Monday, October 1, 2012

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Square Competitor mPowa Inks Multi-Million-Dollar White Label Deal With First National Bank, South Africa Top
mpowa new photoSquare is gearing up to launch its first international services by the end of this year, but in the meantime, one of its many dongle-based mobile payment competitors is building up outside of the U.S. Today mPowa -- who you may recall from "hand-gate" -- announced that it has signed a white-label deal with First National Bank in South Africa to offer its payment device in the country. The exact financial terms of the deal were not revealed but mPowa says its value is in the "multimillion pound" range. This is the first announced deal for UK-based mPowa, which is building its multiplatform (Android, iOS iPhone and iPad devices, Windows Phone and BlackBerry) mobile payments service both as a retail and wholesale/white-label offering. Under the terms of the deal, FNB will integrate mPowa's hardware and software into its existing merchant services, with FNB's own branding and look. mPowa's founder and CEO Dan Wagner tells TechCrunch that it is also working with several other financial institutions for similar products in Europe, the U.S., and Asia, as well as other markets in Africa.
 
Japan's Third Largest Carrier, Softbank, To Acquire Fourth Placed eAccess In Share Swap Worth $2.6BN Top
softbank-logoJapan's third largest carrier, Softbank, is to acquire fourth place carrier eAccess in a share swap deal valued at just under ¥200 billion ($2.6 billion), Reuters is reporting (original story at the Nikkei business daily).
 
Yandex Gives Google A One-Two Punch In Russia: A New Browser And App Store For The Local Search Giant Top
yandexYandex today is doubling down in its ongoing battle to make sure that Google doesn't eat away its market share in Russia, with the launch of two products that aim directly at some of Google's strongest touchpoints with consumers (and the wider ecosystem of developers). Yandex today is launching its own internet browser, and it is also launching its first app store -- with the former targeting desktop users and the latter a move to extend its position in the mobile market. The company says that both are being rolled out first in Russia, with the intention to then take them to other markets where Yandex operates, such as Turkey and other CIS republics -- and then take them worldwide. "We see Google pushing into the Russian market and we have to answer symmetrically," a Yandex insider told me. "We launched our own browser that is available in Russia now, but it will also be a product for the rest of CIS, Turkey and the World soon."
 
Online Games Giant Nexon Acquires Japanese Mobile Games Developer gloops For $468.4M Cash Top
nexon logoKorean free-to-play online games giant Nexon, which has been quietly outperforming Zynga since its IPO last December, has announced it's acquired all outstanding common shares of gloops, a developer of mobile games for Japanese games developer DeNA's social gaming platform Mobage. Nexon paid ¥36.5 billion ($468.4 million) in cash to acquire gloops. The transaction closed today.
 
Transphorm, An Energy Efficiency Groundbreaker Backed By Google, Raises $35M From Japan Powerhouses Top
transphormTransphorm, a company that has developed a power conversion technology to drive energy efficiency, emerging from stealth early last year, has today announced a Series E raise of $35 million led by a particularly strategic pair of investors. The round is led by the Innovation Network Corporation of Japan (INCJ) -- a government/manufacturing partnership with a procurement budget of up to $25 billion annually -- and Nihon Inter Electronics Company (NIEC), which will help Transphorm manufacture its power devices. Existing venture investors Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Foundation Capital, Google Ventures, Quantum Strategic Partners, Lux Capital and Bright Capital also participating. Today's funding announcement in particular points to big manufacturing companies' interest in Transphorm's technology and a strategic turn towards Japan. The INJC is a public-private partnership between the Japanese government and 27 major corporations, including Sharp, Sumitomo Electric, Toshiba and General Electric Company, Japan. INCJ has the capacity to invest up to ￥2 trillion (approximately US$25 billion).
 
Resignation Media Hires CEO John Ellis To Run Tapiture, Its Fast-Growing Pinterest For Men Top
tapitureThe idea of a "Pinterest for men" is something that gets thrown around a lot — a few months ago, it seemed like I'd get a pitch for a new one every day. Tapiture is one of the newer contenders, but its traffic numbers suggest that it has a chance at claiming the title. It helps that the site is associated with an established property, namely humor site theCHIVE. Leo Resig, co-founder of Resignation Media (which owns both properties) tells me Tapiture has its roots as a photo-tagging system on theCHIVE, before growing into a site of its own, where users can share (or, in Tapiture's terminology, tap) photos of attractive women, cool products, funny jokes, and anything else.
 
FreedomPop Opens Its Freemium Internet Service To The Masses With New Public Beta Top
BOLTPHOTONIt's been nearly a year since a company called FreedomPop announced its intentions (through a cryptically ambitious press release, no less) that it planned to bring "free broadband" to data-hungry users nationwide. The early FreedomPop site didn't inspire much confidence, but it wasn't long before the team's practical vision came to light. Put simply, users would get 500MB of free 4G wireless data each month, and a neat social layer would let those users trade data like the commodity FreedomPop thinks it should be. Now FreedomPop is taking another big step forward — the company has just launched its public beta, allowing users to take the nascent freemium Internet service for a spin.
 
Dish And The Dream Of Internet TV Top
dishmobileSo Dish is the latest company interested in building an Internet TV service, as Bloomberg reported last week that it was in talks with various networks about licensing their content and delivering it over-the-top. But while an over-the-top live TV would certainly be a welcome choice among video options, it's unlikely to be as cheap or as competitive as everyone would like it to be. Dish isn't alone in this pursuit: Over the last several years, we've heard about tech companies like Apple and Microsoft being in discussions with media companies to create their own bundled Internet TV services.
 
Adobe's Acrobat XI Boasts New PDF Editor And Touch-Friendly Interface — Upgrades Start At $139 Top
Content Editing-AXIAdobe is ready to share the details behind Acrobat XI, the latest version of its product suite for creating, editing, and viewing PDFs. The company demonstrated the product at a press event earlier this month, where the big emphasis was collaboration and productivity - more specifically, the "productivity gap" created by the challenges of working with documents. The company is releasing an IDC study that it commissioned showing (for example) that a company of 1,000 spends an average of 3.5 hours a week compiling different files and formats into one format, 3.7 hours gathering and consolidating feedback, and 3.4 hours consolidating data from forms. That adds up to an annual productivity cost of $15.9 million per year, the study says.
 
Testing Out Bodymetrics, The Startup That Wants To Be A Denim Shopper's Best Friend [TCTV] Top
Screen Shot 2012-09-30 at 8.32.01 PMFew industries with mainstream visibility and appeal have remained as unplugged from serious tech disruption as apparel and fashion. Of course, the realm of shopping has had major shifts, as has the marketing of clothing from the runway to the mall clothing rack. But the way that clothes are actually made has remained surprisingly unchanged in many ways. When it comes to the incredibly popular category of blue jeans, for example, clothing samples are typically designed to the proportions of a single human "fit model." Then, versions of that design are replicated in smaller and larger sizes to be sold to the masses. If you as a customer want more customization for fit, you better have a good tailor. A technology company called Bodymetrics is keen to bring a bit more personalization to this whole process.
 
Up Close With The Next Big Home Commodity: LED Lighting Top
LED_book_Cangeloso-Decontructed_PhilipsEditor's note: Sal Cangeloso is the editor of Geek.com and wrote a new book on an odd topic. It's called LED Lighting: A Primer to Lighting the Future and it focuses on the upcoming explosion in LED manufacturing, offering a basic understanding of the technology and an interesting look at the history of LED lights. You can buy LED Lighting: A Primer to Lighting the Future here and the first three commenters below get a copy of the book. Here is an excerpt from the first chapter of the book discussing the growth of lighting from old-timey incandescents to modern LED technology. The incandescent bulb is a good place to start with any talk about lighting. This design has had tremendous longevity (over 130 years) and it makes for a cheap, versatile bulb. Unfortunately, this design is also power-hungry, inefficient, short-lived (with some exceptions), and fragile. They produce a minimum amount of lumens-per-watt, though they've made appreciable gains over the years, and are highly sensitive to power conditions. For example, a 5% reduction in voltage could double the life of a bulb while only decreasing light output by 20%.
 
Cloning Instagram For Video Will Not Revolutionize Mobile Video Top
Sandeep CasiEditor's note: Sandeep Casi is founder and CEO of Cinemacraft. Previously, he worked on Virtual Reality at General Motors, led the Systems Group at Industrial Light + Magic (a division of Lucasfilm), and was a research scientist at Fuji Xerox Palo Alto Lab. He currently lives on a plane traveling between Tokyo and San Francisco. You can follow him on Twitter. Peter Csathy's recent article on TechCrunch does an excellent job of addressing the requirements of mobile video sharing and the need to rethink how video services are built. Peter is right about the six "ingredients" that will make an "Instagram for video" a success, but there is a critical point that should be added to his list: the inherent difficulty of video discovery, access, and engagement.
 
(R)evolution Top
Millet, GleanersI love my iPhone. I love connectivity. I hate the resulting obligation of connectivity - and that removing one's self from it now makes you the crazy person, the weirdo in the room. I recently saw a girl on some Bravo reality TV show the other day - entirely by accident, I swear* - talking about men she would and would not date. "I don't want someone who's not on Facebook," she said. "I don't want a man who doesn't have an iPhone or an email that isn't Gmail. If he has Yahoo or Hotmail, I think that's a big no-no," she added. Profound social commentary, actually: participate appropriately, or be abandoned by society. Become the un-dateable. The loser. The left behind. But our obsession with technology, the right and wrong of it, the speed with which we have to create, consume, and engage with it, is not sustainable. People aren't meant for this, not forever.
 
An Analysis Of Market Demand For Web Programming Languages Top
MarcGayleEditor's note: Marc Gayle is a Rails developer and founder of 5KMVP, where he builds Minimum Viable Products for just $5K. Follow him on Twitter.  A few months ago, I got the idea that one way to get leads for remote freelance gigs was to scour Craigslist. So, after doing the manual work of 'crawling' through at least 100 job postings by hand, I wrote a Ruby script to do the heavy lifting and filtering for me.
 
The Kindle Paperwhite Is A Reader's Dream Top
IMG_0872The 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
aircover family locatorWe 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
Gil ElbazEditor'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
main_image01Editor'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 No Ads PeaceFacebook 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 e-commerce 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
dirty dirty windows phoneMicrosoft'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.
 

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