Piryx, a white-label fundraising platform that helps automate online political contributions is reporting record amounts of money raised in this quarter for political candidates. Piryx says that money raised will exceed $4 billion this political cycle
Piryx attributes the surge in online contributions to the strength of Barack Obama’s online campaign that first showed the power of online fundraising in 2008. Many of the current fundraising efforts are being driven by anti-establishment, insurgent candidacy led by tea party candidates. → Read More
Early in April we heard reports that the beautiful but mind-bogglingly expensive Plastic Logic Que e-reader would ship in June — specifically, June 24th, which would be yesterday. However, that is not happening, and pre-orders are all canceled. Is this the end of the line for the sexiest e-reader out there? → Read More
Aviary, the startup that makes a suite of impressive web-based creative applications, including editors for images, vector graphics, and audio recordings, is targeting a new class of customers: school teachers and their students. Today the company is launching Aviary Education, a product that allows educators to encourage creativity on Aviary in a safer (and easier to manage) environment.
Cofounder Michael Galpert says that Aviary has been popular at schools for quite a while. The appeal of Aviary’s apps are obvious — they’re free, and they offer more than enough functionality for most common media creation tasks. But Aviary.com has a few features that aren’t ideal for students. For example, it offers a section for popular creations made with its products, and some of these user-submitted contributions aren’t exactly ‘G’ rated. → Read More
There was a minor flap yesterday when it came out that Google had used their remote kill ability to delete apps from a few users’ phones. I’m not going to restate my thoughts on that here, but in the interest of getting the complete story out, I thought I’d give a link to Jon Oberheide, who created the apps they removed. He’s a security researcher and was evaluating the risk associated with malicious apps, and when Google disappeared the apps off his phone, he checked out the method they used. → Read More
Foursquare is “growing like a weed,” co-founder Dennis Crowley tells us. So fast, in fact, that they’ve had to expand their office space. Foursquare will soon take over the upstairs floor of the office they’re currently reside at in New York City. That’s great — Foursquare undoubtedly needs more room as they’re now over 20 employees. The question I have is, how on Earth are they paying for it?
The answer, of course, is likely that they’ve either gotten or are about to get more funding. A couple weeks ago we heard that Andreessen Horowitz was the big winner in the race to put more money into the location-based service. With all these new employees coming on board, and the new office space, Foursquare simply has to have more money coming in, as they only raised a $1.35 million small round (back in September of last year) so far. → Read More
PayPal haters now have another option to pay for junk online. It’s called payclick (all lowercase = money), and it was developed by Visa. They’re marketing it to teens and their families—“Safe & Secure purchasing for the family.” Basically, instead of using PayPal or directly using your credit card, you set up a payclick account then go to town. → Read More
With all of the hubbub about HP buying Palm back in April, you may have thought the whole deal went down months ago. In actuality, there’s a fairly hefty, many-months-long legal process that has to be followed before all is said and done. During that time, HP’s not even allowed to hint at how Palm should be doing business. Said process, it seems, is just about over. → Read More
It seems like everyone is up in arms about the iPhone 4 antenna issue. You know, the one Apple CEO Steve Jobs suggested you fix by avoiding “holding it that way.” That “way” being the way just about everyone holds their phone. As such, it should be no surprise that Hitler is upset about this issue as well.
Michael Ingram Jr. made the excellent video below. → Read More
Friendly reminder: Steam has a killer summertime sale going on right now, and it runs through July 4. → Read More
Screen yellowing. Wonky cameras. An antenna that hates left-handers. If you take even the most cursory of glances around the Internet, it makes it seem like every iPhone 4 to come off the production line has one issue or another — but are the problems really that widespread? Now that everyone has had at least 24 hours with the device (with an apologetic exception to all of the Best Buy/Walmart/Radio Shack pre-orderers that left empty handed yesterday), I’m interested to know: are you having issues with your phone? → Read More
It’s fairly hard to review the latest crop of consoles. Nintendo, for example, just released a black Wii – it’s the same Wii, but black – and, not to be outdone, Microsoft just sent out their Xbox 360 S, a full-bore replacement for the space heaters known as the Xbox 360. Do you buy a Slim? Do you replace your old 360? Or do you sit tight until the next generation? Questions, questions, questions. An exhaustive review is a bit of overkill for this update, so let’s just talk about what’s different. First, and most important, the processor (codenamed Valhalla ), eDRAM, and GPU are now on one 40nm die, which means that the problems associated with failing heatsinks should be negligible. → Read More
WordPress developer Automattic has acquired Plinky from Thing Labs, the creators of social media application Brizzly. Plinky essentially aims to inspire content creators. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Plinky’s technology prompts you with an intriguing question or challenge and (like a question, or a challenge) and you have to answer. Depending on the prompt, your answer could contain photos, maps, playlists and more. You can then share your Plinky answers on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and others. For example, a sample question prompted from Plinky is “What’s your favorite summer memory?” → Read More
Better batteries may be on the way as lithium-ion battery producer Boston-Power ramps up its manufacturing and R&D with a $60M Series E round from Foundation Asset Management and Oak Investment Partners. Boston-Power produces Sonata, better known as Hewlett-Packard’s Long Life Battery, as well as Swing, which is used to power electric vehicles including the upcoming ZE Saab 9-3.
The company plans to double its workforce, adding sales and marketing staff in Massachusetts and growing its manufacturing centers in Taiwan. → Read More
Super Mario Cross Over is now ever so slightly improved including the addition of Ryu from Ninja Gaiden as well as a new NES sound emulator. The creator posted a full Changelog for your edification. → Read More
Are you toting a Sprint HTC Hero or Samsung Moment? You might wanna take a seat — and while you’re at it, have the ol’ Sad Trombone at the ready. Sprint has positively confirmed that neither of these phones will be updated to Android 2.2 (fire Sad Trombone now!). That means no drastic speed improvements as provided by the new compiler, no built-in Wi-Fi hotspot functionality, and no Flash. Well, unless you root your device and install Android 2.2 without Sprint’s guiding hand. Not that we’d ever tell you to do that. We’re just saying, you know, you should could. On the upside, the EVO 4G will be getting 2.2 — but really, was there any doubt about that? → Read More
Last week we reported that Twitter saw a record number of Tweets-per-second (or TPS) after the Lakers win over the Celtics in the deciding game of the NBA Championship. That event generated 3,085 TPS as the game ended. On an average day, Twitter sees about 750 TPS and 65 million total Tweets a day. But with the World Cup causing massive traffic to Twitter, this record was bound to be short-lived. Today, Twitter announced that Japan’s 3-1 victory over Denmark yesterday resulted in 3,283 TPS.
Of course, Twitter cautioned that it is tough to pinpoint any records set this week on a single World Cup game because many are being played simultaneously. Apparently, the Netherlands/Cameroon game ended six minutes prior to the Japan/Denmark game. And total numbers, Twitter says, were fairly similar to the first week when only one game was being played at a time. → Read More
I’d just like to point out that it’s 12:15pm ET on June 25, 2010, and XM Radio Online has once again crashed and burned. That’s with the iPhone App, the plain on’ Web site, and my third-party application that I use because the plain ol’ Web site is terrible on a Mac. Good service you’ve got here, Sirius XM. Third time this week it’s happened to me (but I only listen a few hours per day, so who knows how often the stream is really down). And to be clear this only seems to affect XM Radio Online users, not Sirius folks. At what point can you reasonably say, “Well, your honor, I paid for a service that patently didn’t work. I’d just like my money back is all”? And… she’s back. That only took 30+ minutes. Cool. → Read More
