Tuesday, January 24, 2012

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Vimeo Gets Its First Facelift Since 2007 Top
Brozar Clip PagePopular video site Vimeo is now starting to roll out a big redesign of its website. If you're a casual user of the site like me, you might not notice some of the changes to the site, and indeed probably don't think of Vimeo as having a design that was particularly in need of updating. However, CEo Dae Mellencamp says the design actually hasn't been updated since 2007: "In Web years, that's a lifetime."
 
Verizon Posts A Net Loss Of $2.02B In Q4 2011 Top
verizon_logoEver since the AT&T/T-Mobile saga came to a grinding halt, you'd think that Verizon would be enjoying its reign in peace. But it would seem that the company has posted a net loss of $2.02 billion in the fourth quarter of 2011. At the same time a year earlier, Verizon was seeing a profit of $2.64 billion.
 
Full Circle: Boxee Brings OTA HDTV And Basic Cable To The Boxee Box Top
Boxee Live TV (1 of 1)Boxee just reinvented the box. The Boxee Box is no longer just a media streamer, thanks to the just-released Boxee Live TV. The little USB ATSC tuner integrates OTA HDTV and basic cable seamlessly into the Boxee Box's menu system, and I found it's as wonderful as it sounds. The little box is now the cord cutter's best friend (if it wasn't already).
 
ScholarPro Intelligently Matches Students With Educational Scholarships Top
ScholarPROChicago-based ScholarPro is launching today as an intelligent matching system for students and educational scholarships. Designed to ease the search and application process, ScholarPro's adaptive matching engine promises to deliver smarter, targeted lists of scholarships. It aims to fix the current dated process that require students to navigate complex application processes and then fail to deliver relevant results. On the site, you answer a few simple adaptive questions, such as where you are from, etc. and the platform will match you to scholarships that fit your needs. You can actually apply for the scholarships directly from ScholarPro.
 
CouchSurfing Gets More Cash As Point Nine Capital Becomes Its First European Investor Top
couchExclusive - Berlin-based early-stage venture capital firm Point Nine Capital has become the first European investor in CouchSurfing, a site that helps travelers connect with locals worldwide to share accommodation, experiences and whatnot. The investment is in fact an extension of the $7.6 million Series A round raised from Benchmark Capital and Omidyar Network in August 2011. Read more at TechCrunch Europe.
 
500 Startups Grad OneSchool Raises $750K For College Student-Focused App Top
512x512-(for-press)OneSchool, a free mobile app for college students which provides easy access to maps, course schedules, directories, bus routes, news, student groups and more, is announcing its official launch today in eight universities around the U.S. The company is also revealing it has raised $750,000 in seed funding from 500 Startups, Learn Capital and Magnolia Ventures.
 
Xobni Brings Contact Manager Smartr To The iPhone Top
jeffAs we reported last September, Xobni rebranded its email contact manager Smartr and launched Android and Gmail apps out of private beta. Today, Xobni is debuting the iPhone version of Smartr. The Smartr Cloud automatically extracts all contacts from your iPhone's email data (currently integrated with Outlook or Gmail), as well as data from social networks, and makes them easily searchable. A complete profile is created for each contact, including a photo, job title, phone numbers, company details, email history, common contacts and info from Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.
 
Online Job Marketplace Elance Raises $16M From Kleiner Perkins, NEA And The Stripes Group Top
elanceOnline job marketplace Elance has raised $16 million in new capital led by the Stripes Group with existing investors, New Enterprise Associates and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers participating. Elance is a service that allows for companies and individuals to hire and pay independent professionals and contractors online and in the cloud. Elance provides companies with the tools to hire, view work as it progresses and pay for results, replacing traditional outsourcing outlets.
 
Fitness Tracker Fitbit Raises $12M To Market New Wi-Fi Enabled Smart Scale, Aria Top
fitbitFitness technology startup and TechCrunch 50 finalist Fitbit has raised $12 Million in Series C funding from existing investors Foundry Group, True Ventures, SoftTech VC and Felicis Ventures. The company offers a device called the Fitbit Tracker and a companion web-based fitness data aggregation technology that tracks weight, nutrition, exercise, sleeping schedules and other health related data for users (you can read more about how Fitbit works here.)
 
The Nikkei: Sony Interested In Buying A 20%-30% Stake In Olympus Top
6_sony_logo_wMore news on the Sony-Olympus alliance that's supposed to be announced soon: Japan's biggest business daily The Nikkei is reporting today that big S is interested in purchasing a stake as large as "20%-30%" in its potential, scandal-hit partner (that would be up from the 0.03% Sony currently owns). The capital and business alliance would be mainly aimed at bringing together Sony's strength in imaging sensor technology with Olympus' expertise in endoscopes and other medical equipment.
 
Daily Crunch: All Pass Top
1529Here are some of yesterday’s posts from TechCrunch Gadgets: Kickstarter: eye3, An Affordable Aerial Photography Drone Federal Judge Rules You May Be Forced To Provide Decryption Password Sony Claims New RGBW Sensors Improve Exposure, Low-Light Performance New RIM CEO: "I Don't Think There Is A Drastic Change Needed" Hitachi And Mitsubishi Stop Domestic Production Of TVs, Optical Discs
 
Sonos Urges Users To Install A Security Update To Protect Their Private Data Top
sonosSonos this morning sent out an email to users advising them to immediately update their wireless music system software with a security "enhancement" in order to plug a hole that "in rare cases" could have been exploited by malicious people to gain access to sensitive, personal customer data. In the message, which was also posted on its forum, Sonos says it is not aware of any breaches so far:
 
Chart: Android Is Catching Up To iOS In Mobile Video Views Top
mobile video chart encodingA year ago in January, 2011, Apple dominated mobile video views, with iOS devices accounting for 87 percent of all mobile views, according to data from video encoding and short-url service Vid.ly. Android had a scant 5 percent. By December, 2011, Android's share of mobile video watching grew to 32 percent, while Apple's shrank to 52 percent.
 
Mark Zuckerberg Spray Paints Graffiti On Real Facebook Wall (Video) Top
Mark Zuckerberg added his touch to a graffiti wall at Facebook's new headquarters. In the video above, graffiti artist David Choe, who was commissioned to paint the wall, incorporates a stick figure painted by the Facebook founder into a mohawked trollish creature wearing a wife beater with a raised fist. It's quite a transformation. Zuckerberg needs to practice first, admitting: "I've actually never spray painted anything."
 
MusicShake Brings Its Music Creation Tool For Novices To The Classroom Top
musicshake-500x466At some point, you may have found yourself bored out of your mind by your current music selection, and resisting the urge to try one of the eleventy million music discovery services out there, you think, "By God, I'm going to do it myself." You rush home, download a music suite, start furiously clicking and recording, only to be sooner or later confronted by the reality that you have no idea what you're doing, and reprimand yourself for turning down those music lessons in fourth grade. The Korea-based, VC-funded MusicShake launched back at TechCrunch40 in 2007 to solve these woes, allowing users to create their own music in a fun an intuitive way.
 
tumblecloud Unveils A Collaborative Take On Slideshows Top
tumblecloud screenshotAn startup called tumblecloud is launching the public beta test today for its easy way to create high-quality slideshows. Founder and CEO Brian Andreas (an artist who also runs the boutique publishing house StoryPeople) describes the company's "clouds" as a new form digital storytelling, but they're probably easier to think of as multimedia slideshows. tumblecloud breaks the process down into three steps — grab, mix, and share. You can pull photos, music, and other media from your computer or from other online services; use a simple drag-and-drop interface to assemble everything into a presentation; then share it with other users.
 
PowerVoice Launches New Social Media Marketing Platform, Pays Users To Post Ads On Twitter, Facebook Top
PowerVoicePowerVoice, a new social media marketing company founded by former federal consultant at IBM Ryan Landau and ex-Googler (and brother) Andrew Landau, is launching today. The service compensates users for sharing brands' messages on social networks in a somewhat similar fashion to Adly. However, unlike Adly, it's not focused solely on enabling celebrities and other public figures to earn additional income through recommendations. Instead, on PowerVoice, anyone can sign up and get paid to promote brands' ads.
 
Home Furnishings And Design Site LuxeYard Adds Concierge Buying To Flash Sales Model Top
luxxLuxeYard, a luxury home furnishings and decor site, is launching its e-commerce platform today, but adding a twist to the flash sales model. Similar to sites line One Kings Lane and Gilt, LuxeYard offers up to 70 percent discounts on furniture, home decor and other accessories in daily sales. However, LuxeYard also offers what it calls 'concierge buying,' which allows members to request items they would like to purchase at a discounted price by posting photos to LuxeYard's Facebook page. The most popular product will be voted up by members, and the startup's experts will attempt to source either the exact product, or a similar product and offer this on sale to members
 
CEO Invests Another $500K In CrowdOptic's "New Social Medium" Top
CrowdOpticJon Fisher, co-founder and CEO of startup CrowdOptic, just told me that he has invested another $500,000 so the company can build out what it's calling a "new social medium." The idea is to create automatic clusters of people based on their location and line of sight. I met with the CrowdOptic team this weekend — they demonstrated the technology by whipping out their phones and taking photos of the same spot off San Francisco's Embarcadero. CrowdOptic can detect when people are all looking at the same thing, and it sends a notification asking whether they want to form a discussion group, where they can share photos and comments.
 
Federal Judge Rules You May Be Forced To Provide Decryption Password Top
safeIn July, we wrote about an ongoing case wherein a woman accused of fraud was being asked by the prosecution to provide the password to access her computer's data, which otherwise would remain encrypted and unreadable, weakening their case. They got permission to compel her to reveal the password, but the defense said that it was unconstitutional to do so, as providing that information was essentially self-incriminating testimony. The defense and the prosecution disagree, there is no single compelling precedent, and even the Supreme Court, which has weighed in on a similar topic, isn't quite sure what to make of the situation. So, doing what Judges are made to do, Judge Robert Blackburn made a decision: "the Fifth Amendment is not implicated by requiring production of the unencrypted contents of the Toshiba Satellite M305 laptop computer."
 

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