Cheapflights Media has made a strategic investment in travel meta-search site Momondo.com and its parent company Skygate International, the company announced this morning.
Both Skygate and Momondo will continue to operate from Copenhagen as independent brands, led by their existing founding management. Terms of the investment were not disclosed. → Read More
GE Energy this morning announced that it has acquired a stake of approximately 90 percent of Converteam, a France-based provider of electrification and automation equipment and systems, for approximately $3.2 billion.
Converteam’s senior management will retain the remaining stake in the company, but GE has agreed to purchase their shares over the next two to five years for a price that it expects not to exceed $480 million. Converteam was previously owned by a shareholder group that includes the company’s management, Barclays Private Equity and LBO France. To learn more about the company’s history, check out its Wikipedia profile. → Read More
Make no mistake about it: the digital music space will be turned upside down this year, courtesy of giants like Apple, Google, HP, Sony and now, Amazon.
Earlier today, the latter announced that it was entering the world of digital music locker services with a bang, introducing services dubbed Cloud Drive and Cloud Player that basically let you store your digital music – and more – in the cloud and stream it from browsers on any computer as well as from Android phones. → Read More
Just in case you missed it: Mark Cuban’s most recent investment took place in what is a fairly unusual setting for early-stage startup seed funding — a shark tank. That’s right, the controversial billionaire and media mogul was a recent guest shark on ABC reality show “Shark Tank”, in which 5 business moguls listen to entrepreneurs pitch their companies and decide whether or not to devour them like so many sardines. Great premise. (I’m also pretty sure ABC lifted the show’s name from Ron Conway’s boardroom, but I haven’t confirmed that yet.)
In the most recent Shark Tank-isode, co-founder and chief executive of Toygaroo, Nikki Pope, pitched her startup to the panel of honchos, hoping for big-time investment. Toygaroo, the self-labeled “Netflix for toys”, is an online toy rental service in which parents can sign up for and choose a “wish list” of toys that are then sent to their home, played with by their kids, before being returned to Toygaroo via a FedEx box. Before you start shuddering, the toys are, of course, cleaned and sanitized before being shipped. → Read More
It is rare to find a device that is both baffling and compelling. We’ve been talking about the Acer Iconia for a while now and this dual-screened tablet or “Touchbook” is now available and shipping in the US next month. It runs a Core i5 chip, Windows 7, and has two 14-inch screens made of high-strength Gorilla Glass that allow for typing, multi-touch, and gestures. → Read More
This OCD Chef Cutting Board Aligns Perfectly With My Neuroses MIT Scientist Claims To Have Created Practical “Artificial Leaf” Giveaway: Every Impactband Color Videos: Robot Spatula “SWITL” Picks Up And Replaces Semi-Liquids Without Destroying Their Shape Excelsior! Students Build Fruit Ninja Simulator → Read More
StockTwits, a realtime platform for stock traders to share information, has been undergoing a rapid growth spurt of late. According to Quantcast, 465,000 people are now visiting the site per month, which means the company has more than doubled its visitors since early December, when less than 200,000 were checking in to share and trade. This seems largely due to the service’s continuing evolution beyond its TweetDeck roots and creation of its own true investor ecosystem chalk full of video, news and charts — all enabled by an AIR app.
What’s more, the company announced in December that Yahoo would begin pulling data from the StockTwits API and adding it to individual stock pages, complementing the similar deals it had already forged with CNN, MarketWatch, and Bloomberg.
And now it seems that, while Yahoo is pulling data from its API, StockTwits has been busy pulling senior executives from Yahoo’s staff. (I guess turnabout is fair play?) In yet another victory for a company not named Yahoo, David Putnam, who for the past five years has been responsible for global product strategy and management at Yahoo, announced on his blog today that he will be joining StockTwits on April 1 as VP of Product. → Read More
The watches you see above are for people who consider themselves tastemakers on a budget — if such a thing exists. The new watches from 01THEONE come in three different flavors at affordable prices: Mystery Dial ($189), Binary ($199), and Jump Hour ($229). Expect these to catch some looks and maybe a good pickup line or two. The 01THEONE can certainly be considered high-fashion; they offer figure over function. Grab them here. → Read More
ust like that fake Color.xxx slide deck, this fake VC pitch video has been making the rounds across Silicon Valley lately, portraying the saga of a probably fake Rachel Sequoia (heh) and her fake startup “Share The Air.”
As I just finished doing an Ignite talk, the whole bullshit for five minutes thing really hits home with me, but especially the part where the actress playing Sequoia asks an audience presumably filled with VCs for 500K to support her service, which includes an ancillary app where you can use Google Maps to check into places where you’ve breathed. Yes, breathed. → Read More
SSDs have been on my Amazon Wishlist for over a year now, but the prices have always been a little higher than my blogger’s salary allowed. The good news is that when new technology gets older, we enjoy very nice price cuts. This is no more obvious then here with the new third-generation SSD 320 Series from Intel. → Read More
As you may have read by now, earlier tonight, Amazon dropped a bomb on their rivals in the online music space: a fully working cloud storage and playback system. And it’s not just working on desktop web browsers, it works on Android devices too. One important place it doesn’t work though: iPhones, iPads, iPod touches — no iOS devices.
At first, you might think this is a Flash issue (Apple’s devices famously do not support Flash). But it’s not. I don’t have Flash installed on my MacBook Air and the Cloud Player works fine (as does it when you disable Flash in Chrome). Flash is needed to upload files to Cloud Drive, but not for playback. So that’s not the issue. → Read More
Matt over at Gizmodo points out a nice bit of DIY work done by Andrew Scrivani, a left-handed photographer for the NY Times. His right arm is out of commission for a while, and left-handed SLR bodies are expensive as hell, so he went to his gear closet and put together this little hack. Basically it’s just a rigid bracket for him to hold while he fires the remote with his incapacitated hand; he can’t do everything, but he can at least hand-hold the camera and get the shot. More details at Scrivani’s blog. → Read More
Well, the rumors were true. Not only is Amazon entering the “music locker” space, they’re doing it before both Google and Apple — as their “Cloud Drive” and “Cloud Player” have just gone live on their site tonight.
Cloud Drive is the name Amazon is giving to its media storage space on their servers. They give you 5 GB of storage for free and allow you to access the media from any computer. Cloud Player is the name of yes, the actual player. And it comes in two flavors: a player for the web, and one for Android devices. You’ll note an absence of an iOS player… → Read More
I won’t deny it — I get pretty neurotic when I’m chopping stuff in my kitchen. I was just fretting over some barbecued pork earlier that I simply couldn’t slice into pieces of equal width. Cheese is like that too, and of course celery. Maybe I’m crazy (I’m crazy), but I think we can all agree that this measurement-covered cutting board is a pretty good idea. → Read More
Kenwood started shipping their new DNX9980HD in-dash navigation receiver this week. This is the company’s first model to offer both HD Radio and Pandora Internet Radio link.
For the Pandora Link to work, users will need an iPhone with the Pandora app on it; all the same controls from the app interface will be mimicked onscreen. Album artwork and various visuals get displayed on the 6.95-inch touchscreen as well as the main function: navigation. → Read More
Online test prep company PrepMe is taking on the likes of online course platform Blackboard with the launch of Coursification, a web-based application for personalized online learning courses.
What differentiates Coursification from other course management and online learning platforms is that it helps teachers offer a tailored, personalized curriculum to each student based on their performance and learning schedule. Each online course begins with a diagnostic assessment that identifies student learning gaps (specialized to the subject). After the diagnostic test, each student receives a personalized study schedule, which the teacher can simply import into the platform. The schedule is customized based on student proficiencies and the duration of the course. → Read More
It was just about a year ago that we wrote about Square nabbing engineer Bob Lee. As we noted at the time, the man affectionately known on Twitter and elsewhere as “Crazy Bob” was quite the catch — he had been leading the core library development of Android while at Google. But he clearly saw an even bigger opportunity with the mobile payment startup. And on Friday that vision was repaid as Lee was promoted to be the company’s first Chief Technology Officer.
Lee was originally brought on board to lead the development of the at the time still-in-the-works Android app. That app came in May of last year, alongside the iPhone version going live in the App Store. Communications Director Kay Luo also tells us that he’s been helping a lot with recruitment, hiring, server and API design, product design, security, business relations, and marketing. Now Lee will oversee all the technology that the company is working on. → Read More
We’re back with a new episode of TC Cribs, the show that takes you inside the hopping offices of tech startups. This week we check out Seesmic, the multi-protocol client that lets you monitor your Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and many other accounts from one place (they offer a nice web app and native mobile apps as well). And they have a thing for raccoons, as you’ll see in the video above.
Tune in for our full walkthrough of the office, led by Seesmic CEO Loic Le Meur.
Oh, and if you want to watch Loic’s full description of Seesmic (which ran a bit long), you can watch it right here.
As usual, credit to Ashley Pagán and John Murillo for the camera work, and to Mr. Murillo for the great editing.
Here are the past episodes of TC Cribs: → Read More
After a recent thorough teardown of the 3DS and its components, Chipworks was able to figure out how much RAM the 3DS has. X-raying the chip in question, the Fujitsu MB82M8080-07L, led to a special model code being discovered inside the die. → Read More
We’re entering another round of testing in the paywall/microtransactions world, but it doesn’t look to be turning out any better than the last one. I argued that until payment methods are improved, everyone is just whistling in the dark, but that hasn’t stopped the NY Times from taking another shot at it, and The Daily from trying a whole new format. The necessary precursor to any of these schemes, however, is a simple, easy, and generally agreed-upon payment system — an e-wallet.
Minno seems to feel this is true as well, and are hard at work making a payment tool they feel is as simple and powerful as cash, without the political and regulatory trappings of bank-related NFC schemes or credit card tie-ins. It’s simple, all right, but is it powerful enough? → Read More
