Thursday, October 4, 2012

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Haters Gonna Hate This Top
haters-gonna-hate
"At times one remains faithful to a cause only because its opponents do not cease to be insipid."
I've spent a good part of this morning defending two blog posts that hit the TechCrunch homepage last night. No it wasn't "Jumio's Credit Card Scanning Technology Pops Up in Travelocity's Hotel Deals App" or even "Flayvr, A Mobile App That Automatically Creates Photo Albums, Raises $450K Seed Round." Nope, instead, it was two posts that used the F-word* in the headline.
 
For Oracle It's About The Machine Not The Fantasy Of A New World Top
alicewonderlandFor Oracle, it's about the machine, not the user; this became abundantly clear this week at Oracle Open World. Oracle talks the cloud talk but what the company is really doing is protecting its base, and building engineered systems that by all accounts is extraordinary technology. But its principles are wrong. I see little proof of humanity. What I do see are calibrated machines - homogenous and stacked in Oracle's shiny red brand. But maybe that's what people want in the end. For me, that is depressing as hell and counter to the swell of innovation that pushes me back every day like some gale force wind that picks me up and drops me into a new world. At every level of this altered place a creature pops up to remind me that the reality is not all that we see in a subterranean conference hall on the Bay.
 
ZEFR Hires Former Dailymotion Exec To Expand Internationally, Also Nabs Some BetterWorks Engineers Top
zefrZEFR has been focused on getting Hollywood studios to let it license their movies, and create clips to put on YouTube. But it's recently added a new business focused on helping content creators across a number of verticals to monetize content that gets posted on YouTube. Now, it's going beyond just its home U.S. market and taking on the world, with a key international hire to expand overseas.
 
Paper By FiftyThree Now On Apple Retail iPads, Tops 3.3M Downloads And 190 Years Spent In-App Top
color-by-fiftythreeHere's a neat, well-deserved win for a startup company: Paper, the critically acclaimed drawing application for iPad is now being featured by Apple on iPad demo units in its retail stores, and now has over 3.3 million downloads, with 25 million pages of drawings created by users. The time spent in-app creating Color journals adds up to almost 200 years in total.
 
The PandaBot: Another Day, Another Anamorphic 3D Printer With A Cute Name Top
0747cfb65ce66ee195306aec633308e8_largeThe 3D printer craze shows no signs of stopping and Kickstarter is full of exciting examples of new printing hardware. Today's entrant in the 3D race? The devilishly cute PandaBot, a "fur white" 3D printer with a an 11x11x11-inch build area and a smooth, seamless design.
 
Rock The Post And CrowdHut Are Trying To Solve Two Of Crowdfunding's Biggest Pain Points Top
crowdThe passage of the JOBS Act earlier this year cemented that not just in practice, but in policy. As a result, it's been a huge year for crowdfunding platforms -- especially Kickstarter, which has raised $50 million for games alone in 2012. But with the increased attention, we've started to spy potential holes in the crowdfunding model. Two problems in particular stand out and two startups are trying to solve them.
 
Samsung's ATIV Smart PC And Asus' VivoTab RT To Launch On AT&T In Time For The Holidays Top
ativivoHoly cow AT&T, another announcement? While most of the other national wireless carriers have opted to save some news for later on, AT&T keeps pushing out releases like it's going out of style. Anyway, in addition to heavily pushing Nokia's Windows Phone 8 handsets, the carrier has also announced that it will carry a pair of Windows 8 tablets — the Asus VivoTab RT and Samsung's ATIV Smart PC — in time for the holiday rush.
 
Zynga Cuts Revenue Outlook For 2012, Q3; Cites Weakness In Certain Games Including The Ville Top
zyngaGaming company Zynga has just released preliminary financial results for the third quarter of 2012, lowering its outlook for the year. The company expects to report full Q3 results October 24. Zynga expects to report revenue in the range of $300 million to $305 million and bookings in the range of $250 million to $255 million for the third quarter. The company also says it will report a net loss of between $90 million and $105 million, non-GAAP net loss between $2 million and $5 million and adjusted EBITDA between $10 million and $15 million for the third quarter.
 
Y Combinator-Backed Perfect Audience Makes Facebook Retargeting Easy (Even For Tech Bloggers), Raises $1.1M Top
perfectaudience logoWe've already seen that the new Facebook Exchange for retargeted ads is delivering impressive results for advertisers. Now a startup called Perfect Audience aims to make those campaigns accessible to a broad range of startups, small ad agencies, and other advertisers. Co-founder and President Brad Flora says the current batch of ad companies offering access to Facebook Exchange are serving large advertisers — it usually takes a few days to learn how to use the product, and there's often a minimum ad buy. With Perfect Audience, on the other hand, anyone can run a campaign of any size.
 
Facebook's 1 Billion Human Shield Against Disruption Top
facebook-etchFacebook grew to 1 billion users by adding massive value on top of what came before it. Specifically, authenticated identity. There may be no greater leap forward another social network could take, and that's why Facebook will hold the crown for a long time. What's emerged is network effect incarnate. No feature, no user interface, and no marketing campaign can trump that. Sorry, startups.
 
Panjiva Adds Global Search To Its Social Network For World Manufacturing Top
panjivaImagine Google Analytics but for world trade, with graphs showing data like shipping volume instead of site visitors. Combine that with LinkedIn-style profiles, but for manufacturers, and you get Panjiva. The six-year-old New York company is rolling out a new global search feature this week that takes the dozens of data sources it has been quietly accumulating about anyone shipping in bulk -- port shipping volumes, credit ratings, environmental qualifications, etc. -- and lets you easily answer key questions for your business.
 
TuneIn Turns On Facebook Scrobbling For Its Online Radio Service Top
TuneIn_logoTuneIn, the online radio service that just raised $16 million from an impressive group of Silicon Valley venture capital firms, quietly amassed over 40 million monthly active listeners over the last few years. Lately, however, the company has been starting to make a bit more noise about its success while also consistently adding new features to its service. Today, for example, TuneIn announced that its users can now enable automatic Facebook sharing for whenever they tune to a station or favorite a station or song.
 
Samsung Galaxy Camera Will Arrive On AT&T, Pricing And Availability Unknown Top
SamsungGalaxyCamera-FINALAT&T has had a lot of announcements today, most notably the arrival of the Nokia Lumia 920 and 820, exclusively on their network. But Samsung and Android are getting in the mix too, as the blue carrier has just announced that the Samsung Galaxy Camera will be available from AT&T. Unfortunately, a due date on this one is missing from the release.
 
Everpurse Is A Purse That Charges Your Smartphone, Wire-Free Top
Screen shot 2012-10-04 at 3.54.43 PMWe've heard of bags that charge your gadgets — the Powerbag Instant Messenger comes to mind — but none targeted directly at women. That's where the Everpurse comes in.
 
There's A Fine Line Between Private And Public, And Facebook Might Have Just Crossed It Top
4592915995_8d12eaefc8_zAccording to The Next Web, sending someone a link to something on a third-party site using Facebook's social system in a private message increases the "Like" numbers on public counters by two.
 
Mind-Reading Tech Helps Students Overcome Test Anxiety Top
Mynd-wireless-EEG-headset-007Here's something straight out of science fiction: the University of Iowa is offering a new service to help students overcome test anxiety, using a mind-reading technology that guides them into a state of relaxation. So-called "Biofeedback" displays students' brainwaves in realtime and alerts them when they've dropped into a state of calm focus. "Once a student learns to reduce their anxiety using skills learned through biofeedback training, their performance increases significantly — often resulting in dramatic improvements in academic performance," says U of Iowa Counselor and clinical psychologist, Jeffrey Ellen.
 
1 Billion Users Have Done Zilch For Facebook's Stock Price Today Top
facebook stock 1 billionLast week, we noted that Facebook's stock appeared to have gotten a nice little bump after it announced its move into the sale of physical gifts, potentially opening a new revenue stream for the company. Not all of Facebook's big news is so kind. Today's announcement that Facebook has reached 1 billion users has had no impact, or possibly a negative one, on its stock so far today.
 
Microsoft's Windows Phone 8 Launch Event Happening October 29 In San Francisco Top
3prkp3Microsoft is sending out invites for a Windows Phone 8 launch event on October 29, to be held at 10 AM PST. The phone platform was shown off on stage during a joint event with Nokia, and also during another with HTC in September, but Microsoft is saying we'll see more at its own show.
 
Up Close With MacKenzie & Marr's Handmade, Online-Only Guitars Top
IMG_0918One of the benefits of the web is that you can eschew traditional models of distribution and talk to your customer one-on-one. In what I consider a first for ecommerce, guitar makers MacKenzie & Marr have taken this model to heart and are building handmade, unique guitars in China and shipping them out of their warehouse in Canada. We profiled them a few weeks back and they let me take one of their pieces for a test drive last week. I came away very impressed.
 
Microsoft Acquires PhoneFactor, The Security Solution That Authenticates Users Via Phone, SMS Or Mobile Apps Top
threemethods-smallMicrosoft has acquired PhoneFactor, a service which provides an additional layer of security during the authentication process, which today typically involves just a username and password (aka single-factor authentication). With PhoneFactor, as its name implies, the additional step it offers involves using a phone to further authenticate users upon sign in via a phone call, text, or mobile app.
 

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