Tuesday, January 17, 2012

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RIM To Release 7-Inch And 10-Inch PlayBooks This Year? Top
Screen shot 2012-01-17 at 9.05.57 AMAt the beginning of 2011, RIM was doing fine. The company still started the year with a relatively high market share in the smartphone arena, even though Android and iOS were growing rapidly. Then the PlayBook struck. I say it like that because the original PlayBook will be remembered as a calamity to the company, a horrible mistake. It was a rushed premium product missing all of RIM's specialty, high-end services. What did they expect? But it's a new year, with new opportunities for the company to redeem itself (possibly the final opportunities), which is likely why we're hearing rumors of two new PlayBooks this year.
 
Bessemer Leads $21M Round In Cloud-Based Email Delivery And Management Service SendGrid Top
sendSendGrid, an email delivery and management service, has raised $21 million in Series B funding led by Bessemer Venture Partners. Existing investors Foundry Group, Highway 12 Ventures, SoftTechVC, 500 Startups and Bullet Time Ventures also participated in the round. This brings the company's total funding to $26 million. SendGrid, which was incubated in TechStars and has raised $5 million in funding, offers businesses a way to manage transactional emails (emails generated by web applications). SendGrid's cloud-based SMTP platform provides a secure and scalable infrastructure that solves core transactional email deliverability issues, allowing companies to outsource these challenges and remain organized.
 
Rockers One Like Son Record Full Album Using Only iPhones Top
IMG_3046In August, I remember seeing YouTube links for the band One Like Son, who recorded an entire song using only their iPhones and a few iPhone peripherals (in addition to their instruments and drum programs). Today, I received a press release indicating that the band have finished recording an entire 10 song album using the same setup. Intrigued, I contacted Stephen Poff, the mastermind behind the record, to get a few more details about the impetus and methods behind the project.
 
The Sony MicroVault Mach Flash Drives Uses USB 3.0 For SuperSpeed Transfers Top
sony-microvault-machSometimes you just need a file transferred onto a flash drive quickly. Enter The Sony MicroVault Mach. These boys are fast. Some would say SuperSpeed fast.
 
Kno Adds New Features To Smart Textbooks In Attempt To Head Off Apple Top
kno_web_logo_512Kno might be in a world of hurt come Thursday. That's the day Apple is said to commence its assault on the textbook industry. Even if it's mostly hype, any current textbook alternative companies (like Kno) should be on notice. Apple is gunning for their market. This puts Kno in a precarious position, having been a scrappy start-up that once based its future on a massive, dual-screen digital textbook. Now, several years later, the company is focused on building a digital textbook ecosystem for the iPad and web. Kno just unveiled several new features lauded by the company as "major advances in smart textbook technology" which is a fancy way to describe flashcards and a smart goal page.
 
AllTrails Partners With National Geographic, Launches Redesigned, Co-branded Website Top
alltrails-logoAllTrails, the AngelPad and 500 Startups-backed company working to build the most comprehensive database of hiking, biking and camping trails around the world, is announcing a major partnership today with National Geographic. As a part of the deal, the AllTrails website is relaunching this morning with a brand-new redesign built from the ground up, and is co-branded with National Geographic's logo.
 
Coliloquy Makes Romance E-Books A Two-Way Conversation Top
deadletteroffice_parishmail_coverimageRight now, most e-books look an awful lot like their print counterparts, but startups like just-launched Coliloquy want to change that. In the past few months, other companies like Findings, Readmill, and Subtext have experimented with adding annotations and other social features to e-books. Coliloquy co-founder Lisa Rutherford said she wants to go further.
 
AppDynamics Lands $20M From KPCB, Others For Application Performance Management Solutions Top
appAppDynamics, which specializes in application performance management (APM) solutions for high-maintenance Web apps, has raised $20 million in funding in a Series C round led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Previous backers Greylock Partners and Lightspeed Venture Partners also participated.
 
Former First Round Capital VC Charlie O'Donnell Launches New Brooklyn-Based Venture Firm Top
Charlie O_DonnellA new venture firm is launching in Silicon Alley today. VC Charlie O'Donnell, who has worked as at both First Round Capital and Union Square Ventures, is launching his own venture firm today, New York-based Brooklyn Bridge Ventures. O'Donnell says that Brooklyn Bridge Ventures will make investments in early and seed stage technology companies in the "Greater Brooklyn Area" (which includes Manhattan and other boroughs) across a variety of information technology sectors. The fund will also be looking to lead or co-lead seed rounds.
 
ARROWS μ F-07D: Fujitsu's Android Phone Is Waterproof And 6.7mm Thin, Comes With 4-Inch OLED Top
Picture 2The Infobar C01 from yesterday was a bit too much for you? Not to worry, Japan still produces "ordinary" Android phones: Fujitsu's ARROWS μ F-07D [JP], which mobile carrier NTT Docomo plans to start selling this Friday, is the newest example. It doesn't look as unique as the Infobar, but the list of specs is long and pretty impressive.
 
SocialRent Reduces Your Apartment Search Headaches Top
socialrentIf you've ever tried to find an apartment with your friends, you've probably had a moment where you thought that there has to be something better than sites like Craigslist. A new startup called SocialRent aims to be that something better. The SocialRent team's first product, a Facebook app, is only addressing one small part of the apartment search, but it seems like a solid start toward tackling a larger set of problems.
 
Scratch Shield: Nissan Introduces World's First Self-Healing iPhone Case Top
scratch shield featAn iPhone case from Nissan? As you can imagine, it would make no sense for the automaker to develop an ordinary case, and the so-called Nissan Scratch Shield iPhone Case is actually special. According to the company, it's the world's first "self-healing" iPhone cover: in other words, it quickly fixes (fine) scratches by itself. Nissan says they used their self-healing paint finish originally developed for vehicles for the case, which is made from light weight ABS plastic. Scratch Shield as a paint technology has been used in various Nissan cars since 2005, before Nissan teamed up with the University of Tokyo and Japan-based Advanced Softmaterials [JP] to create the case.
 
Cyber Security Startup AlienVault Nabs Seven Senior HP Security Execs Top
Alienvault-logo1In September 2010, HP acquired Fortify Software for what Forbes reported was about $265 million and was later folded into HP's Software Division. Founded in 2003, Fortify makes products and services designed to protect companies from security threats in business software applications, and raised $40 million in 2003 from Kleiner Perkins and Sigma Partners. Today, we've learned that HP Fortify and HP's enterprise security have sustained some notable personnel losses, which stand to benefit a startup called AlienVault.
 
Daily Crunch: Surface Cut Top
1523Here are some recent posts on TechCrunch Gadgets: The Surface 2.0 From Microsoft And Samsung Ships At Last PrimeSense Demos A Gesture-Based Next-Gen TV Interface INFOBAR C01: Japan's Newest (And Most Colorful) Android Phone Ooma CEO Eric Stang Shows Off The New HD2 VoIP Handset Our Favorite CES 2012 Interviews, Videos And Events
 
A Fantasy App Store? CBS Sports To Launch "First Open Platform" For Fantasy Sports Top
CBSSports_Dev_CenterFantasy sports, just like everything else, have also been making the transition to mobile, with news aggregating apps turning to fantasy sports (a la Taptu, Evri, and more). But few of the big media properties have gotten with the times and opened their data-rich platforms to indie developers and data hounds. Today, it looks like CBS Sports is leading the way, as it is officially opening up its fantasy sports service to third party developers, companies, and startups looking to create apps for their products and services.
 
Partner, Investor: Japan's Top Social Network Mixi Backs Video Startup ShortForm Top
Screen shot 2012-01-16 at 7.07.43 PMBack in March of last year, we wrote about how video curation seemed to be growing up, or at least taking some strides forward. Its progress being evidenced in part by a young startup called ShortForm, a social network for video jockeys. Or, better said, ShortForm is attempting to let all those video enthusiasts out there create and curate their own personalized channels of web video, pulling that content from YouTube and Vimeo, among others. It's been a tricky road, but some big media companies have taken note, as today ShortForm announced that it has entered into a partnership with Japan's leading social networking service, mixi, which will introduce ShortForm (and video curation) into Japan. In fact, mixi was intrigued enough by ShortForm's service that it has also made an equity investment in the startup
 
Want To Build A Startup? Entrepreneurs & App Developers Are Going B2B Top
7ef32a75a254f66370f9d74a38bd758eYou may have heard someone say, or said yourself: "I want to build a business, what should I focus on?" Obviously, the possible answers are nearly infinite. Steve Poland wrote a great post in December that addresses this question directly. I would agree with Steve's main piece of advice for founders and entrepreneurs: Focus on problems. Start with a space you know, and ask yourself what's broken -- big or small. Or, here's an alternative approach, which applies to both app developers and founders. Not only should you do market analysis to see what is already working (and not working), but find out which spaces/categories are already saturated. It's not that high frequency alone should be a deterrent, but just because one category is popular, it doesn't necessarily follow that you can't make money (or more importantly, build something disruptive) in another.
 
Splash.FM: A Music Discovery Social Network That Scores How Hip You Are Top
Splash Fm LogoOh, you liked that band since before they were cool? Now you can prove it with Splash.FM. Launching in private beta today, the music social network lets you share songs and raise your Splash score when you help others discover them. Splash.FM lets you follow other tastemakers and listen through lists of the most popular songs across the site or your network. Splash.FM's biggest weakness is also a differentiator -- it has no streaming licenses so major label songs only play as 30-second samples, but tunes by independent artists can be played in full and downloaded for free.
 
CloudFlare Builds 'Stop Censorship' App, Lets Sites Easily "Black Out" Against SOPA Top
Screen Shot 2012-01-16 at 3.36.28 PMWhatever position you may take on SOPA, or on whether or not sites should black out against SOPA (Yes it has come to this), the issue has reached a boiling point today with sites like Wikipedia and Reddit pledging to blackout on Wednesday in order to further awareness of the measure's pitfalls. Because SOPA and PIPA threaten the existence of sites that link to copyright infringing content (like Twitter, Wikipedia, Facebook and every other site on the Internet) the bills -- which are currently stalled in Congress -- have sparked a massive online backlash.
 
CES 2012: Graphing The Tweets Top
CES Chart TrendsAs I noted earlier this week, I'm not a fan of all of the "Company X Won CES!" jibberjabber that goes on around this time of year. It's posturing for the sake of posturing, with the "winner" generally determined by anecdotal evidence and perceived mindshare. If only someone could find a way to graph the show! To chart each company's buzz (be it good or bad) over time, using cold, hard numbers to extrapolate trends from the barrage of tweets fired off during the show. Oh! Here we are..
 

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