Thursday, September 27, 2012

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Google Marks 14 Years Organizing The World's Information With Birthday Doodle Top
Googles_14th_Birthday-2012-2-hpThe chameleonic Google Doodle is currently marking a very special occasion for Mountain View: today is the search giant's 14th birthday. The Birthday Doodle is a rather simplistic affair, compared to some Doodles past (playable Pacman was a particular highlight) -- showing a layer cake that breaks down to form the Google logo, while the cake's candles rearrange to chalk up the 14 years since Larry and Sergey set up their startup shop in a Menlo Park garage.
 
12 Tips To Building a Successful Startup Community Where You Live Top
aeriel-viewEditor's Note: This is a guest post by Mark Suster (@msuster), a 2x entrepreneur, now VC at GRP Partners. Read more about Suster at Bothsidesofthetable In the first phase of the Internet - roughly from 1995-2005 it was difficult to build massive Internet-based companies outside of Silicon Valley. The big companies to be built and scaled were mostly infrastructure: databases, routers, browsers, spam filters, search engines and the like. Plus the obvious initial pioneers of the web like Yahoo!, eBay, Craigslist and so on. But the infrastructure is now in such a state the we're seeing the emergence of large tech businesses being built all across the United States including Gilt Groupe & Etsy in NYC, Living Social in DC, Groupon in Chicago, DemandMedia & Cornerstone OnDemand in LA. And many more. What does it take to build a successful entrepreneurial community? Can you build one locally? This post explores the 12 components of every successful startup city. Details after the jump.
 
New Zealand Prime Minister Apologizes To Kim Dotcom As Megaupload Nears Relaunch Top
3dea73f8c0ea11e1aebc1231381b647a_7"Headlines from Britain to Malaysia, France to China, Germany to Brazil, Australia to the US. An apology can go a long way," said Kim Dotcom in a recent tweet. It's true. This comes after the New Zealand Prime Minister John Key issued a rather frank apology to the internet mogul saying, "I apologize to Mr Dotcom. I apologize to New Zealanders because every New Zealander... is entitled to be protected from the law when it comes to the GCSB, and we failed to provide that appropriate protection for him." PM John Key is of course referring to the spying conducted by the New Zealand government which lead to the dramatic take-down of Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom. As it turns out, members of the New Zealand government conducted the invasive investigation under the pretense Dotcom was a foreign nationalist when in fact he had acquired residency status, thus affording him the rights of the country.
 
Amazon Rejects Apple's Claim That Its Use Of "App Store" Is False Advertising Top
images-screenshots-captures-amazon-appstore-logo-21032011_00B4000000001978Flashback! Remember this one? Last year, Apple filed a trademark lawsuit against Amazon, claiming that Amazon's use of the term "App Store" (as in "Amazon Appstore") could contribute to confusion among consumers as it was not, as Amazon believes, "a generic term." Other app store providers like Microsoft and Google have made a point to brand their app stores differently by calling them the Windows Marketplace and the Android Market (now Google Play), respectively, just to be on the safe side. But Amazon has stuck to its guns, saying that the phrase should not be subject to trademark protection. The case is still underway, and in a filing on Wednesday with the U.S. District Court in Oakland, California, Amazon has asked a federal judge to reject Apple's "false advertising" claim.
 
HowAboutWe Provides Hand-Picked Date Ideas To Help Couples Fall And Stay In Love Top
Screen Shot 2012-09-26 at 4.29.46 PMHelping couples to stay happy, connected and in love is what HowAboutWe is all about. Each month, couples receive a DateBook with beautifully presented, one-of-a-kind dates specifically curated for its users. Couples just have to select their romantic local experiences and the service will take care of everything. On top of that, the newly launched service offers a more traditional dating site to find someone special to go on those dates. The date remains the common thread between the two core products.
 
Pew Pew Pew! iPhone 5 Destroyed By Lasers [Video] Top
laseriphoneI've avoided posting videos of people shooting the iPhone with bullets, dropping iPhones into squirrel pens, and ingesting and then excreting iPhones because I think such videos are wasteful and pointless. But this video is a little too cool not to post.
 
Website Creation Platform Joomla Debuts Version 3.0, Mobile And Tablet Optimized Thanks To Twitter Bootstrap Top
joomla logoJoomla, the open-source-based content management system that competes against WordPress, Drupal and others in the world of blog, website and intranet creation, has today taken a step up in the world of converged media. The company, which says its platform powers 3% of all the websites in the world, has released version 3.0 of its CMS, which automatically optimizes content created on the platform for the mobile web. The company says that its mobile implementation is the first to be built on Twitter Bootstrap, the mobile-friendly toolkit developed by Twitter and released on Github in August 2011 that is a collection of base CSS styles for typography, forms, buttons, tables, grids, navigation, alerts and more that are already widely used in the development of websites and apps.
 
Nokia's Lumia 820 And 920 To Hit Italy And Germany In November, Russia In Q4 Top
nokia-lumia-820Nokia was eager to talk up its new pair of Windows Phone 8-powered Lumia smartphones earlier this month, but the company left one weighty question on the table: when can we actually get our hands on them? Well, here in the U.S. we still don't have anything more than rumors to go on, but Nokia's Russian, German, and Italian arms have begun to reveal their pricing and availability plans.
 
Apple's Siri Patent Application Hints At Apps Becoming A Backround Service Layer Top
apple-siriApple has filed a sizeable 51-page patent application continuation with the USPTO according to AppleInsider, which covers Siri in general terms, described broadly as an "Intelligent Automated Assistant." The filing includes screenshots of Siri pre-Apple acquisition, and generally describes in detail the system however many hundreds of millions of iOS device users are already using. But it also sketches a system in which Siri is much more in the driver seat, handling the task of finding the right app for the right job while the user just makes his or her needs known.
 
Bad Piggies Is A Hit, Taking Just 3 Hours To Hit The Top Spot In The U.S. App Store Top
Screen shot 2012-09-27 at 9.00.56 AMAnd just like that, Rovio is back to number 1. The Finnish gaming company today launched Bad Piggies, an entirely new game that features some of the same characters from the smash hit, Angry Birds. In this iteration, however, you play the game from the pigs' point of view, building vehicle-style contraptions to get you through the map. The game only launched a few hours ago, at 3am ET, yet Ville Heijari of Rovio, tweeted that the game had already hit the top spot in iTunes in the U.S. It took only three hours or so.
 
Quantcast Open Sources Hadoop Distributed File System Alternative Top
Haddop Elephant LogoQuantcast, an internet audience measurement and ad targeting service, processes over 20 petabytes of data per day using Apache Hadoop and its own custom file system called Quantcast File System (QFS). Today, it's making that technology available to as open source under an Apache license. You can now find it on GitHub.
 
True Ventures-Backed Madefire Brings Its Digital Comics To The iPhone Top
madefire iphone 5Madefire just launched the iPhone (and iPod Touch) version of its comics-reading app, expanding beyond the iPad and optimizing the experience for a smaller screen. The company has recruited some impressive names both inside and outside the comics world, with an advisory board that includes well-known comics artists Dave Gibbons (Watchmen) and Bill Sinkiewicz (Elektra: Assassin), plus Automattic CEO Toni Schneider, Flipboard CEO Mike McCue, and angel investor/former Apple SVP Sina Tamaddon.
 
Magazine Publisher Future Charts Path Back To Profitability Thanks To Apple's Newsstand Top
future-cameraFuture, an international publisher whose titles include T3, Official Xbox Magazine and websites like GamesRadar, revealed in a new trading update today that it is building up a good incoming gross revenue stream from Apple Newsstand, which has driven over £5M (roughly $8M U.S) in total since Newsstand's launch in October. Increases in digital revenues are offsetting the decline on the print side, CEO Mark Wood told me in an interview, and that trend is expected to continue.
 
Rovio's Bad Piggies Goes Live In The App Store: Build Bridges, Don't Burn Them Top
Screen shot 2012-09-27 at 9.00.56 AMAngry Birds is now a household name. Even Rovio (the company responsible for the ultra-successful bird-flinging app) is a logo as familiar as EA's. But today we'll have to add another bit of vocabulary to our lexicon. Prepare yourselves: Bad Piggies has arrived. We've known about Bad Piggies for a while, but only a lucky few have actually played the game. Quite a bit hinges on it. As you justly may have forgotten, Amazing Alex (Rovio's other game) hasn't exactly made a splash. According to Finnish analyst firm Alekstra, Rovio's revenue is dropping like a rock as of late.
 
Apple Patents In-Screen Speakers, Flexible Displays And Tactile Keyboards For Future iPhones And iPads Top
iPhone-flex-display-speakersApple has published a new patent today, one that takes the possibilities for future iOS mobile devices and adds a whole heap of abilities seemingly ripped from sci-fi thanks to flexible display technology. Some of this we've seen before: tactile keyboards that essentially rise up to meet your fingers have long been a theoretically possible addition to screens, and there's been talk of Apple using them in the past. But a display that's also a built-in surround sound system? That's new.
 
BlueStacks Partners With AMD, Bringing 500,000 Android Apps To Windows PCs Top
New BlueStacks LogoBlueStacks, the startup that's bringing Android applications to Mac and Windows computers, is today announcing a partnership with chipmaker AMD which will see its catalog of applications optimized for AMD-powered Windows 7 and Windows 8 PCs. With the launch of "AMD AppZone," the BlueStacks technology has been specifically optimized for AMD GPUs and APUs, similar to how Intel's PC app store, AppUp, has been optimized to run on Intel-powered Ultrabooks. In addition, today's announcement opens the door to future partnerships with PC makers, which may see them preloading BlueStacks technology onto new PCs. BlueStacks says it's now in discussions with some big-name manufacturers about pre-installations, but has nothing specific to announce on this point.
 
App Marketing Costs Decline In August As Developers Held Their Breath For The iPhone 5 Top
app-marketing-costsThe cost of bringing in new users to mobile apps declined last month as developers and consumers waited for the new iPhone 5. The average daily download volume for the top 200 free iPhone apps dropped by 7.3 percent to 4.05 million. The cost to acquire a loyal user, or one that opens an app three times, fell by 20 cents to $1.34. Many of the very biggest mobile developers like Groupon and gaming companies like GREE and Zynga have to spend multiple millions of dollars a month in user acquisition to make sure they have a constant flow of new and returning customers. Fiksu, which helps developers optimize how they spend on different app marketing channels, tracks billions of app actions every month to figure out which ones are most cost effective.
 
Google's Eric Schmidt Talks Apple Partnership, Samsung And Patent Problems Top
Eric Schmidt D9Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt is in Seoul attending the launch of the Nexus 7 in Korea Thursday, and he's been very talkative on a number of topics, as he was in Tokyo earlier in the week. This time around, he spoke out about patent problems, the search giant's relationship with Apple, and Samsung at a launch event at the Grand Intercontinental Seoul.
 
Europe Shoots For The Clouds: EC Lays Out New Cloud Strategy To Add €160B To EU GDP By 2020 Top
linuxcon-cloudsUp to now, the European Commission has kept a relatively light position on where it stands with cloud services -- putting more effort into the wider issues like broadband and mobile regulation and ensuring that users all get a fair deal as these services continue to grow. Today that changed, as the EC unveiled a high-level cloud services strategy, with the aim of adding €160 billion ($206 billion) to the region's economy by 2020, equivalent to 1% of total GDP. Plans include improving interoperability standards; setting up lists of "trustworthy" cloud providers; taking a part in regulating how service level agreements (SLAs) should work; and creating a formalized structure for how governments and other public bodies in the region should procure in cloud services: the public sector accounts for 20% of all IT spend in the European Union.
 
EU To Charge Microsoft Over Browser Compliance Breach, Still In Talks With Google Over Search Top
Flag of European UnionEuropean Union regulators are preparing to charge Microsoft for failing to comply with a 2009 ruling ordering the company to offer users of its desktop operating system a choice of web browsers, Reuters is reporting. The EU opened an investigation into the case back in July, to determine whether Microsoft had kept the commitments it made under the antitrust ruling which stipulated users should be offered a choice of browsers to ensure a more level playing field for competitors to Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser.
 

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