When we first heard about Samsung’s 5.3-inch Galaxy Note, we didn’t really know what to do with it. Is it a phone? Is it a tablet? Oh, look! A stylus!
It was weird.
But apparently people like weird, as Samsung is now reporting that it’s shipped over 1 million Galaxy Note phablets globally. The device launched back in September, and devices shipped is normally a higher number than the devices actually out in the real world, but it’s still a solid number nonetheless. → Read More
Today, Cool Planet BioFuels, Inc. announced that BP Technology Ventures has made an investment in the company’s C round led by Shea Ventures. Current Cool Planet investors, General Electric, Google Ventures, ConocoPhillips, NRG and North Bridge Venture Partners also participated.
The amount of funding was not disclosed. → Read More
Mobile analytics firm Mobilewalla has ranked the top apps across all four mobile platforms for 2011, using its own ranking system known at the “Mobilewalla Score.” Instead of looking at raw user ratings, this scoring system is an algorithm that analyzes a variety of factors in addition to ratings, including an app’s position within its own category, volume, social media sentiment and more.
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Amazon has just released new data regarding its Kindle sales for the holiday season. According to the e-commerce giant, Amazon customers purchased millions of Kindle Fires and millions of Kindle e-readers. And 2011 was the best holiday ever for the Kindle family, as customers purchased over 1 million Kindle devices each week.
Amazon CEO and founder Jeff Bezos said in a statement: “We are grateful to our customers worldwide for making this the best holiday ever for Kindle.” Bezos also highlighted the fact that the #1 and #4 best-selling Kindle books released in 2011 were both published independently by their authors using Kindle Direct Publishing. → Read More
The Apple rumor mill never takes a break, even during the holidays.
In the past months we’ve heard two very specific allegations concerning the iPad — both out of Digitimes — focused on a smaller sized Apple tab at 8.75 inches and a release date of early 2012. As Devin explained so well, the notion of a smaller iPad out of Cupertino is a bit hard to believe. It would mean that Apple is going back on its word that the iPad is the right size.
Today Digitimes backtracks from its previous rumor with a new one: Instead of the 7.85-inch iPad, Apple will supposedly be bringing two new Retina-style iPads to the market to fill in the mid- and high-end market segments, while the current iPad 2 hangs around to take on the Kindle Fire. → Read More
We spent two posts on SIM-LEI, an electric car developed by a a spin-off startup at Keio University in Tokyo in collaboration with a total of 34 domestic and foreign companies, in the past months. And it seems that the startup, SIM Drive Corporation, is on track to start mass-producing the vehicle in about 2 years. The company was set up in August 2009.
The main selling point of the newest version is that it can drive over 300km at a constant speed of 100km/h. In spring, SIM Drive said the SIM-LEI (“Leading Efficiency In-Wheel motor”) can reach 333km under “general urban traffic conditions in Japan”. → Read More
We’re all familiar with the pain of having to share photos with people. I’m not talking about the staff party album on Facebook, I’m talking about moments that matter – the family holidays, the weddings, big days like those. And this remains an ongoing issue. We can share Dropbox folders all we like. Everything still has to be downloaded and the interface does not suit viewing, especially on tablets. We can ask friends and family to sign up to a private Flickr group, but that’s still another hurdle. Lots of photo and file sharing services are rubbish and many people remain afraid of Facebook’s now quite public nature. Now, a new startup out of Berlin has come up with something it calls the ‘Dropbox for photos’ where you can privately exchange photos in a group: 7moments.
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Just.me, a stealth startup incubated by Palo Alto, California-based Archimedes Labs has raised $2.7 million in Series A funding according to an SEC filing. The company earlier secured $600,000 in seed financing from SV Angel, Google Ventures, True Ventures, Betaworks, CrunchFund and a couple of other high-profile investors such as Don Dodge and Michael Parekh.
I reached out to Keith Teare, CEO and sole founder of just.me (and also technically also a co-founder of TechCrunch, for full disclosure), but he politely declined to comment on the funding round. → Read More
It seems that 55-Inch OLED TV wasn’t enough for LG: the Korean company today announced it’s ready to showcase another monster TV at the CES 2012 in Las Vegas (which kicks off on January 10). This model comes with a 84-inch 3D LCD display with 4K resolution (3,840×2,160 pixels).
To put things into perspective: 4K resolution, which LG calls “Ultra Definition”, is four times the resolution of full HD. Other details are scarce at this point, but LG promises “slim and narrow bezel design”, controllable 3D picture effects, and 3D sound zooming capability. → Read More
Here are some of yesterday’s stories on TechCrunch Gadgets: → Read More
There are no shortages of “predictions” articles, here I look at a dozen things that won’t happen in the world of online video in 2012, even though they should.
1) We Will Have Standards and Definitions (No, we won’t)
By the end of 2011, the online video industry didn’t yet have a common definition and standard for a video view. It also wasn’t sure if the click-through-rate or completion rate would become the ultimate yardstick for success. A lot of experts are coming out and saying that 2012 will mark the year where we define these standards and agree on one. Personally, I think that is wishful thinking, 2012 is the year where we admit that we have this problem, but it won’t matter, as online video advertising continues to grow despite a sea of confusion, smoke and mirrors → Read More
The Gillmor Gang goes enterprise in a conversation with Paul Greenberg, the eminence grise of the CRM, now Social CRM world. Gangsters John Taschek and Steve Gillmor decrypt Paul’s latest report from the front. → Read More
“Google+ is about sharing the right updates with the right people – making sharing online just like sharing in real life. Just like in real life, sometimes you just want to hang out with friends. Hanging out on Google+, with your family, your friends, or new friends you don’t yet know, is more than just multi-user video chat. It’s about eliminating borders and bringing people together around the world. It’s about people.”
Blip Networks, which operates Blip.tv, is raising more money. According to an SEC filing, the New York City company sold $6 million worth of stock beginning on December 22, 2011 in an offering that could expand to as much as $11.1 million. Presumably, this is part of a Series D offering, since Blip raised a $10 million Series C in May, 2010, almost 18 months ago.
Blip is trying to become a destination for indie online videos. But it is becoming increasingly hard for any video site that is not Youtube to carve out a niche for itself. → Read More
Local interactive advertising firm WebVisible has shut its doors. According to a note sent from the company’s CEO to employees, WebVisible ran out of cash, and Silicon Valley Bank is shutting the company down.
WebVisible’s software allowed advertisers to manage local online campaigns on Google, Yahoo, Bing and others. The company’s services were offered directly affiliate partners to local businesses, franchisors, and national advertisers Previous WebVisible partners include AT&T, British Telecom, Yellow Pages Group of Canada, EarthLink, and The McClatchy Company, among others.
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Facebook has AppData, Twitter has Twitaholic, and now Google+ has its own independent brand page rankings site: ZoomSphere. It shows which brands have the most followers, activity, +1s, shares, and comments, and slice the data by time, page category, and country. Oddly, the site doesn’t rank user profiles like SocialStatistics does — just brand pages. Still, by augmenting its existing charts for Facebook and Twitter, ZoomSphere could become a comprehensive resource for brands charting their own performance, assessing competitors, or scoping for potential partners. → Read More
In many ways, 2011 was the year of the pivot. One startup that successfully switched gears was Fab, which started the year as a gay social network and ended it a design-oriented e-commerce site. Founder Jason Goldberg created the Fab Timeline slideshow below to illustrate all the changes the company has gone through, from its pivot in February to raising $8 million in July, another $40 million in early December, and growing all along the way.
But one slide in particular caught my eye. It shows Fab’s order growth shooting up from just above 20,000 orders in July to about 40,000 in September and then jumping to nearly 100,000 in November. Orders in december continues to climb, Goldberg tells me, and the company is on an annualized revenue-run-rate of almost $70 million. → Read More
Makerbot’s Thing-O-Matic is pretty pricey – $1,299 for the kit and $2,500 for the assembled kit – but (and this is my professional opinion) it is amazing and everyone in the world should own one. That said, Fab.com has a special deal on Thing-O-Matics this week – $999 for the kit and $2,000 for the assembled device – one of the first and biggest discounts ever on the entire system. → Read More
According to some press reports today the British Prime Minister, David Cameron is to get “his own personalised iPad app” to stay on top of Government business.
Cameron is known to use an iPad to read newspapers and catch up on media generally, as evidenced by this photo taken at a party conference last year. But this report sounds just a little like a slow news week combined with some idle chatter over the Christmas party season amongst the Whitehall press gang and the ‘spads’ – insider shorthand for Special Advisers. → Read More
Other than Salesforce, no cloud SaaS provider handles more transactions than Taleo. The stats the company revealed to me about its 2011 are staggering. The Taleo talent and recruitment solution helped enterprises hire 3.1 million people, roughly 15% of the year’s US hires. It had 50 to 60 million visitors to the job listing sites and other services it powers. Bootstrapped but now publicly traded, Taleo serves 5,000 customers including half of the Fortune 100. When companies need to hire huge numbers of employees, they come to Taleo. → Read More
