The dual 7-inch screen Android tablet that NEC introduced during CES earlier this year is finally ready to ship (in Japan, at least). The company today announced [JP] that it’s now called LifeTouch W, and that it’s scheduled to hit stores over here sometime next month. → Read More
Comcast Interactive Capital, the venture capital arm of the media giant, has partnered with Philadelphia based venture fund and startup accelerator Dreamit Ventures to provide seed funding, training, mentoring and other benefits to minority-led startups through DreamIt’s accelerator program.
The new $350,000 fund will give five minority-led startups for its Fall Philadelphia 2011 program a… → Read More
Sophia, which operates a free online social teaching and learning platform, this morning announced that it has acquired Guaranteach, a Web-based service that provides tens of thousands of short-form tutorials along with assessment tools to students, teachers and schools.
Guaranteach offers nearly 23,000 short-form videos on math topics ranging from counting to calculus, developed by nearly 200… → Read More
Can you imagine owning a TV with 16 times the resolution of HDTV (or, in other words, about the same resolution as IMAX)? That’s 7,680×4,320 pixels, and today Sharp (in cooperation with Japanese national TV broadcaster NHK) showed a 85-inch LCD TV boasting that spec, also known as Ultra HDTV or Super Hi-Vision. → Read More
Friday is an Android app that let’s you browse events that happened in the past. You can see what happened on your phone since you turned it on the first time. It tells you where you’ve been, who you called or sent emails to. The app provides you with analytics of your entire phone usage. It’s much like an automated journal of your life. I like it because usually I have no idea what happened 10… → Read More
We talk a lot about the startups and companies that receive venture capital and angel funding, but what about the other subset of small businesses that are fundamental to the success of the economy, but may not be on the radar of VCs and angels? These companies, from restaurants and small retailers to salons and florists, may not be high-potential startups like a Google or a Facebook, but they… → Read More
Venture capital firm Khosla Ventures is raising $1 billion for its new fund, Khosla Ventures IV, an SEC filing reveals. From the looks of it, the new fund will be roughly the same size as the previous one (raised in September 2009).
The news comes a few weeks after former YouTube and Facebook CFO Gideon Yu left the firm after joining them less than two years earlier, to go work for the San… → Read More
NY Times Editor: Twitter Giveth, And Twitter Taketh Away Toshiba Protoypes Ultra-Thin, Rollable OLED This Is A Piranha Plant USB Keychain For Today’s Stylish Man Apple Employees Trade Out iPod touch For iPad 2? Kinect Hack Could Eventually Translate Sign Language → Read More
Plizy is an interesting new startup which wants to bring personalized video content to the iPad [iTunes link] the company has also announced a $1.2m angel funding round from undisclosed investors.
Plizy wants users to discover, share and watching online video based on your social graph, history, and interests. It sounds like a few other startups we could mention, and competitors might best be… → Read More
Looking for a transistor or a relay? Or possibly an oscilloscope? More than likely you’ll end up at Octopart, a vintage Y Combinator startup that launched in 2007.
The company is a search engine for electronic parts, allowing users to navigate through a taxonomy of structured stuff, or just do a plain old parts name/number search. Once you find what you’re looking for, Octopart will show you a… → Read More
Just last week had Fujitsu announcing the TH40/D, a 10-inch convertible Windows tablet/notebook. It’s actually aimed more at the enterprise market, but Digitimes reports they have an option coming for consumers as well. It’ll be smaller, with a 7-inch screen, but it’s not clear whether it will have the stylus support and keyboard of the TH40/D. → Read More
The photo-sharing space continues to heat up, and continues to leave dominant player in the space Flickr in the dust innovation wise. If one thing’s becoming clear, it’s that it must be really painful to work at Yahoo and have any sort of passion for good product design.
The latest example of this comes from Flickr designer Timoni West, who has publicly criticized the service on her… → Read More
Display conference SID is underway, and all the cool companies are showing off their new display tech. Yesterday we saw a sweet high-resolution bistable e-paper display from E-Ink and Epson, and today Engadget has found another cool screen, also bistable, but slightly more… clear. → Read More
With regard to their cloud music offering, it looks like Apple is now just about ready to rock and roll. It would seem that this is now coming together even faster than they anticipated. And that may be thanks to two unlikely sources: Google and Amazon.
CNet’s Greg Sandoval is reporting tonight that Apple has signed an agreement with music label EMI to offer its music through Apple’s upcoming new… → Read More
A strange development on the Thunderbolt front. Intel’s new high-speed interface certainly made its big debut on Apple’s new MacBook Pros, but why would Apple be trademarking it if it’s Intel’s technology? → Read More
As if you’re not scared enough of the Internet (and its potential to ravage your personal information), something comes along to make you even more paranoid. Just ask PlayStation users, or those that were on the receiving end of Firesheep’s eavesdropping. Today’s vulnerability du jour? Expired domains. The technical veterans among us are likely already familiar with this, but it seems that letting… → Read More
Some French hackers have put together a program that uses the Kinect to detect certain hand gestures (which is, after all, what it was designed to do) and translate them into words. Right now it only recognizes “hello” and “sorry,” but the team is only just now teaching it words — the “build” period is over, and now it’s time to learn.
Check out the video inside. → Read More
When I first saw the ReadWriteWeb headline: Google Places Now Imports Your Foursquare Check-Ins, I was surprised. Wow, that’s interesting, and could be huge, I thought. Then I wondered why neither Foursquare nor Google was touting this? Again, could be big for both! Then I read the not-so-fine print.
Oh. RSS. Meh.
Turns out, Google is touting this, quietly. On their Google Places blog (one of… → Read More
These days, most “hacks” are more about an attacker’s ability to exploit your download habits, as opposed to exploiting holes in your firewall. In a review of Internet Explorer’s feedback reports, Microsoft found that 1 in every 14 programs downloaded are in some way malicious. The software giant also warned that more often than not, it’s the hacker’s mind-games that cause a malware attack… → Read More
Body augmentation and limb replacement are just hugely interesting fields right now. We’ve got bionic legs, bionic eyes, even bionic cats. Bionic hands have been a troublesome topic for research because of the inadequacy of current technology in replicating fine motor control. This arm, being wielded by a young Austrian fellow who lost the use of his hand in an accident, isn’t quite perfect, but… → Read More
Earlier today, Gilt launched the latest addition to its group-buying sites with Gilt Taste—a very pricey online purveyor of produce, meats, fish, cheese, and other “artisinal” foods. While it’s easy to get distracted by the jaw-dropping prices ($50 steaks anyone?), the part I find interesting is that Gilt Taste is also an online magazine.
Mouth-watering food photography helps to move the… → Read More
The Next conference in Berlin is an international, English language conference covering of the latest in “digital”, and serves as a useful platform for German startups to present themselves. One of the best – and the one that won the startup competition this year – was Wahwah.fm. I actually really liked this company, but the downbeat presentation of its founder belies quite an innovative idea. → Read More
In March, HP CEO Leo Apotheker promised a June launch for his company’s forthcoming TouchPad tablet, and since Best Buy has already posted a teaser page, it’s probably safe to assume that the TouchPad is running on schedule. Best Buy’s page has yet to include pricing or specific availability dates, opting instead to mark the product as “coming soon.” → Read More
For someone so disdainful of the Internet, New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller sure fits the textbook definition of a troll. His anti-aggregation screed “All the Aggregation That’s Fit to Aggregate” and today’s Twitter-bait “The Twitter Trap” have taken up a good chunk of my New York Times paywall quota. If that was his objective, then well done Bill Keller.
The part of me that wants… → Read More
Hold onto your seats everybody. The Dell Streak’s big brother, the Streak Pro (it just doesn’t sound good, does it) has gotten a few extremely predictable specs. Are you ready to be underwhelmed?! → Read More
Forty-plus weeks traveling the emerging world has taught me many things. Chief among them is that most entrepreneurs outside Silicon Valley learn the wrong lessons looking in.
A lot of that is the fault of publications like TechCrunch: We get excited about new things. If it’s exploding like Groupon, all the better. But we even go nuts over things like Foursquare or Quora that have pretty muted… → Read More
I was tempted to make the headline “NY Times Editor: I Agree With Devin Coldewey,” since his editorial today, “The Twitter Trap,” lamenting the loss of traditional ways of remembering and learning, is a very close sibling to my own The Dangers Of Externalizing Knowledge. His experience was a little more personal, however, watching his daughter finally join/succumb to… → Read More
Just two weeks after launch, ViewsHound, the crowd-sourced news site with daily prizes, has introduced a revenue share option for contributors.
Instead of just being in with a chance of winning a part of the site’s daily prize fund for the best articles, photos and cartoons contributed, in a move similar to UK competitor Blottr, users can now get a share of advertising revenue – I just hope they… → Read More
http://cdn2.themis-media.com/media/global/movies/player/flowplayer.commercial-3.2.5.swf Get over here! (and watch other NSFW Zero Punctuation episodes) → Read More
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