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
MySpace is mere hours away from their big redesign push (our early review is here). If you’ve got nothing to do until midnight California time, spend it perusing this document. It is, according to an anonymous source that claims to work at MySpace, an internal MySpace document showing traffic and engagement by age band.
And it’s on Google, publicly. → Read More
“People like stumbling videos more than webpages,” StumbleUpon founder Garrett Camp tells us in explaining why the service has decided to revamp their video offering, which they’re doing tonight. While you’ve been able to stumble through videos for a couple of years now, they’re finally making the experience more social. And they’re adding two big names to the arsenal: TED and Hulu.
Previously, StumbleUpon was simply using trending data to find hot videos to take your through. But now they’ve integrated their social recommendation engine into the mix to make the entire experience more personalized. In other words, you’ll now be taken to videos liked by people you’re connected with on the service. → Read More
Among the many things about living in the year 2010 that blow my mind (robot vacuums, smartphones, Google Books), the fact that we are at the beginning of commercial space flight is, incredibly, not constantly on my mind. Yet advances are constantly being made, most visibly by Virgin Galactic, which just this last week inaugurated the commercial facility for vertically- and horizontally-launching aircraft. I mean spacecraft. I’m not sure I’ll ever get used to saying that.
Spaceport America, in addition to having a snazzy logo, sports training facilities for Virgin Galactic pilots spacemen, a 10,000ft runway, and will serve as Virgin Galactic’s headquarters for the next two decades. Want to visit? Good luck with that — you should probably just watch this video. → Read More
Yahoo Mail just announced its first redesign in five years and it took the tech community 20 hours to notice. Meanwhile Aol Mail went down last week without making a sound. Imagine the echo chamber uproar if either had happened to Gmail. → Read More
Just when I think Microsoft has no more tricks up their sleeves, they pull something like this. I know some of you out there feel that the Kinect just isn’t made for the hardcore, what with the lack of buttons and launch titles being tiger simulators and all, but this trailer will prove you wrong. The Kinect is hardcore. Hardcore practical. → Read More
The time has come to fiddle around with all the options for your new Chevy Volt. Assuming you’ve got a spare $42K laying around. Yes, it’s not exactly the most affordable vehicle, nor is it, strictly speaking, an electric vehicle, but it is a practical, good-looking, and high-tech car, which is perhaps better.
At any rate, the official configurator is now live, and you can add and subtract trim as you please. → Read More
I don’t know what to say about this bizarro device. I mean… as a game platform it depends entirely on the games. As hardware it’s… difficult to say until you hold the thing. That trackpad in the middle is out of this world, though. With the dots? Sony is either out of its mind or doing something really interesting here. → Read More
If you haven’t tried out Blippy since the company rather infamously launched last year as the social network for sharing credit card purchases, you should go back and give it another look. Things are quite a bit different now. And a new partnership showcases that.
Blippy has partnered with Sephora to create a version of Blippy specifically tailored to the fragrance and beauty retailer’s brand. From here, Sephora shoppers can easily share purchases, see what others are buying, and talk about all this stuff. While you can still see some purchase prices, it’s less about that, and more about the social aspect of the shopping experience. For example, a user saw someone bought some DiorShow Mascara and asked, “Is it worth the higher price tag (as compared to a $5 mascara)?” A few minutes later, they got an answer (yes). → Read More
MySpace is preparing to roll out its long-awaited redesign, perhaps as early as tomorrow, at least for new users. It’s not going to be pretty. Well, actually, it is quite pretty—I’ve seen screenshots—but that still might not be enough to help stem the diminishing appeal of the social network. MySpace tried to brief us on the new design under embargo, which we don’t do, so we declined the briefing. Nevertheless, we keep getting snippets of information from various sources.
So let me describe it for you. The design will feature the new MySpace logo at the top, and center around discovering and sharing media—music, photos, and videos. When you log in, a big status bar will prompt you to “Share something!” That can be a status message, a link, a photo, or a video. → Read More
The new Nook Color has been revealed, and it’s a 7″ Android tablet with a color LCD touchscreen. Talk about bringing a knife to a knife fight when someone else already brought a gun.
It was the wrong move for Barnes & Noble to change horses mid-race. The only thing e-readers (and this is supposed to be an e-reader, make no mistake) have as a defense against the tablet onslaught is their superior (and rapidly improving) e-ink displays. Amazon knows this, and they know that a huge proportion of their sales are black-and-white. The color stuff market is ceded to tablets — they can have it, too, because e-readers already own the book market. Barnes & Noble just got greedy. → Read More
http://player.ooyala.com/player.swf?embedCode=J2eTRzMToH-6f4N1BPgeGj9QliHLP4ZS&version=2 Here is some of the live dancing at the Nook Event today. Wild stuff. → Read More
Is Apple’s vanilla Bluetooth keyboard too minimal for your taste? Maybe this blinged-out one is more your speed. It comes with a bunch of stickers for assigning app shortcuts to this or that key — you know, in case you didn’t want to extend your finger to launch that app. → Read More
It’s said that you’re not supposed to wear white after Labor Day. Apple, it seems, is sticking with that rule. Yes, the elusive white iPhone has been delayed again.
As Apple representatives have told Reuters, the white version of the device is now not due until next spring. This is the third delay of the device, as it was at first pushed from launch day in June until the second half of July. Then it was pushed until “later this year” in late July. Now for the next question: will it actually beat the next version of the device itself to market? → Read More
