Tuesday, October 2, 2012

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Google Announces New "Lightbox" Ad Format: Advertisers Only Pay When Users Expand The Ad Top
Anthro_Final_Blog2At Advertising Week, Google today introduced a new ad format called Lightbox, which is a standard ad unit that expands into a super-sized canvas takeover ad after a user hovers their mouse cursor over the ad. The company says that the ad will offer advertisers a way to pay only for engaged users, as advertisers will only pay when the ad is expanded, as opposed to clicked. For users, the ad is designed to minimize accidental expansions, as it requires the user to hover their mouse over the ad for two full seconds before the expansion occurs.
 
Atooma Is Like An IFTTT For Mobile And It's Insanely Clever Top
3During our CrunchUp in Rome last week - where which I was blown away by the amount of Italian startups that have emerged from almost nowhere in the last year - I came across an extremely interesting (and I don't use that phrase lightly) startup which deserves much closer examination. Atooma is an Android app [Google Play link] which is in itself like carrying around a mobile toolkit to create your own mini-apps - but without needing any coding skills. In fact, it operates almost like an App store inside an app sotre. But the closest thing it resembles is a sort of IFTTT for mobile, and some of its applications could well be insanely useful. Let me explain.
 
TripAdvisor Acquires Wanderfly To Continue Social Travel Push Top
tripadvisorTripAdvisor, a site that offers free guides and reviews for various traveling adventures, has just acquired Wanderfly. TripAdvisor has been slowly but surely integrating more social layers to its platform, with Friend of Friend reviews and a Local Picks Facebook app for restaurants. But the company's acquisition of Wanderfly is taking that social integration to the next level.
 
Does This Mole Look Weird? This App Will Tell You Top
Screen Shot 2012-10-02 at 9.49.31 AMAn app that tells you if your mole looks funny? That's stupid, right? But for folks who are walking around with little mole-shaped time bombs on their skin, understanding the difference between skin features and cancer is a pretty big deal. Doctor Mole allows you to scan moles (using an AR system that's reminiscent of Star Wars) and assess the Asymmetry, Border, Color, Diameter and Evolution (ABCDE). You can also store images of the mole over time and be reminded every few weeks to check the mole again, thereby ensuring it's not growing or changing.
 
Samsung Galaxy S III's Display Better Than iPhone 5′s On Paper, But Users Unlikely To Notice Top
sgs3vsiphone5According to a new report from research firm IHS, Apple's iPhone 5 display lags behind the Samsung Galaxy S III's on the important measure of color gamut, which creates a more vibrant, crisp image with better overall color saturation, but the difference in terms of how users perceive the margin could actually be negligible, and is unlikely to alter buying decisions.
 
Locu Launches To Merchants: Now Local Businesses Can Update Once To Publish Prices To Web, Mobile & Facebook Top
locuLocu, a Boston-based local business data provider born out of Sir Tim Berners-Lee's lab at MIT, is today officially launching its commerce dashboard for merchants. The company, which raised a $4 million Series A round led by General Catalyst in April, offers a proprietary system that can extract structured data about local businesses from their not-so-structured websites. Locu's initial focus was on restaurant data, which now accounts for around 80% of the data Locu has on hand.
 
YC-Alum Lockitron Is Back With A New Kit That Allows Smartphones To Control Dumb Deadbolts Top
lockitronLocks are a necessary evil. They keep the bad guys out while allowing good guys in. The Lockitron aims to make the point of entry as safe as possible, but also as convenient as possible. Plus, it's packed full of features including remote management, proximity entry through Bluetooth, and, even more fun, a vibration sensor that will notify the owner when someone is knocking on the door. The original Lockitron Deadbolt was a hit. A graduate from Y Combinator's 2009 summer class, the company sold $100k worth of units of the novel $299 kit since launching it in 2011. Put simply, it was a deadbolt that could be controlled by a smartphone. But it still had its downfalls. For one, it was a deadbolt replacement, requiring the hassle of installation including re-keying. And at $299 and up, it was rather expensive. But the company has a fantastic new solution. But they need your help (i.e. pre-orders).
 
3D Printer Form 1 Tops $1.4M On Kickstarter In A Week Top
form1mainThe Form 1 3D printer, which you may recognize from Kickstarter, has topped $1.4 million in pre-orders in just under a week on the crowd-funding platform. With nearly 1,000 backers already, the FormLabs team has sold out of all their early-bird pledge packages, so anyone who backs the project now is only ahead of the official website sale shipments. Mad Kickstarter success always comes down to demand. Disrupt runner up gTar walked away with 3x its funding goal because it made learning the guitar fun and easy. Pebble took home a whopping $10 million after finding the perfect balance between smart watch functionality, beauty, and battery drain. The Form 1 is no different. It takes the quality of a $1 million+ professional-grade 3D printing machine and packs it nicely into the price point of a hobbyist's play thing.
 
All-You-Can-Eat Movie Service MoviePass Launches A Mobile App And Prepaid Debit Cards Top
MoviePass-LogoThe movie industry is facing a bit of a crisis: Attendance is down, as the high price of going to the movies, combined with a generally crappy selection of films to actually go to, threatens studios and exhibitors. Enter MoviePass, a startup that has created a new business model based around users who love going to the movies.
 
GrexIt Turns Gmail Into A Social Task Management System Top
grexit-logoLast month I said that collaboration and project management apps should focus on killing e-mail from within, not creating yet another place users have to look for communications and information. Today GrexIt is coming out of beta not to kill e-mail, but to make it better.
 
Box Adds Two-Step Login Verification, More Advanced Security Features To Cloud Storage Platform Top
two-step verification.png - BoxCloud storage company Box has placed an emphasis on security for some time now, as most of its customers are large companies with massive amounts of data stored with the platform. But there have been a few features missing from Box's security offerings, and today, the company is filling these gaps. Most notably, the company is adding Two-Step Login Verification. Box, which just crossed 12 million users globally and signed its largest deal ever in the past quarter, says that these new security features will be showcased next week at BoxWorks, the company's annual customer conference and industry event. Box is expanding its authentication choices with the introduction of native two-step login verification.
 
Samwer Zappos Clone Zalando Takes On A Hefty €40.7 Million In Debt Financing Top
zalandoE-commerce, by its very nature, is an online business, but you can't always get away from the expense of bricks 'n' mortar entirely. And so it is that the Samwer brothers' Zalando, which originally launched as a Zappos clone but has since expanded from shoes into general fashion, has announced that it's secured long-term debt financing of €40.7 million (approx. $52.6m), from Commerzbank, Sparkasse Mittelthüringen and KfW Bankengruppe. The new capital will be used to fund parts of the "interior fittings" of its new logistics centre as the company continues to gun for scale.
 
Online Ticket Seller Eventbrite Grows U.K. Ticket Sales By 115% A Year On From Local Launch Top
Eventbrite LogoOnly this summer we reported online ticket seller Eventbrite had sold a total of more than $1 billion worth of tickets. Today the company has revealed details of its year-old push into the U.K. market -- announcing it's shifted a total of four million tickets for more than 100,000 events since launching a localized .co.uk version of its ticket platform in September last year.
 
HTC Finally Reveals The Refreshed One X+, And It's Hitting Europe And North Asia This Month Top
onexplusWell, there we have it -- after weeks and weeks of persistent rumors and unflattering spy shots, HTC has finally outed its refreshed HTC One X+ at a press event in the UK. For the most part, those rumors had the One X+ pegged. The Jelly Bean-powered handset indeed sports a slightly speedier 1.7GHz quad-core Tegra 3 chipset (up from the 1.5GHz model seen in the original), as well as 64GB of internal storage, and a beefier 2,100mAh battery to keep things chugging along a bit longer.
 
Sign Of The Times: The New York Times Debuts An HTML5 Web App For iPad Top
ss_0The New York Times this morning announced a new HTML5 web app for iPad, rounding out their lineup of web and tablet products for digital subscribers. The Times is soliciting feedback from its users about the app and its features, which suggests that it's looking at this as a way to experiment with a non-native delivery method, but isn't quite sure about how consumers will respond.
 
Flite Expands Its Rich Media Ad Platform To Mobile With Its Touch Ad Studio Top
Touch Studio 1Flite, the ad platform backed by Sequoia Capital, is expanding its services beyond the desktop web today with the launch of its new Touch Ad Studio. Judging from my conversation with the company and a quick demo of the touch ad product, this is very much an extension of what Flite is already doing. Like Flite's existing product, Touch Ad studio allows companies to build ads with little technical expertise, incorporating rich media like animation, as well as real-time content like social network updates. And both the desktop and mobile campaigns can be assessed using Flite's analytics.
 
Nest Labs Announces 20% Slimmer, More Compatible Nest Learning Thermostat; Ships This Month Top
Nest BoxContentsToday Nest Labs is taking the wraps off its second-generation Nest learning thermostat that the company says is 20 percent slimmer than the previous model and is now compatible with 95 percent of US residential heating and cooling systems, a bump up from 75 percent. Nest is also updating its mobile software for both iOS and Android to version 3.0 with a plethora of upgrades.
 
LinkedIn Allows You To Follow Key Influencers On The Network; Will Eventually Make Feature Universal Top
linkedinProfessional social network LinkedIn has begun allowing its members to follow companies over two years ago, giving professionals a way to easily access company updates, such as job openings, new developments and more. But the network has not allowed users to follow individuals. Today, that's changing. LinkedIn is allowing you to follow certain key influencers from a variety of sectors, who can broadcast their news, blog posts and more across the network. Currently, LinkedIn is seeing significant traffic from publishers who have embedded a LinkedIn share button on their sites. From this data, the company is seeing that people tend to gravitate towards sharing certain people's work and news. This has also been observed with LinkedIn's social news product, LinkedIn Today, says the company's executive editor of LinkedIn today, Dan Roth.
 
More CIA Money For NoSQL: In-Q-Tel Backs Cloudant Top
cloudant-logoToday cloud-hosted database provider Cloudant announced it has received both a custom development agreement and an undisclosed investment from In-Q-Tel, an independent non-profit venture capital firm funded by the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies. The announcement follows In-Q-Tel's investment in MongoDB makers 10gen last month. In-Q-Tel investments are rumored to typically range from $1 million and $3 million.
 
EU Digital Commissioner Pushes For Better European 4G Rollout To Support iPhone, iPad And Others Top
LTE-iphone-5The European Union's Commissioner For The Digital Agenda Neelie Kroes told a conference in Brussels on Tuesday that the EU's member nations should throw their support behind a plan to invest EU funds in 4G network expansion and improvement, in order to provide their citizens with consistent, widespread access to next-gen networks on the latest mobile devices. Apple's iPhone and iPad both offer only limited connectivity in the EU, where spectrum differences and, in some cases, an absence of 4G networks altogether force the LTE-capable devices to use 3G connections.
 

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