Each week, our friends at gdgt go through the latest gadgets and score them to help you decide which ones to buy. Here are some of their latest picks — along with a few you should probably avoid. Want more? Visit gdgt anytime to catch up on the latest, and subscribe to gdgt’s newsletter to get a weekly roundup in your inbox.
Filed under: Misc
Each week, our friends at gdgt go through the latest gadgets and score them to help you decide which ones to buy. Here are some of their latest picks — along with a few you should probably avoid. Want more? Visit gdgt anytime to catch up on the latest, and subscribe to gdgt’s newsletter to get a weekly roundup in your inbox.
As most of you know by now, we’ve recently welcomed some old friends back to the fold here at greater Aol Tech. We’re thrilled to be working with the gdgt crew on our first event together, tomorrow night in Austin during SXSW.
We’d love to have you join us for a night of fun gadgety action — take a break from your intense schedule of panels and booze buses and come on out to mingle with gdgt and Engadget staff, check out the devices our sponsors are bringing in spades (plus win some!) and have a great time with like-minded technophiles. It’s free to attend, and you don’t even need a SXSW badge to get in. The one catch: you must be 21 or over to come to this party (upside: open bar!), although our future events will be all ages.
See you there!
Filed under: Announcements, Meta
You might say the day is never really done in consumer technology news. Your workday, however, hopefully draws to a close at some point. This is the Daily Roundup on Engadget, a quick peek back at the top headlines for the past 24 hours — all handpicked by the editors here at the site. Click on through the break, and enjoy.
Hey Engadget, I’ve missed you.
For those of you who don’t remember me, my name is Ryan, and until 2008 I served here as the Editor-in-Chief. Well, like Peter, I’m back. But this time I’m doing something totally different.
Let’s catch up.
You may have seen the announcement earlier today that AOL is acquiring gdgt and that Ryan Block and I are going to be rejoining the company. A lot of you may have no idea who I am, but I’m the guy who created Engadget and for a while there was the only person who wrote for it.
When we left Engadget in 2008 to start gdgt we left on exceptionally good terms. AOL even invested in our new company. But even though the relationship has been good all these years, I never honestly expected we’d have the chance to return, and I can say that it feels good to be part of the family again. I’m insanely proud of the work that Tim Stevens and the Engadget team have done to grow the site into a tech news powerhouse that it is today. The Engadget of 2013 far exceeds anything I could have hoped for it when it launched back in 2004.
Yes, the rumors are true! The gadget database and website launched by Engadget founder Peter Rojas and founding editor Ryan Block, gdgt, has been purchased by our parent company, Aol. On gdgt‘s blog, Block explains that the site will bring its community and core technologies to web properties like, erm, this one — in addition to its comprehensive product database, which we’ve been embedding since 2011. It’ll also team up with Engadget on live events throughout the year, which means more gadget-filled fests in cities like Austin, Boston and San Diego, along with the usual suspects, such as our inaugural Expand conference in March. We’ll have plenty more details to fill you in on later today, but you can hit up the post at our source link to see what we’re able to share right now. Let’s give Peter, Ryan and the rest of the gdgt team a warm Engadget welcome!
Filed under: Announcements, HD, Mobile
Source: gdgt
AOL (owner of TechCrunch) today is taking one more step to build out its content empire: it has officially confirmed the acquisition of technology reviews site gdgt — first reported by TechCrunch nearly two weeks ago. Gdgt itself is announcing the news on its own site, and a spokesperson from AOL has also confirmed the news to TechCrunch directly.
Financial terms of the deal have not been disclosed, but we have heard that the deal was in the high seven figures, and that there was another — higher — offer from another company, but that gdgt’s co-founders, Ryan Block and Peter Rojas, went with AOL because it was a better fit.
It seems poetic that the future of a company so deeply embedded in the Internet’s past would hinge upon amassing properties that so vehemently chronicle its future. The deal will see Ryan Block take on a bigger role at AOL, where we have heard from sources that he will become head of product for AOL Tech Media. He will report to Jay Kirsch, and will take some of the learnings, technology and sensibility — and staff — that he and Rojas have brought to gdgt and apply them across AOL’s portfolio of tech sites.
In addition to TechCrunch, those sites include Engadget (which Rojas founded and Block used to edit), TUAW and Joystiq. In other words, the acquisition will give gdgt much greater scale for its product.
With AOL’s tech portfolio heavy on blogs and news, gdgt will be bringing complementary content in the form of a huge database of gadget information, created with the aim of “improving the buying experience,” in the words of Block.
The move lets the two founders come full-circle and, for those who ever wondered, provides more color on why they left in the first place.
“We didn’t leave Engadget (or AOL) because we were unhappy, we left to do gdgt because at the time it was tough to build something that was clearly not editorial,” Block told me. “That’s obviously changed, and we’re excited to be able to continue to invest in and grow gdgt, while also bringing a lot of the stuff we’ve built to the rest of AOL Tech.”
The move is not entirely out of the blue. Peter Rojas — who will stay on running gdgt as well as take on a role as executive editor-at-large at Engadget — notes that gdgt has been working with Engadget (and some other publishers, via a WordPress plug-in) via its Databox for about 15 months now. That automatically pulls data from gdgt’s product database into a module at the bottom of posts, similar to how TC pulls in data from Crunchbase.
AOL, via AOL Ventures, had been one of gdgt’s strategic investors prior to this announcement, along with True Ventures, Betaworks, Spark Capital, Lerer Ventures and several angel investors. In total it had raised $3.72 million.
The move is key for AOL, in that it gives the company another way to bring in traffic to its existing portfolio of news sites, and it also, by way of gdgt itself, increases traffic across the network.
And, the fact that gdgt focuses on the buying experience should not go unnoticed. At a time when companies like Facebook and Google are making an effort to derive extra revenue streams from e-commerce to supplement their bread and butter of advertising, it makes sense for relative Internet dinosaur AOL — which last week reported its first return to revenue growth in eight years — to explore this area, too.
Here is the official announcement from gdgt:
We’ve got some big news: we couldn’t be more excited to announce that gdgt has been acquired by AOL!
As you might recall, last year we started a fruitful partnership with the fine folks at Engadget toprovide structured product data to their site. We got to talking further and realized that gdgt, its team, its technology, and perhaps most importantly its DNA, were a natural fit for the world-class lineup of tech sites. Well, one thing led to another, and here we are. We honestly couldn’t be more excited about adding gdgt to what is easily the most powerful, influential group of technology media brands in the world.
Where we go from here
Over the last year, gdgt has only become increasingly more robust and refined, and we’re only getting started. (Related: have you seen all the great stuff we’ve been doing lately, like aggregating video reviews?)At AOL, gdgt will only continue to grow and evolve as the best premium destination for purchase intelligence, recommendations, user reviews, shopping data, and community-driven content about personal technology. gdgt’s product database (still arguably the best around, in my highly biased opinion), community (ditto), and core technologies will serve as a crucial foundation for all kinds of great new products and services we’ll be building in the coming months.
Our event series will also expand, shall we say, as we pair up with the Engadget team on our 2013 nation-wide tour. Stay tuned for details there, too.
What this means for your data
As you might expect, over the coming months we’ll be transitioning our operations to our new parent, as well as adopting their Terms of Service and Privacy policy.It should go without saying that we continue to completely respect your personal data and privacy, as we always have. For example, AOL has never asked us to hand data over any user for any untoward uses, so gdgt users’ email addresses aren’t going to wind up on some random mailing list after the dust settles. Makes sense, right? AOL isn’t acquiring gdgt to drive away our users. Nor would we let them.
However, we still totally understand if you don’t want your profile data to join us on this new journey. If that’s the case, starting later today (and through March 15th, 2013) just head over to your account settings to mark your account profile data for deletion.
No action is required, though! If you don’t do anything, your profile will remain intact, and we’ll just keep doing what we do to make gdgt the best possible gadget reviews and community site around. Also, the next time we see you we’ll totally give you a high five.
Roll the credits
It’s obvious, but we owe this great outcome first and foremost to the amazing team of gdgt employees, each of whom took a chance on us and stuck around to see things through. They know that all this stuff is much harder than it looks, and gdgt simply would not exist if it weren’t for their boundless passion. As founders, Peter and I are extremely grateful for the work they’ve done.It’s also impossible to talk about gdgt’s existence without mentioning the enormous trust and faith placed in us by Tony Conrad at True Ventures, Jason Calacanis, and Mo Koyfman at Spark Capital, and our many other ridiculously smart investors like John Borthwick at Betaworks, David Lee at SV Angel, and Ken Lerer at Lerer Ventures (just to name a few!). I feel like most startups would (and should) consider themselves extraordinarily lucky to get to work with even one of those folks.
Finally, we’d like to thank Jay Kirsch, Tim Armstrong, Ned Desmond, Tim Armstrong, Tim Stevens, and all the folks at AOL who believe in our product, our team, and our DNA. We honestly couldn’t think of a finer group of folks to come work with, and we’ve got big plans together. Come watch what happens!
Once, buyers were overwhelmed with choice. Now, they’re just overwhelmed with a choice of tools to help them choose. But gdgt, one such site, is hoping that it can build the ultimate solution for consumers looking to make smart gadget buying solutions, is launching new custom search tools it hopes will make using it to clear up shopper confusion a no-brainer.
Gdgt is the brainchild of former Engadget founder Peter Rojas and former editor-in-chief of the same site Ryan Block, offering users a huge database of products to rate, review, compare and declare both their ownership of and desire for. For the gadget space, which is pretty strongly rooted in conspicuous consumption, it is a mecca. You can search for search for virtually anything that runs on electricity and get a look at how it’s been reviewed around the web by professionals, and what other users think. Lately, the team behind it has been quietly and steadily adding new features to make it even better at its job.
“We look at everything holistically when we make an evaluation of a product,” Block told me in an interview, explaining that a lot of what gdgt is has to do with what the founding team saw at Engadget. “We kind of sat down and we took a look at what was wrong with the consumer electronics buying experience online, and we came up with this idea that was somewhat akin to Rotten Tomatoes for personal technology, and that is that we wanted to look at everything there was to know about a product and come up with a very simple, easy-to-digest assessment.”
The new gdgt is all about providing a clear ranking methodology to help users get an at-a-glance look at what they should be buying in any given category. All devices get a score, which is built from a variety of different source data, including reviews at tech sites including this one, user reviews, and first-hand research and testing from the gdgt staff themselves. Categories each get Must Haves taken from the highest scoring gadgets (no more than three per) to help make sure that there’s very little digging to do to come up with the best devices overall.
Gdgt’s latest addition is the redesigned ‘Finder’ (the one for cameras is here, but it’s active for all popular product categories and should be available across the site within the week), which uses simple sliders for important factors like price range and screen size, as well as a couple other simple check box filters to instantly narrow the pool of available products. That process is manually tailored for each individual product category, meaning you’ll never have to wade through unnecessary or irrelevant criteria, and Block is keen to note that gdgt also never scrapes its data, instead using a team of editors and curators to manually prune its results so that you won’t run into the sort of screw-ups typical when you hand these kinds of duties over to a robot.
The people-driven approach also means that gdgt can apply a rubric to reviews from sites that don’t necessarily quantify reviews with a firm number score, and still incorporate that input into its recommendations, something a site that scrapes can’t achieve. That leads to the inclusion of high-quality sources, like the New York Times, which otherwise might go overlooked at sites that depend more on strictly data-driven models like Decide.com and Snapsort.
It hasn’t happened overnight, but gdgt’s approach to the world of consumer tech now puts it in the same basic space as something like The Wirecutter, looking to find a better way to help consumers shop. Block notes however that the approach taken by former Gizmodo editor Brian Lam leans even more heavily toward the editorial side of things and away from data-driven techniques, and he sees the two sites as complimentary, not competitive.
The new focused identity of gdgt as an aide for consumers looking for the best way to spend should help the site with its affiliate revenue from retailers, and overall the site’s reputation and growing library of gadget-related knowledge help it with its growing event-driven business. Overall, gdgt has tied its fortunes to the appetites of early adopters and the rapidly growing community of tech consumers, so if it can continue figuring out ways to continue better serving that community, it should be in a very good place.
Winning gdgt’s StartUp contest has its perks — just ask recent winner Marquee, which is showcasing version 2.0 of its Media Center here on the showfloor. The imposing device, currently available on the outfit’s site for $899, packs 2TB of storage, 4GB DDR3 RAM, DVD player and a 2.4GHz dual-core Intel processor into an aluminum-lidded box to let you stream a mix of online and locally-stored multimedia content. Seen from above, the unit is mostly unadorned, save for a quite sizable power button, three circular vents and two notification LEDs. Off to the right side hiding just beneath that generous metal hood, lies ports for audio I/O and standard USB, with HDMI-out on the back.
Naturally, you need a way to parse through the goods and that’s where Plex XBMC — running atop Ubuntu 12.04 — and a custom wireless controller outfitted with a full QWERTY keyboard come in handy. According to Marquee’s CEO, set-up out of the box is a no-brainer and requires nothing more than connecting to an external display and your home network (via ethernet or WiFi) to get things started. We had the opportunity to take the Media Center for a quick test spin and immediately noticed a calibration issue that, combined with the cluttered remote, made for some extremely unintuitive navigation. You can check out some pics of the startup’s progeny below and, while you’re at it, click past the break to view a video demo of this pricey kit in action.
Gallery: Marquee Media Center hands-on
Continue reading Marquee Media Center hands-on (video)
Marquee Media Center hands-on (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 25 Jun 2012 18:37:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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