Cc:Betty, a free service that helps organize group email threads, has secured $500,000 in funding from Western Technology Investment. The startup previously raised $1.5 million in seed funding in June led by Venrock with investors Seraph Group and Hillsven participating. The company was incubated in Venrock’s offices and officially launched at DEMO in March.
Founded in 2008 by Michael Cerda, Cc:Betty is a service that routes, parses, and organizes email conversations in a simple at-a-glance dashboard so you never have to scour your inbox to find the bits and pieces of a long thread. If you cc “betty@ccbetty.com” on any email, “she” will create a mailspace, which is a webpage, for your entire email thread and will divide important things such as dates, times, people, places, and files and will format them all in one place. Cc:Betty will track messages with up to 100 recipients and can organize emails with up to 20 MB in size, including attachments. → Read More
Step 1: Be a huge nerd. Step 2: Deconstruct a SNES controller and a flash drive. Step 3: Solder shit. Step 4: Become an even bigger nerd. [Ben Heck Forums via hackaday] → Read More
I’ll just say it. Everything is better with a digital picture frame. If someone put a digital picture frame in a toaster, I would buy three. So with that in mind, imagine my excitement when I saw this Insignia alarm clock with built-in digital picture frame. I know, right? Awesome. </sarcasm> → Read More
Whoever says the legal system in this country is broken, well, you’re right. Comcast was caught tampering with its customers’ packets two years ago. It bitched and moaned like nobody’s business, earning itself no friends. The Federal Communications Commission sanctioned the gigantic corporation in what amounted to a slap on the wrist. Big deal. A class action lawsuit was filed, which was just settled for $16 million. Comcast raked in $34.3 billion in revenue in 2008, meaning that this settlement amounts to four hours of revenue. That’s right: four hours. Take that, corporate America! → Read More
The iPhone is already touted for its gaming prowess almost endlessly, but it looks like things are about to take a pretty big leap forward. Epic Games has been crackin’ away at an iPhone port of their Unreal Engine 3 — the engine that powers such jaw-droppingly beautiful games as BioShock, Mirror’s Edge, Gears of War 2, and a bunch of others — and they’re now far enough along that they’re looking to show it off. → Read More
This is just cool. The pic is of a camera blast shield that’s used to capture those spectacular but deadly explosion videos. The best part is that this is homemade device seems somewhat easy to make. That is, of course, if you’re interested in building a camera to record all the shit you blow up. Video after the jump. → Read More
It has been a sad few months on FriendFeed following their acquisition by Facebook. Despite assurances that FriendFeed would not die, activity has dwindled and many users have moved on. While the service was still working, there was a fairly major glitch that made it much less compelling: Tweets, the main source of content for FriendFeed, stopped coming in at realtime speeds, and instead were delayed by up to an hour. But today, finally, realtime tweets have been restored.
If you visit FriendFeed right now, you’ll notice that many tweets are coming in with about an 8 second delay. Some are delayed a little bit longer, but it’s infinitely better than the delay we’ve all endured for months now. And many of us have been complaining for months, wondering if the Facebook deal caused Twitter to pull FriendFeed’s firehose. What actually happened is that FriendFeed was apparently transitioning over to one of the newer Twitter data streams. At our Realtime CrunchUp last month, FriendFeed co-founder Paul Buchheit indicated that they were close to implementing this new stream, but wouldn’t say what the hold up was. → Read More
Still haven’t gotten all those holiday gifts? You still have a wee bit o’ time left. Whether you’re planning to run out to a brick and mortar store or you’re willing to test the limits of expedited shipping, here’s a quick rundown of ideas and info from our gift guide. → Read More
Gotta love cops. A woman in Boston got mad at her 14-year-old son for being up at 2:30am playing Grand Theft Auto. (At least the kid wasn’t smoking dust in the street at that hour.) In fact, she got so mad that she called 911 for help. You know, “You have to help me. My son is up in the middle of the night playing video games! I don’t know what to do!” The cops responded, no doubt aggravated that they hadto deal with this garbage, by saying, “Calm down, ma’am. Just put your dumb kid to bed.” That’s not an exact quote, but you know that’s what they were thinking. → Read More
Ranking cell phone companies is a tough thing to do. Some of these companies have a bunch of popular handsets, whilst others have just one or two yet manage to sell as many or more. Rank the companies by cumulative sales across all of their lines and the results will swing one way; rank them model-by-model, and they might look completely different. Such is the case with the iPhone, according to the latest numbers from The Nielsen Company. While RIM’s marketshare with their BlackBerry line is still nearly double that of Apple’s, the iPhone has now surpassed everything else to become the most popular phone in the US. → Read More
Good news for Panasonic in the last 48 hours. The company announced yesterday that it now officially turned Sanyo into a subsidiary after acquiring a 50.27% stake in its smaller rival. The merger was in the making for several months, and Panasonic paid a whopping $4.4 billion to make it happen. So we now have Japan’s second largest electronics maker in terms of sales (Hitachi is still the biggest).
And one day later, Tuesday morning Japanese time, Panasonic announced another accomplishment: The company has completed the world’s largest plant for plasma panels. It’s located in Amagasaki in Southern Japan and is ready to produce the largest PDPs in the industry (Panasonic says panels sized at 330 centimeters by 190 cm can now be mass-produced). → Read More
Voting is now open for the third annual 2009 Crunchies Awards to celebrate the best technology accomplishments of 2009. Everyone is eligible and encouraged to vote once per day per award category through Wednesday, January 6 at midnight pst. There are 18 award categories to recognize accomplishments across a variety of fields and roles.
Finalists, grab a badge to get your community to vote for you as a winner. And please email us, so we can get you prepared for the ceremony.
Finalists were chosen by GigaOm, VentureBeat and us based on your popular nominations (over 141,000 actually) and our critical eye for the major accomplishments of companies, products and people in 2009. The fine print rules are here.
Wednesday at noon PST, we will release the first batch of 150 tickets to the Friday, January 8 awards ceremony to be held at the Herbst Theater in San Francisco, starting at 7:30 pm. Orchestra seats are $75 and balcony tickets are $45. Both tickets get you into the after-party across the street in City Hall’s Grand Rotunda through midnight. We have fewer than 450 total tickets to publicly release to the ceremony, so these may go nearly as fast as our Avatar screening. → Read More
It has been a sad few months on FriendFeed following their acquisition by Facebook. Despite assurances that FriendFeed would not die, activity has dwindled and many users have moved on. While the service was still working, there was a fairly major glitch that made it much less compelling: Tweets, the main source of content for FriendFeed, stopped coming in at realtime speeds, and instead were delayed by up to an hour. But today, finally, realtime tweets have been restored.
If you visit FriendFeed right now, you’ll notice that many tweets are coming in with about an 8 second delay. Some are delayed a little bit longer, but it’s infinitely better than the delay we’ve all endured for months now. And many of us have been complaining for months, wondering if the Facebook deal caused Twitter to pull FriendFeed’s firehose. What actually happened is that FriendFeed was apparently transitioning over to one of the newer Twitter data streams. At our Realtime CrunchUp last month, FriendFeed co-founder Paul Buchheit indicated that they were close to implementing this new stream, but wouldn’t say what the hold up was. → Read More
Two features make the iPhone great for social games: its GPS chip and its camera. An app called iSpy which was released on the iPhone last week (iTunes link) uses both geolocation and mobile snapshots to re-imagine the children’s game of the same name.
Players create iSpy games by taking pictures of objects in public view, which get geo-tagged and placed within a radius of their actual location on a map in the game. Other players can see which objects are nearby and try to find them. When do find an object, they snap their own picture, which is then verified by the community as either matching the original picture or not. You can also play along on the Web. The more objects you find, the more points you get. The person with the most points becomes the top spy in their city. → Read More
Should Santa leave a Sony Reader Daily Edition e-reader under your Christmas tree (or maybe you just like to buy fancy things on your own), you’ll be pleased to know that you’ll have a few more sources of content to choose from. Sony has agreed to deals bringing The New York Times, The Dallas Morning News, and The Baltimore Sun (among others) to the device. And there was much rejoicing. Presumably. → Read More
Twitter’s traffic continues to flatten as the microblogging site’s global traffic flattened in November. Twitter saw 60.3 million unique visitors in November compared to 58.3 million unique visitors in October. Though the site saw a rise of 2 million visits globally, this slight uptick in visitors only represents a 3.5 percent increase in traffic. Twitter’s November U.S. traffic has stalled as well; U.S. traffic rose by a little over 100,000 visitors, to 19.37 million unique visitors after seeing a 8 percent decline in traffic in October.
Over the past few months, Twitter has rolled out versions in Spanish, German, French and Italian which could help boost the international use of its site. But as traffic stalls on Twitter’s homepage, third party Twitter clients like Seesmic and Tweetdeck are growing like gangbusters. → Read More
Amazon’s got a one-day deal on the 4.3-inch Garmin nuvi 855 GPS at $160, down from $190. You can still get it by Christmas with one- or two-day shipping, too. → Read More
It’s a problem that’s as frustrating as it is ridiculous: many of us are now walking around with incredibly powerful mobile phones capable of rendering 3D graphics and multitasking. Yet transferring small bits of data between two nearby phones is still often a total pain. Bump Technologies is a startup that’s trying to fix this problem: the company has launched very popular applications for both iPhone and Android that let you exchange data between phones simply by lightly tapping them together (those applications have been downloaded over 7 million times). And today, Bump is releasing a new API and SDK that will allow third party developers to leverage Bump’s data transfer platform.
In an open letter to developers, Bump says that the API will allow developers to integrate the platform’s matching technology in only 10 lines of code. And while Bump uses their technology primarily for contact and media exchange (with more in the works), the platform can be used in many other ways. → Read More
All in all, this year had very little vapor (I know, I know, but that wasn’t vapor). In honor of this year of solidity, Wired wrote a nice article about Duke Nukem Forever, one of the vaporest of vaporgames. The article discusses how success, not failure, doomed the game to oblivion. It’s hard to understand how great this game was when it came out. → Read More
Industry research and analysis firm DisplaySearchestimates notebook PC revenues to top $109 billion in 2009, down almost 7% year over year.
The company’s most recent Quarterly Notebook PC Shipment and Forecast Report also shows a huge increase in the size of the netbook market, having grown its revenue share of the overall portable computer market to 11.7% in the third quarter of 2009.
This has increased the overall size of the portable PC market considerably, according to DisplaySearch, but not nearly enough to offset declines in revenue. → Read More
