I’m not really sure if that’s something a lot of gadget freaks were waiting for, but here we go: TDK has found a cost-effective way to tint touchscreens. The company claims it can add color to transparent electrode sheets that serve as the basis of those screens. In the future, electrode sheets will be available in 13 colors, including red, green, blue, aquamarine, purple and black hues.
The main selling point here is to match the body of a given device with its touch screen. → Read More
It’s been a long drought for IPOs, but venture capitalists and tech entrepreneurs are hopeful that 2010 will be the year they rain down on the Valley once gain. Earlier this year, a handful of IPOs trickled out, such as OpenTable, Rackspace, and A123Systems. But what people are really waiting for is another Netscape moment—an iconic IPO which will whet investor’s appetites and open the floodgates for others to follow.
Below is our list of the top ten IPO candidates for 2010 in the technology industry (and, no, it doesn’t include Twitter). I conducted an informal survey of some top VCs and angel investors. These are the names whispered about the most in the Valley and other tech circles. The hope is that the economy will swing back and the public markets will become receptive to IPOs, especially towards the second half of the year. The stock market in general is finding its legs already. The S&P 500 is up 24 percent this year. If the bull market continues, that will be good for the prospects of seeing these potential IPOs. And if it doesn’t, there’s always M&A. → Read More
I’m not an RC gadget expert, but modding static model kits of space ships so that they’re water-proof and can be RC-controlled to make them then “fly underwater” seems like a very, very geeky thing to do to me. Take this 1/350 scale replica of the USS Enterprise NCC-1701-A space ship from Star Trek, for example.
Some person [JP] in Yokosuka, Japan, bought the static kit and transformed it into a space ship that can move and be RC-controlled underwater. The people belonging to the “underground” circle of these self-made gadgets call themselves “Aqua Modelers” and meet up on a regular basis [IT] to exchange ideas and show off their works each year. The last one apparently just took place a couple of days ago.
Video after the jump. → Read More
About a year ago, JVC started selling headphones with wooden housing in Japan, claiming the superior sound quality they bring justify the high price ($730). And today the company announced the HA-FX700 [JP], earphones partly made of wood. And we have the same things coming with it again: JVC promising high sound quality and a relatively high price. → Read More
Funny story on Dutch business blog Sprout this morning: Soocial, an Amsterdam-based digital contact management startup, talks about its quarrels with actor and singer David Hasselhoff.
Here’s how the story started: Soocial, an angel investor-backed startup that provides a simple but powerful contact synchronization service for both the Web and mobile phones, figured ‘hassle-free address book management’ fit its core product perfectly as a description when it was founded about two years ago. → Read More
Clear Channel Radio already had mobile applications for iPhone, BlackBerry and Chumby devices, but today it’s adding an Android version to the line-up.
Not that there’s a lack of decent radio streaming applications on well, any platform these days, but here goes: Clear Channel Radio’s iheartradio app gives users free access to some 350 American radio stations, including a couple of artist-hosted stations from the likes of Christina Aguilera, Megadeth, Eagles and Weezer. → Read More
Publicly traded Zealous (OB:ZLUS), a fountain Valley, CA-based holding company which operates through its three subsidiaries, Zealous Interactive, Health and Wellness Partner and Zealous Holdings, has had a pretty rough year.
Zealous Holdings, the financial services arm of the company formerly known as Adult Entertainment Capital, was recently discontinued and is currently involved in Chapter 7 dissolution. In addition, the company is now desperately trying to sell off its Interactive unit to anyone who cares to take a look, in order to reduce the legacy debt that stems from the Holdings’ demise. → Read More
One of India’s most popular gaming platforms Indiagames is launching a nifty new Cricket iPhone app, called Cricket T20 Fever. Cricket is hugely popular in India and the new app will be a feature rich gaming app that will aim to simulate the experience of playing the sport and competing against other players.
The game will launch first on the iPhone and as a PC browser based game and within a few months be available on additional platforms like Symbian, Symbian, Maemo, PSP, Xbox Live Arcade and Nintendo DSi. And the app will feature Facebook Connect. → Read More
FriendFeed’s return of its realtime Twitter feed is a great end to a turbulent year. Watching the river flow is a maddening exercise in gauging the value of the stream, but having the option again is invigorating as much as it underlines the futility of keeping up. That’s where the Kindle comes in. Kindle is a vacation from the stream; it’s checking into the Millstream motel and communing with old friends and old-is-new ideas.
2009 has been a challenging year, particularly on a human level. Personally, I’ve seen friendships turn to dust as the economic crisis grinds the once-carefree impulses of the realtime Web into marketing and posturing. As someone who writes columns and produces the Gillmor Gang, certainly we all are guilty of these crimes. What I saw as a declaration of the obvious (RSS is dead) continues to roil the conversation, but the damage to a longstanding friendship with Dave Winer seems substantial. Perhaps the friendship that founders on disagreement is not the loss it once might have been.
On the plus side, the massive success of social media and its drivers has rendered moot the criticism that these issues and personalities are not worthy of the enterprise or indeed any serious pursuit of one’s time. As a product of the Sixties, if anything the connection between industry and my passion for technology, the arts, and comedy has become so pervasive that I would be virtually unrecognizable to myself from that era. I have become my father, mother, cop, and judge even as I struggle to make the mortgage and ease my kids into the unknowable future. Tech feels to me like the sessions for some potentially great record, or the noodlings of some robotic drum machine.
I haven’t seen the Lizard movie yet, but from afar it seems more on the side of science fantasy than fiction. I’m sure I’m wrong, but for now I’ll preserve that standoffish pose I took with Twitter and Facebook and the Kindle — knowing full well I’d soon join the stumbling herd but glad to pass the time today pushing more familiar buttons. As the stream floats by, the usual persists: open v. closed, tablet rumors, is realtime real, and so on. OK, I’ll bite:
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7velKsXtiQ&hl=en_US&fs=1&] → Read More
Over the last decade or so, the public perception of online dating has shifted from being a bit odd to something that’s pretty normal. But even as people get used to surfing the web as they look for a potential date, there’s a new trend emerging: location aware, mobile dating services. Skout, a social dating service with a strong mobile component, decided to conduct a study to see how hesitant people are to make the move from mobile messaging to in-person meetups.
The company surveyed 1000 of its users 20-30 years old, with an even gender split. While everyone surveyed was a Skout user, the questions pertained to any mobile dating service. Now, obviously these stats don’t readily apply to the general public — everyone surveyed is already a Skout user, so they’re more likely than average to be inclined to use a mobile dating site. Here are some of the conclusions Skout came up with: → Read More
Back in November, at our Realtime CrunchUp event, I sat on the geolocation panel with members of Twitter, Foursquare, SimpleGeo, GeoAPI, Hot Potato, and Google. At one point, I raised the question if location was going to be the next battleground between startups large and small, much like social identity plays (Facebook Connect vs. Google Friend Connect) and status updates (Twitter vs. Facebook). All of the panelists indicated that it wouldn’t be, because they could all get along. How sweet. Sadly, I don’t believe them. I believe they might think that right now, because it’s still very early in the game. But it’s still a game, and people are going to play to win.
I’m sure some of them would counter that because location data is fairly standard right now, and moving easily between services, all of them will win. But that’s not true either. While location, as a whole, will win, there will be individual companies that end up ahead of others in the space. More to the point, there will be one or two services that people will go to for their social location data. That’s what we’re moving towards. And the bigger companies are starting to realize it. That’s why today we saw what may be the first maneuver in an upcoming rush to secure the location landscape, with Twitter snatching up Mixer Labs, the team behind GeoAPI. → Read More
Managing a baseball team, school club, or fraternity can be a rewarding experience. It can also be a total nightmare, at least when it comes to getting everyone to cough up their dues. WePay is a very promising startup in private beta that’s looking to fix group payments for good. Earlier today news broke that the company had raised $1.65 million from August Capital and some angel investors. That’s obviously great news for WePay, but also impressive is the company’s roster of angels: as of tonight the company can count PayPal cofounder Max Levchin as an investor. Given Levchin’s experience in this industry, that’s a very strong endorsement. PayPal alum Dave McClure is also onboard, as are Paul Buchheit, Ron Conway, Mark Goines, Andrew McCollum, Joe Campanelli, and Angus Davis. WePay is also a part of the Y Combinator program.
So what exactly does WePay do that PayPal can’t? The difference stems from the way payment accounts are set up. With PayPal, your account is tied to your name, without any way to separate the payments associated with your soccer team from those of your fraternity or your own personal transactions. → Read More
Everyday I troll SEC Form D Filings to discover new startups, fundings and investments. I put everything I find into CrunchBase.
For everyone else I give you the daily digest, a quick hit of the latest and greatest SEC Form D filings in the TechCrunch sphere: → Read More
It’s not often that you hear about a startup still in deep stealth that has over 40 employees and backing from some of the biggest names in the valley. But that’s exactly the case for Santa Clara-based Kakai, which was founded in May by Chegg founder Osman Rashid. The company has recently closed a $7.5 million Series B round led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from Josh Kopelman (First Round) and Ron Conway. Marc Andreessen will be joining Kakai’s board. This brings Kakai’s total funding to $9.35 million, after a $1.85 million Series A earlier this year led by Rashid himself and Mike Maples.
Very little is known about Kakai at this point. It was cofounded by Rashid and engineer Babur Habib, who has spent time working on both semiconductors and software at Intel, Philips, and Exponent. The company has been rumored to have something to do with electronic readers, but all reports are vague. → Read More
[Austria] Vienna-based tunesBag is opening up the public beta version of its social music service today, after allowing access by invitation only for the past year or so.
The launch has been a long time coming, considering the fact that the startup has already produced a fully functional web client, and Adobe-AIR powered desktop client and applications for iPhone, Facebook and Boxee since its founding in late 2008. → Read More
Short Version: The audio is only passable (at least at speed) and the fit questionable, but hey, these do just what they set out to do: put some headphones in a decent hat. → Read More
Regular readers will know my affinity for Apple products. In general, they’re high quality, and I’m willing to pay a bit more for that. But a lemon is a lemon, regardless of who it’s made by, and must be labeled as such. These new 27-inch iMacs? Lemons.
In case you haven’t heard yet, the screens on these massive things are failing left and right. Granted, not all of them seem to be affected, but 110 pages worth of support questions/rants on Apple’s Support page for the issue tells me the problem is pretty widespread. That’s 1,640 replies, so far. And that thread has been viewed an incredible 264,630 times. The next closest recent page with that many views has 26,852 — and guess what? It’s also about a problem with the 27-inch iMac screen.
Two days ago, Apple issued a fix for the issue. The only problem? The fix doesn’t appear to work. → Read More
Since the TechHub project was first announced on TechCrunch Europe, I figure we owe you an update here, just so you know what is going on with it.
As you can read here, TechHub – the project to create a create a large space for tech startups from the UK, Europe, Middle East, Asia, the US and beyond to work and meet in London – has been busy since the idea first broke cover. I’ll declare my interest: I am acting as a strategic board advisor, although once the project is up and running I won’t be involved in any ‘day to day’ decisions.
Elizabeth Varley has been an incredible lead for this project, and last week, took the idea straight in to the heart of the UK government. More on that in a moment. → Read More
