Friday, January 6, 2012

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Keen on Robert Hurley: Who Should We Most Trust About Trust? (TCTV) Top
RobertHurleySo who do you trust? Given the decline in trust and the rise of protest movements like the Tea Party, the Occupy Movement and the Arab Spring, the chances are that you trust nobody. So how can we rebuild trust in a world where The Protestor just got made Person of the Year and every traditional source of political and economic authority seems to be in crisis?
 
Etsy Makes It Easy For Users To Post Items To Pinterest With New 'Pin It' Button Top
pinitOnline pinboard Pinterest is all the rage these days, and as Etsy is showing today with its latest product announcement, e-commerce sites are starting to realize the power of pinning. The e-commerce marketplace is making it easier for Pinterest users to pin and organize Etsy items, via a new Pin It button on Etsy listing pages, along side the Tweet and Like buttons. Etsy says that its members are big fans of Pinterest (and so is Etsy), so the integration makes sense. Etsy is also using Pinterest's price display feature. So when you pin listings with the Pin It button, the required pin description field is prefilled with the item title and price. Users can also add a note about why they like the item, which will be added to their Pinterest posting.
 
ChatON, Samsung's iMessage Competitor, Arrives In App Store Top
chaton-iosRemember ChatON? The Samsung-built, cross-platform, mobile messaging app which arrived in Google's Android Market this fall? The app, somewhat similar to BlackBerry's BBM or Apple's iMessage, provides users with an alternative to SMS or MMS. At the time, Samsung was promising support for iOS would be coming "soon." Well, "soon" has arrived. ChatON is now available for download from iTunes.
 
Shelby.tv To Launch "Touch Play": An AirPlay-Based Gesture Remote Top
touch-play-shelbytv-1Video-sharing startup (and stars of Bloomberg's TechStars reality show) Shelby.tv is about to launch a pretty nifty feature called "Touch Play." The new addition, a gesture-based remote control that works via Apple's AirPlay, will be shown off at next week's CES, with its launch planned for the week following.
 
Facebook's Free Social Cards From Moo Are Going Like Very Hot Cakes Top
Some 24 hours after we broke the news that Facebook had engaged Moo to be the sole creator of its new 'social' business cards service we have some exclusive numbers on what that deal is translating into. The promotion of 200,000 free packs of 50 cards is on a first come, first served basis. However the offer is capped at 5,000 orders per day (that's 250,000 cards per day) in order, Moo says, to ensure a "strong ethos of customer service and to make it fair."
 
Startup Weekend's Eventful Year: 260 Events In 202 Cities; Startups Raised $30M+ Top
startup weekendsStartup Weekend, whose mission is to kickstart and foster startup communities worldwide through events and networking sessions, had a very lively 2011. According to internal statistics shared exclusively with TechCrunch, the organization held a total of 260 events in 202 cities, in 67 countries (you can find the obligatory accompanying infographic below). All in all, the 'startup weekends' attracted some 21,316 people, who collectively formed 2,817 teams. Startups that were incubated at its events raised at least $30 million in outside funding in the course of last year, although Startup Weekend CMO Joey Pomerenke tells me there were probably more fundraising rounds completed that they simply don't know about yet.
 
Nobody Wins At CES Top
ces_countdown3Rather than do a CES pre-round-up of exciting products I'd like to address this interesting slant on the whole "massive electronics trade show in the middle of the desert" concept that has kept the Gadgets crew here up for the past few weeks. MG said Apple won CES. He was being snide, but, in a way, honest because, in the end, nobody wins CES. The Consumer Electronics Show is, as its name implies, a show for consumer electronics. These include, but are not limited to, TVs, DVD players, Blu-Ray players (if they still make those), and accessories. TV stands! TV brackets! Speakers! Remotes! In fact, there's an entire hall dedicated to the Asian purveyors of the components that make up those consumer electronics, a sort of Fishmongers Row to the CE industry where the smell is at least far more tolerable.
 
Siri Sibling Trapit Raises $6.2 Million Series A From Horizons Top
trapitPersonalized web search tool Trapit, often called the sister to Apple's Siri because both were built on the same artificial intelligence project from DARPA and SRI, has just raised $6.2 million in Series A funding. The round was led by Horizons Ventures, the Hong Kong-based venture fund that manages the investments for Facebook and Spotify investor Li Ka-shing. Horizons also previously invested in Siri's B round.
 
After 58 Years: Panasonic To Cut The Cord With JVC Kenwood Top
jvc logoPanasonic has been partnering with Victor Co. of Japan, which in 2008 merged with Kenwood to become JVC Kenwood, since 1954. But yesterday JVC Kenwood announced [JP, PDF] that Panasonic, its largest shareholder and business partner, will go alone in the future. Big P is apparently ready to sell 24,225,400 of its shares, a move that will make the company the seventh-largest shareholder in JVC Kenwood.
 
Nokia Acquires Norwegian Mobile OS Company Smarterphone Top
SmarterphoneNokia has acquired Oslo, Norway-based Smarterphone, a company that builds a mobile operating system for so-called feature phones. The news of the purchase, which was actually completed last November, comes straight from investment firm Ferd Capital, which pumped 6.5 million euros into Smarterphone since 2007.
 
HTC's Growth Spurt Is Done (For Now) Top
htc-slippingHTC released their unaudited Q4 financials earlier this morning, and as expected, they indicate a disappointing decline for the Taiwanese hardware vendor. The company's net operating income was down to NT$12.9 billion ($426 million), a nearly $22 percent decline from their position this time last year. HTC's revenues were similarly impacted -- they only managed to pull in NT$101 billion ($3.35 billion), which represents a 2.49% year-over-year dip, and a nearly 25% decrease from their impressive Q3 figures.
 
Sony Announces World's First XQD Memory Cards Top
xqd_logoAre you ready for yet another memory card format? Dubbed XQD, the medium was first announced by Sandisk, Sony and Nikon in November 2010. And after the the CompactFlash Association finalized the specifications last month, Sony took the wraps off the world's first XQD cards today. Two versions of the card will be available, in addition to an XQD-compatible card reader (USB 3.0) and an ExpressCard Adapter.
 
The Samsung Note Is Definitively Not Coming To AT&T As Far As You Know Top
pink_flip_flopRemember 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
PiazzaPiazza, 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
sezmiSo 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 headquartersSamsung 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
caseSteve 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
1514Here 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
FlotypeFlotype, 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
AnimotoIt'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.
 

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