Sure we still have wars and cancer and cold sores. Sure we can’t solve the crisis in the Mid-East and many Americans live achingly close to the poverty line. Sure we can’t blot out racism, homophobia, and irrational traditions. But we can make tubeless toilet paper and dammit, it’s a start. → Read More
If there was one problem with the otherwise excellent Eye-Fi card it’s that images stored to the card had the nasty habit of appearing on public Flickr accounts without their owners knowledge – images that usually involved the owner in a compromising position with a close, naked friend or a barnyard mammal. Sure you can control where the Eye-Fi sends stuff but not many people bothered with those settings.
The company has just announced Eye-Fi View, a sharing system that makes sense. View creates a temporary private storage space for all Eye-Fi users where it keeps photos safe and sound for up to a week (you can buy unlimited storage for $4.99 or $49 a year.) You can see the updated View UI at http://center.eye.fi/. → Read More
Resilient storage solutions provider Cleversafe this morning announced that it has secured $31.4 million in an extension of its series C funding from new and existing investors including Motorola Ventures, New Enterprise Associates and OCA Ventures.
Earlier this week, the cloud storage company also announced that it had received a strategic investment from and inked a development agreement with In-Q-Tel (IQT), the not-for-profit investment firm that was launched by the CIA back in 1999. → Read More
Like the Audemars Piguet Royal Oak Offshore or Hublot Big Bang, the Chopard Mille Miglia is a constant force of consistency, which little changes each year to help spice up a core collection timepiece that hopes to find a delicious new flavor to tempt you. It is like you know you enjoy ice cream, but are sick of chocolate, vanilla, or strawberry. So in this case, with the Mille Miglia, Chopard offers up potentially tasty new flavors to re-enliven your interest. 2010 first sees two new limited edition models with the Chopard Mille Miglia XL GT Chrono 2010, which is limited to 2010 pieces (imagine that), and the new Chopard Mille Miglia Grand Prix de Monaco Historique Chronograph 2010 – a new version of a Monaco tribute watch limited to 250 pieces in rose gold, with the steel version being a new edition to the overall collection (until they discontinue it down the line). Both watches are pleasing to the eye, fun, and fashionable. → Read More
The 3D boom knows no end. Pioneer Japan today announced [JP] two Blu-ray players supporting 3D content, the BDP-LX54 (pictured above) as the high-end model, and the BDP-430. Apart from Blu-ray discs, the players are also compatible to the following formats: DivX HD, MKV, WMV, MP3, WMA, and JPEG. → Read More
According to an SEC filing, cloud-based phone systems provider RingCentral has raised $10 million in its third institutional financing round (with another $851,240 remaining to be sold).
The filing lists previous investors Khosla Ventures and Sequoia Capital – it’s unclear whether the company’s third backer, DAG Ventures, also participated. → Read More
Industry sources at Foxconn Technology and Compal Communications are stating that they are currently manufacturing multiple WebOS devices including the so-called PalmPad. → Read More
The clock is counting down until November 2, when American citizens will flock (hopefully) to their local polling places to cast their votes for the mid-term elections. And you can bet some of them will be checking in on Foursquare. To mark the occasion, Foursquare has teamed up with noted design firm JESS3 to create a dynamic map, which will display Foursquare check-ins in real-time at nearly 107,000 polling locations across the country. You’ll be able to access it at http://elections.foursquare.com/ → Read More
uCIRRUS, which markets real-time enterprise operating software dubbed PUSHvm, this morning announced that it has closed a $4 million funding round led by SK telecom Ventures and joined by Qualcomm Ventures and ATA Ventures.
The company says the fresh capital will be used to accelerate the product roadmap for PUSHvm, which powers real-time datastream processing and delivery of large volumes of customized data for its clients, thus reducing their infrastructure costs. → Read More
Barry Diller realizes that his Ask search engine isn’t going to gain market share anytime soon, but search can still power growth for IAC if it just keeps up with the growth in the overall search market. IAC released third quarter earnings this morning. Total revenues were up 25 percent to $422 million. Operating income quadrupled to $36 million, and adjusted earnings per share came in at $0.32 versus Wall Street estimates of $0.27. (However, after stripping out the adjustments due to one-time sales of stock and other assets a year ago, net income was actually down 19 percent).
Search represented nearly half of revenues ($205 million). The search business grew 20 percent, goosed primarily by a 55 percent increase in active toolbars to 97 million. IAC’s toolbar business is its secret distribution weapon, but those searches tend to generate lower revenue per query than those on Ask.com, which itself is still growing and is now ranked as the sixth largest website in the U.S. LAst month, Ask CityGrid Media’s new local advertising network also contributed to overall search revenues. → Read More
Online analytics company Compete has just published its ranking of the top 50 websites for September 2010, giving some insights into current visitor trends (and not absolute numbers, as the company tends to undercount traffic for most websites).
Compete’s data compilation shows increasing traffic to Microsoft’s search engine Bing (up 11.7 percent for the month and 108.5 percent for the year) as well as Ask.com (up 8.7 percent for the month and 75.3 percent for the year). → Read More
Have you ever walked into your neighborhood Sephora only to feel utterly inundated by a sea of colorful beauty products? There are literally thousands of slots filled with bronzers, eye palettes, brushes, moisturizers, foundations, creams, creating a dizzying kaleidoscope of shades and scents.
As someone who doesn’t pour over fashion magazines for the latest product and make-up tips, it’s simply overwhelming. I’ve always wondered why we couldn’t take the makeup discovery process out of the box, aka the brick and mortar experience, and bring it into the home in a real, non-Mary Kay tactile way that’s a step beyond mere online shopping.
A new breed of startups are trying to do that, including New York-based BirchBox, which just raised a $1.4 million seed round led by First Round Capital and Accel Partners. → Read More
We’re hearing from two separate sources that Nasza Klasa, the largest Polish social networking platform, is on the block for €130 million.
Launched in November 2006, at its height the service had over 27 million registered users. But figures have been nose-diving this year as Facebook eats into its core social networking user base. It may be that heat from Facebook which is prompting the sale. We’ve reached out to Nasza Klasa for comment. → Read More
CherryPad Orders Unfulfilled, Customers Antsy Sanyo Celebrates eneloop’s 5th Anniversary With Glitter Batteries Review: Tonka Ricochet RC Car Hands-On With the Nook Color Nice Knowing You, Nook → Read More
In a world of Angry Birds and Foursquare, I’m not sure how AT&T came up with this one.
This week, AT&T unleashed the Eco-App, a youth-centric iPhone app that tries to promote sustainability through education. It’s hard to argue with a such a legitimate, noble goal but the app itself is a bit of a head scratcher. As explained on AT&T’s website, the Eco-App has two top features: a tool to help teens find nearby recycling centers and educational resources to help teens comprehend the “environmental benefits of paperless billing.”
File this under the increasingly expanding folder of “What was AT&T Thinking?” → Read More
Well, well, well. An eagle-eyed reader tells us PayPal posted a short announcement yesterday on its corporate blog, only to pull it mere seconds later. As you can tell from the URL, PayPal was poised to announce support for “all three major mobile platforms” (also see retweets of the blog post).
That is: support for Apple’s App Store, Blackberry App World … and Android Market.
How do we know? Thanks to a little something called Google cache (screenshot below for posterity). → Read More
Spotlight Ticket Management, which offers Web-based ticket management software for venue owners and operators, sports teams and the like, has secured a $2.5 million round of Series A financing led by Point Judith Capital.
Sports media entrepreneur Brian Bedol, founder of the former Classic Sports Network (now ESPN Classic) and CSTV (now CBS College Sports), has also joined the round of financing. → Read More
An advertising agency that represents American Express took issue with my post yesterday complaining about my failed efforts to get a simple credit card. In the post, titled Damnit Amex, Give Me A Credit Card, I complained about the difficulty of someone in my particular demographic to get credit, and noted the usefulness of Credit Karma, a startup that gives people immediate access to their credit report.
Some users actually saw an ad for the Amex ZYNC card next to the post.
In an email to our sales team, the agency said “We found this on your site today, obviously not a good thing for AMEX or for ZYNC branding.” → Read More
Well, I’m officially a Stargate Universe fan. I’m hooked and for good reason, too. The show’s damn good. I’ve wrote extensively about SGU here and started out as a skeptic like many of you. It’s totally different than either SG-1 or Atlantis that came before it. I think it took everyone off guard. Instead of being a continuation of the previous series, it’s a total reboot. The episodes are no longer shot clearly for syndication and full of quirky dialog riddled with inside jokes. No, Universe is more Battlestar Galatica than SG-1; it’s more Lost than Atlantis – and I like, but it took me a season and half to get here. → Read More
It’s been a difficult couple of months for Digg. The crowdsourced news site pushed out a major new design at the end of August which met with a lot of criticism and broken axles. There was literally a user revolt and things deteriorated so rapidly that earlier this week the company had to let go more than a third of its employees.
How bad did it get? Here’s one data point from comScore: Digg lost 30 percent of its audience in the month of September alone. Digg’s estimated unique visitors worldwide went from 18.4 million in August to 12.8 million in September. That is a drop of 5.6 million people in a single month. Remember, the new site went live for everyone on August 25, so September was the first full month of the new design. Compared to a year before, Digg’s worldwide audience shrank by 16 million visitors. → Read More
