Tuesday, July 31, 2012

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This DIY Lego Wheelchair Can Carry (Small) Passengers Top
2012-07-29-21.16.10-1024x764Burf aka Simon Burfield is an iOS programmer and Lego experimenter who tries to take building blocks to the next level. Interestingly, if this wild rideable Lego wheelchair is any indication, he's left the next level and is now firmly in the distant future. Made with 12 Lego NXT motors and 12 multi-directional wheels, this carefully designed prototype can carry around a 198 pound person and is controlled via a small joystick. It can move in multiple directions and even roll side to side to "strafe" through a room.
 
Verizon Can No Longer Charge For Tethering, FCC Declares Top
tetherballVerizon has been slapped with a $1.25 million fine for charging customers to use their cell phones as a mobile Internet hotspot, and has declared that it must allow tethering for free. Google must also reinstate tethering applications from its Android store, which Verizon had asked them to remove. This is especially great news considering more Android devices (and perhaps the next iPhone) are 4G compatible, making mobile Internet nearly universal for Verizon customers. Sprint, T-Mobile, and AT&T customers should prepare to be gripped by overwhelming jealousy, as it only applies to Verizon.
 
Mozilla Will Nearly Double SF Office, Add 125 People In Early 2013 Top
Mozilla_3893Mozilla announced today that they are expanding the size of their San Francisco office and will add 125 employees to the office's current staff of 150 by early 2013. Mozilla currently occupies the seventh and part of the third floor of the Hills Brothers Building at 2 Harrison St. and will expand to include the first two floors.
 
Facebook Spent $24 Million On Acqui-hires, $633 Million On Patents During The First Half Of 2012 Top
we-are-hiringFacebook makes a good number of talent-focused acquisitions, aka acqui-hires -- but the cost of each deal is normally kept under wraps. In a regulatory quarterly filing the company made today, though, it put an aggregate pricetag on all those "non-material" sized deals it made in the first half of this year: $24 million. Facebook also broke out the exact amount of money it spent on acquiring patents and IP, that it was pretty significant: $633 million. The bulk of that -- $550 million -- went to its purchase of hundreds of AOL patents from Microsoft.
 
Google Delays The Nexus Q To Make It "Better," But Pre-Order Customers Get A Free Dev Unit Top
google-nexus-q,W-A-343306-13Here's hoping you weren't planning on using one of Google's Nexus Qs any time soon -- the company has just revealed to pre-order customers that it has postponed the device's consumer launch because users wanted more out of the curious little orb. That said, Google's tiny media streamer has been unceremoniously yanked from the Google Play store. All interested consumers can do now is give the company their email address for future updates on the situation, as there's no word yet on when Google expects that full-blown launch to take place.
 
Wildfire Only Sells Ads Through Its Partner Adaptly, So Will Google Buy Them Too? Top
Google Adaptly DoneWildfire, just acquired by Google, isn't a social ads company. It relies on its partner Adaptly for access to ads APIs for Facebook and other sites. That means Google may buy Adaptly or another ads company any minute now. Otherwise Google will have to split the profits of social ads Wildfire will continue to sell through Adaptly. As Facebook Sponsored Stories and Twitter's promoted products are taking off, being the middleman between brands and social networks is become quite lucrative and its only sensible that Google would want to own a social ads API tool and/or service.
 
Zynga And Bump Delve Into Their Social-Mobile Future This Friday At The Facebook Ecosystem CrunchUp Top
crunchup2012-wide-for-wp-1Mobile usage is upending web empires, as Silicon Valley has come to realize over the last few years. And we'll have two companies smack in the middle of the shift present at our Facebook Ecosystem CrunchUp this Friday in Redwood City, Calif., sharing how they're surviving in this new world. Get your CrunchUp tickets here. Zynga, the dominant social game developer on Facebook, has been both building and buying its way into mobile gaming to adapt for this change. It's had a few wins, like the growth of its "With Friends" franchise, and some losses, like the decline of Draw Something's traffic. Bump, meanwhile, has been mobile-first since it launched in 2009. The company started out with an app that lets you swap contact information and other data by tapping two phones together -- and it's on track to hit 100 million downloads later this summer. And the company has just gone straight to the heart of mobile-social, with the launch of a new app called Flock that uses geofencing to help you share photos more easily (we came away impressed).
 
Twitter Apologizes For Conflict Of Interest, Pointing Out Olympics Tweet To NBC Top
twitter-nbc1Twitter posted an explanation and apology on their blog regarding the Guy Adams/NBC debacle. "That said, we want to apologize for the part of this story that we did mess up," the post reads.
 
Stagedom: An iPhone App To Follow Updates From Your Favorite Musicians Top
stagedom_homeShahar Nechmad, who previously founded and ran web analytics company NuComony (which was acquired by LivePerson), has a new startup whose pitch, at least, is a little more fun. Stagedom aims to be the app where people can find new music, tour dates, videos, and other updates from their favorite artists. Nechmad admits that music tech is a pretty crowded field right now, but he says that particularly on mobile, no one has really created a unified experience to get everything you want from your favorite musicians — think of the way that most bands once treated Myspace pages as the de facto websites, offering everything that a fan might need. Now, a band's content is usually scattered across various social sites and services like YouTube. Some musicians create their own apps, but as Nechmad notes, "No one want to install 15 different apps." And on the artist side, you want to reach your casual fans too, not just the diehards who are most likely to install your app.
 
Apple Lawyer Outs Internal Samsung Documents That Claim The iPhone Is "Easy To Copy" Top
samsung_phones_before_after_iphoneToday the first shots were fired in the high-profile U.S. patent war between Apple and Samsung, beginning with Apple's opening statements. And no punch was pulled — Apple's lawyer made a few hard-hitting claims in the courtroom, providing documents that show Samsung thought the iPhone was "easy to copy." Harold McElhinny (Apple's lawyer) also showed documents prepared by a Samsung executive that claim that the company was in a "crisis of design" because of the iPhone. The presentation also included images of Samsung's design evolution between pre-iPhone time and now. But despite the evidence, McElhinny's most crushing blow may have come in the form of a simple and well-known tech adage: "As we all know, it is easier to copy than to innovate. Apple had already taken the risks."
 
Amazon Updates Cloud Player: Scan & Match Imports, 256 Kbps Audio Upgrades, Premium Accounts Top
cloudplayer-logoAmazon just updated its Cloud Player music storage service with a number of interesting new features, including an iTunes Match-like scan and match technology that allows Amazon to just scan a user's music library and add matching songs to that user's library without having to upload those songs one by one. Just like Apple, Amazon now also upgrades the audio quality of matched files to 256kbps audio, no matter the original bitrate. In addition, Amazon will automatically move all of its users' previously purchased music from its MP3 store to Cloud Player. To enable these new scan and match imports and audio upgrades, Amazon signed deals with Sony Music Entertainment, EMI Music, Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, and more than 150 independent distributors, aggregators and music publishers.
 
Google Acquires Wildfire, Will Now Sell Facebook And Twitter Marketing Services Top
blog_imageGoogle has just bought social marketing software developer Wildfire, which lets brands serve marketing and ad campaigns on Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube and LinkedIn. Wildfire has grown to 400 employees over the last four years and now serves 16,000 customers. Several sources and blogs say the sale price was around $250 million. The acquisition will allow Google to provide advanced software and services to brands who want to run contests, sweepstakes, branded games and more on Google+. Wildfire will still operate as a marketing tool for brands on Google's competing platforms, including Facebook, putting the search giant in a curious position where it earns money on the success of its rivals.
 
NBC Retracts Complaint, Guy Adams Is Back On Twitter Top
twitter-nbc2Independent reporter Guy Adams' Twitter account was restored today. It was suspended after Adams tweeted NBC President of the Olympics Gary Zenkel's email address. Adams tweeted in two parts, "Twitter emails to tell me: "we have just received an update from the complainant retracting their original request...Therefore your account has been unsuspended." No further explanation given, or apology offered."
 
Welcome To The New And Improved Yahoo Mail. And It's Crashing. Top
Screen Shot 2012-07-31 at 10.44.47 AMYahoo Mail users were surprised today by an upgrade that never went through, blocking them from accessing their inbox. Hundreds of users have taken to Yahoo Answers to try to figure out what's happening. Yahoo user "Brad" started a popular thread, "I got a message that Yahoo Mail has been upgraded, that it's faster and easier to use. Yahoo said I needed to consent to the new terms of service. I clicked Accept and the screen blinks and gives me the same Accept or No Thanks option."
 
Is The #NBCFail On Olympics Coverage Giving Rise To VPN Pirates? Top
BBC streaming blocked? StrongVPN promoted tweetWe've been pretty outspoken about NBC's coverage of the Olympics. From what looked like a good start full of social media promise, the broadcaster has failed to deliver the most crucial element of all: a large, unfettered river of live sports content from the event itself, available to anyone, not just cable subscribers (coverage here, here, and here). It's been getting a lot of grief on platforms like Twitter, but one subset of annoyed U.S. consumers have taken a more industrious route: getting VPN services. "We have seen a very large spike in UK VPN sales in the last week," says Phil Blancett, president of StrongVPN.com, a VPN service provider that gives customers the option of a U.S. or UK IP address. With a UK address, users can effectively visit BBC's site, as if they were in the UK, meaning they would have full access to the Beeb's online Olympics video offerings: live plus catch-up streams for every single event, tagged in small chunks based on individual athletes for easy navigation. A regular U.S. user would normally be geo-blocked from accessing this -- it is available, theoretically, only to UK TV license fee holders.
 
Caught Blue-Handed: Someone Is Buying Mitt Romney Twitter Popularity Top
edited-countIt looks like someone made the colossally silly decision to buy Mitt Romney Twitter followers. In just a few days earlier this month, Romney saw of a spike of 150,000 Twitter followers, and most of these likely fake accounts, had less than 2 followers themselves, according to some crack reporting by The Atlantic. It is unknown whether the purchase was made by someone at Camp Romney, a clueless PR flack, or a conspirator trying to make him look bad. Regardless, fibbing politicians are a serious affront to democracy, and someone owes the American people an explanation.
 
Google May Soon Give Chromebook Users 100 GB Of Free Google Drive Storage Top
Google DriveGoogle's browser-centric Chromebooks have now found their way into your local big-box electronic store and they seem to be a hit with schools, but there is little evidence that mainstream users are warming up to Google's ChromeOS devices. Nevertheless, the company is pressing on with this program and now it looks like Google has a nice perk for ChromeOS users up its sleeve that could make Chromebooks a bit more palatable for mainstream users. Google+ user Francois Beaufort recently noticed a few lines in Google's source code for ChromeOS that seem to indicate that Google is about to give Chromebook owners 100GB of free online storage on Google Drive.
 
Facebook Unleashes Powerful Marketing Tool: Page Post Targeting By Age, Gender, Likes, and More Top
Facebook Ad Targeting BullseyeToday Facebook begins the roll out of "Page Post Targeting Enhanced" allowing Pages to target their posts to segments of fans with certain genders, ages, and other characteristics so they can tailor market messages to specific audiences. For example, a business could tell teens they've got "swag" while telling adults they're "reputable". Until now, Facebook Pages could only target posts to fans of certain locations and languages, but the social network just told some admins that the new targeting options are opening to a select number of Pages today and will roll out to all Pages over the next few weeks. The tool could make Pages even more useful to marketers and convince them to pay for ads to buy additional fans.
 
Shelby.tv Raises $2.2 Million More To Rebuild Its Video Discovery Platform From The Ground Up Top
shelbylogoWhen Shelby.tv shut down its online video discovery engine earlier this month, some viewed it as a sign that the New York City-based startup was in trouble. While Reece Pacheco assured users that and headcount would remain the same, it's not every day that a startup just pulls its product without having something new ready to show off. Well, breathe easy Shelby.tv fans: Investors have doubled down with a new round of funding, allowing the team to continuing working on bringing the next version of its video discovery app to market. Last summer, Shelby.tv raised $1.5 million from Avalon Ventures and a group of angels that included DFJ's Tim Draper, Buddy Media's Mike Lazerow, Simulmedia's Dave Morgan, former Flatiron Partners member Jerry Colonna, Hashable's Mike Yavonditte, extension.fm's Charles Smith, Saba's Bobby Yazdani, Hearst's George Kliavkoff, and Allen Morgan, who was formerly with Mayfield. Avalon's Rich Levandov and Brady Bohrmann also joined the board. Now those investors are back for more, putting an additional $2.2 million into Shelby.tv.
 
Y Combinator-Backed Hiptype Launches A Google Analytics-Style Service For E-Books Top
Hiptype_LogoA new startup called Hiptype wants to bring all the analytics data that has become standard on the Web to the world of e-books. Hiptype's co-founders, James Levy (CEO) and Sohail Prasad (CTO), describe the product as "Google Analytics for e-books." They say they were collaborating on an e-book of their own about big data, and they were surprised to find that the information available via the big e-book stores is limited to download numbers/sales, user ratings, and reviews. There are other products trying to provide more detailed analytics, but they require publishers to go through a specific store.
 

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