How would you feel about an iPhone app that claimed to be able to tell if that mole on your arm was not looking too healthy? That’s the claim of Skin Scan, an iPhone medical app available now on the Apple App Store. The startups has secured €50,000 Euro in seed funding from Seedmoney.
Either Skin Scan is going to get people to see a doctor earlier, thus potentially saving lives. Or it’s going to make hypochondriacs of us all. I can’t decide which. Suffice it to say this appears to be one clever app. Because it also asks for your location, Skin Scan is also producing a live map of how our moles are looking around the globe. The implication for the app are very interesting – Skin Scan could end up mapping skin cancer rate across the planet, if it gets this right.
The app takes a picture of a mole on the skin, then uses a proprietary algorithm to look at the fractal-like shapes which exist in human skin (have a look up close, you can see little triangles in normal skin, honest). It then calculates if the shape of the mole means it is is developing normally, or abnormally thus in a into a potential cancerous melanoma. → Read More
Fellow Seattlite and Etsy seller Erica Hanson has put together a great little tool bag for discerning bikers: the Mopha. It’s waxed canvas and consists of ten of little pockets for you to put your patch kits, hex wrenches, spare tube, and all that jazz. Then roll it up and strap it to your frame. Hell of a good-looking thing, and the simple, rugged construction seems like it should last quite a few years. I’d hide snacks in it too, I think. At $38 (plus $6 for shipping), I’d say it’s a pretty good deal. Update: Oops, someone bought it. Try this one if you still want one. [via Cool Material and The Awesomer] → Read More
Disrupt runners-up, Cloudflare have been getting a lot of attention recently, thanks to the company’s role in helping LulzSec’s website stay online. In fact the hackers even gave Cloudflare a shoutout on their Twitter feed — offering to trade rum for a premium account — leading to a surge in customer sign-ups.
Of course, co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince is quick to point out that the company takes — at best — a neutral approach to hosting LulzSec, and that protecting the hackers has only served to make Cloudflare’s systems more resilient for all of its other customers. Still, it’s a pretty ironic twist for a company which promises to protect websites against DDOS attacks and other nefarious activity.
Keen to understand the company’s position on helping hackers and on sharing user data with the authorities, I invited Prince into the TCTV studio for a quick interview. → Read More
Back in the old days, in Europe, TV selection was pretty limited. When they started offering satellite, you had a few free channels and a few paid channels but enterprising hackers figured out how to decode all of the channels using a breakout cart and the C64′s super processor. The resulting solution cost about $120 way back when and saved a bunch of Euro-hackers quite a bit of money. → Read More
Earlier this morning Twitter released “Twitter for Newsrooms,” its primer on how to use Twitter to gather and report news in the 21st century.
#TfN is Twitter’s official nudge to old school reporters, a heavy handed reminder to get with the program and embrace Twitter as media production and consumption device. → Read More
Ambitious goals are nothing new to HTC. As last year came to a close, the Taiwan-based phone maker promised to sell 60 million handsets in 2011, three times what it sold in 2010. With a good six months left before we see if that last goal will be met, HTC has vowed to add another 1,370 retail stores in mainland China, bringing its total to 2,000. → Read More
You know you’re in a bubble when tech journalists leave publications to join startups. The other sign of course is MBA graduates turning their nose up at a cozy bank job. But the former has just happened to us, in the shape of my awesome colleague Steve O’Hear, who is leaving Techcrunch Europe to become CEO of a new startup called Beepl.
Annoyingly, Steve isn’t saying publicly what Beepl actually does, although the strap line reads a “smarter way to question the world.” They also call themselves an “expertise platform” and “semantic technology company”, it says here…. Whatever. It’s clearly some lame kind of Quora clone and he’ll be back in 6 months asking for his old job back. → Read More
A 60% share of the the leading daily deal site in Switzerland, Deindeal.ch, has been acquired by Ringier, a Swiss media company. Zurich-based Deindeal.ch is said to be larger than Groupon in the region, and continuing on a good growth path. Terms were were not disclosed.
Deindeal.ch has been online since March 2010 and has over 100 employees. It offers daily deals with at least 50 per cent discount on lifestyle products, as per the Groupon model (which has been roundly trashed, but perhaps it’s working in niche markets?).
Management will stay on at the company. → Read More
A new iPhone is approaching — this, everyone knows. While WWDC came and went without an announcement, this was expected. Instead, this year it will be all about the fall — with new hardware hitting just in time for the formal launch of iOS 5. But what exactly will the new hardware be? An “iPhone 5″ or an “iPhone 4S”? Or, better yet, both?
That’s the latest rumor making headlines today, based on a report by Deutsche Bank’s Chris Whitmore, an analyst. Now, analysts typically have a horrible track record when it comes to correctly predicting Apple moves. And when I say “horrible”, I mean that you’d have a better shot correctly predicting what Apple is going to do by throwing darts at a board… with a blindfold on. But — there has been some evidence that backs up this latest claim (which is probably why they made it in the first place). → Read More
We first wrote about SocialBicycles when it was just a student project in New York. Now it’s going totally legit with a new website and Kickstarter project that promises to bring real bike sharing to the Windy Apple.
Pledges of $25 or more get a free sharing account plus a credit while $50 gets you a T-shirt. For $500 you get “a 2 hour bike ride around New York” with the founders. “We can talk bikes, technology, and start-ups. BYOB(ike) or if the timing is right we can ride Social Bicycles!” A real treat, to be sure. → Read More
PayPal has hit 100 million active users. The company confirmed the milestone today. Last week, the company announced that it was upping estimates of the amount of mobile payments transactions using the technology this year; doubling the estimate to $3 billion in mobile total payments volume (TPV) in 2011.
At the end of last year, PayPal, which is owned by eBay, had around 94.4 million active users, and has been adding approximately one million active accounts per month. It’s unclear, however, what PayPal considers as an ‘active user.’ → Read More
Just a couple months ago, Apple and Samsung were basically BFFs. Of course, they were still competitors, but their relationship was symbiotic. Samsung produced the A4 chips that run Apple’s iPhone 4 and the A5 chips found in the iPad 2, and in return, Apple became Samsung’s largest customer, providing the South Korea-based company with millions of dollars in revenue. However, the unending patent battle between the two companies seems to have led Apple to dump Samsung as a producer of its A6 chipset, opting for Taiwan SemiConductor Manufacturing Company. → Read More
Social gaming company CrowdStar has hit a milestone today, passing one million downloads of its recently launched iOS game Top Girl in 10 days.
Top Girl is a female-focused mobile role-playing game that allows players to create a fashionable avatar and then climb up the fashion social ladder, collecting money by doing modeling jobs, buying new outfits, and going to clubs. The app is free to play but charges users for virtual goods. → Read More
I got a chance to play around with Lacie’s newly announced Porsche Design P’9220 mobile hard drive and one thing is certain: this little 5-inch hard drive is one sexy beast. If we’re judging this book by it’s cover, I’d give the Porsche P’9220 a ten, hands-down. It has this nice brushed metal aluminum finish, sharp lines, and even sharper corners (seriously, be careful), and is light/small enough to fit in a back pocket. → Read More
Want the 3D experience without the glasses and with the headache? You’re in luck. Brando is offering a $180 glasses-less 3D PMP that plays multiple file types and presumably plays naked-eye 3D video. → Read More
Another day, another sold-out Mac product that points to a refresh. This time Best Buy is the culprit, noting that current MBA notebooks are not shipping from its stores. This usually means that a refresh is coming within the next few days and is most probably a minor upgrade of little interest to the average user but that will piss people off who just bought an MBA in the last week to no end. → Read More
TechCrunch Europe is an interesting gig. There are 27 members of the “European Union”, 48 geographical European countries and territories, and… 51 participating countries in the Eurovision Song Contest (surely, the ultimate gold standard of a chaotic definition of Europe). But we love them all. Whether you are working on a startup in Romania, or with a VC in Mayfair, London, or a teenager in a Berlin bedroom in building the next Google, TechCrunch Europe is interested. But it’s impossible to cover everything going on, so we like to use this platform to give YOU a voice. → Read More
Temperatures neared the 40 degree Celsius mark around Tokyo over the weekend – reason enough for Thanko to start selling the so-called USB Hinyari Cushion Ver. 2 [JP], which essentially is a USB-powered cooler/cushion for your butt. The Tokyo-based crap gadget maker has offered a very similar item last summer, and apparently that cushion sold well enough to be updated this year. → Read More
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