Social network for currency traders Currensee has raised $8M in Series B funding led by prior backer Northbridge Venture Partners and joined by new investor Egan-Managed Capital.
The company had earlier raised $6 million from Northbridge Venture Partners, but $2 million of the Series A round (raised in October 2009) was converted to Series B terms as part of the deal. Thus, this round brings the total of financing for the company to $12 million. → Read More
The rapid evolution of mobile phones, both on a hardware and a software level, combined with a surge in application storefront releases, deployments of higher-capacity network infrastructure and recent developments in positioning technologies could drive revenues from mobile location-based services to more than $12.7 billion by 2014, according to a new report published by Juniper Research.
The report found that while MLBS had experienced a number of false dawns from 2000 to 2007, improvements in handset UIs together with easier consumer access to an range of app distribution channels had led to greater interest from service providers in providing mobile location-based applications. → Read More
Apple’s hypocrisy with regard to the App Store is something I know well. Several times last year I wrote about Apple allowing apps like “Asian Boobs” and upskirt apps into the App Store while rejecting things such as satirical apps that mocked public figures. It was ridiculous. So you might think I’d be happy that Apple is now rejecting and removing sexy apps from the App Store as well. But actually, the hypocrisy is much worse now.
Problem number one is that while Apple is removing most of these sexy apps from the App Store, it’s not removing all of them. So who gets to stay? Big publishers like Sports Illustrated and Playboy. In fact, not only is Sports Illustrated’s Swimsuit 2010 app not being removed, it’s being featured in the App Store. Both it and the Playboy app clearly violate the new rules of the more prudish App Store, yet they get to stay. Why? → Read More
I myself am in the “This will never work”-camp, but Japanese video game giant Capcom is preparing a special version of their hit title “Streetfighter IV” for the iPhone/iPod touch. The announcement was made last week, making the iPhone version the first on a mobile device (the arcade game has been ported to the PS3 and XBox 360 only so far).
And today, Gamepro was able to lay their hands on Streetfighter IV (see their video below), revealing the final version will feature a total of eight characters: Ryu, Ken, Guile, Blanka, Chun-Li, Dhalsim, M. Bison and Abel (the console games have 17 playable characters). → Read More
Compost-powered heating Science vindicates afternoon naps, yet again Remember that post about the wire shoe thing? Walking and jumping and generating energy, oh my Go Computer: Help the aged Quick Look: Motorola Devour → Read More
Online productivity suite Zoho has been open to allowing users to use their Google, Google Apps and Yahoo accounts to log-in to Zoho Apps. Zoho says that most of its users are using their log-ins for other applications to use Zoho’s offerings. Today, the productivity suite is adding a social layer to its suite by integrating the ability to login with Facebook Connect.
Similar to its integration with Google apps, Zoho users can login to Zoho using their Facebook credentials. Users with existing Zoho accounts can now link the two accounts so that they can login with Facebook credentials alone. But the plus of using Facebook Connect now allows Zoho to transcend platforms. So you can now share documents with Facebook users who don’t have a Zoho Account. Of course this isn’t Zoho’s first foray into Facebook’s territory. Zoho’s Facebook app allows users to create documents, spreadsheets and presentations from within Facebook and includes the ability to view and edit all existing documents, spreadsheets and presentations (both personal and shared) from Zoho Writer, Sheet and Show. → Read More
On Thursday 8 January 2009, then 18-year old Mahoud Samed Almahadin (aka Matt Connor aka Agent Pubeit) took off his shirt, proceeded to rub vaseline all over his upper body and subsequently used it to hold toenail clippings and pubic hair. He then ran into the New York Scientology building, tossed some books around and smeared the mixture on objects.
After his greasy raid, Mahoud Samed Almahadin was charged with burglary, criminal mischief, and aggravated harassment as hate crimes. Weeks later, 21 year-old film student and Anonymous member Jacob Speregen was charged with the same crimes, bar burglary, because he had filmed Almahadin carrying out his prank. → Read More
We’re big fans of Mobile Roadie, a startup that helps develop iPhone apps. But the one gripe we had was that Mobile Roadie was limited to the iPhone platform. Today, out wish came true as Mobile Roadie is launching functionality for Android phones.
The beauty of Mobile Roadie’s platform is that it offers a dead simple mostly-automated system to build apps and have them posted to Apple’s App Store in as little as a week. Launched earlier this year, the startup develops mobile apps for other conferences, events, and venues, as well as musicians, athletes, politicians, and other celebrities. The apps can provide users with access to news, music, live and recorded video, photos, event listings, and more. The apps also feature integration with YouTube, Brightcove, Flickr, Twitpic, Ustream, Topspin, Google News, RSS, Twitter, and Facebook. → Read More
Google Buzz is now two weeks old. I decided to hold off on writing about it (beyond my overview on launch day), until I had a solid amount of time to play with it and gather my thoughts. Now I have. And now I will.
My reasoning for holding off is pretty simple: I was confused. For the first few hours I was sure it was the best thing ever. Then I was certain it was the worst thing ever. The truth, not surprisingly, is likely somewhere in the middle. Google Buzz is a service with a ton of potential, but the execution of it is so bad right now, that’s it’s at points completely unusable. → Read More
It took them four days, but Apple is finally explaining its surprise decision to remove nearly all “sexy” content from the App Store. Once again, the morsels of information come from Apple SVP of Worldwide Product Marketing Phil Schiller, who spoke with the New York Times for an article published earlier this evening. None of it is too surprising, but Schiller’s unconvincing explanation as to why some applications like Sports Illustrated’s swimsuit app and Playboy will be allowed to remain on the store is sure to anger plenty of developers.
So why did Apple decide to pull these sexy apps?
“It came to the point where we were getting customer complaints from women who found the content getting too degrading and objectionable, as well as parents who were upset with what their kids were able to see”
I don’t get GPS in cameras. There have been times (not many, but there have) when I’ve been out taking pictures and don’t necessarily want the whole world to know where I was. Casio’s new EX-10HG camera is going to take that option away from me, with their new GPS-enabled point and shoot camera. → Read More
The idea of having a 64GB card in your camera is a strange one. I take a fair amount of pictures in RAW, yet I rarely if ever run up against the edge of my 8GB card. I mean, you’re shooting digitally and regularly offload your pictures, right?
The only situation I can think of where this might be useful is one where you literally have to shoot thousands of pictures in a row (somehow the battery must last that long) without ever switching out a card or dumping them into your image editor. When was the last time you took four thousand pictures in one go? → Read More
Email overload is a pain for many reasons, but above all, the worst thing about an overstuffed inbox is the fact that you sometimes miss messages you shouldn’t have, or you forget to keep in touch with the people who are important to you. If you’ve run into these issues before, a new Y Combinator-funded startup called Etacts might be exactly what you’re looking for.
Etacts is similar in some ways to CRMs like Highrise and SalesForce, but founders Evan Beard and Howie Liu say they’re focusing on helping people stay in touch, rather than on teams looking to complete sales. The service’s home screen features a list of people you know, ranked by how often you communicate with them via Email or phone. The list includes information like the total number of times you’re interacted with each person and when you first began talking with them online. Most important, it lets you know how long it’s been since you last contacted them, and lets you set regular reminders — if you go too long without talking to someone, the service will send you an alert. → Read More
How delightfully meta. It’s not real, unfortunately. [via bookofjoe and OhGizmo!] → Read More
This rather unconvincing video shows a current project of DARPA’s, in which a jet is accelerated first by regular propulsion, then ramjets, then scramjets — eventually pushing the vehicle to a ridiculous Mach 6. That’s somewhere around 1700-2000 meters per second, or ~4000MPH. That’s if they can keep the thing from breaking apart. Wikipedia tells us that “while very short suborbital scramjet test flights have been performed, no flown scramjet has ever been designed to survive a flight test.” That’s not very promising.
The video is years old but it’s news because they’re planning a test flight for April. The landing site is actually just a place in the ocean they’re going to let it crash, so I don’t think we’ll be seeing these things overhead any time soon. → Read More
What with tablets looming large on the horizon, one could be forgiven for thinking MIDs might be reaching the end of their usefulness. But when you put something like this in front of me, I can’t help but get excited. ABXY buttons and a real D-pad? Yes please. 4″ 800×480 screen, 8GB of built-in storage, 600MHz ARM A8 processor? Man, this thing will be a mobile gaming powerhouse if it isn’t super expensive. The Moblic E7 is still pretty much a cryptogadget right now, though. No pricing or availability is indicated on the Moblic page, so I’m just going to guess randomly. I’m going to say… $600 and available in the Summer, probably not in the US. Doesn’t that sound realistic? [Image and find: CarryPad; via Engadget] → Read More
There’s a story going around right now that the development costs for Apple’s A4 chip, which powers the iPad, might be as high as a billion dollars. Let’s not get carried away here. Apple licensed the CPU and GPU from ARM, and the A4 shares a lot of elements with the Tegra 2.
The billion dollar investment here is for designing a chip “from scratch.” Is that really what happened here? → Read More
Just last week, HTC announced the Legend. As the epic name implies, it’s essentially the “Hero 2“; its got the jutting chin, the rounded corners, and HTC’s software signatures all over it. The primary difference, outside of a minor (but still worthwhile) hardware spec bump, is the design of the body; carved from a single block of aluminum, it’s ridiculously light weight, super strong, and drop dead gorgeous.
While we somehow managed to over look it whilst roaming (almost absurdly) huge halls of Mobile World Congress, our buddies at MobileBurn spotted a display case showing off examples of the unibody shell as it steps through the manufacturing process. → Read More
After a lengthy legal face-off, Microsoft and European antitrust officials recently agreed on the implementation of a so-called ballot screen that will give European Windows users a chance to download rivals’ browsers – including Chrome, Safari, Firefox and Opera – as possible alternatives to Redmond’s own Internet Explorer (see screenshot above or go here).
Under the terms of the deal, Microsoft has agreed to provide a “ballot screen” to most European customers that will offer links to downloads of browsers offered by the company’s fiercest competitors when it comes to the Web browsing space, starting next week. The browser choice screen was designed to give all listed browsers a random order upon each new visit; antitrust regulators saw this as the right path to take to make European consumers more aware of alternative browsers to IE without favoring one over the other.
But how random is the presentation of the browser on that ballot screen, really? → Read More
Sweet merciful fates, the continued existence and use of Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 is getting as much publicity as the Linux-vs-Windows debate. If you’re interested in this story, and we all know you’re interested or these stories wouldn’t keep popping up, there’s an interesting examination of the reasons for MSIE6′s prolonged existence online for your perusal. The usual suspects — slow-moving change-averse mega-corporations on protracted refresh cycles, cheapskates, and ignorance — are rounded out by at least one surprising addition. → Read More
