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• The Samsung Note Is Definitively Not Coming To AT&T As Far As You Know
• Bessemer Leads $6M Round In Q&A Platform For Students And Teachers, Piazza
• No Cable Killer After All: KIT digital Buys Assets Of Sezmi For $27 Million
• Samsung Posts Record Q4 Numbers, 35 Million Smartphones Sold
• Colbert Asks Steve Case About The 'Sharing Economy', Invents Toasterster
• Daily Crunch: Strive
• Andreessen Horowitz, Salesforce Put $1.4M In Real-Time Messaging Infrastructure Startup Flotype
• Animoto Learns To Play Friendly With Instagram, Now Pulls Photos In Directly
• Yammer, We Just Can't Quit You
• For The 5th Year In A Row, Apple Wins CES. Before It Starts. Without Showing Up.
• Millennial Media Files For IPO, Keeping Status As The Top Independent Mobile Ad Network
• You Can Now Post Full Size Instagram Pics To Facebook (And Timeline)
• LG Shows Off Its New Google TV Set Before CES
• BenchPrep Is Codecademy For Any Subject, High School To Med School
• Watch An iPad (And GoPro Camera) Survive A 100,000 Foot Drop
• Is The Internet A Human Right?
• Top10′s Nifty Spotify App Drives 100,000 Song Recommendations In Three Weeks
• Even Sprint's "Truly Unlimited" Plan Isn't Truly Unlimited
• After A Breakout 2011, Yammer Works On A Big New Funding Round
• Why Aren't Chromebooks Saving Password Changes?

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The Samsung Note Is Definitively Not Coming To AT&T As Far As You Know	Top
Remember the mini-slate Samsung released a few months ago? The Samsung Galaxy Note? Pretty cool little device. As we enter CES week, the press releases are flying fast and furious and this one caught my eye. It's for a small company that makes accessories for gadgets and I suppose (I can't find the original) it outlined Anymode's plans for Samsung Note accessories. The release also noted that the Samsung Note would hit AT&T this year. There were rumors of this, but Anymode essentially confirmed it. Until they didn't.
Bessemer Leads $6M Round In Q&A Platform For Students And Teachers, Piazza	Top
Piazza, a Q&A platform for students and instructors, has raised $6 million in Series A funding from Bessemer Venture Partners with Kapor Capital and Felicis Ventures also participating in the round. The company is also backed by Sequoia Capital and SV Angel. Piazza's platform helps classmates share their questions and answers in a format that's a mixture between a wiki and a forum. Each class gets its own hub for Q&A, and students can bookmark any questions if they're also eager to find out the answer. Multiple students can contribute to each answer in a wiki style but there's a version history that shows what each student wrote.
No Cable Killer After All: KIT digital Buys Assets Of Sezmi For $27 Million	Top
So much for Sezmi's ambitious plans to kill cable TV: the assets of the cloud-based TV delivery platform company were recently acquired by KIT digital for approximately $27 million in a mixture of stock and cash. Sezmi, founded in 2007 under the name Building B by the former CTO of Sony Music (and later CTO of Sony's US subsidiary) Phil Wiser and serial entrepreneur Buno Pati, reportedly raised over $70 million.
Samsung Posts Record Q4 Numbers, 35 Million Smartphones Sold	Top
Samsung has today posted record quarterly profits after selling 35 million smartphones in the fourth quarter, up from 27.9 million in the previous quarter. Operating profits have soared to 5.2 trillion won (US $4.47 billion), representing a 73 percent year-over-year increase.
Colbert Asks Steve Case About The 'Sharing Economy', Invents Toasterster	Top
Steve Case, the co-founder of AOL (which owns TechCrunch blah blah blah) and founder of Revolution, was on The Colbert Report yesterday to get interrupted by host Stephen Colbert after every other word he spoke while attempting to explain the 'sharing economy' to him and the audience. Fortunately for viewers, the interruptions were amusing, especially when Colbert lays out his vision for a new startup called Toasterster, which would enable New Yorkers to pick up and 'rent' toasters at a central location and return them there after using it for the couple of minutes they need it for.
Daily Crunch: Strive	Top
Here are some recent posts from TechCrunch Gadgets: Semiconductor Startup SuVolta Collects $17.6M In Second Funding Round Review: Nokia's Low-End Hail-Mary Pass, The Lumia 710 Marvell's ARM-Based Chipset Tapped For New Google TV Units Striiv Fitness Gadget Puts Personalized Challenges On The Menu The Logitech Cube Attempts To Redefine The Humble Mouse
Andreessen Horowitz, Salesforce Put $1.4M In Real-Time Messaging Infrastructure Startup Flotype	Top
Flotype, a startup that offers a suite of technologies that simplify real-time messaging for cloud and mobile applications, has raised $1.4 million in seed funding from Andreessen Horowitz, Ignition Partners, Yuri Milner, Salesforce, and Y Combinator. Flotype, which was part of Y Combinator's Winter 2011 class, is announcing that its first product is Bridge, a technology that enables real-time communication between any server, any device, on any platform. Bridge is essentially an API that developers can use to avoid the complexity of building real-time messaging into their applications, and help push more data faster between servers, web browsers, mobile phones and other devices.
Animoto Learns To Play Friendly With Instagram, Now Pulls Photos In Directly	Top
It's not a bad day for Instagram. First came the announcement that they were 2011 Crunchies Finalists. Shortly thereafter, they finally figured out how to push fullsize Instagrams to your Facebook Timeline. Capping off the day, automatic video slideshow service Animoto has launched full, built-in Instagram support.
Yammer, We Just Can't Quit You	Top
Do you have a product or service you don't really like, always complain about, yet can't really stop using? Everyone knows someone who owns a car that always breaks down, or dates a girl that they're not particularly into but for some reason they haven't made the move to cut ties. You just kind of wave the annoyances away like, "Yeah, [whatever it is] sucks," but you don't want to go through the trouble of getting a new one because the switching costs (i.e. the time it takes to adapt to a new product/service/girlfriend) are too high.
For The 5th Year In A Row, Apple Wins CES. Before It Starts. Without Showing Up.	Top
Are you ready for CES? I know I am. The PR emails are flowing in and I'm going to respond to every single one of them. I can't wait to hear about Samsung's social media stuff. And Vizio's new thingy. I can't wait to get my hands on that one thing made by those guys who did that other thing last year that no one bought. It's gonna be fantastic. So pumped. ... No, I'm not going to CES. I've never been to CES. I doubt I'll ever go to CES. Why would I?
Millennial Media Files For IPO, Keeping Status As The Top Independent Mobile Ad Network	Top
As the second-largest mobile ad network, and the top independent one, Millennial Media is the first to try to get an exit the old-fashioned way. It filed its S-1 documents today as the first step in going public, having nearly achieved profitability. According to the filing, its revenues grew to nearly $70 million in the first nine months of 2011, a 138% increase over the same period in 2010; net losses, meanwhile, declined from $5.4 million to $417,000.
You Can Now Post Full Size Instagram Pics To Facebook (And Timeline)	Top
You know what's cool? When you subconsciously want something and a startup responds to your (unvoiced) requests. Well, mobile photosharing app Instagram has just made a very small tweak that has the potential for huge growth: You can now send your Instagram photos full size to Facebook, and they automatically display "beautifully" in your Facebook Timeline. Photos shared from Instagram will appear in your Timeline with the original caption that you posted on Instagram, as well as a link to the public Instagram URL.
LG Shows Off Its New Google TV Set Before CES	Top
In keeping with our prediction that Google TV would be seeing something of an expansion this year at CES, LG's first foray into the Google TV ecosystem has just been unveiled ahead of the show. As you can see in the picture, it's got a new interface but the guts are still Google TV. This is probably something that we'll be seeing more of: manufacturer-specific builds, like Sense and TouchWiz for your TV.
BenchPrep Is Codecademy For Any Subject, High School To Med School	Top
Books are not the best way to learn. To retain knowledge you have to interact with it, and that's where BenchPrep comes in. The startup licenses textbooks from big publishers like McGraw Hill and converts them into interactive web and mobile learning courses. Today, BenchPrep announces its expansion beyond college admission test prep. It will now offer courses to assist with high school, university, law, medicine, professional certifications, army, and more. It's also releasing a new evaluation tool that determines a student's weaknesses in a given subject. BenchPrep is the future of the 'education anywhere' movement.
Watch An iPad (And GoPro Camera) Survive A 100,000 Foot Drop	Top
There were doubters last time. They said a 1300 foot drop wasn't all that much. It wasn't a true test. It fell onto grass, they said. Well, G-Form is back with another marketing ploy. This time they sent an iPad encased in G-Form's $45 Extreme Edge case to the cusp of space and back. The iPad of course survived. It's an impressive feat if it really happened. When the iPad eventually touches down, there's a bit a russling the weeds that sounds more like footsteps than a parachute crashing. Just saying.
Is The Internet A Human Right?	Top
No. At least, that is what Vint Cerf, of TCP/IP, IEEE, and Google fame, decides in a NY Times op-ed piece. But the idea is subtler than the flame-bait headline; the decidedly less flashy "technology is an enabler of rights, not a right itself" expresses it more accurately. It's a difficult topic to address, not just because it's naturally inflammatory, but because it is difficult to pin down what exactly is meant by "right," and what is meant by "internet." Without defining terms, any assertion is meaningless. But a little thought seems to exonerate both Cerf's position and that of the people who take exception to it.
Top10′s Nifty Spotify App Drives 100,000 Song Recommendations In Three Weeks	Top
On November 30 2011, Spotify made a bold move: it became an application platform, allowing third-party apps to live within the walls of Spotify's official application so that they could take advantage of the service's full-song streaming and tight Facebook integration. The revamped Spotify went live last month, and there are 13 third-party apps now available as part of the App Finder. One app is especially straightforward, and it's also surprisingly fun. It's called Top10, and you can find it right here.
Even Sprint's "Truly Unlimited" Plan Isn't Truly Unlimited	Top
Watch the video up above. Note the end: "Truly Unlimited Data for your iPhone. The only national carrier with no throttling, no metering, no overages" We already knew the wireless industry's definition of "Unlimited" had changed — hence Sprint's ad. Now even the definition of "truly" has changed.
After A Breakout 2011, Yammer Works On A Big New Funding Round	Top
Yammer, the Facebook/Twitter for companies, has been coming into its own, even as big competitors like Salesforce try to compete with rival enterprise social networking products. Having generated somewhere between $5 million and $10 million in revenues over 2010, Yammer more than doubled that in 2011, reaching towards $25 million according to sources close to the company. Now, it's working on a big new funding round, we're hearing -- in the $40 million range if not more.
Why Aren't Chromebooks Saving Password Changes?	Top
There's something weird going on with Chromebooks - the Google-branded laptop computers powered by the company's web-based operating system Chrome OS. They're not saving the password changes you make to your Google account. Basically, if you change your password, shut down your machine, then reboot, the Chromebook will ask you for your old password instead of the new one. The problem has to do with Google's sessions being persistent (that is, they don't log you out), and leads to a relatively minor security threat. Meaning, if someone was to take advantage of this threat, they would need physical access to your Chromebook. In the grand scheme of things, that puts this threat on the low-end of the risk spectrum. However, because Chromebooks are pitched as low-cost, secure, easy-to-use alternatives to traditional laptops for businesses and educational institutions, it's important to highlight issues such as this to make the community aware. Also, I just think it's annoying.

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