In November of last year, i/o Ventures-backed Skyara launched a platform that was essentially the Airbnb for experiences, as it allowed those who are in the position to offer cool experiences like a culinary tour, beer tasting, or personalized yoga to hook up with those who want to try them. Skyara was the platform that would connect the providers with the fun-seekers.
Since then, founders Jonathan Wu, Dennis Liu and Steven Ou have been working quietly on the platform, adding, iterating, and tweaking. As is often the case, the development process led to an early pivot, and the team is officially transitioning Skyara into a new product, called RAVN — which launches in private beta today. (Invites below.) Unfortunately for early Skyara users, the team will be either shutting down or redirecting Skyara in the near future. → Read More
The purchase price of Google’s acquisition of restaurant review and guide source Zagat has been pinpointed at $151 million in cash, according to an SEC filing by the company itself and reported by Reuters. → Read More
To add a little more screencap credence to reports that Google will be launching its own Music Download Store within the next couple of weeks, people who attempt to access music.google.com from their Android phones are presented with following screen on the left, advertising the Google Music Beta Android app, among other things.
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Silicon Valley is still king when it comes to startup hubs, but there’s at least one area where NYC has it beat: having a good time for a good cause.
In this case, the event is Raise Cache, and it’s looking to raise $100,000 for hackNY, an organization started by Columbia and NYU faculty that looks to spur innovation in NYC.
Today they’re announcing that Raise Cache is teaming with hot startup Turntable.fm to bring the social DJ site to life at a party/fashion show in NYC’s State Armory, with the help of some notable figures from the New York tech scene. The event will take place on November 17, and tickets are on sale now at Eventbrite for $70 for general admission, and $30 for students. All of the proceeds will go to HackNY, which you can learn more about in the video below. → Read More
It’s been a rough year for Mahalo. The startup, which was founded by Jason Calacanis in 2007, began its life as a human powered search engine that offered curated links in what was intended to be a mix between the traditional search layout and Wikipedia. Over time, Mahalo became a knowledge directory, launched a Q&A service a la Yahoo! Answers, and began producing educational and games-related video content.
However, in late February, Google made a change to how it determines rankings for the websites it aggregates and serves in search results as part of an effort to lower the rank of content farms and reward sites producing higher quality content. Though Mahalo had spent millions producing expert-driven video content as well as accompanying articles, Calacanis wrote to employees in March that Google’s revisions had led to a “significant dip” in their “traffic and revenue”. → Read More
What happens when you’re the de facto distribution platform for something like Occupy Wall St and other events that run afoul of the police? Well, you end up getting an email through semi-official channels saying “Would you please remove the video of Officer Pounder allegedly overstepping his authority” — and there’s not much of a choice. As much as Google would like to avoid antagonizing local police forces, the backlash that would occur if they forcibly took down, say, Officer Bologna (Tony Bologna no less) pepper spraying those girls, would be lethal to the YouTube brand. Up it stays.
On the other hand, there are plenty of legitimate takedown requests that come from governments when a video or other Google-hosted item is in fact illegal, so down they must come, whether they like it or not. It’s a fine line to walk, and Google has hoped to make their position clear with their Transparency Report. The report corresponding to the first half of 2011 has an interesting little extra tidbit: “We received a request from a local law enforcement agency to remove YouTube videos of police brutality, which we did not remove.” Why so specific? → Read More
Your fine friends at TC Gadgets have gotten back together to discuss Nokia, Striiv, and the project Matt is building in his basement.
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Developer communication network Geekli.st has raised $600K from angel investors Keith Richman, Nick Wilson, Neal Rapoport, Max Clark, Brian Tu, Sean Knapp, Jeff Fluhr, Joseph Shieh and Great Oaks VC. → Read More
At a media even in the Big Apple, Canon today announced its latest flagship photo printer, the Pixma Pro-1. According to Canon, the Pixma Pro-1 is the world’s first A3+ printer to boast 12 separate inks.
Along with Photo and Matte black inks, there are three grey inks — dark grey, grey, and light grey — and six color inks, including Cyan, Photo Cyan, Magenta, Photo Magenta, Yellow and Red. The printer also comes with a Chroma Optimizer, which is meant to add richness to blacks and add uniformity to glossiness. → Read More
Last year, several lawsuits emerged that accused Yelp of extorting businesses to advertise in exchange for positive reviews. Yelp has just announced that a judge granted Yelp’s request to dismiss these suits.
For background, the lawsuits claimed that after declining a request to purchase advertising on Yelp, a number of positive reviews from businesses’ listings on the reviews site mysteriously disappeared, downgrading the company’s rating on the site. → Read More
Sorry RIM, but it looks like the promise of free apps and tech support weren’t enough to assuage the masses. According to the Financial Post, RIM is preparing to deal with a class action lawsuit filed on behalf of Canadian users affected by the company’s widespread service outage. → Read More
I unintentionally set off a nice little flame war last week when I criticized Samsung’s decision to go with a Pentile sub-pixel matrix for their new Galaxy Nexus phone, a display technology that doesn’t have an illustrious past and, while it may prove itself in this generation, still made me lose confidence in the phone. Sub-pixel layouts are something few people consider, but (as the Engineer Guy explains) all those pretty colors you see on your displays are almost always made up of a few tiny monochromatic dots. E-ink screens use one dot per pixel, but they are of course monochrome, and the Mirasol and Pixel Qi displays we’ve seen also use an RGB matrix. But research being done in Taiwan may combine the best of both worlds.
Wallen Mphepö, a researcher at National Chiao Tung University, has created a new kind of pixel that operates completely differently from existing technologies. The way the new screens work is that each pixel, normally created by a set of sub-pixels, is instead a single mechanism of silvered crystal. → Read More
If you’re waiting in the queue for Google’s Real Time Analytics Beta, we’ve got good news… and we’ve got bad news. The good news: Google has just let in another big round of participants, so odds aren’t too shabby that you’re in. The bad news: they mixed up their “To:” field and their “BCC:” field on the welcome e-mail. → Read More
RIM may be pinning their hopes on BBX, but that doesn’t mean they’re done churning out classic BlackBerrys. Case in point: the revamped Bold 9790 has been revealed in a new set of photos that doesn’t look like someone took them during an earthquake.
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There’s been some chatter about how Conde Nast’s tablet editions of its popular magazines, which have enjoyed a large increase in subscribers since the release of Apple’s Newsstand feature. It must be a pleasant surprise to the company, which as late as April was easing back on tablet content production after a less-than-stellar debut period. A lot can happen in six months, though: for example, 20 million iPads were sold. That’s a big increase in the demographic. And of course the designated channel for magazine-type content helps as well.
As pleasant as this news is (I’m all in favor of bringing print-quality content to digital devices), I think this portion of the tablet experience is still very much an early-adopter, minority share situation. They’re probably patting each other’s backs at Conde Nast, but the champagne is still in the fridge. → Read More
Another day, another Tokyoflash watch. The Kisai 7 is a clever, fairly cool watch that looks like something Jeff Bridges picked out of his magisterial beard in the last Tron movie. Priced at $99 for the next 30 hours, you, too, can look like a Program just looking to get out of the CPU.
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RelayRides, a car-sharing service that lets you rent (or rent out) cars a few hours at a time, has raised an additional $3 million in funding, adding on to the company’s Series A round that now totals $13M. More important than the money is who took part in the round: it was led by General Motors Ventures, with participation from the company’s existing investors.
The funding is connected to a recent deal that RelayRides forged with GM, which will allow RelayRides users to tap into the OnStar system that has come equipped on all GM cars since 2005 (that’s around 15 million cars). After connecting their OnStar accounts to RelayRides, renters will be able to remotely unlock the cars they’ve signed up for using their mobile phones, without having to deal with swapping physical keys.
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Kobo is about to launch their new Vox ereader/tablet and I think it’s important to remember that the reader race isn’t just down to two contestants: this Canadian company, while comparatively small in the US, is performing quite admirably on the international stage, hitting 2.5 million users in the US and over 5 million total in the world.
The Vox is a fairly nondescript Android tablet running a slightly modified version of Android 2.3. It is compatible with most Android apps and ships with the Kobo app pre-installed. As it stands there’s little to be excited about except the price and the bright, readable screen that is purported to have excellent visibility in direct sunlight. At $199, the Kobo Vox is probably one of the most affordable “big name” Android tablets that may actually gain some traction this holiday.
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What. The. Bleep.
Not to say that Nokia’s new smartphones aren’t interesting, but this crazy flexible smartphone-like device CNET spotted over at Nokia World has to be the coolest thing to grace the showroom floors. Unfortunately, CNET reports that its strictly in the prototype phase, and may never become an actual product that’s for sale. → Read More
