Barely one day after the FCC passed a form of Net Neutrality, pleasing no one in the process, opponents have already committed themselves to repealing the “hostile takeover.” Sen. Jim DeMint, from South Carolina, has come out against the new rules, saying that “unelected bureaucrats rammed through an Internet takeover.” I suppose we should ignore the fact that AT&T, no friend of Net Neutrality, has been his third biggest campaign contributor over the past five years. But that’s just a coincidence. → Read More
A few days ago I was driving across the snowy Midwest (don’t ask) and watching the View (don’t ask again) while I was getting ready to check out of my St. Louis hotel room. The View has daily giveaways, and they vary wildly in quality. It’s basically like old-school radio-hour sponsorships where the ladies hawk a product and give it away to the audience and everyone cheers, but it’s really all a paid-for ad.
Monday’s was brought to you by Yahoo. They were touting Yahoo mail as the best way to keep in touch during the Holidays for, you know, all those people who don’t have email already. Since mail accounts are already free they gave away a purple “Power Stick” to upload your holiday photos into your mail account instead. As far as I could tell, it was just a purple USB drive. → Read More
Google obviously has some grand ambitions for Android, its mobile OS that is now being activated on 300,000 devices per day and has a forthcoming release called Honeycomb that will take on the iPad. But even that isn’t enough — now Google wants to bring the green robot to an entirely new market: the final frontier.
Alright, so maybe I’m getting a little ahead of myself — Google hasn’t stuck a Droid flag on the moon just yet. But it did just use weather balloons to send seven Nexus S devices over 100,000 feet above Earth, each equipped with a variety of sensors to see how the device performs at some very extreme conditions. Google also strapped the phones with some cameras, so we get to watch them rise into the sky (and then full back down). → Read More
When Japan’s second biggest mobile carrier KDDI announced its winter and spring line-up back in October, the company also showed a very Kindle-like e-reader. Dubbed Biblio Leaf SP02, the e-ink device was introduced with an open price model, no exact release date and just a few specs – until today. → Read More
Last time I was in Cape Town, I was hanging out with Vinny Lingham, founder of Yola, a service that allows small businesses to create a site in about five minutes. He was incredibly spazzy about some big deal he was about to close that would have a material effect on the company, but he wouldn’t tell me what it was. That’s OK I think I found out anyway.
It’s HP, according to these screenshots below, and that’s a whale. → Read More
It looks like News Corp. has unloaded its Fox Mobile Group division. According to a release, investment company Jesta Group has acquired Fox Mobile Group (FMG) from News Corporation. Terms of the deal were not disclosed in the release.
FMG operates a number of mobile services including Jamba, Jamster, Mobizzo and iLove, as well as Bitbop, a recently launched mobile video service and entertainment platform. FMG will become part of Jesta Mobile Holdings. → Read More
A team of researchers at Japan’s Tsukuba University is working on a robot that’s supposed to improve the interaction between man and machine in the future. The aim is to make the so-called “TalkTorque 2″ [JP] a master in non-verbal communication with humans – even though it looks a little creepy. → Read More
Breaking: Skype appears to have gone down. We’re trying to ascertain why and get comment from the company. However, as of this moment Skype is not working for millions of users, and the angst is playing out on Twitter right now.
Of course what’s so funny is that so many of us now use Twitter DM (direct message) and perhaps even Facebook IM as a sort of alternative “Skype-a-like” IM platform that there are now potential alternatives. It looks like for now that Skype has huge issues though – and it’s coming at a delicate time for the company as it tries to forge path independent from former owner eBay. → Read More
Time circuits on. Flux capacitor iPhone 4 decal… fluxxing. Engine running. All right! $6 on Etsy. [via Geeky-Gadgets] → Read More
According to one of our Asia contacts, there is a range of phones in China by a manufacturer called OPPO and they’re selling quite well. Not to be outdone, members of the Shanzai have created a knock-off model for those who want a little class in their lives. Not content to just copy verbatim, they changed things a round a bit to create the exciting new POOP line of cellphones. → Read More
During our first TechCrunch Disrupt conference in New York last May, the startup that nearly stole the show and was the obvious audience favorite was Ujam, a sophisticated Web-based music creation site which lets even tone-deaf people like me compose songs. During their demo at Disrupt, angel investor Chris Sacca, who was one of the judges, took it upon himself to test the application onstage and belted out a tune (see video below). Now you can try it too. Ujam quietly came out of private alpha last week, and is allowing a set number of new users in every day.
All you do is hum, whistle, or sing, and Ujam can turn your voice into nearly any instrument and fix it so that it is in tune. You can also upload your own pre-recorded tracks or pick pre-existing tracks on Ujam from different styles of music (Kraftwerk, 80s Rock, Campfire Guitar). The Ujam music editor lets you change the instruments, tempo, pitch, and mix between vocals and music to create your own composition. Once you are done, you can save your songs and download them as MP3s for sharing. → Read More
Dell has announced its intent to acquire InSite One, which offers cloud-based medical data archiving, storage, and disaster-recovery solutions to the healthcare industry.
Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. → Read More
If you have an iPhone, iPad or Android phone, chances are you have at least one “Talking Friends” app on your favorite device, especially if you have kids. Which is it? Tom Cat? Santa? Roby the Robot? Rex the Dinosaur? Harry the Hedgehog? Or is it Bacteria John?
Kids may abolsutely adore those quirky apps, but apparently building and selling them is quite a solid business to boot.
Outfit7, the company behind the ‘Talking Friends’ series of apps for iOS and Android, says it has reached 41 million downloads in less than six months since the first app was released. The download rate is accelerating at 10 million a month and the company’s CEO, Andrej Nabergoj, tells me they expect to hit 100 million downloads by the second quarter of 2011. → Read More
Whether or not Windows 7 has a place on tablets or not, it isn’t stopping some brave companies from releasing consumer-oriented slate computers running Redmond’s latest operating system. Today, IN MEDIA announced the release of the uncreatively named “Windows 7 Tablet PC”.
Don’t look for this one to give the iPad a run for its money just yet. → Read More
It’s a done deal. As we reported yesterday, Motorola subsidiary Motorola Mobility has acquired cloud storage startup Zecter. Y Combinator-backed Zecter is best known for developing cloud streaming and storage services ZumoDrive and ZumoCast. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but we hear from sources that Motorola is buying all of Zecter’s products, technology and the team including founder David Zhao.
Motorola says that Zecter’s technologies will be used to “enhance Motorola Mobility’s mobile content experience” by allowing users to access their content on a variety of devices. According to the release issued by the company, Motorola Mobility, which encompasses Motorola’s Mobile Devices and Home businesseswill integrate Zecter’s syncing, desktop integration, video transcoding and thin-file retrieval technologies across its device and Motoblur offerings. → Read More
Curation, the concept of filtering and organizing online content to separate signal from the increasing noise in social media, is currently one of the most discussed buzz words in the web industry. The number of curation tools, however, is still (relatively) low: Storify, which launched during TechCrunch Disrupt, and Curated.by are probably the most prominent examples at this point.
Enter Chirpstory, a new and Twitter-focused curation tool, which lets you gather and share collections of tweets around a specific topic. Popular news items, events, or trends may see thousands of related tweets, retweets and spam posts in a matter of hours: Chirpstory offers a way to curate and “summarize” related tweets in the form of a continuous or thematic narrative. → Read More
Teradata is to acquire Aprimo, a cloud-based integrated marketing software maker, for approximately $525 million including the assumption of roughly $25 million of cash at closing.
Aprimo delivers a suite of integrated marketing applications to more than 150,000 professionals worldwide, and says more than 36 percent of the Fortune 100 relies on its solutions for integrated marketing management. → Read More
MMC Ventures has invested £1.5 million (roughly $2.32 million) in AlexandAlexa, a UK-based online retailer for luxury children’s wear, selling premium brands such as Ralph Lauren Kids, Burberry Kids, Little Marc Jacobs and Junior Gaultier.
MMC said in a statement that it is taking a “significant minority stake” in the business. → Read More
‘Air Conditioned’ 2022 World Cup In Jeopardy As Players’ Union Calls For Winter Tournament FCC Reveals The JBL On Air Wireless AirPlay Speaker System This Super Mario Bros 3 Furniture Set Will Really Impress The Princesses PrimeSense, Co-Creator Of Kinect, To Lead Open Gesture Tech Organization Dear Tech Early Adopters: Manufacturers Don’t Care About You → Read More
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