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 release an Android phone, of course — but get this: Microsoft has likely made around 5x more money from Android than they have from Windows Phone 7. → 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 company.
Solazyme’s S-1 filing on March 11, 2011 confirmed its intention to go public, officially. Speculation about an IPO for the company preceded that by many months in the cleantech industry, however.
Algae-derived marine and jet fuels made by Solazyme have been used and tested by the U.S. Navy. Prior to going public the company… → 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 Groupon effect knows why this is important, namely because restaurants can prepare for the onslaught in advance, overloading on the inventory they expect will sell out. → 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. Version 2.1’s anti-downgrade protection was hacked last summer, and just a month ago, calculator hobbyists broke into OS 3.0.1. → 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 You,” which leads us to believe that Asus has a 3D-capable device headed our way, as well. → 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 another $1.25 million from an all star roster of investors, with new investors including Sequoia Capital (Jim Goetz and Roelof Botha) and Keith Rabois. That’s in addition to existing investors Max Levchin and Michael Birch, who are themselves experts at tracking viral data. The company previously participated in Y Combinator and raised $500k from Birch and Levchin in Feburary 2010.
Unlike traditional analytics services that focus on page views and uniques, Mixpanel is all about on-page actions: how many times users are activating a feature, how far in a flow they’re getting, and so on. All of this is tracked in real-time. → 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 not all people. So what about you? What are you feelings on the Nazca collection? → 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 Court for the Southern District of New York dropped a cherry on top of that unlucky sundae, in the form of a class-action suit. → 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 explains the difference between Quora and Wikipedia, and we get into many other orthogonal discussions as well. But I wonder if Cheever is tempting fate by having such an explicit non-goal. After all, he’ll look ‘a right Charlie’ if Quora gets snapped up in the frenzy of acquisitions that will probably mark the post LinkedIn-IPO social marketplace. → 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 widely reported that there will not be any major hardware announcements at WWDC this year, people seem to be letting their imaginations get the best of them anyway. This site, for example, notes that Apple is pushing for British journalists to fly out for WWDC. And today, there’s a report about Australian journalists getting the same message. Both conclude this must be for the “iPhone 4S”. → 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 towards transforming digital music, as BusinessWeek proclaims. Apple’s iCloud will be iTunes online, with a few features that make it slightly better than Google’s Music Beta—namely, I won’t have to spend hours uploading my music collection and I will get better quality audio files for some songs. That’s all great, but I am not sure it is enough for me to pay a monthly subscription. If it’s bundled with MobileMe, it certainly would make that service more appealing, but I wouldn’t pay for iCloud as a standalone service if that is all there is to it. And certainly, this could turn out to be only one part of a revamped MobileMe service. Depending on what else will be added, iCloud could help push more MobileMe subscriptions overall. → 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 your Dell any time soon, but it’s interesting to see the direction Kinect on the PC could take. → 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 fighting your computer to set it up and keep it up to date.” Sounds nice, right? Well, Trend Micro’s security consultant Rik Ferguson vigorously disagrees, claiming that the search giant risks repeating the same security mistakes Apple made. → 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 income for the quarter came in at $8.2 million representing 266 percent growth from the same period last year. → Read More
Yesterday, PayPal filed a lawsuit against Google and two of its executives for stealing trade secrets. The lawsuit came on the same day that Google announced its mobile wallet plans involving Android phones with NFC chips. The two executives, Osama Bedier and Stephanie Tilenius, previously worked at PayPal. In fact, Bedier was in charge of negotiating a deal with Google on behalf of PayPal for inclusion of PayPal as a payment mechanism in Android phones. The deal fell through and Google hired away Bedier instead, who then helped build Google’s own mobile wallet product.
At least that is PayPal’s side of the story. Last night, I asked Google for a comment. It took them a while, but a spokesperson just emailed me the following statement: → Read More
Pixable, a startup that develops sleek social photo creation and categorization tools for Facebook and other photo sharing sites, has released an infographic today that includes a number of impressive stats regarding profile pictures on the social network.
Pixable’s service, which has 800,000 users, allows people to use of all their Facebook and image sharing site photo content like captions, tagging information, comments, and birthdays to make albums, slideshows, calendars and nor artwork. Pixable’s browser-based simplifies the creation of albums, making it easy to use for anyone. One of Pixable’s early applications was a nifty tool that allows you to make mosaics of your Facebook photos. → Read More
We know that Google has big ambitions for flight search, as the search giant dropped $700 million on travel search software developer ITA Software. Today, the company just announced a few new flight search features that have been integrated into search (but do not use ITA’s technology….yet).
Now, when you search for a destination on Google, you can see which airlines serve that specific route and when they fly. For example, if you search for flights from ‘New York to Chicago,’ you’ll see schedules of all the non-stop flights that serve that route, which airlines fly, and times. You can access the full timetable by clicking on “Schedule of non-stop flights.” → Read More
