Thursday, September 29, 2011

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Shazam Ditches The Monthly Tagging Limits For iOS And Android Devices Top
ShazamBack in late 2009, then-free music identifying service Shazam made a rather drastic change to their business model: they went freemium. Everybody got 5 free song identifications per month... but after that, they'd have to cough up for premium app, "Shazam Encore". That worked well enough for a while — then the competition rolled in, and gave away what Shazam was trying to charge for. Shazam responded with an experiment: they'd remove the tagging limits in their app, with a single "sponsor" covering their costs in exchange for ad placement — but only for Android, and only until the end of the year. Seems that worked well enough: Shazam has just removed the tagging limits in their iOS and Android apps indefinitely.
 
Nokia Preparing New "Meltemi" OS For Low-End Phones Top
Image (1) nokialineup.jpg for post 68830It's no secret that Nokia has put their faith in Windows Phone 7 to carry their future smartphones, but they haven't forgotten the millions of customers who count on them for their lower-end handsets. A new report from the Wall Street Journal suggests that Nokia is hard at work on a Linux-based OS codenamed "Meltemi."
 
StoryDesk Brings Sales Catalogs To The iPad Top
StoryDesk_logo_largeStoryDesk, a tablet publishing platform for enterprise, is today launching its first product called CatalogApp, an iPad application that lets businesses bring their sales catalogs to the tablet computer. The application is designed to be easy to use, even for those without technical expertise. With StoryDesk's Web-based content management system, CatalogApp users can enter in or even drag-and-drop product information, photos and pricing into the StoryDesk online interface. The changes made are then immediately synced to the iPad application on the end user's device.
 
The Best (Fake) iPhone 5 Video Yet Top
fake iphoneReally? Could this video really show the iPhone 5? Probably not. The video's authenticity is tipped by several subtle clues. But the video is still worth watching. The creator clearly knows his way around video editing software and deserves major props for this timely video. It's good and I want it to be real.
 
Bezos: "In The Modern Era Of Consumer Electronics Devices, If You Are Just Building A Device You Are Unlikely To Succeed." Top
scaledwm-3314The Kindle Fire may be poised to win the Android tablet wars, but Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos doesn't think of it as a tablet. "We think of Kindle Fire as an end-to-end service," he told me yesterday in an interview after his presentation, picking up on a theme he introduced earlier onstage (see video above). The Kindle Fire is a wrapper for all of Amazon's digital media products in the cloud. It is designed specifically to consume digital media in all its forms, from books and magazines to movies, games, and apps. Bezos sees the Kindle Fire holistically as a delivery device which will help unleash all the digital media services Amazon offers.
 
eBay Adds Facebook Platform And Mobile Marketing Exec Katie Mitic To Board Top
Katie Burke MiticeBay is adding a new member to its board today—Facebook executive Katie Burke Mitic. She joins current board members eBay CEO John Donahoe, Pierre Omidyar, Scott Cook, Fred D. Anderson, William Ford, Marc Andreessen, Edward W. Barnholt, Dawn Lepore, David Moffett, Richard Schlosberg, and Thomas Tierney. Mitic currently leads Platform and Mobile Marketing for Facebook, with responsibility for shaping and growing products for over two million developers and businesses that engage with Facebook's 800 million active users. Prior to joining Facebook, Mitic served as Senior Vice President of Global Product Marketing at Palm, where she oversaw hardware and software product management and marketing, as well as business and corporate development.
 
Gibson Shipping The Firebird X, A Computer Inside A Guitar Top
gibsonfirebirdxeng2010Announced at CES 2011, the Gibson Thunderbird X has been a fascinating example of a traditional instrument maker building something that, arguably, is quite revolutionary. The Thunderbird X is essentially a computer inside a guitar. The guitar itself contains a Freescale processor and can run apps approved and sold through the Gibson website. The guitar can model over 2,000 different sounds and styles out of the box and, when coupled with Gibson's auto-tuning machine heads, you can select any number of tuning possibilities automatically. Guitar purists are an angry lot and many innovations, including the Fretlight, are welcomed with derision and snark. To be fair, guitars haven't improved much since Les Paul strapped some strings to a hunk of 4x4. As electronic music has eclipsed "real" instruments, it's good to see that Gibson is still trying new things. They could just sit back and keep making sunbursts until the end of days, but instead they're building what amounts to a PC in a solid-body electric.
 
The Europas Awards For European Tech Startups Launches Top
europaslogo2_white (1)The Europas, the European Tech Startup Awards, were held for the second time December 2010, in London, supported by TechCrunch Europe. It was the culmination of a month of online voting by the European tech startup industry for the finalists, where some 33,126 votes were cast, judges deliberated over the results and over 350 people joined the cream of Europe's startups, VCs and entrepreneurs at a huge awards event. This year it's getting bigger to get the community even more involved, create an even bigger event, and find the best startups in Europe. You can enter here and tickets are here.
 
Vostu Debuts Golmania, A Multi-Player Soccer Game For Orkut And Facebook Top
golBrazilian social gaming company Vostu is unveiling its first title that mixes casual gaming with social gaming, Golmania. The multi-player soccer game will launch on Orkut and Facebook in English, Spanish and Portuguese For background, Vostu is one of the largest social gaming companies in Brazil. The gaming company, which now has more than 35 million users, was founded in 2007 by three Harvard classmates: CEO Daniel Kafie, chief scientist Mario Schlosser, and Joshua Kushner (who is also an active seed investor through Thrive Capital). Vostu is backed by Tiger Management, Accel Partners, Intel Capital and General Catalyst. The company has also been embroiled in a nasty lawsuit with social gaming giant Zynga.
 
Huzzah! A Wooden Frame For Settlers Of Catan Top
catan_showcase_tilespips_textWhen you woke up this morning, did you think that the world would change? Well it did, people. It did. Boardcrafting is a Kickstarter project that will change the way people play Settlers of Catan forever by replacing the easily-jostled cardboard pieces with real wooden markers and pips. If you're not familiar with Catan it's a game for former D&D nerds who want to feel like they're kind of playing Civilization. We're a Carcassonne family, but that doesn't mean we don't like to whip out our sheep and wheat and colonize the island a bit. However, because the game is made of light cardboard it tends to shift and flop around during play, especially on uneven surfaces. That's where Boardcrafting comes in.
 
GetJar Gold Gives Away $1 Million In Free Apps Top
getjar_logo_2010 (1)Earlier this month, third-party mobile app store GetJar announced the public launch of its GetJar Gold Program (previously in beta), a catalog of premium Android applications made available for free. Today, the company is providing an update on the catalog's success: over $1 million in free applications have been downloaded in the three weeks post-launch, Get Jar says. It has also spurred an increase in GetJar's free app downloads, too - a 5000% increase, in fact.
 
Farmeron, 'Google Analytics For Farms', Secures 500 Startups Investment Top
farmeronEver had cows instead of users? You've probably never thought about building software for farmers, but Farmeron just raised a round of investment as well as support from 500 Startups, a seed fund and startup aggregator led by Dave McClure. Farmeron is basically buidling an analytics package inspired by the numerous apps you might have used, such as Omniture or Google Analytics, but built for farms. Farmeron's solution is a slick web based application in which you, as a farmer, can keep track of your animals, their feeding, deaths etc. Like we all have profiles on Twitter or Facebook, each animal in Farmeron has its own profile as well.
 
9 Android Phones For Japan: SoftBank's Entire Fall/Winter Line-up Top
Picture 10We've already shown you the three coolest smartphones Japanese carrier SoftBank announced for its home market today, the LUMIX Phone 101P from Panasonic, Sharp's AQUOS PHONE 102SH, and the DELL STREAK PRO 101 DL. But SoftBank actually introduced a total of nine new Android models today (plus a feature phone). Here's the carrier's entire fall/winter line-up for the Japanese market.
 
Search Engine Blekko Raises $30 Million From Russian Search Giant Yandex And Others Top
blekkoSearch engine Blekko has raised $30 million in new funding Yandex, MLC Private Equity, and existing investors U.S. Venture Partners, CMEA Capital and PivotNorth Capital (Ashton Kutcher is also a previous investor). This brings Blekko's total funding to $55 million. Yandex's CEO Arkady Volozh will join Blekko's board. Blekko launched last year as the shiny new search engine that wanted to take on Google. The search engine differentiates itself from Google by giving users tools to do new types of searches that they can't do elsewhere. Blekko offers unique query refinement tools to human editors called Slashtags (i.e. /news or /date or /amazon or /blogs) to filter results to what you are looking for (you can read our full review of the platform here).
 
Q: When Will Quora Release An iPhone App? A: Now. Top
photo 1Quora can be an addiction. You visit the site just to see what's going on, 30 minutes later you're still there. Today, the addiction goes mobile. Finally. The service has just released their first iOS native app. Tailored for the iPhone and iPod touch, I can safely say that it's awesome. I've been testing it out for the past few days, and my own personal usage of the service has already skyrocketed. Why? A few reasons.
 
Lego Tries Augmented Reality With "Life Of George" Game Top
scaledwm.IMG_3339Lego (or LEGO if you're adamant about trademarks) has just dipped another toe into electronic gaming with their clever "Life Of George" iOS title. The game uses 144 pieces and a piece of cardboard covered in a dotted pattern. The game is simple: George shows you a picture from his travels and asks you to recreate it using Legos. You have to dig around in your box of pieces to recreate the image and then take a picture of it on the Playmat. Using a brick recognition system from Eye-Cue, the game awards you points for speed and accuracy. The game is oddly addicting and great for kids. The pieces are bit small so it's aimed at ages 12 and up but it's also a great way to build teamwork with one player - maybe a parent - calling out the pieces and the other player putting the object together.
 
Compete: Social Networks Grow Audience As Netflix, Daily Deal Sites Lose Traffic Top
competeCompete.com, a Kantar Media company, today released its ranking of the top 250 websites for August 2011 (click here for the top 50). We can't repeat this often enough, but take these stats with a grain of salt when it comes to accuracy. We've looked at the top 250 all the same, because the list tends to depict trends also visible with other analytics service providers, such as comScore and Google Trends.
 
New NFC Spec Makes It Easier To Swap Contacts, Save Data To Phones Top
paypal-nfcMobile users with NFC-enabled devices will no longer need a special application in order to exchange contact details or other types of data between their phones thanks to a new NFC specification which has just been released. The non-profit industry association The NFC Forum has published its 16th specification today, this latest being a standardization of the Simple NDEF Exchange Protocol (SNEP) to use peer-to-peer mode for data exchanges. For users, this means less compatibility problems between devices, and for mobile app builders, it means simplified development.
 
T-Mobile Joins Verizon, Takes Samsung's Side In Apple Patent Suit Top
t_mobile_logoIt looks as though the carriers are ready to weigh in on the Apple vs. Samsung case, with Verizon and T-Mobile both voicing their opinions over the past week. Since the original showdown in April — when Apple sued Samsung over Galaxy tablets and smartphones — Apple has had the upper-hand, winning an injunction against the Galaxy Tab 10.1 in Germany, delaying the same GalTab multiple times in Australia, and winning a preliminary injunction on three Galaxy smartphones in the Netherlands. After watching the events play out, Verizon and now T-Mobile have said that they play for Samsung's team, and would like to keep Samsung's products on their shelves.
 
The Top 6 Alternatives To The Kindle Fire Top
velocity-micro_cruz-t408The Amazon Kindle Fire isn't the only low-cost tablet option in town. Sure, it might be the hot new kid, but there are a multitude of tablets that can be had for $300 or less. Some are cheap and clearly only for enthusiasts. Other tabs are legitimate deals that offer Honeycomb on modern CPUs. Best of all - and Amazon knows this - all of them can run the Kindle app, instantly turning them into Kindle Fire competitors.
 

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