GigaOM » SecondRotation

Gadget Buyback Site Second Rotation Relaunches as Gazelle

Craig Rubens — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 23:15:01 +0000

Second Rotation, the startup that will give you cash for your outdated gizmos, has rebranded and relaunched its buyback site under the new name “Gazelle.” This change doesn’t mean a lot when it comes to the service, as Gazelle will still pay you cash for your janky gadgets and sell them on eBay or recycle them for you. But the change probably means the ‘Second Rotation’ brand wasn’t bringing in the amount of visitors the company wanted.

Gazelle does has a few new features including expanded offerings and now accepts laptops, satellite radios and portable hard drives. The service operates in the same fashion, but a redesigned website speeds you through the process of identifying, rating and selling your old tech toys with fewer kinks. Once you agree to sell, Gazelle will send you a Netflix-style prepaid envelope with which you can send in your gadgets. And as soon as it clears their verification system, you get paid and the item goes up for sale on eBay.

Founded in 2006, Gazelle raised $4.4 million earlier this year from Venrock. While Gazelle does have an edge with VC funds, there’s actually a lot of competitors out there like BuyMyTronics.com, FlipSwap and TechForward that all offer similar buyback programs. There’s also FixYa, which is a crowdsourced tech support site focused on repairing broken gizmos, and recently raised $6 million. The potential market is huge and could support multiple players. According to the EPA, in 2005, the US generated a total of 2.63 million tons of electronic waste, only 12.5% of which was “recovered” for recycling.

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Weekend Vid Picks: Eurovision 2008

Liz Shannon Miller — Fri, 23 May 2008 19:00:34 +0000

Now in its 52nd year, the Eurovision Song Contest has made strides in uniting some of the world’s most chaotic areas under one common purpose: the creation of spectacularly awful pop music. Previous winners include ABBA and Celine Dion. They’re on the higher end of the artistic scale here.

On May 24, the finalists, including representatives from Israel, Bosnia, the United Kingdom, Russia and Azerbaijan will compete for the top prize. And America can no longer use geography as an excuse for ignorance, because the fine folks at Eurovision are not only streaming the competition live — they’ve provided a vast wealth of video for international consumption.

I’ll be honest: I haven’t watched American Idol since its first season — but that’s because American Idol never had a turkey puppet for a contestant:

Unfortunately, Ireland’s Dustin the Turkey did not progress beyond the semi-finals. (Which is baffling to me, given that his song had lyrics like “Shake your tail feathers to the funky beat.”) Commentary refers to Dustin as “controversial,” which I don’t understand. Is it because he apologizes to the world for Riverdance?

Meanwhile, the steamy pop ballad sung by Belarus’s Ruslan Alehno isn’t so bad — until the chorus reveals that the screenwriters of Terminator deserve a song-writing credit:

It’s not all completely awful. Andy Abraham out of the UK is pretty fun (just three decades out of date). And the frontrunner, Russia’s Dima Bilan with Believe , is about on par with current top 40 radio (which shouldn’t come as a huge surprise, as he’s previously recorded with Timbaland and Nelly Furtado):

Most people in the U.S. have never even heard of Eurovision — and for some, that’s probably for the best. But for those with a refined palate for the ridiculous, it’s like Christmas. Don’t believe me? Check out Switzerland’s entry from last year, by an artist named DJ Bobo.

I’m not sure what this song is trying to say about international cooperation — hopefully “vampires are alive” isn’t a veiled critique of EU tariffs. Because what I like about Eurovision is the idea of many people, speaking many languages, coming together…for one completely absurd night of music.

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Don’t toss that old UMPC, make it a portable Linux device!

Kevin C. Tofel — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 16:39:32 +0000

Frequent commenter and fellow mobile enthusiast, TaxMan wrote something interesting on his blog and it coincides with something I pointed out earlier today. Namely: we have so many more portable device choices than we did a short time ago. Instead of selling his original Samsung Q1 UMPC, TaxMan decided to take the Linux plunge, something I did with Ubuntu in 2006 with mixed results.It just goes to show you what a little Googling and elbow grease can do. TaxMan has the Gutsy Gibbon release of Ubuntu installed and unlike my failed efforts, he has the touchscreen working as well!“After much tweaking and re-reading of the instructions I posted in an earlier post, I got the touchscreen working. The callibration isn’t perfect, but it’s good enough for onscreen navigation and light text entry using the on-screen keyboard.”He has links to the instructions right on his site and he now has his Sierra Wireless 875U AirCard working as well. If this type of solution appeals to you, you’ll want to hit up his recent posts for the info. Nice job!

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5 Sites That Want Your Janky Gadgets

Stacey Higginbotham — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 19:58:39 +0000

Amidst the flurry of carbon credits, lead-free electronics and green everything, the truth of the matter is that folks who are truly green don’t buy a lot of stuff. But that’s no way to push products, so we’re stuck with greenwashing. The technology industry is as guilty of this as anyone, but at least it’s also providing online communities and services aimed at keeping consumption down and recycling activities up. Here’s our handy guide to web sites devoted to electronic reuse and recycling:

FixYa — This site is made up of a community of users who can help people figure out what’s wrong with their appliances and digital gadgets, and hopefully get them back up and running, avoiding the pain and ecological damage of a trip to the landfill. FixYa recently raised $6 million to keep it up and running.

Partstore.com — Don’t want to throw it away, but you’re missing a key part? Head to Partstore.com, where you can find everything from old washing machine knobs to replacement bulbs for your televisions. It looks like customer reviews of the site are pretty uneven, so I’d keep the orders small, for now.

BuyMyTronics.com — If a hands-on approach isn’t your thang, the BuyMyTronics site might be the way to go. I’m someone who’s had pieces of a broken hair dryer sitting on her counter for a week after taking it apart for repairs, so I admit I’m all about recycling rather than fixing. BuyMyTronics accepts game consoles, cell phones, laptops, iPods and cameras and resells them for you.

SecondRotation — Much like BuyMyTronics, SecondRotation wants to provide a home for your old gadgets by hooking up buyers and sellers, but it only deals in cell phones and game consoles. I’ve sent a couple of phones to SecondRotation and was pleased at how easy it was. SecondRotation raised $4.4 million in January, so maybe recycling and reuse can entice venture investors.

PDAParts.com — This site specializes in parts and repair advice for smart phones and personal digital assistants. But if the site’s instructions aren’t enough for you, just send them your phone or PDA and have them either repair it for you. They’ll also sell it on your behalf.

The web has a ton of places for help on broken gadgets ranging from product forums to repair videos on YouTube. If you can’t fix it and no one wants to buy it, then package that device up and see if one of the consumer electronics stores will recycle it for you. Ideally, you can keep a good thing going for a bit longer, but sometimes you have to bite the bullet and buy a new device. As someone who is still using a 5-year-old iPod can attest, it can be cool to be obsolete. OK, maybe not cool, but definitely green.

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DEMO 2008: TimeDriver for One-to-One Appointment Scheduling

Judi Sohn — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 15:00:26 +0000

There are already web applications focused on scheduling meetings between a bunch of participants including ScheduleOnce, Tungle, iKordo, Jiffle (formerly iPolipo), and others. Helpful if you have 4 or 5 people who need to meet at the same time and you want to narrow in on consensus.

TimeDriver, a new application making its debut at DEMO today, is designed for folks who have to make multiple one-on-one appointments with different people across pre-determined available blocks of time.

If you’ve ever scheduled your own appointment at QuestDiagnostics or Sears Portrait Studio, then you may be familiar with the technology behind TimeDriver. TimeTrade System’s TimeTrade Enterprise Scheduling Application (TESA) is an enterprise leader for managing individual appointment scheduling on a large scale. Their new application for the individual user, TimeDriver, uses the same technology as TESA but strips away all the complexity, leaving a very simple interface focusing on a single resource…the user.

TimeDriver connects with existing calendars in Google Calendar or Microsoft Outlook, wisely not forcing the user to adapt to a new calendaring tool. The web interface works in all major browsers on both Mac and PC. Support for Salesforce and Lotus Notes for calendar connectivity is coming soon.

The idea is that you indicate what window of time you have available and the blocks of time you’ll take for your appointments.

The application then generates a link for participants to schedule their appointment with you. Once they’ve committed to a block, that time is immediately unavailable to everyone else, but your overall calendar is never publicly shared. The same link can go to multiple recipients or can be published on a website, making it a viable e-marketing tool.

TimeDriver will launch with a beta version (Windows only) in a few weeks, with a general roll-out that will include Mac support targeted for the second quarter of this year.

This looks like it could be a useful tool for the web workers who are frustrated waiting for clients to get back to them to confirm appointment times. You might also want to look at TimeBridge which offers a similar solution.

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SideShow eReader demoed

James Kendrick — Wed, 23 May 2007 17:30:37 +0000

WinHEC was obviously a great event with all the cool things that I’ve seen coming out of the conference. I didn’t see these two SideShow devices until today and they might be the coolest thing coming out of the show yet. First up is something that makes so much sense on so many levels that I can’t wait to see this. The eReader SideShow is an electronic document reader that works using SideShow technology to communicate with a Vista computer. The display is simple black text on a white background that has been optimized for document reading. How useful that would be!

The second device is the MK140 eChatter, a portable communications device with a PDA-like slide-out keyboard that works with a Vista PC over SideShow. It can be used for voice communications like a handset and for all types of messaging. Let’s hope we see these devices start appearing soon.

(via SideShowDevices)

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Google Desktop for Mac OS X Released

Louis Gray — Wed, 04 Apr 2007 13:40:39 +0000

Finally, one less reason to use my Windows laptop at work.

Late last night, Google released the long-awaited Mac OS X version of their popular Google Desktop application, enabling Mac users to break away from Apple’s bundled Spotlight application and use the familiar Google interface to search local documents, e-mail, Web history and GMail archives from their Web browser. While the PC version, out for more than 30 months already, is more full-featured, including Widgets and a Dock-like news sidebar, the Mac version of Google Desktop offers the same level of index and search functionality.

Available from Google’s Mac software downloads page, the software is, as you would expect, very easy to get going. Download the .dmg file, expand it and click the application installer. The Google Updater application will download the needed application, and start the process of indexing. In addition to installing in your Applications folder, Google Desktop offers you a menubar icon and the option of installing in the Dock.

Then, the app really goes to work, crawling your local hard drive as if it were the World Wide Web. Almost three hours into the process, my own PowerBook hard drive is still crunching away, and the index reports more than 50,000 files are indexed so far. But from the very first file, you can search from Google Desktop – either by hitting the Command key twice in succession to bring up a floating app bar, or by selecting “Open Desktop Homepage” from the menubar icon. The desktop homepage button looks like Google.com, only with your Desktop being one of the available resources to query.

Floating Toolbar Search for the Term Backup

Instead of search results from Web sites around the globe, Google Desktop segments your own local results into categories of “E-mail”, “Web history”, “files”, “media” and “other”. In the two-plus years I’ve used the PC version, e-mail is 90% of what I search, with “files” taking the other 10%. Of course, that’s mainly because Microsoft Outlook doesn’t have the excellent search functionality already present in Apple’s Mail, and tons of .PST fields can be a beast, but I digress.

Google Indexing in Progress: Status

For me, I find Spotlight isn’t as intuitive as Google Desktop, and keyword searching is comparatively arduous. Google Desktop for the Mac is one of the very few applications available for Windows and not Mac that I’d really wanted, and it’s finally here. Download it today, and you’ll wonder how you functioned without it.

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Vonage Funding & IPO: Great Expectations

Om Malik — Mon, 09 May 2005 02:55:40 +0000

Paul Kedrosky, a professor at the University of California, San Diego says that the recent $200 million venture capital infusion into Vonage is nothing but great expectations. He believes that Vonage’s valuation is at a point, where it would need a king of fools to bail out the investors. “It’s hugely optimistic,” Mr. Kedrosky told the times. He added that the amount meant that any initial public stock offering for Vonage would have to raise at least $3 billion to justify the latest round of financing. Sandy Miller of 3i, that pumped in another $10 million in this round, discounted all plans of an IPO. he thinks this is nothing but a slam dunk. But that’s not what the other Times VoIP story of the day says. At their current rate, the cable companies may soon eclipse the market leader, Vonage, which has 600,000 subscribers. “Brand has everything to do with it: long-term stability, willingness to stand by the product, quality of product,” Steve Kirkeby, a telecommunications analyst at J. D. Power & Associates, said of cable companies. (NYT)

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DSL is the king of broadband

Om Malik — Thu, 24 Jun 2004 14:06:11 +0000

Broadband Reports: DSL Dominates Earth, Targets Moon. DSL accounts for 65.8% of the world’s broadband connections.

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