Amazon wants you to use their brand new Android Appstore. So much so, in fact, that they’re coughin’ up the cash to offer up one free app per day that would otherwise set you back a buck or two. While we’re not going to cover each and every daily deal (you can find’em right over here), today’s free app is one of our favorites: Fruit Ninja. For those who haven’t discovered the art of unleashing your rage on an endless stream of flying fruit, Fruit Ninja is a game wherein you… unleash your rage on an endless steam of flying fruit. You “slash” at the fruit by dragging your finger across the screen, all while avoiding the instant-kill bombs and trying to keep any fruit from slipping by unslashed. It’s a pretty simple game — but the most addictive ones always are. Plus, it’s, you know. Free. You can find out how to finagle the Amazon Appstore onto your Android phone right over here. → Read More
NFC (the short-range communications tech that’ll allow us to pay for things with a Jedi-esque wave of our phones) is coming. Hell — it’s already here. It’s just got a mountain of technical and logistical hurdles to overcome before any of us will actually be using it in our day-to-day lives. Fortunately, there’s a massive group, the NFC Forum, focused on little more than killin’ off these hurdles one by one. Their roster is impressive, to say the least, with the likes of AT&T, Qualcomm, Motorola, RIM, and LG amongst their members. Today, they’re adding one more tech monster to the list: Google. Google’s already thrown their support behind NFC with Android (where they’ve steadily been adding payment-focused APIs over the last few months), so their fondness of the tech is nothing new. At this point, buyin’ their way into the forum is pretty much just a pledge to stick with the tech — and, perhaps, to influence the standards/specs a bit as they’re finalized. → Read More
Mi-ray is Korean for ‘future.’ Does that mean the Mi-ray concept is going into production? Probably not, but clearly shows Chevy still has it in them to design cutting edge concepts that push forward the perception of people movers. The just-unveiled Mi-ray mid-electric concept was designed the GM Advanced Design Studio in Seoul, which is only fitting as the concept debuted at the 2011 Seoul Motor Show. → Read More
My love of Boxcar should be pretty clear at this point. Because I’m an information junkie, it’s probably the app I use the most on my iPhone/iPad besides Safari. And earlier this year, they brought the notification goodness to the web as well. Now they’re taking the next step: native Mac support.
Yes, Boxcar is here for the Mac. The app resides in your toolbar and when clicked shows a drop-down with all of your notifications as they come in in realtime. You can set it so a sound goes off with every new message and if you have Growl installed you can get a visual notification as well. → Read More
Yes, it’s happened. Days after Jack Dorsey comes in to head product, the dreaded #Dickbar, or the Quickbar that inserted ads into your tweet-stream on the iPad and iPhone, is dead. While Twitter had taken the step to pin it to the top of the app weeks ago, today it’s decided to do away with it altogether. → Read More
As you may have heard, yesterday Salesforce announced the $326 million purchase of social media monitoring company Radian6, the CRM company’s largest acquisition to date. While we know that Salesforce has been actively pushing its social strategy with the debut of a Twitter and Facebook-like Chatter and the Service Cloud 3, $300-million plus is a lot of money for the CRM giant to shell out for a single company. In a press call with Salesforce executives and analysts yesterday, the company’s CEO and founder Marc Benioff said that Radian6 currently has a revenue run rate of $35 million and is expected to add $40 to $50 million in revenue to Salesforce’s top line this year.
At $326 million, Salesforce paid nearly ten times Radian6′s revenues, which is rare. So why did Salesforce want Radian6 so badly? First, Salesforce is aggressively pushing a social strategy and it’s a dog eat dog world in the social enterprise space with a massive number of companies trying to capture marketshare for social applications. Salesforce is actively marketing Chatter but the Yammer and Jive competitor isn’t a clear cut leader in the space. Radian6 boosts the company’s footprint in social, and provides an established set of well-known clients, such as Dell, GE, Kodak and UPS. → Read More
There are quite a few panoramic apps for the iPhone but they all require a steady hand, lots of patience and, most important, you can only take still photos. The GoPano aims to solve that by adding a panoramic mirror to the iPhone’s video camera, thereby allowing you to take panoramic video in real time.
The GoPano simply snaps onto your iPhone and the included app does the rest. As you record, you can turn the panorama by swiping the screen to shoot what you want as it happens. → Read More
Yes, it’s happened. Days after Jack Dorsey comes in to head product, the dreaded #Dickbar, or the Quickbar that inserted ads into your tweet-stream on the iPad and iPhone, is dead. While Twitter had taken the step to pin it to the top of the app weeks ago, today it’s decided to do away with it altogether.
From the Twitter blog:
“Rather than continue to make changes to the QuickBar as it exists, we removed the bar from the update appearing in the App Store today. We believe there are still significant benefits to increasing awareness of what’s happening outside the home timeline. Evidence of the incredibly high usage metrics for the QuickBar support this. For now, we’re going back to the drawing board to explore the best possible experience for in-app notification and discovery.”
In case anyone misses it, you can replicate the experience <a → Read More
eBay has been quick to start integrating Milo’s local product inventory technology into its products after picking up the startup for $75 million in December. eBay added Milo’s local results in its barcode scanning apps, RedLaser for iPhone and Android, and GiftsNearby, as a shopping tool for consumers to find gift options available for pick up at local retailers in their neighborhood. Today, eBay is launching its deepest integration with Milo—on it’s search platform.
Milo’s local availability results will show eBay shoppers which local stores in their neighborhood currently have a desired item in-stock and how much it costs at each location. Milo currently provides access to millions of products from approximately 50,000 stores across all 50 states. → Read More
A Chinese games company, ShunXiang Technology, has created a four-player, arcade version of Plants Vs. Zombies. “Great,” you say. “I love PvZ!” But wait, there’s more! → Read More
GameSalad, formerly Gendai Games, has raised $6.1 million in funding, led by Steamboat Ventures, with participation from Greycroft Partners, DFJ Mercury, DFJ Frontier and ff Asset Management.
GameSalad’s game creation tool allows non-programmers to build, develop and publish 2D casual games games for the iPhone and iPad. The benefit of using the platform is that developers can design, publish and distribute original games for the iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Web without needing to write a line of code. To date, GameSalad has been used to create powered over 8,500 titles in the iTunes App Store including more than 30 top 100 U.S. Games in Apple’s App Store. → Read More
A few weeks ago, after the debut of the Opera App Store, app marketplace GetJar banned Opera’s mobile browsing app Opera Mini from its own mobile app marketplace. The reasoning: Opera’s App Store was available in the app and competes directly with GetJar’s marketplace. Today, it appears a truce has been made, as Opera Mini 6 is now back in the GetJar store.
GetJar remains committed to offering consumers the best possible content regardless of category, phone or platform, said Patrick Mork, CMO of GetJar. Opera Mini has been a great partner and one of our top apps for many years and our users will be happy to have a bigger and better version of Opera Mini back in our store. → Read More
The HTC Flyer, or the Sprint Evo View 4G here in the states, is the firm’s first tablet and as the offiical demo video embedded here shows, it does things a bit differently than other Android tablets. The Flyer is a curated experience thanks to the tablet-ifed version of HTC Sense. Just watch the video and count the amont of 3rd party apps demonstrated in the 6 minute video. (there’s just one: Onlive) Underneath the seemingly endless supply of first-party apps is Android 2.4 rather than the new hotness that is Honeycomb. We called it a potential fatal misstep when HTC unveiled the Flyer last month, but this video shows that the Flyer has enough going for it. → Read More
At the end of October 2009, my colleague Jason Kincaid traveled all the way to Hollywood, Los Angeles, for the official unveiling of Google’s new music search initiative by the Internet giant and its partners, Lala, Rhapsody, imeem and MySpace Music / iLike. He interviewed just about everyone involved about the news, and Mike Arrington followed up with a post basically calling out Facebook and Ticketmaster for not acquiring iLike instead of MySpace.
In a blog post, Google said that, going forward, a simple Google web search would enable users to “search and more easily discover millions of songs”. Queries for songs, artists or albums would return search results including links to an audio preview of those songs provided by its music search partners, at least in the United States – for starters. → Read More
Granted, Panasonic’s so-called “Life Innovation Container” isn’t nearly as cool as the futuristic mobile robot house from Japan we’ve shown you back in January. But the victims of the big earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan on March 11 still need any help they can get, which means Panasonic’s decision to send one unit of the container to Minami-Sanrikucho is good news. → Read More
Samsung was hit with a potential nightmare yesterday after a report surfaced — and understandably spread to countless news outlets — that certain Sammy notebooks shipped with a keylogger installed. To make matters worse, a rogue Samsung customer service agent reportedly confirmed that, yes, Samsung includes dial-home programs to “monitor the performance of the machine and to find out how it is being used.” Thankfully Samsung took this claim seriously and just released their findings that seemingly clears the maker of all wrongdoings. → Read More
TechCrunch Disrupt winner Qwiki is on a roll. The visual search startup raised $8 million earlier this year from a number of well-knowninvestors including early Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin. And today, the startup is announcing that it has received $1 million in new funding from Lightbank, the investment fund of Groupon co-founders Brad Keywell and Eric Lefkofsky. This brings the company’s total amount raised to $10.5 million.
What makes Qwiki so compelling is its ability to generate media on the fly that combines text, audio, and animated photos. It presents information in a highly visual way, assembling photos and spoken text from Wikipedia and other sources to create visual guides to millions of topics. → Read More
“It’s fucked up when your mind’s playin’ tricks on ya” —The Geto Boys
By far the most difficult skill for me to learn as CEO was the ability to manage my own psychology. Organizational design, process design, metrics, hiring and firing were all relatively straightforward skills to master compared to keeping my mind in check. Over the years, I’ve spoken to hundreds of CEOs all with the same experience. Nonetheless, very few people talk about it, and I have never read anything on the topic. It’s like the fight club of management: The first rule of the CEO psychological meltdown is don’t talk about the psychological meltdown. → Read More
Samsung has been working on transparent displays for a while now, but all we have seen so far were prototypes. Today, however, big S announced that it began mass-producing transparent LCD panels earlier this month, as the “world’s first company”. Samsung says that the panels will be available as a black-and-white and as a color type and that they boast the world’s highest transparency rates. → Read More
Baltimore-based video ad technology company TidalTV has raised more than $30 million in financing led by New Enterprise Associates with participation from Comcast Interactive Capital and Valhalla Partners. This brings TidalTV’s total funding to $61 million.
Launched in 2007, TidalTV develops a video ad optimization product for advertisers that helps deliver ads to a target demographic. For example, advertisers can use TidalTV to serve campaigns to specific age/gender segments or to select audiences that have shown an affinity towards a particular brand. This technology is currently being deployed for online video, mobile video and television. → Read More
