The latest from TechCrunch
- TechStars Launches Accelerato.rs, A Common App For Startups And A Results Tracker For Accelerators
- IFTTT Triggers Loyal, Nerdy Following
- When Ranking Facebook Adoption As Percentage Of Population, Cyprus Is #1
- Ambient Field Conditioner Will Condition Your Ambient Field
- GoodReads' Recommendation Engine Acquisition Gooses The Publishing Game
- Genius: New App Wakes You Up Earlier If It Snowed Last Night
- Gillmor Gang Live 12.28.11 (TCTV)
- comScore: U.S. Online Holiday Spending Up 15% To Record $35.3 Billion
- LG Prada 3.0 Makes Official Debut In Korea, Europe To Follow
- iPhone App Downloads In November Up 83% Over Last Year
- Trademark Watch: What Is "Yahoo Axis"?
- WeedMaps Buys Medical Marijuana Inventory And Patient Management Software MMJMenu
- Call Genie Acquires Mobile Advertising, Analytics Startup VoodooVox
- Japan Gets Wi-Fi Dispensing Vending Machines
- DIY Health Reform: Employers Solving Healthcare Crisis One Onsite Clinic At A Time
- 'Big Data' Giant Mu Sigma Raises $108 Million From General Atlantic, Sequoia
- Will UK Prime Minister Get An iPad App For Work? Unlikely. Here's Why.
- 3DS Sees Record Sales In Japan, Fueled By Mario Kart 7 And Super Mario 3D Land
- Daily Crunch: Parapet
- Andy Rubin: Android Had A Jolly Good Christmas With 3.7M Activations
| TechStars Launches Accelerato.rs, A Common App For Startups And A Results Tracker For Accelerators | Top |
 For a young startup, sometimes you want any funding you can get. For an incubator program, sometimes any startup is what you're looking for. Finding each other won't necessarily make either one successful, but more pairings might help overall. Or so believes TechStars, which is launching what it intends to be the Common Application of the startup world. Called Accelerato.rs, the application is a standard online form that asks founders basic investor-type questions, and lets them write one version then send it to any of the dozen or so participating programs. Funded by the entrepreneurship-focused Kauffman Foundation and under development since earlier this year, Accelerato.rs also lets startups track their acceptance status for each of the programs that they apply to. "One of the big things that a lot of the accelerators are looking for are more applications," TechStars cofounder David Cohen tells me. " Y Combinator, Seedcamp, TechStars and some of the other big accelerators are getting thousands of applications but only accepting a few percentage points." | |
| IFTTT Triggers Loyal, Nerdy Following | Top |
 One of my favorite services to pop in the second half of 2011 is "If This, Then That," or if you're really dorky, IFTTT. Among a small group of faithful nerds on Twitter, IFTTT is a simple yet powerful service that generates warm, fuzzy feelings among those who are hooked. Based in San Francisco, the company has received funding from Betaworks and is closing out 2011 with momentum. Briefly, IFTTT is a service that allows users to set a number of alerts, or "tasks," that will "trigger" a preset function based on what you set. For example, you can set IFTTT to send you an email every time a specific user on Twitter sends a tweet or have a copy of every Instagram photo you snap to be automatically sent to your Dropbox, which I wish I would've set before the last iOS5 update wiped clean two months of my pictures. The different permutations of "triggers" you can set are sort of endless. To help you wade through them, you can browse different IFTTT "recipes" and browse this thread on Quora. | |
| When Ranking Facebook Adoption As Percentage Of Population, Cyprus Is #1 | Top |
 Which countries really, really love Facebook? If you guessed the U.S., you would be somewhat right - this country ranks #7 on Pingdom's new list of countries comparing the percentage of Facebook users to the percentage of the current population. When looking at numbers this way, however, it's Cyprus in the #1 position. Hong Kong, Chile, Singapore and Norway round out the top five. | |
| Ambient Field Conditioner Will Condition Your Ambient Field | Top |
 If you didn't get everything you wanted this holiday and still have a few thousand left over, why not blow it on a box that you put next to your stereo that literally does nothing for the circuitry inside? This box by Less Loss is a "shield" that keeps "noise" out of your stereo. It costs (I'm not making this up) $1,323. The box, when paired with $700 RCA cables, promises to reduce noise in your stereo equipment and, as one reviewer noted, it will cause your body to spasm wildly. | |
| GoodReads' Recommendation Engine Acquisition Gooses The Publishing Game | Top |
 While bookstores are reporting increased sales this month, I foresee a time when "Staff Picks" at the local booke shoppe will soon be replaced by recommendation engines that tell you what ebook to pick up next. Services like Amazon's own recommendation engine and smaller guys like Booklamp all promise to let you know what tome to crack after you finish the Stephen King epic but GoodReads adds a bit of value-add to the burgeoning self-publishing movement. | |
| Genius: New App Wakes You Up Earlier If It Snowed Last Night | Top |
 This is smart: a new alarm clock application for the iPhone and Android wakes you earlier if it snowed last night. Called simply, "Winter Wake-Up," the app lets you configure its settings to wake you up earlier than your scheduled alarm depending on weather conditions, with separate settings for both "Frost" and "Snow." | |
| Gillmor Gang Live 12.28.11 (TCTV) | Top |
 The Gillmor Gang – Paul Greenberg, John Taschek, and Steve Gillmor – are recording live at 8am PT. Recording has concluded. | |
| comScore: U.S. Online Holiday Spending Up 15% To Record $35.3 Billion | Top |
 comScore just released new numbers on U.S. online holiday spending for the season-to-date, and found that consumers continued to shop online in record numbers. For the first 56 days of the November-December 2011 holiday season, $35.3 billion was spent online - an increase of 15% over the corresponding days last year, and a new record. | |
| LG Prada 3.0 Makes Official Debut In Korea, Europe To Follow | Top |
 Tech-savvy fashionistas finally have a reason to rejoice with the official release of LG's Prada 3.0 handset. Namely, it's the first time a in a long while that the company's fashion phones aren't completely outclassed by the competition. When I say outclassed, I'm referring strictly to performance. With it's 4.3-inch WVGA NOVA display, 1 GHz dual-core processor, and 8-megapixel camera, the Prada 3.0 is a solid little package, but one that's a bit lacking considering its premium price tag. | |
| iPhone App Downloads In November Up 83% Over Last Year | Top |
 Marketing technology company Fiksu tracked the impact of the iPhone 4S on iPhone app downloads and found that download volume of the top 200 free apps increased 15% from October's previous record high of 4.91 million daily downloads. In November, the firm's "App Store Competitive Index," which measures this trend, peaked at 5.65 million downloads per day - the first time it has topped the 5 million mark. That's an increase of 83% over November of last year. | |
| Trademark Watch: What Is "Yahoo Axis"? | Top |
 Last Friday, troubled Internet giant Yahoo filed a new trademark application with the USPTO. I can't find any record of an existing Yahoo product or service by the name, so I figured I should just throw it out here for all of you to speculate what the company has up its sleeves. The name, before I forget to mention it, is Yahoo Axis. That will make you none the wiser, but perhaps the classes and descriptions might. | |
| WeedMaps Buys Medical Marijuana Inventory And Patient Management Software MMJMenu | Top |
 In the small but budding legal medical marijuana industry, WeedMaps has the munchies for acquisitions (sorry, I couldn't resist). Fresh off its $4.2 million Marijuana.com bong hit in November, WeedMaps' parent company, Canada's General Cannabis, announced today its acquisition MMJMenu. MMJMenu provides back-end enterprise software for medical marijuana dispensaries. The software handles everything from patient management to inventory control to checkout at point of sale. Medical marijuana dispensaries re highly regulated. | |
| Call Genie Acquires Mobile Advertising, Analytics Startup VoodooVox | Top |
 In what looks like a firesale, Call Genie has acquired US-based mobile analytics and advertising network company VoodooVox, which has raised a ton of venture capital from investors like Apax Partners, Softbank Capital, Steamboat Ventures (Disney), Berkshire Capital Investors and Village Ventures. VoodooVox provides demographic information on phone calls and mobile ad traffic in real-time, enabling companies to gain insights into their call volume and mobile application activity. | |
| Japan Gets Wi-Fi Dispensing Vending Machines | Top |
 It's no secret that Japan is the country of vending machines (they even have models like this one now), but this is new: Tokyo-based beverage company Asahi Soft Drinks took the wraps off a vending machine [JP] that not only offers drinks but also sends out Wi-Fi signals within a 50m radius. The Wi-Fi will be available for free, is accessible with multiple devices, without registration, and for anyone to use (meaning users won't have to buy any drinks to go online through the machine). It's possible to use the web for about 30 minutes before the machine cuts you off (re-connecting is possible, however). | |
| DIY Health Reform: Employers Solving Healthcare Crisis One Onsite Clinic At A Time | Top |
 In several of my past pieces, I have written about the importance of a disruptive model of care and payment called Direct Primary Care (DPC) such as The Most Important Organization In Silicon Valley That No One Has Heard About. As the DPC models scale, they become a great option for individuals and small business. However, larger organizations have another option at their disposal that I'm as excited about as the DPC models. Employers fed up with the annual "get less for more" health story when they get annual health plan updates have taken matters into their own hands. This has created one of the hottest sectors of the economy -- onsite clinic providers. These are companies providing corporations with primary care onsite at employer workplaces. Each of the onsite clinic provider CEOs (e.g., Concentra, CareHere) I have spoken with have shared that their business is growing 100% annually. Reportedly 20% of employers with over 500 employees are implementing onsite clinic programs. | |
| 'Big Data' Giant Mu Sigma Raises $108 Million From General Atlantic, Sequoia | Top |
 Mu Sigma, a provider of analytics and data-driven decision support services for enterprise customers, has raised $108 million in funding in a round led by growth equity firm General Atlantic. The financing comes about half a year after Mu Sigma raised $25 million from Sequoia Capital, which also participated in this round. | |
| Will UK Prime Minister Get An iPad App For Work? Unlikely. Here's Why. | Top |
 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. | |
| 3DS Sees Record Sales In Japan, Fueled By Mario Kart 7 And Super Mario 3D Land | Top |
 Nintendo is really lucky to own the Super Mario brand: after the bumpy, Mario-less launch of the 3DS in Japan back in February, big N is seeing record sales for its portable console. As predicted, sales in Japan for the 3DS crossed the four million unit mark before the end of the year, namely sometime between December 19 and 25. That's the week Nintendo sold 510,629 units 3DS systems, according to Japan's biggest video game magazine Famitsu [JP]. In total, the company has shifted 4,135,739 units in the country since the launch on February 26. Nintendo president Satoru Iwata earlier predicted the 3DS will find 4 million Japanese buyers sometimes in February next year. | |
| Daily Crunch: Parapet | Top |
 Here are some recent stories on TechCrunch Gadgets: Giving Windows Phone A Chance Fire Emblem: Nintendo Announces First 3DS Game With Paid Download Content Airtight Is Airplay For Your Google TV Li Ka-shing Invests In HzO, Which Protects Your Gadgets From Water Damage 5 Japanese Tech Companies (And Samsung) Set Up LTE Mobile Chip Venture | |
| Andy Rubin: Android Had A Jolly Good Christmas With 3.7M Activations | Top |
 Google SVP Andy Rubin took to Twitter again today, not to delete one of his tweets but to publish a brand new one, saying Android saw 3.7 million activations in two days (Christmas day and the day before). He also posted it on his Google+ account, just in case you were wondering. | |
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