Live video streaming service Ustream continues to expand its presence in Asia with the help of major telecom corporations.
Today, the company is announcing that it’s teaming KT Corporation, a leading telecommunications provider in South Korea, to launch Ustream Korea. Ustream will be launching its new Korean portal in January 2012, with a new office opening in Seoul that month as well. The joint venture includes a new $10 million funding round for Ustream, which brings the company’s total funding to $98.7 million.
The bulk of that funding comes from Japanese telecom provider Softbank, which forged a deep relationship with the company in February 2010 and has invested 75 million.
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Even with Ice Cream Sandwich on the way, Android Gingerbread devices are still as hot as ever. That said, there are way too many Android handsets on the market to parse through each and every one, but that’s why we’re here. We’ve looked through all the latest Android smartphones to give you our brief thoughts on the pick of the litter. These aren’t full-length reviews, but rather a way for you to easily compare what we think to be the most full-featured Android handsets released this month. Hopefully, your shopping research just got way less intensive.
For the glorious and spooky month of October, we’re putting the following handsets on the table: Samsung Galaxy S II (AT&T, T-Mobile, Sprint) Motorola Droid RAZR (Verizon, and maybe AT&T), HTC Amaze 4G (T-Mobile), and the Samsung Stratosphere (Verizon). While each of these phones run Android 2.3 Gingerbread, they all have something different they bring to the table, along with varying price tags.
Let’s take a closer look, yes? → Read More
Move over Motorola and Samsung. It’s HTC’s turn to send out invites to a mysterious press event, and we’re fully expecting to see the HTC Rezound (a.k.a. the Vigor) take the stage come November 3.
The Rezound, for those of you who have missed my near-obsessive coverage, is HTC’s next Verizon-bound LTE device. It’s slated to be the first stateside device to pack Beats audio technology, but it also confirms its geek cred with a 1.5GHz dual-core processor and a 4.3″ 720p display. Here’s hoping that the battery is up to snuff for this one. → Read More
Early in my tenure as product manager for the web servers at Netscape, we faced a terrible crisis. We just got our hands on Microsoft’s new web server, Internet Information Server (IIS), and benchmarked against our product. Microsoft’s IIS had every feature that we had, was five times faster and we knew that they were going to give it away for free. This might not sound so bad, but we had just gone public three months earlier with a story to Wall Street that said, “Don’t worry about Microsoft giving away the browser because we will make money selling servers.” Oh snap.
I immediately went to work trying to move the playing field and pivot the server product line to something that we could sell for money. The late, great Mike Homer and I worked furiously on a set of partnerships and acquisitions that would broaden the product line and surround the web server with enough functionality that we would be able survive the attack.
As I excitedly reviewed the plan with my engineering counterpart, Bill Turpin, he looked at me as though I was a little kid who had much to learn. Bill was a long-time veteran of battling Microsoft from his time at Borland and understood what I was trying to do, but remained unconvinced. He said: “Ben, those silver bullets that you and Mike are looking for are fine and good, but our web server is five times slower. There is no silver bullet that’s going to fix that. No, we are going to have to use a lot of lead bullets.” → Read More
SMK Electronics has put together a new capacitive touchscreen that’s designed to work not just with those wonderfully conductive fingers of yours, but also with gloved hands and perhaps more. SMK developed a new sensor panel structure that is noise-resistant, allowing for a clearer signal to be detected at high sensitivities.
But this isn’t the first touchscreen we’ve seen that works with gloves. → Read More
We’re but a mere 14 hours away from the long-awaited unveiling of Nokia’s first ever Windows Phone 7 handsets, and it seems they just can’t keep the spigot plugged. A set of images seemingly detailing not one, but two of the handsets set to be announced has just leaked out. → Read More
PROskore is a newly launched business network that ranks your social media activity and influence in combination with your professional experience in order to give you a score denoting your overall professional influence. At first glance, it sounds a lot like Klout, the popular service that measures online influence.
But unlike Klout, PROskore takes into account your business connections and actual work experience in its scoring methodology. It’s also built specifically for business networking purposes, allowing its users to focus on growing their companies. Meanwhile Klout, via its Klout Perks program, is more focused on help brands and advertisers grow their own businesses instead. → Read More
As the co-founder of Daisy Systems, the founding CEO of Sun Microsystems, a general partner at Kleiner Perkins and the founder of Khosla Ventures, there are few men who appear to have failed less than the legendary Vinod Khosla. And yet, when I caught up with Khosla after he keynoted yesterday’s excellentFailCon conference in San Francisco, he confessed to me that he’d failed more times than he succeeded.
Failure, of course, was the theme of the day at FailCon. And Khosla had much else to say about failure – arguing that the teachers in American schools are all failures and suggesting that all experts are full of “crap”. In Khosla’s mind, I suspect, what’s so interesting about failure is that you have to experience it in order to be successful. And that’s why, he told me, the success of technology entrepreneurs like Jack Dorsey and Max Levchin is dependent on their earlier failures. → Read More
Not content to let Nike hog the spotlight, Adidas has launched the SPEED_CELL, a miCoach compatible shoe dongle that senses your foot’s speed, acceleration, and distance travelled. The SPEED_CELL works with multiple sports and fits right inside the shoe’s outsole.
Unlike the Nike+ gear, the SPEED_CELL is more focused on general sporting rather than solely on running. It offers a window on the athlete’s performance and works with the miCoach virtual coaching service to allow weekend warriors to get fit without depending on a fireplug-shaped man yelling at them through a bullhorn.
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It’s been proven again and again that Siri has a peculiar sense of humor, but what if there was something more calculating, more sinister hiding beneath that jovial facade? Well, dock your iPhone 4S into ThinkGeek’s new IRIS 9000 voice control module, and you may soon find out.
On paper, the IRIS 9000 is pretty straightforward — once the iPhone is in place, just carry around the included remote, and go about your business. Whenever you need Siri to schedule an appointment (or sing a song), hit the button on the remote and let your request fly. → Read More
Last week, Google announced an impending update to its neglected online RSS reader, Google Reader. The service is soon getting a cosmetic overhaul and will see its current social features removed in favor of deeper integration with Google+. Although many TechCrunch commenters lamented alongside me about the forthcoming disappearance of our favorite “human curators,” when I asked the same question on Google+, the outcome was decidedly different: no one really cares.
Except, it appears, Iranians. According to a blog post now making its way around the Web, Google Reader served the Iranian community as a way to get uncensored, unfiltered news outside of government control. And now, that may be over. → Read More
Created by a young man named Jonathan Bouman, Scrolldit is a thing that scrolls Reddit for you, thereby allowing you to avoid the hard, hard job of scrolling Reddit. Why, you ask, is this news? Because we like Reddit and it’s really cool.
The site essentially takes Reddit feeds (including NSFW ones, hurr hurr hurr) and places them in little boxes that march across the screen. Because most people don’t read too good, there are lots of pictures and the occasional video, available for easy and quick consumption. Most of the rendering happens in the browser and it even feeds in Reddit’s own ads.
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Good morning everybody. In case you needed a reason to stare at your computer screen dumbfounded for a few minutes, here is an amazing video, financed by tech titans Ron Conway and Sean Parker, endorsing San Francisco Mayoral Candidate Ed Lee.
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Leonardo DiCaprio is the latest celebrity to get in on the celebrity tech investing trend, joining Lady Gaga, Ashton Kutcher and others. Leo is leading a $4 million round in photo sharing app and Israeli startup Mobli.
For background, Mobli is a photo-sharing app where users can share moments and see the world through other people’s eyes. Unlike other photosharing apps, Mobli is made up of subject-based channels and filters such as people, places and topics. The platform has seen significant celebrity adoption and is used by Leo himself, David Arquette and Paris Hilton. → Read More
I was at the CES press conference where head Monster, Noel Lee, unveiled the Miles Davis Trumpet Headphones with much fanfare. He said something to the effect that these headphones are for those that listen for nuances within music. These are for professionals, he said. That was code to me that they probably sound like garbage to the average listener. But after several weeks of testing, I’m pleased to report that I was mostly wrong.
Monster markets the Trumpets as “musicians’ headphones.” They praise the detail and clarity and I agree for the most part — if you can get can them in your ear correctly and don’t care about lossless audio. → Read More
Wikinvest’s realtime portfolio tracker makes tracking a number of brokerage accounts and your investment portfolio easy. The Wikinvest portfolio tracker lets anyone link up their real brokerage accounts to so they can keep tabs on their actual holdings, which are updated automatically every time you make a trade. Today, the startup is launching its free investment portfolio tracking iPad app, Wikinvest Portfolio HD, to enable users to track, analyze and manage all their investments in one place.
The app has been built from the ground up for iPad to give investors a high-level view of their investments. Through Wikinvest’s proprietary brokerage import technology, users can import their account information from over 60 of the largest brokerage firms in the U.S. → Read More
BBM Music has been keeping a low profile since it was announced last August, but a recently leaked image indicates that it may soon see the light of day. Crackberry got their hands on what appears to be a Best Buy Canada circular that touts both the BlackBerry Bold 9900 and RIM’s strangely social music service. → Read More
Music search and discovery startup SoundHound is today announcing its usage numbers for the first time, and it looks like they’re worth touting. SoundHound says that it now sees over 4 million music searches per day and user engagement tops 1,000 hits per second. In addition, the company now has over 50 million mobile users on iOS and Android combined.
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If your device is Bluetooth Smart Ready then it’s compatible with Bluetooth Smart and Bluetooth but if it’s Smart then it’s not compatible with regular Bluetooth. Got that?
The Bluetooth SIG, never content to leave well enough alone, as introduced three new “icons” for their new 4.0 standard. “Best” Bluetooth devices will support both “old” Bluetooth and 4.0 while Smart devices will only support 4.0. In short, Smart Ready devices will support dual modes and work the way with which we are currently familiar in devices like laptops, phones, and PCs, while Smart devices will support ultra low power devices like heart rate monitors and pedometers, allowing Bluetooth to come up against wireless standards like ANT.
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Scrappy outsider startup Unthink.com, which bills itself as the “anti-Facebook,” is opening up its doors today, allowing in its first round of beta testers. The Tampa-based company with $2.5 million in funding from DouglasBay Capital sees itself as a more open, more honest form of social networking – one where its users are the owners of their data, and not the product being sold to advertisers.
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