Wednesday, March 28, 2012

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Feast Your Eyes On The First Image Of AT&T's White Lumia 900 Top
white-nokia-lumia-900Longtime readers may already know that I have a peculiar fixation on white phones, and I'll admit that my heart went a-quiver when AT&T revealed that a white Lumia 900 would be released shortly after its black and cyan brethren. For those of who share my particular predilection, take a gander at AT&T's latest snowy-white handset, which is scheduled to land on store shelves on April 22 with the same $99 price tag.
 
Steve Jobs Was Against The Name "Siri" Before He Was For It Top
fullA palate-cleanser for the four course meal that will be your long and fruitful day: Yoni Heisler recounts a talk by Siri co-founder Dag Kittlaus in which he describes the naming process. Siri means "beautiful woman who leads you to victory" in Norwegian and Kittlaus owned the siri.com domain. He was planning on naming a child after said beautiful woman but his first child was a boy. Instead, he named his product after her.
 
Watch 1 Windows Phone Control Bing Maps On A Screen Comprised Of 28 Phones Top
Hacks make the world fun. This one came by way of a Microsoft hackathon hosted in France where Windows Phone dev Rudy Huyn cobbled together what's shown above. Using 29 Windows Phones of various makes and models, he coded a little hack that allowed Bing Maps to be displayed across multiple devices. One phone did the scrolling and navigating, and then the other phones, each using their own data connection, worked together to display the map as if it was one.
 
Box OneCloud Brings 30-Plus Enterprise Applications To New Mobile, Cloud-Based Storage Platform Top
boxoneCloud storage platform Box has long offered a web-based app directory that includes apps for services like Salesforce, and others that enhance the storage platform's capabilities. And last year the company launched a platform for developers building off of the Box platform, called the Box Innovation Network (/bin). Today, Box is taking development and its app directory mobile with the launch of Box OneCloud, a mobile cloud for the enterprise that provides a suite of more than 30 productivity applications, allowing businesses to access, edit, and share content from their mobile devices. Box, which now has over 10 million users with more than 200 million files accessed via Box each month, is a cloud storage platform for the enterprise that comes with collaboration, social and mobile functionality. Box has evolved into more than just a file storage platform, and has become a full-fledged, multi-platform collaborative application where businesses can actually communicate about document updates, sync files remotely, and even add features from Salesforce, Google Apps, NetSuite, Yammer and others. The company says 80 percent of the Fortune 500 are using Box.
 
Jive Tackles Social Intranets For The Enterprise, Adds Gamification For Groups Top
jive-1Social enterprise company Jive has been providing a social collaboration product to businesses for some time now; and many customers have been using the platform as an intranet of sorts, says Jive. But today, Jive is launching a dedicated social intranet for the enterprise. As you may know, Jive is one of the giants on the social enterprise space. Modeled to offer Facebook-like features to enterprises, Jive's software combines computing with social collaboration to offer fully-featured, internal social networks for businesses. Its suite of applications help businesses collaborate on a variety of tasks, including holding discussions, communication, sharing documents, blogging, running polls, social networking features and more.
 
Zappos Clone StyleTread Secures $12 Million To Keep Australia Heeled Top
Screen Shot 2012-03-28 at 12.21.21StyleTread, the leading Australian online shoe store modeled around Zappos principles, has secured a Series C financing of AUD$12 million led by Starfish Ventures, joining existing investors Lakestar, Nine Entertainment Co., and Adinvest. Nine Entertainment recently invested $4 million and is further evidence of a bit of a tech boom in Australia, where a few startups have emerged in recent years including 99designs, Envato, Remember the Milk, SitePoint and DesignCrowd, though many prefer to bootstrap at the outset rather than take VC.
 
Consumer Group Turns The Screws In Euro Google Antitrust Investigation, Outcome Expected 'In Days' Top
google-euThe European antitrust investigation of Google, originally filed November 2010, looks like it might be entering the next stage of its development. The European Consumer Organisation (BEUC), a consumer-rights group that represents 42 regional groups in 31 countries, says that it expects the Competition Commission to release its findings "within days" and possibly by the end of this week. For anyone watching how these antitrust cases develop and get decided, if we do see a decision within days, that is a big deal.
 
Nokia Pushes Its Emerging Market, Low-Cost Strategy With The 800C, China's First CDMA Windows Phone Top
Nokia Lumia 800CA big step today for both Nokia and Microsoft in their bid to be at the center of the huge smartphone growth currently underway in China and other emerging markets: Nokia today paired up with China Telecom to launch the Nokia 800C, the first CDMA Windows Phone to hit China, and the first of Nokia's Lumia line of high-end devices tailored specifically for that market. The two also said that it would be following this up with a lower-cost CDMA handset, the 610C, in Q2. This handset is especially crucial in testing whether Nokia will be able to retain its smartphone leadership in emerging markets as it continues its transition from Symbian to Windows Phone, and Android continues its low-cost march up the sales charts.
 
Foxconn To Invest $1.6B In Sharp For Flat Panels, Maybe For The iPad? Maybe For Apple TV? Top
foxconnstoresApple has yet to make any statements about where and when we might ever see an Apple TV product to match the impact it has had in the smartphone and tablet markets. But news of an investment by its key manufacturing partner, Foxconn, could point to the confidence others have of what might be coming soon. Foxconn is investing a combined 133 billion yen ($1.6 billion) in TV maker Sharp Corporation and a flat-panel JV it has with Sony -- and it has added a commitment to buy up to 50 percent of all of Sharp's LCD panel output. The deal is the largest-ever by a Taiwanese manufacturer in a Japanese supplier and could be all the more bold, considering that just yesterday there was a report from iSuppli on how sales of flat-panel TVs were in decline and flattening out.
 
Opera Mini 7 For Android Out Today: A Fightback For Web Browser Leadership? Top
opera browser androidEarlier this month, Opera and Android briefly made headlines together when one analytics firm found that Google's OS, Android, had finally overtaken Opera as the world's largest mobile browser. Today, the two are in the news again for a slightly different reason: Opera is releasing the newest version of its popular (and free) Opera Mini and Opera Mobile browsers with added camera, HTML5 and 3D graphics support -- one way for Opera to claw back some share on Android, currently the biggest smartphone platform in the world. The new version of the browser is something that Opera had hinted was in the works back in February, when it announced deals to further its reach in the area of mobile payments. As with that news, today's release is another example of how mobile browser developers are looking to add more features to make their products more like native platform experiences. The release comes at the same time that Opera has also released a new edition of its browser for Symbian.
 
Oh, That "Pull To Refresh" Thing In iOS? Yeah, Twitter Has A Patent App On That Top
IMG_4262Like that "pull-to-refresh" feature found in many popular iOS apps, including Twitter, Facebook, Tweetbot, Sparrow and others? Been wondering why Apple hasn't implemented the same thing in its own apps, like Safari or Mail, for example, when such a thing would make for a dramatically improved user experience? As it turns out, the reason why the feature hasn't made its way into Apple's core iOS apps may have to do with a patent application titled "User Interface Mechanics" - an application which lists the inventor as Loren Brichter, creator of Tweetie. You know...Tweetie? The app Twitter acquired back in 2010, which later became the official iOS Twitter client? Yep, Twitter is trying to patent "pull to refresh." But the patent app doesn't stop there - it goes after anything that issues a command on pulling down a menu.
 
Mobile Ad Optimization Startup AppStack Raises $1.5M From Eric Schmidt, Google Ventures And Others Top
Screen Shot 2012-03-27 at 8.24.56 PMMobile web and ad optimization startup AppStack has just closed a $1.5 million seed round from Google Ventures, Eric Schmidt's Tomorrow Ventures, 500 Startups, Gary Vaynerchuk, Don Dodge, and Punchbowl founder Matt Douglas.
 
Coping With Twitter's Unfollow Bug Top
Screen Shot 2012-03-27 at 8.22.01 PMIf you're like me, you may have noticed that Twitter may be arbitrarily, randomly, and haphazardly, unfollowing people you fully intended to follow. Similarly, if you've ever noticed your friends and contacts unfollowed you, it may have caused a sense of confusion, dread, or self-insecurity. Before one spirals into a series of apologies or deep-depression, it's likely not your fault, (whew!). What's causing this? I'm not sure, so I asked my proper contacts at Twitter who responded "This is a bug, and our team is working to fix it." They also sent me a link to their support FAQ, which indicates the known issue. I'll leave it to the team at Twitter to get this resolved, but in the meantime, let's discuss how we can cope with this industry phenomenon.
 
TechCrunch's Picks: The 10 Best Startups From Y Combinator Demo Day Top
The Best Of Y65 startups showed off today at Y Combinator's Demo Day, and we covered all 39 that were ready for the public. After talking to VCs and tech moguls, the TechCrunch teamed huddled up and picked these 10 companies as the best. They're disrupting commerce, evolving how we communicate, and making our phones even more powerful. Check out our coverage of session one, two, three, four, and five to choose your own favorites, but here's a cheat sheet to the startups we think are going to change the world, or at least make a ton of money.
 
YC Demo Day Session 5: Hackpad, FamilyLeaf, Ark, Chute, Minefold, Exec, 99dresses, Matterport Top
Y-combinator-logoAfter a marathon day of really solid startup pitches, it's officially a wrap for Y Combinator's Winter 2012 demo day held at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif. We've been here since the beginning, with coverage of all the startup pitches across the five demo sessions that were marked as "on the record" and ready for publicity. The fifth round of YC companies today had a wide-range of specialties -- from bringing families closer together, to tools for mobile app developers, to letting women swap dresses online. In case you missed our earlier dispatches, you can find our previous coverage of session one, session two, session three, and session four.
 
Harry Potter And The Great Sideloading Gamble. A 'Dark Day' For Publishers? Top
Pottermore.com detailA milestone today in the world of publishing, as Pottermore.com, the site dedicated to all digital things Harry Potter, opened for business as the exclusive distributor of Harry Potter e-books and audiobooks. This marks the first time that a major author has ventured forth to offer e-books directly to the public, bypassing publishers' sites and online bookstores in the process, to allow readers to buy the content direct and then sideload it to their reading platform of choice. And such is the weight of Harry Potter that Pottermore even got some (but not all) of the biggest book portals, Amazon and Barnes & Noble, to agree to link to Pottermore in affiliate marketing arrangements, rather than routing sales through their own systems (Amazon explains how this works; B&N just links directly through). No small feat, but is this a sign of how e-books -- and perhaps other content like apps -- might be more widely sold in the future?
 
Supplier Chatter Suggests New HD Models Of Kindle Fire Forthcoming Top
kinfiEarly in 2011, upstream suppliers of displays and components let a few of Amazon's secrets into the open, and these early, incomplete indications were actually on whole quite correct. Now we're seeing more of the same kind of thing predicting the coming year's announcements from Amazon, and the predictions seem just as reasonable. The news is what you might expect: a diversification of the Kindle Fire lineup, with a focus on display quality — and presumably thrift, considering the series' low price.
 
YC Demo Day Session 4: Shoptiques, Pair, Daily Muse, Per Vices, iCracked, Socialcam, AnyVivo Top
y-combinator-logoIf you want a better way to shop, hire, share video, or stay in touch with your significant other, you'll love the companies that presented at today's Y Combinator Demo Day session four. Many are already gaining traction, and investors are vying to get in before their valuations increase. Check out why Y Combinator companies are all about mobile, as well as our coverage of the first, second, and third sessions. Here's a look at the seven companies that strutted their stuff in session four:
 
Facebook's New S-1: An 'Unfavorable Outcome' In The Yahoo Patent Lawsuit 'Could Be Material To Our Business' Top
facebookFacebook just filed a new S-1 with the Securities and Exchange Commission. We've sifted through what's new and one noticeable change is the inclusion of commentary about Yahoo's patent suit against Facebook as a risk factor. From the filing: "From time to time, we receive notice letters from patent holders alleging that certain of our products and services infringe their patent rights. Some of these have resulted in litigation against us. For example, on March 12, 2012, Yahoo filed a lawsuit against us in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California that alleges that a number of our products infringe the claims of ten of Yahoo's patents that Yahoo claims relate to "advertising," "social networking," "privacy," "customization," and "messaging." Yahoo is seeking unspecified damages, a damage multiplier for alleged willful infringement, and an injunction."
 
YC Demo Day Session 3: Crowdtilt, Flypad, Carsabi, Anyperk, TiKL, Dealupa, Priceonomics, Kyte, EveryArt Top
Y_Combinator_Logo_400Crowdfunding, gaming, finding deals, and decorating your office  -- these are some of the ideas powering the startups in Y Combinator's Winter 2012 Demo Day session three. We're here at Mountain View's Computer History Museum covering the flurry of launches, and investors are salivating. You can read our coverage of the first and second sessions, plus Eric Eldon's analysis of why mobile is trending at Y Combinator. Now here's a breakdown of all the companies from Demo Day's third of five sessions:
 

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