Monday, January 23, 2012

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Thanks To Santa, Tablets And E-Readers Are (Almost) Everywhere Top
pew tablet ereaderOwnership of tablets and e-book readers saw a big spike over the holidays — in fact, it nearly doubled in the United States, according to a new study from the Pew Research Center's Internet and American Life Project. The study was based on telephone surveys conducted in mid-December and January, which found that ownership of both device types nearly doubled in just a month. Now a total of 29 percent of US adults own a tablet or an e-reader, or possibly both.
 
#BlackoutSOPA: How 87,000 People Taught Us About The Future of Online Activism Top
Screen Shot 2012-01-23 at 11.21.15 AMAt 1pm on Monday January 9th, Greg Hochmuth and I launched #BlackoutSOPA, a site that lets you alter your Twitter profile pic to display SOPA opposition. 15 minutes later the site went down due to more traffic than we expected. That demand was just the beginning. Over the next 10 days, tens of thousands of people used the tool to reach tens of millions of their followers. Since then, #BlackoutSOPA has received coverage in the Wall St Journal, TechCrunch, the New York Times and several other prominent sources. And the community members ranged from Ashton Kutcher to Occupy Wall Street. There was no 1% or 99% - just 100%. #BlackoutSOPA started because Greg and I wanted to see how we could find other people who cared about stopping the flawed "anti-piracy" bill, but it ended up teaching us about the future of online activism. Here's some of what we learned, plus a few thoughts on what SOPA was trying to do, and why were we fighting it.
 
News Aggregator Wavii Wants To "Make Facebook Out Of Google," Bring Relevant Content To You Top
Screen Shot 2012-01-23 at 10.12.00 AMThe problem of how to find relevant content on the web has yet to be solved on a mass scale. You've got cyborg news aggregators like Techmeme and Google news and social aggregators like Reddit and Digg competing with Twitter and the Facebook Newsfeed, all of them trying to get you the news that you want to know, as fast as possible. The Seattle-based Wavii, which has been in super stealth mode until now, takes a different approach to the problem. The startup uses natural language processing and machine learning to parse far corners of the web and bring users personalized content based on their Facebook Likes and feedback. Upon entering Wavii via Facebook Connect, you are asked to pick a combination of 12 topics that pertain to you and rinse, repeat. Wavii picks these initial interests by processing your Facebook Likes, and adjusts itself as you give it more data.
 
Supreme Court Rules Search Warrants Needed For GPS Tracking Top
supreme_courtThe U.S. Supreme Court has unanimously decided today to uphold citizens' Fourth Amendement rights in the GPS tracking case which would have allowed the U.S. government to track a suspects' cars without a warrant. The court states that the Fourth Amendement's protection of "persons, houses, papers and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures," extends to vehicles.
 
Evi Arrives In Town To Go Toe-to-Toe With Siri Top
Screen Shot 2012-01-23 at 17.43.57When Siri arrived on the iPhone 4S I thought to myself, who else could do this? It would need to be a search engine with natural language processing, but also behave in the manner of artificial intelligence and respond to voice recognition. One company that sprung to mind was True Knowledge. I pinged them. Are you working on a Siri type application, I asked? Interesting question, was their response. And then they went quiet. Now they can reveal what they've been building. Evi is a new iPhone (iTunes link) and Android app in Beta (link) which might just give Apple's Siri a run for her money.
 
1-Month Old BuzzDoes Scores $750K For Mobile App Marketing Platform Top
buzzdoes10LastSmallBuzzDoes, a newly launched word-of-mouth marketing tool for mobile app developers, has secured $750,000 in seed funding from angel investors and Proxima Ventures. The tool, which operates as a drop-in SDK (software development kit), allows developers to add a viral recommendation feature to their application using a single line of code. Once installed, app users are "incentivized" (meaning rewarded), for recommending the app in question to their friends.
 
Nimble Goes After Salesforce, Wants To Be The "Pandora Of Contacts" Top
Jon-Ferrara_largeJon Ferrara thinks Salesforce is doing it wrong when it comes to social. The founder of Goldmine, a CRM company he sold for $100 million nearly a decade ago, is attacking the market a different way with his latest startup, Nimble. "We are effectively Salesforce but social," he says, taking a jab at what is now the 800-pound gorilla. Salesforce would counter that it has Chatter and Radian6, but punching up is always a good way to get noticed (just ask Marc Benioff, who became a billionaire tussling with Microsoft and Oracle). Ferrara just hired away the product director who made Chatter Mobile, Jason McDowall, who will now head up the team building Nimble's mobile apps.
 
Asus Transformer Prime Users Still Reporting Major GPS Issue After Official Fix Top
primeRight on cue, Asus started rolling out Ice Cream Sandwich to Transformer Prime tablets last week. The update not only brought Android 4.0 to the tablet, but also a fix for the lackluster GPS performance. But apparently the GPS is borked for some. Users are still experiencing poor performance and worse yet, some are even stating that the GPS no longer works in ICS when it did prior to the update.
 
Polar Mobile Raises $6 Million For HTML5-Based Publishing Platform, MediaEverywhere Top
polar-mobilePolar Mobile, a digital media platform provider that builds apps for some of the biggest media companies, today announced it has secured an additional $6 million in funding. The new round, led by growth equity firm Georgian Partners, joins more than $3 million invested in the company previously from private investors, bringing its total funding to $9 million. The company is also announcing its plans for a new product line called MediaEverywhere, an HTML5-based content distribution solution for smartphones, tablets and desktops.
 
Cloud Computing Software Company Joyent Raises $85 Million To Pursue Global Growth Top
joyentCloud computing software and service provider Joyent has secured an $85 million round of new funding, the company is announcing today. The round was led by European group Weather Investment II. It also included Telefónica Digital, the growth arm of global telecom giant Telefónica, which participated as a strategic investor.
 
DLD 2012 – Drew Houston: "Yes, Steve Jobs Called Dropbox A Feature" Top
dropboxIn a conversation with WIRED UK's David Rowan on stage at the DLD Conference in Germany, Dropbox CEO Drew Houston acknowledged that he did in fact have a "great meeting" with the late Steve Jobs in 2009. Houston said about the get-together that Jobs had heard of them and asked to meet with him. Even though he was generally gracious, Houston said, Jobs expressed that he felt Dropbox was more of a feature than a product or business and gave him a "bit of a hard time" about that.
 
LG's Quad-Core 2012 Flagship Leaks: The Poorly Code-Named X3 Top
LGX3Other than the LG Spectrum, LG didn't have much to show off by way of phones at this year's CES show. But that doesn't mean that something special isn't in the works. In fact, Pocketnow reports that LG's 2012 flagship will run a Tegra 3 quad-core chipset and go by the name X3, at least for now. The phone likely won't show up on store shelves until spring or summer, but we should hear an announcement (including a retail name) come Mobile World Congress in February.
 
SoundCloud Hits 10 Million Users, Releases New Sounds+Slides Feature Top
20462v2-max-250x250SoundCloud still isn't conforming our story that they recently raised a $50 million round led by Kleiner Perkins - but today at the DLD conference in Munich they have announced a pretty significant milestone - hitting 10 million users. SoundCloud is gunning to be a kind of YouTube for sound, but with a wide variety of apps that can plug into its platform, and a business model which encourages upgrades to a premium paid experience. It competes with the like of Audioboo to some extent, but that is on a much lower 300,000 users and focuses on speech.
 
YouTube Reaches 4 Billion Views Per Day Top
youtube-viewsGoogle's video-sharing property YouTube now sees 4 billion video views per day. That's a 25% increase over the past eight months, the company told Reuters in a report released this morning. There's now approximately 60 hours of video uploaded to the site every minute, compared with roughly 48 hours uploaded in May.
 
DLD 2012 – Brian Chesky: "Average Airbnb Host In NYC Pockets $21,000 A Year" Top
airbnb nycBrian Chesky, co-founder and CEO of Airbnb, took the stage this afternoon at the DLD Conference in Germany for a keynote covering his views about the 'sharing economy'. In terms of news, there isn't much to report based on his talk, but Chesky talked about the fact that sharing used to be an integral part of human life and 'hardwired' into our DNA, that it disappeared after the second World War because of increased consumer spending and individualism, and that we're now at the beginning of the return to sharing. Access, Chesky purports, will eventually become more powerful than ownership again.
 
New RIM CEO: "I Don't Think There Is A Drastic Change Needed" Top
ThorstenHeinsRIM's new CEO Thorsten Heins has only been at the reigns for an evening, but he did a very "BlackBerry" job of presenting himself to the media this morning on his introductory media call. It felt a lot like the media calls of yore, with Balsillie and Lazaridis at the helm. Especially when Heins referred to Apple as "the other fruit company," noting the two companies shared strategy of vertical integration. Unfortunately, vertical integration of software and hardware is about all that these two fruits have in common. Remember folks, Heins is coming off of a four-year stint at RIM. At the relatively young company, Heins worked under founder Mike Lazaridis and his partner in crime Jim Balsillie. That said, you can basically hear Lazaridis-style hubris in Heins' comments. When asked if there was anything Heins wanted to do in the past, but was held back from by his position, Heins confirms that he (along with the freshly removed prior leadership) doesn't see much wrong with RIM.
 
Intel Acquires Fabric Technology InfiniBand From Qlogic For $125M Top
InfiniBand SwitchesIntel is announcing an acquisition today—the company has acquired the InfiniBand business from networking and hosting company Qlogic. Intel says a significant number of the employees associated with this business are expected to accept offers to join the company. The acquisition amount was $125 million in cash. InfiniBand is a fabric technology that provides the communications links for data flow between processors and I/O devices. The scalable technology is used to connect servers in high-performance computing (HPC) environments.
 
Baseline, Accel Put $15M In Online Privacy Certification Company TRUSTe Top
trustOnline privacy certification company TRUSTe has raised $15 million in Series C funding led by Baseline Ventures with existing investors Accel Partners, DAG Ventures and Jafco Ventures participating. This brings TRUSTe's total funding to $37 million. TRUSTe certifies that companies are meeting online privacy standards for consumers. Websites which are certified by the company bear a "trustmark," indicating that the site is secure. TRUSTe says more than 82 percent of consumers who recognize TRUSTe's privacy seal use it to decide how and when to disclose personal information. TRUSTe was actually a not-for-profit venture until 2008 when the company changed its business model.
 
Fantasy Shopper Confirms Its Hottness With $3.3m First Money From Accel And NEA Top
logo (1)Fantasy Shopper is a social shopping game where players discover and share the latest fashion from real-world online and offline retailers. It's gained a lot of traction since it's launch last October, especially amongst women and we've heard on the grapevine that it was piquing the interest of investors for some months since emerging from the European Seed accelerator HackFWD. Today that intense interest has been confirmed with a first round of funding led by top tier venture firms Accel Partners and NEA (one of the key investors in Groupon) to enable it to build out engineering and expand into new cities other than London. With NEA co-leading the investment, clearly there is a big opportunity to scale in US cities and elsewhere. The investment is based on a convertible note not equity, which is standard practise when investors want in fast and the round is hotly contested.
 
Mykonos Helps Companies Battle Hackers, Raises $4 Million Top
mykonosMykonos (the security software company, not the lovely Greek island) has secured $4 million in a Series A funding round led by previous backer Tom Golisano, founder and chairman of Paychex.
 

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