Kayak is announcing a major update to its iPad app today. The travel search giant has made its iPhone and iPad apps universal, adding a bunch of new features to the tablet version of the app.
The free app has gotten a huge UI makeover, with redesigned flight and hotel search, including an easier to use calendar. The app has been totally redesigned in terms of layout. Kayak has also added car rental search, the ability to integrate Kayak’s trip planning features, and a new autofill assistant helps you complete your purchase on airline and hotel web sites. → Read More
Okay (First Round Managing Partner Josh) Kopelman, you win.
Every year VC firm First Round Capital gets creative with its holiday video. Its previous video holiday greetings have been riffs on Les Misérables, the Old Spice commercial and dancing through the worst of times.
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Myriad Group is probably best known for creating a solution that brings Android apps to some decidedly non-Android devices, and it looks like the Zurich-based company has set their sights on app-ifying yet another screen in your life: your television.
Sorry tweakers, this isn’t the sort of thing you’ll spend a weekend hacking together. Rather, Myriad’s new Alien Vue software (powered by the now familiar Alien Dalvik) is meant for television service providers looking for a bit of an edge against the robust media experiences that Google and Apple can deliver.
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CES 2012 is going to be a crapshoot of predictable products. How do we know? Meetings, lots and lots of pre-show meetings. Like previous shows, Apple will not be present in person but still has a major presence. Consumer electronic companies are seemingly trying to build product lines and feature sets that compete directly with current and future Apple products. It’s as if these companies are prematurely releasing items just to head off Apple. The iPad took them by surprise and they’re not going to let that happen again — even if that means announcing and releasing half-baked products.
So, what can we expect to see at CES this year? What are we going to cover live at the show? Read on. → Read More
Hopefully you weren’t looking forward to Casio’s CES 2012 press conference. It’s not going happen. The Japanese manufacturer just sent us a note indicating that while they will still be at the show, “we are not prepared yet to announce our future plans.” → Read More
Remember Brightkite? Launched with the help of TechStars back in August 2007, the location-based ‘check-in’ service once rivaled the likes of Foursquare and Gowalla, but never really got the traction it needed to keep on competing and win the day: the startup killed the check-in functionality about a year ago to focus on group texting.
It’s been quiet about Brightkite ever since, and the company’s two founders moved on long before the pivot to group texting was announced, starting a new venture dubbed Forkly (our review).
Now, a reader tells us, it appears Brightkite (which remained the name even after their 2009 merger with Limbo) is changing course again. → Read More
Most people don’t realize you can trademark sounds. Intel’s chimes, Yahoo’s yodel, and Taco Bell’s bell toll are all locked down, but only about 700 sound trademarks exist. That means the signature sounds of tons of companies could be stolen and trademarked by squatters. That includes an app’s boot up noise, a sound from a commercial, or a pronunciation of a company’s name. Bootstrapped trademark registration startup Trademarkia can help. It just launched a sound trademark service where you can listen to existing trademarks and apply for your own.
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Mobile gaming community MocoSpace is releasing the results of a new study focused on virtual goods consumption and engagement by age. The report found younger gamers (25-35) spend the most time playing social games, but gamers over 45 years of age buy exponentially more virtual goods than their younger counterparts. The study surveyed nearly 500,000 gamers on MocoSpace’s network of 22 million users.
Basically, MocoSpace is reporting that age directly correlates with amount of money spent on virtual goods within social games. The older the gamer, the more virtual goods were purchased. Gamers over 35 years of age, who made up 18 percent of gamers surveyed, were responsible for 42 percent of all virtual goods spending. In contrast, 18- to 25-year-olds, who made up 43 percent of those surveyed, were responsible for only 18 percent of virtual goods purchases. → Read More
Gaming hardware company Razer has been on our radar for quite a long time: they’ve made high-end gaming peripherals like mice and keyboards for years, and have recently expanded into more esoteric devices and game-specific partnerships. They’ve been running under their own steam this whole time as what’s called a “successful business,” but they’ve decided to take a big funding round to expand their reach.
IDG-Accel, specifically their joint China Capital Fund, has chipped in to the tune of $50 million, a minority investment that allows the fund to join the board at Razer, and allows Razer to expand further into the whole-systems business, something that requires considerably more R&D and space to manage. → Read More
Intuit has made an interesting move today with its mobile credit card reader GoPayment reader. Intuit is allowing merchants to keep and receive funds on a prepaid credit card as opposed to depositing the amount in a bank account.
Launched two years ago, GoPayment offers a complimentary app and credit card reader to allow small businesses to conduct charges via their smartphones. GoPayment, which competes directly with Square, is available for iOS, Android and Blackberry phones and the card reader simply plugs into the audio jack of a phone or tablet. The credit card data is also encrypted, (and never stored on the phone). → Read More
In case you haven’t noticed, it’s a new, new Twitter world out there and we’re just living in it. The new Twitter interface is very, for lack of a better word, “appy” and although the desktop apps are abysmal, the website is pretty strong and interesting. This week Erick and I take a closer look at this improvement and assess its value in our lives.
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Last minute Christmas shoppers, take notice. Amazon has your back. The online retailer announced free expedited shipping on many items. Stop procrastinating and get your Christmas shopping done. Or wait a bit longer. The cut-off is tomorrow night anyway.
Order by 8 pm PT on December 21 for free two-day shipping on the $79 Kindle, $99 Kindle Touch, $149 Kindle Touch 3G and $199 Kindle Fire. Amazon is already selling the product family at a rate of more than 1 million units per week and this offer will likely up that count. To take advantage of the offer, shoppers simply need to add the desired Kindle to their shopping cart. → Read More
Is healthcare the industry that represents the next big opportunity for startups? Many are starting to believe it is, especially considering the fact that U.S. healthcare is currently a $2 trillion business. With technology beginning to play an increasingly vital role in healthcare and the health industry, disruption of legacy systems and an in-with-the-new approach has come to the fore for entrepreneurs looking for big opportunities in areas where they can add some serious real-world value. And what better way to help jumpstart these new health businesses than with business accelerators focused solely on healthcare? Bring them on, we say.
Rock Health is off to a good start with its health-focused accelerator, announcing its second batch of killer startups last week. And now Chicago-based Sandbox Industries is launching its own health-y startup accelerator, called
Healthbox. → Read More
It seemed last week like Apple was eyeing up flash memory technology company Anobit for a potential purchase, and now word from Israeli news outlet Calcalist is that the multi-million dollar deal has been finalized.
While Anobit has already broken the news to their employees, many of the deal’s salient details are still unknown to outsiders. There’s still no word on exactly how much Apple paid in the acquisition aside from the vague “400 to 500 million” price tag mentioned last week, and 9to5mac’s sources mention that Anobit’s executive team haven’t yet been formally introduced to Apple employees. → Read More
In what Vlingo CEO Dave Grannan calls a ‘good outcome’ on Twitter, the voice-to-text technology company has just been acquired by speech recognition king Nuance.
Notably, Nuance has repeatedly sued Vlingo over patent infringement – and tried to acquire them – in the past, and Grannan once referred to competing with Nuance as “having a venereal disease that’s in remission”. → Read More
We saw an early version of Swivl a month or so ago and the $159 device is now ready to ship. It’s basically a camera dock with a twist. Instead of holding your camera still, the Swivl will follow you around the room, tracking you as you move around on stage or in front of an audience. Why is it good? Well, it keeps the camera on you at all times and, more important, you can control the swivel speed and tilt using a small hand-held remote, thereby turning you into a one-man (or one-woman) film crew. → Read More
Lenovo is reportedly working on a quad-core LePad (ThinkPad in other markets) tablet. This comes from a Digitimes report that credits upstream supply chain partners as the source. The news, if it’s true, is somewhat predictable as tablet makers move to dual-core CPU platforms. Lenovo has seen a fair amount of success in the tablet market thanks to its solid ThinkPad Android tablet. The Digitimes reports states that Lenovo has managed to steal a bit of market share from Apple, which is currently around 8.4% in Lenovo’s home market of China. → Read More
Silicon Valley-based database infrastructure software maker ScaleArc has secured $5.33 million in its second round of institutional funding, which was led by Trinity Ventures, with earlier backer Nexus Venture Partners participating.
In addition, ScaleArc announced the appointment of Justin Barney, who previously ran sales divisions at companies like Citrix and Juniper Networks, as president and COO. → Read More
Allmyapps has grown a lot since we last covered them. They had 100,000 users back in April, but recently hit 2.5 million. But with the news that Miscrosoft will develop its own Windows Apps store, they will have to “pivot”, as they say. Thus they are repositioning as a “Personal App Manager” to go beyond the Windows world. What does that mean?
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