Nomadesk, formerly known as Aventiv, offers one of the most elegant cloud-based data sharing, synchronization and storage solutions on the market, and you’ve probably never even heard of it.
Perhaps this will change in the near future, as the Belgian company has just raised $7 million in Series B financing to support its plans for expansion in North America. → Read More
Uh-oh, Flash. In a time when people are questioning your use, you really don’t need a critical security flaw.
Adobe today announced the discovery of a critical vulnerability in Flash for Windows, Mac, Linux, Solaris, and Android that may allow an attacker to take control of your system. To quote:
A critical vulnerability exists in Adobe Flash Player 10.1.85.3 and earlier versions for Windows, Macintosh, Linux and Solaris operating systems; Adobe Flash Player 10.1.95.2 and earlier versions for Android; and the authplay.dll component that ships with Adobe Reader 9.4 and earlier 9.x versions for Windows, Macintosh and UNIX operating systems, and Adobe Acrobat 9.4 and earlier 9.x versions for Windows and Macintosh operating systems. → Read More
Boticca is an ecommerce startup launched this week by former Accel Partners associate Avid Larizadeh and Kiyan Foroughi as a unique marketplace for original jewelry and other accessories. In the same conceptual online accessory space as Gemvara and Jewelmint, what sets Boticca apart from most ecommerce sites is its design, curation, content and community features.
Says founder Foroughi, “The most singular thing about the site is how the site combines fashion aesthetics and ecommerce usability in a way that hasn’t been done to date.” → Read More
Best Buy have been running a little promo this month called “Free Phone Friday”, where — you guessed it — they reduce the up-front cost of a phone to $0 for one crazy Friday.
Well, today is the last Friday in October, and it seems Best Buy have decided to make their final Free Phone Friday one to remember by offering up two top-level Verizon Android handsets — the HTC Incredible and the Motorola Droid 2 — as well as T-mobile’s Galaxy S variant, the Vibrant, for free on a two-year contract. → Read More
In a time when unlimited rarely means just that, it’s good to know that a plan can come out that more closely resembles what it promises. Verizon are beginning trials of unlimited mobile-to-mobile plans in Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and “select markets” in Texas, Tennessee, and Florida. Ranging from $60 to $130, and available for families or individuals, the plans will differ with the amount of included non-mobile minutes. The trial plans will run until the end of the year, at which time we can only hope Verizon decide to make them available to the rest of their customer base. [via Engadget] → Read More
“If you waited for the white iPhone, you’re an idiot. You’re a stupid human being who has waited 5 months for a phone that’s a different color. That you’re just gonna put a cover on anyway. So you’re a fool. In fact, why don’t you go get an EVO or something? Or a Droid. 2. They apparently does.”
Back in July, a group named jLe Productions made a great mock iPhone 4 commercial addressing the antenna issues. Now they’re back. And this time they have a promo for the mythical white iPhone 4. And once again it’s great. → Read More
Siemens has snapped up a $466 million six-year contract to build 70 electric trains for Amtrak.
The deal, which is Siemens’ first major contract with the rail operator, is a significant coup for the company which is trying to aggressively expand its footprint in America.
The new trains, called Amtrack Cities Sprinters, will be a step up from the average locomotives on the market and will feature a few green highlights to improve energy efficiency. Modeled after the European version, the EuroSprinter, these trains will hit the track in 2013 and be able to easily maintain speeds of 125 mph. → Read More
The iPhone continues to be big in Japan, the world’s most advanced and competitive mobile nation. We reported in April this year, that the Apple handset commanded a 72.2% market share in the smartphone segment in 2009, capturing 4.9% of the entire Japanese cell phone market. → Read More
A simple question on Quora yields some fascinating comments: “Is MySpace likely to recover?”
Google VP Corporate Development David Lawee left a brief and sarcastic “Is this a real question?” response. Which is noteworthy because Google is a major advertising partner to MySpace. Generally speaking, partners are nice to each other in public, but not here.
Investor Chris Fralic says “Define recover.” → Read More
Back in July, I wrote about an Italian project in which an engineering team was going to allow two driverless electric vans to make their way from Parma to Shanghai. After months of travel, they’ve just arrived at their destination, unharmed and triumphant. → Read More
Putting together a system can be an expensive process, and one is tempted to cut corners in areas where performance doesn’t seem to be a an issue. A cut rate GPU? Not likely… but, say, the PSU? They’re all pretty much the same, right? If they’re rated at such and such, that’s all that matters? Ehh, not so much. → Read More
Your iPhone, now a musical instrument. Musician slash comic Reggie Watts was recently interviewed by Ron Bennington (of Ron & Fez fame) on Sirius XM’s Unmasked. (Unmasked is a series of long-form interviews, hosted by Bennington, with comics, musicians, writers, etc. It’s quite good, and is a pretty much proof positive that, for all its faults, Sirius XM can actually be worth a damn every once in a while.) This bit, I thought, would be particularly interesting to you iPhone fans out there. It may also interest those of you who like pancakes. → Read More
Last month, there was an interesting story at IBM about the development of their “optochips,” which use photons instead of electrical signals to communicate information. Optical computing is a huge area of development right now, and there are interesting discoveries happening constantly — at least, interesting to those interested in stuff like wavelengths, photon cascades, and all that.
This recent discovery addresses the fact (if I understand correctly) that wavelength, phase, and polarization may differ between two systems, or even two components within a system. → Read More
I haven’t run into him, but have confirmed from at least ten local programmers and angel investors that Eduardo Saverin– the Brazilian-born estranged Facebook co-founder who helped Ben Mezrich write a devastating revenge book of his ouster before taking a settlement and disappearing from the face of the US tech scene– has been hiding out in Singapore for the better part of the last year-and-a-half. I’m told he lives in the penthouse of the tallest building of the city, and is a regular at Singapore’s club hot spots, especially a place called The Butter Factory.
Rolling with the city’s socialites aside, locals say that Saverin is pretty low-key. No one I spoke with had ever heard him refer to himself as the “co-founder” of Facebook. It either goes unsaid or, on one occasion, he told someone who’d never heard of him he was merely a “programmer of Facebook games.” I don’t know how much coding he’s doing, but he’s reportedly using that Facebook settlement money to fund a variety of Facebook game developers from his perch in Singapore. He may be hiding out from the limelight and attention, but he’s certainly not trying to get away from Facebook itself. → Read More
Good news for the Archos fans out there who’ve been waiting on the Froyo update since the new line’s introduction in August. It seems that the time is drawing near when you will have it running officially on your tablet &mdsah; though you certainly might have hacked it on there before now. This is the official build, much less risk of bricking. → Read More
SINGAPORE– On the eve of my trip to Indonesia last May, I was having dinner in Cape Town with someone from an investment firm that has been killing it in Asia. When I told him Indonesia was my first trip to Southeast Asia he almost spit out his Springbok, saying “My God! You are starting with the hardest one first!”
On the eve of this trip to Singapore, I was having coffee in San Francisco with a venture capitalist who has been killing it in the Valley, after four years of living in Southeast Asia. He gave the same observation a decidedly Valley twist: “You are going to be bored to death in Singapore.”
Bored is hardly the word I’d use– it’s hard to be bored when you are running from meeting to meeting, not to mention eating some of the most awesome food known to man. But Singapore is most definitely an Asia with training wheels. And that’s the Singapore blessing when it comes to globalization, but it may be its curse when it comes to entrepreneurship. → Read More
These days, it’s a given that the latest web service you sign up for is going to be using email for something. The better services make these messages interactive — when someone leaves a message on your Facebook Wall, you don’t have to head back to Facebook.com to respond; you can just reply to that email message. Unfortunately, from a development standpoint, this is a bit easier said than done.
Mailgun is a new service launching today that wants to make this kind of functionality easy to implement: it offers a ‘Mailbox API’ that lets you bake Email functionality into your application. → Read More
After watching our recent in-car tour of the Ford Edge Sport, I noticed the same problem Matt and our commenters did: the in-dash interface is a pain. Slow and unfamiliar, just like most other car dash touchscreens. Don’t you wish you could just have something you already knew, or maybe use whatever’s on your phone or iPod already? Well, that’s actually starting to happen, and this demo from QNX of Blackberry OS 6 running on the car touchscreen actually looks pretty solid. → Read More
I’m currently in Dublin, Ireland, for a (most excellent) event dubbed Founders, where I was invited to handle a fireside chat / interview with YouTube cofounder and CEO Chad Hurley earlier tonight. We had an interesting conversation about the company, although nothing particularly newsworthy came out of it, except for this little nugget: Hurley is moving to an advisory role at the Google subsidiary and will soon focus most of his attention on other projects.
Hurley casually mentioned this when I asked if he still felt as motivated as he was in early 2005, when he started the company along with fellow ex-PayPal employees Steve Chen and Jawed Karim. → Read More
When you hear the word “startup”, you most likely think of an Internet startup. Maybe it’s funded, maybe not, but its burn rate almost for sure puts it in the red each quarter. Obviously, Microsoft is not a startup. Nor have they been a startup for a long time. But what if you thought of their Online Division as an Internet startup? One funded by Microsoft. The thought it terrifying. Or it should be. To Microsoft.
Microsoft released their Q1 2011 earnings today. The results were very good except for one very big blemish: the Online Division. Last quarter, the division lost $560 million for Microsoft. That’s better than the previous quarter when it lost a staggering $696 million, but it’s much worse than a year ago, when it lost $477 million. In the past year, Microsoft has lost well over $2 billion from the division. → Read More
