Close proximity technology TransferJet is evolving. Toshiba has developed an LSI (pictured) that supports TransferJet and is designed specifically for mobile devices. The LSI is sized at just 4.0×4.0× 0.5mm and the smallest of its kind, according to Toshiba.
The company says the LSI achieves a receiving sensitivity of -78dBm, outperforming the value of the TransferJet standard itself (-71dBm) and making data transfer between two TransferJet-equipped devices more stable (it actually boasts the industry’s highest sensitivity). → Read More
Joyent, a San Francisco-based cloud computing software and service provider, has secured $5 million in debt funding according to an SEC filing.
The company, which was founded back in 2004, offers an integrated technology suite and related services geared towards service providers, medium-sized and large enterprises, and developers. → Read More
It’s happened again: a Foxconn plant explosion has caused a large fire in Yantai. According to MICGadget the fire stemmed from “improper operation of workmanship on color spraying” which suggests a aerosol paint may be involved.
The last fire happened in May in Chengdu. This fire was at a plant that made PCs, laptops, and printers. It employs and, in some cases, houses 80,000 workers, many of whom were evacuated. The blaze lasted 30 minutes and there are no reports of casualties. → Read More
Two weeks ago, we covered Chomp‘s news that it will be powering app search on Verizon’s app store for all Android phones. Today, the app search early player is announcing some more big news, and this time advertisers and developers are the ones who stand to benefit.
Launching in private beta today is “Chomp Search Ads”, a new program that will allow developers to bid on the keywords or phrases that will deliver their ads to users who search for those terms within an app search engine. The ad engine then matches app ads to the most relevant potential customer based on what apps they’re currently searching, making ads less annoying and more relevant for the consumer and ideally more lucrative for developers. → Read More
Panasonic Japan announced [press release in English] the development of the so-called HOSPI-Rimo yesterday, a cute “Communication Assistance Robot” specifically designed for medical use. HOSPI-Rimo (Remote Intelligence and Mobility) is supposed to make it easier for bedridden patients to get in touch with doctors or family members living far away (“virtual visits”).
Technically, the mobile robot is based on the HOSPI, which Panasonic introduced last year. That robot is equipped with four laser range finders, 27 ultrasonic sensors and the ability to change floors in buildings autonomously. → Read More
Luxury home decor flash sale site HomeSav.com this morning announced that it has raised $1.2 million in seed financing from multiple retail angel investors and entrepreneurs including the Koffler family and the Metrick family (founders and owners of Canada’s largest high-end home furniture retailer).
In addition, HomeSav.com says it has grown its membership by over 1,400 percent in the first year to over 100,000 registered users in the United States and Canada. Its members are said to place over 100 orders per day. → Read More
Nokia this morning announced that its sleek new smartphone, the N9 – which will almost certainly be the first and only MeeGo handset to ever see the light of day – has begun shipping to customers who’ve pre-ordered the device, and retail stores.
The N9 features an interesting UI that’s controlled with a simple swipe. The buttonless smartphone features three home views (Applications, Events and Live Applications) that are designed to enable people to easily and swiftly navigate the interface. → Read More
Wikets, Inc., a young social commerce startup, announced today that it has raised $1.5 million in seed funding from venture firms Andreessen Horowitz and Battery Ventures, as well as from six angel investors, including Robert Davoli of Sigma Partners. The startup will use its seed capital, says Wikets co-founder and CEO Andy Park, to ramp up hiring and prepare for the release of its eponymous iPhone app, which will reward users for providing and sharing recommendations on products and places to their friends — while on the go.
From this brief description, Wikets may sound a little bit like a game-ified rewards system overlaid on, say, Yelp. While the Wikets team is not yet sharing all the details of the app’s UX — as the team is busy putting the finishing touches on the app ahead of its expected release date in early October — nut, to be sure, Wikets is more than a Yelp with badges, designed instead around social commerce, around helping users discover and connect with like-minded people based on shared favorite places and products. → Read More
Tokyo-based human translation service myGengo (“Mechanical Turk for translations”) has raised a Series A Round of funding. The US$5.25 million round was led by Atomico, the London-based VC firm headed by Skype co-founder Niklas Zennström, and existing investor 500 Startups. Atomico partner Hiro Tamura will join myGengo’s board of directors.
This capital injection follows the US$1.75 million in seed funding the company raised from a group of investors so far (myGengo’s other backers include Mitch Kapor, Team Europe Ventures, Point Nine, and more). myGengo says the fresh money will serve to bolster sales/marketing/engineering, to expand its API business, and to grow its global native translator network. → Read More
Million dollar question is not: will you use the revamped social bookmarking service? But rather, will your mom, sister, and that dorky teenage kid from across the street use it?
As you may have heard, Delicious was saved from Yahoo’s incompetent hands by AVOS, the new startup created by YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, in April 2011.
Today, AVOS is relaunching Delicious, which they say was “rebuilt from the ground up”. → Read More
Here are some of yesterday’s Gadgets stories: → Read More
For baseball fans, that magical month is almost afoot. October: The time in which we look on, annoyed, as our favorite team heads to Florida to play golf, or stumbles, gets injured, and whimpers quietly out of the playoffs. It’s a testy time for most, but still one most of us would never miss.
Another thing baseball fans have likely noticed: Moneyball — a book written about the Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane and his use of sabermetrics and other newfangled ways of keeping tabs on which players are undervalued, etc. — has been made into a film and is being shown in theaters nationwide. For those unfamiliar with any of the above, the reason this is of interest to baseball fans? Moneyball highlighted a then ongoing re-conception of what metrics and methods teams and organizations use to evaluate players. Thanks to Moneyball and the ascendancy of Bill James and his sabermetrics, geeks were finally able to secure a place in the clubhouse.
I haven’t yet seen Moneyball, but it’s on my towering list of things to do this week, to be sure. So, in the spirit of a close wild card race, the encroaching playoffs, and the release of Moneyball, here’s a cool new app for iOS called Baseball Mobile that is, simply put, a fast and easy way to get baseball stats on your iOS devices. Not stats geeks can go mobile. With authority. → Read More
Realtime car traffic data company Inrix has been selected by Google to provide traffic data to help power the search giant’s navigation and mapping applications.
Inrix, which just raised $37 million from Kleiner Perkins and August Capital, aggregates and crowdsources real-time traffic information from more than 30 million sources including cars, taxis, delivery vehicles, trucks and other channels, Inrix’s data software aggregates and enhances traffic-related information from hundreds of public and private sources and then sells this data to mobile app developers and websites.
→ Read More
Apparently my former colleague and fellow Diet Coke fiend Paul Carr is founding a startup post-TechCrunch, instead of heading back to professional blog jockeying like the rest of us pixel-stained wretches. Yay Paul.
So what on earth is it already? Well Carr himself told me that the startup is a media-play, traversing the intersection between old media and new media — “the third way,” as he puts it. Okay. → Read More
In honor of President Obama’s LinkedIn town hall meeting today — and the impending campaign — we bring you a political startup. Before you gag, give it a chance; I think this is a political startup that might just get your vote. Launching today is Ruck.us: A social and political engagement platform that allows like-minded individuals to find each other, connect, and to take collective action based on issues, not political affiliations.
On the surface, that doesn’t sound particularly earth-shattering. We’re pretty sure both Facebook and Twitter enable this kind of grouping — as does Fox News and MSNBC (and No Labels and Americans Elect). But it does help that the Ruck.us co-founders both have politics in their blood: Ray Glendening is the son of former Maryland Gov. Parris Glendening and Nathan Daschle is the son of former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle. Naturally, both guys have been involved with the democratic party professionally, having recently worked for the Democratic Governors Association. → Read More
Q&A site Quora has just unveiled a revamp of its commenting system, the most notable change being the implementation of a threaded commenting feature for the discussions under a question and its subsequent answers. The new threaded comments allow users to reply to specific comments in an answer thread, intuitively by entering text into the Reply box under each comment. → Read More
You might be familiar with Walk Score, a site that crunches mapping data into a simple “walkability” score for a neighborhood or region. You know, whether food and entertainment are nearby, whether transit is available, and so on. It’s being used by more than 10,000 sites that list apartments and real estate now, providing an at-a-glance impression of how much you can expect to need your car.
They’re sitting on a ton of data from transit authorities, OpenStreetMap, and user input, and have decided to leverage that into a more user-centric tool, Apartment Search. It basically turns the telescope around; instead of taking a place you like and providing a commute and walkability score, you put in your workplace and desired commute, and it finds places for you within that trip time. And it looks really cool while doing it. → Read More
Piston Cloud Computing, Inc. is today emerging from stealth and introducing its new enterprise-ready cloud operating system for private clouds called pentOS. The new OS is built on OpenStack, the open source IaaS cloud computing project that now has over 1,450 contributors and 110 participating companies, including NASA, Rackspace, Citrix, Intel, Cisco, Arista Networks, Microsoft and Dell. → Read More
The news that Amazon’s tablet was real was a great scoop, but not quite a shock to the industry. Bezos all but confirmed it months ago, and supply-line leaks had it coming in late summer, which was optimistic but not far off; the Fire will be arriving on Wednesday.
One question I always had, though, was how Amazon would justify putting out this device when they’ve spent so long slagging the iPad as an e-reading platform? Simple: the Fire isn’t an e-reader. Sure, you can read books on it, but its main function is acting as a wedge for all those sadly-overlooked Amazon services. Apple sells you on one platform then keeps on nudging you until you accept the rest. iTunes, iPhone, iPad, OS X, it doesn’t matter which you do first, the point of the ecosystem is to make you use all of them. Amazon is trying for a similarly lateral play. → Read More
In took them a few years, but Y Combinator has finally stormed Manhattan. Albeit — much to the chagrin for some of the people reading this — for one night only.
No, despite some of the rumors that had circulated around tonight’s YC NYC event, Y Combinator is not opening a branch in NYC. But the YC crew in attendance, which included nearly all of the firm’s partners and a dozen YC alumni, did share plenty of anecdotes and advice with a massive crowd of 800+ New York-based entrepreneurs, entrepreneurs-to-be, and an array of other people interested in the world of startups.
The keynote of the evening featured a talk by Y Combinator cofounder Paul Graham, who tackled an issue that’s been pervasive in the NYC vs Silicon Valley debate: what are the key ingredients needed to foster a startup community, and does NYC have what it takes? → Read More
