Interested in the Viliv N5 clamshell Windows PC? Well, pricing info for the handheld is finally available and it might cool your excitement a bit. It’s a tad pricey, but I must say that I’m really starting to enjoy the form factor after spending a few days with the N5. → Read More
With the Dow down more than 250 points, today is not the best day for an IPO. But Tesla shares are rallying after an initial scare. Tesla Motors rang the Nasdaq opening bell earlier this morning to commemorate its initial public offering under the ticker symbol TSLA The shares opened at $19, a 12% jump from its $17 pricing yesterday. But then they immediately dropped, dipping below $17.70 before rallying again. Currently, they are trading above $18, which gives Tesla a market cap of about $1.7 billion
The company was able to price the shares above its $14 to $16 range, and will collect $202 million from the IPO Tesla is selling 13.3 million shares, 11,880,600 through the company and 1,419,400 through selling stockholders, including founder Elon Musk. This is the first time an automotive company has gone public in more than 50 years. → 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
Flash has faced a bit of controversy recently with Apple’s continued ban of the rich media technology in its products, including the iPhone and iPad. Because of this, many advertisers and media companies are looking to other technologies, such as HTML5, to serve video and rich media on these devices. Rich media ads are known to elicit higher CPMs, so advertisers and publishers are llooking for ways to serve rich media ads on all devices. Today, comScore is releasing an online advertising report that shows that Flash and rich media ads represent 40 percent of all U.S. online advertising.
ComScore’s Ad Metrix Creative Summary report is designed to provide data on size, formats, and types of display ads being used by advertisers on publisher sites. For May, the report showed that JPEG display ads led the market with more than 42 percent of impressions in the U.S., while “leaderboard”-style banner ads (728 x 90 in dimension) were the most commonly viewed display ad by size. → Read More
A day after Amazon made it abundantly clear it’s gunning for world domination in the e-reading space by lowering the price of the Kindle from $259 to $189 – following competitor Barnes & Noble’s decision to slash the price of its Nook e-reader down to $199 – chief executive Jeff Bezos sat down with Fortune’s JP Mangalindan for a fairly interesting interview.
One of the things Bezos talked about was the iPad, Apple’s tablet computer that is selling like hotcakes and unequivocally poses a genuine threat to Amazon’s burgeoning ebooks and ereader business (and, as some claim, to reading in general).
According to Apple, it’s already taken about 22% of the U.S. ebooks market, with iPad owners having downloaded some 5 million books in the first 65 days of the iBooks store alone.
But Bezos does not seem terribly impressed. → Read More
I’ve seen many things in the tech and gadget world, but this one’s a first. A robot research team at Tokyo Institute of Technology has developed a “virtual reality”-based hair cut simulation system. Aptly named Air-Hair, the system makes it possible to imitate the process of cutting a person’s hair using a manikin and a pair of physical “scissors” that’s connected to a screen showing the head of an avatar. → Read More
Ladies and gents, this is a 3TB hard drive. Let that sink in. Three effin terabytes. That’s a whole lot of data on one hard drive. Seagate previously stated that the drive would be out by year’s end, but here it is and it’s barely summer.
The FreeAgent GoFlex family is Seagate’s first product line to sport the gigantic hard drive. USB 3.0, USB 2.0 and Firewire 800 via Seagate’s GoFlex adapters are tasked with the job of transferring the data to and fro the connected computer. The USB 2.0 flavor is available right now with the MSRP $249.
The real story, however, isn’t that Seagate managed to stuff 3TB into one 3.5-inch hard drive. It’s that Seagate is actually bringing it to market amid so many potential problems. → Read More
So far, an estimated 82 million gallons of oil have leaked into the Gulf of Mexico. Everything BP has tried to stop the largest oil spill in history has failed. The company has tried everything from “junk shots” to “top kill” to containment domes, and is still spending $100 million a day to try to cap the well and clean up the mess. The company is even open to suggestions.
Whether they are submitted to BP or not, lots of smart people are sharing solutions their own solutions. Below are some of the suggested cleanup solutions, with videos explaining the technologies. For instance, actor Kevin Costner (remember Waterworld?) has funded and deployed devices designed to separate oil from water. The separated oil can be reused after it is collected. → Read More
The future is looking bright for the Samsung Galaxy S. The SK Telecom — the exclusive provider — managed to put 100,000 Android handsets in the hand of South Koreans over the last six days. Of course it’s not iPhone 4-type numbers, but South Korean is different than the subsidized market here in the US and this is just another Android unit. After playing with the phone yesterday and walking away impressed, we’re kind of pulling for the new contender and hope it finds the same sort of success here. → Read More
Oh, Shanzhai, you did it again! This wild iP4 clone looks just like the real thing (presumably they had plenty of time to copy this one over the past few months thanks to a young man who enjoyed beer) and runs the standard garbage OS and processor chip. → Read More
Over 1 million of users have purchased and downloaded the MobiTV iPhone app, propelling it to number two on Apple’s Top Grossing apps list.
The application (iTunes link), which was released in April 2010 and is only available to users in the United States, features live TV programming and video-on-demand content from every major network, and many of the most popular cable channels.
But the real reason it has now surpassed 1 million downloads on the App Store is the planet’s largest football event, the World Cup – all the games are broadcast through MobiTV for iPhone. → Read More
Music licensing company Rumblefish last week announced a new music program for YouTube users, enabling them to buy a lifetime, worldwide music license on a selected music track at $1.99 a pop and fully edit the music into their videos.
The online store, dubbed Friendly Music, has just been pushed live.
YouTube users can use the website to access Rumblefish’s catalog of copyright-cleared songs (about 35,000 tracks strong), which they can use to create soundtracks for their videos. → Read More
Small companies clone big companies all the time. And by clone I don’t just mean steal a basic idea. I mean clone almost literally – they just plain rip off every single feature and hope for the best. It certainly saves time on user testing.
Big companies, particularly big tech companies, don’t do this as much. Pride and ethics come into play at an individual and team level. Pure copying just isn’t how things are done. Instead they tweak a little here, add a little there, and launch it as a variation of the original. That’s evolution, not stealing. And most of the time it doesn’t work very well. Facebook’s users just don’t seem to want to behave like Twitter users, for example, no matter how hard Facebook tried to get them to change. And Google Buzz, besides the privacy snafus in the beginning, is just a little too complicated to get people using it wildly. Plus, I’m not convinced that people want all that junk in their email inbox.
But pure clones work well. Microsoft crushed Netscape in the 90s by simply building their own web browser and giving it away for free. Webmail and instant messaging services across Microsoft, Yahoo, Google and AOL are all largely the same, and that market is fragmented among all of those companies. If there’s a better way to do mail and messaging, no one has figured it out yet and gotten all the users to switch to them. → Read More
ProgrammableWeb, a well-known repository for Web APIs, has been acquired by Alcatel-Lucent in a surprise move. Terms of the acquisition remain undisclosed, but according to the press release, ProgrammableWeb will continue to operate as a separate entity and the site’s founder John Musser will be making the move to Alcatel-Lucent.
The repository, which was launched back in 2005 and now contains some 2,042 APIs (we covered when it hit 1,000 back in November 2008), will be maintained by its new owner. → Read More
One thing home solar startup SunRun doesn’t seem to have a problem with is getting access to lots of capital. The three year old company has now raised $85 million in venture capital – including a new $55 million round led by Sequoia Capital. Previous investors Accel Partners and Foundation Capital also participated in the round.
But that’s not all. The company also has $90 million from US Bancorp and $100 million from PG&E to finance home solar installations.
At its core SunRun is a finance company. They offer attractive solutions to home owners to add solar panels to their roof, or in their yard. Customers can choose to pay up a single up front fee for the systems – which average around $25,000 – or pay nothing up front and make monthly payments over the decades-long useful life of the system. Either way customers are likely to save money versus their normal grid electricity largely thanks to federal tax credits and state and local incentives to go solar. → Read More
Tetris creator has been working on true multiplayer Tetris for “more than 10 years” High school science teacher tricks his students into actual NASA assignment Target-tracking autonomous guard-bot-tank is the precursor to the Hunter-Killer Meet DARwIn-LC, Virginia Tech’s new mini humanoid (video) Concept: Solar strap charges your camera while you’re out → Read More
Good news, MOG fans. The online music streaming service, which allows users to listen to as many songs as they want for a flat monthly fee, has had its iPhone application approved by Apple after spending well over a month in App Store purgatory. The application isn’t available for the iPhone quite yet (MOG says it will launch in the next few weeks), but it’s been given the green light by Apple, which is important considering that the company was worried it might be blocked. In addition to that news, MOG has also announced a new partnership to put MOG on Roku media players.
Roku makes an inexpensive set-top box for streaming media to your TV; this marks the first hardware integration for MOG. The service is included as part of MOG’s existing premium plan, which runs $4.99 a month and lets you stream as much music as you’d like from the site (and now, your Roku box). → Read More
Cloudera, which is backed by an impressive list of investors and advisors and run by a team of experienced technology veterans, commercially distributes and services Hadoop. The startup is announcing its first paid software today: Cloudera Enterprise. Cloudera Enterprise is next generation data management software to help companies leverage the Apache Hadoop platform.
Hadoop is a Java software framework born out of an open-source implementation of Google’s published computing infrastructure which is fostered within the Apache Software Foundation. Hadoop supports distributed applications running on large clusters of commodity computers processing enormous amounts of data. Cloudera helps distribute Hadoop, and provides services around the technology. → Read More
A day after Amazon made it abundantly clear it’s gunning for world domination in the e-reading space by lowering the price of the Kindle from $259 to $189 – following competitor Barnes & Noble’s decision to slash the price of its Nook e-reader down to $199 – chief executive Jeff Bezos sat down with Fortune’s JP Mangalindan for a fairly interesting interview.
One of the things Bezos talked about was the iPad, Apple’s tablet computer that is selling like hotcakes and unequivocally poses a genuine threat to Amazon’s burgeoning ebooks and ereader business (and, as some claim, to reading in general).
According to Apple, it’s already taken about 22% of the U.S. ebooks market, with iPad owners having downloaded some 5 million books in the first 65 days of the iBooks store alone.
But Bezos does not seem terribly impressed. → Read More
In a recent updated to the Playstation blog, Sony released some news about the latest firmware update coming to the PS3 and PSP system. Luckily, Sony was kind enough to include some information about exactly what changes will be coming out in the next update. → Read More
