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
Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s a 360° camera! Although I personally think it looks a little like a funky speaker/sound system…
Equipped with three 10 million pixel sensors and 3 fish-eye objective lenses covering 180° each, the Girocam is the new 360° camera produced by Lille-based company Giroptic. Contrary to most traditional solutions that use a spherical mirror, this new product is capable of capturing an entire frame of vision in a single click. In other words, now just about anyone can take and distribute high quality 360° photos on the internet – no tech skills needed. → Read More
MP3s are so last century. As we’ve previously reported, Apple is moving iTunes to the cloud and is slowly signing on record labels to supply content. The latest company to fall is apparently Warner Music. The company signed a deal with Apple last week. → Read More
Does founding a non-profit organization require the same skills as founding a traditional start-up company? Are the most successful social entrepreneurs as skilled in personal reinvention as the top Silicon Valley entrepreneurs?
Yes and yes. Take, for example, charity: water, the meteorically successful non-profit organization founded by the charismatic Scott Harrison. Four years ago, Harrison was a nightclub promoter making his living by selling $15 bottles of vodka for $350 at four in the morning. Today, having raised over $40 million, he is running a global non-profit dedicated to solving the world’s water crisis.
So how did he do it? As Harrison told me when he came into the TechCrunchTV studio last week, it required both radical personal reinvention and an understanding of the importance of marketing in building a new brand. Sounds familiar? Yes, the worlds of the non-profit and for-profit entrepreneur are uncannily similar. The only difference being that one is the business of making money and the other in “business” of giving it away. → Read More
Youwho, an Internet startup very much in stealth mode, has secured $5 million in funding, an SEC filing reveals.
We don’t know anything about the startup whatsoever at this point, apart from what we were able to piece together from a couple of Internet searches:
- One of the co-founders is Andre Brummer, former SVP Product at MyFamily.com
(More after the jump) → Read More
Online forms are not sexy, but every Website that wants to collect information or payments from visitors needs them. Today, SurveyMonkey acquired online form maker WuFoo to its growing bevy of tools for $35 million in cash and stock. I’ve confirmed the price with a source.
What’s really great about this story is that WuFoo is another Y Combinator win. The startup launched way back in 2006 with only $118,000 in angel money (Paul Bucheit, who is now a partner at Y Combinator, was one of the investors). The company never needed to raise money again. It added payment processing options a couple years later, and now more than $100 million in transactions have been processed through its forms. → Read More
Ned Strongin, co-inventor of Connect 4, passed away on April 9 of this year. He also invented Weebles, the little toys that wobble but don’t fall down.
Strongin was 92. → Read More
The Nook Color has always been considered a wannabe Android tablet and the latest update makes the 7–incher more tablet than ereader. Previously, modders opened up the platform to all sorts of Android tomfoolery, allowing users to run nearly stock Android builds that brought email, proper web browsing and apps to the device. Never mind that nonsense, Barnes & Noble just added those features themselves.
The latest update is a doozy. The Nook Color now runs on Android 2.2 and supports Flash, real email, and get this, page turning animations. (Like the iPad!) The Nook Color is open to even more apps, but only designed specificity for the device. Epicurious, Pulse, and Angry Birds are the highlights out of the 125 mostly paid apps but it still can’t run any ol’ Android app. → Read More
This past January, upon seeing a demo of IntoNow, we noted that the media check-in game just changed. Apparently, Yahoo agreed — they’ve just acquired the company for something in the range of $20 to $30 million, sources with knowledge of the deal tell us.
There are a couple fascinating layers here. First of all, IntoNow launched just 12 weeks ago. That’s $0 to $30 million (roughly) in just under three months. Second, Yahoo moved fast — really fast — to get this deal done. And they had to — Facebook and Twitter were interested as well, we hear. → Read More
Scott Devon sure shook up the high-end watch world when people got word of the Tread 1. Divorced from all the “tradition” in Switzerland, this California made watch relies instead on suppliers to outfit the aerospace industry. The basic theme of this electro-mechanical timepiece is that time is told on belts (the treads) and read through windows placed over segments of those belts. → Read More
Yep, an Android netbook. 1SaleADay has the Augen 10.2-inch Android 2.1 netbook up for only $99. Now, this netbook is probably not for the weak. No, it’s probably best to only buy this if you already have your bootloader-cracking merit badge. I’m not saying this generic netbook ships locked down, but rather it’s probably so rough in the user experience department that only die-hard Android fans should apply. Like the other one-item-per-day websites, this deal expires tonight so you better throw your $100 into the wind before then. At least this netbook has a working SD card slot. That’s something even the latest Android tablets can’t boast. → Read More
SugarSync, like Dropbox is a standard file storage/cloud solution for PCs and Macs. I’ve used the iPad and iPhone apps and now Android users can share in the fun with their new Android version. The app is free and works with most versions of Android, including Honeycomb. It allow you to access your files on the go and to upload files to the cloud. It works similarly to the iPad version. → Read More
Email marketing software giant ExactTarget has raised $30 million in new financing led by Technology Crossover Ventures with Battery Ventures, Scale Venture Partners and Greenspring Associates participating in the round. This brings the company’s total funding up to $208 million.
The company is also announcing that it posted record performance in the first quarter, increasing revenue 52 percent year over year. The company posted annual revenue growth of 41 percent in 2010 finishing the year with $134 million in revenue. → Read More
It used to be that all a marketer needed to know was your zipcode, and they could infer your income range and a whole host of other demographic data about you. But with everyone now using mobile phones that can be targeted down to exact GPS coordinates at different times of the day, areas bounded by zipcodes seem vast in comparison. Imagine if instead marketers could break up the world into 100 million different tiles, each one about the size of a city block, and infer everything from what types of people are likely to be found in that tile at any given time. That’s basically what mobile advertising data startup PlaceIQ is setting out to do.
Mobile advertising inventory still goes largely unfilled because the relevance and targeting isn’t that good. PlaceIQ sifts through tons of data about locations to give marketers a mini-zipcode-like profile of each block. The data comes from both open sources and commercial data sets, including place data, retail data, government data, event data, photo data, social data, and, crime data. This goes well beyond Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare, but the company says it doesn’t use any personally identifiable information. Rather, it is making assumptions based on the contextual cues of a person’s location and time of day. → Read More
Do you remember Hexapod, the six-legged robot from Japan that we have shown you earlier this month? It’s maker now has released a few more technical details [JP] and also published two demo movies on its site, which are pretty cool (the spider-like sounds the Hexapod can make are especially terrifying). → Read More
Barcelona, Spain
New York City
San Francisco, CA
