I had a friend who once amazed me by writing a basketball game for the TI-81 graphing calculator. This, however, is an order of magnitude more impressive. Gossamer is a web browser for the TI-83+ through TI-84+SE calculators and, through the use of a number of fairly interesting network protocol APIs, it lets you see the text of almost any website right on the calculators tiny, pixelated screen. → Read More
Motif Investing, a new vehicle that allows you to invest in ideas, has raised $20 million in Series B financing led by Ignition Partners with participation from Norwest Venture Partners and Foundation Capital. This brings the company’s total funding to $26 million.
Motif, which is in private beta, was founded by former Microsoft executive Hardeep Walia and hedge fund analyst Tariq Hilaly to give individuals a new way to invest based on themes. Instead of choosing to buy stock in specific companies, Motif allows investors to invest in different portfolios of stocks, each called a “motif,” that are centered around everyday ideas. For example, motifs can be built around themes and ideas ranging from cloud computing to democracy in the Middle East. In addition, each motif can be customized to meet an individual’s ideas or needs. → Read More
tl;dr version:
If you’re an entrepreneur or VC or will be working in this industry - buy this. read it. live it.
It’s written by Brad Feld & Jason Mendelson. They know what they’re talking about. It’s important information that you need to avoid “information asymmetry” with VCs
Some big lessons I’ve learned over the years about term sheets:
1) the language never says anything remotely like “blocking rights” or “participating preferred liquidation preferences” in the term sheets. It’s hidden in legal language. You need to understand them.
2) lawyers seldom walk you through the “how can this term be used against you” scenarios. If you don’t know the right questions to ask you may be left unawares.
3) VCs are anal about things like voting thresholds, seniority of their stock, protective provisions, etc. Entrepreneurs never seem to focus on anything other than ownership percentage.
Brad & Jason’s book, Venture Deals, will arm you. Read on for more details … → Read More
Facebook is the largest social networking site in, well, the world. But not in China. Facebook and Twitter are blocked by China’s Great Firewall. The micro-blogging service Sina Weibo is the whip in China. HTC knows its market and therefore slightly retooled the Status/Salsa for the China market. Gone is the Facebook logo and a Weibo burning eye logo is on the dedicated button instead. → Read More
Goshi, a marketplace that aims to disrupt Craigslist by adding a local and mobile component to buying and selling items in your community, is debuting its service in Chicago today.
Basically, Goshi’s iPhone app allows you to take a photo of an item you want to sell, describe the item, put a price on it and then post it to the marketplace. Instead of picking up items at people’s homes or workplace, Goshi has created “hubs” at local coffee shops where transactions take place. → Read More
We’ve been saying for a while now that Samsung is primed and ready to dethrone Nokia from its nearly 15 year reign as the top smartphone maker in the world, and it would seem the moment is upon us.
We can’t say for sure, as Samsung hasn’t released official numbers, but research firm Strategy Analytics told Bloomberg that Samsung’s official sales numbers should fall between 18 million and 21 million units sold worldwide. → Read More
Qualcomm has bought certain technology assets from GestureTek, a well-known developer of gesture recognition technology. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
According to a release, Qualcomm is buying IP assets related specifically to gesture recognition technology, as well as “engineering resources.” GestureTek is retaining other assets in that relate to its gesture-controlled public display and digital signage business. → Read More
TIM is a new $60 camera kit from Holga that – get this – shoots in 3D and half-frame without digital technology! Groovy, right? It includes a detachable flash with color filters and uses something called 35mm “film,” which seems to chemically recreate patterns of light and dark on something called “photo paper” when used with the proper “agents.” It was very popular at the turn of the century.
→ Read More
In line with RIM’s planned “cost optimization program,” the company is moving a number of executives into positions of greater power and will lay off 2,000 of its estimated 19,000 person workforce.
In an effort to consolidate product efforts, the company is also moving former COO of Product Engineering, Thorsten Heins, into a position that makes him also COO of Product and Sales. Current COO, Dan Morrison, is retiring after a period of medical leave. → Read More
Canvas, which allows business to customize and publish data on mobile devices, has raised $1.2 million in Series B funding led by an investment from Motorola Solutions Venture Capital. This brings the company’s total funding to $2.3 million.
Canvas’ platform allows businesses to find, create, deploy and share mobile business applications. Businesses can allow employees to collect information using their mobile devices, analyze that data and share the analysis and data. Canvas subscribers can use their mobile devices to collect data in a simple form or via a survey. → Read More
What does MSI’s new WindPad want you to do? Enjoy (but only a little) that’s what! That’s why their latest 10-inch Android device, the Enjoy, looks so underpowered.
The device has just appeared on the FCC website and is running a 1GHZ ARM Cortex-A8 processer and, get this, Android 2.3. Feh. → Read More
I’ve been Warsaw for a few weeks now (we come here every year, long story) and I thought it might be nice to explore the Polish/Central European start-up scene. To that end, we’ll be holding an ad hoc meet-up in Warsaw on Friday the 29th at 6pm. Space is limited so reply early.
→ Read More
Bloomberg is reporting that the recently popularized Kunming-area fake Apple store is being investigated by Chinese authorities and it, along with another store, has been ordered to shut down.
The owners of said stores, including one Yu Cheng (who claims he’s doing Apple a favor), have been trying to become official, authorized retailers for years and they say they’re not violating any laws. → Read More
CloudBees, a company that helps companies manage the lifecycle of Java application development and deployment in the cloud, has raised $10.5 million in Series B funding. The round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and joined by Matrix Partners, following up the latter’s initial lead investment in the company’s $4 million Series A, which also included JBoss alums Robert Bickel and Marc Fleury. → Read More
So, we just exposed the awesome secret that Facebook’s iPad app is actually already out there, hidden inside of the iPhone app. Now it’s time to show it to you.
I’ve been playing with the app for much of the night, and it seems solid. Of course, there’s no guarantee that this is what Facebook will launch when the iPad app does officially hit, but this looks and feels about right.
After months of downplaying the importance of having an iPad app, and instead playing up HTML5, Facebook has clearly spent some time working on this. At the same time, it is an HTML5-rich experience, with things like the News Feed being populated that way. But other things, like image uploads simply cannot be done without native code at this time. → Read More
There are things out there all around us that we often miss because we’re just not looking. This is perhaps most true in the tech world, where thousands of secrets are out there in the wild, hidden in code. If you know where to look, or if you can read the code, you can find those secrets. It’s how so many features of iOS get revealed early by sites like 9to5 Mac, who are great at parsing the code (and confirming our non-code-digging scoops). It’s how we knew basically everything about Chrome OS before it actually launched. It’s how we knew Facebook Places was coming before it was announced. And now we’ve just uncovered a new massive find this way.
Hidden in the code of Facebook’s iPhone app is the code for something else. Something everyone has been waiting over a year for. The iPad app.
Yes, it’s real, and it’s spectacular (well, very good, at the very least). And yes, it really is right there within the code. Even better, it’s executable. → Read More
Here are some of the past week’s stories on TechCrunch Gadgets: → Read More
Editor’s note: This guest post was written by Dave Chase, the CEO of Avado.com, a health technology company that was a TechCrunch Disrupt finalist. Previously he was a management consultant for Accenture’s healthcare practice and was the founder of Microsoft’s Health business. You can follow him on Twitter @chasedave.
Historically, in the U.S. Healthcare system, a primary way to differentiate oneself as a healthcare provider has been to have impressive physical assets such as newly built clinics/hospitals/wings and medical equipment. This is logical when the legacy reimbursement model has incentivized activity (procedures, tests, prescriptions) instead of positive health outcomes. Anything that can be done that will create more activity creates more billing opportunities. → Read More
At the beginning of the year, Apple said it wanted 30% of everything sold through the iPad platform. You could sell almost anything – books, downloadable content, magazines, pictures of kittens – but, according to their subscription rules, everything had to go through Apple itself and you could not, in short, go out to a web page to complete the transaction. That promise – to shut down external web stores on the iPad – has been fulfilled and the Nook, Kindle, Kobo, and Google Books apps have just been either drastically changed or removed from the App Store entirely. → Read More
Although I’ve never been a huge fan of the Cybershot line, it’s interesting to see how much tech Sony has been dumping into these things of late. For example, this $350 camera shoots full 1080i video and 12-megapixel stills at exactly the same time with no interruption.
It has 5X optical zoom and some sort of 16-megapixel 10X digital zoom and can also shoot in 3D. Panoramas are easy and massive at 42 megapixels. It will be available in September.
→ Read More
