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
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
The US Supreme Court just ruled on Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association (formerly Schwarzenegger v. EMA) and deemed a 2005 California law unconstitutional, which prohibited the sale of violent video games to minors. Simply put, California cannot ban the rental or sale of violent video games to children. This was previously banned by the 2005 law introduced by State Senitor Leland Yee and punished offending retailers with a $1,000 fine for each infraction.
The SCOTUS ruled in a 7-2 vote that the law was unconstitutional. → Read More
Another day, another unfortunate piece of news out of Groupon’s international operations. Today it’s that SoSata, Groupon’s Indian site, got hacked. In a letter to users, Groupon encouraged them to change user names and passwords and assured them no financial information was compromised because none is stored on the site. Compared to the flood of angry headlines about Groupon of late, this is nothing.
But the minor blight comes on the same day that the number two daily deals site in the US, Living Social, is also getting more serious about international expansion. The company has acquired three small daily deals sites: DealKeren of Indonesia, its parent company Ensogo which operates in Thailand and the Philippines and GoNabit which operates in Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Lebanon, Jordan and Kuwait. Living Social also announced it’s offering daily deals in the Netherlands. This brings LivingSocial’s global reach to 21 countries.
Assuming Living Social has been watching Groupon carefully, it may be able to avoid making the same costly international Groupon made gobbling up sites in far flung parts of the world. That could give Living Social, long seen as the daily deal also-ran, its best opportunity to go head-to-head with the soon-to-be-public market leader. → Read More
TVs with integrated HDDs and Blu-recorders are nothing new anymore, but Mitsubishi Electric is trying to score with a specific selling point: its compact design. Their REAL LCD-22BLR500, announced [JP] today, is an all-in-one device that houses a 22-inch screen, a 500GB HDD, and a Blu-ray recorder with AVREC support. → Read More
As if it was planned this way, GM just introduced the 2012 Transformers Special Edition Camaro days before the new Dark of the Moon hits theaters. This special edition RS is done up Bumblebee style, complete with the black on yellow color scheme, 20-inch black wheels (yum), and, of course, an Autobot shield logo. So yeah, it’s just like the original Transformer’s Camaro but with a slightly different kit to celebrate the latest Transformer movie. Buyers can order the $3,000 kit this coming July with shipping expected for September. → Read More
The iOS hacking world is full of all kinds of crazy terms and phrases. “Cydia”. “DFU Mode”. “Saving your blobs.” That last one — the blob one — is a particularly important idea for those on the cutting edge of the jailbreak scene. To break down the concept as simply as I can: by saving a record of a few chunks of data (the SHSH “blob”) uniquely generated for your iPhone during a firmware upgrade, you can later downgrade (read: go back to) that firmware without iTunes throwing a hissy fit. Be it that you ever accidentally update to a build that just doesn’t seem to be jailbreakable, you can return to one that is. With iOS 5, however, this process seems to be on the way out. → Read More
A new Pew research survey of U.S. adults conducted in May, 2011 shows that ownership of electronic readers such as the Amazon Kindle or The Barnes & Noble Nook is now at 12 percent. The ownership of e-readers doubled from six months prior when it was 6 percent.
The adoption of e-readers continues to outpace tablets such as the iPad and Motorola Xoom. Only 8 percent of respondents said they won a tablet, compared to 5 percent six months earlier. So tablet ownership seems to be growing at a slower pace. → Read More
The world is getting a first look at Impermium, a new startup that aims to help sites fight growing user generated spam – spammy comments, hacked accounts and (my personal favorite) fraudulent registrations.
Sounds like a useful service. And the team behind it just makes it more compelling. CEO Mark Risher was known as Yahoo’s “Spam Czar” until he left in June 2010. Joining him from Yahoo are Vish Ramarao and Naveen Jamal. These guys have seen, and fought, a lot of spam over the years. → Read More
When we reported on the Nexus 4G, Google’s first Ice Cream Sandwich smartphone, we weren’t sure whether or not it would be a “pure Google” device or a handset made by one of the tech giant’s manufacturing partners. The inside source promised a “monster-sized” 720p display, a 4G radio of some kind, an an OMAP440 processor, but none of the leaked specs hinted at who would make the device.
Today, however, BGR’s source has given some new information about the handset that definitively answers our question. → Read More
In a little room underneath Basel I sit with the humble and talented Mr. Klaus Ulbrich of Temption Germany. Temption is one of those underdog watch brands that I have been rooting for, for years. I have written about their watches a lot on aBlogtoRead.com – and reviewed a few as well (such as the CGK203 and the Cameo). Which you can search for easily. This is the first time that I have actually gotten to meet Mr. Ulbrich and it is an honor to meet the man behind these watches. → Read More
We reviewed Addonics‘s first NAS adapter in early 2009, somehow missed the second version of the same, and now present our review of their NAS 3.0 Adapter. Like the previous iterations, the NAS 3.0 Adapter is an extremely small device. It sports two USB ports, an RJ-45 port, and a power socket. As with the original version, the power adapter is not a wall wart. Say what you want about Addonics products, at least they understand that consumers hate wall warts. → Read More
Three students at the University of Pennsylvania—Joseph Cohen, Dan Getelman, and Jim Grandpre—are quitting school to launch a new education startup called Coursekit, and they’ve raised $1 million in a seed round to do it. (Peter Thiel would be proud). The New York City startup just closed a seed round from Founder Collective, IA Ventures, Shasta Ventures and some angels.
Coursekit is like Facebook or Yammer for courses. Like many other students frustrated with Blackboard, the current online course management standard, the Coursekit founders think they can do a better job. “It is really a Blackboard replacement with a heavy emphasis on social networking,” says CEO Cohen. → Read More
The story goes that a seagall, the rat of the air, picked up this GoPro camera. The result? Well, just watch the video above. It’s pretty awesome. → Read More
