toones

Control your music using gestures with Toones for iPhone

Looking for an easier way to control the music on your iPhone? If you like gestures, you'll love Toones, though there is a small catch. And that small catch is the app is free and ad-free, but two key features -- search and shuffle -- cost 99 cents to enable.

After you launch the app for the first time, you'll notice that it has accessed your music library. When you tap to play a song, album art fills the screen. Notice the lack of buttons or any sort of control. Hidden beneath the album art are different zones … Read more

Mix and match to create funny characters

Slide-a-ma-jig gives the iPhone treatment to a popular children's board-book format, with a touch-screen app that lets children create a huge variety of comical characters by mixing and matching different heads, torsos, feet, and so on.

It's not really a game in the sense that there are no rules or points to score--but that's perfect for the intended audience of young children. The interface is easy to master, accompanied by satisfying sound effects: you start with a silly character (30-odd in all, anything from a hulked-out bodybuilder to a self-repairing robot to a badger-loving fairy), and you … Read more

The 404 431: Where we can eat a peach for days

Like most social-networking sites, Twitter isn't immune to lurkers, fakes, and creeps. The 404 Twitter account received over 600 followers in the last 24 hours, which leads us to believe that we're either becoming wildly popular or more likely, the new adds are demonized accounts; in other words, people that had their accounts taken over by a spam bot. This has to stop, Biz--stop teasing our egos!

In other ridiculous news, the CBS video print ad we picked apart in Episode 411 is fetching up to $400 on eBay--what the what? If we'd known that prices would skyrocket on the black market, we would have ganked a few more copies from our parent company, CBS! This is a great example of how you can buy practically anything online, including an 800 thread count Egyptian Cotton duvet cover or a set of custom-made Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle drapes from your humble host's childhood...don't ask, just watch the show.

After the break, we get to a few Calls From the Public, including one from a caller all the way in the Caribbean! We also run down the 20 best cartoons from the 1990s, but they forgot about the X-Men cartoon! And where is "Teenage Mutant Ninja Frickin Turtles?!" Take a look at the list and let us know your favorites!

EPISODE 431 Subscribe in iTunes audio | Suscribe to iTunes (video) | Subscribe in RSS Audio | Subscribe in RSS Video… Read more

TechCrunch50 kicks off: Let the games begin

SAN FRANCISCO--The fall season has officially begun. Starting Monday morning, the annual TechCrunch50 conference took over the San Francisco Design Center for two days of start-up pitches and presentations; the conference's angle, as co-hosts Michael Arrington and Jason Calacanis reiterated, is that all 50 companies on the roster are completely new and launching for the first time.

Start-ups presenting at the conference, which were chosen through a behind-the-scenes elimination process, were grouped into categories. The first of the day was "Youth & Games," with an array of kid-focused and entertainment start-ups.

The day had already begun with … Read more