The Black Friday madness has finally come to a close. Well, almost. We all still need to live through Cyber Monday — a much safer version of our public displays of consumerism — but for the most part Black Friday is behind us. People camped out all night, were pepper-sprayed, and hopefully walked away with some new gear for a cheap price.
Apple, which seemed to have the weakest discounts of almost any gadgets retailer, posted some strong numbers from its Black Friday one-day sale. → Read More
The sheer number of new startups forming and getting funded these days is dizzying. It’s never been easier to start a company to harness new technologies and turn them into products. Traditional venture capital may not even be able to keep up with it. We are at the beginnings of what may very well become a Cambrian Explosion of startups, which will have implications well beyond the technology industry to the entire economy.
We’ve spent the last 15 years building out the tethered Web. The next 15 years will be about connecting the Web to the physical world. And mobile is just the start. → Read More
Back in early 2009, I wrote about an Italian startup called BeeTV, which showcased some impressive TV recommendation technology. The goal was to sell that technology to telcos and cable operators, but this proved to be a very difficult task for a small, scrappy upstart. This led to BeeTV changing course and trying its hand at making consumer-focused products, like an iPad app for watching and sharing TV experiences with friends. They also secured more funding, bringing its total raised to over $10 million.
Alas, this morning CEO Yaniv Solnik informed me that they’ve failed to gain significant traction with the new strategy, and that they’ve subsequently ran out of cash. The company will be ceasing operations soon. → Read More
Matrix Partners and WI Harper Group, a Chinese VC, this morning announced that they’ve pumped $12.5 million into SNS Plus, an international publisher and distributor of games with a focus on the Asian market. As of June 2011, the company has published more than 60 games on Facebook, and more than 15 games on other platforms such as Zingme, iOS, Friendster and more. → Read More
We’re one step closer to the Robocalypse: Japan-based Kawada Industries has developed a humanoid robot that’s specifically designed to work alongside human beings. The so-called Nextage is certainly not the first robot of its kind, but his specs are pretty impressive, and he’s already commercialized, too.
Nextage is equipped with a high-speed stereo-camera and two arms that have 12 joints each and can be positioned within 30 microns. When a human worker gets near, the robot stops working immediately for safety reasons. → Read More
Amazon this morning pounded itself on the chest once more for selling Kindle devices as if they were hotcakes, particularly during last (Black) Friday. According to the company, it was the “best Black Friday ever” for the Kindle family, with Kindle sales “increasing 4x over last year”. As usual, don’t expect Amazon to share hard sales numbers, because they never do.
We’ll have to do with analyst estimates, which I’m sure will be rolling in during the course of this week (today is Cyber Monday and will likely result in another sales spike for Kindle devices). The number does run in the millions, of course. → Read More
Last week, Erick posted a video in which the founders of a stealth, San Francisco-based startup called Undrip spit some rhymes in an effort to raise seed funding for their new venture. Undrip, which is building a service to better filter your social networking streams (like Twitter) and let people consume media content without the noise, hoped to use their creative plea as a way to attract attention from top investors. They even created custom videos that they sent to individual investors, like Ron Conway. (See the video here.)
And today, we’ve been pointed to this response created by Detroit-based venture capital firm, Ludlow Ventures, which seems to prove that some investors are not only listening, they may just want in. You may (or may not) know the Detroit firm as an investor in startups like Hipster, Graphic.ly, Fundly, and FLUD, to name a few. Jonathon Triest, the Co-founder of Ludlow Ventures is the moonwalking, rhyme-dropping emcee above. → Read More
Last week, Yandex, one of biggest search and advertising companies in Russia, announced that it would be teaming up with Microsoft, Nokia, HTC and Samsung to become the default search engine on both new and upcoming Windows Phones in Russia. This followed the news last month that Yandex is also set to become the search provider for bada-powered smartphones in Russia and the CIS. It’s been a good last few months for Yandex, as Robin pointed out last week, the company has steadily grown its share of the Russian search market to a point where it now owns 62.7 percent of the market in Q3 2011 — ahead of Google.
Today, the Russian search giant has announced another strategic move in its mobile strategy, as it has acquired SPB Software, a developer of mobile software that makes its home in Russia, Taiwan, and Thailand. As for the price, sources close to the deal say that it was set at approximately $38 million. → Read More
In the post-iPhone era, a lot of things changed in Japan, once the most admired country in the mobile world. The number of cell phone manufacturers, for example, has fallen from 13 to five after massive consolidation and re-organization, and all of the remaining players fight with a shrinking and rapidly greying domestic market.
That’s one of the reasons why Nippon’s cell phone makers have been talking about going international for a long time (years after basically all of them gave up on the world market), but now Panasonic seems to be ready to get serious. → Read More
Twitter photo sharing service YFrog has deleted the account of Grace Dent, an influential UK Twitterer and writer with over 94,000 followers. There appears to be no explanation for the blunder at the moment but we’ve reached out to YFrog for comment.
Twitter recently became the number one photo sharing service on its platform, handling 36% of shares, and YFrog is down to 21% from 29.3% five months ago, indicating a slow death.
So it seems a massive blunder for YFrog to lose such an influential user. She has now switched to European startup MobyPicture.
→ Read More
Here are some of the past week’s stories on TechCrunch Gadgets: → Read More
Displayed in the Dieter Rams exhibit at SF MOMA is a hand-held Braun television. Yes, an old-fashioned television with a handle on it that never saw the light of day because the Braun marketing team determined there wasn’t a market for hand-held televisions. IN THE SIXTIES.
Inspired by the work of Rams and Braun, Apple’s Steve Jobs went on to build hardware that incorporated many of the elements of Rams’ philosophy. In fact, today’s iPad seems like a streamlined descendant of that handheld television. But, unlike what happened at Braun, it doesn’t seem like many Apple products are held back from production by the Apple marketing team, at least if you look at how many Apple products are total failures initially. → Read More
The good news is that Wikipedia has finally switched up that image of Jimmy Wales begging for money on its homepage. The bad news is that they’ve replaced it with another unfortunately left aligned image of some random guy (Wikipedia programmer Brandon Harris to be precise) who, according to my email inbox, looks like everything from Jesus, to Nickelback lead singer Chad Kroger to a member of the Hell’s Angels. → Read More
As we heard on Saturday, IBM reported a 24 percent increase in online sales for Black Friday this year. ComScore is announcing even stronger results for e-commerce, with Black Friday seeing $816 million in online sales, making it the heaviest online spending day to date in 2011 and representing a 26 percent increase versus Black Friday 2010 ($648 million spent).
That’s an impressive jump considering the 2009 to 2010 increase in Black Friday spending was only 9 percent. Thanksgiving Day saw an 18 percent increase in online spending to $479 million. U.S. consumers have spent $12.7 billion already in the first 25 days of the November to December 2011 holiday season, up 15 percent from the corresponding days last year.
→ Read More
When someone you haven’t seen in a while asks you “What’s up?” or “How are you?”, you probably give them a high-level summary of the major life events from the months since you last spoke. When you speak to someone you see frequently, you probably respond to the same questions with close-up, specific descriptions of your activities over past few days. Humans are aware of when and what we last communicated with someone, and we dynamically alter what information we provide to avoid repetition.
While most of the discussion about Facebook’s latest changes has centered around the real-time Ticker, the switch to a news feed that displays different content depending on when you last visited will also profoundly change how we use the social network. Eventually, I think the “return visit-aware” concept will also change how we consume content across the web. → Read More
Something about the juxtaposition of things reminds me of the politics of disruption, the emotional spring of the social generation. By themselves, interesting, intellectual perhaps, but not of the parallel land of hope and acceptance.
I read an interview with Noel Gallagher, the supposedly sane one of the Oasis brothers. Something about Oasis being in the Top 10 of bands. He ducked the statement briefly, attributing it to alcohol and passing it off as Top 20 straight. → Read More
Amazon’s extra-large Kindle DX is available this weekend (which is to say for the next few hours) for the low, low price of $259, down from its normal $379. It’s telling that even the lowered price still seems ridiculously high, considering that smaller but more advanced models are selling for under $100. How long can this outlier live in a world dominated by cheap, pocketable, touchscreen e-readers?
In its current form, the fact is it’s likely on its way out. The Kindle Keyboard and indeed the graphite look in general are on their way out, to be replaced by the lighter, thinner, more touchable new generation. But there’s a problem: the DX is one of the very few e-readers that doesn’t use the same 6″ E-Ink screen as everyone else. Amazon probably knows there’s demand there, but perhaps the time is not yet right to strike. → Read More
Most folks spent their Thanksgiving weekend ensuring that every inch of their intestinal track was thoroughly covered in gravy. Others spent it trying to get just drunk enough that their relative’s worst habits were bearable.
Some, however, spent the weekend doing something pretty much only they can do: hacking the heck out of the iPhone. As a result, everyone waitin’ and wishin’ for an iPhone 4S carrier unlock has something to be thankful for. → Read More
As I’ve written about before, we’re in an amazing period of the consumer Internet. Despite a shaky economy, many web companies are in hypergrowth. This is reminiscent of the five-year period over a decade ago when companies like Amazon, Netscape, eBay, Yahoo, Google and PayPal were built.
One challenge, which isn’t new, is the battle for consumer attention. If you’re looking to grow your user base, is there a best way to cost-effectively attract valuable users? I’m increasingly convinced the best way is by harnessing a concept called social proof, a relatively untapped gold mine in the age of the social web.
What is social proof? Put simply, it’s the positive influence created when someone finds out that others are doing something. It’s also known as informational social influence. → Read More
New Facebook game CastleVille is one of Zynga’s fastest-growing titles ever, as it announced a few days ago. That’s good news for the company, but maybe not good enough when you consider its overall traffic trajectory on Facebook, and its plans for an initial public offering as soon as next week.
After launching in the middle of November, the medieval role-playing simulation title has grown to 6.9 million daily active users today, currently the third-highest out of any Zynga game on Facebook.
Overall, the developer has a total of 49.5 million daily actives on Facebook, according to Inside Network’s AppData application tracking service. It’s still by far the largest of any Facebook developer, but it has been falling from its peaks in previous months and years. Up until CastleVille launched, its games had been drifting down over the last 30 days from 48.2 million DAU.
And bigger picture, the company’s Facebook DAU had been 59 million in the second quarter, and had already fallen to 54 million in the third. In previous amendments to its filing, Zynga had said these changes were due “to a decline in players of our more mature games and a limited number of new game launches in the first nine months of 2011.” → Read More
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