I’ll admit to lobbing a few mortars at RIM (alright, maybe more than a few), but it looks like things may be even worse than expected. BGR reported earlier today that RIM co-CEO Mike Lazaridis lied about the the reason their first BlackBerry 10 devices would be delayed even later into 2012. → Read More
If you are a big TinTin fan, you probably know that Steven Spielberg’s The Adventures of TinTin opens today in theaters. But if you are a really big fan, there is also a companion coffee table book called “The Art of The Adventures of TinTin.” But don’t get the $39.99 print edition. Get the $5.99 iPad app instead. It has all the same art work, plus a whole lot more—3D models of the characters ond vehicles from the movie that you can spin around, HD video clips, and immersive 360-degree experiences. (Watch the video below for a run-through of the app’s features, with an intro by Spielberg).
The app was published by HarperCollins in partnership with Holopad, one of Edo Segal‘s startups (part of his bMuse operating company), which provides the technology platform. All of the artwork comes from WETA, Peter Jackson’s motion-capture art and special-effects studio. → Read More
A new startup is launching out of incubator YouWeb today that aims to make watching movie trailers more social. MoviePal, an iOS app, allows you to watch movie trailers and share them with friends.
The MoviePal app allows you to watch movie trailers via your phone. The app sources trailers from YouTube, Flixster and other video sites that post trailers. But in case you don’t want to filter through all the trailers available and listed, you can use a Shazam-like feature to tag a movie trailer that you are watching on TV or in the movie theatre. → Read More
The biggest hindrance to consumer adoption of 3D technology thus far has been a lack of content, and price, of course. While I can’t vouch for their price tags quite yet, it would seem that Stream TV Networks has come up with some new 3D technology that could make that whole limited content thing much less of an issue. → Read More
Luis von Ahn has a pretty impressive track record when it comes to Google acquiring his companies. Not many entrepreneurs can count two exits to the search giant. Google acquired von Ahn’s ESP Game, which crowdsourced people to look at images and label them to improve image search, in 2005 and renamed it Google Image Labeler. In 2009, Google bought von Ahn’s Captcha startup Recaptcha as well. And now, von Ahn’s latest project, Duolingo, is finally launching in private beta.
von Ahn explains to me that computer language translation is a broken system. It can be very expensive to pay for quality professional translators to translate web applications and pages on a large scale. That’s the problem Duolingo is trying to solve.
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Perhaps best known for the Air Display iOS app, Avatron is at it again with new app called iOS dictation app called (what else?) Air Dictate. But of course, Avatron wouldn’t just cook up a straightforward dictation app — there’s a twist.
Instead of just taking your voice input and transcribing it into a file on your iDevice, it actually syncs with your Mac and dumps the interpreted output into your text field of choice. As long as both devices are on the same wireless network, the connection yields quick and (mostly accurate) transcriptions. → Read More
Pinterest’s growth over the past six months has been nothing short of astounding. We’ve noted this before, but some new data today from Hitwise confirms the trend. Last week, Pinterest attracted 11 million visits, up almost 40-fold from just six months ago. Pinterest is now one of the top 10 social networking sites Hitwise tracks.
These stats are estimates of visits, not visitors, so you’d have to divide by how many visits per visitor Pinterest gets in a week to get the number of people going to the site. Pinterest is daily habit for many people, which is why it’s pageviews are going through the roof. Hitwise doesn’t break out estimates for visitors, but comScore has Pinterest at 4.9 monthly uniques in November, up from 3.3 million in October. → Read More
Today, SetJam, a company that describes itself as “building the future of TV,” has announced it has been acquired by Motorola Mobility. The company’s products currently include a customizable TV and movie widgets designed for embedding on websites, plus developer-friendly tools like a REST API and XML download of the SetJam database.
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RightNow Technologies this morning announced that, at its special stockholders meeting, nearly everyone voted in favor of the previously proposed merger with Oracle, who agreed to buy the cloud-based customer service company for $1.5 billion (or $43 per share) in cash at the end of October 2011. → Read More
Verizon will be rolling out a new Media Server product for its FiOS customers late next year, which will be a single hardware device that will eventually eliminate the need for a set-top box altogether. The server will be capable of streaming HD TV to all devices in the home, including the TV, of course, but also gaming systems, mobile devices and tablets like the iPad. Although the company has not officially announced details, timeframe or pricing, we were given a sneak peek into the company’s plans.
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Rocket Internet, the Berlin-based incubator best known for German-language clones of US startups like Zappos and Groupon, now has big ambitions in the online furniture space according to information passed to TechCrunch Europe.
In a confidential email sent by Oliver Samwer which we have confirmed is genuine, the head (with his brothers Marc and Alexander) of European Founders Fund and the driving force behind Rocket, says their strategy is to become “number one” in the ecommerce sector for furniture over the next year. But the language he uses – including the world “blitzkrieg” – indicates an aggressive and potentially insensitive management style which appears to be a ‘modus operandi’ of Rocket Internet culture. Samwer has since apologised for using the term. → Read More
Interview Street has been busy building out new ways for developers to prove their skills to potential employers, and now it’s introducing a 48-hour contest to help them show off their skills. Think of it as part of a next-generation way of finding the right employer
The site already offers a web-based integrated development environment, where developers can choose from dozens of challenges, lets them input answers, then get immediate results. If they’re successful, recruiters from a variety of leading technology companies can then contact them about getting hired. → Read More
This winter is looking to be a mild one (it’s something like 60 degrees here in New Jersey), but no worries: YouTube is bringing the snow to you, even if Mother Nature won’t.
All of YouTube’s videos are now outfitted with a special snow button, which as you may expect, turns the video into a winter wonderland. → Read More
Skitch, the popular photo editing Mac app acquired by Evernote in August, is now available on the iPad. The release follows the launch of the Skitch for Android app earlier this year, and is the first iOS-compatible version available. Using the new app, you can annotate just about anything – a new photo, one from your camera roll, a screenshot, a map or you can just draw on a blank canvas.
And, of course, when you’re finished with your creation, you can save the photo to Evernote for safekeeping. → Read More
Android just keeps ramping up higher and higher. Andy Rubin tweeted yesterday that there are now more than 700,000 Android phones activated every single day, which is up from 500,000 activations per day last June. You can see how steep the ramp has been over the past three years by looking at the chart up top, which comes from Horace Dediu at Asymco.
Dediu estimates that the total cumulative number of Android devices activated so far is between 224 million and 253 million. To put this in perspective, last October, Apple announced a cumulative total of 250 million iOS devices sold. But that number includes iPods and iPads. → Read More
SpotMe, a handy little tool for sharing expenses in groups, is now a top 10 mobile app in the finance category and a featured app in Apple’s App Store Rewind 2011. Zornitza Stefanova, the CEO of SpotMe’s maker Boomerang Digital, describes the app as “a social messenger for payments.” What that means is that the app takes over the often uncomfortable job of having to ask your friends for the money they owe – it does that for you.
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The Nest Thermostat is a gorgeous piece of eco-friendly electronics. But like your mom always said, it’s what’s inside that counts. Well then, she’ll be pleasantly pleased to find out that the inside of the Nest is as equally beautiful as the sleek exterior. The $249 thermostat might be costly, but a teardown posted on SparkFun shows the innards of a device worthy of such a price. Not only is it well-built, but the Nest is rocking serious processing power and connectivity options. Silly hyperbole alert: The Nest is a game changer. → Read More
Amazon is making it easier for its users to discover recommended content today with the launch of a new ‘best of’ digital store, where consumers can find recommendations from Amazon’s team of editors on the year’s best of movies & TV shows, music, video games, software, mobile apps, magazines and Kindle books and more. Basically, Amazon will recommend the best of any type of digital content that the company sells.
Of course, the timing of the launch is meant to coincide with holiday shopping season, which has historically brought record sales of digital content for Amazon. Last year, from Christmas Eve through December 30, Amazon customers purchased over three times more digital content, including Kindle books, magazines, movies, TV shows, music, and digital games as compared to the weekly average for the year.
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