ScottEVest makes clothes for use geeks. They have lots of pocketses, plenty of acceptable style, and you can amaze people by stuffing a water bottle and laptop out of one of their coats with room to spare.
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When the Kindle Fire first shipped a couple weeks ago, the reviews were mixed. Uncle Walt calls it good, but not great. David Pogue at the NYT thinks it is “sluggish,” lacking “polish or speed.” But the Kindle Fire is still selling like hotcakes. Some reviewers are disappointed that it is not an iPad, but that is the wrong way to look at it. The Fire is a standout media tablet that does a few things very well and I am going to tell you what they are.
I’ve been using a Kindle Fire for the past two weeks (that is, when my kids or wife haven’t absconded to another room with it). The device passes my first test: my family fights over it. The Fire is kid-tested, and mother-approved. Fruit Ninja is the new obsession with my young children. Even my two-year-old, who loves the iPad, is increasingly eyeing the Kindle Fire and scheming ways to get her Mom out of the room so she can play with it. My wife will have none of that, she’s reading Joan Didion’s latest book on the Fire. I sneak it away from the bedside table when everyone is asleep at night to watch old episodes of Arrested Development. → Read More
As we heard earlier today, Thanksgiving proved to be a lucrative day for online retailers. IBM reported online Thanksgiving 2011 sales were up 39 percent over Thanksgiving 2010, with mobile shopping on the rise. eBay and PayPal are seeing similar trends. PayPal Mobile just announced a 511 percent increase in global mobile payment volume when compared to Thanksgiving 2010.
On Thanksgiving in the U.S., consumers shopped on mobile via PayPal most frequently between 6:00 p.m. and 7:00 p.m. PST. Around the world, consumers shopped on mobile most frequently between 1:00 p.m. and 2:00 p.m. PST. → Read More
RjDj’s Michael Breidenbruecker, also a Founder last.fm, has certainly opened up the avenues for sound apps on mobile platforms. The startup’s apps have become platforms for musicians, but are gradually evolving into augmented reality mobile apps.
Most recently the company partnered with screenwriter Christopher Nolan on Inception: The App, which reached 4 million downloads. The amount of “dreamtime” (time spent listening to the app ) was over 94 years. The average listening time per session is over 30 minutes. This was not your average app! → Read More
Fire sales turned into a firestorm for Walmart this morning as the company’s web servers buckled under Black Friday traffic. Shoppers from around the country waited until the middle of the night for sales only to experience broken checkout pages, emptied shopping carts, and login errors. This caused their desired items to go out of stock before they could buy them, leading to mass frustration and ill will towards the discount store chain. Meanwhile at its physical stores, 20 people were pepper sprayed by a fellow customer, and 2 people were shot outside separate locations. Walmart will need to sort out its servers in preparation for the upcoming Cybermonday blitz or it risks losing customers to Amazon. → Read More
Black Friday often makes people act absolutely crazy. This is well-documented. Still, you don’t expect to see consumer-driven insanity go down in countries that don’t celebrate Turkey day and its accompanying shopfest. And that’s not where the surprises ended this morning in Indonesia.
A crowd of 3,000 people waited in line today in Jakarta, Indonesia for a new smartphone. In fact, the group got so out of control that riot police had to be brought in to calm the masses. → Read More
We are entering into a new era, ladies and gentlemen. Well, “era” may not be the right word considering how quickly things change in these here mobile parts, but the fact remains the same: Quad-core mobile processors are here. And the ones that aren’t quite here yet are coming.
While many of our brilliantly geeky readers need no tutorial on the advantages of four processing cores, some of you may be thinking “Uh… OK, why do I care?” So I took it upon myself to place a few calls and get some of the big guns — Qualcomm, Nvidia, and TI — to explain why exactly you should care (or shouldn’t), and what kind of differences technology like this can make in the average user’s daily phone usage. → Read More
Banksy fans, this one’s for you.
Imagine an iOS photo app that swaps out Instagram filters for stencils from your favorite meme or art piece, then add a little augmented reality, and you’ll get Look.
Built by a couple of the developers behind Sports+ as a side project earlier this month, it’s the latest mobile app to use simple photo-editing and social features to make the world around you more interesting.
After downloading Look for the first time, you log in with Facebook, then see a camera view with the “Look” stencil overlayed on it. You can then switch to new stencils, available in the first folder at the bottom of the screen, that include the Pepper Spraying Cop, Charlie Sheen’s “Winning!” and a moustache for enhancing photos of your friends.
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Iovox is a startup specialising in something known as VaaS (Voice as a Service). Their telephony platform allows companies to build services on the telephone network that do real-world, heavy-lifting style jobs which normally require call centres. Companies which have taken on the service include News International and many others.
I went over to their West London offices (yes, not all startups in London are in the East, incredibly), to check out the legendary guitar playing skills of CEO Ryan Gallagher in our TechCrunch Europe version of TC Cribs. Maybe next time we should do a duet.
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This morning, AT&T issued a formal statement on the withdrawal of its application from the FCC regarding its merger with T-Mobile. The company had previously agreed to pay a $4 billion pre-tax charge in the case that its $39 billion takeover of T-Mobile failed to go through, $3 billion of which would go to Deutsche Telekom’s T-Mobile and another $1 billion going to the book value of spectrum access. Yesterday, on Thanksgiving Day here in the U.S., AT&T released a statement announcing its intention to withdraw its request from the FCC.
Today’s statement is meant to clear up misconceptions around its withdrawal request, namely that the FCC must approve it. → Read More
Over the past year the WWE has continued to push the social media envelope by integrating Twitter and Facebook further into its regular broadcasts. Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, now a cross-over star in both the WWE and Hollywood, cut a promo on WWE Raw to hype the upcoming pay-per-view “Survivor Series”. During that promo, the Rock quickly coined a new catchphrase “Boots to Asses” and said it was now trending worldwide. Before he mentioned it there was no mention of it on Twitter. Shortly after he said it, not only did it start a new chant throughout the arena, but it proved that Mr. Johnson was prophetic as minutes later the term “Boots to Asses” was trending worldwide. One might say this is a one off, but for anyone observing what the WWE has been up to this can be seen as only a small part of a much larger social media strategy. → Read More
Divorce. It happens to the best of us. As emotionally heart wrenching as it can be, it’s even worse now that we’re living out our lives on the public stages of Facebook, Twitter and the like. If the recent very public separation of Ashton and Demi is any indication, it’s only going to get worse. As a former physician, current internet entrepreneur, and ever-curious observer of the human condition, I’m fascinated by how the internet is broadly shaping our culture, and the day-to-day implications this has on our interpersonal relationships. → Read More
As we heard a few weeks ago, retailers were expecting Thanksgiving Day to be a major online shopping day as more and more consumers are hitting their laptops, tablets and more to get a head start on sales in between Turkey time. It looks like early results point to the day being a profitable one for retailers. According to IBM’s Coremetrics retail data, online Thanksgiving 2011 sales were up 39 percent over Thanksgiving 2010.
Mobile shopping also had a break out day on Turkey Day. The number of consumers using a mobile device to visit a retailer’s site reached a high of 15.2 percent, up from 6.45 percent in 2010. The number of consumers using their mobile device to make a purchase increased to 11.09 percent, up from 4.25 percent in 2010. → Read More
There’s certainly no shortage of social media monitoring and analytics service providers out there, with companies like Radian6, Visible Technologies, Sysomos, Socialbakers and Buddy Media among those who get most of the attention. But the market remains young, and there are lots of opportunities for small startups still.
This morning, I sat down with Folke Lemaitre, co-founder and CEO of Engagor, to see how their offering stacks up against that of its competitors. A bootstrapped startup, Engagor has managed to deliver a product that can definitely compete on features, pricing and overall user experience. → Read More
No, this isn’t a turkey-induced hallucination: ads for Verizon’s LTE-capable Galaxy Nexus have begun to pop up on a number of Android fan sites, and they clearly state that Samsung and Google’s latest joint effort will retail for $199. → Read More
It’s Black Friday in the United States, but Amazon this morning revealed a couple of deals that it will be running from Cyber Monday and/or the next few days (specifically, starting at midnight on Sunday, November 27, through the end of next week).
The company is selling a $79 Kindle, a $99 Kindle Touch, a $149 Kindle Touch 3G and a $199 Kindle Fire – and reiterates that the latter device is “currently the best-selling item across all of Amazon”. Good thing they’re prepared for the rush. → Read More
Starting today, on the retail shopping holiday known as Black Friday here in the U.S., Walgreens will begin rolling out its new scannable mobile coupons which work at its over 7,700 stores nationwide. The coupons are being made available in the Walgreens mobile applications and to use them, you simply show your phone at checkout where it will be scanned by the cashier.
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Dude I know this happened a month ago but I’ve been staying at my parents’ now for three days and we’ve already had the “You should start thinking seriously about your relationships” conversation because I will soon be no longer in my twenties and if I don’t get married asap I will be sent to the glue factory. So it’s still relevant.
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RjDj’s Michael Breidenbruecker, also a Founder last.fm, has certainly opened up the avenues for sound apps on mobile platforms. The startup’s apps have become platforms for musicians, but are gradually evolving into augmented reality mobile apps.
Most recently the company partnered with screenwriter Christopher Nolan on Inception: The App, which reached 4 million downloads. The amount of “dreamtime” (time spent listening to the app ) was over 94 years. The average listening time per session is over 30 minutes. This was not your average app!
→ Read More
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