A month or so ago, I wrote about how Google’s apparent willingness to secretly hand over user data to the feds had made me rethink my obsession with cloud storage. Not – natch – because I have anything in particular to hide from Uncle Sam, but rather because if I’m going to have my data subpoenaed, I’d rather know about it so I can write blog posts and make self-promotional hay about it.
I also have a bit of a thing for physical security: storing my mail in a physical location rather than in the cloud so, even with access to password, no-one can hack into my old correspondence and share it with the world. Mentioning no names: TechCrunch. → Read More
The Sidekick is dead. Long live the Sidekick. → Read More
Yesterday, the tips started flowing in. “Google has deleted all my email.” “Check Twitter, massive Gmail failure.” “Gmail just melted down.” Users were freaking out. And that’s understandable. Many were apparently opening up Gmail to find that all of their emails had vanished. Had it happened to me, I would have been on Twitter swearing at the top of my digital lungs and promising to do something crazy — like switch to Hotmail. Of course, the reality of the situation wasn’t quite so dramatic.
While the initial reports had around .29 percent of Gmail users affected by the bug (about 600,000 users), those estimates were quickly revised to .08 percent (about 150,000 users). And today, those numbers were further revised to .02 percent. This means that only around 40,000 of Gmail’s 200 million (or so) users were affected. → Read More
Motorola’s Xoom, the first Android 3.0 tablet to get into consumer hands (if you don’t count hacked Nook Colors), has a total cost of about $278, according to UBM TechInsights and iSuppli. That’s $33 more than the iPad’s cost-to-build estimate. On the consumer pricing front, an iPad with 3G and 32GB of storage costs $729, while the Xoom is $799. Motorola is, of course, going to have to defend the insensible comparisons between the Xoom and the iPad’s costs and pricing. As far as I’m concerned, as far as hardware goes, the Xoom has the iPad beat by a pretty large margin, and let’s not forget that the iPad costs the same as it did a year ago. → Read More
This week, Sarah is in New York doing various book-related things – but WITN is all about life outside the valley so she dialled in via Skype to give us an update in what’s happening on the East coast.
Spoiler alert: NY is still no Silicon Valley, but it’s increasingly proving that it doesn’t have to be. We also discussed whether New York’s status as a multi-industry town is a pro or a con when it comes to technology startups. Video below.
(Next week Paul will be in LA, a trip which he vehemently denies is about finding a new American girlfriend/wife. Instead, he claims he’ll be on the look out for interesting start-ups to rival Machinima and – uh – MySpace. If you know of a company that fits the bill, let him know.) → Read More
Today, Intel announced a new line of solid-state drives: the Intel SSD 510 Series. The new drives operate over 6Gbps SATA to take advantage of Intel’s new higher speed SATA bus interface (like the new MBPs). Speeds are now up to 500MB per second and 315MB per second for reading and writing respectively. That’s a pretty serious upgrade from just a year ago. The two drives available now are 250GB and 120GB and are priced at $584 and $284 in quantities of 1,000. Got three hundred grand lying around? → Read More
The two-year trajectory of Bump Technologies, the designers of the app that makes it easy to swap contact information, music, and other data between mobile devices, is a somewhat interesting case study in the evolution of early-stage app startups.
Speaking from the DEMO Conference today in Palm Springs, Founder Jake Mintz told the audience that Bump started as a “nights and weekends project” among close friends. Co-founders Mintz, David Lieb, and Andy Huibers launched Bump in March of 2009, and a month-and-a-half later, their nights and weekend project had already pulled in 1 million users.
The founders then decided to move their operations to San Francisco, where they began couch hopping in earnest. Mintz said that between May 2009 and February 2010, even though Bump raised nearly $3.5 million in Series A in November 2009 from Sequoia, they slept on couches, devoting all waking hours to their project. → Read More
A new technology that we’ve been hearing about for a few year finally is getting unveiled today at CeBIT in Germany. Tobii Technology has partnered up with Lenovo to create a laptop with integrated eye tracking control. It is said that it will add to the functionality of a keyboard and mouse, rather than killing them. → Read More
You might remember quite a few years back when the Sega “Trance Vibrator” for Rez made a stir by essentially being… a vibrator. Yeah. So they’re doing that again with Child Of Eden, Rez’s spiritual successor for Kinect, though a separate vibrating accessory probably isn’t going to happen. The game is shaping up nicely, though. → Read More
The recent compounded protests and revolutions in the Middle East and North Africa have had the unintended side effect of highlighting information nodes/elites like @Ghonim and @Sultanalqassemi, people who electively become human routers of related information on Twitter, Facebook and other social networks.
NPR’s Senior Strategist Andy Carvin has been one of the most prominent Western information routers, spending 15-17 hours a day tweeting out news about the region, getting rate limited and subsequently whitelisted by Twitter, and at one point becoming so synonymous with #Egypt that someone anonymously sent him a shirt “I followed @Acarvin before #Egypt did.” → Read More
Intrigued by OnLive, but don’t really want to invest in a glorified set-top box and weirdo controller? You’re in luck. GaiKai, a firm specializing in video game advertising, has launched a streaming game service that lets you play new games right in your browser. Nothing to download, even. Like literally, click here, wait for the popup (takes about 10 seconds if you have the bandwidth) and you’re playing Mass Effect 2. → Read More
If you’ve ever thought “I’d get so much more geo-location done in my day if it could all just be done from my watch,” the folks at inPulse smart watch have an app for you.
This hack allows inPulse smart watch users to check into Facebook Places and Foursquare with a tap of their watch button. It’s pretty kludgey right now because it requires a Bluetooth connection to an Android smartphone to work but, as an extension to the standard check-in APIs used on phones, it could prove useful. → Read More
Hosted application platform dotcloud is announcing 800K in angel funding today, from notable angel investors Ron Conway, Chris Sacca, Jerry Yang, Raymond Tonsing, Roger Dickey, Ash Patel, Eric Urhane, Kenny Van Zant, Trinity Ventures and others.
In the same space as Heroku (before it got bought by Salesforce for $212 million) and a slew of 1st generation platform-as-a-service Heroku clones, what 2nd generation dotcloud does differently is that it gives developers flexibility. To make it easier to make server administration changes downstream, dotcloud lets companies “mix and match” components and use multiple languages and tools instead of focusing on one language and development stack. → Read More
You’d think that by now, pilots and airlines would have figured out a really sophisticated browser for flight paths, charts, regulations, and stuff like that, but as it turns out, a lot of that information is still on paper. After all, when the lives of hundreds of thousands depend on such things, you can’t risk a system crash or low battery. But it looks like the stable, long-lived iPad has overcome some of these limitations, and may just be coming to a commercial flight near you. → Read More
Mogwee launches this evening, an ambitious new product from Ning unrelated to its core social networking service. It’s a new social/communications tool that’s built from the ground up for mobile platforms, beginning with iOS for iPhones, iPod Touches and iPads.
For now, Mogwee’s main feature is to let you have on the fly public and private instant message-like conversations with people via the app. It updates in real time allowing for synchronous conversations, or you can wait for notifications to come in to have a more asynchronous experience.
Unlike most new services we see, there’s no friending or following with Mogwee. If you invite someone to the service, or interact with them in a group “hangout,” you can then have one on one conversations with them. It ends up being very similar to services that have mutual friending, but it worked effortlessly in my testing without al the hassle of adding and removing friends. → Read More
LG just sent over a press release titled “LG Optimus 2X to Launch in Key European Markets This Month”. While “this month” is technically still February where we’re sitting, we’re going to go ahead and guess that the person sending these out is on the other side of the world where March is already under way. Friggin’ timezones. As the aforementioned title indicates, LG’s Optimus 2X will finally be ending its exclusive Korean run sometime soon, hitting Europe’s “key markets” (though what markets they consider “key” is still a bit of a mystery) in the next few weeks. Like its Korean counterpart, the European Optimus 2x will launch with Android 2.2, though they promise that the update to 2.3 is on the way. Still no official word when (or if) this thing will hit the ol’ Yankee shores. Need a refresher on the specs? Check’em out after the jump. → Read More
If the Galaxy Tab 7″ is a little too small for your taste, but the 10″ is a bit too big, maybe I can interest the reader in the 8.9″ version? Rumors have been swirling that a version right between those guys might be coming soon, and this teaser on Samsung’s Facebook page seems to confirm it. → Read More
Annapolis-based Nexus EnergyHomes raised the first $200,000 of a $1.5 million dollar series A round, a new SEC filing revealed. The company designs, sells and builds pre-fab homes that are “net zero,” or zero energy homes (ZEHs).
According to the U.S. Department of Energy ZEHs are “connected to the utility grid but can be designed and constructed to produce as much energy as they consume [or more] annually.”
Nexus EnergyHomes also makes and sells green building materials, and offers software to optimize the installation of, and manage the use of equipment in a net zero energy home — like air conditioners, filters, lights, meters, geothermal wells and solar power generating systems… → Read More
There are a few buyback programs out there, and at CES we even saw a meta-buyback program, EcoSquid, that lets you get the best price from among those. But retail electronics juggernaut Best Buy had to have a piece of the pie — and why not? They have a captive audience of people who like to shop “in real life” and who would probably be excited to get anything for an old TV.
Unsurprisingly, it’s not exactly the best value out there. → Read More
Guardian’d You’re a North African dictator with a penchant for “voluptuous” Ukranian nurses. What do you do when your people rebel against your 42-year rule, demanding such things as basic human rights? Why you shut down communication with the outside world, of course. Thuraya, a regional satellite communication provider, has confirmed that its service is being actively jammed inside Libya. The jamming has affected both voice and data services, but voice services are said to be coming back online in recent hours. Thuraya says it’s considering legal recourse, but what are you going to do, ask the Gaddafi regime to kindly stop jamming? Something tells me they’re not exactly open to such suggestions right now. This, on the day that international community has stepped up efforts against the Gadaffi regime, with the US freezing some $30 billion (!) in assets. → Read More
