AT&T Senior Executive VP John Donovan took to the company’s Innovation Space blog to talk wireless data, and the statistics he brings to the table are nothing if not impressive. Among other tidbits, Donovan revealed that the carrier’s wireless data traffic has at least doubled every year since 2007.
“Over the past five years, AT&T’s wireless data traffic has grown 20,000%,” he said.
He pegs this “wireless data tsunami” on the growing popularity of smartphones, and AT&T’s recent numbers back him up. The nation’s second largest wireless carrier picked up a total of 8.9 million new subscribers in 2011, and broke their own quarterly records by selling 9.4 million smartphones during the year’s fourth quarter. But with wireless data use on the uptick, AT&T is going to have to get creative when it comes to managing their data networks. → Read More
You’ll recall the battles between the RIAA and the technology industry over music licensing. Well something similar as been going on regarding how newspaper content is licensed to commercial clippings agencies, and it’s blowing up on both sides of the Atlantic.
The Associated Press today filed suit against Meltwater News for copyright infringement and misappropriation of its breaking news content. The complaint, filed in a New York federal court, alleges that Meltwater U.S. Holding Inc. and its Meltwater News Service, a news clipping service, have been illegally selling unlicensed AP content that competes directly with AP and its customers.
Meanwhile in the UK, there’s been a ruling today which has relevance for how links to newspapers are shared online.
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Advertising in email newsletters is an old idea, but the founders of LaunchBit, a startup that’s leaving closed beta testing today, say things haven’t changed since the ’90s.
The biggest problem? When you advertise in newsletters, you blindly send the same ad to everyone on the list. → Read More
Barry Diller always enjoys riling the media industry from which he sprang. A few minutes ago at a press conference at IAC headquarters in New York City, Diller introduced a new startup IAC is backing called Aereo that is building a DVR in the cloud that broadcasts live TV to your iPad, computer, or TV. Diller has always believed that Internet TV would be a healthy counterweight to “media concentration” as media companies increasingly want “to protect that closed system.”
The problem with Internet TV so far, says Diller, is that “there wasn’t a lot to watch” other than “cats swinging from chandeliers.” → Read More
Lover.ly, an inspiration engine and Pinterest-like startup for weddings, has raised $500,000 from Joanne Wilson, Michael Edwards, Michael Yavonditte, Charles Smith, Anu Duggal, Jordan Levy, and Rick Webb.
Launched in the Fall of 2011, Lover.ly is a centralized place that helps brides discover and save wedding ideas. The site is designed to help brides, vendors, and wedding enthusiasts find inspiration (from wedding blogs), people to hire, and things to buy. Similar to Pinterest, the site allows users to curate board of ideas and make them public for users to view and draw inspiration. Currently, the site has an archive of over 130,000 images organized by editors and its community of users. Lover.ly offers both editor-curated inspiration boards (i.e. bridesmaid dresses for beach weddings, honeymoon ideas) as well as user-generated boards. → Read More
Oh crap, it’s Valentine’s Day. Did you just remember, too, courtesy of that clever Google Doodle? The blogosphere will be filled today with last-minute gift ideas and other such ephemera related to this mushy holiday, and while I’m refusing the V-Day pitches as a general rule, there is a startup announcing its launch today that’s actually kind of fun. The company is called Walnuts, and it’s a Facebook app that can automatically build you a digital or printed book of your best Facebook photos and status updates, or even those belonging to a Facebook friend. Last-minute gift idea? Yeah, sure. But not a bad gift the other 364 days of the year, either.
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Even if it isn’t my favorite new device, I’m glad to see the Galaxy Note bring something totally different to the mobile table. At first glance you’d think it was a tablet, especially when you set it next to a “regular” phone, but you’d soon realize the Note has a 4G LTE radio tucked inside to let you phone home.
Unfortunately, you might look a little crazy with that huge thing up to your face. I found that it was really difficult to get comfortable with the device, never feeling like I had complete control over it as I would with a smaller phone. On the other hand, the mobile video experience offered by the Note can’t really be beat thanks to that stunning 5.3-inch 1280×800 HD Super AMOLED display. → Read More
Inkling Co-founder and CEO Matthew MacInnis tells us that, two years ago, the team set out to build a publishing platform that would redefine digital media, starting with the reinvention of the textbook. But in doing so, they discovered that to reinvent books, they’ve had to go back to ground zero and re-imagine the entire printing process itself. Desktop publishing has been around for decades, but to do it right, MacInnis said, this required them to reset the type, so to speak.
This long process culminated in the “software environment” the startup officially unveiled today, called Inkling Habitat. This new platform targets the other end of the spectrum from iBooks: — professional publishers — giving them an industrial, or enterprise, platform that includes everything they need to create and publish interactive content for both the iPad and the Web. “No desktop software, and no constraints of the printed page.” → Read More
Yes, there are going to be a lot of startups trying to capitalize on Valentine’s Day. Postmates, however, has the advantage of doing something cool — something that involves free chocolate.
When the app launched last year at TechCrunch Disrupt, the coverage described it as the “Uber of packages.” On its face, the comparison might sound a little silly (at least, it did to me) but in the same way that Uber works because town car drivers often have downtime, Postmates is trying to take advantage of the fact that couriers and bike messengers aren’t always scheduled to make deliveries, and can instead take last-minute delivery requests via the Postmates app. → Read More
Seattle and London-based nFluence Media emerged from two years of stealth mode to announce it has raised $3 million for a deal-targeting technology whose first application will be a daily deal aggregating iPhone app, due out later this month. However, the company is not necessarily just another player in the overly crowded “daily deals” space. Instead, the technology being funded here is an anonymous self-profiling system that can expand into other verticals, including future uses with mobile carriers, cable/satellite TV operators and shopping mall owners.
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Here’s a roundup of recent stories on TechCrunch Europe:
— On-demand car service startup Cabify – which I likened to the ‘Uber of Europe’ – is starting to gain momentum in its hometown (Madrid, Spain), but plans to expand to 15 more European cities in 2012.
— In the UK, private sales club SecretSales has raised £6.3 million in funding to double down on its expansion in the country.
— TCEU Editor Mike Butcher traveled to Latvia for the first TechCrunch Baltics meetup, learned more about the tech scene in the country as well as that in Lithuania and Estonia, and saw some interesting startups.
More stories after the jump. → Read More
Motorola’s latest handsets have been pretty impressive. The Razr and Razr Maxx, in particular, are excellent handsets. But it would seem that the (almost) freshly acquired company has no intentions of resting on its laurels.
Rather than sticking with its usual OMAP-powered devices, Motorola has slapped an Intel Medfield chip on to this anonymous device. And lest we forget, Ice Cream Sandwich is finally coming along for the ride. (It sure does pay off to be under Google’s wing, doesn’t it?) → Read More
It would appear Dropbox is building a pretty wide ecosystem around its service and the latest today is an integration with WorldDesk. Who are they? Well they provide desktop virtualisation software, and they’ve just launched a beta cloud-based desktop delivery platform leveraging Dropbox.
Right now WorldDesk lets you access your “desktop” (whatever that is these days) from any device,allowing access to your applications and personalised desktop from your physical machine. Using WorldDesk, you could use a simple USB drive, or access your desktop from a smartphone, for instance.
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Amazon is opening a 1 million-square-foot fulfillment center in Middletown, Delaware, which is the e-commerce giant’s second facility in the state. Amazon says that the new center will create 850 full-time jobs, and will cost $90 million.
Amazon’s fulfillment centers enables the company and third-party merchants to store inventory and fulfill orders. The Middletown center joins Amazon’s New Castle fulfillment facility, which was opened in 1997. Amazon says that the New Castle center currently employs “hundreds of full-time workers,” but it sounds like the new facility will be larger. The Middletown facility is expected to be complete this fall. → Read More
There are few aspects of growing a business that are easy. But when you think about the big picture, one of the most significant challenges — besides hiring attractive, productive interns — is customer acquisition. Not every business scales like Facebook; many have to fight tooth-and-nail for every client, sell their firstborn, do whatever it takes. And once those customers are on board, the most successful companies make it a point to listen to them, hear their feedback, iterate, tweaking the user experience of their business/service/platform until the cows come home if that’s what’s required.
Sure, there’s something to be said for the “ask forgiveness not permission” strategy, but the recent PR fiascos of Airbnb and Path prove, if anything, that prioritizing transparency and communication with customers can save you from a lot of headaches. → Read More
No, silly, this isn’t about murder – it’s a program to remove people from a photo! Scalado has created a photo-taking system that allows you to selectively remove people in a photo. How does it work? It basically interpolates the “clean” version of the scene by watching the moving, live objects. It’s not rocket science, but it’s pretty cool.
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The Linux Foundation today posted their first ever Linux Jobs Report, created in conjunction with tech job site Dice.com. The report examines the current demand for Linux talent, and identifies a few interesting trends.
Of the 2,300 survey respondents, eight in ten said that hiring Linux talent is a priority in 2012, and more than half of firms surveyed said that they’re increasing Linux hires relative to jobs created in other skill areas. → Read More
Digital audience measurement company comScore this morning reported its earnings for Q4 and full year 2011. Last quarter, comScore says it achieved record revenue of $62.6 million, a 22 percent increase compared to the fourth quarter of 2010.
However, comScore posted a net loss of $3.3 million, or a loss of $0.10 per share, for the quarter. The reason isn’t hard to find: the company says it includes $7.8 million in costs related to litigation with Nielsen and the related settlement. → Read More
Pearltrees, a company offering a novel interface for sharing and finding content, has raised 5 million euros ($6.7 million US) in new funding.
The basic unit of the Pearltrees service is the pearl, which is basically a bookmark. Users can assemble these pearls into trees based around a topic. Meanwhile, Pearltrees is using that data to determine how different topics and bookmarks are related, and allows users to find new pearls (related to whatever topic they’re exploring) through its “related interests” button. → Read More
For Valentine’s Day, Google has created one of its most ambitious Doodles yet. When you click on the Google logo today, you get to watch a one-minute animation showing the highs and lows of young love — and illustrating that Google can’t solve everything.
I’ve embedded a video of the Doodle below, and if you like it, much of the credit goes to Michael Lipman, an animator whose past work includes Happy Tree Friends, and who was hired by the Doodle team to turn their animatic storyboard into a full-length animation. Lipman told me that it was definitely an intense project — an animation of this length would normally him take nine or 10 weeks, but when Google approached him in mid-January, they gave him three. → Read More
