Panasonic Japan announced [JP] a special Lumix camera yesterday, the LUMIX DMC-FP7D (where the “D” stands for Disney). Unlike many other cute special edition cameras from Japan, the design on this model is rather subtle. → Read More
Exclusive - Zozi has landed $7 million in Series B financing from existing investors, TechCrunch has learned. The startup, which offers deals on unique local things to do, raised capital from LaunchCapital, the Pritzker/Vlock Family Office, 500Startups, ZIG Capital, Thomas & Peter Lehrman, David Tisch and others.
The round brings the total of funding raised by the San Francisco startup to $10 million – the $3 million Series A round was secured back in August 2010. → Read More
Mobile entertainment startup mSpot is launching a new feature for its cloud music service today—Radio Spotter. mSpot lets you upload your music to the cloud, after which it can be streamed from a multitude of devices, ranging from PCs, Macs, to the iPhone, iPad and Android.
Radio Spotter matches the songs you’re playing from your personal online music collections to music playing on hundreds of radio stations across the web. You can also select Internet radio stations you’ll like, based on music genres or your own artist searches. Radio Spotter puts the metadata in your music collection to work by matching whatever you’re listening to, and offers new recommendations based on your changing preferences. → Read More
Stealthy startup Project Slice is launching to the public today and announcing a $9.4 million Series A funding round led by DCM and Lightspeed Venture Partners with Michael Birch, FLOODGATE, Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors and Rick Thompson participating.
ProjectSlice aims to help you organize your online shopping by analyzing your inbox. It’s sort of like what TripIt does for your itineraries, except ProjectSlice tracks receipts, notices and purchases. The startup is launching a free app called “All My Purchases” for Yahoo Mail that will help keep your shopping information organized and accessible. → Read More
Kenwood is making portable music players, too. The company announced [JP] the so-called Media Keg MG-G608 for the Japanese market today, the newest addition to their Media Keg series of DAPs. → Read More
Why Don’t You Get Yourself A Nice Wooden Tie Since 2009 Kickstarter Funneled $60 Million To 24,000 Crowd-Funded Projects Ollie The Socially Awkward Blimp Wants To Be Your Friend Set Your Living Room To Turbo With This NES Advantage Lamp The Pioneer AppRadio: Select iOS Apps In Your Car’s Dash For Less Than $500 → Read More
Earlier this week, Amazon offered the new album from superstar Lady Gaga, ‘Born This Way’, for a mere $0.99 in an effort to get people to discover its recently launched Cloud Drive / Player service.
Only problem was that the offer was so good that it quickly put quite some strain on Amazon’s infrastructure.
Well, the company wants to make amends by repeating the offer today. → Read More
If you’re the kind of guy that always has to have some kind of off-the-wall tie, this could be right up your alley. No, it’s not pixelated, or LED-lit. It’s made of wood. Like real reclaimed wood pieces held to one another by sturdy elastic cord. Made by Wooden Thumb, they come in large and small (how large and how small isn’t specified), both for a very reasonable $34, plus shipping. [via NotCot] → Read More
Three days and 32 startup pitches later, the winner of TechCrunch Disrupt has been determined. Out of the 30 startups and two audience choice winners, we whittled the list down to six finalists, which include Billguard, ccLoop, Do@, Getaround, InvoiceASAP, and Sonar. Without further ado, the two runners-up are Billguard and Sonar (that’s the first time we’ve had two runners-up). And the winner is….Getaround!
Getaround is a car rental market place where you can rent a car by the day, hour or week through a smartphone app. Getaround’s all inclusive package, which includes insurance, 24 hour roadside assistance, a Getaround car-kit, iPhone app and a web app makes it easy for people to conveniently car share anywhere. The company’s founder said today that currently the startup has signed up 1,600 cars for sharing since its launch yesterday, which is 20 percent of car-sharing giant Zipcar’s fleet of 8,000 cars. → Read More
Looking for a startup with a healthy dollop of hubris, a sense of humor, and a shroud of secrecy? Meet Amen, a company that claims to be offering “the best job in the world”.
At this point we don’t know much about the startup aside from a few things: it has a very solid founding team, and it has something to do with strongly voicing opinions.
The company’s founders include Florian Weber, a very early Twitter employee who played a major role in that company’s creation (to the point that he has been called a forgotten cofounder). Amen also includes Felix Petersen, who formerly founded Plazes, which was acquired by Nokia in 2008. Rounding out the roster are Caitlin Winner (MIT, Nokia) and Ricki Vester Gregersen (Input Squared). → Read More
Remote control cars, while amusing, tend to get in more car accidents than life-size vehicles. If it isn’t rolling off a curb, drifting into a pool, or crunching under the tire of a pick-up truck, it’s just plain out of battery. For that reason, and possibly for success and profit, the folks at Pop Culture Software have launched the RC vCar application, for the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad 2. → Read More
Hasselblad is known for high megapixel counts, but this is getting a bit ridiculous. On the other hand, the engineering solution they’ve employed to create that count is really interesting. Most camera makers, including Hasselblad, increase the pixel count of their sensor by reducing the size of the photosensitive wells and pushing them closer together. This has some benefits, but also drawbacks, one of which is a sort of pixel density wall that Hasselblad has probably been running up against for a while.
But instead of making the sensor bigger or packing more into it, they created a clever hardware-software combination that might give them a real advantage over the competition. → Read More
Google is holding an event tomorrow in New York City. While everyone seems to be aware that it’s a partner event to announce the NFC strategy for their Android phones, Google has refused to confirm it. Well, they don’t have to. One of their partners just did.
We just got an email from the PR firm representing ViVOtech, wondering if we were going to the Google event tomorrow. They try to talk vaguely about ”Google’s latest innovations”, but that doesn’t matter. Just look at what ViVOtech does. They make NFC software. → Read More
http://cdn2.themis-media.com/media/global/movies/player/flowplayer.commercial-3.2.5.swf → Read More
TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield finalist Getaround is already disrupting the current car sharing industry, only a day after its launch. As we wrote yesterday, GetAround is a car rental market place where you can rent a car by the day, hour or week through a smartphone app. Getaround’s all inclusive package, which includes insurance, 24 hour roadside assistance, a Getaround car-kit, iPhone app and a web app makes it easy for people to conveniently car share any where.
Today, the company’s founder said that since its launch yesterday the startup has signed up 1,600 cars for sharing. That’s 20 percent of car-sharing giant Zipcar’s fleet of 8,000 cars. Impressive for a bootstrapped startup that has only been open to the public for a matter of hours. → Read More
A recent evening news report from North Korea showed the insides of a computer manufacturing facility, where the country claims to be developing its own PCs. A little digging has shown that one of the laptops in question is actually a super-low-cost netbook already on the market here in the US, but buying OEM hardware doesn’t mean they aren’t working on something of their own. The other PC, for instance, appears to be a bit more customized, and is made to attach to a TV, presumably to reduce cost of entry among the generally low-income households (if low-income is the correct term in a communist economy). → Read More
At the TC Disrupt startup battlefield finals, after Sonar CEO’s product demo (Sonar is an app that introduces you to the people relevant around you) TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington asked founder Brett Martin, how much he spent to build the service.
When Martin replied that Sonar took around $250K to date to build, Arrington commented, “This is better now than Color could ever hope to be,” looking at Sequoia investor Roelof Botha for comment or reaction. There was none. Sequoia invested about $25 million in Color’s $41million Series A round. → Read More
If you’re short on cash and desperate for the speedy joys of 4G connectivity, go ahead and cancel your late-night plans for tomorrow. The pink carrier is offering the T-Mobile G2 and the Sidekick 4G smartphones during its After Hours special tomorrow night, from 9 p.m. to 3 a.m. And get this: they’re free. Of course, you’ll have to sign up for a new two-year contract with T-Mobile to participate in the deal, but the good news is there’s a pretty good chance you can get out of it once AT&T swallows T-Mo. → Read More
