It’s been a good day for Y Combinator. Hot on the heels of news that YC portfolio company Wufoo landed a $35 million exit, YC alum TalkBin has just announced that it’s been acquired by Google — less than five months after the company was founded.
TalkBin offers a platform that lets customers give immediate feedback to local businesses (users submit their opinions and critiques via mobile applications, and it looks like the businesses can read and respond to them from a web app). TalkBin’s homepage shows screenshots of both Android and iOS applications, but I can’t find them on either marketplace (I’m not sure if the apps were pulled or if they simply haven’t been released yet).
The mostly-stealthy Montain View-based company was founded in December 2010 by Qasar Younis, Michael Ma, and Sunny Dhillon. → Read More
As Gigaom notes Netflix’s (global) subscriber base is now bigger than Comcast’s national one, a happenstance that should send fear into the hearts of cable providers everywhere. The numbers came from an earnings call today. → Read More
This wild printable clock doesn’t have a working escapement yet (that’s in the works) but it does prove that you can build complex mechanical objects using MakerBots. → Read More
Netflix just announced its first quarter 2011 earnings and they’re cause for optimism, with earnings at $1.11 a share on revenue of about $719 million, out-performing analysts expectations of $1.08 per share on $704 million in revenue. The company doubled its profits, at $60.2 million versus $32.3 million at the same time last year.
The company is hedging its future on its streaming subscription services, and called its DVD business a “fading differentiator” in its investor letter. → Read More
Fresh Pioneer Corporation docs just landed in the FCC database of a so-called AppRadio, or as it’s named in one document, iPhone Control Receiver. The unit, SPH-DA01, has a whole host of testing documents in the database but only two are are all that interesting. The user manual names this device AppRadio and then there’s an unflattering picture that shows a center-mounted iPhone button. → Read More
Amazon has an Android App Store. They also have a brand new section of their site, AmazonWireless, where they sell, amongst other things, Android phones. Realizing just how well those things fit together, Amazon is running their first cross-promotion between the two. From this morning until 11:59 pm on May 1st, any Android handsets purchased through AmazonWireless will come with a giftcard good for $25 bucks on Amazon’s Android Appstore. Think about all you could buy with $25! That’s like a million copies of Fruit Ninja! Or, you know, 25. But still. Not a bad deal, considering that Amazon’s prices on most Android handsets are amongst the cheapest out there. → Read More
Good news, Internet. Russian police pulled off what sounds like a legitimate Hollywood kidnapping rescue and rescued the kidnapped son of Kaspersky Lab’s co-founder, Yevegny Kaspersky. The short story is the 20-year was returned safely, but the long story is much more interesting. → Read More
How many apps does it take to recharge a vehicle? Apparently, one is not enough. Several companies offering mobile apps to drivers — to help them find a place to charge up or refuel in an environmentally sustainable way — made product and milestone announcements around Earth Day. Here’s the run down.
ECOtality (NASDAQ: ECTY) — a San Francisco company that’s building electric vehicle (EV) technology and infrastructure in the U.S. and China— unveiled its Blink Network mobile app (screenshot, above) to help users find and reserve a nearby, available charging station at the Electric Drive Transportation Association conference in Washington D.C. Reservation and status-update features made ECOtality’s app distinct from other charger-finders for about a minute.
On Monday, however, Coulomb Technologies announced an upgrade to the ChargePoint app, including similar functionality… → Read More
Ready for another shameless marketing video for the iPad G-Form Extreme Sleeve? Last time the encased iPad survived a 12lb bowling ball. This time they’re dropping an iPad 500 ft. from an ultralight aircraft. Does it survive? EXTREME PROTECTION, BABY! [via TUAW] → Read More
It is rare to find a gaming accessory so ham-handed and ridiculous that you just know this is going to be a patent troll situation where they start suing Microsoft Kinect for stealing their “gaming standing up” idea. But you have to hand it to this guy for his tenacity. There are plenty of YouTube videos up showing him showing it off and the real money shot is where he’s brought in a “real teenager” to declaim its virtues.
This thing is basically a treadmill with a joystick on it. You run around, turn the joystick, and play PC games. Then, when the joy wears off, you can start using it as a clothes hanger and then, when you’re finally sick of the thing, you can put it out on the street for some other sucker to find and take home. → Read More
Launched at SXSW, social music app SoundTracking has announced its quarter of a million milestone today, surpassing 250K downloads in just six weeks after launch on the iPhone. With 100K downloads taking place in the app’s first two weeks of existence, SoundTracking is experiencing rapid growth for an iOS app without without a previous app or website to drive installs from. Another music sharing app, Play by AOL, has also hit 250,000 downloads in half the time on Android.
While founder Steve Jang wouldn’t disclose numbers of daily active users or users, he does tell me that over 50% of SoundTracking users are using the app to share their music moments on both Facebook and Twitter, which might explain the increased signups. It seems like every five minutes or so someone else is following the SoundTrack to my life. → Read More
Netflix just released its first quarter earnings. Earnings per share were $1.11, up 88 percent (3 cents above the consensus estimate of $1.08). Revenues came in at $719 million. And Netflix added 3.3 million U.S. subscribers in the quarter, plus another 290,000 interantionally, to end at 23.6 million. The 3.6 million new subscribers is slightly below the 3.7 million analysts were hoping for, but still double the growth from a year ago. Depending on how many subscribers Comcast reports this quarter, Netflix might surpass it to become the largest entertainment subscription business in the U.S. Netflix ended the quarter with 22.8 million U.S. subscribers, exactly the same number of subscribers Comcast reported at the end of 2010.
Net income was $60 million, and free cash flow in the quarter was $79, a 55 percent increase from the fourth quarter. Netflix saw a rise in domestic operating margins to 16 percent, from 14.9 percent in the fourth quarter, largely due to an increase in streaming-only subscribers and price increases on hybrid subscriptions. Margins should fall back to around 14 percent as streaming and marketing costs continue to rise (offset by declines in DVD shipping). → Read More
The iPhone rumor mill has been all off-kilter for the past few weeks, primarily stemming from the idea that there may very well be no new iPhone at WWDC this year.
And yet, the rumor-mill continues to churn. According to whispers over the past few weeks, Apple’s busy toiling over a handset that looks very much like an iPhone 4, but with a few lil’ tweaks to its guts — namely, it’s purportedly packing Apple’s A5 CPU, and a slightly bigger screen.
Is this it? → Read More
Nothing like a calm opening title sequence to settle the soul and quiet the mind. Sure, it’s just remake of Ocarina of Time for the 3DS, but this movie brought back such good memories that I’m ready to replay the game. [via Joystiq] → Read More
Never mind Alienware’s upcoming overclocked M18x, the Origin EON is shipping today and can be configured with a variety of overclocked Sand Bridge Intel Core i5 and Core i7 CPUs. The mad computer builds at Origin will even overclock and warranty the systems up to 4.5GHz. Your credit card limit is really the only barrier between you and a mobile powerhouse as the system can be configured with 2GB Nvidia GTX 485M GPU, 32GB dual-channel RAM, 480GB OCZ SSD, and the aforementioned CPUs. Even an optional $40 wooden shipping crate is available. The EON17-S can be ordered right now with shipping estimated for the middle of May. → Read More
Facebook’s increasingly ubiquitous ‘Like’ button is getting a new friend: the Send button. Click on a webpage that has the Send button integrated, and you’ll be prompted to share it with any of your Facebook Groups, your Facebook friends, or any standard email address. In other words, where the Like button is designed to let you quickly share content with all of your Facebook friends, the Send button is for sharing with a subset of them.
Site designers are groaning right now (they have yet another sharing widget to integrate), but it’s a logical step for Facebook — there are certainly times when you want to share links with a handful of friends instead of your News Feed, and this gives you one less reason to fire up your non-Facebook email account. 50 sites are launching with the feature.
In addition to the new Send button, Facebook is adding a handful of features to its existing Groups product, which was overhauled last October. First is the introduction of photo albums for Groups. → Read More
This morning, an SEC filing revealed that Gary Flake, a former Overture vet who went on to found both Yahoo Research Labs and Microsoft’s Live Labs, raised $1.39 million in funding for a stealthy new startup dubbed Clipboard (I’m not the only one who noticed).
Flake informed me that he wanted to avoid any publicity for now, but since Geekwire already posted on this: Flake is the sole founder of the fledgling Bellevue, Washington-based company, which is apparently building ‘social media with a purpose’ (which is still vague, admittedly).
Flake said he wouldn’t disclose the names of the investors at this point, as some would like to be kept out of the spotlights, but we’ve learned that there are a little over a dozen investors involved, ranging from large institutional funds, mid-size seed VCs and angel groups, as well as a few individual investors. → Read More
It was only a matter of time until Lenovo broke into the Honeycomb party. The company’s upcoming Tegra 2 tablet is reportedly set to hit this June with an iPad-ish WiFi/3G and storage pricing scheme starting with a 16GB WiFi-only model. Not that exciting, right? You’re probably saying it’s more of the same ol’ Android nonsense. → Read More
It’s not every day you find $40 phones for the aged. This odd-looking piece of kit has huge buttons, echanced loudness settings, and a big orange SOS button. It also has an LED flashlight on top for spotting your keyhole in the dark. → Read More
Remember back in July last year when we reported that Google quietly invested $100 million in Zynga in preparation for a new product dubbed Google Games?
They even recruited gaming industry vet Mark DeLoura (formerly of Ubisoft, Sony Computer Entertainment America, Nintendo and others) as developer advocate for game-related products, though he quit after only 4 months on the job (he’s now a VP at THQ).
This morning, a job offer surfaced on Google’s LinkedIn profile that suggests the search and online advertising juggernaut is finally about to put its stake in the digital games ground. → Read More
