After being teased for months and months, nine months to be exact, of when Verizon and Motorola would release the DROID Bionic, the wait is finally over. The DROID Bionic is now out in stores and the reviews have been nothing but positive. In fact, people are so in awe of the phone, some even believe it will be the only phone to compete with the up-and-coming iPhone 5. So, since this is Friday, and we like to give things away on Friday, we are going to give one DROID Bionic away to one lucky reader. → Read More
I’m not often the fan of startups that are “the this, for that,” but I think I could get into something like Deal Décor: it’s the Groupon for furniture. This San Francisco-based startup is using the group-buying model made popular by Groupon to connect customers with factory-direct deals from overseas furniture manufacturers.
The company is launching on Monday in San Francisco, which will serve as the pilot program for the service for 6 months. Afterwards, the plan is to launch in one new city every month, scaling up to reach the 20 largest metro areas in the U.S. → Read More
So remember that one time I said that Samsung was planning on stepping up its game against Apple? That was no joke.
In the same court that granted an EU-wide injunction against three of its Galaxy smartphones, the Hague Court in the Netherlands, Samsung has asked that the iPhone and iPad get pulled from shelves. → Read More
Along with being one of the world’s leading seed investors in technology start-ups, Israeli entrepreneur Yossi Vardi is also an acknowledged expert in renewable energy. He once ran the Israeli Ministry of Energy and was involved in a number of pioneering projects to develop non-commercial, indigenous and alternative energy resources for oil-poor Israel.
One of these projects involved an attempt to make cow manure the engine of the Israeli energy economy. And at his recent Stream unconference in Athens, Yossi revealed – for the first time ever on camera – the details of how he became the world’s leading authority on cow’s manure and how this World Bank funded green energy project could have powered the Internet. → Read More
At 500 Startups’ Smash Summit in New York today, Robert Scoble revealed that PayPal is launching something big with Facebook in two weeks, and that it would be a more expansive partnership than the existing PayPal-Facebook integrations. This announcement is coming at eBay and PayPal’s X.commerce Innovate conference in two weeks, we’ve confirmed with the payments giant, and Katie Burke Mitic, who leads Platform Marketing for Facebook will be making an announcement. We hear the announcement will be relate of PayPal parent company eBay Inc.’s new developer platform X.commerce.
Last year, PayPal announced its new micropayments product, which Facebook integrated. In early 2010, Facebook announced that you could use PayPal to purchase Credits. → Read More
Word of an Amazon press conference slated for September 28 at 10 AM is making the rounds. Could the fabled Amazon tablet make its first appearance?
If so, then the invitation does a great job of playing it cool. Aside from a mention of the time and date, it offers little else to chew on. That hasn’t stopped speculation from running wild, and the potential unveiling of their new tablet is on everyone’s mind. → Read More
You’ve likely already heard about that defunct six-ton satellite hurtling its way to the Earth’s surface. Unless you’re paranoid, you also know that the chances of this changing anyone’s life, anywhere (save for a few NASA peeps) are very small. Like, microscopic.
Still, it’s been a slow news week and the media has to keep pumping things out — and so begins the emergence of a thousand different news stories on several hunks of space metal that will likely land in an ocean. Rather than feign some notion of severity in this situation, my favorite comedic newscaster Stephen Colbert has weighed in. → Read More
Dish Network has the answer to Netflix: Blockbuster. The company bought the bankrupt Blockbuster six months ago at auction for $228 million and apparently wasted no time integrating Blockbuster’s current streaming service into Dish’s satellite TV plans. The Blockbuster Movie Pass is a complete media rental service and features streaming movies and TV shows along with movies and games-by-mail. But don’t cancel your Netflix streaming account just yet. → Read More
The ninjas at The Digital Reader have uncovered the names of two new Nook Color versions – the Encore, priced at $249, and the Acclaim, priced at $349. The Nook Touch (now called the Nook Smart Touch) will remain $139.
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When it was released in 1991 on the Amiga, Another World was one of those games that drew you into its world from the very first second, and kept you at rapt attention even after you died countless times. The game has spent nearly two decades meandering from computer to console and vice versa, but Eric Chahi’s creation has just made the leap onto iOS just in time for its 20th anniversary.
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Blockbuster is back. Today it is expected to launch a new streaming video service to take on Netflix. Blockbuster was bought out of bankruptcy by Dish Network for $230 million last April and everybody, including Netflix, has been waiting for it to fully enter the digital age with an all-you-can-eat streaming video service.
Relatively speaking, in the U.S. we are still at the very early stages of adoption for streaming full-length TV shows and movies. Which brand is better positioned? Take the poll below.
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ViKi, an international video site for world TV series and movies translated in 100+ languages by its community, is debuting a new iPhone app today, called ViKi On-The-Go.
As we’ve written in the past, ViKi is an open-source-like solution for video, and acquires the rights to TV shows and movies. The site then puts it on one of its channels and within the first 24 hours an organized, volunteer community subtitles the content using ViKi’s software. The site has gained considerable traction in the past year. Currently, ViKi is seeing 8.5 million unique visitors and 36 million tota visits in the past month, which is four times the traffic that ViKi has seen from last year.
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It’s only been a few days since the launch of the official Google+ Hangouts API (application programming interface), but we’re already starting to see some interesting implementations make their debut. Case in point: online whiteboarding service Conceptboard has introduced a Hangouts extension that puts Google’s own newly integrated Sketchpad to shame. → Read More
Texas Instruments has closed its $6.5 billion acquisition of fellow semiconductor manufacturer National Semiconductor. In April, Texas Instruments announced all-cash deal, which was valued at $25 per share. The deal has now cleared all regulatory reviews and has shareholder approval.
Santa Clara-based National Semiconductor is a semiconductor manufacturer, specializing in analog devices and subsystems. The company’s products include power management circuits, display drivers, audio and operational amplifiers, communication interface products and data conversion solutions.
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If you were to take a good hard look at the Apple-Samsung trail of destruction (otherwise known as their world-wide patent war), you’d likely come to the conclusion that Apple is ahead by a few key points, at least thus far. Apple has taken down the Galaxy Tab 10.1 in Germany, won an EU-wide (sort of) injunction on three Galaxy smartphones (though Samsung’s found a way to keep selling them), and kept the GalTab from being sold in Australia as well. Samsung has yet to get any iProduct removed from store shelves.
Obviously, this is an ongoing war and anything could happen, but as it rests now Apple has the advantage. With any win, however contained, the psychological affects of that win carry over into other court systems and countries. So Apple’s win is more than just a win in Europe, and a semi-win in Australia — it’s a sign to all the other courts that Apple may just have a point to their argument. To Samsung, this effect is lethal.
With that said, Samsung’s head of global marketing for mobile communications Lee Younghee has said that Samsung plans to take a much more aggressive stance with regard to Apple, reports the AP. → Read More
I’ve been using a pretty cool app of late called Fantastical. It’s OS X-only but I suspect the Windows crowd would get a kick out of it as well.
Basically it’s a natural language calendar app. You can paste (nearly) anything into its little window and it will automagically create an event. “Dinner with Joe at 5pm on Thursday” works just as you would imagine it would and unless today is Thursday, Fantastical will figure things out. It fumbles sometimes with word order and ends up setting all day lunches with “Tuesday” but most of the time that’s reparable with a few keystrokes. → Read More
While it’s near impossible to say what exactly Apple has in store for us come October, a new report from DigiTimes reveals that there may be fewer iPhone 5s to go around if it indeed makes its debut.
Some of the iPhone 5 touch panels that manufacturer Wintek has assembled are turning out to be defective, and could potentially cause a supply shortage come launch day. → Read More
StartApp is a new monetization and distribution platform for Android applications designed to address the challenges the platform has created in terms of revenue generation for developers. Using the new StartApp SDK (software development kit), developers can receive $10 – $50 per 1,000 downloads, the company claims. This is higher than the $4 average per 1,000 downloads developers see elsewhere, StartApp says.
Sounds great, right? What’s the catch? → Read More
Mintigo, a company that provides big-data analysis for customer acquisition, has $9 million in Series B funding led by Sequoia Capital, Giza Venture Capital and other private investors.
Mintigo helps companies sift through data sets to find leads and potential customers. The startup’s Mintigo, customer targeting and acquisition solution is a custom engine that analyzes a company’s unique customer acquisition goals and then crawls the web, looking for prospects with high potential and receptiveness to the product offered. → Read More
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