While Baitr didn’t win the TC Disrupt Hackathon, it did win the minds and hearts of those in attendance who had a tendency towards black humor. Baitr, a Launchrock-type viral launch page that does nothing but visualize your email falling into the abyss, isn’t at all useful. But it is funny.
Says creator Peter Watts, “Launchrock is good for entrepreneurialism but it’s also bad [for users] because… → Read More
Facebook shares on private secondary markets like SecondMarket and SharesPost spiked briefly in March to $34 – an $85 billion valuation. But they settled down to around $31.50 after that and have mostly stayed around that level since then. But something caused the shares to surge past that old record to a solid $35 per share in this week’s auction. Our guess is that newly public LinkedIn’s… → Read More
The latest Disrupt has wrapped, but given the volume of news it created and the rate at which posts were pushing each other off the front page, you could be forgiven for missing a few items or videos here and there. Don’t worry, though: we’ve got the highlights of the show collected right here.
Actually, that’s not entirely true. We still have a ton of backstage talks and other footage we’re… → Read More
For as long as I can remember, there has been one app that has constantly held the top paid app spot in Apple’s App Store: Angry Birds. Sure, other apps surge to the top briefly. But Angry Birds always comes flying right back. But a new app appears to be bucking that trend. Today is day 3 of The Heist‘s reign, and sales are quickening.
As The Loop noted after a partial day 1, The Heist saw… → Read More
As we found out a few months back, all of the old T-Mobile/Danger Sidekicks out there are headed for greener pastures early next week. Come May 31st, the ol’ Danger data servers will given a belly rub, one last defrag, then will be unceremoniously taken out back and shot.
Here’s something we didn’t know, though: if you’ve still got any important photos, contacts, calendars, or notes on that… → Read More
I was just rewatching the 1995 classic Johnny Mnemonic and, nestled amid the overwrought actors and odd storyline, I heard something that stuck out: mention of a Thomson Eyephone… or iPhone. If that doesn’t mean that William Gibson isn’t on the cutting edge of future-tech, I don’t know who is and I find it charming that he once thought that Thomson would survive past the new millenium.
I also… → Read More
This 6-inch screen displays black and white e-ink text and images at 800×600 pixels and can roll around a tube the circumference of a dime. If this isn’t the future of print, I don’t know what is.
Designed and manufactured by Polymer Vision, the screen can be rolled and unrolled 25,000 times. The question, obviously, is why would you need a rollable display? Well, as ereaders become ubiquitous… → Read More
With WWDC quickly approaching, the rumor mills are heating up with what we should expect at Apple’s annual conference known for big announcements. We’ve learned a little bit more that speaks to what to expect — including a couple of big, widely-requested things.
First of all, a lot of sites seem to be working themselves into a tizzy about the so-called “iPhone 4S”. While it has already been… → Read More
It’s hard out there for a ninja these days. It’s difficult to find commissions and getting the right gear and training is becoming increasingly expensive. Where do you buy your katana? Your tabi shoes? And, most important, your collapsable shuriken?
Well, you’re in luck. A young man named Zach wanted to make a collapsable ninja star for his 7 year old brother. With a little plastic and some elbow… → Read More
Despite the fact the number of PCs in China and the U.S. are pretty similar, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer claimed on Wednesday that the company sees 95 percent less revenue coming from China than the States. Why, you ask? Piracy, of course. Other tech companies have had the same problem in China, which could indicate that the Chinese government hasn’t done enough to stop the acquisition of costly… → Read More
Depending on how you’re counting (whether or not you’re including slightly varied models or not, for example), Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 partners have released either slightly over or slightly under 10 different handsets since the platform’s debut. In that same time, how many Android phones has Microsoft released? Zero. Of course, no one would really expect Microsoft to… → Read More
Shares in Solazyme, the makers of algae biofuels and algae-based oils and chemicals used in health and beauty products, began trading on Nasdaq under the symbol SZYM.O on Friday. The business set an initial public offering price at $18, but its stock opened at $20 and traded between $19.60 and $22.00 throughout the day, with 10.98 million shares sold, raising about $197.6 million for the… → Read More
Munchonme is a daily deals site for food. But wait, before you click away to a slideshow about hot coders, Munchonme has got some features that might just reroute you from relying on the big G and coming back to its sweet sweet embrace.
First of all Munchonme focuses on giving discounts on specific dishes, instead of onanything in the entire restaurant. Any business who’s been a victim of the… → Read More
Memorial Day isn’t usually a gift-giving holiday, but Amazon’s Memorial Day sale may put you in the mood to treat yourself. Almost 20 4G phones will be listed for free (with a contract, of course) on Amazon’s site on Monday, including some pretty top-of-the-line devices like the HTC Thunderbolt, Samsung Droid Charge, LG Revolution, and Google Nexus S 4G.
Update: See update behind the jump → Read More
The battle between Texas Instruments and calculator hobbyists rages on, as TI seeks to keep its OS locked away from third-party developers. After the calculator hacking community discovered the independent tool Ndless (which allows for third-party development on TI’s platform), TI has spent the last year updating its OS to prevent downgrading to version 1.1, which is necessary to run Ndless. → Read More
Stepan Pachikov, founder of Evernote, is a fascinating individual and very much the model of the Russian intellectual who was driven by sheer curiosity to create the concepts behind Evernote and thus one of today’s most successful startups. A founder of ParaGraph, ParaScript, he studied at the Academy of Sciences of the old USSR where his dissertation was the use of fuzzy logic. And in some sense… → Read More
While at the Lint Conference in Moscow this week I stumbled across something quite special. Two of the authors behind a new how-to-guide for Russians all about Twitter.
This is significant – after all, no-one would even bother with writing an entire book, unless there was a growing curiosity about the platform both amongst consumers and business people wanting to learn more about using it as a… → Read More
Most options for wood used in decks, outdoor furniture and siding are rarely entirely earth friendly, since they are often treated with heavy metals or toxic chemicals, or logged from unsustainable forests. One company is innovating in the space by altering the chemistry of the wood itself to make it weather and decay resistant. → Read More
If you were a fan of the Asus Eee Pad Transformer, get excited, because the company seems almost as excited to tease its upcoming products as we are to get a peak at them, which will happen next week during Computex in Taipei. Asus has already slated a June launch for its Eee Pad MeMo, and pencilled in a reminder for us on its Facebook page. But one picture promises “A Tablet That Jumps Out At… → Read More
When it comes to building a web startup, the devil’s often in the details. And keeping track of those details — be it how far users get in your signup process, or how often they’re clicking a certain button — can be a real pain.
Mixpanel is a startup that’s looking to solve that problem by giving sites an easy-to-integrate analytics solution. And today it’s announcing that it’s raised… → Read More
I love how a design like that of the RSW (Rama Swiss Watch) Nazca is bound to be so polarizing. I think that RSW themselves gets a kick out of that. I mean, from a purely business-oriented motive you’d want to make timepieces that appealed to more people, not less people right? Yet despite this RSW continues to tread forth in the design of timepieces that appeal to just some people, but certainly… → Read More
BlackBerry maker Research In Motion (RIM) is not having the best year so far. The April launch of RIM’s BlackBerry PlayBook received mixed reviews, to put it nicely, of what many called a “half-baked” product. And just a few days earlier, co-CEO Mike Lazaridis shut down an interview half-way through after a BBC reporter pushed questions on Indian security. Today, the United States District… → Read More
Quora co-founder Charlie Cheever not only doesn’t want to sell his hot start-up but – as he told me backstage earlier this week at Disrupt – he even has an explicit non-goal of not selling the company.
Non-goals or not, Cheever has a lot to smile about. Traffic is up to record levels at Quora and the site continues to be a paragon of innovation in the social space. In this interview he… → Read More
With WWDC quickly approaching, the rumor mills are heating up with what we should expect at Apple’s annual conference known for big announcements. We’ve learned a little bit more that speaks to what to expect — including a couple of big, widely-requested things.
First of all, a lot of sites seem to be working themselves into a tizzy about the so-called “iPhone 4S”. While it has already been… → Read More
As we’ve suspected for a long time, Apple is very close to launching an online music service which may go by the name iCloud. The basic idea is that it will mirror your iTunes collection online so that it is available on any device without clunky cable syncing.
While getting rid of those cables will be a big step forward, if iCloud is nothing more than a music locker service it won’t go far… → Read More
While I can’t imagine anyone would want to perform the feats demonstrated in this video, what you’re seeing is basically a hack that allows users to control PC programs – including Powerpoint – using the Kinect. Why? Because it’s there.
At IIT Delhi, a technologist named Ramaprasanna showed off his proof-of-concept demo using an unreleased Kinect SDK. Obviously you’re not going to get this on… → Read More
Google made a couple bold statements about its upcoming Chromebook tablet, many of which have certainly excited consumers, particularly the promise of an end to security hassles. In the Chromebook launch announcement, Google claimed that “Chromebooks have many layers of security built in so there is no anti-virus software to buy and maintain. Even more importantly, you won’t spend hours… → Read More
Respected European venture capital associate Katy Turner is leaving Eden Ventures to join video advertising startup Videoplaza, working as their head of marketing out of London. Turner told us on email:
“Working with the fantastic team at Eden has been a great experience – the early stage startup space in Europe is hugely dynamic right now and I have had the luck to work with some really exciting… → Read More
http://www.collegehumor.com/moogaloop/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=6507690&use_node_id=true&fullscreen=1 While I think a lot of start-up folk have moved away from this sort of buzzword garbage, it seems that this pair still exists in the world of web-enabled iPad-centric hashtag coding for early adopting morphologies with high topological connection value. via Dvorak → Read More
Late last year, travel search engine Kayak filed for an IPO, aiming to raise $50 million. The company just released a new version of its S-1 today, with updated financials. The company will list its stock on the NASDAQ under the symbol “KYAK.”
For the three months ending March 31 of this year, Kayak generated $53 million in revenue, which is up 43 percent from the same period in 2010. Net… → Read More
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