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
HeyWire, a service developed by MediaFriends that offers a free SMS service is debuting its Facebook App that will allow Facebook users to send both texts and Tweets via SMS (from a real phone number) from within Facebook.
Via the new HeyWire Facebook App, Facebook users can text worldwide without any per messaging fees and Tweet via SMS from within Facebook. Here’s how it works. Similar to other free texting apps, HeyWire users are given a real phone number to send and receive unlimited texts with friends and family worldwide. → Read More
This year’s European startup conference GeeknRolla has become a platform for news, as startups launched and speakers broke news direct from the stage.
Duedil, the business reputation startup, secured first prize in the startup competition, and an on-the-day announcement from DFJ Esprit that it would award the winner a £50,000 no strings investment in the form of a convertible note. This would convert into its next funding round at the price of the next round. That kind of announcement is more common in Silicon Valley, so to have the deal announced literally within a couple of hours of Duedil’s pitch on stage was real news for a European event. Let’s hope we see more of that kind of fast action in the rest of the year. They also won a crack at a year’s worth of Windows Azure hosting, £5,000 in free legal advice form Orrick and free premium job advertisements for a year on CoderStack (normally £120 per ad per month). Not a bad result for a 3 minute pitch. → Read More
Google is one of 32 companies to recently join the NFC Forum, a non-profit industry association that has been advancing the use of Near Field Communication (NFC) technology since its founding in 2004.
Google is joining the organization as a Principal member, while CSR and Intel have also raised their membership status to that level (they were formerly Associate Members). The full NFC Forum member list is available here. → Read More
IAC has made a business out of developing or acquiring mobile applications based on its popular properties. In fact, IAC’s mobile apps, which include apps for Match.com, CityGrid, UrbanSpoon, and Dictionary.com, have seen over 40 million downloads as of end of the year 2010. Today, we’ve learned exclusively that IAC is furthering its mobile strategy by launching Hatch Labs, a technology sandbox devoted to incubating mobile startups and innovations.
Hatch Labs is the brainchild of Dinesh Moorjani, who was formerly the SVP of IAC Mobile. At IAC, Moorjani started the mobile group in 2007 and helped lead all product strategy for mobile. During his time, Moorjani helped doubled mobile revenue annually for IAC. He tells us that for the past five years IAC has been acquiring mobile technologies and apps, but this can be an expensive endeavor. Moorjani and the company wanted to help incubate more innovation within IAC, particularly in the mobile sector and thus Hatch Labs was born. → Read More
A mere day after Salesforce announced that it was acquiring social media monitoring company Radian6 for $326 million in cash and stock, rival Visible Technologies this morning announced that it has secured an extra $6 million in financing.
The round was led by the company’s previous backers, which include Investor Growth Capital, Centurion Holdings, Ignition Partners, In-Q-Tel and WPP. Visible Technologies has raised a total of $45 million in funding to date. → Read More
Social networking company myYearbook this morning announced it has acquired five new Android apps to support its mobile strategy and grow its team. In addition, the company acquired FlockEngine, which powers multiplayer games on Android phones.
The acquisitions include Toss It, Tic Tac Toe (both of which are among the top 30 most downloaded free Android games), Minesweeper, SpringDroid, and Line of 4. → Read More
Exclusive - Munich, Germany-based social games developer and publisher MegaZebra has secured ‘multiple millions of euros’ in its latest round of financing led by Doughty Hanson Technology Ventures. Previous backer Kizoo Technology Ventures also participated, alongside private investor Markus Stolz.
Founded in 2008 and originally supporting a variety of social networks, MegaZebra in the course of last year shifted its focus squarely on developing and publishing games for the Facebook platform only. → Read More
Exclusive - Viber Media, the Israeli startup behind the Viber service, which lets iPhone users make free calls to each other, has released version 2.0 of its app in the App Store.
The company’s still gearing up for the launch of their Android application, but in the meantime the update to the iPhone app brings a couple of goodies, in particular the ability to text message other Viber users free of charge. → Read More
Video: French Robot REETI Can Show Emotions CrunchDeals: Super Mega Worm For Super Mega Free Cardboard Pinhole Hasselblad Is Short On Megapixels, Long On Cute Video: New Touchscreen Control Interface Flexes When Scrolled 5 Reasons To Buy A Nintendo 3DS… And 5 Reasons Not To → Read More
Although the Mars rovers have gone way, way beyond the call of duty (the original mission was for 90 days; Opportunity is still active after more than six years), the dream has to end sometime — and evidence is mounting that for Spirit, the first of the two rovers to touch down, may be down for the count. After a year of being trapped in sand, its last big hope was a big solar boost over this last month, but it seems that was insufficient to bring the poor little guy back to life, and NASA is moving on. It’s not impossible that it could be reinvigorated by a fresh breeze and some sun (like many of us), but things don’t look good. → Read More
I think we can all agree that while bass is an important part of most music, there is a limit past which it is pointless to amplify that part of the sound spectrum. This video is about going so far beyond that point that the sound starts being measured in gut punches rather than decibels. That poor phonebook never had a chance. → Read More
Eric over at Photography Bay captured this demo of Adobe’s in-development Photoshop app for iPad on video. It’s way more full-featured than the Photoshop Express already available — if file management was a little easier, this would go a long way towards making my iPad an actual full-powered blogging station.
There’s no release date yet, but I can’t wait. We’ll let you know as soon as we hear more. → Read More
So, there I was, sitting at TCHQ, discussing the recent Vanity Fair article about Jack Dorsey — and the ridiculous bluebird-on-the-shoulder picture that accompanied it.
Keen to track down the image itself, I typed Dorsey’s name into Google’s predictive image search box.
Here’s what came up… → Read More
One of the games for Kinect that I’m genuinely excited about is Child of Eden, from the geniuses behind the mesmerizing Rez and Lumines. The system seems just perfect for it, and the aesthetic is… well, just watch the trailer. → Read More
