Christian Susana of Germany came up with this concept of a motor home with a detachable front car for tooling around on day trips, going to restaurants, and whatnot. Susana is calling it “Colim” for Colors of Life in Motion. → Read More
While this could have been anything from Kid A, this is actually a version of “Creep” reworked by Microsoft Songsmith and the peppy beats could potentially completely cure the melancholy infused into countless proto-Goths by this moody yet charming band over the years.
The strange thing is this: SongSmith actually brings out some of the original music here but the quality here is nill. It reminds me of chiptunes. I once heard “Closing Time” done on a Gameboy’s audio processor and the song, which is a bit schmaltzy in the first place, sounded like one of the songs the Music Department would would generate for Hate Week in 1984. → Read More
Microsoft has a patent floating around for “a universal smart interface and peripheral management system for portable devices such as mobile phones.” You’d dock your phone into this thing, which would connect to a keyboard, mouse, monitor, and just about anything else that could be plugged into it – even your TV. → Read More
Social networking advertiser SocialMedia raised $6 million from IDG Ventures. Existing investor Charles River Ventures also participated. The company was shopping around for a larger investment of around $20 million with the investment bank Savian, but decided to take a smaller amount. At least, that is the story the company is going with.
The company claims that it had $16 million in revenues last year and says it was profitable for three consecutive months thanks to the launch of a new advertising product called Word of Mouth. These are opt-in display ads that asks people on social networks to answer a question or take a poll. The point of these ads are to find people who have an affinity for a brands and then rebroadcasting that affinity to their friends. → Read More
Atlas Venture has closed its eighth fund, which comes in at $283 million. The bad news is Fund VIII is smaller than Fund VII ($385 million) and comes in well below their original target of $400 million. But if there is a silver lining, it is that there are still VC houses out there raising any funds at all in this car crash of an economy. Plus the leaner, meaner fund will necessarily have to look at at early stage startups as a result.
The company is spinning the reduced fund as a positive thing, of course. “The new fund is the right size for our early-stage focus and organisational structure,” said Jean-Francois Formela, partner.
Amongst VCs themselves some will snipe about the “size” of each-other’s fund, but frankly if a startup secures backing, who cares. One of the go-to guy for tech startups in particular will therefore be the same guy as before: Fred Destin, a VC who also doesn’t mind firing off a few opinions on his blog now and again. → Read More
Sony didn’t have a great fourth quarter of 2008 to say the least. The company saw profits vanish over 2007, recording only a 10.4 billion yen verses 200.2 billion yen. The cause? You and I didn’t buy what we were suppose too. Shame on you, btw. TVs were a big factor, but maybe with the Super Bowl quickly approaching, Sony will recover some of the lost profits. Still, Sony’s seems to be heading down a dark path. → Read More
There is a slight chance that MacRumors stumbled across the first evidence of Apple’s next iPhone. It boils down to a previously unused product code – iPhone2,1 – which suddenly made an appearance in firmware 2.2.1. The current generation iPhone is notated with the product code, iPhone1,2 so they might be onto something. Plus, iPods have seen similar product code increases as new models were released. Let’s put this all together for you. Apple has a new iPhone in the works. Shocking, we know. → Read More
Following KDDI, Japan’s No.3 telecommunications company SoftBank today also presented the new cell phone line-up for this spring. The company presented a total of nine models and will start selling the first handset of the line-up (the Panasonic 930P) from tomorrow. → Read More
Google may be good at many things, but people search is not one of them. For that you’ll have to use a more specialized search engine. Spock and Wink (merged with Reunion.com) are the people-search destinations most TechCrunch readers could probably name off the top of their head. However, slowly but surely—and mostly, very quietly—a new player has been making serious headway in this search vertical, and it’s name is Pipl.com.
Going by ComScore’s December numbers, Pipl is leading in the US with 557K unique users to Spock’s 260K, but is trailing internationally with 1.35M uniques to Spock’s 2.38M. How has Pipl pulled this off? Matthew Hertz, the company CEO, tells me it’s mostly word-of-mouth. It’s a simple answer but it rings true. Just take it out for a spin and you’ll see why—it’s just good. In fact it’s so good it’ll probably scare some people’s pants off when they see what information it is able to—legally—drudge up. → Read More
Well, to be fair, pretty much everybody loves “Lost”. I for one am happy that there’s some decent sci-fi on television that won’t be violated and then canceled because of a talking car. Popular Mechanics is expressing their love in their own particular way though. → Read More
Japan’s second biggest mobile phone carrier KDDI au today presented their new cell phones [JP] for this spring. The first handsets will be available in Nippon on Saturday.
And they have a few spectacular models to offer – if only the Japanese carriers did what they promised a few months back (large-scale internationalization due to a shrinking home market), everyone could get their hands on these things. → Read More
There is a slight chance that MacRumors stumbled across the first evidence of Apple’s next iPhone. It boils down to a previously unused product code – iPhone2,1 – which suddenly made an appearance in firmware 2.1.1. The current generation iPhone is notated with the product code, iPhone1,2 so they might be onto something. Plus, iPods have seen similar product code increases as new models were released. Let’s put this all together for you. Apple has a new iPhone in the works. Shocking, we know. → Read More
When twitter recently added a “Suggested Friends” feature, I was more than a little disappointed. Unlike Facebook’s “People You May Know” feature, no explanation is provided for why these people were suggested. CrunchBase Information IBM Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
“Imagine, if you will, sitting down to your morning coffee, turning on your home computer to see the day’s newspaper. Well, it’s not as far-fetched as it may seem.”
Thus begins this video of a 1981 KRON report predicting the rise of news reporting on the internet.
You need to see this, it’s pure gold.
My favorite quotes:
David Cole (S.F. Examiner): “This is an experiment. We’re trying to figure out what it’s going to mean to us, as editors and reporters and what it means to the home user. And we’re not in it to make money, we’re probably not going to lose a lot but we aren’t going to make much either.”
KRON reporter: “This is only the first step in newspapers by computers. Engineers now predict the day will come when we get all our newspapers and magazines by home computer, but that’s a few years off.”
Adobe has announced that they’ve recorded 100 million successful installations of Adobe AIR, the company’s cross-platform runtime environment for RIAs, at the same time boasting that the newest version of Adobe Flash Player (10) was installed on over half of computers worldwide in just the first two months of its release.
The company made the announcement at the Adobe MAX Japan event, notably less than one year after the official release of Adobe AIR.
Adobe says the 100 million mark for Adobe AIR installs is a minimum for the total install base of the AIR runtime (read: they think it’s actually more than that) since they only count the ones that are deemed 100% successful (i.e. they can be confirmed by code running after the installation). As for developers building Web applications using the Adobe Flash Platform, the company claims that in the last 12 months there have been over 1 million downloads of the AIR software development kit (SDK), open source Flex framework and Adobe Flex Builder. → Read More
Normally I wouldn’t write about this. I’d keep my head down, hoping that someone else would say what I might. Many of the people cited in Rafe Needleman’s post are friends, professional colleagues, and actors in the Web 2.0 comedy. But this stuff isn’t funny, trading in the politics of personal destruction is not professional, and letting this slide is not an act of friendship. Writing or producing or performing for a living opens us up to the slings and arrows of those who feel helpless, unrepresented, or disrespected. The way the Internet works, anonymity is a shield to hide behind. The only thing worse than that anonymity is the fix for it: digital numbers tatooed on every arm. As we found out in the last administration, destroying our human rights to torture the potentially innocent backfires when we all are presumed guilty. If anonymity is worth the cost, we have to find some other ways to keep the discourse at what my father used to call a low howl. As a father of two children (15 and 8) my responsibility is to leave them with a sense of what is the right thing to do. My father has been dead for 34 years, but I can conjure up at any moment what he might think about any action I’ve ever taken. Of course, I’m really just mapping my sense of what’s right on top of what he taught me to honor. The actions of the haters in the virtual world may be excused as a function of the distancing of technology, but I think that’s just blaming the tools — guns don’t kill, bullets do. We all know better than to revel in the tyranny of the whisper, the flexing of the innuendo, the bullying of the vulnerable. But as parents, we fail when we let the hatred pass as just another day’s work, a kind of wink and a nod that excuses the drumbeat of thoughtless banter and real fear slipped in along with the childish and class cut-upping. Do we really have to let this get as far as death threats before we realize how seriously off the rails we are? It shouldn’t be this way, but it is. And since it is, it’s time for a trip to the principal’s office, not for the kids but for us parents. The kids don’t know better, but we → Read More
