TechCrunch readers may remember Brammo as the Oregon-based designer and manufacturer of all-electric motorcycles (and the battery technology and software that powers them), or as the makers of the bike one Mike Arrington was driving around the conference center at Disrupt NYC this year, whereupon he was almost removed from Disrupt by security. Later, in conjunction with Brammo CEO (And Disrupt Speaker) Craig Bramscher, Arrington gave the motorcycle away to one lucky mother of a marine.
Back in 2008, Brammo raised its first chunk of outside investment, an $11 million round led by Chrysalix Energy Venture Capital and Best Buy Venture Capital. Today, the electric vehicle technology company has added another significant piece of change to its vault, announcing the close of the final tranche of a $28 million series B round of financing. → Read More
Marketing technology company Fiksu’s data for the month of September shows the year’s biggest drop in application downloads, a trend it claims was impacted by mobile consumers holding out for the next Apple iPhone. Last month, the company speculated that a hiatus in sales of older iPhone models was impacting app downloads, and Apple’s recent admission of a drop of 3 million device sales last quarter appears to validate that claim. → Read More
Apparently “innocent until proven guilty” isn’t going to hold up well on the interwebs. At least not according to a group called Demand Progress, who claims that the upcoming House version of the PROTECT IP Act could offer even more power to the accuser. And even worse, sites like Twitter and YouTube may be under fire in no time at all.
The bill, which is a rewrite of the unpopular COICA bill, was passed by the Senate Judiciary Committee in May. Even in its original state, the bill seemingly contradicts this country’s assumption of innocence in many ways, allowing not only the Department of Justice, but private rightsholders to accuse a site of infringement and have it yanked with court approval. If the Department of Justice levels the charge (rather than a private rightsholder), the scope of the order extends past payment processors and ad networks to ISPs and search engines, thus requiring search engines to censor allegedly infringing sites out of their index. → Read More
EasyWeb Innovations, hereafter referred to as ‘EasyWeb’ or, alternatively, ‘some obscure patent troll looking to score coin by suing companies that actually innovate, rather than building and selling something’, has recently filed patent infringement lawsuits against social networking giants Facebook and Twitter. The suits claim EasyWeb holds five patents, with titles such as “Message Publishing System for Publishing Messages from Identified, Authorized Senders”.
Of note is the plaintiff’s lawyer, John Demarais, who is quite famous in patent litigation circles (he went from defending some of the biggest tech firms from patent trolls to working exclusively with and for patent trolls to attack them). → Read More
Casual games publisher King.com is today announcing it has passed one billion gameplays per month and is now one of the top 10 largest developers on Facebook’s social network. The company, which offers nearly 200 multi-platform games in 14 languages, is also expanding its reach in North America with the opening of new offices in San Francisco.
→ Read More
RIBA II is the name of a cute caretaker robot from Japan, which we covered before but now have a professionally made video of. The two-armed robot was developed by Tokai Rubber Industries and RIKEN (a private research institute based out of Tokyo) and is supposed to make life easier for care facility personnel.
RIBA II is able to “gently” lift people (weighing up to 80kg) off the floor and onto a bed, freeing human caretakers of this hard task. His makers say they designed the material that patients get in touch with, especially the arms and hands, to be as soft as possible – thanks to the world’s first capacitance touch sensors made of rubber (see below). → Read More
Clever Sense’s local recommendations app Alfred was already doing a great job suggesting restaurants, coffee shops, bars and nightclubs using its artificial intelligence-based system. But today, it’s going to do something even more extraordinary - it will make suggestions based on who you’re with. This new feature, rolling out today through an app update in iTunes, will combine your personal likes and interests with those of your friends in order to suggest places you will all agree on. → Read More
Mint.com has been available on a variety of mobile platforms, including iPhone and Android, but has not developed an iPad app. Considering the popularity of other finance apps on the iPad and the tablet for factor, the device is ideal for Mint’s service. Today, Intuit-owned Mint.com is finally launching an iPad app. You can download the app here.
The iPad app lets you organize all accounts in one place within the app, and includes a streaming delivery of account alerts, bill reminders and personalized advice. The app takes advantage of the touch interface to allow users to pinch, tap and flick through graphs to drill into spending by category, merchant or budget. Similar to the iPhone app, you can add transactions from the app and it uses Google places to identify local merchants to input.
→ Read More
As you probably know, Disrupt Beijing is happening next week and I’ll be heading south from Beijing after the event. I would love to hang out with folks in Shenzhen and Hong Kong. As it stands, I think we can put together a meet-up in Hong Kong on Wednesday Night (November 2nd) and another meet-up in Shenzhen on Friday night (November 4). I welcome recommendations for spots and I’d love to talk to start-ups and gadget folks in those cities.
→ Read More
The BlackBerry Bold 9900 and Curve 9360 have something to brag about: They are the first SIM-based smartphone to earn the MasterCard PayPass Certification. This states MasterCard feels the phones have the proper functionality and security to handle MasterCard’s NFC-based PayPass payment system.
MasterCard’s contactless payment system rolled out years ago but the company announced earlier this year the system would hit SIM-based systems. Gemalto kickstarted the effort with its SIM cards, which also earned a nod from MasterCard. But now that the Bold 9900 and Curve 9360 are PayPass certified, any MasterCard PayPass-issuing bank can assign a PayPass account to the SIM card within the phones. → Read More
If you’re not familiar with Yodlee, they’re the financial services company that developed technology to make back-end aggregation of bank data secure and speedy so that services like Mint.com could be born and go on to be swallowed up by Intuit for boatloads of cash. Founded in 1999, Yodlee now boasts over 30 million users and has raised over $100 million in funding to date. It’s quietly become a provider of financial applications and management solutions that let users collect all their account information in one, centralized place to let them easily manage all their pesky financial tasks. → Read More
Sprint Nextel, the no. 3 carrier in the United States, reported its quarterly earnings today, and they’re quite solid. In Q3 2011, the company generated consolidated net operating revenues of $8.3 billion, up from $8.15 billion in the same period last year and relatively flat compared to Q2 2011.
The company booked a quarterly loss of $301 million (or 10 cents per share), roughly a third the loss it reported in the same quarter a year ago ($911 million). → Read More
There have been a number of startups that have tried to create a social network for neighborhoods and communities, including OhSoWe and DeHood. But there isn’t one platform that has been able to be the go-to social platform for local neighborhoods groups. Enter Benchmark-backed Nextdoor, the next startup to throw its hat in the social network for neighborhoods ring.
Nextdoor, which is a private social network for neighborhoods, was co-founded by Nirav Tolia, of Epionions fame. After Epinions (which became Shopping.com), Tolia spend time as an EIR at Benchmark, and then co-founded FanBase, a directory of all things sports. → Read More
Pioneer yesterday announced the so-called Potternavi [JP], a GPS for bicycles that will be available in white or black. Buyers can expect a 2.4-inch color LCD with 240×320 resolution, ANT+ support, an acceleration sensor, a USB port, and 10 hours of battery life.
Pioneer says that the Potternavi not only shows maps and directions but also lets users look for popular spots, for example the nearest restaurant or store. It also gives tips for healthy biking, indicates which actions burn how many calories etc. → Read More
Sociable Labs, a startup that helps online retailers increase referral traffic and sales using social commerce, has raised $7 million in Series B financing led by Battery Ventures. The startup was originally seed funded by Facebook through the fbFund.
Sociable Labs focuses on delivering and measuring traditional ecommerce metrics, such as traffic, conversion rates and sales, for retailers via Facebook and others social networks. The startup offers a suite of hosted applications for retailers to socialize buyers opinions and help discover products based on buyer’s friends’ advice, right at the point of purchase. → Read More
Over the last few years, developer-facing services like Heroku and AWS have proven immensely popular, helping reduce the hassles that programmers have to deal with. One of the biggest success stories along these lines has been Twilio, which launched back in 2008 and has raised around $15 million in funding to date.
The company does something that sounds deceptively simple: it makes baking phone calls and text messages into an app straightforward, with a handful of intuitive commands like “dial” and “say” as its basic building blocks. This API has proven to be much easier to use than the services that were used in the pre-Twilio days, and growth has surged over the last year. But there’s been one big issue: Twilio’s functionality has been severely handicapped outside of the United States.
→ Read More
One of the most popular ways for publishers to monetize their content — aside from basic banner and AdSense ads — is through affiliate programs. These are often transparent to users: you’ll click a link to an online store, and if you buy something, the publisher gets a percentage of the purchase price (each program varies a bit, but that’s the standard way they operate).
Of course, signing up for each of these programs takes work. SkimLinks is a UK-based company that helps publishers monetize their content by inserting these affiliate links automatically, and today it’s harnessing a recent acquisition that will make one of its products significantly more efficient (and useful for a broader set of links).
The startup makes two main products. The first is its namesake SkimLinks, which will identify any link that’s been included in a publisher’s content and automatically convert it to an affiliate link whenever possible (this saves the publisher the hassle of having to sign up for affiliate programs with each merchant). → Read More
Back in February, digital gifting platform CashStar raised $5 million in series B funding from Allen and Company and Passport Capital. Today, the startup is announcing that it has cashed in on yet another round of outside funding, with $12 million in new series C financing led by FTV Capital. The round also included participation from existing investors like Coupons.com President & CEO Steven Boal and Passport Capital. The series C financing brings the startup’s total investment to north of $21 million. → Read More
And we’re one step closer to the Robocalypse: a research team at the Nagoya Institute of Technology has developed a passive robot that can walk on its own. All it needs to get moving is a gentle push – no motors, sensors or even electricity needed. Its legs and ankles are powered by potential energy only.
The makers says the robot is made of aluminum and took 100,000 steps in a row during a test (which lasted 13 hours). The robot is able to carry a payload of “10-20kg” and could be used by people who have trouble walking, for example (it’s possible for humans to “wear” the robot on their legs).
→ Read More
Nokia this morning introduced a series of ‘basic smartphones’ (Asha) and higher-end Windows Phone-powered smartphones (Lumia) at the Nokia World 2011 event in London.
The company has put up a whole bunch of videos featuring the phones on its YouTube channel, and also a few weird ads.
Below, you can find a few videos that highlight the Lumia phone(s), which I personally think actually look quite compelling, the longest video ad and the obligatory designer’s story.
Enjoy (after the jump) → Read More
