Friday, April 6, 2012

Y! Alert: TechCrunch

Yahoo! Alerts
My Alerts

The latest from TechCrunch

Fab Expands Into Beauty Products; Partners With Glamour Magazine For New Pop-Up Shop Top
FabOver three million users strong, design-focused flash sales platform Fab is expanding to a new vertical on Monday, with the launch of a beauty-focused pop-up shop in collaboration with Conde Nast glossy Glamour Magazine. As we wrote earlier this year, the fast growing site expanded their product offerings through the launch of the new Fab Shops, which incorporated verticals of Kids, Pets, Food, Fashion and Vintage. Fab co-founder, design guru and chief curator Bradford Shellhammer explains to us that Fab's mantra is that design lives anywhere in the world at all price points, in all categories. While one wouldn't necessarily associate beauty products with design, Shellhammer explains that when it comes to packaging and brands, design is a key component to the allure of certain beauty products.
 
Tradyo Wants To Take On Craigslist With Mobile, Social Classifieds App Top
TRADYOA number of startups are trying to take on online classifieds giant Craigslist, including Antego, EggDrop, and many others. Tradyo is one of the latest companies to join the group, offering a social, mobile marketplace that allows users to buy and sell items with others around them. The startup's iPhone app allows users to buy and sell used goods in your area in realtime. The app uses GPS to reveal the items available around you, allowing you to sell an item, search your community for cool stuff, and receive push notifications when an item you want gets listed, or when someone wants to buy what you've listed.
 
Now You Know: Hotels Inject Banner Ads Into The Wi-Fi They Charge You For Top
thebattle_zoomThis story made the rounds a few days ago but I think generally it's something more people should know. During a visit to the very expensive and not very nice Times Square Marriott, Justin Watt noticed a strange bar at the top of his blog's home page. He had recently dealt with a PHP hack and so was alert for changes on the site and when he dug further he found some strange Javascript embedded into the page. Noting that nothing changed on his server, he posted on the experience and thought little more about it - until a commenter noted that the behavior he noticed was coming from an RXG A8 or "Revenue Extraction Hotspot Gateway." In short, this box, which sits between the access point and the Internet, injects ads into Wi-Fi streams.
 
Better Late Than Never: RIM Preps Refreshed PlayBook With 4G Top
4gplaybookThe BlackBerry PlayBook is about to get the gift of 4G. That is of course if a random leaked image and FCC documents are believed. And why not? Even though the PlayBook is almost a year old, RIM is actually selling more now than ever. The PlayBook is a fine tablet. The OS is competent and slick. It packs all the standard BlackBerry apps and functions. Much as the iPad is a great iPhone companion, the PlayBook should be the BlackBerry user's tablet of choice. The PlayBook is a fine tablet now. But it didn't launch that way.
 
Amazon S3: 905 Billion Objects Stored, 1 Billion Added Each Day Top
s3_growth_2012_q1_1Amazon has released some fairly impressive numbers showcasing the growth of Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) over the years. By the end of the first quarter of 2012, there were 905 billion objects stored, and the service routinely handles 650,000 requests per second for those objects, with peaks that go even higher. To put that in perspective, that's up from 262 billion objects stored just two years ago and up from 762 billion by Q4 2011. Or maybe it's more impressive when you look further back: 2.9 billion in 2006, for example. And how fast is it growing? Well, says Amazon, every day, over a a billion objects are added. That's how fast.
 
HTC's Rough Q1: Profits Down 70% Over Last Year, Revenue Dips 35% Top
htc-slippingHTC released their unaudited Q1 2012 earnings earlier this morning, and the results aren't pretty [PDF]. The Taiwanese company managed to pull down NT$67.8 billion ($2.3 billion) this past quarter, a nearly 35% dip year-over-year. What's more, HTC took an even bigger hit when it came to net income after taxes — in Q1, they only raked in NT$4.4 billion ($149 million), compared to the NT$14.8 billion ($501 million) in profits earned this time last year. Ouch. Just… ouch.
 
Do We Even Need NFC For Mobile Payments? PayPal, Google Weigh In (Video) Top
DavidMarcus-posterIf you tried to judge whether NFC mobile payments are ready for prime time — based on the amount of chatter you hear in your newsfeed — you'd think the contactless technology was on the brink of ubiquitous adoption. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, there are documented sources out there citing that we are four, five, maybe even ten years away from a realistic and entrenched infrastructure that would allow the masses to make face-to-face payments using secure elements embedded in smart cards and mobile phones. Five years. Just think about where you were five years ago. What kind of phone did you have? Where did you work? How did you communicate with others in these days of yore? Seriously, what has changed for you in that time? What has changed in your environment in that time?
 
Arianna Huffington No Longer Runs The Aol Tech Sites Top
Screen Shot 2012-04-05 at 8.02.18 PMYou know every once in a while you come across news about your company and it turns out your boss is no longer your boss anymore. If you're me this probably happens to you every three months. Anyways this morning I read in the media that Arianna Huffington (who I think used to be my boss) gained more control within Aol and then subsequently read that actually she had been "demoted." Okay truth please guys?!
 
Seven Top
se7en-movie-title-stillWill Apple make a 7 inch iPad? That's the question being batted around yet again today. The true answer right now is easy: I don't know. No one does. Most likely not even Apple. They're undoubtedly thinking about it. And may even have to make a call soon. But it has probably not been decided just yet. But that's a lame answer. Let's sexy it up using history, logic, and common sense. Will Apple make a 7 inch iPad? Yes.
 
Nonprofit "Digital Public Library Of America" To Launch In April 2013 Top
iconThe Google Books project (just today pared down a bit) always impressed me with its sheer scope. Offering modern e-books is all well and good, but that's more of a business problem. It's the scanning and free availability of thousands upon thousands of old books that struck me as a worthwhile endeavor. But publishers and booksellers have been wary of the service, knowing that Google is a fan of free, and their scan-first, ask-permission-later strategy caused some consternation as well. And while access to all that knowledge is appreciated, it is lost on no one that the data is in the hands of a for-profit company. Enter the Digital Public Library of America, which aims to create a similar catalog of works, but both more comprehensive and unimpeded by commercial motives. It's been in the works for a while, but it seems it may finally launch as early as a year from now.
 
Nextpeer Pledges To Make Any Mobile Game As Social As OMGPOP's "Draw Something" Top
nextpeerThere were plenty of other Pictionary-like games in the iTunes app store before OMGPOP's Draw Something. But the secret ingredient behind Draw Something's runaway success was its very social, asynchronous gameplay. Most independent game designers don't necessarily have the extra manpower to build an engine that supports this. That's where an Israeli startup called Nextpeer comes in. It's kind of like the next generation of OpenFeint, a mobile-social gaming network that was acquired by Japanese gaming giant GREE for $104 million last year. Game designers can integrate Nextpeer's SDK to let their players compete against each other. Up until now, Nextpeer only supported synchronous gameplay, meaning that players had to be available at the same time. But now Nextpeer is offering an asynchronous mode, which means that players can finish a round whenever they have a spare moment. That's the secret sauce that has made games like Zynga's Words With Friends and then Draw Something insanely viral.
 
VCs: Secondary Funding Markets Are A Double-Edged Sword Top
Chinese_saberA lot of things have changed in Silicon Valley in recent years -- apps have access to a plug-and-play social infrastructure provided by the likes of Facebook and Twitter, the mobile boom has truly made the post-PC world a reality, services such as cloud computing allow startups to function at leaner levels than ever before, and so on. But for founders and investors, perhaps one of the most significant shifts has come from the increasingly common occurrence of late-stage funding rounds that are largely secondary stock purchasing situations. In a panel discussion held last night by Wealthfront at the Rosewood Hotel, the longtime Silicon Valley dealmaking hotspot, VC heavyweights Sameer Gandhi of Accel Partners, Bill Gurley of Benchmark Capital, and Doug Leone of Sequoia Capital discussed the upsides and downsides of this seemingly unstoppable trend.
 
Wingsplay Pays Influencers To Spread Viral Videos, Runs Campaigns For NBC And Oxygen Top
Logo_Wingsplay HDIf a business creates a fun, potentially viral video, what's the best way to convince people to share it? Wingsplay has a straightforward idea: Pay them. So advertisers pay Wingsplay to promote videos that they want to go viral. "Influencers" with accounts on Wingsplay then visit the site to watch the videos. If they like one, they can post a link to the video on Facebook, Twitter, or a blog, along with a personal message and the "#viralad" hashtag (to comply with the FTC's disclosure requirements). Then the influencers are paid based on every "seed" view of the video that they generate.
 
Twitter Puts Its Foot Down, Takes Five Biggest Spammers To Federal Court Top
no-spamA warning: You can only spam Twitter so much before it brings in the law. As Twitter grows -- the company now claims to have 140 million active users -- naturally, it's become an attractive target for spammers, which have collectively made their drek a familiar part of the social network's user experience. Now Twitter is officially putting its foot down and enlisting the help of the federal courts, filing a suit in San Francisco today against its five most aggressive spammers. In pursuing legal action, Twitter said in a statement on its blog, it believes it's going "straight to the source".
 
Wipe It! Security Hole In Facebook Mobile Apps Threatens Jailbroken / Stolen Phones Top
Facebook Mobile SecurityThere's panic about a security hole in Facebook's iOS and Android apps that surfaced this week, but the threat of identity theft is being blown out of proportion. You only need to worry if your phone is actually stolen, and even then a hacker would need it to be jailbroken, use tools like iExplore, or they'd have to take the device apart. Once a hacker has full physical access to your phone, you have a lot more than Facebook to worry about, as the thief could steal your contacts, cookies, and access all your apps if the phone was unlocked. Really, this security hole highlights the new dangers of having your phone stolen. Owners should make sure they have a remote wipe solution ready to nuke all their data or else things could get ugly quick.
 
Mobile Ad Wars: Augme Slaps Millennial Media With Patent Lawsuit Over Targeting Technologies Top
28380_augmelogoAfter debuting on the New York Stock Exchange last week with a huge pop in stock value, mobile ad network Millennial Media is now facing potential legal trouble from another mobile ad player. The company is facing a patent lawsuit by mobile marketing service, Augme Technologies. We've embedded the lawsuit below. The lawsuit, which was filed in Delaware, says that the patents in question are all generally relating to "systems and methods for providing targeted content over the Internet." From the patent lawsuit: "The '721, the '636, and the '691 Patents are generally directed to the manner in which content provided in a Web page, such as advertisements, music, videos, and the like, is customized based on the end user's computing environment, connectivity, bandwidth level, geographic location, gender, age, or other targeting criteria such as behavioral marketing data."
 
At Long Last, The Nexus S 4G Finally Gets Its Ice Cream Sandwich Update Top
nexusicsHey all you Sprint customers, you haven't been forgotten after all! Sprint has just revealed that the device's Ice Cream Sandwich has finally gone live, which is great news if you're looking to squeeze some more life out of your aging Nexus S 4G before you move into something a bit more modern. Sprint has said the update will be pushed to all devices over the coming weeks, but if you're impatient -- which I can't blame you for -- you should be able to jumpstart the process by going into the device's settings and checking for the update.
 
The Meh-Too Crowd Top
glass_photos4It's been a while since I came to Google's defense but I think it's time to talk about what an absolute downer it is to dig through a lot of tech commentary these days. The most recent example came after the launch of Google's Glass project, a HUD for future travelers that will let us connect to our world in a fairly non-obtrusive way. Arguably, the product is pretty pie-in-the-sky, but all things being equal, the potential device, even if it includes a small subset of the features we saw in the video, is pretty cool. Instead of oohing and guffawing and going back to, you know, living his life, Old Man Gruber took some time out to dump three links to examples of the potential problems Glass faces. He noted, quite rightly, that only the worst companies created flashy videos of non-existant tech.
 
Facebook Picks NASDAQ Over NYSE For IPO Top
NASDAQAccording to The New York Times, Facebook has picked the NASDAQ to list its shares in the company's upcoming IPO in May. This is a huge win for the exchange, which has been battling the New York Stock Exchange for tech company listings over the past year. Facebook, which will list its shares under the symbol FB, is set to be the largest public offering since Google, reports The New York Times' Evelyn Rusli. And Facebook could be valued as high as $100 billion in the IPO.
 
Google Launches Android App To Improve Its Indoor Location Accuracy Top
logo_Google Maps Floor Plan MarkerGoogle Maps, Bing Maps and a number of startups have been offering indoor maps for large venues like airports, malls and stadiums for quite a while. The problem with indoor mapping, though, is that it’s pretty hard for these companies to actually tell you exactly where you are on these maps. GPS obviously doesn’t work well in these spaces and WiFi and cell tower triangulation just isn’t very accurate. Now, however, Google has come up with a plan to improve indoor location accuracy for venues in Google Maps: venue owners who have uploaded their floor plans to Google’s mapping service can now use a new Android app to provides Google with feedback about how accurate its predictions are for their locations. All they need is an Android device (including tablets) that runs Android 2.3 or up.
 

CREATE MORE ALERTS:

Auctions - Find out when new auctions are posted

Horoscopes - Receive your daily horoscope

Music - Get the newest Album Releases, Playlists and more

News - Only the news you want, delivered!

Stocks - Stay connected to the market with price quotes and more

Weather - Get today's weather conditions




You received this email because you subscribed to Yahoo! Alerts. Use this link to unsubscribe from this alert. To change your communications preferences for other Yahoo! business lines, please visit your Marketing Preferences. To learn more about Yahoo!'s use of personal information, including the use of web beacons in HTML-based email, please read our Privacy Policy. Yahoo! is located at 701 First Avenue, Sunnyvale, CA 94089.
Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)