During a meeting I had with Italo Fontana, owner and designer of U-Boat Italy, he expressed his infatuation with professional instruments. The fact that watches are instruments used to measure time, explains why so many watch designers feel the same way. Bell & Ross and Giuliano Mazzuoli are obvious examples that come to mind. The U-Boat U-1001 is a watch that pays tribute to Mr. Fontana’s passion. It is built to withstand the rigorous demands of professional diving and it offers a bold, clear, technical design reminiscent of high tech instruments. → Read More
Just an FYI to all the gamers out there. Some good deals over at Steam today; one of my favorite games of all time, X-COM, is available with all its sequels (including the sadly misunderstood Enforcer) for only $3.74. That’s a huge deal. Grand Theft Auto IV is also available right now (sans expansions) for only $5, which is the lowest I’ve seen it. Now, get thee to the Steamery! → Read More
Well that didn’t take long. Halfway into their big 15 importers in 15 days campaign, Posterous has managed to make one of their competitors very angry. Twitpic is so angry, in fact, that they’re blocking the service and threatening legal action.
This morning, Posterous introduced their new “Rescue your photos from TwitPic” tool — a one-click way to import your photos from Twitpic over to your Posterous blog. This is the same type of importer Posterous has already made for Ning, Vox, Tumblr and a host of other services — as I said, they’re about halfway through the 15 of these tools they intend to make. → Read More
This is interesting. It seems that the dock that came with the original iPhone works great with the iPhone 4. In fact, it might work better than the new model molded specifically for the iPhone 4. → Read More
UK e-tailer Play.com has posted the full public specs of the Kinect motion gaming accessory for the Xbox 360. There’s not a whole lot revealed, but it is stated very plainly that only two active players can be tracked at any given moment. So much for party games — not that you’d all be able to cram into its 57-degree field of view, anyway. → Read More
Between the iPad’s blocking of Flash earlier this year and the huge wave of ad campaigns, open letters, and debates that followed, it seems that everyone has an opinion on the merits (or lack thereof) of Flash on the modern web. Today, YouTube software engineer John Harding took to the site’s official blog to weigh on the current status of HTML5 video support. The gist of it: while HTML5 is great, it can’t do everything YouTube (or most mainstream video sites) need.
Harding explains his thesis point by point, beginning with the need for a standard video format for HTML5. Politics, codec quality, and patent disputes have kept HTML5 from adopting a single standard for video content (H.264, the industry standard, has licensing issues). → Read More
Palm certainly has been working on getting their app store populated. They kicked off a promotion back in February, which is ending soon, and has resulted in over 400 developers splitting up their share of a million dollars. Palm is also trying to increase interest in their applications by offering a 50% discount on the majority of their catalog, starting immediately. The good news for developers is that they will still be paid the full amount, despite the discount given to customers by Palm. → Read More
Last year we found out Reevoo, the online customer reviews startup which had looked like it was slowing down, was actually signing up partners and getting traction. Today it announces a Series B round of funding from existing investors, though terms were undisclosed. The funding has been secured from existing investors Eden Ventures, Banexi Ventures and business angel Andrew Phillipps. The expansion capital will be used to grow faster across Europe and adding social functionality.
A Series B funding is usually in the range of £8-10m. Prior to this Reevoo had raised over £7m. That means Reevoo is clearly confident of making it in the long term and becoming a pretty big business, although there is also the chance this is a “down round”, which is never great for the founders. → Read More
Startup Bling Nation has landed a pretty major deal with PayPal, we’ve learned. Bling Nation’s payment systems addresses physical goods in merchant stores and will now allow consumers to use their payment chips to deduct funds from a PayPal account.
Here’s how Bling Nation works. The startup partners with banks, who then offer the consumers who use their services a Bling Nation and “Bank” branded chip that can be stuck onto any cell phone device. The chip will allow any user to make a payment directly out of their checking account similar to a debit payment. Bling Nation also partners with all of the local merchants in given town, to give them special “Bling Nation” credit card machines that will scan the chips. → Read More
Fresh off the boat from Sweden are a-JAYS’ new pair of affordable ear buds — the a-JAYS Three. The set is priced at $60, which is somewhat of a tough price point as it’s just above the cheap, impulse-buy mark and high-end ‘phones traditionally start north of $100. But we’re not here to discuse market pricing schemes. Nope, we’re here to find out how these headphones sound and feel because that’s what really matters. → Read More
Energy efficiency tracking company OPOWER added Hadi Partovi to its Technology Advisory Board and will open new offices in San Francisco next month. The Arlington, VA based company’s 10,000 square foot office in San Francisco’s South Park neighborhood will have room for between 75 and 100 employees, a large part of which will be engineers. “We signed a two-year sublease because we hope to grow out of that space,” says CEO Daniel Yates.
In Partovi, OPOWER is getting an experienced advisor who will help build the company in its plans to grow from 95 to 150 employees total in the coming year. Partovi co-founded online music service iLike with his brother Ali, which they sold to MySpace, before leaving in April. Previously, Partovi founded Tellme Networks, which was acquired by Microsoft for a reported $800 million. Partovi also worked on IE5. → Read More
Don’t feel like spending the $30 on a nice case for your new iPhone — or maybe just want to be different? A little of this Sugru modeling clay may be the solution. Just make a few little nubbins, let it dry overnight, and boom, your iPhone is now protected from quite a lot of the common bumps and dings that tend to shatter iPhones. Pro tip: this technique works for any flat, fragile object. [via Gadget Lab] → Read More
Facebook is great for keeping up with friends. And of course brands are using it as marketing tool by creating Fan pages. But it can also be used by companies as a recruiting tool. I’ve written before anecdotally about how Citysearch uses Facebook ads for recruiting by targeting the ads at the hiring manager’s friends. Well, now there is a full-fledged Facebook app for that called Work For Us
Work For Us creates a tab on a company’s Fan page which turns it into a mini-job board. You can see an example here for BuildASign or SPG Creative Marketing. People can apply for the job right inside Facebook, or Like a job and there → Read More
So apparently the reception problems on the iPhone 4G are reaching levels where Apple feels they need to make sure their customer service people are aware of it. According to a document leaked to BGR, the problem isn’t with the phone (or the network) it’s that you’re not holding your new phone properly → Read More
After a brief hiatus, the founder of Etsy Rob Kalin reclaimed the CEO title in January of this year. During a brief interview at Etsy’s Brooklyn headquarters, I asked Kalin, “Why do you think you deserve to be back as CEO?…Is there anything really unique about your vision that will take Etsy to the next stage?”
Kalin responded:
“Sure, so why do I deserve to be CEO is something that you gotta earn every day, so I definitely don’t take that title for granted. As far as where we want to go, to me the most important part of commerce is the social aspect of it. Social aspect drives the marketplace.”
Currently, Etsy is on track to record roughly $400 million in gross merchandise sales this year (versus nearly $200 million last year), Kalin argues that in just a few years Etsy could be in the multi-billion-dollar range— that is, if he can pull off his social strategy. In episode two of our profiles series, Kalin gives us a tour of Etsy, discusses profits, his social vision and why he stepped down in the first place. → Read More
You often hear about Amazon Web Services having some downtime issues, but it’s rare to see Amazon.com itself have major issues. In fact, I can’t ever remember it happening the past couple of years. But that’s very much the case today as for the past couple of hours the service has been switching back and forth between being totally down and being up, but showing no products.
Obviously, Twitter is abuzz about this — though there’s no word from Amazon on Twitter yet about the downtime. Amazon Web Services, meanwhile, all seem to be a go, according to their dashboard. The mobile apps on the iPhone, iPad and Android devices are sort of working, but it doesn’t appear you can go to actual product pages. → Read More
Foursquare, the geo-mobile startup everybody tried to invest in or buy, now has officially closed its Series B funding round. The “wire transfer heard ’round the world,” as board member Bryce Roberts puts it, was for $20 million, giving the company a $95 million pre-money valuation. The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz, as previously reported, with existing investors Union Square Ventures and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures participating.
CEO Dennis Crowley says the fundraising was “a lot of work” and plans to use the money to staff up and keep adding to the product. “It’s all about building a team that can churn out new product,” he tells me. “We’ve been dreaming up these things for the past 10 years and now we have the opportunity to build them all.” The money will also help pay for more office space. His 27 employees are already too big for the startup’s current New York City offices, and Foursquare is about to move into new digs upstairs in the same building. “It’s awesome,” he says, “we can hear them building it upstairs right now!” He plans on hiring a lot more engineers. → Read More
We heard tell of the Optimus Popularis in May, but it had a completely different look. The new one, with its dedicated display bar and lack of number pad, is in my humble opinion a vastly superior design. The LED (not OLED) keys are, after all, totally customizable, and this saves a ton of money — that’s 20 less displays they have to put on the keyboard. And they can pass the savings on to the customers! Or not. It’s still going to cost nearly a grand. → Read More
Big news from Foursquare today. No, not that news (just yet). And okay, not really that big. Still, very useful.
Foursquare has given its friend request emails a nice upgrade today. Previously, all you would see is a text note that someone wanted to be your friend. If you wanted to learn anything about them, you had to click-through to their profile page on foursquare.com. But starting today, Foursquare has a new notification email system that includes the user’s profile picture and more importantly, an area noting what friends you have in common. → Read More
Maybe we should do a post all about what brands and devices Hulu Plus is not going to come to. It’d be shorter. Samsung, for its part, just announced that it too will be getting the premium TV service, on most 2010 Blu-ray players and TVs over 40″. You can download the app today if you’ve got the hardware, but it’ll just be sample content for now. You can request an invite to the preview period via the app. → Read More
