Wednesday, November 30, 2011

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Walmart Launches Shopycat, A Social Gift Finder Built On Top Of Facebook Top
ShopycatRetailing giant Walmart is launching its first-ever social gifting platform tonight, dubbed "Shopycat." The service, previously in beta, is initially available as a Facebook application where it will also be promoted to the nearly 11 million Facebook users who have "liked" Walmart's fan page. The app, which suggests gifts for friends based on their Facebook use, was built with technology Walmart acquired from social media startup Kosmix (now @WalmartLabs) earlier this year. And here's the interesting part: the new app won't just point you to pages on Walmart.com for its gift recommendations. It also recommends products from nearly two dozen other retailers, including Barnes & Noble, ThinkGeek, RedEnvelope, NBC Universal, Hot Topic and more. (Just not, of course, Amazon).
 
The First Ice Cream Sandwich Android Tablet Surfaces In China Top
ics tabRight now the only way to officially taste Ice Cream Sandwich on a device is on the Galaxy Nexus. Google stated that it would eventually hit tablets. Well, the wait is over. Somewhere in the bowels of China the first ICS tablet has appeared. It's a Xoom clone powered by slightly-dated hardware but it's running 4.0.1. That's all that counts. The story goes that the tab shown here (and in the video after the jump) is the first 4.0.1 tablet. As Shanzhaiben and GizChina notes, the 10.1-inch tablet is a bit of a Xoom knockoff but sports respectable internal components. 1GB of RAM and a Tegra 2 chip powers the device. There's 16GB of storage, dual cams, GPS, HDMI, a 7000mAh battery, and a 3G SIM card slot.
 
Source: Zynga Lowering IPO Valuation To $10 Billion Range, Due To Larger Economic Fears Top
zynga-party-shirtSocial game developer Zynga will start talking to potential public investors this Monday ahead of a mid-December IPO, according to reports earlier this week. The question is: how much will it be selling its stock for? That information has been expected to surface in an amended filing on Monday, but Reuters has some early details, that we've confirmed with a source close to the company. Zynga is seeking to raise around $900 million by selling 10% of its stock at a range between $8 and $10 per share, for a valuation of around $10 billion, according to the report. Speculation had previously been that it would go for between $15 billion and $20 billion, and a third-party valuation analysis that Zynga had provided in a recent filing amendment indicated it was worth $14.05 billion. Our source says Reuter's range is correct, and adds that the decrease is due to Zynga's concerns over larger economic issues, like any fallout out from Europe's financial crisis, and the poor reception that other tech IPOs have had recently. Deals site group Groupon went public at $17.8 billion, but has dropped to towards $10 billion recently (although it's climbing back up in the last couple days).
 
TechCrunch Giveaway: Last Chance To Win A Ticket To LeWeb'11 Top
lewebLeWeb'11 is right around the corner. For those who do not know what LeWeb is -- it is Europe's number one tech event. This year they already have some amazing speakers lined up. Some of those include ones we've even seen at our very own Disrupt events. Those speaking at LeWeb'11 include: Eric Schmidt, Sean Parker, Kevin Rose, Marissa Mayer, Brian Chesky, and Dave Morin just to name a few. You can view the full list of speakers here. Also, Karl Lagerfeld has just been added as a speaker. Many of you may know him as the head designer and creative director for Chanel. Très fantaisie, vous ne pensez pas? They have a number of other surprises in store for those attending as well. I can promise you that it is going to be a great event. Already over 3,000 participants from 60 different countries have registered and that number is continuing to grow, but not for long. I was just informed that tickets are almost sold out. Lucky for all of you, we have one of the last tickets to give away and we're giving it away for free.
 
More Than One Million Listings A Week Are Now Made Through eBay Mobile Top
ebayIt's no secret that eBay is pushing mobile in a big way. Especially during this holiday shopping season, the e-commerce giant is seeing record mobile engagement. And today, eBay is announcing that more than 1 million listings are now made every week through eBay mobile. That means that now more than ever, eBay's marketplace sellers are uploading items they want to sell via mobile devices. Last year, eBay consolidated its buying and selling iPhone apps, allowing seller to quickly take photos of items and post them on eBay from the same app that buyers browser items on.
 
Examination Of Privacy Policies Shows A Few Troubling Trends Top
trustheadA superficial comparison of privacy policies around the web by privacy service company TRUSTe has produced a few interesting statistics. Of course the most interesting bits are usually buried deep in the agreements and authorize things like the use of your child's likeness for doll faces. Nothing sinister like that was discovered, but the standout stats should cause a bit of head-shaking.
 
Academia.edu Raises $4.5 Million To Help Researchers Share Their Scholarly Papers Top
academiashot1Academia.edu, a social network for researchers, is having a good year. In 2011 it's tripled its total registered userbase to 800,000, and today it's announcing some major news that ensures the site will be expanding well into the future: it's just raised $4.5 million in a funding round led by Spark Capital, with participation from True Ventures. This is the company's second round of funding, after a $2.2 million round in late 2009 (the investors from that round participated in this one as well). Academia.edu can be thought of as a social network for academics, in that it allows them to forge connections and follow updates around their field, but it has another benefit: it gives them a powerful, efficient way to distribute their research. Unlike, say, a personal website, which probably won't have much in the way of analytics or search engine optimization, Academia.edu will let researchers keep tabs on how many people are reading their articles with specialized analytics tools, and it also does very well in Google search results. Academics are uploading 2,500 articles to the site each day, and, as a result, the site is now drawing some 3 million unique visitors, many of whom are arriving at the site's articles via Google.
 
Classic Gaming Mag And Site GamePro Buys The Farm Top
MarioGameOverGamers of the 8- and 16-bit generation will fondly remember GamePro, one of the leading publications covering and reviewing the growing games market during the console salad days of the 90s. But like so many publications before it, and surely many to come, the modern age was too much for it. Even after shifting to quarterly publication and focusing on an online presence, the venerable magazine is finally being shelved for good.
 
YouTube Analytics Slakes Your Thirst For Your Channel's Viewing Stats Top
analytics-infographic-r3-1500pxYouTube has upgraded its viewer demographics and video tracking tools and changed the name from Insight to Analytics. The changes should be rolling out to "everyone with a modern browser" today, though you can still access Insight if you want to do a little comparison of capabilities. The changes are non-destructive; some existing features have been tweaked and expanded, and there are a few new tools that could help the struggling YouTube-jockey pull in more views and better understand their viewers.
 
Facebook Ups Character Limit to 60,000, Google+'s Is Still Bigger Top
Facebook 60,000 Character Status Updates Done 2There's a pissing contest going on. Google+ launched saying it has no character limit, though my tests show it stops publishing at 100,000. Surely unrelated, Facebook upped its limit from 500 to 5,000 in September, and today announced its limit is now over 60,000. That's 1/9th the length of a novel. This gives users the flexibility to write full-fledged blog posts or even longer content. However, I suspect that Facebook was also trying to neutralize one more selling point of its competitor. Wanna guess how it chose the exact limit of 63,206? Facebook engineer Bob Baldwin wrote, "I set the exact limit to something nerdy. Facebook ... Face Boo K ... hex(FACE) - K ... 64206 - 1000 = 63206 :-)".
 
Android Smartphone Round-Up: November Edition Top
leadFalling Leaves. Black Friday. And Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. These are the cornerstones of the month of November. Releasing new phones, however, is not. Unfortunately, this means that our Android Smartphone Round-Up for November is a bit lean, but we've still managed to pick out a few handsets worth your valuable consideration. Without further ado, these are our favorite November releases of the Gingerbread (2.3) persuasion: The Samsung Galaxy S II Skyrocket (AT&T), the HTC Rezound (Verizon), and the Samsung Captivate Glide (AT&T). They range between a solid $300 to a cool $149 (all with a two-year agreement, of course), and each has its claim to fame. Onward!
 
Nexus One Gets A Taste Of Ice Cream Sandwich Thanks To CM9 Top
n1icsGoogle may have run out of love for the Nexus One as far as Ice Cream Sandwich is concerned, but that doesn't mean the legions of loyal Android developers have. An intrepid dev named TexasIce on the XDA forums has managed to get an early build of CyanogenMod 9 up and running on Google's first Nexus device, and it looks mighty impressive for a work-in-progress.
 
Another Study Shows Data Caps Are Likely Ineffective, Address Wrong Problem Top
routers02Data caps on your broadband, while in principle sound troublesome, are at least understandable. Bandwidth is a limited resource and we all have to share it, and presumably if we all were maxing our connections out all the time, we'd tax the system beyond its capacity. But who uses the most bandwidth and when is a more practical thing to investigate, as knowing that could prevent congestion at peak hours and so on. Some studies and theories have suggested that so-called bandwidth or data hogs, in other words people who use the entirety of the product they paid for, aren't really a great source of congestion, and the data caps intended to prevent such users from maxing out all the time aren't an effective countermeasure. This study says as much, and has some interesting stats as well.
 
Familiar Turns Your Screensaver Into A Social Picture Frame Top
Screen Shot 2011-11-30 at 1.35.29 PMFamiliar, the artist formerly known as Picadee, launches in beta today. Familiar has an incredibly simple yet compelling value proposition, namely that billions of screens worth of untapped real estate are worth taking advantage of ... Familiar is basically a socially programmed screensaver (yes, screensaver) which allows you to share and display photos with contacts you select through Facebook and via email. In the beta version, all photos you upload to Familiar will turn into a collective screensaver for the people you've connected with, combining with photos that other users have shared in Familiar's 'The Shuffle' function.
 
Amazon's New App Allows Kids To Create Gift Wish Lists For Santa Claus On The iPad And Kindle Fire Top
Amazon Santa 2Amazon is debuting another holiday shopping app, but this offering is geared towards kids. Amazon Santa is a free app for Kindle Fire and the iPad that allows children and their parents to create holiday Wish Lists to share with friends, family and of course, Santa Claus. Basically, Amazon Santa brings the e-commerce giant's wish list functionality in a kid-friendly app. Kids can browse and search more than 500,000 toys, games, books, clothes and other kids items. Kids can then make holiday wish lists that can be shared with loved ones. Of course, kids under a certain age will need to a little help from parents in creating wish lists.
 
Burstly Raises $5.5M For In-App Ad Management; Launches Mobile Offer Mediation For iOS & Android Top
burstly_logo-color_high-resApp developers don't exactly have a plethora of monetization options, which is why, alongside in-app purchases, they're becoming increasingly reliant on mobile advertising. For this reason, they want to get the most out of their ads, and, really, they want to sell directly to customers. Unfortunately, for most small teams, this just isn't in the cards. Which is where startups like Burstly enter the picture. While there are plenty of mobile ad mediation solutions to choose from, Burstly CEO Evan Rifkin thinks that the current batch isn't doing enough to empower developers to take complete control over monetization opportunities. For example, the startup offers a storefront for developers that enables them to establish their own branded portal where advertisers can directly purchase placements in their apps.
 
TechCrunch Gadgets Webcast: The Standing Desk Top
This week we bring you the Fujifilm X10, the Galaxy Tab 8.9, and my new standing desk. The standing desk, incidentally, is my second desk, which puts me firmly in the 1% camp when it comes to home workstations.
 
Network Optix Raises $750K For Their Enterprise Video Platform Top
Untitled-6One of the companies at Disrupt SF 2011 that escaped the horror of presenting on stage was Network Optix, whose impressive video handling technology was a little too practical for presentation. They've been busy the last few months in improving their product and forging business relationships, and have just announced that they've raised $750K with which to continue development. Their product is what they call Enterprise Video as a Service, and is designed around the idea of handling all the complex transcoding and bandwidth issues associated with viewing and manipulating video on different platforms. Sound complicated? It is. But it's also pretty cool.
 
Welcome To The Future: Every Instrument In This Song Is From An iPad App Top
SingsongI'd be lying if I said I hadn't tried my hand at making music with various iPad apps. I'd also be lying if I said any of that music sounded even halfway decent. Imagine someone getting into a fist-fight with a duck. Add some reverb and a terrible bass track. It generally sounds like that. That's clearly a limitation of my own musical abilities, though, as dudes like the one in this video are managing to make entire songs with nothin' but the iPad, a handful of apps, and their own golden pipes.
 
Asana Adds Calendar Syncing To Its Task Lists: Another Simple, Subtle Iteration For Better Productivity Top
Screen Shot 2011-11-30 at 11.13.20 AMAsana wants its task-list tool to feel so simple that you only encounter complexity when it's useful. In other words, the opposite of how most enterprise software feels. And it has just added a little new piece of complexity in the form of a feature that lets you sync tasks to calendars. The result is users having to make smarter decisions about which tasks matter most, which should end up helping their productivity. The feature looks obvious enough. A drop-down in the project menu lets you syndicate any task with a due date to apps like Apple iCal, Microsoft Outlook or Google Calendar. Select the sync option, and you can either click to add to Gcal, or click the URL to add to iCal, Outlook or other services. You can then use your calendar app to fine-tune things like how often you sync. But there's more going on. The core interface lets you create projects for different sets of task lists, and within that, creating any task is as simple as hitting return on a project page then writing a few words. The date-creation option is purposefully buried in a window to the right of the list, that you need to click on to open. This means that if you create a calendar date for the task, it'll be because date is going to be pretty important for whatever the task is. The importance of the date implies that you're going to want to track it carefully.
 

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