When you love something so much – as much as this guy Pascal likes Star Trek’s LCARS UI – that you recreate it down to the smallest detail, you’d better be willing to go all the way. While he has skinned Windows to look like a screen on the deck of the Enterprise, why doesn’t he have his girlfriend dress up like a Klingon? Why aren’t there tribbles in his kitchen? Where is the Borg? WTF, Pascal. You don’t cut and run when it comes to religion. → Read More
In October last year, Sony started teasing a 3D CMOS camera with two lenses and the ability to shoot video at up to 240fps. Unlike Panasonic’s model, Sony’s camera was intended for professional use, and now big S is showcasing their latest 3D camcorder prototype (which again will be geared towards professional users). → Read More
Nokia has appointed Jerri DeVard as Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer, a new role that comes into effect as of January 1, 2011. DeVard is a 25-year marketing vet, with relevant experience in the telecom industry – she served as Senior Vice President for Marketing and Brand Management at Verizon from 2003 to 2007.
DeVard started her own marketing consultancy agency, called DeVard Marketing Group and based in New York. As a Principal at the firm, she provided counsel to Microsoft, among other consumer-focused companies. I mention that, of course, because Nokia’s new CEO, Stephen Elop, hails from the Redmond software company.
DeVard will join Nokia’s Group Executive Board and report to Niklas Savander, Executive Vice President and head of Nokia’s Markets unit. → Read More
Opera’s mobile browser, Opera Mini has had a big year. It’s iPhone app was approved, saw one million downloads in the first day and since the mobile browser has been growing like gangbusters. Today, Opera released its state of the mobile report showing that Opera is continuing to grow in terms of usage.
In October, Opera Mini had over 76.3 million users, a 7.1% increase from September 2010 and more than 92% compared to October 2009. Opera Mini users viewed over 41.6 billion pages in October 2010, which is an increase of 142% since last October. → Read More
Google is blowing the doors off with its display advertising business, which is doing so well that the company bragged about that it is on a $2.5 billion annualized revenue run-rate just in display. A big part of that growth is coming from YouTube and Google’s own sites. But another big driver of display advertising growth both for Google and across the industry is coming from a less well-understood source: the big advertising agencies themselves and their so-called trading desks and demand side platforms (DSPs). By one estimate, these DSPs already account for 10 percent of online ad spending, and could grow to as much as 50 percent over the next few years.
One advertising agency in particular, Publicis, is pushing a ton of advertising dollars through Google in return for what two industry insiders independently refer to as “kickbacks” or “rebates.” Kurt Unkel, an SVP at Vivaki (the digital arm of Publicis) flatly denies there are any payments of this kind. “There isn’t a rebate in play. We have a strategic partnership,” says Unkel. Any suggestion that Publicis is accepting payments from Google in return for driving online ad spending through Google is “an utter crock of shit,” he says. He adds, “That is illegal in the U.S.”
Google is a bit more circumspect. “There are incentives,” admits a Google spokesperson. “I don’t now that there is a wad of cash,” he adds, “payments are predicated on a bunch of things.” Those things are more along the lines of investing in the trading platform, co-marketing, and training if Publicis and Vivaki hit certain milestones. “There is no commission being paid,” says the Google spokesperson. So there are payments, but they are framed as technology incentives to help Vivaki test and prove out its exchange. → Read More
Last year TechCrunch partnered with Founders Fund on an innovative awards program called the TechFellow Awards to recognize top high-tech entrepreneurs. The 2009 TechFellow Awards recognized 22 inaugural innovators across four categories: Engineering Leadership, Product Design and Marketing, General Management, and Disruptive Innovation.
Founders Fund is expanding the awards program this year and added New Enterprise Associates (NEA) as co-host. Together, Founders Fund and NEA will grant each TechFellow $100,000 to invest in a start-up of their choice, more than doubling last year’s award size. Additionally, a new fund structure will allow each TechFellow to share in the interest of all 2010 TechFellow companies. Last year’s TechFellows helped fund and found fFlick, Bidfire, Quora, Flipboard, HipChat and others. Check out last year’s winners.
We invite the tech community to nominate candidates for this year’s 5 award categories: → Read More
Newly launched ad network RadiumOne is announcing a new hire today—Bill Lonergan. Lonergan joins RadiumOne from Offerpal, rival to RadiumOne’s offers platform gWallet, where he was chief financial officer.
Prior to Offerpal, Lonergan was CFO of online ad network Blue Lithium, which was launched by RadiumOne’s founder Gurbaksh Chahal and later sold to Yahoo for $300 million in 2007. Lonergan joins other former Blue Lithium execs Kamal Kaur, Mike Werner and Eugene Kislyi as part of the RadiumOne team. → Read More
A child is born on a roadside as a Google Streetview car swishes by. It’s almost good too good to be true. And it is.
The photo, which was apparently taken in the German suburb of Wilmersdorf, exactly outside No. 37 Hubertusallee, Berlin, looks like it was snapped by one of Google’s camera cars. It’s doing the rounds of Twitter and Facebook right now.
A man cradles a newborn baby in his hands beside a car which has been parked hurriedly on the street with its door open. Uh huh…
German website pcgames.de has called it out as a hoax, and it’s not hard to see why.
Here’s where the photo is supposed to have been taken. Notice how close it is to a nearby hospital? → Read More
Enterprise cloud computing company Salesforce.com this morning announced the appointment of JP Rangaswami, an internationally acclaimed thought leader in the tech industry, to the newly created position of Chief Scientist.
Rangaswami, an expert in enterprise software, had recently stepped down from a similar position at BT Group, after nearly five years with the company. → Read More
Enterprise cloud computing company Salesforce.com this morning announced the appointment of JP Rangaswami, an internationally acclaimed thought leader in the tech industry, to the newly created position of Chief Scientist.
Rangaswami, an expert in enterprise software, had recently stepped down from a similar position at BT Group, after nearly five years with the company. → Read More
Earlier this month, we noted that Delicious founder Joshua Schachter, together with Nick Nguyen (the former director of add-ons for Mozilla) and Paul Rademacher, the ex-Googler known for creating “the first true Web 2.0 app”, was working on a new stealthy startup called Tasty Labs.
This morning, Union Square Ventures partner Albert Wenger revealed on his blog that the firm has invested in Tasty Labs together with Andreessen Horowitz and unnamed angel investors. It’s unclear how much Tasty Labs raised, but we’re trying to find out. → Read More
I had the privilege of joining the Monaco Media Forum in Monaco recently. It was a fairly star-studded event: opened and closed by Prince Albert, dinner at Hotel de Paris, Monte Carlo, great hotel etc. But to be honest it was the debates in the conference room that were the best thing about the event, and I had a lot of fun on my closing panel of the week: “Silicon Envy: Will Europe ever build the next new media giant?”
Now, admittedly with such a subject we had to run through the usual arguments, which I hope are now well known. Silicon Valley is the product of over 50+ years of history, Europe is only just getting going, America has one big unified market, Europe is splintered into many etc etc etc.
Luckily, however, I think my fellow panelists and I moved the debate on to what I call “New Tech Europe”. Namely, people in their 20s now coming out with agressive startups which go international from the word go and where the founders are not afraid to get out of their home markets and scale globally. Ironically this takes far less money than it used to, hence why VCs are having to adjust their model and Angel investors are being asked to step up to the plate. → Read More
Angry Birds, the best-selling mobile game from Europe’s Rovio, is turning into quite a cultural phenomenon. No doubt, you’ve seen the viral video featuring the angry birds and pigs in peace treaty talks – I’ve embedded it below in case you’ve been living under a rock the past few days and haven’t seen that one yet.
Here’s another that’s bound to rack up a significant amount of views in the next few days: Queen Vs. Angry Birds Rock You – Noy Alooshe Remix → Read More
I was just logging into me.com today to find that my password would not work. Strangely, we also received this tip that describes a security breach in Apple’s own accounts. I’m asking around at Apple right now but has anyone else noticed a password problem?
Apparently a hacker has a list of logins and passwords and they’re being systematically changed. Correlation is not causation and all that, but it’s awful fishy. At the very least pop over to your Me account to check it out. → Read More
RockYou founder and CEO Lance Tokuda is no longer leading the company, we’ve confirmed. Tokuda helped found RockYou back in 2005, and led it through several funding rounds totalling nearly $130 million. The change comes at a critical time in RockYou’s life, as the company attempts to reinvent itself and bounce back from substantial layoffs.
I spoke with RockYou COO Lisa Marino, who says that Tokuda told the company he would be stepping down last month, around the time that it pivoted to focus primarily on social gaming. A significant but undisclosed percentage of RockYou’s workforce was laid off as part of the transition, and the company hired former EA exec Jonathan Knight to serve as SVP of RockYou Games. → Read More
The Kinect hacks continue. Today we have a team who has put together a telepresence robot controlled via Kinect, and although you probably can’t remove a splinter with the thing, you could at least gesture a lot, and pick up blocks. Man, shades of the Robotic Operating Buddy for NES. → Read More
After an 11 day trial whose highlights included the hilarious “Where In The World Is HP CEO Leo Apotheker?“ the Oracle vs. SAP intellectual property case has finally ended today in a whopping $1.3 billion dollar verdict, “The largest amount ever awarded for software piracy” according to Oracle co-president Safra Catz. → Read More
You remember RockMelt, right? After the social browser launched two weeks ago, talk about it exploded — then seemed to die down just as quickly. But today brings an update that may get people interested again.
The service has just rolled out their first big update to their browser. Version 0.8.36.74 (sexy name) contains a number of bug fixes and stability improvements. It also updates the underlying Chromium browser to version 7 finally (for those keeping score at home, the Chromium open source project is already well into version 9). But the real keys here are the functionality improvements. Namely, the new RockMelt makes it even easier to be social. → Read More
There’s not much to say here. The Verbatim Clip-it is a slim-style USB flash drive with a little plastic clip on one side. It’s small and cheap enough that it should be considered replaceable because, well, it will get lost. Think a plastic paper clip with a flash drive embedded. Available in 2GB and 4GB sizes at a street price starting out at $12. Click through for another look at the tiny flash drive. Update: The US market only gets the 4GB model. Move along. That’s all. → Read More
