Tuesday, May 1, 2012

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Facebook Engineer Behind 'Presence' Is Turning The Concept Into A Standalone Company Top
Screen Shot 2012-05-01 at 10.41.40 AMOne of the geeky, cute contraptions of the early Facebook days was a web-enabled beer keg at company headquarters. Whenever an employee swiped their RFID badge on it, a camera would snap a photo of them pouring a beer and post a status update to Facebook. Whenever it ran low on beer, the keg would post pictures of BevMo to Facebook as a desperate refill reminder. Even though Facebook's beer keg world domination plans never played out, the technology behind the keg, called Presence, may still show up in the wild. That's because one of the engineers behind Presence, John Stockdale, is starting a company around the concept. It's aptly named Presence.
 
Did Scalado Invent RIM's Time-Defying BB10 Camera Tech? Top
bb10cameraengRemember that retro time-defying camera app that RIM unveiled alongside a few other BB10 features? You should — it happened this morning. Well, it would seem that the ability to search back through frames captured before the actual moment you pushed the shutter button has already been done. Nope, not by Apple. Not by Motorola, HTC, Samsung, or Nokia either. It's been done by Scalado, an imaging technology company known for their Remove and Rewind tech, among other things.
 
Samsung Is The New King Of Mobile Top
samsung_logo_crown-300x268Sammy is now the big kahuna of cell phones. Today's Juniper Research and comScore reports indicated that Samsung kicked Apple from the top spot in regards to smartphones. IDC also released a report today indicating the same thing while noting that Samsung kicked Nokia from the top of total phone shipments. This comes just days after another analyst firm questioned Nokia's current title as reigning king. Samsung happened to be at the right place at the right time -- but only because the company positioned itself properly.
 
eVr1 Turns The High Points Of Human Knowledge Into A Portable Codex Top
codexA new startup launching today called eVr1 sits at the intersection between the digital and physical worlds. In the words of co-founder Brandon Peele, eVr1 has tried to answer the question, "What does it mean to be human being in the context of 16 gigs?" So the team selected what it saw as the most important aspects of human knowledge and literature — the entirety of Wikipedia, the CIA World Factbook, and a literary canon that includes authors like Plato, William Shakespeare, and James Joyce (to name just a few — you can see the full list here). That's supplemented with instruction manuals and documents from personal development website Trans4mind. Everything gets copied onto a 16 gigabyte Micro SDHC card, which is then wrapped in several layers of protective tape, then packaged in a leather container with a key ring. The leather also comes with a hand-stitched image of your choice — you can choose from things like the double helix and the infinity symbol.
 
Flickr Adds Pinterest Buttons To Photo Sharing; All Images Will Be Pinned With Attributions Top
pinYahoo-owned Flickr is one of the largest content sources for Pinterest, with users posting Flickr images on the pinboard sharing site in droves. But in order to Pin a Flickr photo on Pinterest, you had to use Pinterest's own Pin button, and you couldn't Pin photos to pinboards directly from Flickr. Until today. Flickr, which just debuted a new HTML5 photo uploader last week, is announcing a partnership with Pinterest to add Pin It buttons to sharing options on the photo sharing platform. Flickr also assures that all pinned images will be properly attributed, regardless where they are pinned from. As Flickr's head of product, Markus Spiering, explains to us, the photos sharing site wanted to make sharing to Pinterest a one to two click process, for both content owners and for people who discover interesting photos on Flickr to be pinned. Now, you'll see a Pin It button on Flickr image pages where you see Twitter, email, Facebook and Tumblr share buttons. You'll be able to share photo pages, favorites, and groups. If you pin a lot, the share menu will prioritize the Pin It button, showing it as one of the two shortcuts on the photo page.
 
Google Graduates Automatic Email Translation Feature From Gmail Labs, Expels Old Snakey And Others Top
translation_comicIn 2009, Google brought its translation features to Gmail as a Gmail Labs experiment. Today, almost exactly two years after it first launched, this features is finally graduating from Gmail Labs. Starting in the next few days, you will see an option to "Translate message" in the header at the top of every message that is written in a foreign language.
 
Doc Searls Would Like You To Join Him In The Intention Economy Top
the-intention-economyEvery day companies are spending gobs of money to earn and keep your attention. Advertisers are collecting heaps of information about you in the hopes of presenting you with more targeted advertisements: advertisements on which you'll want to click. Yet despite all of this information, advertising still pretty much sucks. It doesn't have to be this way. While marketers and advertising agencies strive to command your decisions in the "attention economy", long-time open source advocate Doc Searls puts forward a better idea in his new book, The Intention Economy. Rather than continue to allow vendors to blindly guess as to what we want, we should all be moving toward a new market equilibrium in which we consciously and directly signal our intentions to the market. Companies that respond to our intentions will reap larger profit, waste less money on dubious advertising initiatives, and enjoy real customer loyalty.
 
ComScore: Samsung Widens Lead As Top Mobile Brand In U.S., Android 51% Of All Smartphones Top
samsung_galaxy_s_iiSamsung doesn't break out actual unit sales figures for its mobile handset business, but among analyst houses, many are estimating that it is the brand to beat anyway. The latest comes from ComScore, which today released the results of a poll of 30,000 U.S. consumers. It found that Samsung accounted for 26 percent of all handsets -- smartphone or otherwise -- used in the U.S. in the last three months. LG came in second position at 19.3 percent. And smartphone use continues to grow: there are now 106 million smartphones in use in the U.S., a nine percent increase over the previous quarter, and so do the services associated with them: a full 50 percent of consumers have now downloaded and used mobile apps.
 
Scoople Lets You "Ask Your Friends" About The News Top
InboxI recently wrote about news gamification app Scoople, and today, the company is releasing a new version with improved social interaction. When you use Scoople, you read news stories (usually aggregated by Scoople from multiple articles) then fill out an associated poll. You can enter your own opinion and also predict the opinion of the larger community — people who do the best are recognized on Scoople's leaderboard. (Currently you need to be accurate 70 percent of the time to get on the leaderboard.) The model seems to be really addictive for some people — the company says the average Scoople user has now filled out 45 surveys. However, with a new "Ask Your Friends" feature, the company is hoping to broaden its reach beyond the serious news junkies.
 
Meet MillionShort: The Google Hack That Could Be The Antidote To Search Engine Spam Top
Screen Shot 2012-05-01 at 10.00.20 AMRecently I tried to do a Google search for a wine to pair with swordfish, and it was pretty much a disaster (first world problems, I know, but still.) The problem is, web search results for certain topics are just overloaded with "search engine optimized" (SEO) content, which is very often just spam meant to attract people to dummy websites overloaded with ads. Of course, search engines work overtime to stay one step ahead of the SEO spammers, but sometimes the bad guys just win out. That's what a neat hack called MillionShort aims to help with. The website is a search engine that lets you remove the top million (or 100,000, or 10,000, or whatever) hits from the results list.
 
Facebook Wants Us To Save Lives Through Organ Donation, Will We Follow Through? Top
facebook_logoThis morning, Facebook announced a new feature which lets users post to their Facebook timeline that they've chosen to be an organ donor. The idea is that friends will choose to share the story of their decision with friends, hopefully tapping into Facebook's natural virality to encourage others to do the same. (Hey, it's worth a shot.) Facebook is also helpfully linking to state and national organ donation registries, where appropriate. While obviously a move worthy of mention given Facebook's size and scale, the story has been overhyped by Facebook and media as a new feature that "will save lives." That's going a bit far. It is one thing to post on Facebook, it's quite another to actually impact change.
 
Twitter Improves Discover Tab To Surface More Interesting Content, Promises To Make It "Magical" Top
twitter_newbird_boxed_whiteonblueOne of the core features of Twitter's redesign last year was the addition of the Discover tab in the web and mobile interface. Today, the company is launching the first major update to this feature. The new and improved Discover tab, says Twitter, will now begin to surface more personalized content. Starting today, the algorithm that populates this feature with stories will now also look at which tweets are popular among the people you follow and their friends. This should make for a more personalized experience and highlight content that is more relevant to the individual user.
 
Help! The TechCrunch Not-So-Mini NYC Meet-Up Needs Some Volunteers! Top
Help-WantedWhen John and I first chatted out the idea of an NYC-based TC meet-up, we expected around 500 attendees. Last week we hit the 700 mark, and today we've surpassed 1,000 RSVPs. Luckily, our fine sponsors have made sure that there'll be enough beer and pizza for everyone. But, we're still going to need a little help.
 
CareZone, A Service For Caregivers, Raises $13M From NEA, Catamount And Jonathan Schwartz Top
CareZone-Logo_Symbol

CareZone has been busy discovering a few key markets since launching in February, chief executive Jonathan Schwartz tells me. And the results are good enough to warrant a big round of funding: nearly $13 million from New Enterprise Associates, Catamount Ventures, and Schwartz himself.

Founded as an intranet for people who are taking care of aging parents, children, or anyone else in need of special attention, it has connected with communities around autism, Parkinson's disease, and other illnesses.

 
Fly Or Die: HTC Titan II Top
Screen shot 2012-05-01 at 10.57.26 AMThe HTC Titan II is a symbol for an excellent partnership. I love HTC hardware and I love Windows Phone. It should be a match made in heaven, but unfortunately it's not. John and I sat down in the studio yesterday with the giant 4.7-inch hunk of glass and plastic, and we came away with pretty negative sentiments toward the device.
 
Following Strategic Investment, Enterprise Software Maker Socialtext Joins Up With Peoplefluent Top
Socialtext PictureSocial enterprise software maker Socialtext is today announcing having received strategic investment from Bedford Funding that will now see the service joining the Peoplefluent family of products. Bedford Funding, for those unaware, is a $1.4 billion tech investment fund and owner of Peoplefluent, the maker of Talent Management software for business customers. Following the investment, Socialtext will be integrated into Peoplefluent's own Human Capital Management (HCM) Suite, which focuses on offering tools to help companies recruit better. With the Socialtext integration, employees on the suite will be able to collaborate with each other and their greater enterprise, the company says.
 
Tired Of Talk? Here's What BlackBerry 10 Might Look Like Top
bb10conceptEven though we still don't know when RIM will get around to launching it, CEO Thorsten Heins gave us a few brief glimpses at what BlackBerry 10 would be able to do during his keynote address at the BlackBerry World conference. But what's that? You missed the keynote? Well, just for you, here's the video that Heins played during his time on stage that shows off what the company's forthcoming mobile operating system could look like when it officially launches later this year.
 
Cod Liver Oil: Like It Or Not, Apple's Gatekeeper Makes Sense Top
Screen Shot 2012-05-01 at 11.21.11 AMElectronic Freedom Fighters and knee-jerk reactionaries: prepare your big drums because here comes the cause of the week. We learned about Gatekeeper, Apple's app signing solution that ensures "rogue" apps can't infect your computer, a few months ago when the company announced the coming of a new OS, Mountain Lion. Developers recently received a note reminding them to begin implementing Gatekeeper features or, well, nothing bad will happen:
"The Mac App Store is the safest place for users to get software for their Mac, but we also want to protect users when they get applications from other places. Gatekeeper is a new feature in OS X Mountain Lion that helps protect users from downloading and installing malicious software. Signing your applications, plug-ins, and installer packages with a Developer ID certificate lets Gatekeeper verify that they are not known malware and have not been tampered with. Mac Developer Program members can sign applications with their Developer ID now to get ready for Gatekeeper. If you're not already a member, join the Mac Developer Program today."
 
SigFig Launches To Be The Data-Driven Financial Planner Of Your Dreams Top
Screen Shot 2012-05-01 at 8.23.02 AMWhether you have $10,000 or $10 million, trying to find help to manage your investments can be a minefield. Enter SigFig. Launching in public beta mode today, SigFig is a web application that tracks all of your various investments -- bank accounts, 401k plans, IRAs, stock holdings, and the like -- and gives tailored recommendations about your portfolio's performance and changes that you could make. It's a very visual product, so SigFig's co-founders Mike Sha and Parker Conrad came to TechCrunch TV to give a detailed walk-through, which you can watch in full in the video embedded above. Here's how it works:
 
Newvem Raises $4M From Greylock, Eric Schmidt To Help AWS Customers Spend Less Money Top
newStartup Newvem, which offers a SaaS based service for Amazon/AWS customers that aims to help businesses spend less money and gain more value from Amazon's cloud infrastructure, has raised $4 million in funding from Greylock Partners with participation from Index Ventures and Eric Schmidt's Innovation Endeavors, as well as angel investors, including David Strohm, George Kadifa, and Maurice Werdegar. As part of this financing round, Greylock's Erez Ofer is joining the Newvem board of directors. Basically, Newvem's KnowYourCloud Analytics is a free SaaS solution for Amazon AWS customers, that provides a 360-degree view of AWS cloud usage, revealing issues and anomalies in their cloud, and recommending actionable insights that help solve not just cost efficiency, but security, availability, and utilization issues.
 

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