Hands-On With the Blackberry Style Italy Orders Google To Clearly Label Street View Cars, Advertise Routes Is Cloud OS Maker Jolicloud Preparing To Sell A Netbook Of Its Own? A Week In The Technology-Packed 2011 Ford Edge Sport PaperBecause: A Paper Industry Astroturf Defending Paper → Read More
Last Wednesday, I got my hands on one of the new MacBook Airs. I haven’t touched my MacBook Pro since. It’s six months old. RIP.
I know that sounds outrageous. Or like hyperbole. But it’s not. When I wrote up my initial thoughts, it was after only a few hours of usage. I hadn’t even used it outside the house yet. But now I have. I’ve used it almost everywhere I’ve been for just about a week now. There’s no question in my mind that this has replaced my MacBook Pro as my go-to machine. → Read More
Pelican Imaging, a startup that focuses on smartphone camera technology, has just raised $10 million in a Series B round led by Globespan Capital Partners.
Previous investors Granite Ventures, InterWest Partners and IQT, also joined this round.
All told, Pelican has now raised north of $17 million in the last two years, after a $7 million Series A round in August 2009 and a strategic investment from IQT in July 2010 (for an undisclosed amount). → Read More
What makes Sequoia invest an undisclosed multi-million dollar round in a 22 year-old’s startup? The future. No, not in the sense that young entrepreneurs hold the future of our industry. Literally the future. Or to be more exact, selling advertisers future trends. Of course to pull that off one needs some precognition.
One route was to comb the earth for mutated humans and exploit their gift, but Taykey took the other route – algorithms. Watch out, Agatha. → Read More
The darkest fears of every Digger (or, as is increasingly common, former Digger) may be coming true: some very compelling data mining by a concerned user has turned up evidence that dummy accounts under Digg auspices have been promoting certain sources to the front page with almost no activity from real users. The information was gleaned from Digg’s own records of front-page stories and associated Diggers.
The 159 dummy accounts, which were given pathetically anonymous names, seem to have contributed systematically to submissions from Digg publishing partners, including TechCrunch. The suspicious activity seems to have started after the algorithm revision of October 15th, after which time a number of submissions (though by no means all front-page stories) were blatantly promoted by these accounts. → Read More
Are you tired of tilting your head to read your phone? Does your grip fail you during the fourth or fifth episode of a Battlestar Galactica marathon? Do you like things made out of metal?
My friend. Special deal for you. In exchange for click, I give you metal smartphone coaster. USA only, sorry world! → Read More
Well that was fast.
In roughly 24 hours, Firesheep has been downloaded more than 104,000 times, as would-be-hackers — or the merely curious— downloaded the Firefox extension to test the exploit.
As we reported on Sunday night, Eric Butler’s Firesheep allows users on a public Wi-Fi network to effectively spy on others, by giving Firesheep users access to sensitive information (via cookies) that lets them log into their victim’s accounts on unsecured sites.
We got a chance to catch up with Butler this evening, who has been overwhelmed by the extension’s attention.
UPDATE: Butler’s latest blog post is live, click here. → Read More
This is great. Designer Christopher Stuart decided to put together a decent sofa using only materials you’d find at a local hardware store — I’m pretty impressed how well it turned out. I don’t imagine the pieces all told set him back more than $75. Sure, you could get a couch of Craigslist for free, but we all know why free couches are free. Better to make your own. → Read More
Some mildly shocking news broke the other day as a result of some Nielsen numbers stating that 32% of iPad owners had never downloaded any apps. While I found that number a little hard to swallow, it’s hard to argue with cold, hard facts — that is, unless they’re not facts. → Read More
Just about every evening investor Dave McClure sends me an email pitching one of his startups for a story. Company X just got a user! That sort of thing.
Tonight though the pitch was a little more interesting. Credit Karma, a startup we first covered late last year, now has more than 2 million members. Revenue is “8-10X higher than last year,” but without a hard number and my understanding that last year they had zero revenue makes that somewhat less impressive.
But the service is really cool. I have recently been in credit card hell. Chase dropped my credit limit on my United card to absolutely nothing for no reason at all last year, and won’t increase it. I’ve also been declined by American Express, repeatedly, for a Starwood credit card. → Read More
How many of you out there still have your Dreamcasts tucked away somewhere? Nice. Me too. I mean, when you’ve got classics like Chu Chu Rocket, Skies of Arcadia, Soul Calibur, Rez, and more all still looking as good as they did in 1999 (actually still pretty good), why would you throw it away?
And now you don’t even have to worry about finding your old discs. This SD card adapter means all the games, emulators, and other stuff are as easy to run as a memory card. → Read More
It feels like we’re on the verge of something — “feel” being the keyword. Personal computing has more or less been the same for a few decades now. It’s the mouse, the keyboard, the monitor, and the machine. With things like notebook computers, this has been altered a bit, but it’s the same basic idea. But with the rise of smartphones and now tablets, the whole concept is finally starting evolve. And it looks like OS X Lion will be a key to this transition.
On stage last week during their Back to the Mac event, Apple gave a sneak peak at some of what they have in store for the next version of OS X. Of note, CEO Steve Jobs made it very clear that it has been born out of the concept of “OS X meets iPad”. In other words, OS X meets iOS, Apple’s touch-based operating system. → Read More
Parts of Europe have been, for whatever reason, more wary of Google’s Street View service than others. The occasional lawsuit hasn’t prevented the march of progress, though Italy’s new regulations may cause more of a hassle than the occasional grumpy homeowner. The Privacy Authority President, Francesco Pizzetti, described the outrage:
“There has been strong alarm and also hostility in a lot of European countries against Google taking photos. We have received protests even from local administrations.”
Odd that a country so heavily invested in their tourist industry, which consists largely of foreign people taking millions of photos of the country’s most precious possessions, would take issue with the far more systematic and predictable Street View operations. Considering their handling of that other incident, it seems that perhaps the Italian government is simply not equipped to deal progressively with the implications and consequences of the internet and Google in particular. → Read More
This is just “Look At Me!” type news, but put in context, it’s rather impressive that Nintendo sold at least 63,500,000 Nintendo Wii Remotes since the Wii’s 2006 launch — just in the US too. This is so many, in fact, that if that number represented citizens of a country, it would be the 22nd most populated country on Earth, falling in between France and the United Kingdom. Or, in other words, there is one Wii Remote in America for every five citizens. Yeah, it’s a lot and gets even more impressive. → Read More
At first glance, Blue Water Satellite might strike you as a poor fit for a post on this website. We’re so inundated with web-based startups that we forget there is a world out there full of technology startups that are just as new and just as interesting, but have nothing whatever to do with the web. But in addition to being an interesting business in its own right, Blue Water Satellite is an example of the deep data analysis industry which in a way has always been with us, but more recently has been flourishing due to the sheer volume of useful data.
At Disrupt we saw an impressive toolset for social data provided by DataSift. Those guys surely have a rosy future if only because they’re getting in early to the web data-diving game. Similarly, Blue Water Satellite (BWS) has a very specific mission at the moment, but the way they’re branching out, they hope to be a leader in the growing business of satellite and environmental data analysis. Providing a unique and powerful way to visualize or interpret a huge amount of data is turning into quite the business model. → Read More
The chief problem with tiny clamshell computers like the Viliv N5 or UMID mbook BZ is Windows. The OS just doesn’t work well on really small screens or underpowered systems. However, Android does and that’s why I’m excited about this next round of clamshell devices particularly this one from Dion Computers → Read More
If you’re a crafty fellow, like to work in the shop and all that, you’re probably always looking for a new challenge. Birdhouses and spice racks aren’t doing it for you any more. You need something that will really push the limits of your crafting ability. How about a single-lens reflex camera? This guy sure managed to do a good job of it. → Read More
AppMakr, a service that makes it easy to generate your own custom, native iPhone application, has closed a $1 million seed round. The round includes angel investors and VCs: Mitch Kapor (founder of Lotus), Bill Lee, Rich Chen, Charles River Ventures (George Zachary & Bill Tai), Brian McClendon (angel, VP of Engineering at Google), Kima Ventures (Jeremie Berrebi & Xavier Niel), Warren Hellman (previously at Lehman Bros), Ben Narasin (TriplePoint Ventures), Pietro Dova, Sean Glass (Top Floor), Transmedia Capital (Chris Redlitz & Peter Boboff, of Kicklabs incubator).
We’ve written about AppMakr a few times in the past — the startup launched in early 2010, allowing users to put together an iPhone application with a surprisingly small amount of work involved. → Read More
