Is foursquare becoming a noun? Judging from the cover of Carmine Gallo’s new book, The Power of foursquare: 7 Innovative Ways to Get Your Customers To Check In Wherever They Are, it is certainly on the way to becoming a word synonymous with location services. And indeed with the “sale” of Gowalla to Facebook, it does seem as if foursquare is now becoming the fairly undisputed mayor of the location space. → Read More
Textaholics, this one’s for you.
Swype — the Android-flavored keyboard that lets you type (or swype, rather) faster than you ever thought possible — has a present for you this holiday season. With Siri on the iPhone 4S, voice control apps are sprouting up faster than you can ask Siri about the meaning of life. Voice is where we’re headed and there’s nothing anyone can do to stop it, so if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em right?
That said, Swype is launching a new beta with Nuance’s Dragon dictation built right in. → Read More
Disrupt 2010 winner Qwiki has had quite an interesting year — after they launched in January 2011, they pulled in $9 million in funding and lost co-founder/Google alum Louis Monier.
Now they’re hoping that a change of scenery will do the company well. Founder Doug Imbruce announced on the company’s blog earlier today that they have relocated Qwiki HQ to New York City.
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Evernote’s new browser extension called Clearly has arrived on Firefox. The add-on, which offers a better reading experience on the web by removing ads, links, navigational elements and other clutter from websites, was first released for Chrome users back in November.
Now the extension comes to its second platform, along with three built-in themes, and, of course, the ability to clip articles to Evernote for later reading. → Read More
This year will be Microsoft’s last year at CES where the company usually runs the keynote and takes up a huge portion of the show floor. “In looking at all the ways that Microsoft is now reaching its’ customers today (its’ owned events, marketing campaigns, retail stores, etc.) this felt like a natural time to make this transition,” wrote an MS PR rep.
This will also be the last time CEO Steve Ballmer keynotes the show.
Omada Health, a graduate of Rock Health’s first batch of startups, is announcing today that it has raised $800K in seed funding from a number of angel and venture investors, including Esther Dyson, NEA, Aberdare, Kapor Capital, and TriplePoint Ventures to name a few.
Omada Health, simply put, has turned its focus to one of the most pervasive diseases in the country: Diabetes. Well, really, prediabetes. The CDC estimates that 79 million people in the U.S. currently have prediabetes — said another way, that’s approximately 1 in 3 adults. And the majority of those people are not aware of their condition, which essentially means that they are suffering from blood glucose levels that are not irregular enough to be considered diabetes, yet still indicate an extremely high risk of progressing to full-blown diabetes. → Read More
While memorials of all kinds and sizes have been presented since his death, the world’s first statue of the late Steve Jobs has today been unveiled in Budapest, Hungary. It’s made completely of bronze and stands nearby the entrance of architectural software maker Graphisoft’s headquarters.
Jobs seems to be presenting a new product on stage, or possibly waving as he was known to do upon exiting the stage. → Read More
Toronto-based deal provider Dealfind is on the move, having recently gone mobile, and, as of today, is launching something called “Everyday Deals.” The feature is somewhat similar to GrouponNow in that it allows you to find deals you can buy and use right now. But really, the site is more of a deals database, where deals are searchable by location, category and redeemable time.
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Sincerely, the company behind photo-printing iOS app Postagram, is launching a new app today. It’s designed to capture all the nostalgia that you and your family feel about those disposable camera photo sets you all shot during the holidays over the last couple decades.
Called Dotti (maybe your effusive aunt’s name, too?), you download it from the App Store or Android Market, get 12 photos to shoot, and then get the option to send them off to be made into high-quality 4×6 prints for $4.99. You’ll get back the photos by mail in less than a week. → Read More
Cyber-Ark Software, which provides identity management solutions to financial institutions and other enterprise customers worldwide, has raised a healthy $40 million in venture capital funding in a round led by Goldman Sachs and Jerusalem Venture Partners (JVP).
Founded in 1999, Cyber-Ark had previously raised $25 million from angel investors and VCs. → Read More
The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is delayed in Congress, but it is definitely not dead. The media company lobbyists and their Congressmen (hello, Lamar Smith!) are simply regrouping. Some of the more controversial aspects of the bill include transferring liability for copyright infringement to sites that host user-generated content and blocking that content via DNS servers.
To highlight the chilling effect this legislation could have on free speech on te Internet, today document-sharing site Scribd is protesting SOPA by making every document disappear word-by-word when you vist the site. All in all, there are a billion pages of documents on the Scribd. “With this legislation in place, entire domains like Scribd could simply vanish from the web,” warns Jared Friedman, CTO and co-founder, Scribd. → Read More
StartupBus, the hackathon/road trip combo started by Elias Bizannes nearly three years ago, is doubling the number of events it runs in 2012. There will be a maximum of twelve buses that run in the new year, up from six previously. But here’s the fun part: the organization will determine which regions get their own Startup bus through an online competition requiring hopefuls to “vote up” their region through social media.
→ Read More
In April, Expedia announced its intentions to spin off trip reviews site TripAdvisor as a public company. And this morning, TripAdvisor debuted on the NASDAQ under the symbol ‘TRIP’ trading at. This morning, TripAdvisor is trading at $29. Expedia is trading at $27.72, down 50 percent.
TripAdvisor, which was founded in 2000, was originally bought by IAC in for $212 million in 2004. IAC spun off Expedia, which included TripAdvisor, in 2005. With 50 million unique monthly visitors and 20 million members, TripAdvisor is the giant in the travel reviews space. The site publishes 25 new contributions every minute and also features over eight million candid traveler photos. The reviews site operates in 30 different countries, including in China under the site Daodao. IAC chairman Barry Diller will serve as the TripAdvisor’s chairman. → Read More
In case you are heading to the movie theatre this holiday season, you might want to pay for your ticket via Fandango. Using the Fandango mobile app, you can now purchase movie tickets using your PayPal account and, in some cases, get your movie ticket straight to your mobile phone, avoiding lines at the ticket counter.
While Fandango has offered PayPal as a payments option on the web, this is the first time the company is using the payments platform in its iPhone and Android apps. The company, which began rolling out mobile tickets in 2010, says that more than 20 percent of Fandango’s ticket sales come from mobile devices, seeing a 73 percent year over year increase in mobile ticket sales in 2011.
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Amazon has updated the Kindle app for iPhone and iPad, adding some basic improvements to the standard assortment of reader functions. These include the addition of “print replica” textbooks so students can follow along with the paper copy in class as well as improved PDF support and a personal document system that lets you send files to an Amazon address for conversion.
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A group of researchers at the Advanced Institute of Industrial Technology in Tokyo has developed a car seat [JP, PDF] that can identify drivers when sitting down. The trick is that the system measures the pressure people apply on the seat through a set of 360 sensors.
Each sensor is measuring pressure by its own and sends the information to a laptop, which aggregates the information to show key data like the highest value of pressure, area of contact on the seat (see below), and other factors. According to its makers, the system was able to identify drivers with 98% accuracy during experiments. → Read More
Streamglider is launching its iPad app today, hoping to disrupt the tablet news consumption and social reader space. Despite competition from Flipboard, Pulse, and many others, Streamglider believes that it provides the most comprehensive iPad experience to date for tracking your social streams, RSS feeds and more via the iPad.
The free iPad app allows you to import your social accounts like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr and Google Reader and more into a single stream. You can mix and mash multiple sources together (via a drag and drop interface) to create specific topic-focused streams, and share these streams with others. Streamglider will also provide designated streams of content around specific subjects as well.
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Though they had until April of next year to figure out a fix for their patent-infringing UI feature, HTC CEO Peter Chou has reaffirmed to the media that the company has already has a solution ready to go at a joint press conference with Google’s Mobile SVP Andy Rubin. → Read More
Internet holding company FriendFinder Networks, which operates a number of adult, social networking, dating and e-commerce websites, has quietly established a game development subsidiary back in 2010.
Today, the company said that the studio, which is called Fierce Wombat Games, will be releasing its first title for Mac, PC and iOS in early 2012. → Read More
San Francisco-based Fingerprint Digital, a startup building educational apps for kids, is blowing up. The company released its first apps into iTunes on December 1st, and already, it has seen over 270,000 game playing sessions for a combined total of over 2 million minutes played. And, according to CEO Nancy MacIntyre, its apps are about to reach download numbers in the six figures.
In just two weeks, Fingerprint pushed two of its games into the top five in the educational apps’ category: Big Kid Life Firefighter and Big Kid Life Fairy Princess. (And yes, despite what those titles sound like, they are actually games for learning.) → Read More
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