A team of researchers at the University of Tokyo has developed a new type of optical atomic clock that boasts a 100 quadrillionth of a second accuracy (one quadrillion has 15 zeros). The optical lattice clock is the brain child of Professor Katori who says his device observes a million atoms simultaneously whereas conventional atomic clocks measure time by using single atoms. → Read More
After being acquired by Citrix Systems in July for more than $200 million, Cloud.com’s CloudStack cloud management framework is being open-sourced. The software currently supports over 60-large scale production clouds, including those run by GoDaddy, GreenQloud, KT, Nokia, Tata Communications and Zynga. With the release, CloudStack has also added support for additional hypervisors and support for bare metal provisioning.
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Zeebo, a company with the ambitious goal of “helping the next billion play, learn and connect”, has raised $17 million in equity funding according to an SEC filing.
When the company was founded, the company’s stated intention was to create an cheap game console with affordable games and educational content delivered via wireless digital distribution (to circumvent piracy). The Zeebo was targeted at developing markets such as BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China) and Mexico. → Read More
Samsung is launching ChatON, a cross-platform mobile chat service similar to RIM’s BlackBerry BBM. The service, which is expected to launch in September, will be showcased at this week’s consumer electronics-focused IFA Conference.
ChatON is an interesting launch for Samsung because it will support a variety of mobile operating systems, including Samsung’s own bada mobile operating system, Android, feature phones and even competitors’ platforms, including iOS and BlackBerry.
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The Toshiba Thrive isn’t exactly a good-looking Android tablet. Sure, it has plenty of ports, a removable battery, and a low price, but it’s also bulky and feels of cheap plastic. Sans the Toshiba logo, it feels and looks just like a random Chinese rip-off. But have no fear, Toshiba fans! Per a pre-IFA leak, there’s a new tablet coming and it’s every bit as sexy as the Asus Transformer or Samsung Galaxy Tab while packing at least some of the I/O ports found on the Thrive. → Read More
Alphonso Labs, the fledgling company behind Pulse, a nifty social news reader for iPhone, iPad and Android devices used by roughly 5 million people, aims to pose a challenge to simple bookmarking tool Instapaper (and a range of other bookmarking and ‘read it later’ apps).
The startup is today debuting both a bookmarklet and a Chrome add-on that enables users to ‘save stories to Pulse’ with a mouse click. Extensions for other browsers are ‘in the works’, I’m told. → Read More
Vitrue, a social media marketing company, is rolling out version 3.0 of its social media management platform for brands. New features include localization and enhanced analytics and metrics within one dashboard interface.
As we’ve written in the past, Vitrue’s SaaS platform allows brands and marketing agencies to
communicate with fans and consumers across Facebook, YouTube and Twitter accounts, location based services, and via mobile applications. The company’s SRM (social relationship management) platform is being used by a number of high profile brands including Harley Davidson, Mentos, Dick’s Sporting Goods, Crocs, Eddie Bauer, Maybelline, Purina, McDonald’s, YouTube, Ford, AT&T, Disney and Best Buy.
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Ladies and germs, this is the Go Live 1535 M, which according to TomTom, is the first PND with connected apps. That claim may not exactly be true, but the Go Live 1535 M does have an impressive — that is, impressive for a GPS — set of non-standard functions through a variety of apps such as Twitter, Yelp, TripAdvisor, and Expedia. These are in addition to TomTom’s VIA connected services that includes fuel prices, weather and Google Local Search.
The personal navigation device market has lost much of its thunder the last few years. These apps are the sort of functions that could have at least temporarily slowed the transfer of power to the smartphones regime. But alas, the Go Live 1535 M is hitting a few years too late with a crazy-high price. → Read More
Cisco this morning announced that it has acquired San Francisco startup Versly, a privately-held company that develops collaboration tools that integrate with Microsoft Office applications.
Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, but all Versly employees will be integrated into Cisco’s Collaboration Software Group (CSG) upon the close of the acquisition. → Read More
Stealthy cloud startup Kenandy has raised $10.5 million in Series A funding led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers with Salesforce.com, and Wilson Sonsini Goodrich Rosati participating. As part of the transaction, Kleiner Perkins partner Ray Lane will join Kenandy’s board of directors.
Kenandy basically puts manufacturing management in the cloud. The startup which is led by Sandra Kurtzig (previous founder, CEO and chairman of the Ask Group), horizontally integrates all aspects of supply chain management for manufacturers including, inventory management, engineering, purchasing, and production. The company is also incorporating Salesforce’s cloud app management platform Force.com, allowing companies to manage mobile and social apps. → Read More
Back in spring, we’ve spent a few posts covering the Medias N-04C from NEC Casio Mobile , an Android handset the company calls the “world’s slimmest smartphone”. Being just 7.7mm thin, it beats the Galaxy S II, for example, and at 105g, it’s very light, too.
Announced by NEC Casio in February this year, the handset was selling well when it hit the Japanese market a few weeks later (to date, 500,000 units have been sold). → Read More
Here are some stories from the past week on TechCrunch Gadgets: → Read More
Nokia has temporarily shut down its developer community website as a precaution, after a hacker gained access to a database table containing forum members’ email addresses and other information. The hacker last week exploited a vulnerability in the bulletin board software that allowed an SQL Injection attack that in turn enabled him (or her) to deface the forum website.
Nokia has now emailed all its developer forum members alerting them to the fact that not only has the website been defaced, but the hacker also gained access to records, which – fortunately for Nokia – did not contain passwords, credit card details or other sensitive information. → Read More
Quixey, the Palo Alto-based startup that’s building a functional search engine for apps, today announced that it has closed a $3.8 million series A funding round. The investment was led by U.S. Venture Partners and WI Harper Group, with participation from Webb Investment Network alongside follow-on investment by Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors. The series A round adds to the $400K Quixey raised in April from Innovation Endeavors, bringing total investment to $4.2 million. → Read More
“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.” – George Orwell, Animal Farm
“Leck bei Wikileaks“. The headline in German-language news weekly, Der Freitag, described the irony with Teutonic efficiency: “Leak at Wikileaks“.
In the story, published on Friday, editor Steffen Kraft claims to have found online a “password protected csv file” containing a 1.73GB cache of entirely unredacted diplomatic cables, originating from Wikileaks. According to Kraft, the password for the file is also easy to locate.
The same day, Wikileaks dumped a large number of cables online and asked its followers to help sift through them. Copies of the files have been in the possession of news organizations like the Guardian, the New York Times and Reuters for months, but this is the first time the documents had been made available to the public. The release came, says chief leaker Julian Assange, because the media has lost interest in the diplomatic revelations as yet unreported. (A cynic might infer that Assange — who remains under house arrest in the UK pending extradition on sexual assault charges — is worried that the media has lost interest in him too.)
But the document found by Der Freitag are not the official Wikileaks files, which have been partly redacted to remove the names of vulnerable sources. Rather it contained thousands of unredacted pages, with ‘named or otherwise identifiable “informers” and “suspected intelligence agents,” from Israel, Jordan, Iran and Afghanistan.’ → Read More
One of Steve Jobs’ most devastating talents is in knowing when he is right. By he I mean he and his team of talented designers, engineers, supply chain wranglers, and technologists. Standing pat when the alternative is worse is a difficult move to make, but one Apple under Jobs has made a trademark.
Take the iPhone 4 and its famous dropped calls crisis. Jobs responded by delivering a software patch, comparing the problem to other competitor’s offerings, providing a free case to those who’d already bought the phone, and making a deal with Verizon to fix the real problem: AT&T. You could see the resolve in the strategy. This is what we’ve discovered, this is what we will do, we bet you’ll stick with us. He was right. → Read More
Get ready. This is one epic episode of OMG/JK.
It’s been a couple of weeks since our last show — and those weeks have been packed with news. Google announced that it’s in the process of acquiring Motorola, which will have major implications for the future of Android. Facebook made some changes to its Places product and privacy settings. And, in sad news, Steve Jobs announced that he’s stepping down as CEO of Apple.
Don’t worry, the episode isn’t that long — it clocks in around half an hour, and we think it’s a good one.
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Over the years, there’s been a radical change in the way we interact with our networks of friends online. It used to be that we had a few of our friends (online or offline friends) on a service, allowing us to connect to friends through the Internet and see what their activities were. Where the Internet used to be a somewhat scary world full of strangers, we suddenly had friendly anchors to explore that world with. Sure, most of our friends weren’t online, or at least not using the same services, but the familiarity was comforting and the ability to see what a few of our friends were doing allowed us to find new content and new friends.
We fell in love with sites that made us feel like there are people out there who are similar to us, who we are talking to and having common experiences with. But then, some of these networks — Facebook and Twitter in particular — began to grow explosively. Facebook facilitated a cultural norm of using its service to “friend” everyone we knew. All of a sudden we had tons of our friends everywhere we went. With the experiences gained sharing online spaces with a few friends, logic would dictate that having more of our friends online would make this experience richer. But that isn’t what happened → Read More
Healthtech is an ever-growing sector, but from the $1 billion pool VCs poured into startups over the last year, health companies only received about 3 percent of that total. Not many healthtech startups have been able to secure those big venture rounds; however, last week, I highlighted one healthtech company that seems to be doing it right: Zocdoc, which raised a $50 million round from DST earlier this month, and offered a few takeaways for startups looking to learn from Zocdoc’s experience. (Check out the post here.
As the aforementioned venture numbers from Rip’s post show, many startups really haven’t demonstrated the same wisdom Zocdoc has shown, which has led to an increasing number of healthtech failures over the last few years. One recent study in particular highlights this phenomena. After interviewing 110 digital health entrepreneurs, RockHealth recently released the findings of a study demonstrating the disconnect between the companies that are actually getting funding and the many that have come up empty.
This disconnect sheds light onto why so many healthtech companies have failed to make an impact, or have had to undergo significant pivots in order to survive. Herein you’ll find some of the top causes of healthtech startup failure. → Read More
Bizness Apps, the startup that gives small businesses the tools to quickly and easily build mobile apps, launched in October 2010 and has been growing like gangbusters, reaching over 1,000 applications, 10 languages, and over 20 countries in less than 9 months. It also recently partnered with WuFoo to give SMBS the ability to create and seamlessly add contact forms, online surveys, and invitations to their apps. The startup also has an interesting founding story that provides some useful lessons for your entrepreneurs. Check out our April coverage here.
Bizness Apps’s value proposition is simple: The startup wants to make mobile apps affordable, customizable, and simple to make for small business owners. Thus, the startup offers a DIY iPhone, iPad, and Android app platform that enables SMBs to create, edit, and manage mobile apps without any programming experience required. You start with a template, customize them to suit your business, and then Bizness Apps makes them native apps and distributes them on iTunes and the Android Marketplace. → Read More
