Many businesses offer ‘senior discounts’, which are offered to customers who are above a certain age (typically 50, 55, or 60) under the assumption that many senior citizens are retired and/or living on a budget. There are sites that offer an extensive database of available discount codes, such as SeniorDiscounts.com, but they usually look a bit old (pun intented). Enter Sciddy, a new website from Dirxion.
Decidedly not a group buying site like Groupon or LivingSocial, Sciddy lets senior citizens across the United States find discounts on travel, restaurants, shopping, automotive, education, pet services and whatnot in their neighborhoods. → Read More
Google has released Overstock.com from the ‘penalty box’ after the e-commerce destination was caught artificially boosting its search results earlier this year.
From the brief release: Overstock.com today announced that the search engine penalty enforced on them by Google in late February has been lifted. “We understand Google’s position and we have made changes to remain clearly within their guidelines,” said Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne. → Read More
Some time in February of this year, David Fagin noticed he was suddenly being blocked from sending friend requests on Facebook after the social networking giant for whatever reason labeled him as a ‘spammer’. When it happened again, Facebook told Fagin that he was in danger of getting his account wiped out completely to boot.
Fagin, an AOL News writer, subsequently penned an opinion piece, in which he claims being called a ‘spammer’ is humiliating, equivalent to being labeled an online pickpocket or con artist.
This morning, he announced he is suing Facebook for $1. → Read More
Amazon has launched a new content hub for its Books area, called The Backstory. The content destination includes interviews with authors, guest reviews, authors’ favorite playlists, recipes, podcasts, essays and more.
Amazon is also debuting “Author Interviews@Amazon,” as part of the launch which is a new author interview series. Author Interviews@Amazon launches with five video interviews, including celebrity chef Tom Douglas, Joshua Foer, young adult authors Holly Black and Cassandra Clare, and Gossip Girl producer John Stephens. Amazon says that new author interviews will be announced via the Amazon.com Books Facebook page and on Omnivoracious.com, the Amazon.com Books blog. Customers will be able to post questions on these pages for visiting authors that will be incorporated into each interview. → Read More
For some reason, “designer calculators” (of all devices) are a dime a dozen, but this model announced [JP] by Japanese stationery maker Kokuyo is a bit different. First, the calculator (dubbed X-VIZ) is designed to be used with one hand only, and second, it’s the brain child of famed robot designer Tatsuya Matsui. → Read More
Nintendo posted a new financial report today, and in a nutshell, things aren’t looking too good. The company’s net profit dropped a whopping 66% to $944 million in the fiscal year that ended March 31, compared with $2.78 billion in the same period a year earlier. Revenue in the same time frame fell 29.3% to $12.2 billion. → Read More
Like this hamster, I am sure you are currently running in circles screaming “Excelsior” at your houseplants and pets, as it was written it has come to pass: Apple is finally shipping the white iPhone 4 and all signs point to availability this week.
The white iPhone, to be clear, is the same as the black iPhone 4 but it is white. → Read More
Pixelpipe, a San Francisco-based startup that offers a ‘content distribution gateway’ that basically allows people to upload text, photos, videos and whatnot to a variety of social networking and media sharing sites at once, has raised $2.3 million in funding according to this SEC filing.
The company has earlier raised an undisclosed amount of funding from angel investors like James Joaquin and Russ Siegelman, but this is Pixelpipe’s first institutional money since it was founded by Brett Butterfield, former director of R&D at Kodak, back in 2007. → Read More
CloudTalk, a social communications platform that enables users to connect through voice as well as text, photo and video, this morning introduced its new apps for the iPhone and the Android OS, sporting a refreshed user interface and new rich multimedia capabilities.
Voice, perhaps surprisingly, remains decidedly core to the service, with the ability for users to send and receive asynchronous voice messages from their friends (voice mail 2.0?). When words just don’t cut it, users can also add photos and videos to messages. → Read More
Mogulite, the seventh site in Dan Abrams’ Media Metwork goes live today at 6am EST. In the same family as Mediaite, Geekosystem and The Mary Sue, Mogulite will focus on chronicling the lives of moguls of all stripes, ranging from Mark Cuban to Oprah Winfrey, Arianna Huffington and more!
The site boasts The Real Deal’s Amy Tennery as managing editor and The Daily Beast’s Peter Lauria as consulting editor and will feature content such as an ever changing mogul “Power Grid” (Both @Jack, @Ev, @Biz and @AriannaHuff are on it) and a spectrum of blog posts about the rich and powerful, from “Pizza And Condoms: The Weirdest Kate And William Products” to “What Microsoft CEO Ballmer Gets Wrong About Employee Compensation.” → Read More
Sohu.com, one of China’s leading online media, search and gaming companies, this morning announced that its MMORPG subsidiary Changyou.com is to acquire a majority stake in Shenzhen 7Road Technology (“7Road”), an online games developer and publisher.
Changyou will acquire 68.26% of the equity of 7Road for approximately $68.26 million in cash (see how that works?), plus additional variable cash consideration of up to a maximum of $32.76 million in performance-based earn-outs. → Read More
Israeli startup Personyze is launching its website personalization, segmentation, and analytics platform today. Personyze provides businesses the ability to turn their website into a more personalized site that puts the visitor in the center.
The idea behind Personyze is that website owners can quickly and easy ramp up personalization to their visitors. Personyze’s SaaS allows owners to return content in real-time based on each visitor’s past site activity, online search history, Facebook preferences, location, etc., Personyze can give web marketers the ability to personalize the whole site rather than just the ads and banners or landing pages. → Read More
The Facebook “Like” button celebrated its 1st anniversary this week, on April 21st. It’s ubiquity makes it hard to believe that it was a little over a year ago when Mark Zuckerberg took the stage at the third annual f8 Developers Conference to announce the button, which is now integrated with around 2.5 million websites worldwide, 10,000 new ones being added daily. → Read More
You know what’s awful about every politician blindly saying he or she “supports our troops”? It’s usually a hollow sentiment uttered just to get applause.
You know what’s great about every politician blindly saying he or she “supports our troops”? When presented with something that demonstrably helps the troops, there’s zero political capital in obstructing it.
And hence, Gunnar Counselman may not only have one of the best entrepreneur names I’ve ever heard, he may also have come up with one of the first Silicon Valley-based, venture-backed online education startups that will help students, make money, and not be crushed by the lame-brain education establishment. → Read More
I always enjoy seeing science fiction prophecies come true. Last month, Broadcastr. This month, Wolfram Alpha’s WolframTones, modestly subtitled “A New Kind Of Music.” (Yes, that would be the same breathtaking humility that led them to originally price the Wolfram Alpha app at a hilarious $50. Fortunately, they subsequently bought a clue.)
It is pretty cool, in a geeky sort of way: music generated by fractally complex cellular automata, in the style of your choice—classical, dance, rock/pop, hip-hop, etcetera. Every composition is unique, and can be downloaded as a ringtone. They lay claim to the copyright on all the generated music, mind you, raising the interesting question of what counts as “fair use”, but I’ll leave that rant to Cory Doctorow. What sort of saddens me about WolframTones is that it’s yet another nail in the coffin of ten million teenage dreams of musical superstardom.
I don’t know if its creator Peter Overmann is a fan of the great Australian science-fiction writer Greg Egan, but I do know that he’s just recapitulated something Egan described twenty years ago in his book Quarantine, in a paragraph that has stayed with me since: → Read More
Roger Nichols died the other day. He was the engineer behind the Steely Dan records, the ones that stood in the great chasm between George Martin’s Beatles productions and whatever is going on today. When I think of what could be of the great realtime stream we’re all building, I hope and trust it will somehow reach toward the quality of that perfection.
It felt like a perpetual motion machine, a unique world inside a glass ball, shimmering in the precision of the world’s greatest drummers’ time machine. Some felt it lacked emotion, settling for cool perhaps. You could say that, but as the years went by, the clock kept quietly ticking — through the rage of the punks, the bloat of the eighties, the decades we stopped counting. Like a Kubrick film, exacting in its architecture, with tinges of humor and slashes of jump cuts. → Read More
As I sit here writing this post, I am on board an American Airlines flight from Chicago to New York City. I consider it a minor miracle that the plane is actually in the air. After two cancelled flights on this trip alone, a seat without a cushion, and some trouble counting the number of people on the plane which made us return to the gate a second time after another minor problem, I’ve lost count of how many errors American Airlines has now made in this comedy that is my travels. Oh, and @AmericanAir also managed to prove that it is an utterly toothless marketing arm of American which fails when it comes to providing actual customer service. I never thought I’d say this as a loyal American Airlines customer who has travelled hundreds of thousands of miles on American over the years, but it may now be worse than Delta.
Yes, this is going to be a rant. If that’s not your thing, avert your eyes. There isn’t any one thing I can point to that makes me never want to fly American again. Rather, it is everything—a succession of flubs and foibles. I like to believe I am a pretty tolerant air traveler, but everyone has a breaking point. → 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
There’s a line of thinking in Silicon Valley that you should build product businesses rather than services businesses. This thinking is largely driven by the venture capital industry who are in search of high margin, highly scalable businesses.
It’s nearly impossible to get a services company financed by VCs. You’re a small fish.
But technology service businesses can be hugely profitable, rewarding & life-changing experiences for entrepreneurs. So how should you think about whether to build a services business or how to finance your existing one?
Read on … → Read More
This time last week, I wrote about my backstage tour of Cirque Du Soleil’s KÀ, at the MGM Grand. I also promised to go back and talk to the show’s technical director, Erik Walstad for TechCrunch TV.
In the video below, Erik talks about the technology behind Cirque’s most complex show, and in particular the two gigantic moving stages that form its centerpiece. Then we head to the auditorium to see that technology in action, as Erick’s team reset the show ahead of the night’s performance.
As I wrote last week, a video can’t begin to do the show – or its technology – justice, but Erick’s explanation of how the ‘Tatami Deck’ stage is just like a kitchen drawer is at least better than anything I could possibly write about it.
(And finally, there’s a special feature tucked at the end of the video. Spoiler alert: if you love English narrowboats, you won’t want to miss that.) → Read More
Barcelona, Spain
New York City
San Francisco, CA
