Personal profile startup About.me, which is owned by our parent company AOL, is looking for the ‘face of About.me’ and is kicking off a contest to feature profiles housed on the site in a new ad campaign.
For background, About.me offers people free profile pages. On your dedicated profile page, can include your name, bio and links to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other sites that have information about you. Users can also upload high-resolution photos to the site, making profiles look fairly sleek and professional with minimal effort. You can check out co-founder Tony Conrad’s profile here. → Read More
Earlier today, for reasons too egotistical to go in to, I found myself looking back at the columns I wrote for the Guardian back in 2003.
Inevitably, with industries as fast moving as media and technology, my 23-year-old self made a whole load of terrible predictions. I dismissed the fad of “cameraphones”, for example, but was bullish on red-button Interactive TV.
One prediction I’m happy to stand by, though, is that the way to solve media piracy would not be through legislation but through making it easier and cheaper for customers to buy legitimate versions of movies, music and books. Yeah, I know, today that sounds obvious. But back then it remained a “theory” in the way that evolution still does to Ron Paul. → Read More
After spending far too much time with far too little support from their owners at Condé Nast, Reddit is on a bit of a roll lately. They’ve gone on a handful of hiring sprees this year, moved into a bigger, better office… and now, they’ve made their first acquisition: RedditGifts.
For the non-Redditors out there (yeah, yeah, Narwhal bacons at Midnight and all that), RedditGifts is a user-to-user gift exchange service first launched by Redditor kickme444 for Reddit’s record-breaking Secret Santa back in 2009.
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In what might (really) be the last Why Is This News before Sarah’s baby gets out of private beta, we’re talking about democracy.
Specifically, we discuss the news that India wants to monitor its citizen’s private messages while Brazil is freezing Google’s local accounts in a tussle over anonymity — and we ask: “wait, aren’t those countries supposed to be democracies?” It’s almost as if privacy and censorship issues aren’t black and white. → Read More
MakerBot Industries, creator of home 3D printers, has announced a total of $10 million in funding from a number of investors, the bulk coming from Foundry Group. Also included in the round were Bezos Expeditions, True Ventures, and RRE, along with a dozen or so angel investors.
The company started in 2009 with around $75,000 in seed money, and since then has put together and sold some 5200 of their compact fabrication machines. We saw them in action at the very first TechCrunch Disrupt NYC, and since then they’ve been a regular feature on this blog. MakerBot also just added Brad Feld to their board, and are now hiring. → Read More
On Sunday we broke the news that Skype was acquiring group messaging service GroupMe. What we didn’t know was the price, and neither company disclosed any of the terms of the deal other than that GroupMe would remain a standalone brand for now, and the team would stay in New York.
A widely spread report said that Skype paid as much as $85 million for the year-old company. We’ve heard this number is a bit high. What’s the real price? → Read More
It was almost exactly one year ago that Facebook launched Places, their location-based offering. Reading the press at the time, you would have thought it was going to be the Foursquare-killer, the Gowalla-strangler, the Loopt-beheader, etc. Nevermind that Facebook partnered with all of them for the launch — those guys were done.
Fast forward to today: Foursquare recently raised a large round of funding valuing them at $600 million. And Facebook is killing off Places.
To be clear, Facebook is not ducking out of the location game itself. In fact, you could say that they’re doubling-down on it. But they are moving away from the game that the “check-in” services have been playing. And a result of that is Places being killed off and being replaced by new “Nearby” area, as Jason outlined along with the bigger privacy changes today. → Read More
Surprise! Even a clever little gimmick like a dedicated Facebook button can’t save a bad phone from an early demise.
After just 36 days on the shelves, a trusted source close to AT&T tells us the carrier is already prepping to ditch HTC’s so-called “Facebook Phone”, the Status. The reason? The thing just isn’t selling. → Read More
As we once again enter the iPhone 5 breach, one would do well to keep their grains of salt at the ready, but the Business Insider reports that Sprint will be among the few carriers to sell the iPhone 5. → Read More
Back in March, after at least one high profile security incident, Twitter created an option to turn on HTTPS at all times. But you could only enable the more secure way of viewing twitter.com by manually selecting it in your profile (or typing “https://” each time you went to Twitter). Starting today, the service is beginning to enable HTTPS by default.
At first, this will only be enabled for a small group of users, Twitter says. Over time, they’ll roll it out to more. It’s a welcome change that other services like Gmail have added over the years. Google has even experimented with it for google.com, and Facebook has an option to use it as well after years of avoiding it.
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Backing up data is getting more and more important, since although much of our critical stuff is in the cloud, we’re all generating so many pictures, videos, documents and so on that it’s wise to keep a local copy. Many people use external drives to back up, which is fine, but if you want any automated stuff, or server capabilities, you have to update to a network-attached storage system, and they aren’t all that user friendly.
LaCie has updated their devices with a pretty new operating system they call NAS OS, which they hope will make backup and serving easier. Let’s just take a quick look. → Read More
Hell has frozen over, pigs have flown, and it’s now possible to approve photos you’ve been tagged in on Facebook before they show up in your profile.
Pause. Take a drink if you need to. If you hear fireworks in the streets this morning, you know why.
In what amounts to a kitchen-sink of fixes, tweaks, and new terminology, Facebook is rolling out a new update this week that’s setting out to ‘Make It Easier to Share with Who You Want’. In short, today’s release fixes many of the biggest annoyances (and privacy issues) that the site has had for years now. So let’s get to them.
It’s now possible to approve tags — including photo tags — before they show up in your profile.
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It was only a year ago that I first wrote about Greplin, the “other half of search” for you online life. It’s an incredibly useful search engine that indexes your online email, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Calendar, Dropbox and other stuff (22 services are currently supported). Greplin is a single search box for all of this, and it’s fast.
Until now, though, you had to use the HTML5 site for mobile use, there was no dedicated application. If you’re an iPhone user, that’s now changed. Android and other users have to wait a bit longer.
Why the need for a dedicated app? 20 year old CEO Daniel Gross says they needed an app to add in their most requested features. The goal is to reduce typing by anticipating what you need – if you open the app on a way to a meeting, Greplin can use your location and the date/time to make an intelligent guess you want an address or phone number relevant to that meeting, and then give it to you.
The Greplin iPhone app’s predictive accumen is impressive. → Read More
There are now 30,000 mobile applications available for Windows Phone, Microsoft’s newest mobile operating system. That’s a huge jump from the 11,500 apps Microsoft reported back in March, but still far short of industry leaders, iOS and Android. For comparison purposes, there are 425,000 iOS apps and over 250,000 on Android, at least according to the latest official reports. But 30K apps isn’t bad for an operating system that’s not even a year old yet, we’d argue.
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Remember when the Asus Eee Pad Transformer was the hottest thing since Laserdisc? Remember when it was hailed as an iPad killer with its fancy IPS screen, low price and sweet name. Autobots, unite! Well, Walmart is currently selling it for $350, which puts it at the low-end of the Honeycomb tab price scale. Jokes aside, it’s actually a great deal for an Android tablet. → Read More
There are quite a few iOS productivity apps with handwriting recognition functionality available, for example Notes Plus, iWriteWords for kids, or (indirectly) Evernote. But recognizing handwritten text isn’t trivial, which is why a new app called 7notes (iPad: free, $8.99 premium/iPhone: free, $4.99 premium) focuses almost entirely on this problem – and does the job really well. → Read More
Flipboard-esque magazine-style aggregation apps are all the rage right now. Obviously Flipboard has the space nailed, and Pulse is a nice alternative as well. But one aggregation app seems to have caught the attention of a big name news publication — Zite.
The same company that once had a mailbox full of cease-and-desist notices from beastly publications like the Washington Post and AP, may now be headed toward a big payout. → Read More
Have you ever wanted to recreate the kitchen scene in Goodfellas from a very low angle with Lego characters? Well, here’s your chance to create your own diminished steadicam shots using a GorillaPod tripod and four wacky little wheels called CineSkates. These wheels allow for slow tracking shots, “worms-eye” views, and smooth rotations. You can also pan across a scene with the wheels.
The wheels fit on the GorilliaPod Focus, a tripod made for DSLRs. The creator has partnered with Joby to offer the GorillaPod tripods at a considerably discount (or you can just get the wheels).
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As we heard last year, Ask surrendered its search operations to its competitors and refocused on building out its Q&A platform. This seems to have paid off somewhat—the company has seen over 1 million downloads of its iPhone app. Mobile, specifically, has been a growth area for the Q&A platform, with a 100 percent increase in visits to Ask.com from smart phones over the last year (mobile is 10 percent of total usage). Today, Ask.com is bringing its Q&A platform to Android devices.
Ask says that the Android app is now available in the Android Marketplace and Amazon AppStore for Android. Includes all of the functionality of its iPhone application including voice to text features, the ability to get web results as well as top-voted published answers from other Ask.com users. You can also specifically send a question to a real user, and activate push notifications to alert you to when a new answer has arrived. → Read More
YouWeb, the social incubator behind OpenFeint, CrowdStar, Sibblingz and iSwifter, has raised another $2 million in funding from a number of angel investors including Dave Roux (the co-founder and chairman of Silver Lake Partners, Dave Whorton (the founder of Tugboat Ventures), Praful Shah, Brett Wander, Winston Cho and YouWeb founder Peter Relan. The company had previously raised $700,000 in funding.
Relan explains that YouWeb differs from other programs in that it is an extremely early-stage, almost pre-Y Combinator incubator. He says that YouWeb simply chooses individuals based on talent, and entrepreneurs come in with no team, business model or idea. The individual is given $100,000, and develops a business or app in house. YouWeb usually incubates around two entrepreneurs per year. → Read More
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