Hitachi subsidiary Hitachi Information Systems has announced [JP] the development of a next-generation RFID tag today. What’s new about it is that the tag withstands the heat of welding: in other words, companies don’t need to drill screw holes anymore to put them into place. Hitachi says that their new tags can be welded into place in just 10 seconds, whereas conventional ones take around 5… → Read More
Sometimes big companies do silly things, we all know that. But why exactly Toyota America has decided to use Hatsune Miku, a virtual idol barely known outside Japan, as the promo character for a new Corolla campaign, is beyond my understanding. → Read More
Ah, robots. When they’re not busy planning world domination, they apparently play Angry Birds just like the rest of us. OptoFidelity, a Finnish company that specializes in machine vision and optical measurement technology, in addition to other things I don’t understand, recently produced a physical robot that knows how to kill nasty green pigs.
It most certainly beats the crap out of this… → Read More
Exclusive: Location-based mobile advertising company JiWire has raised $20 million in new funding led by Trident Capital with Comcast Interactive Capital, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Panorama Capital, and Norwest Venture Partners also participated in the financing. With the current funding, JiWire’s total capital raised to date is $45 million.
JiWire offers a highly targeted, location-based… → Read More
Pittsburgh-based The Resumator, which aims to “take the hassle out of hiring”, has secured $700,000 in funding led by Rincon Venture Partners, with Paige Craig, ff Venture Capital and Christopher Muenchhoff participating.
The Resumator is a graduate of the May 2009 AlphaLab program, a startup accelerator program run by seed stage investor Innovation Works, which also participated in the round. → Read More
Videos: Brainwave-Controlled Cat Ears “Necomimi” Gameboys… Innnnnn… Spaaaace Smithsonian Announces Art Of Video Games Exhibition Winners An Atari 810 Disk Drive For MicroSD – Built To Scale LA Noire To Ship On Three Discs For 360, One For PS3 → Read More
UK-based security software maker Sophos has acquired Astaro, a privately-held provider of network security solutions.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Astaro booked $56 million in billings last year, which makes it the fourth largest dedicated unified threat management (UTM) provider in the world. → Read More
Peixe Urbano, Brazil’s largest daily deal site (Groupon is a close second), has closed a “significant growth capital” investment from General Atlantic and Tiger Global Management, the company tells me. The size of the round isn’t being disclosed, but these firms only tend to get involved when at least tens of millions of dollars, and often hundreds of millions, are invested. This was a primary… → Read More
I thought I had Google’s PR and launch strategy all figured out a couple of months ago. There haven’t been, and won’t be, any big “this changes everything” announcements around social, I said. Because, well, no matter how great their products are, it’ll be hard to shine next to Facebook. All of my sources in and around Google have said that post was essentially correct and reflected Google’s… → Read More
Oh dear, this isn’t good. HTC’s Flyer tablet, which we saw in Barcelona at MWC, has set itself apart with its unique (among today’s tablets) pen input. Of course, it’s not a resistive screen and the stylus isn’t just a pointer — it’s a separate piece of electronics, like those used on Wacom tablets, and according to Best Buy, it’s going to run you… → Read More
I would take this report with a grain of salt, but it seems a little IRC lurker-bird told CNET that the same hackers who hit both PSN and SOE are going for a third strike this weekend. It’s not clear where these secret hacker talks are taking place other than on IRC somewhere, and no details were given aside from that a third attack was forthcoming. FUD? Fabrication? Or confidence? You be… → Read More
LA Noire, one of the biggest games on the table this year, will be shipping for Microsoft’s system on three separate discs, and while they assure us it’s “hassle-free,” it’s still three discs. The PS3 version will fit on one 25GB Blu-ray disc. Now, I’m not saying one version is going to be better than the other (or all I know, the PS3 version has higher load… → Read More
Self-publishing content company Helium has raised another 10 million in debt financing according to a SEC filing from earlier today. Listed on the the filing are President Mark Renalli, and board members Ann Bushell and John Paloian from RR Donnelly, Joseph Farrelly of Interpublic Group, Anne Kennedy of Beyond Ink, Steve Pogorzelski, David Weild IV and William Huff. There is no indication of who… → Read More
Creative is offering their new PMPs, the ZEN M300. Price at $40 to $90 these tiny MP3/Video players have Bluetooth support and a micro-SD slot and FM radio. They come in 4, 8, and 16GB sizes and they come in black, white, red or yellow. The M100 is exactly the same but without Bluetooth.
Creative has been doing great stuff in the speaker world recently, especially with their unique Bluetooth… → Read More
There are a number of barebones/mass-market low-cost devices out there, many of them aimed at the huge developing world market, hoping to outfit people with basic PC functionality for as little cost as possible. The OLPC is among the most famous, but perhaps the most luxurious: with a cutting-edge screen, built-in keyboard and networking, and so on, it has perhaps aimed too high, resulting in (as… → Read More
Earlier today, AOL’s Head of AIM Products Jason Shellen sent an email to the entire company urging people not to share its contents with people outside of the company. Even though we’re a part of AOL, we didn’t get that email. Well, that is until someone was kind enough to leak it to us. Hey, we are not outside of the company so that’s fair right? And since we didn’t technically get the email, I… → Read More
The buzzword of the year is “cloud,” and it carries with it an implication that your data is somewhere magical and safe, and in a way, it is. But there’s no getting around the fact that our appetite for storage is increasing by leaps and bounds, whether it’s stored locally or remotely. There’s always the possibility of catastrophic failure, and of course the flip side of that is that there is… → Read More
Qwerly, which originally pitched itself as a “DNS for people”, used to have profile pages along the lines of About.me. But no more. As of today the startup is pivoting (my apologies) and shutting profiles in favour of doubling down on its growing API business.
In an email to users today, CEO and founder Max Niederhofer told users that over the last few months demand for integrating Qwerly data… → Read More
“The online farmers will not be able to choose to grow cannabis or bananas, but undoubtedly there will be some strange decisions, some decisions I would not have made.” — Richard Morris, farmer
Because it’s hard hitting journalism week here at TC (and pretty much every week in my world!) I’m just going to throw this one out there: Some actual farmers in the UK have decided to turn their farm into… → Read More
Now here’s an exhibit I would be tempted to spend some time on. The Smithsonian has been working on putting together a collection of games for an “Art of Video Games” exhibition, exploring “the 40-year evolution of video games as an artistic medium” — and believe it or not, it’s actually respectful and comprehensive. What, video games being treated seriously as a cultural and artistic force? → Read More
There may be some truth to the idea that some people get turned off coding because it’s often restricted to simple input-output stuff at first, tied to a screen filled with text. Carnegie Mellon, a hotbed of roboticism, has decided to make introductory programming (with an eye to to robots) a little more accessible. They’ve put together a little robot that’s easy to code for and can be used to… → Read More
After raising a whopping $90 million last year, Palantir Technologies appears to be raising another big round. According to an SEC filing, the company has just raised $50 million in new funding. This would bring Palantir’s total funding to $175 million. The company declined to comment on the filing.
Founded in 2004 by former PayPal employees and Stanford computer scientists, Palantir offers a… → Read More
This is the twee-est disk drive I’ve ever seen! Those of you who are old enough will remember the Atari 400 and 800 systems, with their separate disk drive, the 810. This Rossum character has put together a working replica of the 810 that takes MicroSD cards – at about a hundredth the size. → Read More
Residents of Half Moon Bay California, there’s no need to be worried. That large roar you hear is likely the collective cheers coming from GoPro’s HQ. The Californian company just announced a new round of funding and that Best Buy is now selling most of its product line based around the popular HD Hero camcorder.
The founding comes from Riverwood Capital, Steamboat Ventures, Sageview Capital… → Read More
Today during her keynote talk at Social Loco, Google VP of Location and Local Services Marissa Mayer outlined some of the core goals driving Google’s local and location strategies, and how social will tie into that. The gist: Google wants to create serendipitous experiences, and to present you with contextually relevant information before you even search for it. But there are still plenty of… → Read More
We covered brainwave-controlled wheelchairs from Japan before, so why not brainwave-controlled cat ears, dubbed Necomimi? The wearer concentrates or sees something interesting and the ears stand up. And when you relax, your decreasing brain activity makes the ears fall down. No, I am not making this up. → Read More
There are a lot of gigantic phones being released these days, but what about those of us who like a more diminutive form factor? Sony-Ericsson has our back, it looks like, and is releasing a pair of Android 2.3 handsets that number among the smallest out there. → Read More
To say that our latest contest was a success would be… a bit of an understatement. Most of our giveaways pull in a few hundred entries, or maybe a bit over a thousand. Between comments here on MobileCrunch, Facebook passphrase hunters, and those who took the time to dig up all of the eggs we hid around the site, our giveaway of the insanely awesome 1.5 Ghz Android Developer Device from… → Read More
Content platform Demand Media reported its first quarter 2011 results today, reporting revenue of $79.5 million, an increase of 48% compared to $53.6 million in Q1 2010, beating analyst expectations of $69.49 million in Q1 revenue. The company reported a net loss of $5.6 million compared to a net loss of $4.1 million in Q1 2010. Net loss per share was $0.13 compared to $0.94 in Q110.
In a… → Read More
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