Here is another chance to win a free ticket to this year’s Disrupt in NYC. . We have announced some amazing guests and speakers for this year’s Disrupt and we will be announcing more later on today. Tim Armstrong, Arianna Huffington, Ron Conway, Dennis Crowley, and Chris Dixon will all be joining us, just to name a few. For now, you can check out the full list of speakers and guests here. As you know, we will be taking over Pier 94, overlooking the Hudson River in west Midtown Manhattan. However, not only are we taking over a pier, we are also taking over some amazing spots in New York City for the after parties. We also have other special surprises we will announce as we get closer. A special congratulations to Adam Growald for winning last week’s ticket.
Disrupt is happening May 23rd to May 25th in New York City and we want you to come with us. To win this week’s free ticket, all you have to do is follow the steps below. → Read More
I’ve been suffering with a major wrist issue for the past few weeks and I’m slowly trying to figure out what triggers/prevents the onset. To that end, I’d like to share this nice post on unpluggd that features four separate wrist exercises for sedentary knowledge workers like me. → Read More
Nokia Siemens has closed the acquisition of the wireless network infrastructure assets of Motorola Solutions today. The company reports that it paid $975 million in cash for the assets and approximately 6900 employees will transfer to Nokia Siemens Network from Motorola. The finalization of the deal come after China regulators approved the acquisition a last week. The full release is paste below.
As of April 30 2011, the company says that responsibility for supporting customers of Motorola Solutions’ GSM, CDMA, WCDMA, WiMAX and LTE products and services transfers to Nokia Siemens Networks. Part of the approval is due to the fact that Motorola reached an agreement with Chinese manufacturer Huawei over a pending patent lawsuit relating to the assets being acquired. In January, Huawei filed a lawsuit to prevent Motorola from giving Nokia Siemens Huawei’s IP information. → Read More
We’ve been looking for ChromeOS to hit the shelves for a few months now and it looks like Samsung may be one of the first shops to pound out a small, COS netbook with a low-power processor. This mock-up describes a 1.5GHz machine with Atom N550 and 2GB RAM with a 1280 x 800 display. The stats come, from all places, a bug report from the Chromium Google Group. → Read More
AudioMicro, a site where you can find royalty-free stock music and sound effects backed by DFJ Frontier and Fotolia, has struck a deal with Microsoft to provide music and sound effect files to Microsoft Office 2010 users worldwide.
Under the terms of the licensing and distribution deal, Microsoft Office 2010 users are able to select from a hand-picked collection of over 1,500 music tracks and sound effects at Office.com to use with any Microsoft Office project. → Read More
Matrix Partners, a US-based investment firm with additional offices in India and China, this morning announced that it has closed two new funds: Matrix Partners China II (at $350 million) and Matrix Partners India II (at $300 million). The funds bring the firm’s total international assets under management to $650 million in China and $600 million in India.
Matrix Partners established an India presence back in 2006 and has an experienced entrepreneur running its investment team there: Avnish Bajaj, co-founder and former CEO of India’s largest online marketplace Baazee.com (acquired by eBay). The firm has been active in China since 2008. → 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
Banner Ads. They first started in 1994 and are therefore almost as old as the Web itself. They were very effective back then, with the original ad garnering a 78% click-through rate (CTR)! I guess from there we had nowhere to go but down.
Nowadays banner ads get on average 0.2% CTR meaning for every 1,000 ads that are served up only 2 people click on them. And as Jon Steinberg of Buzzfeed points out, the CTRs for social media banner ads are just 0.08%. Holy Shiitake! → Read More
Two California residents, Drew Moss and Sahar Maleksaeedi, have filed a rather peculiar class action lawsuit against Twitter (see documents embedded below).
Basically, they’re suing over the fact that Twitter sent a confirmatory SMS to their cellphone after they themselves used an SMS command (‘STOP’) meant to turn off all phone notifications.
The two men allege that Twitter has engaged in unlawful conduct by contacting them on their mobile phones without their consent, which they say is a violation of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991 (TCPA) and an invasion of their privacy. → Read More
The Royal Wedding is finally over, and William and Kate are hitched. The wedding goes beyond just a ceremony, the event is actually a huge business. Between replicas of Kate Middleton’s engagement ring and Royal Wedding china, retailers are profiting off of the nuptials. And eBay and its merchants are part of this business. Here are a few stats related to the searches and purchases of wedding-related items on the marketplace. → Read More
In December 2010, Paramount showed the first teaser trailer for Transformers 3 (Transformers: Dark Of The Moon), and today they pushed out the first full trailer for the movie (which is scheduled to hit theaters in the US on July 1). And it looks pretty cool. → Read More
Sharing what mobile apps you have in a social network has been tried various ways. Appsfire hit on the idea of socialising apps.
Zwapp is coming at it from a slightly different angle. Its iPhone app (iTunes link) auto-discovers what apps you have on your iPhone and connects up your contacts, Facebook and Twitter friends. You then follow people who’s opinion’s you respect when it comes to apps. It even has a live feed where you can see what apps your friends are using and downloading (privacy is now most definitely over it would seem). → Read More
Onavo, as we just reported, is a magical iPhone app which literally shrinks the data your phone uses and thus your roaming data bill when you are travelling.
It launches today and I caught up with CEO and co-founder Guy Rosen at The Next Web conference in Amsterdam. → Read More
As a German, I can tell you we don’t understand baseball at all, but apparently our robot makers do. A team of researchers at German Aerospace Center (DLR) has developed Rollin’ Justin, a humanoid whose most spectacular skill is that he can catch two flying balls thrown in his direction at the same time. → Read More
(Fly Or Die) Can TweetDeck’s New iPhone App Survive A Twitter Acquisition ThinkGeek’s USB Mushroom Lamp Provides Light, Not Super Abilities 5D Miracle: Sharp 360-degree Video Room Consists of 156 LCDs Mario Meets Portal Why Can’t Anyone Make A Popular Tablet? → Read More
There’s really no better way to describe Onavo other than a must-have app for any and every iPhone user on a data plan. I’ll go a step further: I think it’s the very first app one should install.
Why? Because Onavo shrinks your data usage (and thus, your bills). All you need to do is install the free app and you’re done. The app will then run in the background and do its thing and all you have to do is continue consuming data as you do today… Surfing the web, emailing, tweeting, using maps, etc. → Read More
Amazon defied the record labels by launching an unlicensed personal cloud music service. (Disclosure: I’m CEO of competitor MP3tunes.) Music companies immediately expressed their dissatisfaction and Amazon public stated they would discuss licenses with labels. Since then considerable speculation has swirled about regarding licensing discussions Amazon, Google and Apple are having with the 4 major record labels.
Dominating the discussions is the labels concern that personal cloud services will exacerbate piracy and erode their business even further. Consequently they want to impose substantial restrictions on any such service, but each labels has different concerns and demands. Below are examples of the startling limitations major labels wish to impose on such services.
Universal Music Group is concerned that users will load pirated songs into lockers. Average MP3 players house more than a thousand songs and UMG believes that many were unpaid for. They do not want to see the billions of songs that came from P2P system laundered (think drug money) in a cloud service and become legitimate. → Read More
According to research firm IDC, the global mobile phone market ballooned in the first quarter of this year, growing 19.8 percent year-over-year, mostly due to the meteoric rise of smartphone shipments, especially in emerging markets.
According to the firm’s Worldwide Mobile Phone Tracker, vendors shipped 371.8 million units in Q1 2011 compared to 310.5 million units in the first quarter of 2010.
IDC posits that smartphone growth worldwide, particularly in Asia/Pacific, Middle East, Africa and Latin America, helped lift the overall market to a record first-quarter high. → Read More
Any cyclist in the city knows how essential a lock is for your bike, but they’re often bulky and heavy. This Kickstarter project aims to create a unique, lightweight lock that I would buy in a second.
More details inside. → Read More
While I think we all knew, deep down inside, that at some point there would be an Android 3.1, it hasn’t actually been mentioned by anyone except as a potential future upgrade. But Adobe let the cat out of the bag today with an update to Flash: the changelog to 10.2 includes a few features with “(requires Android 3.1)” on the end – or at least, it did until they fixed it. Luckily, Droid-Life got a screenshot. → Read More
