Digital media is just more compelling when it is updated on a regular basis. That is what keeps people coming back. It’s as true for blogs as it is for apps. Fotopedia has built a nice little franchise putting out digital photo books re-imagined for the iPad. After 9 apps and 6.2 million downloads, with 1.4 million active users and 100 million pageviews a month, it is taking a more magazine-like apporach with its latest iPad app, “Wild Friends.”.
Instead of a relatively static set of highly-curated pictures around a single topic, you get a highly-curated set of pictures that changes every day. And each photo now has a narrative caption written by the photographer. Fotopedia started experimenting with this more magazine-like approach in September with its HTML5 website and integration into Flipboard. You can see what the “Wild Friends” magazine looks like on the web also. → Read More
Some call them wackaloons, others visionaries, however any way you slice them the Founders Fund – consisting of Partners Peter Thiel, Luke Nosek, Brian Singerman, Derik Pridmore, Lauren Gross, Bruce Gibney, Sean Parker, Toby Prosky and others — is definitely an unconventional lot.
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A study by investment analysis startup SigFig suggests that iPhone-owning investors are 20% more likely than the average investor to also own Apple stock while investors with Androids are 25% less likely to own Google than average. This is just one startup’s limited data, so don’t get all excited and assume that this is the case worldwide. But still, it makes for an entertaining look at just how loyal those Apple fans are.
SigFig gets the data from its Wikinvest site, which tracks $20 billion in investments. Its users track more than $5 billion of the total through their mobile phones — not that much by public market standards, but still something to look at. The company then correlates users’ investment portfolios to their mobile phone operating systems to see who is using and buying what. → Read More
The three Samwer brothers (Oliver, Marc and Alexander) founders of the Rocket Internet incubator in Berlin, are the most successful Internet entrepreneurs in Germany and possibly Europe. After launching and exiting multiple businesses, many of them clones/copycats of US startups, they are multi-millionaires. Indeed, their Groupon clone CityDeal sold to to Groupon for an estimated €750m in cash and shares. But much of that success looks threatened by the departure of at least 20 of its key staff in the last two weeks – including CTO- level people – and possibly as much as 40, according to multiple sources spoken to by TechCrunch Europe.
While Rocket Internet has around 200 people on staff, losing key heads could be a severe blow to the renowned incubator. The timing could not be worse for the Samwers, who are understood to be in the middle of raising at least a billion dollar financing round designed to clone every successful US startup, to launch them outside the US much faster and become a larger global player than many of the Silicon Valley businesses they plan to copy. → Read More
Really? The whole thing? You probably didn’t, but you should because there are things you posted long ago that you might not want people to see. I sincerely worry that all over the world, this is happening right now: “Oh look, a new Facebook profile design. Grrr, I dislike change, but it looks cool. There’s a 7 day preview period? But all my friends are showing off their pretty covers. I’ll just publish my Timeline now, and go back and delete embarrassing posts later.” But they won’t. This is a big problem for individuals and Facebook. → Read More
I don’t know about you, but when I hear about another photo sharing app or website, my eyes roll back into my head, and I reflexively go into “screen saver mode”. There are just way too many options. How about Shutterfly, Kodak, Flickr, Instagram, Path, Twitter (TwitPic, Yfrog), Facebook, Google+, App Trover, GLMPS, Tracks, LiveShare, OpenPhoto — just to name a few. I don’t even like photos that much.
So, when I heard about ZangZing, especially considering its name, I had the same reaction. However, back in April, Mike gave the pre-launch startup a ringing endorsement (granted, that was in comparison to Color), and Alexia backed up its private beta launch a few weeks later. So I pressed on. → Read More
Erick and I are both parents so we know from tablets. The $99 LeapPad from Leapfrog is cool, to be sure, and fun if junior’s aunt or uncle is picking it up, but we both found it lacking, especially when compared to other devices. Obviously if you don’t want the wee ones slobbering all over your iPad, this is a huge winner. Otherwise, the lack of apps, especially for geeks like us, was disheartening. → Read More
Once upon a time netbooks ruled the land. But with the rise of tablets and miniaturization of traditional x86 CPUs, the mini notebooks are quietly dying. The latest victim is the Dell Mini. Liliputing discovered by way of MyDellMini.com that the products are no longer listed on Dell.com. They’re dead, my friends, and it seems ultrabooks and similar products are to blame. → Read More
Earlier today, we posted on some data from Pando Networks that shows that free-to-play online games, often overlooked in the hype around social and casual games, are growing just as fast and as furiously around the globe as their counterparts. Obviously, much of this has to do with the industry’s transition from paid to freemium models — the examples of which are numerous not only in online gaming, but for web and mobile apps on the whole — and even startups and SMBs making their way in the consumer Web.
While many of us probably take the rise of freemium for granted by now, some new stats and a nifty infographic from Quixey show that we are still very much in a transitional phase. → Read More
Well now, this call turned out to be much more interesting than I expected. First, RIM co-CEO Jim Balsillie has just announced that he and partner Mike Lazaridis will be cutting their annual salaries down to $1.
According to Forbes, both men currently receive $1,175,664 per year. While they don’t appear to receive annual bonuses, they both receive restricted stock awards, although the terms under which those stocks can vest are unknown. → Read More
There’s one big new feature in today’s global rollout of Facebook Timeline. Facebook has enhanced the Timeline Map with a wizard that lets you rapidly tag your existing photos with locations. You can also now type in a location and share rich stories about whether you’ve been, took a trip, or lived there. The Map feature could seriously advance Facebook’s “location as a layer” plan. By convincing users to append valuable geographic data to its massive collection of photos with this easy flow, Facebook could improve local ad targeting. → Read More
We’ll we’ve run a lot of TechCrunch meetups all over Europe since 2007, getting to most of the major European cities. But there’s one place we haven’t got a chance to hit and that’s the tiger economies of the Baltic states: Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. The latter is of course where, famously, Skype was largely developed. So we’re putting that right with an event in January, TechCrunch Baltics. It will be on February 9th, 2012, in the lovely city of Riga, Latvia. → Read More
RIM has just released their Q3 earnings, and the figures are about as rough as we expected: the Waterloo-based company pulled in $5.2 billion during the past quarter — a considerable bump over their Q2 performance, but still a 6% drop year-over-year. → Read More
Zynga priced its IPO at $10 a share, according to Bloomberg and CNBC (bankers love to leak). The IPO, which is set for tomorrow, will be in the upper end of the $8.50 to $10 price range the company indicated previously in SEC filings.
Zynga will sell at least 100 million shares, raising $1 billion at a $7 billion valuation. The valuation is about half of where early reports were speculating it would be, but Zynga lowered the price in the face of the tepid performance of other tech IPOs lately and general economic concerns weighing down the stock market. Even with the lower price, Zynga is poised to open trading with a bigger market cap bigger than LinkedIn, which currently is at $6.4 billion. → Read More
It’s Google Zeitgeist day — the annual event where Google rounds up the year’s top search queries and trends to present a data-centric recap of the last twelve months (minus, ahem, any adult searches).
Most of the Zeitgeist data went live this morning — see our earlier post for the top trends overall. Spoiler: Rebecca Black took the top spot.
And now Google has given us some additional datapoints that haven’t been published yet, which focus on electronics — namely, the top gadgets, the top consumer electronics, and the fastest rising consumer electronics. I’m not sure exactly how Google defines a gadget versus a consumer electronics product (I asked and was told gadgets are a subset of CE), though I’m guessing it has something to do with the device being portable. Note that these lists apply to the United States, only. → Read More
The Galaxy Nexus has been on sale here in the U.S. for mere hours, and it’s already getting its first refresh. But reports are bound to come in over the next week or so, but it looks as though Google had a few things that still needed fixing upon release.
In Android 4.0.2 build ICL53F, you’ll see improvements to your 3G/4G connection, your Wifi connection (including automatic reconnection to already-saved networks) and mobile hotspot enhancements. → Read More
Salesforce.com has just announced the acquisition of social performance platform Rypple. Financial terms of the deal, which is expected to close early next year, were not disclosed.
Rypple, which has raised $13 million in funding, is a web-based social performance management platform that helps managers and employees improve performance. Essentially, Rypple replaces the traditional performance review with a more social and collaborative approach. The software has been compared to a “Zynga for the enterprise,” and allows managers to track projects, guide their team and give kudos to deserving staff for others to see within its online application. → Read More
If you’re familiar with Usenet, you’ll be well aware that the newsreading platform is, well, not longer about newsreading. In fact, most Usenet providers are, by necessity, experienced data storage providers. That being said, GoldenFrog has just announced DumpTruck, a WebDAV file-sharing resource that, in the wrong hands, could end up a SOPA target.
The service lets you store data in the cloud. It’s free for holders of “Diamond” Giganews Usenet accounts and costs $99 for a full terabyte of monthly storage. DumpTruck promises anonymous, worry-free storage with, interestingly, no data reduplication. This means DumpTruck won’t compare your files with other files and save only one copy. Your folder is your folder, no matter how full. → Read More
The Sony Tablet S is actually a pretty hot 9.4-inch slate, and doesn’t look like every other Android tablet out there (thank goodness). On the performance side, however, I found myself frustrated on more than one occasion. The design is everything I’ve been wanting from Android tabs, but unfortunately I just couldn’t ignore the underwhelming responsiveness of the slate. → Read More
What’s a museum to do when they want to offer a richer art experience for guests but no one wants to use an audioguide? Why, give Nintendo a ring of course. Nintendo will be providing 5,000 3DSs to the French museum this March as part of the museum’s push to appeal to a more modern audience.
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