Oh, AT&T.
I’ve already made my feelings on their MicroCell abundantly clear. Considering the quality of the carrier’s network in cities like San Francisco (which is to say, awful), it’s a good idea. But given the poor state of AT&T’s performance, they should be giving away the device for free to customers affected. Instead, they’re making those customers pay an extra $150 for the “privilege” of having working service. It’s a truly remarkable business model. Let’s call it: bait & switch & fix (for a fee). And it’s working.
AT&T managed to rope in two of the biggest name in tech into their scheme: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff. So that’s great for AT&T, right? Two huge potential endorsers of their rip-off box. Well, not so fast — this is AT&T, after all. → Read More
This is almost too much. It seems that the Panasonic Lumix G2 TV spot was filmed with just a Canon 5D DSLR. The funny part is that the video is supposed to look like it came from the Lumix, but really most of it seems to be shot from the Canon, a camera that costs at least $1700 more. Click through to see what we mean. → Read More
Remember Steve Jobs’ advice regarding the iPhone 4′s reported reception issues – it’s all your fault – relayed via an email from the Apple CEO himself (yes, one of those emails). Well, perhaps unsurprisingly, it hasn’t gone down well with UK early adopters of the company’s latest smartphone.
That’s according to a rather opportunistic “flash” survey from rightmobilephone, which found that 63% of respondents were “particularly angered” by Jobs’ email in which he told one early iPhone 4 adopter to “avoid holding [the phone] in that way”.
The mobile phone comparison website polled 836 iPhone 4 users, 93% of whom claimed to have already been affected by a loss of signal whilst gripping the handset to make calls, whilst 78% of owners dubbed the fault “an insult”. → Read More
Sigh. This is sad. I mean, I’m all about DIY solutions and making a quick buck, but please, build this thing yourself. An enterprising Etsy seller is charging $25 for what looks to be a poorly-constructed wood frame that is might improve the iPad‘s sound. → Read More
Online humor site JibJab, which is behind ElfYourself and loads of other zany videos has hit a big milestone: it’s now processing one million paid transactions per year. That’s big news for the company, which pivoted in late 2007 from an ad-supported business to one that generates revenue primarily through premium services and downloads.
JibJab earns money through a few channels. First, it offers a premium membership for $12/year that gives members access to its full range of customizable “Starring You” videos, which let you insert your friends’ faces into funny video clips like the site’s amazing take on the original Star Wars Trilogy . → Read More
It seems interest in the development of electric cars has really picked up steam in recent months, especially in Japan. A research team at Tokyo-based Waseda University has manufactured the ULV [JP], a one-person electric vehicle with a number of selling points: it’s cheap, it’s small and light (72.6kg), and it has a decent driving range (80km). → Read More
Apple this morning announced that it has sold over 1.7 million of the iPhone 4 through Saturday, June 26, three days after its launch on June 24.
The company went as far as to call it the “most successful product launch in Apple’s history”, citing its iconic chief executive Steve Jobs.
Jobs also says he’s sorry about all those customers who were turned away because the company did not have enough supply. No word (yet?) on the antenna issues that continue to plague a subset of iPhone 4 owners. → Read More
One day before its scheduled IPO, Tesla Motors is increasing the allotment of shares that will be sold to the public from 11.1 million to 13.3 million, according to an amendment to its S1 filing. The additional shares are being sold by existing shareholders looking to cash out at the IPO, including Tesla founder and CEO Elon Musk who is selling an additional 909,212 of his personal shares. Other selling stockholders include VantagePoint Venture Partners (238,748 shares), Bay Area Equity Fund (88,586), Westly Capital Partners (72,625), Compass Venture Partners (22,931), as well as friends and family like Elon’s brother (and OneRiot CEO) Kimball Musk (12,692). Tesla itself won’t make any additional money from the bump in shares, but more shares will be available to the public.
If Tesla shares open at the high end of its expected range of $14 to $16, the Silicon Valley electric car company will debut with a $1.5 billion market cap (based on 93.5 million total shares outstanding after the IPO and a concurrent $50 million private placement with Toyota). After the offering, Tesla’s largest shareholder will still be founder Elon Musk, who will own 28.4 percent of the company (worth $426 million at that valuation, versus a potential windfall of $14.5 million for the shares he is selling). The second largest shareholder will be Daimler (through an investment arm called Blackstar Investco) with 8 percent of the shares, and the third largest will be the government of Abu Dhabi (through Al Wahada Capital Investment) with 7.8 percent of the shares. The two biggest VC shareholders will be Vantage Capital Partners with 6.6 percent and Valor Equity Partners with 5.25 percent. → Read More
Exclusive – Mobile application developer Geodelic has raised $7 million in a Series B financing round led by MK Capital, with previous backers Clearstone Venture Partners and Shasta Ventures participating.
The round brings the total amount of capital injected into the company to more than $10 million.
Initially incubated by Clearstone in 2008, Geodelic develops a free application for mobile phones that come with ‘search-less search’, meaning the app automatically browses and shows your points of interests in your immediate vicinity. → Read More
Huh, the results are a bit surprising. It doesn’t look that much worse than if the phone had been dropped on the floor. Well, besides the .50 cal-size hole of course, which might help with the reception issue. → Read More
Affiliate marketing platform Skimlinks has launched its latest product that aims to make it even easier for publishers to place revenue generating affiliate links in their content.
Dubbed SkimWords, the feature, which is currently in beta, differs slightly from the company’s main offering. Rather than simply converting existing retailer links to affiliate links on-the-fly, it looks at the page’s content and converts any references to known products into fairly non-obtrusive geo-targeted links to retailer sites where the item can be purchased.
The fact that these links are location-aware – at the country level – is perhaps noteworthy since it accommodates a site’s international traffic and therefore hopefully doesn’t leave much money on the table. → Read More
Apprupt, an affiliate network for mobile apps, has today launched its self-service platform for “appvertisers” (a slightly silly name).
It enables app developers to sign up to apprupt on a cost-per-install basis, enabling them to track their marketing campaigns for both paid and free apps. Features include account management (including campaign spend), and reports and analytics providing “the ability to determine the ROI at any given time” by measuring the number of app downloads generated. → Read More
Facebook recently announced it would be opening an office in Hyderabad, India, to be able to provide better round-the-clock and multilingual support to its ever-increasing number of users, advertisers and third-party developers.
According to Business Standard and India Times, the company is set to launch its India operations from the ‘City of Pearls’ – its first office in Asia – within the next two months. → Read More
Yep, you read that right. Today W3i is announcing Apperang, a new service that will pay users to download mobile applications. Apperang builds on the pay-per-acquisition model that we’ve seen succeed with companies like TapJoy. As opposed to pay-per-click, pay-per-acquisition (or pay-per-action) means that the developer only pays if the desired action occurs. In this case, developers pay only when the user downloads the app. Hit the jump to find out how Apperang works. → Read More
Another day, another iSuppli teardown. The folks at iSuppli have found that the iPhone 4, according to their estimates, costs $188 to make. While this is almost comically low, it says something about Apple’s ability to mass produce phones and the high margins they’re able to make on relatively low-cost products. The gyroscope chip, for example, apparently costs Apple $2.60 while it costs $2.90 in quantities of 200,000. These disparities pop up in a number of places, which, sadly, lends an air of WTF to the proceedings. → Read More
Mobile entertainment startup mSpot is debuting its free music cloud service today that allows you to sync your entire music collection across Android phones and PCs/Macs to the public today. The service, which was launched into private beta in May, streams music to your browser and Android phone.
Here’s how it works. The service’s application that operates in the background of your computer managing the upload and day-to-day syncing of your music library. In addition, it can upload playlists, coverart, ratings and song information you may have entered using iTunes. The application will manage your music for you, making automatic updates whenever changes occur in your library, and on across different connected devices. → Read More
Apple this morning announced that it has sold over 1.7 million of the iPhone 4 through Saturday, June 26, three days after its launch on June 24.
The company went as far as to call it the “most successful product launch in Apple’s history”, citing its iconic chief executive Steve Jobs.
Jobs also says he’s sorry about all those customers who were turned away because the company did not have enough supply. No word (yet?) on the antenna issues that continue to plague a subset of iPhone 4 owners. → Read More
Yahoo wants to help people write effectively for the Web by publishing a custom style guide, as was announced last April.
The stylebook, entitled “The Yahoo! Style Guide: The Ultimate Sourcebook for Writing, Editing, and Creating Content for the Digital World”, will be released on July 6 by St. Martin’s Griffin, and will be available in dead tree form in a variety of stores, but also – naturally – in digital form for Apple’s iPad and Amazon’s Kindle. → Read More
According to website analytics company StatCounter, Google Chrome has now overtaken Apple’s Safari in the US browser market for the first time on a weekly basis, claiming third place overall.
StatCounter, which says it analyzed some 874 million pages viewed on its network of over 3 million websites in the US alone for the week 21 to 27 June 2010, pegs Chrome’s market share at 8.97%, ahead of Safari with 8.88%. → Read More
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