This morning, Motorola dropped a bit of a surprise with the MOTO ACTV, an iPod Nano-esque thimble of a device.
Does the world need another tiny, crappy audio player? Probably not. But what about a tiny, Android-powered audio player that focuses on gauging exercise? Still, probably not — but hey, it’ll be fun to hack! → Read More
A new venture backed by European Seed accelerator HackFWD has launched today. Fantasy Shopper is a new social shopping game where players discover and share the latest fashion from real-world online retailers. Look out shopping addicts this is seriously addictive. On Fantasy Shopper, users spend Fantasy Money to buy virtual clothing, create outfits and stock out their virtual wardrobe. Launching… → Read More
Today, at the Web 2.0 Summit, Ben Horowitz, the former co-founder and CEO of Opsware and founding partner of well-known venture capital firm, Andreessen Horowitz, took to the stage today to speak to John Heilemann of New York Magazine. Horowitz spoke to his history with his founding partner as well as what the two tech veterans look for in the companies they invest in and mentor.
Interestingly… → Read More
Forget about rating restaurants and bars – now you can rate everything! According to this website, Jotly is a new startup that lets you rate everything in your life and share it with everyone. The service is mobile, local and social, and even includes points and contests.
Oh, and one more thing: it’s totally fake.
That’s right, despite sounding suspiciously like a lot of me-too apps that… → Read More
After talking scale and product at Web 2.0 Summit, moderator John Heilemann started asking CEO Dennis Crowley about the competitive landscape. “Has Groupon made your life difficult?”
Then Heilemann turned to the Google and Facebook rip offs both Facebook and Google Places.”Does that scare the shit out of you?” Heilemann asked Crowley. “It’s one of the most challenging things to deal with.”… → Read More
I’m a Clif Bar fiend. Cool Mint Chocolate’s my current favorite, but mainstays like Chocolate Chip and Crunchy Peanut Butter suit me just fine.
But sometimes as I bite into one of these super-efficient, energy-packed bundles of nutrition, I find myself asking: could there be an energy bar out there that’s even better than my beloved Clifs? One that sacrifices some sugar for a bit more protein… → Read More
Solar manufacturer Solaria and solar performance monitoring software and hardware provider meteocontrol have today announced a partnership that will see meteocontrol’s Virtual Control Room (VCOM) monitoring system added to Solaria’s projects. The system aims to help Solaria’s customers increase their solar yields through remote management. → Read More
SMS Audio is gear up to launch 50 Cent’s headphone line. The top-tier wireless cans leaked (which eventually lead to their official release) but the company just released pics and technicial info on the wired versions. Price and exact release data is still missing, though. → Read More
Bill Gross was just on stage to officially introduce UberMedia’s latest product, Chime.in. The app hit iTunes yesterday. It is an online mobile social network built around interests.
We’ve been seeing a lot of companies trying to tackle the interest graph lately, and Chime.in is the latest. Chime.in does this by layering the interest graph on top of the social graph (the connections between… → Read More
We’re at the Palace Hotel for day two of for the 2011 Web 2.0 Summit, where the lineup for the next three days consists of almost everyone on the entire Internet. The. entire. Internet. In case you didn’t get to be a part of the in-person action, you and your friends at home can follow along from the Livestream above, starting at 1130 a.m. PST.
Today’s speaker highlights include the… → Read More
While onstage today at Web 2.0 Summit, I asked Michael Dell if he regretted saying that Apple should shut down the company and sell the stock back to shareholders 14 years ago when Apple was trading at $17, in light of the fact that the latter company is now trading at $420 a share at a ~$400 billion dollar market cap, among other things.
His response? “My answer was misconstrued.” → Read More
After the hot mess that was the Droid Bionic Saga (Delay! Delay! Delay! Screw it, release garbage.), I didn’t think I could ever like another Motorola device again. Guess I was wrong.
I just spent a bit of time with the just announced Droid RAZR, and, at least at first glance, it is… surprisingly great. Dive in for my first impressions, won’t you? → Read More
Secret Escapes, the exclusive flash sales for luxury hotel rooms along the lines of Voyage Prive in France, is announcing a second funding round, although they are being coy about the level. Suffice to say this is a site which is pretty much ‘coining it’ amongst users, having attracted 750,000 active users since January this year and claims to be doubling turnover every three months.
Tom… → Read More
We may be on the brink of a third industrial revolution, but it’s going to happen in Europe rather than America. That’s at least the view of Jeremy Rifkin, whose new book The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power is Transforming Energy, the Economy and the World, argues that the internet will be a thousand times more powerful when merged with the renewable energy revolution.
But as… → Read More
Today, after the market closes, Apple will release its fourth quarter earnings – the first time the company will do so since the loss of Co-Founder and visionary leader Steve Jobs. It’s expected that the newly launched iPhone 4S will one day soon help to usher in another record-breaking quarter for Apple, given that the company already announced that the iPhone 4S’s first weekend sales exceeded 4… → Read More
Everyme, a startup that plans to disrupt the address book, has announced $1.5 million in funding from an impressive group of backers including Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock, Michael Arrington’s CrunchFund, Chinese internet giant Tencent, SV Angel, Dave Morin, Joshua Schachter and Vivi Nevo.
A graduate of Y Combinator’s Summer 20011 class, Everyme wants to reinvent the way you experience your… → Read More
You may remember that we recently broke a story about a small company called Timelines Inc, which filed a trademark infringement lawsuit against Facebook. According to the lawsuit documents, Timelines claims that Facebook’s recently announced Timeline feature could “quite possibly eliminate” its entire business.
The lawsuit is still ongoing – although the U.S. District Court in Chicago… → Read More
If you remember from a teaser video posted a few days ago, today is a big day. Verizon and Motorola have finally announced the much-anticipated Droid RAZR, the next LTE beast to grace big red’s shelves. Here at the launch event in New York City, we’re hearing four words over and over again: faster, thinner, smarter, and stronger. And that’s exactly how we’d describe the new Droid RAZR. → Read More
In a plot twist not many of us were expecting, Motorola took an opportunity at its NYC press event this morning (where we expect to see the Droid Spyder unveiling) to announce MotoACTV, a new smart watch. → Read More
Mike Lazaridis, CEO of Research in Motion, “The whole company is aligning behind this single vision. It combines the best of QNX and Blackberry.” Meet BBX.
BBX is the future of RIM. Dan Dodge, president of QNX, joined Mike Lazaridis and proudly co-announced BBX. This platform incorporates enterprise, NOC and cloud services into one system that can run on smartphones, tablets and embedded… → Read More
Mike Lazaridis, the belegaured co-head of RIM, took the stage at DevCon Americas to announce some strong numbers. First, RIM has just announced 1 billion App World downloads, which amounts to about 5 million downloads per day. The service is on pace to hit 2 billion this year. Mike went on to proudly state that on average, a BlackBerry app is downloaded 43% more than its iOS or Android… → Read More
Advise.me, the new and rapidly expanding startup accelerator and incubator, is working on its first startup. The company is still in stealth mode, and all we know about it is that it’s a social communication service of some sort, but definitely not another social network. It will, however, use existing social networks. And given the name and the landing page (chirping? mobile? the color blue?)… → Read More
As a fan of kitten videos, I’m often embarrassed by my inability to attach said videos to emails I’m trying to send the rest of my local chapter of American Society Of Kitten Video Lovers (ASKVL). While 50MB may seem small to some (and it’s a file barely big enough to hold a kitten video let alone a video of a kitten and and a baby monkey), it’s enormous for some mail systems. In the end, I have… → Read More
Short Version: The Archos 80 G9 tablet isn’t necessarily something I’d recommend for the hardcore tablet enthusiast, but it certainly gets the job done. Powered by pure Android 3.2 Honeycomb, the tab offers everything you’d expect out of Android and a nice variety of ports, albeit with a somewhat rough build-quality. → Read More
Media company Clear Channel Radio and daily deals service LivingSocial are today announcing an agreement that names LivingSocial as the sole daily deal provider for over 500 Clear Channel-owned radio stations across 90 cities in the U.S. The agreement marks LivingSocial’s expansion from an online and mobile platform to one that now serves listeners, specifically the 80 million listeners per week… → Read More
Do you remember Actroid-F, the super-realistic humanoid that we’ve shown you last year? Her makers, robot venture Kokoro and Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), have apparently been working hard since then to create a “brother” for her.
According to AIST, people kept asking the institute why it only manufactured a female robot, and they not only did… → Read More
It hasn’t been an easy year for RIM. The Playbook came out half-baked, their handset line has taken a pummeling from its ambitious competitors, the businesses and governments of the world are alternately hassling and blaming them, and as if that wasn’t enough, they just had a catastrophic global network failure and their olive branch is unlikely to fend off lawsuits. Did someone at RIM HQ break a… → Read More
Women 2.0, an organization whose goal is to increase the number of female founders in technology startups, is sharing some good news today: the number of women starting companies has doubled over the past three years. The new data comes from a survey of its own community, which includes everyone from actual founders and co-founders to aspiring entrepreneurs.
Back in 2008, Women 2.0 ran the same… → Read More
Dexetra, a mobile start-up, impressed us all last night with their Siri clone, an Android app called Iris. The folks there were so thankful that their project hit the front page that they sent us a kind thank you as well as a picture of a cake that the founders gave the team in celebration of getting TechCruched [sic]. It’s heartwarming to see people who worked hard get rewarded for their… → Read More
Capcom has let slip that an official Nintendo 3DS add-on circlepad – the circular joystick on the left side of the console – will be available for purchase in February to coincide with the launch of Resident Evil: Revelations. The dual circlepads will allow for more accurate aiming in many titles and I can definitely see the value, even over the 3DS’s built-in gyroscopic sensors. I’ve found that… → Read More
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