Stealth startup Small Batch has raised an undisclosed round of equity funding from True Ventures with Twitter co-founder Evan Williams, Flickr and Hunch co-founder Caterina Fake, WordPress/Automattic Founder Matt Mullenweg, renown investor Ron Conway, Chris Sacca, Josh Felser and Dave Samuel participating. Small Batch is launching Typekit, a service that lets designers build sites with web-native typography.
Small Batch was co-founded by Jeffrey Veen, who was one of the founding partners of Adaptive Path and project lead for Measure Map, the well-received web analytics tool that was acquired by Google. After the acquisition, Veen worked at Google and started Small Batch in January of 2009. Veen was also the recipient of TechFellow award a few weeks ago. → Read More
I’m a sucker for a multi-tool. I had a great Swiss Army one – I think it was Victorinox – but I lost that and then I got a Leatherman. This one looks nice, though. It has a caribiner, a saw, two screwdrivers, and a knife. Best of all it’s only $37, which is considerably less than I paid for my Leatherman.
It will be available at RockyNational in July. Click through for a thrilling video. → Read More
More than a few people have left comments on our Twitter posts related to the Iranian situation wondering if they weren’t really articles by the satirical site, The Onion. Here are two that come to mind, Twitter Reschedules Maintenance To Allow Iranian Protests To Continue and Bush Advisor: Twitter Founders Should Get Nobel Peace Prize. Well, The Onion finally has one of its own. And as you might expect, it’s good.
The post is short, sweet and to the point. But the best parts are the fake quotes by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey:
“Twitter was intended to be a way for vacant, self-absorbed egotists to share their most banal and idiotic thoughts with anyone pathetic enough to read them,” said a visibly confused Dorsey.
I’d imagine by now you’ve seen this picture of Megan Fox snubbing this poor little portly boy at the London premiere of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. If you haven’t then you need to get out from under the rock or watch The Soup or something. → Read More
Fever is a hot new RSS reader that aims to cure “second inbox syndrome, unread item guilt, and unbold elbow.” In other words, the common plights of the modern RSS power user.
Besides offering a full-featured feed reader, the application attempts to create a personalized Techmeme by scanning a user’s feed list for popular (or hot) links. Fever then groups these links into stories and assigns each a “temperature.” This allows a user to quickly keep a pulse on what’s going on in his or her “slice of the web.”
The other refreshing feature of the app is its move away from email inbox-style unread counts. As a long-time Google Reader user, I always dreaded the experience of returning from an offline vacation only to find several thousand unread items in my reader. With Fever, the emphasis is on dividing subscriptions into two camps: must-reads (called Kindling) and everything else (Sparks). By moving the “hit-or-miss” feeds into the Sparks bin, Fever ensures that a user gets only the most relevant content. → Read More
One of my favorite recent Twitter-related trends is the onslaught of jokes from late-night talk show hosts pointing out how laughably dull (or stupid) some of our favorite celebs’ tweets really are. Read aloud, even the most seemingly innocuous Tweets are often hilarious.
Now Break.com, a video site heavily geared towards a male audience, is looking to get in on the action. The site has signed on comedian Mike Polk (formerly of HBOLabs) to host a show called Tweet Boxx, which is specifically focused on making fun of the Twitterverse. You can catch the first episode here.
Polk kicks off the inaugural show saying that each week he’ll “be sharing with you my favorite celebrity Twitter tweets of the week” following that up a moment later with, “what am I saying here, these are words?” Welcome to my life, Mr. Polk. → Read More
A Japanese company called Interlink [JP] is organizing a contest to find potentially lucrative future gTLDs (generic top-level domains). And the best thing is that the “World Domain Cup” is open to everyone with the contest’s dedicated web page being available in English, Japanese and Chinese. → Read More
Cable providers Comcast and Time Warner might be late to the Internet video party, but that doesn’t mean they are going to let us enjoy content for free that they pay for. Oh no, the TV Everywhere Model is designed to give Comcast and Time Warner paying subscribers access to content and block-out everyone else. And this system might find its way into Hulu.
You can’t blame the cable operators for their plans. They have to pay good money for access to cable stations. Then they, of course, pass along the cost to subs via a monthly bill. The thought is that those people that pay for the content should be able to watch all of it on both their TVs and computers.
Of course the other side is that if you don’t pay for those services, then you’ll be shut out. This authentication system will be used initially on sites like Comcast’s video site, Fancast, but there is always the possibility that it could eventually make its way on to Hulu. → Read More
Teenagers spend their days texting, tweeting and hanging around on YouTube, Facebook and MySpace! Honestly, that’s what I assumed too. Turns out I’m wrong, and I needed Nielsen to teach me that. The audience measurement company is releasing a brand new report on teens and media with a lofty promise of serious myth busting and hard fact presenting that will downright knock your socks off.
Ready for some eye-openers? Here we go: → Read More
“You know the beautiful thing: June 29, 2009, is the two- year anniversary of the first shipment of the iPhone,” Elevation Partners (which owns a huge portion of Palm) co-founder Roger McNamee told Bloomberg in March. “Not one of those people will still be using an iPhone a month later.”
We’re 5 days away from that milestone. Anyone want to take that bet still?
It’s been 18 days since the launch of the Palm Pre, and the device has already passed an important milestone: 1 million app downloads, according to mobile analytics firm Medialets. That’s impressive for a store with only 30 or so applications. While Apple surpassed 10 million downloads in its first weekend following the App Store launch in 2007, it had over 500 applications at launch, and already had a few million devices (the original iPhone) with which people could download from. → Read More
Even though Nokia and Intel were both relatively tight-lipped yesterday about the actual hardware products that’ll spring forth from their new joint-venture, rumors are already circulating that Nokia has placed orders with Quanta and Compal, Taiwan’s number one and two netbook/smartbook manufacturers, respectively. → Read More
Here it is in living color: the HTC Hero/Sense UI walk-through. This is a real phone running the actual software and we delve into some of the most important features including social media integration and the browser experience.
The most interesting thing is that all of the contact/Facebook/Twitter interaction is automatic. You import your login info and it just shows up without fuss or muss. There is none of the Palm Pre’s linked-list creation. This is a small improvement but makes a world of difference in most cases. The Facebook info updates once every two hours so when profile pictures or contact info is updated online, the phone updates itself automatically. → Read More
One of those highly paid analyst types from Wedbush has gone on record saying that the only thing holding back a true-to-life Xbox 360 game download service, à la Steam, is hard drive capacity. Right now, you can buy a 120GB hard drive for $140 on Amazon, which is ridiculous given the low, low prices of standard hard drives these days. (A recent CrunchDeal spotted a 1TB hard drive for $77.) So if Microsoft is serious about launching such a service, it needs to do something about bringing large capacity hard drives at normal prices. There’s no reason that a 120GB hard disk drive should cost $140 in the year 2009. → Read More
Yesterday the WSJ reported of the Iranian government using deep packet inspection technology to censor and monitor Internet activity throughout the country. Deep packet inspection (DPI) is essentially a method through which network operators can delve into individual IP packets to develop an understanding of the type of content flowing through their networks. In the case of Iran, the technology was purportedly used to block certain types of content from being accessed within the country. Similar, less invasive tactics have also been employed in China. Though reports of this nature present DPI as an emerging technology facilitating the invasion of privacy, DPI has long been used in IT departments for a variety of purposes. Jay Botelho of WildPackets, a DPI technology provider with several enterprise clients, informed us of how the technology is utilized in the enterprise space. Botelho explained that DPI is most commonly used for network troubleshooting. For instance, if a network hold up occurs, DPI technology allows one to reduce congestion by prioritizing traffic or reallocating portions to other branches of the network. DPI is also widely used to protect corporate networks from viruses and spyware by identifying and filtering out packets with malicious content. More recently, IT departments have turned to the technology to obtain a more comprehensive view of network performance. WildPackets, along with competitors NetScout and Network Instruments, for instance, all offer suites that monitor and provide quick summary-level reports of applications running across a network. In sum, though deep packet inspection has recently been portrayed as an emerging technology utilized by government agencies, the technology has existed in the enterprise for several years. It is only now, with rich media flowing through the Web with incredible abundance and speed that governments are utilizing the technology to control the flow of content and slow the proliferation of ideas. As social media continues to abound, it is also conceivable that IT departments may further utilize DPI to squelch out social media before it renders them obsolete. → Read More
Because Mac users need hard drives more than Windows users. Seagate announced some brand spankin’ new external drives today that include the FreeAgent Go Drive for Mac w/ USB, FreeAgent Go Pro for Mac, a 2TB FreeAgent Desk for Mac and the FreeAgent Go Dock+. The dock is actually really cool. → Read More
In case you hadn’t heard, ViewSonic — fine purveyor of affordable LCD monitors — has crossed over into the all-in-one desktop market. The company’s new VPC100 is now shipping to US retailers with an MSRP of $599. → Read More
Ugh. Don’t you hate when you get yourself all psyched about a new product and then you use it and realize it doesn’t do what it’s supposed to? That was kind of my experience with Gokivo, the first turn-by-turn GPS app for the iPhone, released on the heels of the iPhone OS 3.0 launch. Unfortunately, despite having some cool features, Gokivo just didn’t work as a turn-by-turn GPS solution. Though it did occasionally get me from point A to point B, there were so many bumps on the road that I found it better to simply use printed Google Maps directions. → Read More
Today, Facebook is launching a new “Live Stream Box” feature which allows for Facebook Pages to offer their own live video and chat area. And Ustream will be the first to take advantage of it with Ustream on Facebook, a new service to provide live video support to select Facebook users.
This functionality is an extension of what Ustream and Facebook did with some Jonas Brothers concerts last month — events which drew huge numbers. How huge? This huge, according to Ustream:
So clearly, there’s a big demand for certain live events via Facebook, and Ustream is jumping on it, as Facebook’s preferred partner. → Read More
This was “breaking news” two hours ago, but now it’s just regular news. ZeniMax Media, which is the parent company of Bethesda Softworks, has bought id Software. → Read More
