URDB — formerly Universal Records Database – is announcing a name change and $1 million in Series A funding, from investors Chris Sacca, VantagePoint Capital and 77 Ventures. Initially conceived of at yes, BurningMan, URDB is now RecordSetter and a million dollars more flush.
The premise behind RecordSetter is that “everyone on earth can be the world’s best at something.” The startup wants… → Read More
Today at the China 2.0 conference at Stanford, Alibaba Groups’s Jack Ma replied to a pointed question about buying Yahoo with, “We are very interested in Yahoo. Our Alibaba group is important to Yahoo and Yahoo is important to us … All the serious buyers interested in Yahoo have talked to us.”
Those “serious buyers” most likely include Alibaba Group investor Silver Lake Partners… → Read More
Back in March, we heard about a breakthrough from MIT: an “artificial leaf” that produces pure oxygen and hydrogen gas, powered entirely by sunlight. The technology was described in yesterday’s edition of Science, and the team has released a video showing one of the devices in action. → Read More
Looking to fill in the blanks on your family tree? A startup called Mocavo might be just what you’re looking for. The service is setting out to become a search engine that’s highly optimized for ancestry-related purposes — type in the name of a relative, and it’ll do its best to surface content from the web’s troves of genealogy data, some of which has been difficult to search through before… → Read More
We’re back with a new episode of TC Cribs, and it’s featuring one of the most tricked-out offices yet: YouTube.
Yes, the world’s biggest archive of cute cat videos (among other things) invited us to take a stroll through their halls, which are brimming with nifty artifacts, viral video memorabilia, and gnomes. A lot of gnomes.
There’s also a big surprise that comes around two-thirds through… → Read More
By now, we all know that the US Department of Justice filed an antitrust suit to block the AT&T/T-Mobile merger. Sprint and C Spire Wireless (formerly known as the Cellular South) have filed suits to that same effect, but AT&T has asked the court to reject those companies’ complaints.
The reason? AT&T believes that Sprint and C Spire are fighting for their own sakes, and not for the… → Read More
Hitwise just published a new study examining how much time people living in different countries spend on Facebook. Singaporeans actually spend the longest on the social network, with an average of 38 minutes and 46 seconds per session, while people living in Brazil spend less than half that with an average of 18 minutes and 19 seconds per Facebook session for August 2011.
Singapore is followed… → Read More
Aloha! You know where I wish I were right now? That’s right, Maui! You know who else is in Maui? Some of the Google Social team. Note: I am really jealous of anyone who is a Googler in Maui right now, because it sure beats being someone who has to write about being a Googler in Maui right now.
According to unpaid blogger Michael Arrington, I’m not alone in my jealousy, as some other people who… → Read More
Oh, Microsoft! You are so cunning. With IE market share plummeting and many users opting for “alternative” web browsers like Firefox and Chrome, your base of power is crumbling. We thought you would succumb to melancholy and accept your fate. But you had a plan all along. Clever girl.
Yes, Microsoft has found a way to stanch the hemorrhaging of its users to other browsers: label them as malware… → Read More
Around 2004-2005, puzzled non-tech journalists continually asked me why people were using MySpace — this was before social networking was a common phrase, before moms & dads were using social sites, and before Facebook was open to the public. Back then I would answer something like “MySpace is email with pictures, on steroids.” It was the simplest way for me to try and describe the value to… → Read More
Location-based service Loopt has been allowed its first patent, and it could be a big one.
The patent, as described, seems relevant to numerous existing products, including Google’s Latitude. In layman’s terms, it describes using your location to display relevant ads and offers on top of a map, as an interstitial, or as a text ad — another claim also discusses displaying where your friends… → Read More
Last week we ran a giveaway for one whole week, giving away a DROID Bionic. A huge congratulations to Scott Leither for winning last week’s DROID Bionic! Since the giveaway was so popular, we wanted to give all of you another shot. Thanks again to Verizon, we are giving one more DROID Bionic away to one lucky reader. Just like before, the giveaway will run for one full week and we will choose the… → Read More
The Gillmor Gang – Robert Scoble, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, Danny Sullivan and Steve Gillmor – are recording live at 1pm PST. Recording over at 2:25PM PST. → Read More
The AT&T Galaxy S II is a lot of things. It’s fast. It’s thin. It’s pretty damn nice to look at. But secure? Yeah, not really.
In what seems to be an almost inexcusable oversight, it appears that the pattern lock (the thing that keeps prying eyes from prying) on AT&T’s version of the Samsung Galaxy S II is… pretty much useless. → Read More
I’m sure all of you remember BigDog, the utterly terrifying biomimetic robot platform that dances over rough terrain on weird legs and makes a sound like it’s full of angry bees. You didn’t think they were going to give up on it, did you? No, it’s been a rousing success apparently, so much so that they decided to build one that outdoes the original in every way.
The AlphaDog, as they’re calling… → Read More
Remember Connectify? The downloadable software that turns PCs into Wi-Fi hotspots in just a few minutes? It looks like the company now has a new investor: In-Q-Tel (IQT), which just so happens to be the strategic investment firm that seeks out new technologies for the U.S. Intelligence Community, including the CIA. → Read More
The social beer fanatics at Untappd are at it again. Their web app has been letting users share their brews of choice since 2010, but the company has just announced that they have released a pair of native apps for iOS and Android in time for the weekend.
According to the company’s blog, they’re big fans of the mobile web, but “there does come a time when you reach the limitations of the mobile… → Read More
In March, we wrote about Stripe, a new payments startup cofounded by brothers Patrick Collison and John Collison. The stealthy company was tackling online business to business and business to consumer payments, and had already received $2 million in backing from a number of all-star investors including PayPal founders Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, as well as Sequoia Capital, Andreesen Horowitz and SV… → Read More
Watch out for falling tablet prices! No, seriously, don’t get burned by price cuts. The HTC Flyer is the latest tablet to see a major price reduction. Starting tomorrow, October 1st, Best Buy will lower the price of the 7-inch Android 2.3 tablet from $499 to $299. This follows the PlayBook, Xoom, and most notable, the TouchPad.
The Flyer is nearing its 6 month birthday and hasn’t fared very… → Read More
Oops. A new promotional poster made an appearance in a store at T-Mobile’s German headquarters, where it confirmed the existence of a Nokia Windows Phone with a 3.7-inch display and Nokia’s Drive navigation service.
The poster was up only briefly, but a quick-thinking tipster snapped a few shots and fired them off to WinRumors. After running it through a quick and dirty Google translation, the… → Read More
For many families, finding the best kid-friendly apps among the million plus apps in the Apple App Store and Android Market can be daunting. Enter Famigo, an app directory and curation platform that helps families find games, e-books and other apps that are appropriate for kids. Families can now use Family App Review to discover, select and share favorite apps for both the Apple iOS and Android… → Read More
Sports brand and sneaker maker Nike is going to start investing in green startups, through its new VC arm called the Sustainable Business & Innovation Lab. This group will seek out companies focused on sustainable products, sustainable manufacturing and sustainable marketplaces.
The fund is designed to support Nike’s goals involving the integration of corporate responsibility into its… → Read More
San Francisco-based Pantheon opened its doors to the public today after a year building its Web development platform for Drupal sites. (Drupal is an open-source content management system). Pantheon is a combination of a Web development tool in the cloud and a Web hosting and management service. Companies can develop, test, host, and manage their websites on Pantheon It is all based in the… → Read More
In 2010, the U.S. installed 887 megawatts (MW) of grid-connected photovoltaic (PV), up 104% from the 435 MW installed in 2009, according to a new recent report by the Solar Energy Industries Association and GTM Research. However, the U.S. market’s share of global installations fell to 5.1%, down from 6.0% in 2009.
In the end of 2011, that’s expected to change, thanks to slowdowns in major… → Read More
Last we heard of settlement talks between Apple and Samsung was in June, and you can tell from recent events that those talks probably didn’t end well.
Today in Australia, however, Samsung’s lawyers have reportedly extended an olive branch, hoping to end delays of the Galaxy Tab 10.1 launch in the Aussie market. If Apple accepts the terms of the agreement, we could see the GalTab 10.1 on… → Read More
Ex-Googler Jake Quist is debuting a new stealthy startup, called Zillabyte, that aims to disrupt the data analysis space. Quist explains that while he and his co-founder were engineers at Google, they were able to access a number of internal, extremely in-depth data analysis tools. But aside from being powerful, these tools were convenient for Quist and other Googlers to use and made it easy to… → Read More
Despite the fact that Apple has found a way to block sales of the latest two Galaxy Tabs, Samsung is going to try try again.
The company officially announced the Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus this morning, a 7-inch, HSPA+, dual-core slate. With the 7.0 Plus, Samsung has basically covered every size tablet there is: two 10.1-inch models, an 8.9-incher, a 7.7-inch tab, now a straight up 7-incher, along… → Read More
Canonical, the commercial backer behind the Ubuntu Linux distribution, have been hosting a file synchronization service called Ubuntu One for a couple years now. A free account gets you 5GB of storage, and the client side controls have been baked into the last couple of releases of the Ubuntu distribution. It works pretty much like Dropbox or similar services, but has been — until today … → Read More
The Kindle Fire announcement set the interwebs ablaze as Amazon burst into the tablet scene. But the retailer-turned-CE player might be looking to go a different way in the future. Amazon has been named as Palm’s current top suitor among “a handful of contenders” as HP looks to rid itself from the TouchPad/webOS disaster.
It’s unclear from VentureBeat’s leaks why Amazon is interested in Palm. → Read More
Timelines Inc., a small venture capital-backed Chicago company that operates the Timelines.com website, has launched a trademark-infringement suit against Facebook on Thursday, claiming that the latter’s recently announced Timeline feature could “quite possibly eliminate” its entire business.
Timelines.com is a website that basically allows people to record and share personal or historic… → Read More
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