Online payment methods are old and in the way. Sure, whether or not the world will have a generally-agreed-upon payment system is up for debate, but it seems that a new era of micropayments is here — hopefully to stay. With the political and regulatory inertia around bank and credit card-related payment tools, there is room for a third party without these hangups to bring a new perspective to micropayments. Minno, a startup that offers a simple, embeddable payment solution, is today announcing that it has changed its name to “BuySimple”. Its new name is appropriate given its objective, and gets rid of the small-fish-big-pond connotations that came with the name “Minno”. What’s more, BuySimple has partnered with SoundCloud and raised $700K. Not bad for a day’s work. → Read More
Yesterday, we reported that Twitter was close to acquiring AdGrok, the Y Combinator-backed keyword bidding platform. Today, the company has confirmed the move with a blog post, “@AdGrok Is Going To @JoinTheFlock“. But as we noted in an update to our post yesterday, things are a little bit more complicated than they appear. You see, one of AdGrok’s founders and its CEO, Antonio Garcia-Martinez, is not joining Twitter and has instead taken a job at rival Facebook.
Both Garcia-Martinez’s Facebook and LinkedIn confirm that he has accepted a role as a product manager at Facebook this month (though we’re hearing he may have accepted the position in April). There, he’ll be working on the Facebook Ads team. In other words, yes, he’ll be competing (at least in some regard) with his former colleagues. → Read More
You know, we haven’t really thought much about Pantech since the ol’ days of Helio (and the Pantech-made Helio Ocean.) We’d figured the company had decided that the U.S. mobile market and its current iPhone/Android-mindset was a bit too tough to crack, and had gone back to mainly focusing on slingin’ their feature-phone wares in their home country of South Korea. Well, Pantech’s back — and this time, they’re rockin’ Android. → Read More
Enterprise social networking platform Yammer is adding two new features to its platform today that are worth noting. The company is supporting in-line videos within news feeds, and is also allowing users to recognize colleagues with badges.
Now you can attach videos to Yammer messages (just as you would with a Word document or PowerPoint presentation), and then users can play the videos directly in the feed, comment, and like videos. Users can also browse all uploaded videos that have been added to a company’s stream and search for videos by keyword. Yammer says that the video player is HTML5 compatible and works in the web browser on the iPhone and iPad. → Read More
The aging Nintendo DS Lite just got a breath of sweet life. If you don’t already own the fantastic handheld, perhaps its new, lower $99 price will bring you aboard the party bus. Nintendo just announced the price drop from $129, which in my mind, does nothing but create a bit more competition for the $249 3DS. Maybe this move is a precursor to Nintendo dropping the 3DS’ price next week at E3. → Read More
The Garmin eTrek series has long been the go-to outdoor GPS unit. They’re affordable, capable, and, as I’ve learned, able to survive numerous drops from a tree stand. Garmin just outed the latest editions that bring a far amount of new features to the line. → Read More
I wrote a book in 2004 about hackers, spammers, and other nerds and I thought I’d like to share it with the world. It’s currently available on Amazon and B&N and is $9.99 for the print edition and an inexplicable $9.49 in the Kindle edition. It is apparently not available for the Nook.
The book is 7 years old and is nearly out of print. It is about spammers, hackers, and viruses and I wrote it for a general audience like my dad who may or may not be all that technically savvy. It’s not a How-To as much as an exploration of the personalities in hacking.
According to Bookscan I sold 0 copies in the past few months and rather than allow it to molder, I’ve decided to give it away, with some caveats. → Read More
Haters gonna hate. Reports just hit that states “booby-trapped” Ikea alarm clocks recently exploded within stores in Belgium, France and The Netherlands. One calls the incidents fireworks where another uses the phrase small explosions that seem to cause nothing more than earaches. In at least one case, two clocks were simultaneously detonated remotely and a company spokesperson said the other incidents circumstances were similar.
I don’t about you, but in-store fireworks sounds like a grand idea to me. Anything to make the bimonthly Ikea trip a bit more lively, amirite? → Read More
When I got an iPad 2 test unit in the mail a few weeks back, one of the first things I noticed when browsing through apps was that the iWork suite of apps, Numbers, Pages, and Keynote, were all present in the App Store for the iPad. Immediately, I was overcome with jealousy. Of course, typing in Pages on the iPad isn’t the smoothest experience, but having access to these core apps is better than not, right? In any case, it looks like the iWork suite of apps has been doing pretty well on the iPad, as Apple has migrated those applications over to the iPhone and iPod touch. → Read More
Billed as a sort of affordable TED, The Inspire Conference is coming to London on 7-8 June.
The event, organised by the team behind Launch48, promises to bring “the most brilliant minds” together in Technology, Creativity and Entrepreneurship. And on that note our very own Mike Butcher is making an appearance. He’ll be doing an on-stage discussion/interview with Peter Vesterbacka of Rovio, makers of the phenomenon that is Angry Birds. You don’t get much more brilliant than that.
Overall, the event will feature 30+ speakers including representatives from The Times, Mozilla Labs, Spotify, MediaSift, Ogilvy, YouGov, Mendeley, Ushahidi, Soundcloud and others. → Read More
Toshiba may have delayed its Honeycomb tab, but the just-announced WT310 shows the company hasn’t delayed all products in this form factor. The Windows 7 slate runs on an Oak Trail Atom Z670 and 2GB while packing a 64GB SSD, 802.11b/g/n chipset, Bluetooth 3.0, 2MP front & 3MP rear camera along with USB 2.0, HDMI, and a SDHX card slot. Sounds great, right? Well, at least for a Windows 7 tablet, that is. There’s a bit of bad news though. Only the Japanese release was detailed and it seems that Toshiba has bypassed the consumer market and is releasing this one only to the enterprise crowd sometime next month for a yet-to-be announced price. → Read More
Pop over to iCloud.com today and you’ll see a doomed web page. The domain, which redirects to Xcerion’s CloudMe software, is sitting on some prime real estate, namely Apple’s new iCloud service.
In a short release, Apple confirmed the existence and name:
Apple® CEO Steve Jobs and a team of Apple executives will kick off the company’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) with a keynote address on Monday, June 6 at 10:00 a.m. At the keynote, Apple will unveil its next generation software – Lion, the eighth major release of Mac OS® X; iOS 5, the next version of Apple’s advanced mobile operating system which powers iPad®, iPhone® and iPod touch®; and iCloud®, Apple’s upcoming cloud services offering.
There goes all the fun rumors and wild speculation. Apple just released a press release detailing what’s coming next week at the company’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference. I’ll let that sink in for a moment. Apple pre-announced something — iOS 5 and OS X Lion to be exact. Oh, and something called iCloud, too.
It was already generally accepted that the two operating system were going to debut next week, but it’s rather strange that Apple would take to the wires with a pre-announcement. Please correct me if I’m wrong, save a teaser image showcasing a roman numeral and a large feline, the company hasn’t done this in recent history. The presser is after the break but it’s more of an advert for the developer’s conference. This pre-announcement either means Apple doesn’t have that much to show, or, hopefully, there’s so much that the company had to announce some ahead of time to make room in Steve’s keynote. → Read More
After buying Terracotta last week, Software AG is continuing its acquisition spree today. The provider of business process management solutions has acquired UK mobile development company Metismo. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Founded in 2007, Metismo provides a platform for the design and development of device independent mobile apps. The company’s write once – run anywhere software Bedrock platform for the development of mobile applications converts Java source code to native source code for different mobile devices. → Read More
Next week, Apple will unveil its much-anticipated iCloud service at its annual developer conference, WWDC. Apple even put out a press release this morning pre-announcing the service—something it almost never does. Details began leaking out in March, and then the name was pretty much confirmed when Apple bought the domain iCloud.com. Yet for all the talk and speculation, we still don’t know exactly what iCloud will look like, or what services it will include.
Here is what we know so far (or at least what we think we know): → Read More
Earlier this year, Yuri Milner and Ron Conway’s SV Angel announced a new fund that offers all Y Combinator startups $150,000 in convertible debt. Not only is The Start Fund a brilliant investment strategy, but the news was also a big win for Y Combinator and the startups housed and developed in the incubator. And it was only a matter of time before other incubators and funds caught on to the idea and emulated a similar strategy. Today, New World Ventures, one of the Midwest’s largest early stage funds, is partnering with Chicago incubator Excelerate Labs to offer their own version of the Start Fund.
Excelerate, which launched its incubator last year, will now offer its entrepreneurs $50,000 in convertible debt from New World Ventures, with no discount or cap. The money is available for Excelerate’s 2011 class of ten startups. Roughly one-third of the money is available for draw down during the Summer and the remainder is available after Demo Day in August. → Read More
Continuing our series of interviews with companies in the Silicon Roundabout area of London (we’re calling this The Roundabout Tapes), we went to interview Mixcloud.
The on-demand radio service wants to be the ‘YouTube of radio’. Online radio is very much a digital media orphan; languishing in a fragmented space while innovations in other aspects of streaming media have come thick and fast over the last few years. → Read More
Magma, the platform that helps magazine publishers (both dead tree and online) streamline their workflow, has secured $350k from Syddansk Teknologisk Innovation (SDTI).
A sort of ‘Basecamp for magazine publishers’, Magma was founded in July 2010 by Andrew Dahl, whose had stints at Amazon, Expedia and PricewaterhouseCoopers, and Sebastian Stockmarr, a User Experience Designer who has worked with Benjamin Media, one of Denmark’s largest publishers. It helps streamline magazine publishing – an area that is said to be seeing a resurgence because of new digital devices like the iPad – by offering collaborative tools for copywriters, editorial, layout designers and ad planning. → Read More
Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 owners: don’t forget to put a smile on this morning when you get dressed because the sweetest Eclair of last year is headed your way. Sony Ericsson today announced the release of the update to Android 2.1 Eclair to all Xperia X10 owners on AT&T’s network. → Read More
