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 mobile platforms.
Basically, Famigo not only provides an app directory but also surfaces the best apps for Apple or Android across a variety of family-focused categories, such as the best games by age group and more. Parents can also sign up to receive a weekly email that recommends the best apps for their platform of choice, iOS or Android, tailored to their family’s needs. Users can also refine searches by excluding features such as advertising, profanity, violence and in-app purchases. → 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 business and its evolution to a “closed-loop” business model. → 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 cloud, and the service is free for developers. Once you make a site go live, it costs $100 a month.
The company raised a $1.3 million seed round a year ago from First Round Capital, Baseline, Floodgate, Founder Collective, and Heroku founders James Lindenbaum, Adam Wiggins, and Orion Henry. You can think of Pantheon as a Heroku for Drupal sites in that it puts the web development environment in the cloud. Founder and CEo Zack Rosen has simpler description of what Pantheon offers. ” You can get an enterprise-complete website for your organization with the level of polish of a consumer-grade site.” → 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 European markets like Italy and Germany. And in a few years time, the report says, the U.S. market may be the largest in the world. → 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 Australian shelves by next week, said Samsung attorney David Catterns. → 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 analyze data and make better decisions.
As Quist tells me, When we left Google, we realized that data analysis outside the Googleplex kind of sucks. Big time. The tools available are so niche that only big enterprise can purchase them. The alternatives suck too. → 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 with the 5.3-inch smartphone/tablet hybrid Galaxy Note. → 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 — Linux-only.
In an announcement late last night, Canonical has revealed that there is now a Windows client for Ubuntu One, allowing you to access all your files from either Linux or Windows computers. → 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. Ditching Android for webOS after building an ecosystem around Android seems foolish and shortsighted. This move, if it’s really happening, could be more about hardware development and patents than reviving a dead operating system. Sorry, fanboys. → 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 events, and contribute descriptions, links, photos and videos related to those events, people, companies, bands and whatnot (i.e. Cuban Missile Crisis, Al Capone and Pink Floyd). → Read More
As promised earlier this summer, mobile video calling app Tango has finally made it to the PC. Today, a year after its launch on iOS and Android, Tango is now available for Windows desktop computers (XP, Vista and Windows 7). The company says a Mac version will be available later this year. → Read More
Hey Amazon, Appsfire wants to have a chat about your logo for the Kindle Fire, that interesting, affordable tablet you announced a few days ago. They’re upset because it looks a lot like theirs.
Writes Appsfire co-founder Ouriel Ohayon:
(after the jump) → Read More
Full HD resolution (1,920×1,080 pixels) isn’t enough for Sharp. The company has developed [JP] a TV that’s capable of producing images with 3,840×2,160 resolution and is ready to show the device to the public during the CEATEC 2011 exhibition that takes place next week near Tokyo.
The 60-inch 4K TV has been developed in cooperation with the I3 (I-cubed) Research Center in Kawasaki. I am assuming Sharp will share more detailed specs when they bring the prototype to CEATEC (so far, only the size and resolution have been revealed). → Read More
Disney, which has been doing business as an MVNO in Japan (Disney Mobile) since 2008, took the wraps off two new Android phones [JP] yesterday. The DM010SH will be rolled out in Japan in October, followed by the DM011SH in December (prices tbd).
Technically, the DM010SH is based on the Sharp’s AQUOS 009SH [JP] and features Android 2.3, a 4-inch LCD with QHD resolution, an 8MP CMOS camera, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, a microSDHC slot, a digital TV tuner, an e-wallet function, infrared communication, etc. → Read More
Myspace savior Specific Media laid off 8% of its staff yesterday, about 50 people. Those laid off were mostly Myspace employees, according to one source, presumably eagerly awaiting their severance package; “The people that [sic] got let go were celebrating because Specific Media doesn’t have a clue what to do.”
In the past three months Specific Media had gone from the excitement of new acquisition smell to post partum depression it seems like, recently scaling back this summer’s grand Myspace relaunch plans because of unfavorable progress. → Read More
Is this finally the beginning of Japanese Android phones being made available outside their home market? Japan’s biggest mobile carrier NTT Docomo yesterday announced it has inked a deal with French telco Orange to bring a Sharp Android handset to Asia and Europe.
The handset in question is a pretty nice one, the AQUOS PHONE SH80F (pictured), that Sharp introduced (together with Docomo) in Japan back in May. → Read More
Here are some of yesterday’s stories on TechCrunch Gadgets: → Read More
Nexus S or iPhone? Kindle Fire or iPad? Samsung TV or LG TV? When people try to make such decisions, they usually look for as much data as possible so they can compare choices. For many gadgets, that’s relatively easy because you can compare similar specs such as CPU speed, RAM, screen size, etc. But what about for everything else? That’s what the startup GetComparisons is going after.
They aim to be the “Epinions for comparisons,” founder Akshay Arabolu says. The service is all about gathering user-written product reviews and formatting them in such a way that it’s easy to compare things. While a service like gdgt does a great job of this for gadgets, Arabolu found a pain point in trying to figure out if he should use WordPress or Tumblr for blogging. So that’s the service he set out to build. → Read More
Last night at an informal gathering of tech people, someone likened Silicon Valley to a “Las Vegas for people who want to make crazy shit” equating VCs and angel investors to gamblers of sorts. Well if investors are gamblers, and startups are hands of cards, what does that make engineers? I don’t know (in the Vegas analogy I’m Hunter S. Thomson), but it sure seems like they get paid a lot. → Read More
Massive severance packages are nothing new, but sometimes you just feel the need to call attention to them. Ousted HP CEO Leo Apotheker is leaving the company with a $7.2 million severance payment, plus a $2.4 million bonus and $3.7m in stock (more if you count the other 440,000 vested shares). I understand that this high pay is part of our business culture, but really, now.
Is it possible that HP was in a death spiral and only Apotheker’s sound judgment caused them to get away with a mere 45% drop in value? It seems unlikely that they’d kick him to the curb after less than a year if that were the case. → Read More
