While the big Steve said that you would have to go to Android for your porn fix, I guess he didn’t mean you would have to go there for help hooking up with like-minded leather fans. → Read More
Recently-launched mobile payments startup, Boku, has announced that they have received a strategic investment from VC firm Andreessen Horowitz. Boku has declined to reveal the funding amount from this round, but to date the company has raised a whopping $38 million since its launch a year ago. As part of the deal, Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz will also take on an advisory role for Boku.
Boku, which just raised $25 million and rebranded its platform in January, doesn’t require users to have a credit card or bank account to make a micropayment. Users enter their cell phone number on the site, reply to a text message and then all virtual charges are automatically charged to the user’s monthly cell phone bill. As we’ve said in the past, it’s ridiculously easy. The company also acquired Paymo and Mobillcash over the past year, systems that had significant international reach, Boku gained a strong base of users around the world. Currently Boku is available in more than 60 countries and on over 200 carriers worldwide. → Read More
TweetDeck, the popular Adobe Air desktop app for social networks (though an HTML5 version is on the way), has now integrated Foursquare into its latest release. The move represents the latest from the startup to grab the “social dashboard” crown against the likes of Seesmic and others, although Tweetdeck seems to be heading towards a kind of “Pro User” space more than anything else.
Now, adding your Foursquare account into Tweetdeck adds a location column. This has the handy benefit that Foursquare tweets can now be filtered out of your “All Friends” twitter column. A lot of people will probably welcome this as they tend to polute Twitter rather than adding anything to it. Now, the location column has a map button at the bottom. Clicking on this lets you view a live map of friends checking into Foursquare. Tweetdeck plans to extend this map shortly to be available in a separate view on a check-in item in the location column. → Read More
YouTube has always been known for its, shall we say, vocal community. But until now, the only way users had to respond to each other was through the site’s infamous comments, or via video responses — there hasn’t been a particularly good way for YouTube video uploaders to ask their subscribers for opinions. Today, YouTube is launching a new feature that allows channel owners to poll their audience in a more structured manner: it has embedded a customized version of Google moderator, a tool that launched back in fall 2008. The tool allows your subscribers to vote responses up and down, and has been tweaked to allow for both text and video responses (it is also embeddable). → Read More
Facebook is under a lot of heat right now for how it shares our personal information. So much so that it is trying to simplify its privacy controls to so that nobody gets surprised when that embarrassing drunk photo you thought you were sharing only with a close set of friends finds its way all over the Web. (Hint: don’t put up drunk photos of yourself on Facebook). But this problem is only going to get worse.
Right now, what people share on Facebook is usually pretty tame: a status update, photo, a link, a video, an action in an app. The ones with the greatest potential to creep people out are the geo-specific ones, which probably explains why Facebook is taking its sweet time to roll out its own geo features like geo-tagged updates and photos. If you think the current uproar over Facebook privacy is bad, wait until Facebook embraces location-based apps in a big way.
This is not just a Facebook problem. It is an issue every major Web service is starting to deal with from Google to Twitter to Foursquare. They all want us to overshare and make it almost too easy for us to do so. The more we share with them about where we go and what we like to do, the more they can show us what other people who we care about are doing nearby or have done in the past. That basic premise is what is so compelling about geo apps. → Read More
Gist, a recently launched web service that aims to organize your communication streams, has released an Android app. Gist, which offers services that help you keep tabs on the people in your professional network, allows you to see past messages and attachments from each contact, news about their company, and their recent messages on services like Twitter. The company also has a free iPhone app available on the App Store.
The Android application includes a dashboard with new, blog posts, Twitter updates, and Facebook updates for your contacts. Gist’s app will create in-depth profiles for every contacts including updates from social networks like Facebook and Twitter, mentions in the news, and email correspondence across multiple inboxes, including Gmail, Outlook and Lotus Notes. And an events tab will give you updates on meetings and information about contacts you are set to meet. → Read More
Saplo, a Swedish startup that uses semantic technologies for text analysis, has raised $500,000 in seed funding from Professor Göran Grosskopf, Chairman of the Stichting INGKA Foundation (the parent company of the IKEA Group) and Martin Liljeberg, Founder of the SOVA chain of stores (Sweden’s largest chain of bed stores).
Saplo’s technology extracts data from articles, forums, blogs, wikis, and will evaluate opinions on a given topic, find related articles, or produce relevant tags. Saplo will be able to tag articles by classifying words, and extracting topics from text. The technology can also find articles in large text collections that have similar meaning and can be used for contextual recognition or sentiment analysis. → Read More
As promised, LG’s mid-range, QWERTY, Android-powered slider (phew), the Ally, is now available from Verizon. Just think: somewhere out there, keen LG/Iron Man 2/Android fans are braving the harsh Spring conditions, waiting for their favourite Verizon stores to open. The less adventurous of the devout would have just pre-ordered it, but where’s the honour in that? You can grab the Ally for $99.99 after a not-at-all-annoying $100 mail-in rebate on a two-year contract from Verizon. Rocket boots not included. → Read More
Vodafone UK now have the Nokia N8 on their “Coming Soon” page, so it seems a pretty safe bet that Nokia’s new top-end Symbian ^3 powered handset will indeed be “Coming Soon” to Vodafone UK.
You can probably also safely bet that the phone is “Coming Soon” to other carriers, too… but I don’t have a handy reference page for any other operators. Sorry. → Read More
Today Acer officially announced their latest Android handset, the Stream (coz a whole lotta Liquid makes a Stream).
The device will rock Android 2.1 UI atop a 1GHz Snapdragon processor, a 3.7″ 800×480 AMOLED screen, 5MP camera with 720p video, 512MB RAM, 2GB on-board storage (+ an 8GB MicroSD card), and the usual connectivity options (ie WiFi b/g/n, Bluetooth, HSDPA, GPS).
So, yeah, pretty much the standard “high-end” Android device. → Read More
Who said Christmas never comes early?
It’s iPad day tomorrow in the UK, when the device officially launches. But, for those that pre-ordered, it hasn’t stopped delivery vans across the country turning up this morning with Apple’s shiny new toy in hand. And most customers are delighted, of course.
Yes, I said most. → Read More
Valuestar N VN790/BS – that’s the name of the 3D PC that NEC today announced [JP] for the Japanese market. The company’s faster than expected: just last month, NEC teased such a machine in Tokyo, saying it’s likely to ship by October 2010. But Japan will get the PC as early as next month. And it appears to be a pretty cool machine. → Read More
If you’ve been waiting to get the Nook experience on your iPad, your wait is over. Barnes&Noble just announced the availability of their Nook app, available free from the App Store. Nook is behind in the race to ereader hegemony so they’ve decided to add a few iPad specific including eight different fonts, customizable line spacing and margins, different font sizes, and themes. In short, B&N reps said, “It’s a giant canvas.” The app has two book “views:” grid – showing all of the covers and split which shows details of the book on a split screen with the cover. You can also lend books to friends by shooting emails to contacts using the built-in contact book interaction. The app supports in-book search, bookmarks, and syncs among devices. It also supports ePub formats. They also said the Android App is arriving this summer. Click through to read the full release. → Read More
It’s that time. After seeing 20 startups plus two audience choices present at TechCrunch Disrupt, last night, that list was whittled down to five finalists: Betterment, MOVIECLIPS, Publish2, Soluto And UJAM. And now it’s time to announce a winner.
Without further ado, the runner-up is UJAM. And the winner is… Soluto. → Read More
Disrupt may be over, but half way around the globe, another world-class conference is just beginning. As explained last week, we’re really excited to be live streaming this year’s CHINICT two-day conference which kicks off in Beijing right now.
The full agenda can be found here. The live stream is right here, after the link… → Read More
The time: Day 3 of TechCrunch Disrupt. The place: CrunchGear’s Maker Bar. Given all the attention focused on Chinese factory conditions lately, we thought it would be interesting to have conference attendees (and sponsors and startup guys) assemble some basic MP3 players from the components an assembly line worker in China is likely to use. No soldering, though, we used ready PCBs (to the disgust of some). I managed to put one together in just under two minutes — it’s harder than it looks. Sorry about the noise in the background, that would be the compressed-air-powered stabber-bot nearby. Why I picked a place like that to shoot a video is a mystery to you and me. → Read More
http://cdn.livestream.com/grid/LSPlayer.swf?channel=disrupt&clip=pla_ac526249-5351-4358-87b8-81e1108eceee&autoPlay=false If you haven’t been watching Disrupt today, you’ve missed out. The best panel ever? Ours. I talked to Liam Casey, Adam Hocherman, Chris Hawker, and Bre Pettis about open source hardware, manufacturing, and entrepreneurship in the manufacturing space. I won’t spoil anything for you, but I recommend you watch it. → Read More
fidipidi, aside from being a portmanteau of serendipity and Pheidippides, is a Facebook application that allows you to create real-world greeting cards that get sent through the U.S. Postal Service for delivery to real human beings. Think of it like all those e-card services that were so popular about a decade ago, except that the card gets delivered to the recipients actual mailbox instead of their email inbox. Looks fun, and easy to use. → Read More
If you’ve ever watched old-timey Dr. Who, you probably wondered how they made the music for that series. It’s simple, really:
In 1963 Delia Derbyshire working for the BBC Radiophonic Workshop created one of the most significant and innovative pieces of electronic music, even before the availability of commercial synthesizers.
