Despite being the resident Apple fanboy, I’m not going to try to defend the new Final Cut Pro X. I simply don’t use Final Cut enough to know how good or bad it is compared to the old version. But I will say this, the backlash is very predictable.
Apple completely changed a very popular piece of software — rewriting it from the ground up. People hate change. Revolt. Some changes are made. Everyone calms down and forgets. End of story. It happens time and time again. It’s just more striking when it happens with companies like Apple and Facebook because they’re among the only ones seemingly not afraid to upset their massive user bases. → Read More
Survival horror video game series Resident Evil has sold well over 45 million units since the first title came out back in 1996, on various platforms, for example the PlayStation 1, the Nintendo DS, or the iPhone. But there has never been a mobile social game in the series (“Biohazard” in Japan) – until this week. → Read More
A big (marketing and distribution) deal for Cellogic, makers of the fine FlyScreen mobile application: they’re teaming up with NTT DoCoMo, a big Japanese carrier.
Under the terms of the partnership agreement, NTT DoCoMo and a local Japanese location-based services company called Brilliant will be pushing FlyScreen onto the Japanese market, bringing it to millions of Android handset users. → Read More
Do you remember the LIFEBOOK TH40/D, the pretty nice-looking convertible tablet that Fujitsu unveiled last month? It now turns out that the Windows 7 device will not hit Japanese stores this month, even though Fujitsu announced just that just about five weeks ago. → Read More
The big day is here! June 24 is upon us and that can only mean one thing: glasses free 3D is here, delivered straight from the highly anticipated HTC Evo 3D. The Evo 3D goes on sale today from Sprint alongside HTC’s Evo View 4G tablet. → Read More
When OpenSky launched a year ago, it was a commerce platform for influential bloggers. Bloggers with a following would curate their own merchandise, OpenSky would source the goods from manufacturers, and split the profits with the bloggers. It sounded a hell of a lot better than the miniscule affiliate fees most bloggers were used to, but it didn’t work out. It never got past 5,000 bloggers with a reach of 100,000 unique visitors. “Mixing content and commerce was confusing to people,” says CEO John Caplan.
By November of last year, Caplan decided to start over with a slightly different concept, which OpenSky has been testing since January, and opened up in April. Instead of being distributed across 5,000 blogs, OpenSky is now “a social network for commerce.” With no marketing, in the space of a few weeks, OpenSky is now up to 200,000 members and one million unique visitors. And with only 50 curators instead of 5,000, it is selling hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of goods every week. Caplan refers to it as “Twitter meets HSN.” → Read More
If you happen to be a table tennis player who’s never able to find a partner to play with, here’s your chance: a Japanese company called Happinet is selling some kind of virtual table tennis game that requires neither a second person nor a ball to play. Their so-called Takkyuu High-Tension toy is all about sounds and rhythm (strange video below). → Read More
OneLogin, a cloud-based single identity platform for the enterprise, has raised $1.5 million in Series A funding from Charles River Ventures.
OneLogin allows enterprises of all sizes to centralize access control with a single login for business applications. OneLogin has integrated with over 1,700 applications including Salesforce, Google Apps, Zendesk, SugarCRM, KnowledgeTree and others to allow business users to access all of their apps within one sign-in and password. Other features include password management, multi-factor authentication, directory integration, and user provisioning. → Read More
Chinese search engine Baidu has made a $306 million investment in Qunar, travel search engine in China. The investment will make Baidu the majority shareholder of Qunar. Qunar had previously raised $25 million in funding. Previous investors include the Lehman Brothers, GSR Ventures Management, Mayfield Fund, and Tenaya Capital.
Founded in 2005, Qunar is basically the Kayak for China. The portal allows Chinese consumers to serach for air and rail tickets, hotels, and tour packages. The company also provides group-buying deals and user discussion forums for reviews. Currently Qunar is one of the most frequented travel search engines in China, listing more than 11,000 air routes and 102,000 hotels worldwide. → Read More
Video: Complete Hand Recognition With 5-Finger Mouse Amenbo (Video) Konapun: Making Tiny, Inedible Food For Fun And Profit (?) The UNISROBO Robot Looks A Lot Like NEC’s PaPeRo ThinkGeek Now Selling The FastMac U-Socket, The USB Wallplug Gunbrella Will Get You Shot For Sure Audyssey Lower East Side Speakers Attempt To Mimic The LES In All Its Shabby Glory → Read More
Despite being the resident Apple fanboy, I’m not going to try to defend the new Final Cut Pro X. I simply don’t use Final Cut enough to know how good or bad it is compared to the old version. But I will say this, the backlash is very predictable.
Apple completely changed a very popular piece of software — rewriting it from the ground up. People hate change. Revolt. Some changes are made. Everyone calms down and forgets. End of story. It happens time and time again. It’s just more striking when it happens with companies like Apple and Facebook because they’re among the only ones seemingly not afraid to upset their massive user bases. → Read More
Q&A network Stack Exchange will be launching Stack Overflow DevDays this fall, a two day conference targeting coders who want to brush up or dive into the latest programming technologies like MongoDB, HTML 5 and Coffeescript, with hour long tutorials put on by speakers culled from the developer community. → Read More
After nine months of testing in-stream Promoted Tweets on third party client Hootsuite, reports have surfaced today that Twitter’s head of monetization Adam Bain has been pushing a new in-timeline Promoted Tweets product during this week’s advertiser-heavy Canne Lions awards.
To the two of you that this comes to as a shock, one word: Inevitable. Twitter has made no secret of the fact that in-stream Promoted Tweets have been an eventual business model goal since April of 2010, when co-founder Biz Stone outlined a plan to launch them first on search on Twitter.com, later in 3rd party search and eventually in the user timeline. → Read More
I can’t write a full review of this game because I have no intention of finishing it. I am a huge fan of Dungeon Siege and its sequel, and of the hack ‘n slash genre in general, but I felt it to be my duty to warn you guys away from Dungeon Siege 3 right now, in case you were thinking about picking it up. I’ve played a little over two hours of the PC version of the game, which version (or port rather), it should be mentioned, was clearly an afterthought. I’m just going to list the things I jotted down during those first two hours. → Read More
Around 4 AM PDT this morning, Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling unveiled the latest addition to the massively successful series: a website called Pottermore, which will feature, among other things, Harry Potter eBooks (which have never been legally available to date) and thousands of words of new content describing the characters and world of Harry Potter.
But while the site now features a handful of screenshots, Rowling and the accompanying press material were still pretty vague about what exactly Pottermore is. Fortunately, as a long-time fan myself, I have a few guesses. So let’s try to cast some light on what this all means. Imperi- err, Lumos!
First, the biggest immediate news: this will mark the first time Harry Potter novels will be available in eBook formats. → Read More
It seems that Venture investors are none-too-happy with current IPO activity. According to a study sponsored by Deloitte and the National Venture Capital Association released yesterday, over 80 percent of venture capitalists from around the globe believe “that current IPO activity levels in their home countries are too low”. Low enough, in fact, that it has investors worrying over whether or not it can sustain the venture capital industry.
While it seems that investors and VCs tend not to agree on anything (ever?) and it’s thus a bit surprising to see 87 percent of U.S. investors agreeing that IPO activity is too low, it’s also important to keep in mind that this survey was given to investors in the spring. This was before Pandora and LinkedIn went public and bubbletalk was on the tip of everyone’s tongue; in fact, 2011 seems to be a pretty good year for IPOs and investors are encouraging startups to raise. (Before a potential bubble burst, of course.) So then, perhaps VCs should consider IPO rehab for their addictions? What do you think? → Read More
PayPal is upping its 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.
PayPal says that the rate at which people are using the payments technology to buy items via their mobile phones is growing rapidly and this is actually the third time the company has had to update its numbers. At years end in 2010, PayPal predicted $1.5 billion in mobile payments and in February, the company revised this to $2 billion. → Read More
Whether you’re an athlete or a musician, we’ve got two new sets of in-ear headphones coming from Monster, and if you don’t like one, chances are you’ll like the other. The iSport Immersion in-ear headphones were developed specifically for athletes who use music to keep them “in the zone,” while the Gratitude in-ear headphones were developed in collaboration with Earth, Wind, and Fire, and are more geared toward true music lovers. → Read More
More patents from Apple, adding to the rumors that the iPhone 5 will have a significantly upgraded camera. Today’s patent, filed on December 22nd, 2009 (and not yet granted), is about making automatic corrections to an image based on distance and orientation measurements taken within the device. There are plenty of filters and tools for this purpose in image editing programs, but I don’t recall ever seeing on-device correction. → Read More
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