Sony Corp. has just announced that it will pay $1.47 billion for Ericsson’s 50% stake in a joint mobile handset venture. → Read More
Remember that time that astrologers decided that they had gotten all the zodiac signs off by one, and everyone was so bewildered because all of a sudden you were NO LONGER AN ARIES BUT A PISCES and it seemed like everything you had believed for so long was untrue.
Well the social media equivalent happened today for startup Klout and its “scores,” which purportedly give you and others an idea of your social media influence on various topics. → Read More
Voting in The Europas Awards has gone live. Held annually, The Europas are the main European Awards for early stage Internet and Mobile technology startups. The are selected by a combination of an expert Advisory Board (which changes every year) and voting by the industry itself. The whole thing comes together on a special awards night in London, on November 17.
Of course, out of the sheer need to filter the thousands of people in tech startups across Europe, the Awards can’t cover every single startup and entrepreneur. But what you see below are the ones this year’s Board picked out as representing the best new early stage startups in Europe, and the people making it all happen.
Everyone here is a winner already. Not a single company or person here is not amazing at what they do already. But in the end, there is always a filter. So this is your chance to feed in your choices for the best in Europe. From this will come the final finalists for the awards on November 17 in London. Voting ends on November 1st. You can vote only once in each category. So get voting! → Read More
Today, Discovr, the awesome tool that allows users to discover new apps for iOS (by way of interactive graphs) is announcing that it has passed the one million downloads milestone and has closed a $1.1M seed round led by Australia’s leading VC firm Yuuwa Capital. Of course, there’s no better way to celebrate these achievements than launch a new version of your app for Apple desktops, right? Today, the startup is also announcing the release of its Discovr Music app, which is available for $5 now on those Mac App Stores near you. Discovr Music, put simply, makes it easy to discover new music from the comfort of your laptops and desktops. → Read More
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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Zingaya, a Russian VOIP startup HQ-in London has raised $1.15 million in a Series A funding. Investors include Esther Dyson and Russian private investors. I one “Untitled Venture Capital Company”. I kid not. Zingaya, founded in 2009 by the three young Russian geeks who previously developed flaphone, a web-based VOIP app, is effectively a click-to-call service aimed at support calls for e-commerce sites. They are by no means the only player in this market but are getting traction with customer at a reasonable click with over 100 paying customers including the largest Russian payment system – Qiwi, and major Russian airline S7 Airlines. → Read More
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
English turned out to be an official language at IDCEE, which took place over the past two days in Kiev, Ukraine. The conference organizers proved to have what it takes to challenge Startup Week Vienna and How to Web to become the leading eastern European startup conference.
Familiar faces seen at Startup Week Vienna were pitching at IDCEE competition. Four finalists made it to the final, and the jury was asked to rate the finalists. Here is the result. → 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
Telecommunications has moved to the cloud, inevitably. We have a tele-cloud in East London now, where Twilio has opened its first office outside the U.S. today. The reason I’m excited about this is that telephony infrastructure in the cloud is as technically simple as economically cheap. Sounds good, doesn’t it?
Twilio, as you might know, is a simple API for developers that allows them to integrate phone calls, text messages and IP voice communications into their phone applications. Through that it has becomes something of an enabling layer on top of telecommunications, allowing for innovation in the field. One of the key things about Twilio is its simplicity. Developers with no background in telecom whatsoever can build sophisticated applications using their existing skills faster than you can say API. Well, pretty fast anyway – airbnb built their Voice Connect service on top of Twilio in 48 hours. → 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
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