Saturday, April 28, 2012

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Tumblr President John Maloney Steps Down, Promises "Awesome New Stuff" Top
tumblr logoTumblr President John Maloney just posted (on his Tumblr, natch) that he's stepping down from a day-to-day operational role at the company. "It's the right time for me and a good time for Tumblr," Maloney writes. "We're in great hands with David and the excellent leadership team we've built."
 
Spanning Stats Has Scanned 25,000+ Google Drives Top
Stats_For_Google_Drive_4Spanning, which already offers a backup service for Google Apps, is now riding the coattails of Google Drive. Two days after the Drive announcement, Spanning released a new, free tool called Spanning Stats that helps users understand what's in their Google Drive. The company says its report gives you data including the percentage documents in your Google Drive by type, the 10 newest and oldest files, how much of the total storage quota you're using by file type, the 10 biggest files, and the 10 users using the most storage space.
 
The Winklevoss Twins Are Now VCs: "We Think The Cloud Is Going To Be Huge" Top
Screen Shot 2012-04-27 at 4.11.58 PMIt's a Friday afternoon (in some parts of the world, at least), so go ahead -- take a nice long drink of your favorite alcoholic beverage. If you're like me, you'll need it to make it through the CNBC interview with the Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss that aired today. It is embedded above for your viewing pleasure, with CNBC reporters asking for the Winklevii's autographs and all. Really, drink up. Anyway. On air today, Andrew Ross Sorkin talked with everyone's favorite Harvard grads cum Olympic athletes cum Mark Zuckerberg nemeses about their latest foray into the tech startup space as individuals with significant financial reserves and no apparent engineering credentials. They're becoming venture capitalists.
 
Misfit Wearables, The Startup From Agamatrix's Founders, Former Apple CEO John Sculley, Raises $7.6M Top
misfit-wearablesGoogle Glass isn't the only game in town. Misfit Wearables, a wearable computing startup from the founding team of mobile health company Agamatrix and former Apple chief executive John Sculley, just raised $7.6 million in a round co-led by Founders Fund. The other notable firm in the deal isn't disclosed, but we hear through a source that it's Khosla Ventures. Misfit isn't saying too much about what it's working on, except to say that the next generation of wearable devices shouldn't compete with fashion, has to be ambient and has to have functions outside of sensing. It has to be the kind of thing a consumer wouldn't need to remember to wear and ideally, it would be something that's so critical that a person would go back home if they left it there.
 
A Run Down Of The Mobile Startups At MLove, Monterey Top
Screen Shot 2012-04-27 at 15.16.57MLOVE is a European mobile conference with a difference. If a mobile conference was crossed with TED and a music festival, that's vaguely like MLove. Its big annual event is in an old East German castle 200 miles outside of Berlin. Yes, it's as exotic as it sounds. But this week it took the plunge and brought its special atmosphere to Monterey. Amid the excellent speeches about the future of mobile, and the future generally, organiser Harald Neidhardt throws together a diverse range of speakers, from Grammy Award winning Musician Chamillionaire to "CameraGirl", who runs tech at Burning Man. As one delegate, Dr. Robert Daubner of billiger, put it to me, "mobile is poised to disrupt the world." Never were truer words spoken... Amid the high concept presentations from the likes of the Singularity University and others were a number of startup pitches from U.S.-based startups. Here's a run-down on those:
 
YouTube For Google TV Gets Recommendations, Smoother Playback And A +1 Button Top
Google TV - OverviewGoogle TV, the company's first serious foray into the living room, hasn't exactly set the world on fire. That doesn't mean Google has given up, though. Far from it. While there hasn't been much news about Google TV itself lately, the YouTube app for Google TV is getting an update today. Google says that its developers have "been working like it's a 24/7 hackathon over here to bring all of YouTube to your Google TV." With this update, the developers have added recommendations, a Google+ button and the ability to search for channels. The new version now also handles suddenly drops in bandwidth more gracefully.
 
Gripevine's Dave Carroll Tackles Customer Service Resolution After United Broke His Guitar Top
Screen shot 2012-04-27 at 3.36.05 PMIt's an interesting story. One day, Dave Carroll was taking a flight with his band-mates on United Airlines. When he landed at his destination, he noticed that United staff were throwing his $3,500 Taylor guitar around, and ultimately, damaging it pretty badly. When United did nothing to help, Carroll took matters into his own hands with the help of a little video sharing site called YouTube. His music video, "United Breaks Guitars," took off like a rocket, and after realizing the power of social media, he joined up with his other co-founders to build Gripevine.
 
Study: 95% Of Independent Restaurants Don't Have Mobile Sites, Only 40% Have Online Menus Top
Graphics | Restaurant SciencesRestaurants just love to put Flash intros with auto-playing music and animations on their front pages. If you are trying to look at one of these sites on your mobile browser without Flash, chances are you can't even get to anything else on the site because far too often, there is no way to bypass the animation and get to the information you want, or because the complete site was designed in flash. It's not just these obnoxious animations that make restaurant websites a hassle, though. According to a new study by Restaurant Science, a restaurant industry information and analytics provider, one out of eight full service restaurant chains and a depressing one out of twenty independent restaurants don't have a mobile website. What makes this even worse is that according to some reports, half of all visits to restaurant websites are from mobile devices.
 
Target Neutralized: Amazon Beats Tablet Makers At Their Own Game Top
913d4_funny-dog-pictures-target-acquiredWith the announcement that the Kindle Fire has grabbed 54.4% of the Android Tablet market, it's clear to see that Amazon's Trojan Horse strategy paid off. As I wrote back in December, the Fire is Amazon's way of making all of their offerings "real." Movies, books, and games were Amazon's core competency back when all of that stuff was on disks and on paper and that core competency is repurposed now for the Information Age. That's what all of the other Android tablet makers missed: people don't want general-purpose devices anymore or at least general-purpose devices in tablet form. There is little need to be "productive" on a tablet when consumption is why most people buy them. Sure someone out there is SSHing into their servers and editing documents in Pages, but the average user plops down on the couch with the iPad and calls up some IMDB or some NSFW Reddit, not a text editor.
 
Sony's Gamer-Friendly Xperia Play Could Have Had A Real QWERTY Keyboard Too Top
playphone1Sony's Android-powered Xperia Play debuted to mixed reviews last year, but according to a newly published patent, Sony was apparently toying with the idea of making something much more interesting before settling on the design they ran with. Not content with a single physical keypad meant strictly for gaming, the images associated with the patent depict a Sony smartphone with two of them -- one with the game controls we've become familiar with, and another with a full QWERTY keyboard that would slide down over the game pad.
 
Gillmor Gang Live 04.27.12 (TCTV) Top
Gillmor Gang test patternGillmor Gang - John Borthwick, Danny Sullivan, John Taschek, and Steve Gillmor. Recording has concluded.
 
Yahoo's Five Counter-Counterclaims Against Facebook. #1: Throw Out Retaliatory Patents Top
Facebook Vs Yahoo Boxing LogoToday Yahoo hit Facebook with five big counter-counterclaims designed to invalidate the patents cited in the social network's infringement countersuit. If the court concurs, Facebook could be left wide-open in settlement negotiations, and might have to pay Yahoo a hefty sum of cash and/or stock. Specifically, the old web portal claims that after it sued for patent infringement, Facebook bought patents "for purposes of retaliation".   Therefore they don't meet the U.S. Patent Office's "Duty of Disclosure, Candor, and Good Faith" and should be thrown out of Facebook's countersuit against Yahoo. Yahoo also claims Facebook broke their agreement to inform each other of IP issues, couldn't legally know if Yahoo was violating its patents, and that several of Facebook's new patents were illegally filed. Finally, Yahoo filed two more advertising patent infringement claims against Facebook that look to be quite incriminating. Here's breakdown of the five claims and how they'll influence the outcome of the case.
 
Barely 3 Months Post-Launch, Loyalty App Punchcard Is Live In 15M Locations, Nears Profitability Top
punchcard-iosThe mobile apps from stealthy loyalty startup Punchcard have only been on the market since February, but the company is now reporting it's close to being cash-flow positive. Like a digital version of paper punchcards which reward repeat customers for their business, Punchcard's app lets customers snap photos of their receipts in exchange for cash payouts or other rewards directly from the merchant. While not a new concept in and of itself, what's interesting about Punchcard is how it's been acquiring its business: it just switched on loyalty programs for millions of locations across the U.S., even if they didn't ask for it.
 
The IPO Boom Is Back: Pricings Hit A 12-Year High, With Tech Stocks Leading The Way Top
ipo renaissance 1It's official: We're back in boom times from a tech IPO standpoint. 2012 is now on pace to be a record-breaking year for initial public offerings, and technology companies are leading the way. Fifty-seven IPOs have been priced since January 1st, which is the most U.S. IPO pricings the US market has seen during the first four months of year since 2000, according to new data out of IPO-focused investment bank Renaissance Capital.
 
All-Star Cast Invests 750K In Ben Huh And Matt Galligan's Mobile News Startup Circa Top
Screen Shot 2012-04-27 at 11.12.08 AMSimpleGeo's Matt Galligan and Icanhascheezburger's Ben Huh have teamed up to change the way people consume news via mobile. Their startup Circa, which boasts a newsworthy list of advisors like former Digg CEO Jay Adelson, has just raised 750K in seed funding from eonCapital, Quotidian Ventures, Techstars' David Cohen and David Tisch, Tumblr's David Karp, Eric Norlin, Manesh Arora, Pedro Torres-Picon, Rick Webb, Scott Belsky and Soraya Darabi. "40% of our current funding is provided by Davids," Galligan jokes.
 
42Floors' PDA: The War For Talent Among Startups Needs A New Approach. Here's Why Top
WeWantYou-black-400Startups do the darndest things. As you may or may not have seen, Y Combinator startup 42Floors made a bold and fairly unprecedented move today -- as hiring goes, in any case. 42Floors Co-founder Jason Freedman had been following the work of UPenn sophomore Dan Shipper on Hacker News. The two had chatted a few times by phone and on Twitter, and Freedman was so impressed by the quality of Shipper's programming, design skills, and smarts, that he decided to publicly offer the sophomore a job -- via the company blog. Why? Well, first off, it was likely to turn into publicity both for Shipper and for 42Floors. So there's that. It was also done somewhat with an ulterior motive. As Freedman says in his post, the team believes that "hiring is dead." And he has a point: If you're looking to hire the kind of talent that is out there actually building products, companies, etc. (and who isn't?), those men and women likely aren't filling out job applications. So if you want them, you have to court them.
 
Google Drive Arrives In ChromeOS Developer Channel Top
Google DriveEver since Google released its cloud storage service Google Drive earlier this week, there has been some speculation as to what its integration with ChromeOS, Google's cloud-centric operating system, would look like. Today, Google released the first developer version of ChromeOS 20 with support for Google Drive. As expected, Google Drive is now deeply integrated into the ChromeOS file manager, though this is clearly just a first effort and still needs quite a bit of work.
 
Klouchebag, Finally Something More Douchey Than Klout Top
klouchebagToday my Twitter friends are going nuts about Klouchebag, the service that takes social media parody (and Klout puns) to the next level, with algorithms and stuff. As with Klout, you enter your Twitter handle and are given a score between 1 and 100. But instead of measuring social media influence, Klouchebag tells you "how much of an asshat you are on Twitter." Apparently, you're judged on four factors: anger, "retweet abuse", reposting from social apps, and misuse of the English language.
 
TechCrunch Giveaway: 2 Free Tickets To Disrupt NYC #TCDisrupt Top
disrupt_graphic_03-11_info1-1TechCrunch Disrupt NYC is almost here! Yes, we are very excited. And you should be, too. We have already announced some incredible speakers and judges who will be joining us next month in New York, and we have even more surprises in store that will be announced as we get closer to the event. Starting this week, we are going to be giving two free tickets away every Friday. So, if you don't win this time, make sure to check back next week to win. Disrupt NYC is going to be so much fun. These free tickets, each worth around $2,000, will get you into the whole three days of the conference, plus all of the after parties. Check out the images below. We are already all over New York.
 
Social Networking And Gaming Mobile Apps Are Now Neck-And-Neck For Time Spent On Android, iOS Top
instagram-rankingIn another sign that something fundamental is changing on the iOS and Android platforms, mobile analytics provider Flurry has found that consumers are spending as much time in social networking apps as they are in mobile games. Games have historically led usage on mobile. The last time that Flurry took a look back in January, it found that half of app sessions were spent in games while 30 percent was spent in social networking apps. "We take the rise in Social Networking apps as a signal of maturation for the platform," wrote Flurry's vice president of marketing Peter Farago. "As game demand may be hitting its saturation point, consumers are also discovering other apps, namely Social Networking."
 

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