Not a fan of infographics? Be gone!
For I felt compelled to share with you this infographic made by the folks over at Webhostingbuzz, visually showing how fast the Internet has made its way to the people of this world in the past 15 years – and how fast the Internet has become in some parts of it.
Here’s what stood out for me: the United States leads the world in broadband penetration, with Americans consuming way more gigabytes per month than Europeans or people in Japan and South Korea. → Read More
Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by Mark Suster (@msuster), a 2x entrepreneur, now VC at GRP Partners. Read more about Suster at Bothsidesofthetable
I’m a very big proponent of the “lean startup movement” as espoused by Steve Blank & Eric Ries. The part of the movement that resonates the most with me is that entrepreneurs should keep their capital expenditures really low while they’re experimenting with their product and determining whether there is a large market for what they do.
In the late 90′s I saw a dangerous trend creeping into the startup world, which was that companies were suddenly raising huge amounts of money too early in their existence. It seemed to be purely speculative. It’s not clear that there was big customer demand for some of these products yet entrepreneurs were egged on by VCs to “take the money” and try and push the market.
Here’s what those VCs (and us entrepreneurs, myself included) didn’t understand: 9 women can’t make a baby in a month. Here’s why … → Read More
A research team at Osaka University has developed a new control interface for touchscreens that flexes the content that’s displayed when you move your finger over the screen. In the process, the content is “distorted” to make it possible to view (and zoom in on) a wider space on-screen, while at the same time keeping an eye on the original position you marked with your finger. → Read More
Japan’s telecommunications juggernaut SoftBank, the third largest mobile carrier of the country, had to register quite a lot of damage after the big earthquake that hit Japan on March 11. 3,800 of SoftBank’s base stations were knocked out, meaning no customer in the affected areas could make or receive calls via cell phones (the situation was similar with other carriers).
But it turned out that this damage wasn’t the main concern of SoftBank’s president and founder Masayoshi Son (pictured above). After visiting Fukushima Governor Yuhei Sato in his prefecture on March 22 and seeing the real damage done, Son promised his company will offer free cell phones to all children who became orphans due to the earthquake. → Read More
It really makes a lot of sense for there to be a real diver’s watch in the Titanic DNA collection from Romain Jerome. I mean the whole idea of the collection is to commemorate something that is deep underwater. Well the Titanic DNA diver is here with the RJ Octopus. The Octopus name is actually part of the “octo” theme which involves the number 8. There are special 8 sided screws in parts of the case, it is water resistant to 888 feet, and it will be part of a limited edition of 888 pieces in a few varieties. → Read More
As a person who consumes dozens, if not hundreds, of articles on the web each and every day, it’s easy to remember that I’m an extreme outlier. Most people would prefer to read only a few articles a day — only the ones that they know are worth their time. That’s what Summify does in a nutshell. They survey the content on the web and condense it into the articles that will interest you the most.
Today marks the formal launch of Summify. After a few months in beta testing, they believe their social algorithms are ready for the world to try. And they also have a fresh round of funding to further spread the service. → Read More
Google just settled with FTC over agency’s accusations of “deceptive privacy practices” in the rollout of its social communications tool Buzz. The FTC issued a release here (we’ve pasted it below) and you can also access Google’s Blog post on the subject here. Updating.
Buzz, which launched last February, has been plagued with privacy issues. And the communications tool, which lives inside Gmail, has not exactly taken off. → Read More
Here’s the live stream from the GeeknRolla conference for European startups, organised in association with TechCrunch Europe HERE.
And follow the action on twitter on the hashtag #GKNR
We’ll be updating this shortly with the startups that launched today. Here’s the programme. → Read More
Bubble Motion, which offers a popular a Twitter-like voice blogging service in India, Japan, and Indonesia, has raised $10 million in new funding led by SingTel Innov8 with participation from Singapore’s Infocomm Investments in addition to insiders Sequoia Capital, Palomar Ventures, and NGC. This brings Bubble Motion’s total funding to $45 million.
Bubble Motion’s Bubbly platform is a voice-blogging phone service that allows people to share status updates in their own voice with fans and followers. It essentially takes Twitter’s model and applies this to voice blogging and mobile phones. These ‘bubblers’ record their voice update into their phone, and their followers everywhere are notified by SMS and prompted to click and listen. → Read More
Jive CEO Tony Zingale is finally announcing the results of a big project he’s been working on since he took over the company in 2010. It’s not an acquisition or a product release: It’s a massive upgrade to Jive’s board of directors.
Joining the board are McAfee’s outgoing chairman Charles Robel, McAfee CEO (now at Intel) Dave DeWalt, Facebook’s vice president of technical operations Jonathan Heiliger and Google’s vice president of product management Sundar Pichai. → Read More
As we wrote a few months ago, people search site MyLife may have a ton of traffic from searches, but doesn’t really have the social elements that Facebook and LinkedIn offers. Today, the people search site is launching a number of features to help increase engagement on the site.
MyLife is a full-fledged search engine which not only finds people—thanks to aggregated search across social networking sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, and MySpace—but also helps visitors connect with them all on the same site. MyLife pulls information from public records and also allows users to subscribe to the search site to connect with others, track their searches and more. → Read More
According to Russian business newspaper Vedomosti (via Quintura), star investor Digital Sky Technologies has set up a new fund dubbed DST Global – 2. The fund has already made investments in Groupon (January 2011) and is close to investing $50 million in exchange for 5 percent of online music startup Spotify as part of a $100 million round, according to the paper.
You may remember we broke the news that DST was indeed about to lead a huge financing round for Spotify back in February. In other news, DST has also joined a group of investors who’ve put hundreds of millions of dollars into 360buy.com, a Chinese online retailing powerhouse often dubbed China’s Amazon. → Read More
Washington D.C.-based startup EverFi has acquired Outside The Classroom, the provider of the largest online alcohol prevention course AlcoholEdu.
Founded in 2000, Outside The Classroom’s online curriculum focuses on alcohol prevention in America’s youth. Its online products, AlcoholEdu for College and AlcoholEdu for High School, are used in hundreds of high schools and over five-hundred college campuses. More than 3 million students to date have taken AlcoholEdu. → Read More
Cloud computing giant Salesforce.com has acquired social media monitoring company Radian6 for approximately $276 million in cash and $50 million in stock, net of cash. In addition, approximately $10 million in stock and $4 million in cash will be issued to Radian6′s founders (subject to vesting conditions over two years).
Radian6 helps clients like Dell, GE, Kodak and UPS monitor, analyze and engage in ‘hundreds of millions’ of social media conversations. Salesforce argues that the acquisition of the company will enable it to enhance all of its products, including Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Chatter and Force.com. → Read More
Skype realizes full well its software is used by many school teachers and students from around the globe, and today announced that it has built a dedicated social network to help them connect, collaborate and exchange knowledge and teaching resources over the Web.
This morning, the company launched a free international community site dubbed Skype in the Classroom, an online platform designed to help teachers find each other and relevant projects according to search criteria such as the age groups they teach, location and subjects of interest. → Read More
Kickstarter: Coffee Joulies Are Temperature Regulators For Your Java Video: Cute Teddy Bear Charatter Reads Tweets For You LA Noire Will Be A Part Of The Tribeca Film Festival The Klhip: What The World Needs Now Is Another Nail Clipper… Three New 01THEONE Watches Affordably Priced → Read More
Amazon’s move into the cloud music storage and streaming game is nothing if not controversial. I love it. They’ve seemingly looked at what companies like Apple and Google have been dealing with for months, if not years, and just said “screw it, let’s just do it.”
Ballsy. Brilliant. Wonderful.
Of course, the service itself seems kind of “meh”. But I’m more than happy to take “meh” over nothing at all — which is exactly what the other big players have given us. It has been all empty promises (Google) and endless whispers (Apple). Amazon actually did it. And they deserve credit. → Read More
In this week’s episode of Fly or Die, we cover two big launches—Amazon Cloud Drive and Color—and a Quirky DIY pocketKnife called the Switch. Just yesterday, Amazon launched its Cloud Drive, which is a general storage service in the cloud which is being pushed as a media locker, starting with music
Color is the $41 million photo app nobody can figure out. Is it the future or is it a dud on arrival? CEO Bill Nguyen joins us as our special guest and explains how his team is going to “solve the loneliness problem.” (Video after the jump). → Read More
This one’s for you, cricket fans. For those not familiar with “the gentleman’s game”, we are currently in the grips of the ICC World Cup — or The World Cup of Cricket, if you prefer. “Who cares?” or “what’s a cricket?” you may be asking. Well, considering there are only five proclaimed cricket pitches in the U.S., you may have a fair point. But for countries (and cricket powerhouses) like India, Pakistan, Australia, and South Africa (to name a few), cricket is serious business.
In fact, The Economic Times is reporting that the international gambling industry collectively has more than $1.5 billion riding on tonight’s match between India and Pakistan in the World Cup semifinals.
Considering the combustible relationship between the new nations, the rivalry is a fierce one, and the matches tend to take on a significance greater than game itself. This is the first time the two teams have met since the 2008 Mumbai attacks, and Pakistani Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani will be accepting the personal invitation of Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, in a miraculous show of “cricket diplomacy”. → Read More
If James Cameron were to take all the revenues from both Titanic and Avatar, then he may be able to send his own mars rover to space. That’s the closest he’ll ever get to having his 3D tech blasted into orbit now that Nasa pulled the plug on his plans. → Read More
