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
SurDoc is doing what Adobe has sort of done with its PDF file format, which is make it as easy as possible to share formatted documents across computers and mobile devices without losing the formatting. The difference it offers is that you don’t need to mess with any file formating or PDF reader to access the documents — or with all of the vulnerabilities of PDFs. You can just upload text, spreadsheet and presentation files (Word, Excel, Powerpoint, etc.) to its online service, and share them from there.
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Just two weeks after Verizon’s 4G data network most recently went on the fritz, it looks like customers are once again being forced to live their lives without data. Verizon users across the country will be waking up without without so much as a 3G connection in sight. → Read More
Online audience measurement and Web analytics companies Nielsen and comScore have settled their patent disputes, according to a joint statement released this morning.
Nielsen filed suit against its rival in March 2011, accusing comScore of infringing five patents it owns that relate to measuring and displaying online content. Sure enough, comScore countersued Nielsen just a few days later.
Now, the companies have seemingly buried the hatchet and come to this elaborate agreement:
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Spreecast is a social video platform that lets people broadcast together, has raised $4 million in seed funding from Frank Biondi, former CEO of Viacom; Gordon Crawford, media and technology investor at The Capital Research Group and Edward Scott, Jr., founder of BEA Systems.
The brainchild of StubHub co-founder and investor Jeff Fluhr, Spreecast can be used publicly or privately to create interactive, social online video broadcasts. Up to 4 people at a time can be face-to-face, streaming their conversation live while hundreds of others can watch, chat, and participate by submitting comments and questions to those on-screen
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The Robocalypse is near: Osaka-based Hajime Research Institute is working on a humanoid that will stand 13 feet (4m) tall, which is much taller than most other existing robots of its kind (the latest version of Honda’s Asimo, for example, is just 130cm high). It will also sport a built-in cockpit.
Hajime Sakamoto, president of the institute, is on a mission. After having successfully developed a 7-foot robot in 2009 (pictured above), the plan is to build the aforementioned giant robot next, before following up with humanoids that are 26 and 59 feet tall after that. → Read More
The Health 2.0 space is getting super-exciting — between services like Practice Fusion, CakeHealth, Virgin Health and hardware plays like the Fitbit and UP, it finally seems like technology has caught up to some real world human problems that need solving.
In yet another vote for the space, Health 2.0 innovator Adam Bosworth, who is most known as one of the creators of Google Health, has just raised $6.5 million for Keas from Atlas Venture and Ignition Partners. This funding brings the Keas investment total to $16.5 million. → Read More
LeGuide.com Group, a pan-European publisher of online shopping guides, comparison websites and the like, has acquired online shopping portal Ciao from Microsoft.
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but LeGuide.com says it paid for the Ciao assets in cash and didn’t need to take on debt to finance the transaction. Read more over at TechCrunch Europe. → Read More
Here are some of yesterday’s Gadgets stories: → Read More
Once upon a time, we bought our concert tickets from a good old-fashioned cashier at the local box office. As time went on, we took some of the work out of the hands of the cashier and started buying our tickets at home — on the Web. (For a fee, mind you.) And if what we’re seeing today is any indication, the next step in the evolution of the box office? Facebook.
Ticketfly’s Facebook ticketing app, which launched last week, aims to boost sales by letting people know when their friends buy a ticket. The big idea is to complete the ticket-buying circle — from finding out about a show to buying a ticket — without ever sending the Facebook faithful outside the confines of their favorite social network. → Read More
Facebook’s Frictionless Sharing integration has been a huge win for Yahoo! News US. After just 2 months, 1 million articles are being shared to Facebook daily leading to 500,000 daily referrals. To build on this, Yahoo! has expanded the integration to 26 more of its news sites. These include many international sites such as Yahoo! News Philippines and France, as well as vertical sites like OMG, Music, Movies, and Games. → Read More
Great news, Kindle Fire owners. Amazon just announced the long overdue Kindle Fire update that’s said to resolve many of the issues with the budget tablet. Most of the common complaints are addressed: owners can now select and remove items from the carousel, the WiFi system is more robust and supports passwords, but most importantly, update 6.2.1 reportledly improves overall performance and the touchscreen response. → Read More
Most entrepreneurs found companies to solve a problem. Adam Archer founded GamesThatGive to save the world. During a backpacking trip across the world he was inspired with the idea for the company. He then left Apple in 2008 to work on a farm before founding GamesThatGive, which builds social games where users earn money for charity by playing thanks to sponsorships from major brands. It raised a little over $1 million dollars before selling to Facebook Page management platform Vitrue earlier this year..
Watch as we talk to Archer about the challenges and advantages of starting a social good company, and how one can make a difference in the world and still turn a profit. → Read More
Here’s a bit of science that’s contrary to what a heavy utilizer of social networks might expect. Researchers at Harvard tracked the Facebook activity of hundreds of college students for four years, and came away with the rather unexpected result that the interests of friends don’t, in fact, tend to influence one another. That’s not to say it doesn’t happen at all, of course, but it’s clear that propagation and virality are subtler and more complex than some people (marketers and, I suspect, researchers) tend to think they are.
But the study is also clearly flawed in ways that those versed in social graphs are likely to easily perceive. Pulling useful data from social networks is like catching lightning in a bottle, and I wonder whether the findings may in fact be, as the study attempts to avoid, “a spurious consequence of alternative social processes.” → Read More
