Intel acquired McAfee has just released its forecast for the top targets for cyber criminals in 2011, and a number of popular platforms have made the list. The antivirus and security software company’s labs group, McAfee Labs, says that Google’s Android, Apple’s iPhone, Foursquare, Google TV and the Mac OS X platform, are all expected to be targets in the New Year.
McAfee Labs says that URL-shortening services, which create more than 3,000 URLs per minute, will be a significant target for cyber criminals in 2011. Because social media sites are already riddles with cyber criminals, these links are going to be used for spam, scamming and other malicious purposes, says the company. Interestingly, McAfee recently launched its own URL shortener, McAf.ee → Read More
There’s no doubt in my mind that 2011 will be a big year for location and context-aware applications, and thus also for the companies that enable developers and publishers to build or enhance software that takes advantages of information on users’ whereabouts, such as SimpleGeo and Twitter (which acquired GeoAPI maker Mixer Labs about a year ago).
Enter Zumigo, a company that offers a suite of fully hosted applications and services that feature advanced mobile messaging and location-based services. The startup hasn’t made any noise to date, but an SEC filing reveals that they’ve just raised $420,000 in funding. → Read More
We’ve spent quite a few posts on Sony’s Playstation Phone in the last few months, and today the Asahi Shimbun (one of Japan’s biggest newspapers) is reporting [JP] that the device will be released in spring next year. Not a big surprise, but what’s interesting is that it will hit Europe and the US first, if the report is to be believed. → Read More
Dashwire, which offers a mobile services platform for carriers, handset manufacturers and retailers, has raised $1 million in debt financing, according to this SEC filing.
Dashwire’s Dashworks platform (PDF) is a “mobile-plus-web app” solution that helps people setup their phones, migrate from one device to another, backup everything on the phone, keep it in sync online and share photos and videos with others through social networking services. → Read More
LVX: Your Lights Are Talking To You(r Computer) Indiana Jones Would Rock This Canvas Lunch Bag How A Programmer Rocks The Wee Ones Kindle 3 Beats Harry Potter Book As Bestselling Product In Amazon’s History Apple Patent Reveals ‘Pseudo-Holographic’ Display → Read More
We knew Zynga’s Facebook game CityVille was a hit if the company ever had one (and it’s had several already) but the growth that it is displaying is simply mind-blowing.
Last week, the Sim City-esque game logged about 61.7 million monthly active users, effectively eclipsing its other hit game, FarmVille. Today, CityVille is at close to 72.5 million monthly active users, which means that it has already outgrown FarmVille (which boasts roughly 57,4 million monthly active users) by more than 25 percent. → Read More
Inspired by a tweet from First Round Capital VC Charlie O’Donnell (“Can someone hack a Foursquare app that cc’s my checkin photos to Flickr?”), developer Benny Wong has created Flicksquare, an app that takes advantage of Foursquare’s recent enabling of photo check-in features, allowing you to also send your Foursquare photos to Flickr.
While Foursquare gave lip service to working on the Flickr and Facebook export capability a couple of weeks ago, Wong has beat it to the punch. → Read More
Earlier this week, some folks over on the XDA developers forum got their hands on a leaked test build of a revamped Android music player. This evening the footage was spotted by Engadget, and now the word is spreading like wildfire: Android is going to get a default music player that isn’t totally mediocre.
Alright, maybe I’m being a little harsh — the music player that ships with the stock build of Android can play music just fine. But it’s also underwhelming, especially when compared to the iPhone’s much slicker music application. It’s drab and there’s nothing like Apple’s Cover Flow — but all that’s changing. → Read More
Shhhh… baby is learning Haskell. via ShortForm → Read More
Continuing today’s theme of scouring Quora for interesting nuggets of information, a Q&A about Mozilla’s Firefox Mobile browser is of some interest. In response to the question: Will Firefox Mobile ever be released for iOS devices?, Mobile Firefox developer, Matt Brubeck, this morning gave his answer.
First, he gave the obvious and fairly well-known official answer, “We have no plans to release the full Firefox browser for Apple iOS devices,” Brubeck wrote. Why? Because the current iOS SDK agreement forbids apps like Firefox from including their own compilers and interpreters, Brubeck explains. → Read More
Let’s say you want to find that perfect quirky little black dress for New Year’s? Like a mashup of Etsy, Flickr color search, and Google Instant, Glancely lets you search Etsy visually, sorting instant results by color and by price so you can scan through multiple green knit caps or purple socks or whatever handmade items your heart desires. Hold your mouse over an item to get a closer look and click on an item to go straight to its Etsy profile. → Read More
This thing makes me want to go loot some ancient temple, then stop and have a panini on the way out. Of course, I’m a sucker for waxed canvas, but you have to admit this Artifact lunch sack handsome object. It costs $45, which is a bit much for giving to a young’un with a habit of losing things, but it’s a great option for reducing your own brown paper bag usage. You still want to have a few bags around for taking 40s to the park, but for actual lunching, this is a good bet. [via Uncrate and A Continuous Lean] → Read More
Although the specs on this LG HDTV pretty much put it at the head of its class (72 inches, 3D-ready, local-dimming LEDs, 400Hz (barf), in-TV access to local and remote content), I just don’t like the look. Am I crazy? I just think it’s kind of gaudy-looking. I think I’m more of a thin-bezel wall-mount kind of guy. That little crystal base isn’t doing it for me. They’ll be showing off the LZ9700 at CES, though, so we’ll get a better look then at what they’re claiming is the word’s biggest something or other. Every device out there now is the world’s somethingest these days. → Read More
If there’s any justice in this world then “traitorware” will become the phrase of 2011. It describes any technology, be it hardware or software, that betrays its users. Remember the Sony rootkit fiasco from a few years back? You pop a CD into your computer expecting to listen to some rubbish band, and then you’ve got a nice rootkit on your system, sorta like a bonus feature of the album. “INCLUDES THE HIT SINGLE ‘BABY YOU FINE’ ALONG WITH MALICIOUS SOFTWARE THAT YOU COULDN’T UNINSTALL IF YOUR LIFE DEPENDED ON IT!” You’d need a pretty big sticker to fit that, though. → Read More
Like most little kids, I used to love getting things in the mail. And in the 1990s, I was lucky enough to get something new every single day. Sadly, 99.9 percent of those were install discs from AOL. If you lived in the United States in the 1990s, you remember these. They started as 3.5-inch floppies and transitioned into CDs. And I’m not exaggerating. I got one just about every single day. You’ve got mail, indeed.
If nothing else, it was ingenious marketing for AOL. While people eventually started bitching about getting spammed by the discs, most of those people probably also installed them at least once and checked out the service. So how much did that cost AOL?
“A lot,” says CEO at the time, Steve Case. Case himself took to Quora recently to answer the question: How much did it cost AOL to distribute all those CDs back in the 1990′s? → Read More
MyDVDInsider has an interesting interview with Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood lead writer Jeffrey Yohalem. Yohalem describes his inspirations in the filmic arts and includes titles like Avatar and There Will Be Blood (!!!) but how’s this for a surprise inspiration? → Read More
It’s not every day you see how the sausage is made. This is how Leica puts together their famous M9 camera – by hand, all done by men in white lab coats. It’s an impressive bit of engineering to be sure and pricing aside, this is an incredible camera. Click through for one more walk-through video. → Read More
Over two years ago I wrote about a startup called StyleHop that set out to identify hot fashion items through the use of casual games — instead of having to fill out a survey or poll, it would generate fashion recommendations based on how you played these games. Unfortunately, that didn’t work out (nor did the startup’s second business plan) and today the company is announcing that it will be shutting its doors early next month.
Some of the company’s struggles stem from the financial meltdown of 2008 — founder David Reinke explains that after raising some seed money, StyleHop was planning to close a Series A in October 2008, which happened to be right when Sequoia’s RIP: Good Times was making the rounds. → Read More
This is a guest post by Mike MacCana, founder of I’m Everyone, a magazine-style anonymous problem, confession and discussion site. Prior to launching the company, Mike worked as a Python programmer, and technical journalist. His first taste of startup life was in 2003 at Red Hat.
So is all this ‘Silicon Roundabout’ stuff just a bunch a of empty hype? I work in a building in Shoreditch, London commonly known as ‘Nevada Robs’, due to it being the the location of the monthly London startup poker games. The office is currently shared with two other companies – Rob’s own The Startup Toolkit and fashion retailer lyst.
I’ve been there 10 weeks, with some cash saved up from my former day job taking care of my expenses while I work on my startup. In that time, for nothing more than the cost of my desk rental (55 bucks a month), I’ve gotten the following free of charge: → Read More
While they’ve tried to be pretty hush-hush about the specifics, HTC and Verizon have made it pretty dang clear that they plan to launch a 4G phone at CES — and unless the rumor mill is way, way off, it’ll be the handset thus far known by its rumored codenames: the Incredible HD, or “Mecha”. Neither of those names really captures the 4G spirit, though. Incredible HD implies the phone’s big selling point is its screen; Mecha just conjures up images of super rad robots. You know what name really says “fast”? Lightning. Crap! Dell already used Lightning as a codename! Go-go-gadget-synonym! → Read More
