Sure this Padfone thing (yes it’s real) happened in May, but I just saw it and can’t stop laughing and can’t focus on the other thing I was writing so I am posting it here to get it out of my system, Arrington-style. → Read More
Do you remember when photojournalism and photographic stories used to be a more central part of the news reading experience? Granted, those were the days when print publishing reigned supreme and photo-centric news magazines represented some of the highest circulation periodicals in American publishing. There’s no better example of this than Life Magazine, which sold 13.5 million copies per week at its peak.
Yet, Life’s print edition slowly sputtered out of existence over the years (finally closing the doors of its print operations in 2007 after a number of re-starts), and just as digital technology has forced publishers and media organizations to alter their approach to the distribution and monetization of their content, photojournalism, too, seems in desperate need of a shot in the arm. → Read More
The new iPhone may not have it, but the next one probably will — and it’s becoming increasingly commonplace on Android and other smartphone platforms alike.
Yes, Near Field Communication (NFC for short), is finally starting to make its way into the hands of consumers. And a YC-backed company called Tagstand is looking to help developers take advantage of the technology, by giving them (and brands) all the tools and special, NFC-equipped stickers they need.
Today the YC-backed company, which we first covered in August, is announcing that it’s raised a $1.1 million funding round that includes many notable angels. The full list: Yuri Milner, SV Angel, Naval Ravikant, Paul Buchheit, Yael Shazeer, Christina Brodbeck, Anand Agarawala, Mike Berolzheimer, Bee Partners, Quotidian Ventures, TEEC (Chinese angel network), Vaizra Investments (Israeli fund), Dean Smith, Christopher Morton, and Anand Swaminathan.
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The three Samwer brothers (Oliver, Marc and Alexander) founders of the Rocket Internet incubator in Berlin, are a phenomenon. They are far and away the most successful Internet entrepreneurs in Germany. They have launched and exited at least six major startups since the late 1990s, from ebay clone Alando (€48m to eBay), Jamba (€228m), StudiVZ (€85m), MyVideo (€27m), BigPoint (€100m), and the latest, Groupon clone CityDeal to Groupon for an estimated €750m in cash and shares. And yet they remain famously publicity shy. I personally have asked for an interview since at least 2009. So when I was offered the chance to interview Oliver Samwer – considered by many to be the heart of the operation – I jumped at it. Once a year he or one of his brothers journey to the annual business school conference IdeaLab, aimed at budding entrepreneurs. It’s there that Rocket Internet famously recruits its next generation of startup CEOs for their startups – often companies which greatly resemble the business models of US startups, like Wimdu, which mirrors AirBnB.
The young student organisers of IdeaLab faithfully checked and re-checked that Oliver would do an interview. Today I got up at 5am in London to get the flight over to Frankfurt, then drove 100 miles to the small management school, WHU where IdeaLab is held.
But when it came to it I had 5 minutes 14 seconds with the Rocket Internet guru, much of it walking after him out the building as he repeatedly refused to conduct an actual interview. → Read More
The continually increasing size of hard drives means we can all store more pictures, music, games, and so on, but as with the transistor counts in Moore’s Law, those increases don’t come easy. Companies like Toshiba, TDK, and Seagate are forever looking into ways to increase the number of bits they can store inside a drive. It’s already an astounding amount, but they always seem to find a way to improve it further.
Today’s advance comes from Singapore’s Institute of Materials Research and Engineering, where Dr Joel Yang has figured out a way to fit several times the number of bits in a given area. The secret? A little salt in the mix. → Read More
This week startup contests at Startup Weekend Poznan, E-nnovation and Startup Fest have been keeping entrepreneurs and investors out of the office. For some it may appear unproductive but for Chris Kowalczyk, the founder of HardGamma venture fund and an accelerator called GammaRebels, startup competition is another form of dealflow.
Today Kowalczyk and other investors were judging presentations at the Startup Fest, openly exchanging their opinions in tweets and cheering for the best pitches, instead of keeping the deals private to fend off the competitors.
The competition to find and fund promising companies is indeed increasing in Poland. → Read More
This summer, at the prestigious Edinburgh International Book Festival, the prize winning Scottish writer and filmmaker Ewan Morrison made a highly controversial speech about the death of the traditional author and the book. Indeed, Morrison’s speech made such a stir in Europe that I invited him onto TechCrunchTV to familiarize our global audience with his controversial views.
The unvarnished Morrison didn’t disappoint. Arguing that the Internet is a “model for extreme American capitalism”, he told me that today’s high quality book and author are being killed by three forces: Google, Amazon, and the consumer. While Morrison’s Google and Amazon arguments have been made before by a number of critics (including myself), it is his critique of the online consumer that is likely to be most controversial. But is he right? Could it really be possible that it’s the online consumer – with his or her insatiable appetite for free or very cheap content – that is killing our culture?
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Erick and John take the iPhone 4S and its built in voice activated personal digital assistant Siri, for a spin in this episode of Fly or Die.
Right off the bat Erick says he is impressed with reception he receives when using the iPhone 4S and points out how the iPhone 4S streamlines notifications from various sites (Twitter, Foursquare, Instagram) by having them scroll in one fluid stream. Erick also demonstrates how Twitter is integrated into the phone (with sound effects) before having Siri set up a meeting for him and Biggs. → Read More
At the beginning of the year, super investors Ron Conway and Yuri Milner created the controversial Start Fund to invest in every new Y Combinator startup. They offered each YC startup to graduate from Paul Graham’s rigorous selection process $150,000 in an uncapped convertible note with no discount. Some venture capitalists didn’t like the precedent this set. But at least one more big one, Andreessen Horowitz, is jumping on board and joining the Start Fund.
Going forward, Andreessen Horowitz will contribute $50,000 of that $150,000 to each YC startup that chooses to take the deal (and so far, most of them have). “It will start with the next cycle,” Marc Andreessen tells me. With more than 60 startups per class and growing that comes to $3 million in commitments per class for each of the three investment partners in the Start Fund. → Read More
Just in time to be one of the first app installs on my freshly arrived iPhone 4S, there comes a new location-based mobile app called Roamz (iTunes link), which will have its official debut on Monday at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. As hinted at by the name, the app wants to help you discover the world around you as you “roam” around town.
To do so, Roamz digs into social signals from services like Facebook, Foursquare, Twitter and Instagram in order to find out what people in your area are buzzing about right now. It then presents those results to you in a stream which you can filter by interest. → Read More
Now that RIM’s global network is out of the woods, carriers are having to deal with the public relations nightmare that the outage has caused.
Given the sheer number of vocal BlackBerry users gumming up Twitter with calls for compensation, we (and all of their customers) are left wondering how RIM is going to handle this. → Read More
Most people reading this website will not be surprised to hear that the era of film is coming to an end. Even those of you who, like me, spent days in darkrooms perfecting your dodge technique, are likely unruffled at the notion. But in Hollywood film has been clinging tenaciously to life, if only out of a sort of traditionalist inertia. But this last year was marked by a sort of quiet final surrender by the film cadre: Arri, Panavision, and Aaton have all ceased production of film cameras. These companies have been driving the film industry for decades, and for them all to throw in the towel at once suggests that the end truly is approaching.
The story of the last few years of film is told extremely well in Debra Kaufman’s article at Creative Cow, which touches on the many people and industries which film moviemaking has both relied on and contributed to. To call its end a tragedy would be a sentimental overstatement, but the world rarely moves on without leaving some things behind, and it’s good to acknowledge that. → Read More
Here’s the one in which we figure out what Paul Carr’s startup will actually do; Okay so it is a publication! Okay it’s a whole company focused on publishing only for tablets and e-readers! (Actually doesn’t a tablet count as an e-reader? Wasted thirty minutes having this discussion this morning …)
Carr’s post-TechCrunch company, NSFW Corp, will shun the Internet in favor of a publishing direct-to-the-tablet model because Carr thinks that high-quality content and the web are two mutually exclusive things. NSFW Corp’s first publication will be The New Gambit, which Carr describes as The Economist as written by The Daily Show writers — something like The Onion, but for real news. → Read More
We’ve seen a few peeks of Creative’s Zii-powered Android tablets over the last couple months, but being rather spec-oriented, this reference platform didn’t get much attention. This video does a better job of showing off the advantages of having a general-purpose parallel CPU array like StemCell. It’s a special 48-core chip they’ve married to a 1.5GHz Cortex A9, and it’s dedicated to media processing.
Check it out the video inside. → Read More
The Daily Mail and General Trust which owns The Daily Mail and other media interests is to planning to merge the online property business of its Digital Property Group consisting of FindaProperty.com and Primelocation.com, with venture-backed property startup Zoopla.
Under the proposed merger, A&N Media (the consumer arm of DMGT) will retain a 55% interest in the newly merged entity. Shares in DMGT were up following the proposal.
In 2009 Zoopla closed a £3.75 million round of funding from venture capital firms Atlas Venture and Octopus Ventures taking its total raised to £5.5m. → Read More
Like many, I am absolutely amazed by Siri, the talking assistant on the iPhone 4S. It was the one thing that really stood out for me during the launch event when Scott Forstall introduced it ten days ago. And now we finally get to play with it.
After an Apple product launch, my usual evening at home is telling (umm .. selling) my wife the new features and how I need to have it. When I went home that night, it was all about Siri—”the other person” in my life. I never uttered a word about the specs of the dual core A5 processor or how it has 7x better graphics or even the HSPA+ download speeds—she does not care. An average person, unlike many of us, couldn’t care less for what is under the hood, couldn’t care less whether the product is open or closed, couldn’t care less about Flash, HTML5 or native apps. I found myself listing all the scenarios of how productive I was going to be, how finally something that can actually be used was here. It would be the perfect companion to get all my to-dos done! → Read More
According to a new post by Google VP of Product Bradley Horowitz, on the official company blog, Google is delivering the death blow to several more products and services, including its code search engine, Buzz, Jaiku, iGoogle features and the University Research Program for Google Search, the latter which provides API access to Google Search results for a small number of academic institutions.
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If legit, a freshly leaked document from the Verizon Device Management System confirms earlier rumors that the next official Google phone will indeed be called the Galaxy Nexus.
An Ice Cream Sandwich announcement is already slated for October 19, where Samsung and Google are expected to announce the next Nexus. → Read More
GE has announced plans to spend $600 million on a new solar factory located in the Denver suburb of Aurora, Colorado. The factory, which begins operations in 2012, will be capable of producing enough solar panels per year to generate 400 megawatts of power, or enough energy to power 80,000 homes. When completed, the factory will be bigger than 11 football fields – soon to be the largest factory of its kind in the U.S.
The business will also bring 355 jobs to Colorado plus 100 more positions at GE’s research facility in upstate New York. → Read More
The three Samwer brothers (Oliver, Marc and Alexander) founders of the Rocket Internet incubator in Berlin, are a phenomenon. They are far and away the most successful Internet entrepreneurs in Germany. They have launched and exited at least six major startups since the late 1990s, from ebay clone Alando (€48m to eBay), Jamba (€228m), StudiVZ (€85m), MyVideo (€27m), BigPoint (€100m), and the latest, Groupon clone CityDeal to Groupon for an estimated €750m in cash and shares. And yet they remain famously publicity shy. I personally have asked for an interview since at least 2009. So when I was offered the chance to interview Oliver Samwer – considered by many to be the heart of the operation – I jumped at it. Once a year he or one of his brothers journey to the annual business school conference IdeaLab, aimed at budding entrepreneurs. It’s there that Rocket Internet famously recruits its next generation of startup CEOs for their startups – often companies which greatly resemble the business models of US startups, like Wimdu, which mirrors AirBnB.
The young student organisers of IdeaLab faithfully checked and re-checked that Oliver would do an interview. Today I got up at 5am in London to get the flight over to Frankfurt, then drove 100 miles to the small management school, WHU where IdeaLab is held.
But when it came to it I had a 5 minutes 14 seconds with the Rocket Internet guru, much of it walking after him out the building as he repeatedly refused to conduct an actual interview. → Read More
San Francisco, CA
