When news came out earlier this week that mobile payments company Obopay raised another $70 million, effectively doubling its total funding raised to date, some observers were surprised at the sheer size of the round. While others expressed skepticism that mobile payments would ever really take off, at least in the U.S.
But the bigger opportunity for Obopay and mobile payments in general is not in the U.S. It is in India and other parts of the world where a large portion of the population don’t have bank accounts. These are the so-called “unbanked.” There are billions of them and their relative spending power is on an upwards trajectory. → Read More
A profanity filter that replaces swear words with baby laughter? Wholly tone-deaf happiness filter? A viral video designed to convince a demanding public that LG is actually trying? All this, and more, are available in this lumpen video from LG’s marketing department. → Read More
If the thought of turning your G1 90 degrees to the left and THEN sliding the screen up to reveal the keyboard has you chomping at the bit for an alternative input method, you’ll soon be able to use your sweaty, greasy finger to write out simple words – just like a real business man from the 1990s except you’ll be using your finger, not a stylus. → Read More
Check it out before it gets blown off the interwebs: Fizy is probably the simplest, most powerful and fastest music search engine I’ve ever seen, and that’s saying a lot. Seemingly designed for mobile browsers rather than traditional web browsers, it lets you dig up virtually any song you’re thinking of and stream it in a heartbeat.
It’ll even display an associated video if it can detect one, and you can easily share songs – which come with dedicated URLs – on a wide variety of social networking services.
That’s about all it does and it does that pretty well; I was even able to find songs from one of my favorite bands, Blackbox Revelation, which is not always the case with these types of new services. Fizy claims it can pull up about 75 billion MP3s thanks to access to over 50 different APIs, and the speed is probably the most amazing thing about it and also the main differentiator compared to the plethora of similar services. Bonus points for setting up the service with an international audience in mind: Fizy supports nearly 30 languages to date. → Read More
Intel’s new Nehalem chipset allows for hugenormous amounts of high-speed RAM, a selling point companies like Dell and Cisco are now touting in their latest high-end server systems. Microsoft Vista flavors can support up to 128GB of RAM. → Read More
Teens In Tech, a blogging network founded by 16 year old Daniel Brusilovsky, has acquired the Youth Bloggers Network (YBN). YBN consists of a network of over 100 young bloggers, and was founded by Patrick DeVivo, who is also a young entrepreneur. The terms of the deal were not disclosed, but given how similar the networks are I suspect that if there was any monetary exchange it was very small – it sounds like the two networks are banding together to help establish traction.
Teens In Tech is meant to offer teenagers a simple way to blog their thoughts in an atmosphere that is both safe and receptive to their ideas. The site launched back in August in a private alpha, and has yet to open signups up to the public (Brusilovsky says that the gates will temporally open this weekend, but that it will become private once more after that). While the company had initially planned to open to the public last winter, it is currently exploring building its own CMS, and is also working to establish an advertising program for its publishers. → Read More
Hello Kitty, the cutest cartoon cat in the world and dream of millions of (mostly) Asian teenage girls, celebrates her 35th birthday soon. Reason enough for Sanrio, the Japan-based company behind Hello Kitty, and luxury brand Swarovski Crystal to produce a Hello Kitty figure of a very special kind. → Read More
Another bit of news from Tag is the RS2 Caliper chrono Ti2 running the Caliber 36 movement for 1/10th of a second accuracy. The 36 isn’t new – it appeared in 2008 – but the “caliper” system is quite interesting.
The dashboard is a stylish black 43mm dial designed for optimum readability and information. The spotlight feature is the exclusive Caliper Rotating Scale, an ingenious display mode marked by an oversize crown and red line at 10 o’clock that enables precise readings of 1/10th of a second — magnified 10X for rapid readability.
I have a weird video after the jump. → Read More
Apple stores are selling iPhones 3G without contracts, en masse, for $599 for 8GB and $699 for the 16GB. You can activate the phones in the privacy of your own home or, more importantly, you can downgrade the firmware and unlock them. → Read More
Earlier this evening we saw a new ad come out of the Microsoft hive mind showing Lauren, a charming everywoman, purchasing an HP laptop for $699 after finding that the lowest-priced Mac matching her meagre requirements would cost her nearly double. The resulting commercial is effective in these lean times but isn’t it a bit disingenuous? I’ve often spoken of the PC industry’s race to the bottom. A $699 laptop – along with a $200 LCD monitor – would have been unthinkable a few years ago but it is now commonplace. At that price, however, you get a machine that wouldn’t get a second look, spec for spec, a few years ago. These would have been called barebones machines – a little memory, a hard drive, and a processor are all you’d get. But with the advent of high design, it’s easy to put lipstick on that particular pig and make Lauren happy. → Read More
They’ve got a point on the cost to feature ratio of Macs v. Windows machines in this new Microsoft ad. I have to say, these things are getting a lot better over time. And the price difference is the key weak point in the Apple product lineup. Mac fanatics couldn’t care less. But to a recession-beaten regular computer user, this message is right on the money. “I’m just not cool enough to be a Mac person,” the actress says after visiting an Apple store and not finding any laptops in her price range.
See our coverage of other recent Microsoft ads here, here, here. → Read More
Digital certification platform MyID.is is taking a crack at offering a way for people to claim their real identity online, in order to be able to prevent ID theft and to verify content they publish on their blogs, social networking accounts, photo & video sharing sites, and so on.
Additionally, the site offers (yet another) way to manage your online identity and doubles as a certified OpenID provider. The site has been in alpha testing for the past 8 months and as of yesterday entered into public beta.
This is how it works: you register for a MyID.is Certified account on the website, and enter your personal details, which are later verified by the team (I’ll get to the issues with this later). They do this by cross-checking the name you submitted with the one on your credit card – they’ll charge a fee between $2 and $5 to verify that it is yours, similar to how Google checks your credit card details for an AdSense account – and by sending a 6-digit code to your postal address which you have to enter to verify your identity on their platform. → Read More
The Samsung SWD-M100 Mondi is the first Wimax device in the U.S. and hopes to pick up where Nokia’s Wimax tablet, now discontinued in the U.S., left off. → Read More
In his book Shaping Things, Bruce Sterling imagines a future where objects are tagged, tracked, and all tell their own stories. He calls these objects “spimes.” I read the book years ago, but it was the first thing I thought of when I visited SendMeHome.
The site is wacky but brilliant. It lets you register any object with a unique code, which is printed out on a small sticker that you place on the object. The object can be anything from your wallet or iPhone to a beloved frying pan. Ostensibly, the purpose of doing this is that if you should ever lose the object, anyone who finds it can contact you through SendMeHome. By entering the code on the sticker, they can learn anything you’ve decided to share about yourself or the object, and can contact you anonymously. SendMeHome offers this service for free, but charges $3.99 for a pack of stickers. (It doesn’t get involved in actually getting your item back to you).
The lost-and-found feature is the only practical reason you would use the service. But once you’ve attached a sticker to a favorite object and registered it on the site, there are other things you can do with it. You can tell a story about the object, pass it around, or put it on a mission. It is on its way to becoming a spime,. These spimes are “always associated with a story. . . . they are protagonists of a documented process,” as Sterling once described it. → Read More
Google is holding one of its occasional “Campfire One” events for developers on April 7. These events, which are held outside on the lawn at Google Headquarters, have always included big product announcements in the past. At a May 2008 Campfire One Google announced details of Friend Connect. A month before that, in April 2008, Google announced App Engine.
What will they announce this time? A good bet is Java on AppEngine, which we’d previously heard wouldn’t be announced until the I/O conference in May. But the product would be a good fit for Campfire One. Of course, it may also be something else entirely. We’ll attend (either because we’re invited or because we just show up) and live blog whatever it is that happens. → Read More
Everybody’s doing it. Even YouTube has succumbed to Twitter mania. Below every video if you click on the “Share” link you will find three options: MySpace, Facebook, and now Twitter. You can expand the box for even more sharing options, but those are the main three and Twitter was just recently added.
Clicking on the Twitter button opens a pop-up window that takes you to your Twitter account and fills in a Tweet telling your followers to “check out this video,” along with the title and URL. The URL is not shortened, but YouTube is working on that. (Youtube URLs are short anyway, so it is not a huge issue). Adding Twitter as one of the key sharing options is a no-brainer. Now, if they could actually embed the videos in the Twitter stream like you can on Facebook and MySpace, that would be something. → Read More
Whispers started to come out today about this, but Twitter has now confirmed that it has re-launched out-going SMS in the UK on a shortcode, but with only one provider, Vodafone. So while Vodafone UK customers will be able to receive SMS updates from Twitter as part of their package, and send for free to begin with, users on other networks will have to wait while Twitter negotiates separate deals. The free offer is for a trial period, after which sending a message to Twitter will count as a normal SMS, although receiving updates will remain free. Twitter cut the ability to get your Twitter feed last August after starting to throttle the service down in November 2007. At the time co-founder Biz Stone said that: “Even with a limit of 250 messages received per week, it could cost Twitter about $1,000 per user, per year to send SMS outside of Canada, India, or the US.” Although they’d been able to negotiate service fees with mobile operators in the US and Canada, negotiations failed in the UK. TechCrunch Europe caught up with co-founder Ev Williams at TechCrunch 50 to quiz him about this very subject. Word among operators then was the Twitter had behaved like amateurs, attempting to dictate terms. However, with Twitter growing like a weed in the UK now and being adopted by celebrities left right and centre, they clearly got back into a reasonable negotiating position. It’s fascinating to think back to it now but mobile Twitter took off in the UK amongst early adopters – largely people in tech – precisely because it had an SMS service. Jaiku, the competing service which was bought and killed off by Google only had SMS in Finland, a tiny market. It languished on the desktop rather than the mobile and only had a client for one mobile device, Nokia/Symbian. Twitter’s API saved it, allowing others to develop applications to the point where we are today, with many ways to access to service. Whether the Vodafone announcement will draw Twitter users to the network remains to be seen, but it’s certainly a more mainstream way for people to get into Twitter so should serve them well enough. Here’s their full announcement: Thursday, March 26, 2009 Full SMS Service for Vodafone UK Customers! Extending the power of the real-time network globally through the simple technology of SMS is a driving goal → Read More
We just tried out OnLive, and of course it worked perfectly, being a demonstration on the order of 8-10 machines set up by the company itself. The people we talked to were naturally very optimistic, and my concerns over the availability and reliability of multi-megabit connections were waved away. That isn’t the only problem, though. OnLive will need a top-tier computer for every player at all times, and when a new game is introduced, the volume and subsequent will be unsupportable. Add this to the fact that video quality (which looked okay to me) is questionable at the framerates they’ve set forth, and things start looking a bit pie-in-the-sky. → Read More
