Parents everywhere are constantly uploading videos of their little geniuses effecently using iDevices. Just last week we featured a video of a four-year-old boy playing around on an iPad. It’s certainly a testament to Apple’s user interface. But the iPad just isn’t for pre-schoolers. Oh no, the kid in the video after the jump undercuts the other boy by three years. He probably can’t even say iPad yet. Sorry about the aspect ratio. Whoever uploaded it failed at Video 101.
[Thanks for the video, Rob!] → Read More
Facebook’s first investor Peter Thiel told Fox Business today that Facebook will not IPO until 2012. Earlier this summer, Bloomberg reported that Facebook was holding off on its IPO for another two years and Thiel seems to confirm this line of thinking.
Thiel says that Facebook wants to follow the example of Google, and doesn’t want to IPO until late in the process (which he claims is a byproduct of Sarbanes Oxley and other regulation). → Read More
Forget Mad Men and Breaking Bad, The Walking Dead will be the new king of AMC when it premieres on October 31st. A dedicated fan made the video above simply out of his love for the comic and upcoming show. The art came right from the comic. This show is going to be awesome. In case you missed it during Comic-Con, the 4:35 sneak peak at The Walking Dead is after the jump. [via LikeCool] → Read More
At TechCrunch Disrupt this morning, HP’s Executive Vice President for the Personal Systems Group, Todd Bradley shed light on the massive number of devices being sold through his group, which Bradley says is in charge of a $40-plus billion revenue stream flowing through the company.
Bradley says that HP is selling $4 million worth of computers in his group every hour, with 2 computers sold each second. As we wrote earlier, Bradley also sees a lot of potential in the tablet market, estimating that tablets will be a $40 billion market over the next few years. → Read More
According to the Leichtman Research Group, 40% of American TV households have DVRs, up 8% from five years ago. 64% of these have used Video-on-Demand services while 83% have watched an on-demand program this month. Don’t think we’re living in a world of DVRs, though. 90% of Americans still watch live TV.
One other interesting note: “Netflix subscribers have a mean annual household income 24% above average.” So congrats, rich people! Your disposable income now offers you thousands of movies on demand in the comfort of your domicile or pleasure yacht.
More stats in the press release below. → Read More
Today at our TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco, Clarium Capital President Peter Thiel sat down with our own Sarah Lacy to talk about a whole range of issues. But at the end of the dicussion, he disclosed a bit of news.
Thiel is starting a new initiative that will offer grants of up to $100,000 for kids to drop out of school. Yes, you read that right. Though that’s not how Thiel puts it. Instead, he calls it “stopping out of school.” → Read More
From the designers via bookofjoe, The moon has been a guide and object of admiration and mysticism during thousands of years. Agriculture, fertility, tidal patterns, human behaviour and many other activities have been linked to the different moon phases. Moonwatch has been designed to establish a relationship between the moon cycle and a person’s emotional states. It’s a new concept of time based on nature which invites people to reflect upon and gain a closer understanding of their mood and daily life on earth. → Read More
Peter Thiel made a really wise bet on Facebook as the social network’s first angel investor back in 2003. Of course, now Thiel’s foresight has paid off—the company is not only the biggest social network in the world but it is valued in the tens of billions. In fact, Thiel, who was being interviewed by Sarah Lacy, said today at TechCrunch Disrupt that Facebook’s $30 billion valuation is still undervalued. That’s something that FriendFeed co-founder Paul Buchheit agrees with as well.
But interestingly, Thiel told Lacy that looking back he would be a lot more careful about funding a Facebook-like idea today. In 2003, Thiel made a $500,000 angel investment in Facebook for 10.2 percent of the company. What he meant is that he would think twice about investing in Facebook again because there are not going be that many innovating companies coming from the web. He thinks that a lot of the current big guys, like Google and Yelp, will be at the forefront of innovation and that there’s not many game-changers emerging that will innovate on the web. He tells Lacy, “Yelp of cellphones will be Yelp, the Google of cellphones will be Google.” → Read More
XING, the European social network for business professionals, has recently passed the ten million registered user mark (even if it still advertises 9 million members on its main website).
The publicly-listed company says the second quarter of this year proved to be XING’s most successful period of member growth in the last 15 months. → Read More
If you are a fan of watches made to be instruments, then please don’t pass up the German greats. One of the best is Tutima. Located in Glashutte, nearby A. Lange & Sohne, Glashutte Original, and Nomos, Tutima is an historic watch brand with a serious outlook on the matter of making timepiece. While many Tutima watches have a good handsome look to them, these timepieces are functional machines – with a keen eye on making the time easy to read all in a very reliable watch case. → Read More
Polish site AppleMania.pl [Polish] is getting a cease and desist from good old Apple for potentially infringing on Apple’s delicate trademarks.
Use of the logo APPLEMANIA and Apple http://applemania.pl/ infringes on the exclusive rights of our Principal (Apple – ed.) Its trade marks, and an act of unfair competition. Namely, used by your character and logo APPLEMANIA “apples” clearly refers to the trademark used by the Apple company for many years to describe the products and services from the company Apple. Such action leads to produce confusion among the public as to the relationship between your company and the company Apple. In addition, with signs similar to a highly reputable and well-known marks by Apple, you reap unfair benefits and lead to the dilution of the distinctive power of Apple’s trademarks.
Sony, Warner Brothers, and Disney are mulling over the prospect of offering $30 rentals of new movies before they come to DVD. This would presumably allow a family to watch a movie that they weren’t able to get in to see at the theaters, a sort of WWE-style main-event pay-per-view deal that will almost completely bypass the cable operators and will be available on any number of CE platforms. → Read More
I was in Amsterdam late last week to sit on the jury for Vodafone’s Mobile Clicks startup competition, and I saw four genuinely great fledgling companies strut their stuff.
In the end, plastic card-killing startup Cardmobili came out victorious – they won both the €100,000 1st place prize and the public voting award – more on them below.
Runner-up and winner of €50,000 was the UK’s RouletteCricket, a so-called ‘2nd screen gaming’ service provider that gives fans a new way to engage with cricket games. → Read More
Maybe it was just a slip. Or maybe it was something much more. But here’s what HP’s Todd Bradley said at TCDisrupt today when Mike Arrington asked a question especially interesting to anyone who’s taken a Business 101 course, “Do you think it’s ethically wrong to charge as much for ink as you do?”
“Ask me next year, if I take the [CEO] postion,” Bradley responded to Arrington, language that would imply that he had been offered the CEO position, notable because HP is still searching for a CEO to replace Mark Hurd and Bradley began the talk emphasizing the fact that he was still just an EVP. → Read More
CalendarGod, part of the TechCrunch Disrupt Startup Alley this week, is a new take – incredible as it sounds – on the concept of the calendar. Instead of trying to integrate random calendars as many other startups have tried in the past (but failed to find a model) CalendarGod attaches location to the calendar. In other words, injecting the crucial element of location and making it social.
Here’s how it works: Just like on Twitter, users follow calendars and get a realtime feed of events and activity. So you can broadcast a calendar and get followers. So far the startup has integrated 10,000 local calendars ranging from shopping calendars such as One Kings Lane, Ideeli, and Sak’s Fifth Avenue through to technology, music and community calendars. So in some respects it’s a little like Plancast, but instead of following events put up by members, you follow the calendars from venues and event organisers. → Read More
Today, during our TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco, Mike Arrington and Erick Schonfeld sat down with LinkedIn founder (and investor) Reid Hoffman and Greylock’s David Sze to talk a bit about investing. The big news was that Greylock was giving Hoffman a new $20 million seed fund. But the duo had some other interesting things to say.
When Mike asked how both Sze and Hoffman missed out on investing in Twitter, both expressed regret in that. Hoffman said that he wasn’t an investor in Odeo (the podcasting company that originally gave birth to Twitter) so he didn’t really have an “in”. But Sze noted that he had looked at Twitter a number of times — “I made a mistake,” he said. → Read More
Two Nvidia GTX 480Ms! That’s what Origin has stuffed into the EON17, the company’s latest razzle-dazzle gaming laptop. The specs are probably better than your desktop’s. → Read More
Sharp isn’t the only Japanese company getting ready for the upcoming e-book wars. Tomorrow, Toshiba is throwing its hat into the ring. But unlike Sharp (which starts in Japan), Toshiba will offer e-books in the US first – with plans to expand to Japan, Europe, and other places later. → Read More
Do you still listen to FM radio? I don’t. Pandora, Slacker, Last.FM and the likes all destroyed any lingering appeal FM had for me years ago. That said, there are still the occasional times where I need to catch some FM waves. How am I supposed to know what important worldly events are going on without Ryan Seacrest In The Morning? After teardowns of the Droid 2 revealed an unused FM radio tuner inside, the hacker crowds got to work. Thanks to their efforts, all it takes to jam out like its 1994 is a Droid 2, a bit of elbow grease, and a general disregard for silly things like warranties. → Read More
At TechCrunch Disrupt today, TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington sat down with HP’s Executive Vice President for the Personal Systems Group, Todd Bradley to discuss HP’s recent acquisition spree, future strategy and more. HP just bought data storage company 3PAR for $2.4 billion after a heated bidding war with Dell. And earlier this summer, HP bought smartphone manufacturer Palm for $1.2 billion. And let’s not forget the whole Mark Hurd fiasco. Bradley of course could be a contender for Hurd’s former position as CEO.
Bradley says his group, which is in charge of a $40-plus billion revenue stream including PCs, printers and more, was in charge of buying Palm. Bradley’s main goal now, is how to broadly deploy the WebOS, the mobile operating system for Palm phones. Next year, for example, Palm will sell 15 million printers that use WebOS. He says that while the smartphone category is growing, tablets are going to be a huge market. He estimates that in the next few years tablets will be a $40 billion market (he also said that the smartphone market is a $100 billion market). HP of course, is looking to be a part of this market with its own iPad competitors. → Read More
