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
[Denmark] Danish telco TDC’s Play service, which provides unlimited music downloads for its broadband and mobile customers, has extended its offering to include unlimited streaming, reports Music Ally.
This makes Play even more comparable to Spotify, which although yet to launch in Denmark, does operate in neighboring Sweden and Norway. There are other similarities too.
Spotify clearly sees deals with ISPs and mobile broadband providers as a big part of its future. The startup already has two such arrangements in place. Swedish telco Telia has signed a two year deal to offers Spotify to its subscribers – desktop, mobile and TV – while 3 in the UK have begun bundling the service with a 24-month contract and the Android-powered HTC Hero handset. → 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
Taptu, the mobile search engine, announced a partnership with OneRiot last month to provide real time search results in their mobile-friendly web site. This worked from any mobile client, not just the iPhone. But one of the points of using a smartphone is the use of native applications. Today Taptu announced that they’ve rolled the real-time search results into their iPhone app. → Read More
So it’s the end of 2009 and an appropiate time to take stock. We’re not going to bore you with a long analysis of the year. Suffice it to say that funding for Europen startup tech companies remains tight. And when VCs are running out of LPs to go to, you really know it is. The VC model is still finding its feet in a market where exits are still not that clear. For many companies 2009 was a nightmare – especially the first half. But anecdotal evidence I’ve been picking up suggests that confidence in the European tech scene re-started tentatively after the summer. Hopefully, conversations that have been going on for the last few months will see the light of day in new announcements, launches and, I daresay, one or two exits in the new year. → Read More
It appears that the wintry mess that hit the Eastern seaboard over the past weekend turned out to be a boon to online retailers. comScore says that e-commerce holiday spending showed an uptick thanks to the blizzards that hit the East Coast over the past weekend. The final shopping weekend before Christmas saw a 13 percent growth rate in online spending from the previous year. And the full week posted a 6 percent yearly increase in spending, setting a one-week sales record with more than $4.8 billion in spending.
For the holiday season-to-date, $25.5 billion has been spent online, which is a 4 percent increase versus the same days last year. Online spending has remained steady this year, following strong Black Friday and Cyber Monday numbers. comScore reported that as of the week of Dec. 8, $16 billion had been spent online, which is a 3 percent increase versus the same period last year. Interestingly, comScore also took an in-depth look at the influence of social networks on online shopping and reported that 28 percent of shoppers surveyed said that social media has influenced their purchases. → Read More
A couple weeks ago, when we wrote about Blippy, the new startup that allows you to share your credit card purchases online, it caused quite a bit of controversy. That was expected. Sometimes good ideas do. Sometimes bad ideas do. So which one is Blippy? Well, why don’t find out for yourself?
The company has given us 250 invites to give away to TechCrunch readers. Even if you hate the idea, you should sign up to “if nothing else, reserve your favorite username now, before it’s taken,” co-founder Philip Kaplan says in a message to you, the readers. He also notes that you can easily choose just to share certain things, like your Zappos purchases, for example. That’s exactly what Michael is doing. Or you might want to only share your Amazon purchases. That’s exactly what Sarah is doing. Me? I’m sharing pretty much everything. Because I have nothing to hide. At least not on this credit card. → Read More
It’s another humanoid from Japan, it doesn’t have an official name yet, but it’s pretty cool: This new robot [JP] is the result of a collaboration between various Japanese companies and institutions, namely the Nippon Institute of Technology, Harada Vehicle Design [JP], ZMP and ZNUG Design. Based technically on ZMP’s Nuvo robot, it stands 1.26m tall and weighs 15kg. → Read More
We recently wrote about OneRiot’s foray into the advertising world, RiotWise, which places content in an emphasized position in their realtime feed. Because people are becoming more and more interested in realtime search and getting access to information that is going on right now, OneRiot believes in the strong potential of serving relevant ads beside results. Today, the realtime search engine is launching RiotWise Trending Ads, a stream of ads that correspond to trending topics as they emerge across the social web.
RiotWise will match trending topics with display ads that are highly relevant to the same topics within an application such as a Twitter client or iPhone app. OneRiot says the “realtime relevance” results in a higher click through rate on the ads. The system is enabled by OneRiot’s realtime search technology and PulseRank relevancy algorithm. → Read More
Yesterday, Google published a long manifesto on the “meaning of open” in the form of an email to all employees republished as a blog post. In it, senior VP of product management Jonathan Rosenberg, makes an eloquent argument for why open systems always win and urges Google’s employees to always strive to be open when designing products. An open Internet spurs innovation and brings more consumers on board, which ultimately means more searches and increased use of Web applications.
The gist of his argument is that a bigger, better Internet is good for Google. He writes that Google employees should resist the impulse to create closed products and systems, and even makes a swipe at Apple for doing so (bold added for emphasis): → Read More
Yesterday, Google published a long manifesto on the “meaning of open” in the form of an email to all employees republished as a blog post. In it, senior VP of product management Jonathan Rosenberg, makes an eloquent argument for why open systems always win and urges Google’s employees to always strive to be open when designing products. An open Internet spurs innovation and brings more consumers on board, which ultimately means more searches and increased use of Web applications.
The gist of his argument is that a bigger, better Internet is good for Google. It all sounds great and Google certainly is a champion of open systems with Android and Chrome and countless other projects. Google is making a very public effort to claim the mantle of openness. But the battle for this mantle has been going on for a long time. → Read More
Fennec, Mozilla’s mobile version of Firefox, is “days away” from release. It will initially be available for the Nokia N900; don’t expect an iPhone version anytime soon. → Read More
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