Google Apps plans tools for improving startup names. Our Grade: C Amazon Web Services / StoreGrid Amazon Web Services’ latest product: the Quantum Compute Cloud – and StoreGrid already has its backup solution ready. Our Grade: B+ Gmail Google’s webmail service suffered a vowel outage. Our Grade: B- The Pirate Bay The Pirate Bay goes retro and has a nice surprise in store. Our Grade: B- Moog Moog Music introduces MF-401 Auto De-tune Our Grade: B- Tuts+ Network “Today we’re pleased to introduce the newest member of the Tuts+ family: GIFtuts+. We’ll be publishing tutorials and video training on creating gorgeous animated GIFs in Photoshop, Ulead GIF Animator and Microangelo.” Our Grade: B- Google Translate … for Animals (beta). Our Grade: B+ F-Secure F-Secure Labs is launching a new feature in Browsing Protection today: the Rick Roll Protector. Our Grade: B+ Mobile in Japan NTT DoCoMo and Sony to merge. Our Grade: C Ascender “Verdana/Georgia Love-Child Font Found in Windows 98 Archive.” Our Grade: B- Box.net “Box.net, the leader in cloud content management, has launched (no pun intended) a new initiative to remove the limits of cloud services. Storing the content of 4 million users takes up a lot of space (again, not intended), and existing solutions are not robust enough to support our future growth. Thanks to a new 500 Million round of funding from DST, Box.net has released our new space computing initiative to the public.” Our Grade: B+ WeddingWire WeddingWire created WedRoulette.com Our Grade: B+ HootSuite HootSuite Goes 3D Our Grade: C Opera Browser developer Opera announced a “Space Edition” browser, that “ features advanced technologies developed under the Future Opera Operations in Lunar Surroundings program.” Our Grade: A- LivingSocial Group Buying startup LivingSocial has launched another city where it will be offering its Groupon-like deals: The Jungle. The first deal for The Jungle is 85% off a finger monkey. Our Grade: B Zurb Startup Zurb has launched the Sharpiener, which is a sharpener for your Sharpie markers, in case they go dull. Our Grade: B Flickr Flickr has unveiled its own iPad like device for browsing photos: The FlickrPad. Our Grade: B+ Etsy Etsy, a marketplace for handmade goods, has changed its unique name to Esty for the day. Our Grade: B- Aviary Editing software startup Aviary is launching a new marketplace: A Bird Store. The marketplace will only feature the world’s rarest birds, with pricing set at upwards of 7 figures. Our Grade: A MyBrandz MyBrandz has hijacked TechCrunch, sort of. Our Grade: B Sophos IT security firm Sophos wants to distract hackers with romantic literature. Our Grade: B+ Avvo Avvo, a Yelp-like directory for lawyers and law firms, is launching a dating site exclusively for lawyers, Avvo Singles. Our Grade: B Picnik Picnik, a photo editing tool that was recently acquired by Google, is now an alternative definition for the word Picnic. Our Grade: B+ VideoNuze VideoNuze has reported that Google and Apple are buying up the FCC for $42.5 billion, in an effort to privatize communications. Our Grade: A Google Chrome Google is “unmuting the web” with a Chrome extension that allows for audio feedback as you browse to web pages and interact with the browser. Our Grade: A+ Facebook Facebook is keeping it simple-the social network allows you to enable a different version of English: Upside Down English. Our Grade: B- NYTimes NYTimes will start daily publishing on the iPad. It is part “of a strategy to extend the readership of The Times and to create opportunities for the company in the electronic media industry.” Our Grade: A Shipwire Shipwire launches “Second Day Before Yesterday,” your packages will ship before you ordered them. Our Grade: B Dr. Pepper A chatroulette chearleader brought to you by Dr. Pepper. Our Grade: B+ BuyerZone Connecting consumers to space travel service companies. Our Grade: B- Toshiba “Oh Buoy!” The incredible inflatable laptop. Only seconds to inflate! Press release: “We are thrilled to be first to market, propelling our customers into the future of aquatic computing.” Our Grade: B+ uTest uTest is now using its community of testers to test food, paternity, taste chemicals, take driving tests, etc. Our Grade: C+ Rate Rush Rate Rush is offering lunar lander insurance. Our Grade: C+ Red Tricycle A pregnancy test app: iPeed. “After downloading the application, you simply aim your urine stream at the bullseye in the center of the screen. A complex algorithm analyzes the level of HCG (pregnancy hormone) in your urine. Sensitivity is > 12.5 mIU/mL, comparable to most tests available at the supermarket.” If it’s positive, you get a picture of a baby, if negative, you get a picture of a martini. Our Grade: B- SpeedDate SpeedDate is helping the U.S. Census Bureau collect information. Our Grade: C Advertisement * * Click Here * * Responses * Weekly round-up | Bluewire Media Web Design Blog March 31st, 2010 at 10:11 pm * April Fool’s… March 31st, 2010 at 10:42 pm * MISS Show 10 | PTC Media March 31st, 2010 at 11:05 pm * jardenberg kommenterar – 2010-04-01 | jardenberg unedited March 31st, 2010 at 11:26 pm * April Fool’s Day 2010 ? MojoSimo倾 --

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