Social media analytics company Socialbakers, previously known as Facebakers, has raised $2 million in funding in a round led by Earlybird Venture Capital. The funding will enable Socialbakers, which was founded in 2009 and says it is already profitable, to extend its offerings for social media monitoring. → Read More
Logitech is known for their keyboards and mice, and the company always seems to find new ways to make what should be boring old accessories interesting. The MX 3200 Laser keyboard and mouse are an awesome example, as Logitech said the combo pack was built using an AgION surface meant to disrupt the growth of bacterial cells.
Not a bad idea at all, but the way that Logitech marketed the MX 3200 Laser didn’t please the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency one bit. → Read More
Back in late 2009, then-free music identifying service Shazam made a rather drastic change to their business model: they went freemium. Everybody got 5 free song identifications per month… but after that, they’d have to cough up for premium app, “Shazam Encore”.
That worked well enough for a while — then the competition rolled in, and gave away what Shazam was trying to charge for. Shazam responded with an experiment: they’d remove the tagging limits in their app, with a single “sponsor” covering their costs in exchange for ad placement — but only for Android, and only until the end of the year.
Seems that worked well enough: Shazam has just removed the tagging limits in their iOS and Android apps indefinitely. → Read More
It’s no secret that Nokia has put their faith in Windows Phone 7 to carry their future smartphones, but they haven’t forgotten the millions of customers who count on them for their lower-end handsets. A new report from the Wall Street Journal suggests that Nokia is hard at work on a Linux-based OS codenamed “Meltemi.” → Read More
StoryDesk, a tablet publishing platform for enterprise, is today launching its first product called CatalogApp, an iPad application that lets businesses bring their sales catalogs to the tablet computer.
The application is designed to be easy to use, even for those without technical expertise. With StoryDesk’s Web-based content management system, CatalogApp users can enter in or even drag-and-drop product information, photos and pricing into the StoryDesk online interface. The changes made are then immediately synced to the iPad application on the end user’s device. → Read More
Really? Could this video really show the iPhone 5? Probably not. The video’s authenticity is tipped by several subtle clues. But the video is still worth watching. The creator clearly knows his way around video editing software and deserves major props for this timely video. It’s good and I want it to be real. → Read More
The Kindle Fire may be poised to win the Android tablet wars, but Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos doesn’t think of it as a tablet. “We think of Kindle Fire as an end-to-end service,” he told me yesterday in an interview after his presentation, picking up on a theme he introduced earlier onstage (see video above). The Kindle Fire is a wrapper for all of Amazon’s digital media products in the cloud. It is designed specifically to consume digital media in all its forms, from books and magazines to movies, games, and apps. Bezos sees the Kindle Fire holistically as a delivery device which will help unleash all the digital media services Amazon offers. → Read More
eBay is adding a new member to its board today—Facebook executive Katie Burke Mitic. She joins current board members eBay CEO John Donahoe, Pierre Omidyar, Scott Cook, Fred D. Anderson, William Ford, Marc Andreessen, Edward W. Barnholt, Dawn Lepore, David Moffett, Richard Schlosberg, and Thomas Tierney.
Mitic currently leads Platform and Mobile Marketing for Facebook, with responsibility for shaping and growing products for over two million developers and businesses that engage with Facebook’s 800 million active users. Prior to joining Facebook, Mitic served as Senior Vice President of Global Product Marketing at Palm, where she oversaw hardware and software product management and marketing, as well as business and corporate development. → Read More
Announced at CES 2011, the Gibson Firebird X has been a fascinating example of a traditional instrument maker building something that, arguably, is quite revolutionary. The Firebird X is essentially a computer inside a guitar. The guitar itself contains a Freescale processor and can run apps approved and sold through the Gibson website. The guitar can model over 2,000 different sounds and styles out of the box and, when coupled with Gibson’s auto-tuning machine heads, you can select any number of tuning possibilities automatically.
Guitar purists are an angry lot and many innovations, including the Fretlight, are welcomed with derision and snark. To be fair, guitars haven’t improved much since Les Paul strapped some strings to a hunk of 4×4. As electronic music has eclipsed “real” instruments, it’s good to see that Gibson is still trying new things. They could just sit back and keep making sunbursts until the end of days, but instead they’re building what amounts to a PC in a solid-body electric.
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The Europas, the European Tech Startup Awards, were held for the second time December 2010, in London, supported by TechCrunch Europe. It was the culmination of a month of online voting by the European tech startup industry for the finalists, where some 33,126 votes were cast, judges deliberated over the results and over 350 people joined the cream of Europe’s startups, VCs and entrepreneurs at a huge awards event. This year it’s getting bigger to get the community even more involved, create an even bigger event, and find the best startups in Europe. You can enter here and tickets are here. Also follow the event on Twitter @TheEuropas and on Facebook. Read More → Read More
Brazilian social gaming company Vostu is unveiling its first title that mixes casual gaming with social gaming, Golmania. The multi-player soccer game will launch on Orkut and Facebook in English, Spanish and Portuguese
For background, Vostu is one of the largest social gaming companies in Brazil. The gaming company, which now has more than 35 million users, was founded in 2007 by three Harvard classmates: CEO Daniel Kafie, chief scientist Mario Schlosser, and Joshua Kushner (who is also an active seed investor through Thrive Capital). Vostu is backed by Tiger Management, Accel Partners, Intel Capital and General Catalyst. The company has also been embroiled in a nasty lawsuit with social gaming giant Zynga. → Read More
When you woke up this morning, did you think that the world would change? Well it did, people. It did. Boardcrafting is a Kickstarter project that will change the way people play Settlers of Catan forever by replacing the easily-jostled cardboard pieces with real wooden markers and pips.
If you’re not familiar with Catan it’s a game for former D&D nerds who want to feel like they’re kind of playing Civilization. We’re a Carcassonne family, but that doesn’t mean we don’t like to whip out our sheep and wheat and colonize the island a bit. However, because the game is made of light cardboard it tends to shift and flop around during play, especially on uneven surfaces. That’s where Boardcrafting comes in. → Read More
Earlier this month, third-party mobile app store GetJar announced the public launch of its GetJar Gold Program (previously in beta), a catalog of premium Android applications made available for free. Today, the company is providing an update on the catalog’s success: over $1 million in free applications have been downloaded in the three weeks post-launch, Get Jar says. It has also spurred an increase in GetJar’s free app downloads, too – a 5000% increase, in fact.
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Ever had cows instead of users? You’ve probably never thought about building software for farmers, but Farmeron just raised a round of investment as well as support from 500 Startups, a seed fund and startup aggregator led by Dave McClure. Farmeron is basically buidling an analytics package inspired by the numerous apps you might have used, such as Omniture or Google Analytics, but built for farms.
Farmeron’s solution is a slick web based application in which you, as a farmer, can keep track of your animals, their feeding, deaths etc. Like we all have profiles on Twitter or Facebook, each animal in Farmeron has its own profile as well. → Read More
We’ve already shown you the three coolest smartphones Japanese carrier SoftBank announced for its home market today, the LUMIX Phone 101P from Panasonic, Sharp’s AQUOS PHONE 102SH, and the DELL STREAK PRO 101 DL. But SoftBank actually introduced a total of nine new Android models today (plus a feature phone).
Here’s the carrier’s entire fall/winter line-up for the Japanese market. → Read More
Search engine Blekko has raised $30 million in new funding Yandex, MLC Private Equity, and existing investors U.S. Venture Partners, CMEA Capital and PivotNorth Capital (Ashton Kutcher is also a previous investor). This brings Blekko’s total funding to $55 million. Yandex’s CEO Arkady Volozh will join Blekko’s board.
Blekko launched last year as the shiny new search engine that wanted to take on Google. The search engine differentiates itself from Google by giving users tools to do new types of searches that they can’t do elsewhere. Blekko offers unique query refinement tools to human editors called Slashtags (i.e. /news or /date or /amazon or /blogs) to filter results to what you are looking for (you can read our full review of the platform here). → Read More
Quora can be an addiction. You visit the site just to see what’s going on, 30 minutes later you’re still there. Today, the addiction goes mobile. Finally.
The service has just released their first iOS native app. Tailored for the iPhone and iPod touch, I can safely say that it’s awesome. I’ve been testing it out for the past few days, and my own personal usage of the service has already skyrocketed. Why? A few reasons. → Read More
Lego (or LEGO if you’re adamant about trademarks) has just dipped another toe into electronic gaming with their clever “Life Of George” iOS title. The game uses 144 pieces and a piece of cardboard covered in a dotted pattern. The game is simple: George shows you a picture from his travels and asks you to recreate it using Legos. You have to dig around in your box of pieces to recreate the image and then take a picture of it on the Playmat. Using a brick recognition system from Eye-Cue, the game awards you points for speed and accuracy.
The game is oddly addicting and great for kids. The pieces are bit small so it’s aimed at ages 12 and up but it’s also a great way to build teamwork with one player – maybe a parent – calling out the pieces and the other player putting the object together. → Read More
Compete.com, a Kantar Media company, today released its ranking of the top 250 websites for August 2011 (click here for the top 50).
We can’t repeat this often enough, but take these stats with a grain of salt when it comes to accuracy.
We’ve looked at the top 250 all the same, because the list tends to depict trends also visible with other analytics service providers, such as comScore and Google Trends. → Read More
Mobile users with NFC-enabled devices will no longer need a special application in order to exchange contact details or other types of data between their phones thanks to a new NFC specification which has just been released.
The non-profit industry association The NFC Forum has published its 16th specification today, this latest being a standardization of the Simple NDEF Exchange Protocol (SNEP) to use peer-to-peer mode for data exchanges. For users, this means less compatibility problems between devices, and for mobile app builders, it means simplified development. → Read More
