Looks like Apple might be loosening its grip even more on voice recognition apps? Or, it simply just feels that the competition is not as good as its own native Siri. We’ve just gotten word from Netherlands-based developer Sparkling Apps that its voice-response app, Voice Answer — rejected by Apple for nearly three months — has been approved by Apple and is now live in the App Store, and usable… → Read More
While Zynga and other gaming companies seem to be doing everything possible to claw their way off the Facebook canvas, at least one San Francisco company is still in. Big time.
With just shy of 5 million monthly active users on Facebook, Kixeye is ranked a dismal 72nd on the developer leaderboard behind Zynga, EA and Angry Birds-maker Rovio, according to tracking service AppData.
But the… → Read More
Payments company Square is raising another major round of funding, but is targeting institutional investors first because of the enormous size of the round, we hear from sources. Square’s CEO and co-founder Jack Dorsey and COO Keith Rabois have met with both Fidelity and Legg Mason over the past week, and as AllThingsD reported earlier, Square is looking to raise at a $4 billion valuation, which… → Read More
With the skyrocketing popularity and billion-dollar sale of Instagram, there’s an ongoing race to apply Instagram’s wildly successful photo sharing model to mobile video. There are a number of startups vying to claim the “Instagram for Video” title, with Socialcam, Viddy, Klip, Mobli, and even the infamous Color all in the running. Yet, today brings evidence that Viddy may now be the one to beat… → Read More
It has been more than a week now, but Techmeme today is dominated by Instagram related headlines. Was the Board involved? Did Marc Andreessen know? Did Instagram take the $50m from Sequoia and others before agreeing to be acquired? Was $2bn the right ask? Was $1 billion cheap or is it a bubble?
These are soap opera-like questions. Interesting? For sure if you have insomnia. Deep? Not… → Read More
This just in: According to multiple sources close to the company, Facebook is eying IPO on May 17th — depending on whether the SEC agrees that all the reams of paperwork are in order. This is in line with earlier reports that the company was going to hit NASDAQ during the third week of May.
And also in line with what a single source told CNBC at depth, that the social network was considering… → Read More
Believe it or not, 37 million Americans, or about 16 million households, pick up and move every year. Depending on whom you ask, we move as frequently as once every three years. Yes, moving is a part of life, albeit a stressful and emotional one. Unsurprisingly, the many services and operations that go into household moves have collectively come to represent a sizable industry. If you take… → Read More
It’s not every day that you see code like this:
*——————————-
* Superimpose “Turn disk over” message
*——————————-
FLIPDISKMSG
lda #flipbox
ldx #>flipbox
jmp superimage
Yep. That’s assembly language, about as far from Ruby as you can get. It’s from the original, Apple II version of Prince of Persia, one of the best games in anyone’s… → Read More
Tell your friends to hit the App Store or Android market, there’s a new update for Draw Something out today with some cool new features. Now you can chat with friends while you play, save your drawings to your phone or tablet, and share those drawings straight to Facebook or Twitter. Zynga, who recently acquired Draw Something and its developer OMGPOP for over $180 million, hopes these social and… → Read More
While I seriously doubt the staying power of this game platform, the concept is pretty cool. Called Jumala, this free-to-play online game allows players to stop the action mid-game and flip things around and change the entire level. Level too scary? You can add flying hot dogs and flowers. Too boring? Add demonic death heads.
The game is all about level design. You earn points by creating games… → Read More
This post is contributed by Ben Jiang, editor of TechNode, a bilingual blog based in China.
Gaopeng, a joint venture between Groupon and Tencent, may be headed for a merger by the end of next month with FTuan, according to reports from local Chinese news agencies. Notably, FTuan is a rival Chinese daily deal service that Groupon’s local partner Tencent invested in. If such a deal happened, it… → Read More
If you’re an entrepreneur struggling to find the time or inspiration to udpate the company blog, a new service called Scribit offers a solution.
Scribit was developed by a startup called Vertical Acuity, whose initial product helped publishers syndicate their articles to other sites and find fresh content for themselves. President Joe Fiveash used to work at Weather.com, and he says that this… → Read More
The amount of harried printing situations I’ve been party to has dropped dramatically since I finished school, but Google’s new update to their Cloud Print service should have you covered if you can’t say the same.
According to a post on the official Chrome blog Google has baked the ability to print to any FedEx Office location right into Cloud Print, so you’ll be push your documents from… → Read More
During eBay’s earnings call today, eBay CEO and President John Donahoe said that over 200,000 merchants have signed up for PayPal Here, the company’s Square-like mobile payments hardware and software platform for small businesses. We haven’t seen any sign-up numbers for the mobile payments service since PayPal revealed it was seeing 1,000 new registrants per hour for the new service.
As you… → Read More
Facebook doesn’t want your company to get burned by shady “social media gurus”, so today it expanded its Preferred Developer Consultant program into the new Preferred Marketing Developer program which offers certifications for high quality developers of apps and Page management, ads, and Insights tools and services.
In March we got the scoop that Facebook planned to overhaul the PDC program… → Read More
The amount of leaks, rumors and hype around the Samsung Galaxy S III are reaching iPhone-ish proportions. Consumers obviously want this phone. The latest set of alleged pics show a phone clearly born of Galaxy S pedigree but there’s no way of knowing if they’re the real thing.
The picture quality is of course a bit bad. It looks like it was taken with an iPad 2 or Galaxy Tab. Either way, the… → Read More
It’s only been a few short hours since AT&T announced the availability of HTC’s mamma-jamma One X smartphone, but there may be a few more tricks coming out of HTC’s sleeve before the day is done. For example, T-Mobile just sent over a bit of news regarding the One S, namely that it will launch on April 25 for $199.99 on-contract after a $50 mail-in-rebate.
We first spotted the One S back… → Read More
eBay just reported stronger than expected first quarter 2012 earnings today. Revenue increased 29% to $3.3 billion, compared to the same period of 2011. Non-GAAP earnings came in at $0.55 per diluted share. Analysts expected earnings of $0.52 per share on revenue of $3.15 billion. Net income came in at $570 million for the quarter.
“The first quarter was a strong start to the year for us with… → Read More
Web design and development community Treehouse has just secured $4.75 million in funding from Chamath Palihapitiya’s Social+Capital partnership and the Greylock Discovery fund. The financing comes in addition to a $600K star studded seed round the company raised back in October 2011.
In the same hot edustartup space as Lynda, Codecademy and Udacity, the platform uses example videos, online… → Read More
Marketers don’t actually want clicks, they want the downstream conversions and the return on investment that follow. So today Facebook begins allowing advertisers using its API to ask it to show their ads to people most likely to take any specific post-click action on the social network, such as sharing a brand’s content to the news feed, buying virtual goods in their apps, or redeeming one of the… → Read More
When Jonathan Izak graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 2010, he decided to put his new degree in Computer Science to very good use. In an effort to help his 10-year old autistic brother Oriel communicate and learn new tasks, he developed a new iPad app called Autismate to try and simplify the process.
I got the chance to speak briefly with Izak, and he told me that Autismate came… → Read More
Exec, the new TaskRabbit competitor from Justin.tv’s co-founder, Justin Kan, has just hired a new designer it seems. Or so she sings. In a video posted to YouTube by one Karen X. Cheng, she sings and strums – rather nicely, in fact – to the tune of “Bye, Bye Miss American Pie” about how she’s leaving behind her job Microsoft, where she spent three years compiling Excel code, and is now… → Read More
The Obvious Corporation, the ideas incubator and firm started by Biz Stone, Evan Williams and Jason Goldman, has announced its latest investment—online community Neighborland. While it’s unclear how much the startup raised, other backers include True Ventures, Lerer Ventures, SV Angel, CrunchFund, and Voodoo Ventures.
From the startup’s site, it appears New Orleans-based startup Neighborland… → Read More
Cloud-based phone systems provider RingCentral is debuting a new version of its platform that allows businesses to setup, manage and use their phone system from mobile devices.
RingCentral, which is backed by Scale Ventures, Cisco, Sequoia Capital, Khosla Ventures, DAG Ventures, and Silicon Valley Bank, markets an advanced, cloud-based replacement for legacy phone systems in the form of a… → Read More
Keeping your calendars, contacts and tasks in sync between all of your devices is still a bit of a hassle – especially if you use different operating systems and vendors. Germany-based Fruux, which was founded in 2010, offers a simple and elegant solution for keeping your contacts and calendars in sync between all of your phones, tablets, laptops and desktops. Sure, you could use iCloud or… → Read More
FriendCaller, a Skype alternative which, let’s face it, we haven’t heard much from in years, is today launching new web and mobile apps that support up to 7-way group video chats at once. The addition comes on the heels of FriendCaller’s earlier expansion this year into multi-point video and voice conferencing, the company says.
In addition to the seven video participants, the new apps also… → Read More
Two gadgets enter, one leaves. It’s that simple. Welcome to the TC Gadget Review Battle where two competing products are pitted against each other. No wishy washy conclusion based on an arbitrary numbering system, just a reliable buying recommendation.
These two speaker docks couldn’t be more similar. They both use the same overall design, have nearly identical feature sets and the same $399… → Read More
Right now I’m sitting in a room covered in Spotify and Coca-Cola logos. That’s because Spotify and Coke have just announced a global partnership to help both brands expand their ubiquity.
The folks at Coke explained that music has always been a huge part of Coke’s marketing efforts, going all the way back to a series of ads featuring Ray Charles nearly 50 years ago. That said, the partnership… → Read More
There are a number of different schools of thought about how useful Foursquare-like check-ins really are. Forecast, especially, is taking a very different approach from most of Foursquare’s competitors by emphasizing where you are going to be later in the day over just checking in at a location when you arrive. Now, with the latest version of its iPhone app (an update for the Android app is coming… → Read More
If you were wondering where all the PC growth was, look East, young person. IHS, formerly iSuppli, expects that desktop sales will rise 8% and Ultrabook sales will take up 15 to 20 percent of notebook shipments. Windows 8 and Intel’s Ivy Bridge are to be driving factors in PC growth this year.
In comparison, IDC found that 2011 PC shipments shrank in Europe and the United States by 9%. → Read More
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