May 16th, 2013

Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, CNN And Evernote Apps Coming To Google Glass Today

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Google announced a number of new partner apps today on stage at Google I/O during the “Developing for Glass” session. Facebook and Twitter were the highlights of the list, which also included Evernote, Tumblr, Elle and CNN, in addition to the previously announced NYT and Path apps. → Read More

May 16th, 2013

Google Announces Native Glass Developer Kit, Will Be Able To Do More Than The Mirror API

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Google held a session today hosted by Timothy Jordan, developer advocate on Project Glass on how to develop for the gadget, and while most of it focused on what developers can do right now with the available documentation and Mirror API which makes use of a tethered phone’s capabilities, Jordan also spoke briefly about Google’s upcoming GDK or Glass Developer Kit, which will be a native… → Read More

May 16th, 2013

FixYa’s New FixBoard Allows Companies To Track Customer Support Trends

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FixYa, a Q&A site where consumers can seek advice from product experts, is launching a new feature today called the FixBoard, which should make the site more useful to big consumer brands.

As the name suggests, the FixBoard is basically a dashboard of FixYa data. It shows, over time, the number of FixYa owners who reported a problem with a company product, the products that have the most… → Read More

May 16th, 2013

Yahoo Partners With Twitter To Further Personalize Homepage Newsfeed

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Yahoo and Twitter have partnered to bring tweets directly into Yahoo homepage’s newsfeed on web and mobile, the company announced this morning. The move follows the February relaunch of the front page. At the time, the company debuted a redesigned site with an increased emphasis on personalization, as well as a more modern design. → Read More

May 16th, 2013

Google’s New Hangouts Chat And Messaging App To Incorporate SMS “Soon”

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Google revealed Hangouts, its unified text, video and multimedia messaging platform yesterday during its epic three hour I/O keynote, but while the platform pulls in Google Talk, Google+ and other sources, it was apparently missing SMS integration. Incorporating texts from your carrier is on the way, however, according to Hangouts and Chat community manager Dori Storbeck, who said as much in a… → Read More

May 16th, 2013

Google Announces Rebuilt AdMob Developer Tools With Smarter App Promotion, Local Currency Support

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Mobile app developers using Google’s AdMob ad network will start seeing a new version that has been rebuilt “in a ground up sort of way,” according to Jonathan Alferness, director of product management for mobile ads.

The update, which starts rolling out today, also brings AdMob more in line with Google’s other ad platforms. That’s something the company has been working on since it acquired→ Read More

May 16th, 2013

Luvocracy Raises $11M From Kleiner Perkins, Google Ventures And Others To Master Ecommerce And Social Recommendations

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Luvocracy, a recently launched, Pinterest-like social marketplace where people can buy products recommended by friends and other tastemakers, has raised $11 million in funding from Kleiner Perkins, Google Ventures, Marissa Mayer, Ali Pincus, Jim Lanzone, Tony Robbins, CrunchFund, RPM Ventures and XG Ventures. Kleiner Perkins partner Bing Gordon is joining Luvocracy’s board. → Read More

May 16th, 2013

Google Has Already Removed 8.8M Lines Of WebKit Code From Blink

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Google’s decision to fork WebKit and launch its own Blink rendering engine came as a surprise when the company made the announcement just over a month ago. Yesterday, at the Google I/O developer conference, the Blink team provided an update about the state of the engine. As Alex Komoroske, a product manager on Chrome’s Open Web Platform told the audience, the team has already removed 8.8 million… → Read More

May 16th, 2013

Bloglovin Redesigns Its Fashion-Focused Blog Reader To Highlight Popular Content, Social Features

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Bloglovin, a site where readers can follow blogs about fashion and other lifestyle topics, is getting what CEO and co-founder Mattias Swenson said is its first major redesign.

Until now, Swenson said Bloglovin has been adding new features in a more incremental way. This time it’s getting a new look and new social capabilities that the Bloglovin team hopes will please both the hardcore users and… → Read More

May 16th, 2013

Biz Stone’s New Startup Jelly Raises Series A From Spark Capital, SV Angel, Square CEO Jack Dorsey, Reid Hoffman, Al Gore, Bono & Others

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Twitter co-founder Biz Stone’s new and mysterious startup called Jelly still isn’t saying what it’s up to, but it has announced funding. According to details posted to the official company blog this morning, the team has raised a Series A from a notable lineup of investors in a round led by Spark Capital, with additional investment from SV Angel, and a group of angels that includes Square CEO → Read More

May 16th, 2013

Telefonica Adds Samsung As A Carrier Billing OEM For Apps, Games, Music And More

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Telefonica is today announcing a deal with Samsung that will see it make an even bigger move into the area of carrier billing. Samsung will integrate the carrier’s billing backend directly into its own mobile services, meaning that the Telefonica customers (it has 316 million worldwide) who use the Samsung Hub and Samsung Apps portals on Samsung smartphones will be able to buy apps, music, videos… → Read More

May 16th, 2013

Pebble Nabs $15M In Funding, Outs PebbleKit SDK And Pebble Sports API To Spur Smartwatch App Development

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Get ready for a whole lot more Pebble. The smartwatch company just announced several software enhancements for the Pebble and a $15M Series A led by Charles River Ventures. Pebble is not going to sit around, scared of iWatch rumors. They’re plowing forward on their own accord and committed to providing the best platform possible for developers and consumers.

“We are pledging to support the… → Read More

May 16th, 2013

Google Wallet Rolls Out To More Devices – Nope, Still No Love For Verizon, AT&T Or T-Mobile Owners

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Google sadly scrapped its plans to introduce a plastic “universal” credit card that works at point-of-sale as a way to use its Google Wallet service out in the real world, but the company has not given up on its NFC-powered payments solution just yet. The company announced Wednesday evening the Google Wallet app now works on more phones: the Samsung Galaxy S4, Samsung Galaxy Note II and HTC One… → Read More

May 16th, 2013

Feds Seize Assets From Mt. Gox’s Dwolla Acount, Accuse It Of Violating Money Transfer Regulations

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Bitcoin exchange service Mt. Gox is experiencing some issues with U.S. authorities. The Department of Homeland Security issued a seizure warrant to Dwolla for the money in Mt. Gox’s Dwolla account. Mt. Gox users can’t use Dwolla as a funding option anymore even though it was one of the most popular options. The Japanese startup failed to register in the U.S. as a money transmitting… → Read More

May 16th, 2013

Amazon Taps NBCUniversal To Bring Covert Affairs, Grimm, Suits, And More To Prime Instant Video

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Amazon has just announced a new content deal with NBCUniversal, bringing a host of new television series to the video streaming platform.

Some of those titles include Covert Affairs, Defiance, Grimm, Hannibal, and Suits. And what’s more, the company is pulling content from NBCUniversal’s children series such as Curious George and Land Before Time, which will be available with Kindle FreeTime… → Read More

May 16th, 2013

With PayPal-Like Ambitions For Bitcoin, BitPay Raises $2M Led By Founders Fund

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BitPay, the startup with ambitions to become the PayPal of the bitcoin world, is today announcing that it has raised another $2 million. And in what is a kind of poetic justice, the round is led by none other than the Founders Fund, the VC started by what’s commonly called the PayPayl Mafia. → Read More

May 16th, 2013

BonitaSoft Raises $13M Series C For Its Open Source Business Process Management Solution

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BonitaSoft, a provider of an open source business process management (BPM) solution, has raised a $13 million Series C round led by the FSN PME Fund, a French government initiative to invest in technology companies to help them scale globally. Also joining the round are previous investors Ventech, Auriga Partners, and Serena Capital. The new funding round brings the total raised by the company to… → Read More

May 16th, 2013

Social Analytics Startup Awe.sm Hires Former CBSi And AOL Exec Fred McIntyre As CEO

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Social analytics startup Awe.sm has been growing quickly and getting a lot of interest from brands that want to use its platform for measuring the effectiveness of their social media campaigns. With that in mind, the company has hired a new CEO, industry veteran Fred McIntyre. → Read More

May 16th, 2013

IDC: Android OEMs Shipped 162M Smartphones In Q1, More Than 4X Apple’s Rate; Windows Phone Now In (Distant) Third

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IDC today was the latest to publish its numbers on smartphone market shares after the major handset makers released Q1 earnings, and like Gartner, Strategy Analytics and the rest, it underscores the power of Google’s Android platform at the moment: Android OEMs shipped 162.1 million handsets in the quarter, giving the platform a 75% share of total worldwide shipments, while Apple’s 37.4 million… → Read More

May 16th, 2013

Enterprise Mobility, BYOD Startup AirWatch Adds $25M From Accel To Take Its Series A Total To $225M, As It Preps For Acquisitions

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AirWatch, the startup that helps businesses manage security and more on employees’ mobile devices, is today announcing that it has raised another $25 million, led by Accel with participation also from Insight Venture Partners. The funds come as part of an expanded Series A round, originally for $200 million, which the company announced with a splash in February during Mobile World Congress. This… → Read More

May 16th, 2013

Instabeat Is Revolutionary HUD For Swimming Goggles You Can Back On Indiegogo

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While the world goes gaga for Google Glass, a small startup has come up with an intriguing new take on a device which can display information before your eyes. Instabeat is head-up display unit which attaches to swimming goggles and monitors your heart rate, calories, laps and turns during your swim. It’s been live on crowd funding platform Indiegogo for a few days and is already poised to reach… → Read More

May 16th, 2013

Merlin: iTunes Remains Biggest Digital Destination; Spotify + Amazon 2nd And 3rd; Streaming Still Just An Opening Act

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On the heels of Google wading into the music streaming waters with its Google Play Music All Access service, with a $10 fee for all-you-can-eat streamed tracks, the indie music agency Merlin has today published results of a recent survey of its 20,000-label member group, plus an analysis of 6.5 billion music streams over the last year, which spell out where the money is coming from today. → Read More

May 16th, 2013

Powering The Facebook Card, Marqeta Raises $14M From Greylock Israel To Recreate The Starbucks Loyalty Card For Merchants

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Marqeta, the startup that helps businesses nationwide attain the Starbucks loyalty Card “pay-in-advance for your coffee” model, is announcing $14 million in new funding from Greylock IL (an affiliate fund of Greylock Partners), Granite Ventures, new investor Commerce Ventures, and a number of leading new angel and unnamed strategic investors. → Read More

May 16th, 2013

Enterprise Business Intelligence And Analytics Startup EdgeSpring Raises $11M From Kleiner Perkins

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EdgeSpring, an enterprise business intelligence and analytics startup, is emerging from stealth and announcing $11 million in Series A funding from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Lightspeed Ventures. → Read More

May 16th, 2013

The Magic Of Google’s APIs and Algorithms, The Bread And Butter Of The Google I/O Keynote

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It’s clear that Google had other things it could have talked about on the first day of the I/O conference. Like Google Glass. Instead, the attendees heard more about how Google has developed new ways to turn data into services. The highlights were not some fancy hardware but the magic of Google’s APIs and algorithms, the bread and butter of what Google does. I spent part of the… → Read More

May 15th, 2013

With Google Play For Education, Google Looks To Challenge Apple’s Dominance In The Classroom

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Google I/O, the company’s sixth annual developer conference, got officially underway in San Francisco on Wednesday, and it was an eventful day. It took the company every minute of its epic three-hour keynote to unfurl a laundry list of announcements and updates, seemingly across every product category in its arsenal — from Android, Chrome and Search to Maps, Google+ and Hangouts — each with a… → Read More

May 15th, 2013

The Constitution And The 3D Printed Plastic Pistol

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By now, you have probably heard about the Liberator, a 3D printed plastic gun designed, assembled, and test-fired by Cody Wilson of Defense Distributed. Is it legal? → Read More

May 15th, 2013

Unboxing The First Chromebook Pixel Given Away At Google I/O

Sebastian Rodriguez waited in line 90 minutes to be the first person at Google I/O to get the Google Chromebook Pixel, the premium laptop given to all conference attendees today. Rodriguez is a a software engineer with Thales, a data security company. He humored us and did an “unboxing” of his new  Pixel. He was hoping to get Google Glass as were most of the people we talked to at the… → Read More

May 15th, 2013

Google’s Three-Hour I/O Keynote Boils Down To These Highlights And One Theme: Foundation

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Today’s three-hour-long Google I/O keynote came with plenty of announcements, but the company mostly assured us that it is focused on building frameworks that can benefit developers and consumers.

We saw a more unified company that needed three hours in one session to get their message across. Breaking today’s keynote up into two days would have disrupted the momentum coming out of a company… → Read More

May 15th, 2013

Google’s Products Are Just By-Products Of Its Quest For Tomorrow

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Google isn’t about search, apps, or devices. Those are just vehicles, and there’s no destination. That’s because Larry Page’s Google is on an unending pursuit of the future, not just next quarter’s earnings. The scattershot of projects Google revealed today at I/O had just one unifying factor: They further that pursuit, or empower the curiosity of others. → Read More