Title says it all. More to come. For now, the letter from Steve Jobs himself:
To the Apple Board of Directors and the Apple Community:
I have always said if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple’s CEO, I would be the first to let you know. Unfortunately, that day has come.
Sometimes the need to test outweighs the need for total secrecy. I’m going to assume Color CEO Bill Nguyen shares that belief. The past two days his Facebook stream has been filled with some seemingly bland pictures. But they’re not bland — they’re test pictures. And they’re sent from a new app called “Blue”.
I don’t know much about the app itself, but I was able to dig up a little bit of information — including the logo above. Judging from the name alone, I think it would be pretty safe to assume that this is at least one of the new projects the Color Labs team is working on after Color itself fizzled out. → Read More
Today, mobile payments company Boku is launching direct carrier billing agreements with two of the largest mobile carriers in France— Bouygues Telecom and SFR, offering over 32 million French customers the ability to pay for virtual goods and services using only their existing wireless service account.
Historically, mobile payments companies face the challenge of lofty carrier rates. Wireless carriers have charged roughly 30% to 40% to process transactions made via mobile phone accounts, making it very difficult for mobile payment companies like Boku to scale beyond virtual goods. These transactions costs are passed down to developers using Boku, which are then passed to the consumer. To avoid these costs, Boku has been negotiating direct relationships with carriers as a way of possibly avoiding these costs. While the company declined to reveal the financial terms of the agreements, Boku says the France rates are similar to those negotiated in the U.S. and Germany. → Read More
Social enterprise giant Jive has just filed its S-1, and will raise as much as $100 million in the offering.
Modeled to offer Facebook-like features to enterprises, Jive’s software combines computing with social collaboration to offer fully-featured social networks for businesses. Its suite of applications help businesses collaborate on a variety of tasks, including holding discussions, communication, sharing documents, blogging, running polls, and social networking features and more.
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If you’ve ever roved around Facebook’s developer forums, you may have noticed that — aside from being loaded with complaints and bug reports — they’re pretty basic. There’s nothing wrong with them per se, but they feel like a pretty generic forum install, and not a hub for developers on one of the web’s most popular web platforms.
Today, Facebook is announcing how it’s going to fix the situation: it’s abandoning its old forums, which it says are “showing their age”, and launching a custom site on Stack Overflow, the Q&A hub that’s very popular with programmers (and is loaded with helpful content). You can find the new site at facebook.stackoverflow.com.
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We’re through, GameStop.
I turned a blind eye when you offered me peanuts for a game that you were still slinging used for bucks shy of full retail. I shrugged it off when your employees endlessly pressured me to pre-order games that I didn’t want every time I set foot in the store. I laughed when I was turned away for trying to buy a new release on launch day sans preorder, only to have a copy miraculously appear as I went to leave. These were all prices I was willing to pay, I figured, to support one of the last remaining brick and mortar game stores.
But breaking the seal on brand new copies of games to take out (valuable!) things you don’t like, then selling the game as new? Yeah, I quit you. → Read More
Real estate listings site Zillow reported its first earnings as a public company today, after debuting on the NASDAQ in mid-July. Zillow revealed record revenues of $15.8 million in the second quarter, up 116% year-over-year. Net Income for the quarter came in at $1.6 million, compared to a net loss of $2 million in the same period a year ago and a net loss of $0.8 in the first quarter of 2011. This quarter marked the company’s first quarter of GAAP profitability
Zillow saw record Marketplace Revenues of $9.7 million, up 269% year-over-year. Premier Agent subscribers, which contribute to Marketplace revenues, totaled 13,385 at June 30, 2011, up 180% from 4,777 at the end of the second quarter of 2010. Display revenues increased 30% to $6.1 million from $4.7 million in the second quarter of 2010. → Read More
Acer, recently the world’s second-largest shipper of PCs, has had a rough year. But in March a deliberate decision was made by upper management to abandon their goal of dethroning HP and instead focus on making better, more distinguishable products. The result: sales and revenue in freefall. At least they knew it was coming — but losing millions of customers and a huge proportion of your worth isn’t something any company likes having to do. → Read More
Registration is officially open for our fourth Hackathon, and we’d love to make it our biggest yet! We promise more pizza, more caffeine and more glory than ever. We had 700 registrants for the last event in New York — let’s top it! The format remains the same – a little less than 24 hours to create a hack on site and present a working demo to an audience of developers, press and industry insiders. Sign up now!
Celebrating Developers
GroupMe has proven that you can build a Weekend-hacked, Seed-funded, Series-A-ed, Acquired-by-Skype, all-in-about-a-year startup from a TC Hackathon. (Props to Jared and Steve’s for their monstrous hustle). But the goal of these increasingly awesome events isn’t just to build startups–we want to give developers a platform to shine. For every GroupMe there’s a Mr Stabbyphone; for every Wisedame there’s a Drunkerator; for every Docracy a Venture Crapital. It’s that mixture of utility and whimsy that keeps the Hackathons, and our industry for that matter, fresh. Much of the field is built behind the scenes by the hard work of talented developers and Hackathons are a the best way we’ve found to spotlight them. → Read More
Since HP made the announcement it would be spinning off its PC business, there have been questions over who would scoop it up. A number of different OEMs fit the bill and have the cash to take on HP’s PSG, but one in particular seemed to be looking for an outsourcing partner before HP ever made its announcement.
Digitimes reported that Samsung had been in talks with Quanta, Compal and Pegatron to possibly outsource notebook orders, its sources including HP on the list of suitors as well. “The sources added that Samsung’s actions seem like it is already in preparation to take up Hewlett-Packard’s (HP’s) PC business,” wrote Digitimes. But Samsung begs to differ. → Read More
That’s not the Terminator’s gallbladder you’re looking at there. It’s actually a pocket watch made by Urwerk, a noted designer of extremely high-end timepieces for folks like to think they are Jules Verne.
The watch, called the UR-1001 Zeit Device, tells the time down to (up to?) the century and even has a register for 1,000s of years aka millennia. Why? Because they wanted to, that’s why. It’s made of Aluminium Titanium Nitride, a tough metal used in milling machines and drill bits.
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I’ll be the first to admit that I usually rock a man-bag on a daily basis, but rarely have I ever considered using something as hardcore as the ITS Tactical Discreet Messenger Bag. While my usual load-out consists of the AOL-issued work laptop and a camera, the TDM bag packs compartments for use that goes above and beyond the ordinary. → Read More
RIM announced well in advance of the PlayBook’s launch that it would be able to play nice with certain Android apps, but aside from a leaked beta, PlayBook owners still have nothing to show for it. RIM may not play the waiting game again with their forthcoming string of QNX-powered BlackBerrys though, as the word from Waterloo is that they will be able to run Android apps right out of the gate.
Bloomberg’s sources close to the project have said the Android App Player will be part of the stock software on QNX BlackBerrys when they launch in early 2012. While the addition could potentially add thousands of apps to RIM’s underpopulated App World, it may not be as straightforward as one may hope. → Read More
Amazingly, someone is still making MP3 players for the mass market. I’m pleased to present the $70 Sandisk Sansa Clip Zip, a tiny, portable media player that comes in 4 GB and 8 GB varieties (the 4GB model costs $50).
The Clip Zip comes in 7 colors including red, blue, and orange and is compatible with almost any audio format. It also has a microSD slot so you can expand the player to 32 GB. It also has a teeny tiny LCD screen and a simple interface. → Read More
Over the last several months you’ve probably come across Google’s +1 quite a few times. You may have even clicked it, only to wonder what exactly you’d just accomplished. Because, at least from the user’s perspective, there hasn’t been any reward from clicking on it. You’d push the button for the treat, only to leave empty-handed. That hasn’t stopped the +1 button from getting huge distribution — it’s now on 1 million sites and appears in 4 billion impressions every day, but that growth has had more to do with the fact that it’s Google than it does with the button being useful.
The +1 button has always had a subtle purpose, of course: Google says that it impacts search results, so pages you +1 may show up in your friends’ queries more prominently than they would otherwise. But who knows how often that happens. And while these +1 clicks also get saved in your Google+ profile, they’re not anywhere your friends are going to see them.
Today, that’s changing: Google has just announced that the +1 button will let you share to your Circles on Google+, directly from whatever page you’re browsing. → Read More
If you’ve ever called your carrier about spotty coverage, then chances are you’ve heard the party line: “we’re working to improve the service in your area.” It’s delightfully vague — you know that your concerns are being considered, just without any concrete timeline for improvement.
Today, AT&T has announced their intention to make those mythical service improvements more transparent. They have launched eight microsites for major markets that focus on service enhancements made in the past year. → Read More
Bleacher Report may have spent much of its life quietly climbing the rankings of top sports destinations, but it’s not being bashful or patient anymore.
In a little more than a year, it has hired Brian Grey as its new CEO, a guy who used to run two of its four largest competitors, and it has passed Sports Illustrated and CBS Sports in traffic, beefed up its sales staff, starting hiring a professional editorial team and raised a $10 million round of funding.
Today, it’s announcing another cash infusion: A $22 million growth round from Oak Investment Partners, with participation from existing investors Crosslink Capital and Hillsven Capital. → Read More
The bounty to get a workable version of the Android operating system installed on the now-discontinued HP TouchPad is up to $2,000+, as of today.
As we previously reported, the goal of this project is to get some version of Android 2.x onto the TouchPad and, most importantly, stable. If successful, this effort will help keep the HP tablet a little more relevant to those unfortunate early adopters who have been left with a mobile operating system whose future is decidedly uncertain. → Read More
Each year, I go to a lot of conferences. For each and every one I fumble around at the last minute to figure out the schedule, who’s going to be there, etc. When I get there, I trade business cards that I’ll probably never look at again just because there are hundreds of them and no good way to order that information. The logistics surrounding just attending are a pain. And it’s a much bigger pain when you’re helping to actually put one together. Enter Bloodhound.
Bloodhound is a new mobile app launching today that aims to alleviate the pains of conference-going — for both attendees and those participating. One simplified way to think about it that investor Dave McClure likes to say is that it’s a “realtime ‘Where’s Waldo’ for conferences”. → Read More
The mobile gaming space is exploding and everyone from Zynga to smaller-scale developers are flocking to iOS, Android and other smartphone platforms to capitalize on the growth in mobile gaming. Today, a new company, Lunch Money, is throwing its hat in the ring with a set of monetization and distribution tools for mobile game developers. In conjunction with Lunch Money’s debut, the startup is launching an iOS game, Recess, to showcase the platform.
Similar to OpenFeint, Lunch Money offers game developers an SDK to plug into games. The platform’s initial offerings (as showcased in Recess) include a social leaderboard and a token system. The social leaderboard doesn’t recreating the social graph, but instead leverages user graphs across Facebook, Twitter and Game Center. It’s simple a ranking of your friends’ scores. → Read More
