Talk about a case of the Mondays. Sprint and Philips are the latest to announce layoffs with Sprint cutting 8,000 and Philips 6,000 employees. You know the drone. It’s cause we can’t borrow against our overinflated home’s equity to buy these companies latest crap anymore. We’re too busy dumping all of our cash into organic foodstuff now. The Sprint layoffs are expected to be completed by March 31st and Philips’ are on top of the recently announced 3,000 cuts. Alright, back to work before you get cut reading this in your cube. Unless you wanna collect unemployment, in which case, onto the next post, buddy boy. → Read More
TripIt, the helpful travel site that lets you generate an itinerary by simply forwarding the service your Email confirmations from hotels and airlines, has opened up an API for outside developers. The API will give third party applications access to TripIt’s itinerary sysytem, which now accepts data from 350 travel sites. Developers can find all the details for joining the program here.
A number of applications have already used the API to implement new features. Expensd, an online service that helps business travelers manage their expenses, will use TripIt to automatically import your transit and hotel expenses. Popular iPhone application FlightTrack will use TripIt to automatically look up your flights to see if they’re on time. And Where I’ve Been, a social network application that plots your travels on a map for your friends to see, will use the API to automatically look up your destinations. Other potential uses for the API include an ‘Add To TripIt’ button that would allow travel sites to transmit your booking data to TripIt so you won’t have to forward your confirmation Email. → Read More
Jim Balsillie, co-CEO of Research in Motion, has admitted that they just barely got the Blackberry Storm out by Black Friday. The mad rush to release a product before a major shopping day cramps the normal development and testing cycles, which lead to more and more bugs being included in the shipped product. Balsillie says this is the “new reality”, basically telling consumers to suck it up. → Read More
The next incarnation of WinMob might be Microsoft’s last gasp as Apple, Blackberry, and now Palm reach for an even bigger market share with killer platforms. Microsoft does have the stuff to make a killer OS – look at the Zune – but those folks might be on their way out due to jobs cuts leaving the old farts that designed WinMob user interface a half a decade ago. These screenshots (after the break) on a Compulab exeda smartphone of 6.5 alpha does show promise with an interface similar to earlier spy shots. → Read More
Are cell phones no longer a growth business? At least in the fourth quarter, cell phone shipments actually declined. According to Deutsche Bank analyst Brian Modoff, shipments from the top five cell phone manufacturers (Nokia, Samsung, LG, Sony Ericsson, and Motorola) dropped 13 percent year-over-year in the fourth quarter of 2008. Unit shipments decelerated from 14 percent growth in the second quarter to 2 percent growth in the third quarter, and then finally went into negative territory in the fourth quarter. Shipments for the top five started decelerating sequentially (quarter-over-quarter) in the third quarter, when they were down 2 percent, and then were down 4 percent sequentially in the fourth quarter. The deceleration is likely to continue through 2009. Even Apple saw a 36 percent quarterly decline in sales of iPhones (4.4 million in the December quarter versus 6.9 million in the September quarter). And RIM’s Blackberry Storm sold only 500,000 units its first month, despite a $100 million marketing campaign. As a result, Apple and RIM have about 3 percent market share between them, down from 4 percent in the third quarter, estimates Modoff. Still, that’s half of Motorola’s 6 percent share. → Read More
I don’t know when and if mankind will ever get robotic postmen but I am sure that if, they will come from Japan, just like this mini robot recently presented by Tokyo-based company Kyosho [JP]. → Read More
Verizon’s solution for improving your wireless coverage indoors is this network extender. The $250 device works like a mini cell phone tower with a 5,000 feet range. It seems all you need to do is plug the device into a high speed connection and place it by the window for GPS reasons. → Read More
YouTube has always been infamous for the amount of useless comments that videos hosted on the site tend to generate (which is not unusual when it comes to user-generated services that appeal to a massive audience). But those with comment remorse now at least have the option of deleting their dumb and irrelevant responses in just a heartbeat.
YouTube users can now go back and delete any comment they have published in the past by clicking a new button that appears in the “Text Comments” section below the video.
To all YouTube users who are reading: please schedule a couple of hours to do this. It will make the world a better place, just a little. → Read More
Calcalist is reporting (Hebrew only) that Modu has brought in another $7M in funding courtesy of Qualcomm which as part of the agreement will also manufacture the Modu “core”.
Modu has had a whirlwind of a year, first debuting to much fanfare at last year’s Mobile World Congress, where we had a chance to sit with the company’s CEO, Dov Moran, for a 1-on-1 for a demo. The company then went on to raise a whopping $100M round. Then in November Modu announced a 33%, 88-employee downsizing in November. → Read More
You’d think that someone who sells tshirts with slogans like “It’s not gay if you beat them up afterwards” and “Arrest Black Babies Before They Become Criminals” would not only be prepared for a tidal wave of hate email, but would be able to handle it as well. Some people just won’t find these shirts funny, or understand the social messaging behind it.
But that doesn’t appear to be the case. After 8 years, the owner of T-Shirt Hell, Sunshine Megatron (formerly Aaron Landau Schwarz according to Wikipedia), says he is shutting down the site on February 10, 2009: → Read More
Tokyo-based robot maker Tmsuk and security firm Alacom [JP] jointly developed the “T-34,” a compact patrol and security robot that can launch a net to catch intruders. As this is a Japanese robot, it goes without saying it’s controllable via cell phones. → Read More
The next incarnation of WinMob might be Microsoft’s last gasp as Apple, Blackberry, and now Palm reach for an even bigger market share with killer platforms. Microsoft does have the stuff to make a killer OS – look at the Zune – but those folks might be on their way out due to jobs cuts leaving the old farts that designed WinMob user interface a half a decade ago. These screenshots (after the break) on a Compulab exeda smartphone of 6.5 alpha does show promise with an interface similar to earlier spy shots. Palm surprised everyone with webOS and hopefully Microsoft will follow suit with 6.5. → Read More
Sony Japan today announced the “Carnival Colors” collection of PSP-3000s [JP], which will go on sale in Nippon starting March. The new colors are “vibrant blue”, “radiant red”, “bright yellow” and “spirited green”. I don’t know who came up with these names but Sony didn’t say if the new PSPs will ever make it to the US or Europe. → Read More
When technology focused video blog WebbAlert, hosted by the lovely Morgan Webb, launched in August 2007, we said it could be a winner. Almost a year and half further down the road, we have to come back on that now that Webb is shutting the vlog down.
Webb will be focusing her efforts on her TV show X-Play, which has expanded to five weekly episodes instead of three, and “make a little time for life itself”.
I really appreciate all the support you’ve shown me over the past year and a half, and I’ve had a great time making WebbAlert and sharing my love of technology. When I started WebbAlert, my TV show X-Play only taped three episodes a week so I had the time to dedicate my video blog. At the beginning of the year, X-Play expanded to five episodes, and the last year has been a lot of work trying to keep up with both projects. I finally decided that I need to make a little time for other opportunities, as well as make a little time for life itself. Thanks for understanding and I hope to bring you a number of new projects in the future!
Open source data integration software maker Talend has raised $12 million in Series C financing from Balderton Capital and previous investor AGF Private Equity. Balderton’s Bernard Liautaud is joining their Board of Directors.
The company says its flagship product, Talend Open Studio (demo video), has seen over 3.3 million downloads so far, and Talend boasts about having 400 paying customers (an increase of more than 300 percent over the past 12 months) and over 100 partners. Talend intends to use the funds (which according to the blog post announcing the deal, were “no small feat” to raise in these economic times) to expand global operations into the Americas, EMEA and Asia-Pacific, and introduce a number of new products in the course of this year. → Read More
Offbeat Guides, the travel site launched last summer by Technorati founder Dave Sifry, has launched a new affiliate program. Affiliates will make an 8% commission on every purchase driven from their sites; to help get the program started, Offbeat Guides is increasing this commission to 15% through June 30th for affiliates that sign up by January 31st. To join the affiliate program, you can fill out an application here.
Offbeat Guides are similar to traditional books like Lonely Planet or Frommers, but are flexible and customizable because they’re built on the fly. After prompting users for their destination and the dates they’ll be visiting, the site scours the web, using a variety of sources to generate travel guides for nearly any city (it also supports regions). The site also has a leg up on traditional guides because it can include time-sensitive information like event listings and find activities based on your interests. Guides can be previewed in the browser for free, downloaded as a PDF for $10, or printed into a full-color guide and shipped within a few days for $25. → Read More
ChaCha, the human-powered answers service we’ve written about quite a bit here on TechCrunch, is raising a Series C round of $30 million, of which close to $11 million has already been secured according to a regulatory filing, reports peHUB. The filing doesn’t list any new shareholders.
Update: we exchanged e-mails with a company representative, who informed us that this is actually “old news” and that the Series C round of $30 million has actually closed a couple of months ago.
The company raised $6 million in Series A financing exactly two years ago from Jeff Bezos and Bezos Expeditions, followed by a $10 million round by Morton Meyerson and 21st Century Technology Fund. If ChaCha closes the $30 million Series C round (see update above), the total capital invested in the company will amount up to a whopping $46 million. → Read More
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