Monday, January 23, 2012

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The TechFellow Awards: Nominate Innovators To Win $100K Angel Funds Top
2011 TechFellow AwardsThe TechFellow Awards is different. Rather than just recognizing outstanding innovators, each of its 20 winners receive $100,000 to invest in a startup of their choice. Its purpose? To fund the next generation of high-tech entrepreneurship. Today, Founders Fund, TechCrunch, and New Enterprise Associates (NEA) announce the opening of nominations for the third annual TechFellows Awards. From now until February 17th, visit the new TechFellows website and click "Nominate a TechFellow". There you can submit the name of a great leader, disruptive visionary, product genius, or engineering wizard who deserves a greater chance to shape the future.
 
Virtual Styling And Fashion Community Polyvore Raises $14M From DAG Ventures, Goldman Sachs And Others Top
PolyvorePolyvore, the startup lets web shoppers pull their favorite items any online store and mix and match to create personalized outfits online, has raised $14 million in Series C financing led by DAG Ventures and with participation from Goldman Sachs, Vivi Nevo (NV Investments), Benchmark Capital and Matrix Partners. This brings the company's total funding to over $22 million. The funding was originally reported by the New York Times. Polyvore allows users to create fashion "sets," which are digital collages that users create by combining their favorite products from across the web. The site says it has 13 million unique monthly visitors, an 80% increase over last year. And the Polyvore user community creates on average one Polyvore set every two seconds, a total of 1.4 million sets per month.
 
Google+ Allows Pseudonyms, But Only If They're "Established" Top
name tagGoogle's Bradley Horowitz just announced that as part of a more "inclusive" naming policy, Google+ will now be allow people to employ pseudonyms as their user names. The company's previous insistence on real names has been the subject of much discussion — and Google itself said earlier that it's trying to refine the policy to encompass different use cases.
 
Facebook And Twitter Engineers Fight Google "Search Plus Your World" With "Don't Be Evil" Top
Screen Shot 2012-01-23 at 1.45.13 PMSometimes the nicest of people, when faced with the pressure of competition, make evil stupid decisions. That's pretty much what happened to Google when it realized that Facebook was about to eat its lunch with regards to of social data on the web -- so it started doing dumb things, like building Google Buzz, Wave and most recently rolling out "Search Plus Your World" which to the rest of the world just looks like "Search Plus Google+."
 
No "Drastic Change Needed"? Looks Like RIM's Stockholders Disagree Top
RIMGood news: You've been promoted to CEO! Bad news: Public perception of your company has tanked over the past few years, and your stockholders are looking at you to save the day. What ever you do first, just hope that you don't give the world that sound bite that suggests you think everything is okay and that nothing at the company needs to change. Whoops! Less than 24 hours after RIM's executive shakeup, the company is already seeing its first "drastic change": its stock price.
 
Sony Claims New RGBW Sensors Improve Exposure, Low-Light Performance Top
stackedSony has announced a new line of image sensors that will, in all likelihood, end up in dozens of smartphone models. The improvement is not in megapixels, which have more or less hit a ceiling, but in the actual layout of the light-sensitive wells that make up the pixels in the image. The new sensors have, in addition to the usual red, green, and blue-filtered pixels, an unfiltered pixel element as well that will accept any wavelength of light. It can't be used to determine color, but it will add (they say) to both sensitivity and brightness. Essentially what they're doing is including a hard luminance-detecting element. This is good, much more accurate than taking the average from the RGB elements, and should in fact make low-light photography significantly better.
 
Does Your Business Need Mobile Apps? Bizness Apps (& More) Give You The Premium Tools Top
screen-shot-2011-08-27-at-8-46-22-pmLet's say you want to give your small business a mobile presence. You'd like to develop some mobile apps, but you don't have the time, money, or technical skills to do it yourself, and you're not too excited about the idea of paying a developer an armload to do it for you. Of course, on the other hand, you may be willing to pay a little more of a premium to have someone else do the work for you, work with you directly, and walk you through the process, customizing your app as you go.
 
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.
 

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