Welcome to the future, everyone! As we mentioned earlier this morning, AT&T is rolling out MMS for the iPhone today. If you’re one of those folks who couldn’t be bothered to sit in iTunes and click the “Update” button for hours on end, go check now. We just got hit by an onslaught of reports saying that it had gone live and, sure enough, we just got our update. To get the update, plug into iTunes, go to your iPhones device screen, and hit the update button. The carrier file will take 5-10 seconds to download. Power cycle your handset, and bam – you’re ready to roll. → Read More
Do you often find yourself thinking, “Oh, crap. We forgot to name this baby. We need a name, stat!”? I know I sure do. While most people tend to spend months toiling over their child’s name, digging through their family history and fretting over each potentially offensive rhyming variation, you’re a modern parent. This is 2009, after all – we have the power of the Internets right in our pocket. We’ve got better things to do than spend time coming up with the name our child will live with for the rest of their life. Fear not, present-day procreators – BabyNames.com is now an iPhone app. It pulls from BabyName’s list of over 15,000 names, and lets you save your favorites. It’s not really so much for on-the-spot baby naming as it is for helping the uncreative in conjuring up a list of possibilities, but we like to pretend. With that said, it does have a random name picker – so if you feel like namin’ your offspring UrbanSpoon style, go right ahead. [Via IntoMobile] → Read More
I know that you will probably wanna snag Wii Sports Resort on September 27 when the Wii drops to $199, but don’t. If you can wait until October 12 to get your MotionPlus on, you will be so very happy. → Read More
It’s time to go back, folks. Waaay back. Back to a simpler time; back when the government was busy with Enron and leaving No Child Behind. Back when the best Nintendo handheld the world knew had one screen and looked vaguely like a clam, and smart phones cost upwards of $600 – on contract. We’re talking, of course, about 2002. Why are we having this little time travel adventure, you ask? Because 2002 also happens to be the same year MMS, otherwise known as “Multimedia Messaging Service” or “How people send inappropriate pictures to each other when they’re drunk”, made its big debut. Today, just 819 days and 3 models after launch, this oh-so-futuristic feature has found its way to iPhones on AT&T’s network. We loves us some iPhone around these parts – but anybody who thinks its acceptable that it took AT&T this long to get a feature found on every dumbphone since 2003 onto their flagship handset is taking too many sips of the fanboy juice. It’s not live quite yet – but expect it sometime around lunch time, wherever you are. Remember, you’ll most likely have to plug into iTunes for a carrier update. Update: The update just went live. → Read More
Hot London-based live music startup Songkick launches a new feature today allowing users to share their experiences of gigs. Users can now connect their Songkick account to their Twitter account and auto-tweet any gigs they plan to go to. That’s not that big a deal. What is pretty interesting however is how they’ve integrated Twitter to bring a realtime stream to their service.
When a user goes to a show, Songkick automatically pulls in tweets that they write during the concert as realtime, live reviews. The tweets are from actual gig-goers, making this way more valuable than just pulling in generic artist searches. This looks like the first time anyone has done this. Furthermore the tweets are then preserved for all time on the dedicated Songkick concert page for that gig, foiling Twitter’s annoying ability to lose Tweets after a week or so in search. → Read More
The TomTom iPhone Car Kit has been getting a lot of media play the last few days. It briefly appeared on the UK’s iTunes Store and then TomTom announced that it will be available there for EUR99.99. But until now the company hasn’t said squat about the retail price here in the good ol’ States. → Read More
It’s been a big week for European entrepreneurship, what with 20+ startups emerging at Seedcamp and Dopplr getting picked up by Nokia (or does it just feel that way since I’m here with GeeksOnAPlane for the first time in four years?).
In any case, Seedcamp’s six winners were announced earlier today. If you’re not familiar with Seedcamp, it’s a startup mentorship and funding program for European entrepreneurs that shares basic tenets with US-based Y Combinator and TechStars, among several others. I had the opportunity to sit down on Wednesday with Seedcamp founder Saul Klein and ask him about a variety of topics ranging from the idiosyncrasies of European entrepreneurship to Spotify, smart energy, and the real-time web. In addition to founding Seedcamp, Klein is a partner at Index Ventures and a founding partner at The Accelerator Group (TAG).
A transcript of the interview follows below. → Read More
Travel site Localyte has a new twist on travel advice—the site tries to connect travelers with locals in their destination to serve as guides or just to get advice. Locals in communities around the world vary from professional tour guides who charge for the custom tours to everyday people who simply want to help folks enjoy their hometown as much as possible. Since late 2007, Localyte has accumulated 40,000 local guides in about 10,000 destinations across 160 countries. The site also offers reviews and listings of local activities.
Now, Localyte is furthering its mobile strategy by launching PocketSherpa, a free iPhone app that integrates its online platform onto a mobile device, letting travelers access local guides and information (from WikiTravel) on the go. The app lists tours and contact info in cities and also lists local travel guides in those cities who are available to answer any questions. For example, if you were traveling in Egypt, you could ask “Are there any hot air balloon rides available over the Pyramids?” Localyte’s CEO Guillermo Baensch says that locals answer the questions fairly quickly, within a few hours at most. You can also access threads of previous questions that were submitted in your destination. Localyte’s app has a built-in mailbox that lets you send and receive messages, and also lets you see local newspapers in the region where you are traveling. → Read More
We just got this email from, of all places, Brandoo Co., Ltd., a company that seems to be parasitically suckling off of the good will associated to Brando. However, unlike Brando, their devices are clearly garbage OEM junk. In fact, there’s not a humping dog USB dongle to be found on their site. However, what this company lacks in spelling skills it more than makes up for in design abilities. → Read More
Amazon has been known to offer cell phones at cut-rate prices. Just the other day, all AT&T phones except for ones that start with the letter “i” were a penny on Amazon. But today, you can save $50 off the retail price and snag a Palm Pre for only one bill. → Read More
How many hours ago did it “break” that the Palm Pre wasn’t going to be available on Verizon Wireless? Yeah, well, now word on the street is that, forget everything you read last night, because there’s no way in hell the Palm Pre won’t be available for Verizon Wireless. Or, to remove the double-negative: yes, the Palm Pre will, indeed, be available on Verizon Wireless, most likely this winter. Calm yourselves. → Read More
What do entrepreneurs want from venture capitalists? A new Cornell study by Ola Bengtsson (now an assistant professor of finance at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign) and Frederick Wang looked at the stated preferences of entrepreneurs as expressed in comments and ratings on VC-ranking site The Funded. The study, which is based on opinions from roughly 1,500 entrepreneurs about 526 U.S. venture capital firms, tries to assess what they value the most from VCs.
In general, entrepreneurs view independent venture capital firms more favorably than strategic, corporate, or government VCs. They do a pretty good job of identifying which VCs have the best track record (which Bengtsson checked against VentureEconomics data), but just because a VC has a good financial track record doesn’t mean he or she will be the most helpful. And one of the things entrepreneurs value the most from a VC is quick feedback (positive or negative) when they are doing due diligence because time is money, and startups don’t have much of either.
Bengtsson shares some of his conclusions: → Read More
VoIP services company Sabse Technologies has acquired Canadian Internet voice startup MobiVox for an undisclosed amount. The fledgling company provides VoIP calling via existing landlines and cellphones and also enables its users to do conferencing, make group calls, and transfer calls to their home phone from their cell phone.
The young company had raised a single round of funding that amounted up to $11 million nearly two years ago from high-profile investors like Flybridge Capital, IDG Ventures and Brightspark Ventures. → Read More
If you’ve rooted and modded your Android phone you’ve probably found Cyanogen, one of the best sources for modded Android ROMs out there. All of his ROMs are stable, usable on the G1 and MyTouch, and well-designed. Google, however, takes issue with him releasing closed-source Google apps like Gmail, Maps, and YouTube and has sent him a cease and desist. They’re not particularly mad about the ROMs, mind you, just the apps inside them. → Read More
The American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP) recently made the ridiculous assertion that cellphone ringtones are to be considered “public performances” of music under the Copyright Act and thus require a license. As Ars Technica eloquently pointed out, the claim is ridiculous because after all one doesn’t need a public performance license to drive around town in a convertible with the radio on.
Even the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) sided with the defendants in the case (AT&T and Verizon Wireless), called the organization’s claims downright ‘outlandish’ and urged a federal court to reject the “bogus” copyright claims. Imagine my surprise to find out that Verizon has now agreed to pay the ASCAP an interim license fee of more than $4.99 million for songs the phone service provider uses in ringtones for its customers. Meanwhile, the two sides will continue to debate how much the group should receive for the tunes. → Read More
Amazon has been known to offer cell phones at cut rate prices. Just the other day, all AT&T phones expect for ones that start with the letter “i” werea penny on Amazon. But today, you can save $50 off the retail price and snag a Palm Pre for only one bill. → Read More
Seedcamp, the European startups programme a little (though not entirely) like YCombinator, has announced the winners of its year-long programme to find the best startups in Europe, finally judged over an intense week of mentoring by a long line of fellow European entrepreneurs.
Each startup has won €50,000 to develop their product, in return for Seedcamp taking a stake worth between 5-10% of the company. In each case the exact stake has not been released. As we wrote earlier this week, overall the standard was strong this year and many of the VCs and CEOs I spoke to during this week have remarked on how much the quality of startups in Europe has improved, especially as reflected in this year’s Seedcamp vintage.
So the winning teams are: → Read More
Resident Evil (Biohazard in Japan) – The Darkside Chronicles is an on-rails shooter that comes out in Nippon for the Wii on January 14. Instead of torturing you with the crappy video I took at the Capcom booth at the Tokyo Game Show, I give you the official trailer the fine people over at the Famitsu secured. It contains cut scenes, gameplay sequences and a few spoilers – you’ve been warned. → Read More
I posted some pictures of Sony’s and Ubisoft’s booth at this year’s Tokyo Game Show yesterday, but booth-wise, Square Enix, Microsoft (Xbox 360) and Capcom made quite a strong showing, too. Here’s some proof. → Read More
