Fresh from their pitch at the TechCrunch Europe Geek ‘n Rolla event last week, UK social gambling startup Smarkets has completed a second round fund raising of £145k ($210k), exceeding the first round fund raising total of £100k in May 2008. Despite what are clearly tough economic conditions, six private angel investors (details undisclosed) have participated this time and the funds will be used for the upcoming Smarkets launch. In addition, Smarkets has completed its open RESTful API, in what appears to be a first for the betting industry. This is a betting exchange platform built with Erlang, a programming language enabling Smarkets to process thousands of bets per second. Last week CEO and co-founder Jason Trost pitched Smarkets at Geek’n Rolla, a TechCrunch Europe for startups and investors. Here’s their pitch, recorded by Smarkets themselves: CrunchBase Information Smarkets Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Printers are boring! OfficeMax has a color laser printer for $130, though, which is NOT boring since color laser printers normally go for a bajillion dollars. → Read More
Whoa, hey there, looks like not one, but two NFL players are next in line for the dreaded Madden Curse. EA Sports has revealed that both Troy Polamalu and Larry Fitzgerald will appear on the cover of Madden NFL 10, which ships on August 14th this year. → Read More
After heaps of protest, Konami will no longer publish Atomic Games’ Six Days in Fallujah, citing “reaction to the video game in the United State.” Now, Atomic Games could try to find another publisher, but that’s easier said than done. Obviously. → Read More
Sure, it was official this morning. But now it’s real. It looks like someone had a Samsung i7500 tucked away in their pocket, patiently waiting until just after this mornings announcement to share it with the world. Outside of the fact that it’s by no means fingerprint-proof, there’s not much to be gleaned from these shots (obtained by Mobile-Review) that wasn’t announced this morning. From a purely superficial standpoint, we’re diggin’ what we’re seeing so far – but what’s up with the funky continent pattern on the back? → Read More
Ladies and germs, behold the wonders of what’s to come. Someday we will live in a world that is filled with Microsoft Surface-like devices and everything will blend seamlessly together. Our notebooks will become manufacturing facilities and scanners. Shopkeeper’ countertops will be large touchscreens and our desks will be virtual desks. The future, according to Microsoft, will be grand and wonderful.
Watch the two videos after the jump about Microsoft’s vision of XUI – experience user interfaces – to experience the future too. → Read More
Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO, and Craig Mundie, Microsoft’s chief research and strategy officer, have been named to President’s Obama’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST). According to a statement released by the White House, PCAST is an advisory group of the the country’s foremost scientists and engineers who will help the President and Vice President form policy related to science, technology, and innovation.
The council includes a who’s who in the science and technology fields, with leaders in climate change, medicine, physics, chemistry, and computer science all holding positions on the council. The group is co-chaired by John Holdren, Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy; Eric Lander, Director of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and one of the principal leaders of the Human Genome Project; and Harold Varmus, President and CEO of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, former head of the National Institutes of Health and a Nobel laureate. → Read More
That’s right, folks. Earlier today, Vodafone Spain officially launched the highly anticipated HTC Magic (con Google, for you Español speaking readers). While it may not be got for free (read: 139€ for the phone on the cheapest plan w/ mandatory 18 month contract) like its UK sibling (expected to launch in early May), the real point is that it is here, now (in Spain at least). I’d have filled the rest of this post with witty Spanish jokes, but that would require me to know more Spanish than “siesta” and “fiesta.” Salud! → Read More
Straight outta Compton (yes, Belkin is located in Compton — interesting factoid for your next dinner party) comes Belkin’s $30 CushDesk. It’s a hard-top work surface with a padded underside that sits on your lap, allowing you to work on a notebook up to 17 inches in size without scalding your nether regions. → Read More
Just as the technology world is on the verge of bucking physical media for digital storage, G.E. might have extended its life with a laboratory breakthrough. A G.E. lab has been working since 2003 to find materials and techniques to increase the reflectiveness of the holograms so they are actually readable by optical lasers. The breakthrough involved a 200-fold increase in the reflective power of the holograms, which puts the optical media nearly in the range of Blu-ray drives and one step closer to holding a crapton of data. → Read More
RiceHigh, bless his or her heart, claims to have the scoop on everything, but specs for the upcoming K-7 DSLR. As I mentioned the other RiceHigh, bless his or her heart, claims to have the scoop on everything, but specs for the upcoming K-7 DSLR. As I mentioned the other week, the nomenclature for all Pentax SLRs going forward will be dropping the “D” and simply going with K-x. → Read More
It looks like Jeopardy! contestants will be the latest in a long line of humans being replaced by computers if IBM has its way. Big Blue has developed a supercomputer named Watson that’s apparently able to compete on the famous game show with human-like mental quickness as it pertains to answering questions. → Read More
As we speculated this weekend, Facebook has opened up its activity stream through a new API for developers. Now any developer can create new applications incorporating the real-time stream. One of the first apps to take advantage of this new API is Seesmic Desktop, A Twitter client which is now adding your Facebook feed through this API (something Tweetdeck already did in the past through other more restrictive means). Facebook has also created its own desktop notification client to demonstrate what can be built with the API.
I just got off the phone with Ethan Beard, Facebook’s director of platform marketing, who tells me that the entire feed will be available through a single API call. A developer could recreate the entire Facebook home page if he wanted to or take parts of the feed and remix it to make something more interesting. For starters, I’d expect most Twitter clients to add the Facebook stream as an additional option. On Tweetdeck, for instance, you can read your activity stream, but you cannot respond in-line. The new Facebook Open Stream API is two-way, so it would allow developers to build apps which allow for that two-way communication inside the app.
This is a big deal. It potentially puts Facebook side by side with Twitter in all of these desktop and mobile client applications where a lot of the real-time conversation is happening and lets it compete head-to-head with Twitter. Whichever conversation stream is more interesting will prevail. → Read More
Less than a week ago MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe still felt secure in his job. Fast forward to today and DeWolfe is out and a new CEO, Owen Van Natta, is starting his first day on the job.
And he’s already got two lieutenants, either of which could easily be the CEO: former AOL exec Mike Jones as COO (he has /mike at MySpace and was one of the first 3,000 members) and Jason Hirschhorn is the new Chief Product Officer. MySpace cofounder and President Tom Anderson, who’s currently leading the product team, is having “discussions” about “assuming a new role in the organization.” Hirschhorn was formerly the Chief Digital Officer at MTV Networks and was most recently the head of Sling Media Entertainment Group. Van Natta, Jones and Hirschhorn are pictured left to right above.
Those execs that are still left at MySpace are meeting the new team for the first time today (I’d pay good money to listen in on that). Later in the afternoon they’ll lead an all-hands meeting.
The full press release is below. → Read More
Looks like Amazon is unloading some first-generation refurbished Kindles at $299, a so-so savings over a new second generation unit at $360. → Read More
Conde Nast is shutting down its glossy business magazine Portfolio, two years after its launch. Conde Nast famously poured $100 million to launch the publication, which went on an expensive hiring spree in 2007 in its attempt to take on Fortune, Forbes, and Business Week. The magazine always seemed to me to have an unhealthy fixation with Wall Street and the hedge fund boom over other industries, but as Wall Street cratered nobody wanted to read those stories anymore. The drop in print advertising, down 26 percent in the first quarter, didn’t help matters either.
Portfolio saw itself in the same vein as the Fortune magazine of the 1930s, filled with lush photographs and long narratives. But that formula doesn’t work in an age where business is about speed, not leisure or luxury. It also doesn’t work in an age where monthly magazines in general are increasingly challenged by the wealth of instantaneous business news available on the Web. (And you thought the daily newspapers had it tough). Portfolio’s insistence on favoring its print over its Website content also helped to hasten its demise. If you are going to start a magazine these days, the Website has to come first. The magazine companies still don’t realize this simple fact. → Read More
