Kim Hyung-Suk has been busy these past few months. An attorney based out of Seoul, he gained a bit of notoriety for being the first person to receive a cash settlement from Apple for the iPhone’s location-tracking tendencies. He also announced that he and his law firm, Mirae Law, would be looking into the possibility of filing a class-action suit against Apple. According to a report from… → Read More
According to a new report from location-based media company JiWire, 53% of the “on-the-go” U.S. audience is willing to exchange their location in exchange for more relevant content and better information, including mobile deals.
In the group of mobile consumers under the age of 34, the percentage is even greater: 60% are willing to trade their location for information. And in the U.K., it’s… → Read More
The technology world is still reeling from the announcement of Google’s $12.5 billion acquisition of Motorola Mobility. And today, Motorola announced the departure of William (Bill) R. Hambrecht from the Company’s Board of Directors. Following his departure, the Motorola Mobility Board of Directors will be comprised of nine members, eight of whom are independent.
Hambrecht, a well-known… → Read More
The HP Pre3 launched in Europe today, and oddly enough, HP had very little to say about it. With the TouchPad price falling like a rock, you’d expect that its intended complementary device — and HP’s flagship phone — would launch with more fanfare. But instead HP let the device land in its EuroStore and gave a short response to PreCentral, the first publication to notice its… → Read More
Nintendo is prepping a slightly retooled Wii for a pre-holiday release. This streamlined model sits horizontally (as a game console should) instead of vertically like the original. It’s also slightly smaller, lacks the ability to play Gamecube games, and will likely hit at a lower price.
This move has standard procedure for game makers ever since the original NES. In an effort to revive sales… → Read More
If you like consuming media on your iPhone or iPod touch that’s stored elsewhere, you might want to take a look at what Panasonic has announced [JP] for the Japanese market recently. The so-called DY-PS10 is a “pocket server” that wirelessly streams videos, music and pictures from an SD/SDHC/SDXC card to these devices. → Read More
Glam Media, one of the largest publishing and advertising networks on the Web, is taking on Apple’s iAd today with the launch of GlamMobile, a mobile ad platform that aims to allow brand advertisers to engage with Glam’s readers of its mobile site. The company is also announcing the availability of GlamEnable, a new platform that provides publishers with the ability to develop sites for the mobile… → Read More
WebEx has managed to maintain a pretty good lock on the enterprise world with their online video conferencing/meeting service, but there’s one place they’ve always fallen a bit short: small businesses.
The problem? It’s just too dang expensive. Even on the cheapest plan (which supports 1 host with 25 people per meeting), it’s a solid 50 bucks per month. When you’re on a bootstrap budget and… → Read More
Atlanta-based startup Kabbage, which provides working capital to online merchants, has raised $17 million in Series B funding led by Mohr Davidow Ventures with BlueRun Ventures, David Bonderman, founder of TPG Capital; Warren Stephens, CEO of Stephens; the UPS Strategic Enterprise Fund, Jim McKelvey, co-founder of Square; and others participating in the round. This brings Kabbage’s total funding… → Read More
There are quite a few cloud hosting Platform-as-a-Service providers out there to do the heavy lifting for web application developers who expect a certain amount of traffic for their sites. A new provider called fluxflex aims at differentiating itself from Heroku, Google App Engine, DotCloud and others by being offering an extra-easy to use “one-click install” solution at relatively low costs: the… → Read More
Google’s Slide team has been busy. In the past few months, they’ve unleashed a range of social apps meant to fulfill different needs. But the strange thing is that Google hasn’t done a thing to promote any of them. That has been on purpose. Google is giving the Slide team, which operates on its own within Google, room to maneuver and fly under the radar. But with Photovine, they’re actually… → Read More
Thank you Miles Lothe for taking the whole brogramming thing to the next level by reading the entire Facebook TOS and translating it into bro-speak. This is amazing because Facebook, aside from Manpacks (yes it exists), is the most brogrammy startup on earth — Please email or IM me if you want me to elaborate on this, because it’s late but I can totally prove it. And for those of you don’t… → Read More
Last night, San Francisco’s BART transport system prepared itself to be swamped with Guy Fawkes masks as hacking collective Anonymous urged concerned citizens to take to the streets tracks to protest authorities’ earlier shut-down of the network’s cellphone service.
The hackers had already fired their opening salvo: hacking the BART website and releasing the private user data of thousands of… → Read More
When we switched to Facebook comments several months ago, we spun it as a way to combat the trolls. But you know, there was actually a secret agenda. We wanted to bring families closer together.
And it’s with great pleasure that I can now announce that it’s working. → Read More
Today, Mountain View-based Ooyala, the fast-growing online video services provider, is announcing that it has landed a big content partner: The so-called “worldwide leader in sports”, ESPN. Those avid sports fans among us may have noticed some changes in the look and speed of videos on ESPN.com. Over the last few weeks, Ooyala has begun integrating its video technology into ESPN’s website, and is… → Read More
Scientists, get ready for some disruption.
Last month I wrote about Quartzy, a nifty startup that’s looking to help scientists streamline their labs by making it easy to keep track of who has which reagents (which is actually a bigger problem than you’d think).
And today we see the launch of another Y Combinator-funded startup called Science Exchange that’s looking to help researchers in a… → Read More
Many government agencies have been slower to adopt the cloud because of the specific regulatory requirements, compliance issues and security regulations. To mitigate this, Amazon Web Services is launching AWS GovCloud, a new secure region specialized for U.S. government agencies and contractors to move more sensitive workloads into the cloud.
Amazon says that many government agencies with data… → Read More
What’s on the end of your fork? Do you go online to look at young women or MILFs and cougars? Do you like coercion fantasies about alpha males? Or do you prefer gay romance stories?
Up till now, these questions about our online sexual behavior have, at best, been speculative. But at last, we have data – hard, authoritative data – on what we are really getting up to online when we think… → Read More
Dell reported mixed earnings this afternoon for the second quarter of fiscal year 2012. Revenue in the quarter was $15.7 billion, up 1 percent over last year. GAAP earnings per share was $0.48, up 71 percent; non-GAAP EPS was $0.54 cents, up 69 percent. The company blew past EPS expectations, Dell missed slightly on revenue. Analysts expected non-GAAP EPS of $0.49 on revenue of $15.75 billion. → Read More
Back in July 2010, Google announced a nifty educational project called App Inventor. The goal? Give non-programmers a relatively easy way to build their own applications for the Android platform, using a drag-and-drop interface to add pre-written ‘chunks’ of code. It was heavily inspired by the learning language Scratch, but with an Android focus.
I ran the platform through its paces soon… → Read More
Instead of giving us any more concrete details on when the Playstation Vita will see the light of day, Sony announced the availability of a new PSP model called the E-1000 at their Gamescom press conference. → Read More
We’re in Mountain View at Dave McClure’s 500 Startups HQ where the second ever 500 Startups Demo Day is about to start. Today 31 startups will present to press and investors here in McClure’s bright and sunny Mountain View office and you can watch them here, live.
McClure’s 500 Startups primarily invests in early stage startups that focus on the “Three Ds,” design, data and distribution. The… → Read More
Watch out! Price cuts all around! Following the 3DS price drop, Sony just cut a cool $50 off the PS3, dropping the 160GB model to $250 down from $300. The 320GB model is also a little lower now with a $299 price tag.
This puts the PS3 in a slightly better position ahead of the oh-so-important holiday season. The Wii is currently priced at $150 and comes bundled with Mario Kart. The base model… → Read More
During a press conference at the Gamescom gaming conference in Cologne, Sony announced a few new features for their new handheld console, the Vita (watch our hands-on at E3 here). Among them were support for Foursquare and Skype. The references were made while talking about the 3G capabilities of the $300 model, but it wasn’t implied that a 3G connection would be required.
More powerful than… → Read More
More cash is flowing in for social TV apps. Stealthy company Umami has raised $1.65 million in seed funding from Battery Ventures, NEA and other angels for the companion, social TV platform.
While details about Umami are limited, we know the startup’s free iPad app is currently in closed beta with TV networks and is set to launch with the Fall 2011 television season. Similar to apps like Miso… → Read More
Tyler Loch is the creator of VisualHub, one of the best (and funniest) video converters for OS X. He shut down development a few years ago and left the app to linger and then shut it down completely, forcing folks to scour the Internet for copies. A few OS X versions came and went and the program still worked but a Lion killed the app for users fairly completely.
I’m a former VisualHub customer… → Read More
Back in the day, the knock on the Foursquare iPhone app used to be that it wasn’t very visually appealing. That was especially true in comparison to rival Gowalla. But much has changed over the past several months. And now that Foursquare has big funding and a larger team to deal with the pains of fast growth, they’ve been putting a lot of emphasis into how things look and feel. And it’s paying… → Read More
What do Groupon, Zynga, Airbnb, Crunchbase and LinkedIn have in common? They know site performance is critical to their success, so they use New Relic app monitoring to make sure their apps are quick and fast. Every second on the web counts and New Relic has been on a tear since raising $10 million in October from Benchmark, Allen & Co., and Trinity Ventures. They now measure over 20 billion… → Read More
Box.net has raised $18.6 million out of a $35 million round according to an SEC filing. We’ve confirmed this with the company. This brings Box’s total funding to $96 million.
Box, which has 6 million users and stores 300 million documents, is a cloud storage platform for the enterprise that comes with collaboration, social and mobile functionality. Box has evolved into more than just a fils… → Read More
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