The latest from TechCrunch
- The Kindle Paperwhite Is A Reader's Dream
- Soon-To-Be-Acquired BlueSprig's AirCover Family Locator Is An App That Lets You Track Those Close To You
- Data Markets: The Emerging Data Economy
- CoCoon, The Newest Home For Startups In Hong Kong
- Imagine No Ads On Facebook. It's Easy If You Try
- Microsoft Needs Windows Phone 7 – Not WP8 – To Win Significant Mobile Market Share
- Open Source Fear Mongering Is Ridiculous With The Advent Of Open APIs
- Logitech UE Boombox And Mobile Boombox Review: Bluetooth Speakers With A Rich Sound
- You Don't Need A Prototype To Raise A Seed Round
- Jason Calacanis' Next Act, And Another Pivot For Inside.com, As A 'Knowledge Community'
- Mass Persuasion, One User At A Time
- The Zooka Wireless Speaker Bar Turns Bad Audio Into Loud Noises!
- Iterations: We Know About B2B And B2C, But Don't Overlook B2D
- 5 Big Map App Issues Apple Must Solve
- Why Angel Investors Don't Make Money … And Advice For People Who Are Going To Become Angels Anyway
- Games Are A Difficult Investment Proposition, But Crowdfunding Could Change That
- Barnes & Noble Cuts GlowLight Nook Price To $119 As Amazon Prepares To Ship Its Paperwhite Kindles
- Simon Cowell And Will.i.am Are Teaming Up To Create An X Factor To Find The Next Mark Zuckerberg
- How Technology Is Empowering Teachers, Minting Millionaires, And Improving Education
- Italians Take Up The Torch To Ignite Their Own Tech Startup Scene
| The Kindle Paperwhite Is A Reader's Dream | Top |
 The e-reader arms race moves at a glacial pace. Barnes & Noble does one thing, Amazon follows. Amazon adds a feature and, slowly but surely, B&N adds the same thing. While the Kindle itself has been updated five times since 2008, it seems like it's been around for decades and has only just now gotten much, much better. The latest e-ink Kindle, the Paperwhite, is a beautiful device, plays catchup, and arguably surpasses the Nook Simple Touch with Glowlight. The device is as small and compact as the previous Kindle and yet is more completely featureless. Like the Nook Simple Touch, Amazon has eschewed all front buttons for a very usable touch interface. To start the device, you tap a small button on the bottom and then swipe to unlock. This two-step process ensures the device doesn't wake up in your bag. | |
| Soon-To-Be-Acquired BlueSprig's AirCover Family Locator Is An App That Lets You Track Those Close To You | Top |
 We last heard about AirCover -- an app developed by Founders Den co-founder Jason Johnson's own startup BlueSprig -- when it launched as an all-in-one protection assistant, letting people secure their devices from viruses, back up files, locate a lost iPhone or Android handset, track family members, and more. Fast forward to today, and Blue Sprig is launching the first offshoot of that flagship product, AirCover Family Locator, which takes the people-tracking element and extends it into a standalone app. But while you often hear of spinoffs coming out of the success of the original app, it seems that the opposite is the case here. | |
| Data Markets: The Emerging Data Economy | Top |
 Editor's note: Gil Elbaz is an entrepreneur and pioneer of natural language technology. In 1998, he co-founded Applied Semantics, which developed contextual advertising products, including ASI's AdSense. In 2003, Google acquired ASI, and after a four-year stint at Google, Gil found Factual in 2007. Follow him on Twitter. The term data market brings to mind a traditional structure in which vendors sell data for money. Indeed, this form of market is on the rise with companies large and small jumping in. Think of Azure Data Marketplace (Microsoft), data.com (Salesforce.com), InfoChimps.com, and DataMarkets.com. | |
| CoCoon, The Newest Home For Startups In Hong Kong | Top |
 Editor's note: Brenden Mulligan is an entrepreneur who created Onesheet, TipList, ArtistData, MorningPics, and PhotoPile. He's a mentor for 500 Startups and several startups. You can find him on Twitter at @mulligan. I recently returned from a trip where I embedded myself in a few Asian cities and worked as if I were home. The goal was to explore how technology has enabled legitimate work / travel. The first stop was Hong Kong, where I spent August 30 - September 4 meeting entrepreneurs and working. | |
| Imagine No Ads On Facebook. It's Easy If You Try | Top |
 Facebook has to show more ads to make more money, right? Wrong. Or at least not necessarily. If it expands its new off-site ad network and Gifts ecommerce product, it could rely on its data, not its traffic, to grow its revenues. That would leave its site and apps uncluttered, designed to maximize enjoyment, the amount we share, and our feeling of connection instead of page views. You might say I'm a dreamer... | |
| Microsoft Needs Windows Phone 7 – Not WP8 – To Win Significant Mobile Market Share | Top |
 Microsoft's rebooted mobile OS, Windows Phone 8, arrives in a matter of weeks -- so it's a case of Windows Phone 7 is dead, long live Windows Phone 8 right? Not so fast. WP8 is certainly Microsoft's new weapon of choice for competing in the smartphone space -- with no further OS updates planned for WP7 beyond the customizable homescreen in the 7.8 release -- but the older of the two WP siblings could still have a vital role to play in helping Redmond gain significant marketshare. | |
| Open Source Fear Mongering Is Ridiculous With The Advent Of Open APIs | Top |
 Open source fear mongering is still a reality. But in today's world, it is nuanced with the belief that an open enterprise means open APIs. They are not the same and should not be confused. | |
| Logitech UE Boombox And Mobile Boombox Review: Bluetooth Speakers With A Rich Sound | Top |
 Short version: These two battery-powered bluetooth speakers are the first modern boomboxes designed by the newly created subsidiary Logitech UE. Acquired in 2008, Ultimate Ears is well-known for its in-ear monitors used by many musicians in concert, not for its speakers. Even though the Logitech UE Mobile Boombox is limited, it is no surprise given the entry-level pricing. The real surprise comes from the big brother, the Logitech UE Boombox. | |
| You Don't Need A Prototype To Raise A Seed Round | Top |
 Editor's note: Editor's note: Mike Hirshland is the founder of Resolute.VC, a seed-stage venture capital firm. Prior to Resolute, he was a General Partner with Polaris Venture Partners where he led the creation of Dogpatch Labs as well as Polaris's investments in companies including Automattic (WordPress), Quantcast, KISSmetrics and Q1 Labs (IBM). Follow him on his Resolute.VC blog and Twitter. Back in the "old days" (as in 5 or 10 years ago) the very definition of a seed investment was investing before any product had been built or prototyped. Since then, the ability to build a startup on far less capital has made seed investing less risky. But, oddly, it seems that seed investors have become more risk averse. | |
| Jason Calacanis' Next Act, And Another Pivot For Inside.com, As A 'Knowledge Community' | Top |
 Serial entrepreneur and investor Jason Calacanis appears to be gearing up for the launch of his next venture, which may also signify one more pivot for his information site Mahalo. And that next step also looks like a new chapter for an internet domain that itself has seen a couple of pivots. On a tip from a reader, we visited inside.com and found this: | |
| Mass Persuasion, One User At A Time | Top |
 Marketers are increasingly personalizing their products and services to meet their customers' changing needs. But customization used in conjunction with powerful persuasion techniques is arming marketers with new weaponry to boost customer engagement and drive profits. | |
| The Zooka Wireless Speaker Bar Turns Bad Audio Into Loud Noises! | Top |
 Living in the digital age is a privilege. All the content you could want, whether it's music, video, games, or apps, is at the tip of your fingers every time you fire up the old MacBook or iPad. But these portable devices - our smartphones, tablets and notebooks - aren't really prepared to deliver that content at the highest quality possible. In terms of visuals, Retina displays and the like have gone a way to improve this, but where sound is concerned... | |
| Iterations: We Know About B2B And B2C, But Don't Overlook B2D | Top |
 Consumer and enterprise. Software and hardware. Infrastructure operations and user experience. Products and services. No matter the focus, innovation in technology, and especially around Silicon Valley, has ebbed and flowed across these areas. Some new companies focus on building solutions for the enterprise, and perhaps nowadays it's too easy to take the consumer route. The purpose of this week's column is to shed a bit of light on a growing class of new startups that are not selling directly to big companies or individuals generally, but focusing on software and infrastructure developers specifically. Selling into enterprise -- going B2B -- has been an attractive route for myriad reasons. There are barriers to entry in technological development, it takes real venture investment and time to build these products, and established sales channels and newer marketing avenues make the pursuit of these markets tantalizing. With the enterprise comes a promise of scale, size, and predictability, often in the form of pay-per-seat pricing models, built-in distribution, and lock-in. | |
| 5 Big Map App Issues Apple Must Solve | Top |
 Editor's note: Grant Ritchie is the CEO and founder of Locationary, which created the Saturn management and exchange platform for local business profiles and POI data. Follow Locationary here. The Apple iPhone 5 has been quite a story for a while with many "firsts": the fastest hardware, the most first-week sales, and so on. The device is also now famous for what it doesn't have: Google Maps. | |
| Why Angel Investors Don't Make Money … And Advice For People Who Are Going To Become Angels Anyway | Top |
 Editor's note: Andy Rachleff is President and CEO of Wealthfront, an SEC-registered online financial advisor. He serves as a member of the board of trustees and vice chairman of the endowment investment committee for University of Pennsylvania and as a member of the faculty at Stanford Graduate School of Business, where he teaches courses on technology entrepreneurship. Prior to Wealthfront, Andy co-founded and was general partner of Benchmark Capital. Everywhere I go in Silicon Valley I hear people discussing their angel investments. The conversations remind me of fish stories. People love recounting the one time they caught a big fish, not the many futile hours they spent waiting for a bite. | |
| Games Are A Difficult Investment Proposition, But Crowdfunding Could Change That | Top |
 Game startups have long struggled to find funding (especially in Europe) because of a tension between being perceived to be hit-driven (like movies) while actually needing to be funded like technology companies. However this year, crowdfunding has changed much about how we think of games and their fans, and hopefully will help us find a better way. | |
| Barnes & Noble Cuts GlowLight Nook Price To $119 As Amazon Prepares To Ship Its Paperwhite Kindles | Top |
 Amazon's shiny new Kindle Paperwhite will start trickling out of the company's myriad warehouses in short order, but it seems e-reading rival Barnes & Noble won't let Amazon set foot in the illuminated e-reader market unanswered. To that end, B&N has announced that it has cut the price of its conceptually similar Nook SimpleTouch with GlowLight from $139 to $119 — the same price as Amazon's ad-supported Paperwhite model. | |
| Simon Cowell And Will.i.am Are Teaming Up To Create An X Factor To Find The Next Mark Zuckerberg | Top |
 Simon Cowell is on the hunt for the next Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates. According to The Sun, the former American Idol and current X Factor judge is teaming up with Black Eyed Peas rapper Will.i.am to find the next hot tech entrepreneur. Details are sparse on when the show will debut and the exact format, but if the tech-focused show is anything like X Factor, it sounds like would-be entrepreneurs will be pitching their ideas to an all-star panel of judges. It also appears that the show will be based in the UK. | |
| How Technology Is Empowering Teachers, Minting Millionaires, And Improving Education | Top |
 Thanks to the rise of in-classroom technology, the focus in education tends to be on student engagement and how to improve learning. It becomes easy to forget the importance of great teachers. Startups, entrepreneurs, businesses (and the rest) need to remember that technology doesn't have to put teachers in jeopardy; it can help them lead the education evolution, even if their traditional role in the classroom becomes obsolete. | |
| Italians Take Up The Torch To Ignite Their Own Tech Startup Scene | Top |
 Last year, Italy's official statistics bureau, ISTAT, produced a report on the state of the Internet in Italy. It found that in world terms, Italy was below average in terms of Internet usage. The European average is 73 percent usage by population, and Italians were hovering around the 63 percent mark. But official statistics can be cruel and out of date - and it's clear now to any observer on the ground that whatever is happening in the home market, Italian tech startups aren't just shooting for their own country but for yours, as well. | |
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