Saturday, April 28, 2012

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Cyberpunks Rejoice: Kickstarter Project Aims To Resurrect Shadowrun Top
Screen Shot 2012-04-28 at 1.41.07 PMIf you spent any time in high school thinking about ley lines and bio-implants, you were probably a Shadowrun player. The game, which petered out after a disastrous run as a PC/Xbox game in 2007, brought the high-tech of William Gibson to the magical realms of Mr. Gygax. It was, in short, pretty cool. A Kickstarter project aims to bring back all that fun in video game form, adding lots of what you missed about Shadowrun back to the PC. This new version will be a RPG involving the Shadowrun world complete with various character types - elves, samurai, humans - and, although this is discouraged, deals with dragons. $15 gets you a copy of the game while $60 gets you a t-shirt and some in-game perks.
 
Gillmor Gang: The Teddy Bear Bubble Top
Gillmor Gang test patternThe Gillmor Gang — John Borthwick, Danny Sullivan, John Taschek, and Steve Gillmor — took the bait and played the Are We in a Bubble game. With Apple's stock price in free fall, the mobile giant reported another blowout What Me Worry quarter that sent the stock right back up. Meanwhile, Google announced, no, shipped Gdrive, and sent shivers down the collective cloud storage spine. What Gdrive really does is consolidate Google Office under an attractive layer of collaborative unification, borrowed first from Ray Ozzie's Mesh service and now emulated by a raft of smaller players bubbling up from Startupville. While we're all twisting slowly in the Apple wind, the real action is taking place in what the chat room somehow called the Teddy Bear Cloud. It's the new binky.
 
They Ain't Making Any More of Them: The Great Engineering Shortage of 2012 Top
3483548677_3dc371b216_zEditor's note: This post is authored by guest contributor Jon Bischke. Jon is a founder of Entelo and is an advisor to several startups. You can follow Jon on Twitter here. Corner any up-and-coming Kevin Systrom wanna-be and have a heart-to-heart about the challenges of building a successful company and at some point you'll likely wander into the territory of bemoaning how tough it is to hire people with technical skills. At a party recently a startup founder told me "If you could find me five great engineers in the next 90 days I'd pay you $400,000." Which is crazy talk.
 
How Great Entrepreneurs Create Their Own Luck Top
696This is the story of how a young British fine artist accidentally became a materials scientist, founding a high-growth company that created a whole new product category. It's also a parable for how great entrepreneurs systematically create their own luck. Jane ni Dhulchaointigh is the founder and CEO of Sugru, a London-based startup that makes an amazing moldable adhesive for repairing any physical object. It's a cross between silly putty and duct tape, a space age rubber that can be molded into any desired shape by hand, and that sticks to a vast array of surfaces. With customers in over 100 countries, and all seven continents, Sugru has taken the world by storm.
 
Book Excerpt: Bruce Perry's Fitness For Geeks Top
Screen Shot 2012-04-27 at 8.53.27 AMAnd Now for Something Completely Different Try this: you wake up without an alarm sometime soon after sunrise, with plenty of time to spare to make it to work. It was a good sleep; you went to bed just after nine o'clock after having a snack consisting of coconut milk blended with blueberries and a little whey powder. You're already savvy about getting enough REM sleep, but now you aim to bump up your deep sleep, or restorative NREM. You might even check out the wave chart your Zeo produced. The first thing you do is pour a cup of black tea or coffee and go outside to this pool of sunlight you've noticed out your window. You bask and reflect in it for a minute, perhaps followed by a few Tai Chi moves, push-ups on the lawn, or pull-ups on the jungle gym across the street from your apartment. You sip a bit more coffee and return to your living space to get ready for the commute. Technically speaking, as you gazed up into the sky and basked in that sun, the light rays touched your retinas and were transduced by the hypothalamus and pineal gland in your brain, which has now helped set your circadian rhythms for the day.
 
Interview: John Robb Top
panama-birdsJohn Robb is an astronautical engineer turned US Air Force Special Operations pilot turned Forrester lead analyst turned startup CTO/COO turned military theorist and author, to oversimplify. His writing has heavily influenced my own (eg you'll find his phrase "open source insurgency" several times in my novel Swarm.) He blogs at Global Guerrillas and edits Resilient Communities. Q: Your writing has focused on three themes: global guerrillas, resilient communities, and, more recently, drone disruption. Could you give the quick nutshell summaries of each of those?
Sure. The general theme of my work is to be at the center of the information flow in the place the world is changing the fastest. I did that four times (tier 1 spec ops, the Internet, Internet Finance, blogging) in the past. I think these topics are where the change is happening fastest now:
 
Facebook's Patent Acquisitions? They're More About Google Than Yahoo Top
Screen Shot 2012-04-27 at 6.57.55 PMIn the past few months, Facebook's patent portfolio has grown exponentially as a result of acquisitions of patent portfolios from IBM and Microsoft. After acquiring 650 AOL patents and patent applications from Microsoft, the company now has approximately 1,400 patent assets. Amazingly, only 46 of these assets (24 issued patents and 22 published applications) were originally filed by Facebook. In recent years, Facebook has consistently looked to the outside to augment its IP holdings with strategic acquisitions of patent assets. The company paid 40 million for the Friendster social networking patent portfolio, acquired a group of patents from Walker Digital, and another from Hewlett-Packard. These deals expanded the portfolio to approximately 160 patent assets prior to Yahoo's lawsuit being filed. After Facebook's IPO decision, and the subsequent patent suit by Yahoo, Facebook has kicked its patent acquisition program into overdrive.
 
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.
 

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