Wednesday, September 28, 2011

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Amazon Tacitly Confirms The "Kindle Fire" On Their Website Top
techcrunch-kindle-tabletIt won't be long now before Amazon kicks off their big press conference, where the much-awaited Kindle tablet is rumored to make its first public appearance. We've learned recently that Amazon will be calling it the Kindle Fire, and the company seems to have quietly confirmed the name on their website.
 
Video: Simple Personal Assistant Robot Follows You, Carries Stuff For You Top
robotWe covered quite a few personal assistant robots from Japan in the past, but none of them were labeled as "personal porters". But now Professor Gen Endo from the Tokyo Institute of Technology has built a unique prototype of a robot that follows the owner around and can carry stuff for them, too. Owners simply pull the robot with the help of a cord, and the self-propelled, battery-powered robot follows them everywhere. Thanks to a set of 4 wheels (and much like a space exploration rover), the robot can overcome most obstacles in a pedestrian environment. In its current form, the little guy can run for 2,5 hours (5km) on a single charge.
 
Samsung And Microsoft Ink Deal For Cross-Licensing Patents, Developing Windows Phone Top
signing contractYou'd have to be living in some cave to not know that IP wars are all the rage this season, especially with our favorite electronics/software companies. Samsung, in particular, has been the target of all-mighty Apple, and had quite the difficult year. But alas, Microsoft has swooped in, and the two have decided to cross-license their patent portfolios. This would protect both companies from outside attacks.
 
Ocean Group Pumps $100 Million Into New Digital Subsidiary, Black Ocean Top
blackoceanOcean Group, a massive private holding company founded by entrepreneurs Timur Sardarov and Oliver Ripley, has announced the creation of - and a $100 million investment commitment in - a new digital media and technology subsidiary called Black Ocean. Sardarov and Ripley will spearhead Black Ocean's investments in video, social, mobile, and e-commerce technologies.
 
Sequoia Leads $24.5M Funding Round For Employee Rewards Company Achievers Top
achieversEmployee rewards services company Achievers, formerly known as I Love Rewards, has raised $24.5 million in a Series C round of financing led by Sequoia Capital, with earlier backers JLA Ventures, GrandBanks Capital and the Ontario Venture Capital Fund participating. The round brings the company's total of funding raised to $38 million. Achievers targets organizations between 500 employees, up to Fortune 500 companies, looking to enhance employee engagement through social software.
 
Realtime Parking Info Provider Parking In Motion Lands Series A Funding Top
parkingParking In Motion has raised an undisclosed amount of capital in a Series A financing round co-led by IDG Ventures and Fontinalis Partners, the investment firm co-founded by William Clay "Bill" Ford Jr., the great-grandson of Henry Ford (and Executive Chairman of Ford Motor Company). The additional capital will allow Parking In Motion to deliver its real-time parking database to automobile navigation systems, mobile phones, tablets and other data aggregators.
 
Air Voltage: Maxell Japan Announces Wireless Charger For iPad 2 Top
air voltageHitachi Maxell, in cooperation with Murata, has announced [JP] the so-called Air Voltage for the Japanese market today, a combination of a wireless charging pad (dubbed "Energy Stand") and jacket ("Energy Cover") specifically for use with the iPad 2. According to Maxell, the device is the first of its kind (mass-produced). The way it works is that users put their iPad 2 into the jacket, place it on the pad and let the Air Voltage system charge the tablet - no cables required. Maxell says that the wireless power transmission of 10W takes about 3 hours for a full charge, as long as charging the iPad the conventional way (AC adapter).
 
Private Jet Booking Network PrivateFly.com Raises £2 Million Top
privateflyWe'll all been there. You are craving that delicious sandwich from that place a couple of miles from your home for lunch, when you realize your wife took the car to go shopping (again). So you hop online, looking to compare prices for the best private aircraft and nearest available flight, and begin to search frantically for a website where you can quickly charter a helicopter or small private jet so you can get that smoked salmon and avocado sandwich pronto. PrivateFly.com feels your pain, and has established a private aircraft booking service that lets you find, compare and book your private charter jet or helicopter flight all in one, online place. The company has just raised £2 million from a number of private investors to roll out internationally. Read on at TechCrunch Europe.
 
Newly Minted Morgenthaler VC Mark Goines Leads $5 Million Investment In Fundly Top
101721v2-max-250x250Mark Goines may not be the most familiar name in the Valley, but he was a prolific angel investor, investing in some 40 companies since 2000, including BabyCenter, Mint, PayCycle and Nolo.com. As Sarah reported in May, Goines is known for working closely with the startups he chooses to invest in, leveraging his consumer experience cred as GM of Intuit's Consumer Division and VP of New Products at Charles Schwab to help founders take their companies to the next level. In May, Morgenthaler Ventures snatched up the angel investor, and today Goines is leading his first investment with the VC firm in Fundly, a social fundraising site. The round, a $5 million series A, is Fundly's second outside investment in 6 months, as the startup raised $2 million in seed back in late February. The series A brings the startup's total funding to just under $8 million.
 
Guinness World Records Hooks Up With Kiip To Let Anyone With An iPhone Have A Shot At A Record Top
gwrkiip-post-screenshotIn just about one of the weirdest press releases that has come across my radar, mobile gaming rewards network Kiip and the old-school Guinness World Records (seriously) are announcing that they are teaming up today to offer mobile gamers the chance to be official Guinness World Record holders. Yeah. The partnership will most prominently result in a five-day long contest held from September 28th through October 3rd, where players of the iPhone game 'Mega Jump' will compete, through Kiip, for the Guinness World Record for "Highest Score Achieved on Mega Jump." The highest scoring user on the Mega Jump leaderboard (visible here) will be featured in the "Guinness Book of World Records: 2012 Gamers Edition."
 
Hitachi Develops Low-Cost, High-Quality 4.5-Inch LCDs For Phones Top
hitachi_displayBack in February this year, Hitachi Displays took the wraps off a super-advanced LCD for smartphones that boasted a 4.5-inch IPS LCD with 720 x 1,280 resolution. Fast forward to today, and the company is now announcing [JP] the development of a very similar panel with (almost) the same quality that costs "10-20%" less than touch displays currently used in smartphones. This new panel shares the main specs with the one shown in February: same size and resolution, 500cd/m2 brightness, LED backlight, and 329ppi pixel density. The only difference is that the older model had a better contrast ratio (1,100:1 vs. 1,000:1).
 
Daily Crunch: Shelf Life Top
1433Here are some of yesterday’s Gadgets posts: HOSPI-Rimo: Meet Panasonic's Cute Assistance Robot "Toilettenpapier Drucker" Is What You Think It Is The Future Of Books: A Dystopian Timeline Kobo Pulse Aims To Offer New Twist On Social Reading Toshiba Announces Updated Kid-Friendly Laptop
 
On Eve Of The Kindle Fire Launch, Amazon Posts A Strange "NYC Test" Video To YouTube Top
Screen Shot 2011-09-27 at 11.53.02 PMIt may just be a simple mistake, but it's an interesting mistake nonetheless. Earlier tonight, Amazon's Kindle YouTube page was updated with a new video. The name? "NYC Test". Considering Amazon is holding a press conference tomorrow morning in New York City to unveil their new Kindle tablet, obviously, this is worth noting. But what's odd is the content of the video itself. My first thought was that there is quite a bit of fire — perhaps pointing to the Kindle Fire name we first reported yesterday. But there is also no shot of any type of tablet device whatsoever, as Piotr Kowalcyk, who spotted the video, notices. And the video is full of Hollywood stars. And it's completely silent.
 
Larry Page And Eric Schmidt Hold Court At Google Zeitgeist [Video] Top
Screen Shot 2011-09-27 at 11.34.16 PMEven though Larry Page has been CEO of Google for just about 6 months now, he hasn't been as visible as many other high-profile CEOs. In fact, the most we've heard from him has been during earnings calls. But today during Google's annual Zeitgeist conference, Page took the stage to address the audience. Watch the entire 45-minute talk above. Page talked about a range of things — everything from Search to Android to YouTube to Chrome to Google+ to Nikola Tesla (the great inventor who "failed"). But things got more interesting when Eric Schmidt, Google's Executive Chairman who, of course, preceded Page as CEO, joined Page on stage for a Q&A. They talk the Motorola deal (while it will nearly double the size of Google's workforce, Page jokes that he wished it doubled their market cap too), patents (Page notes Google has never sued anyone over patents), innovation (the self-driving cars), and agility (changing the company every year).
 
Twitter Bot @MrDisclosure Wants Investors To Disclose Conflicts In Tweets Top
Screen Shot 2011-09-27 at 10.44.42 PMIt's hard out there for an tech investor! You're now competing with flashy Hollywood folk like Ashton Kutcher, who have unparalleled opportunities, like getting to show off their investment affiliations on their latest character's laptop, you know that tech startup founder character they play on what is only the most watched sitcom in America. It was the antics of Mr.Kutcher himself that inspired @MrDisclosure, a Twitter bot that attempts to get investors to disclose that they've invested in that company they've been tweeting about incessantly. After a Kutcher-edited issue of DETAILS magazine met with criticism when Kutcher failed to reveal his stake in some of the companies he featured, @MrDisclosure creator Andy Cheung set up the account, wanting to bring awareness to the issue of investor conflict.
 
Free Startup Tools: An Easy Way For Founders To Set The Terms Of Their Collaboration Top
collaboration-handsIn this, our third installment of "Free Startup Tools", we wanted to highlight an agreement launched by Seedcamp, the European startup accelerator, to help startup founders negotiate the early stages of building a company. (You can check out our first post on The Founder Institute's effort to standardize the founder-advisor relationship and compensation here and the second post on a tool that helps founders compare their term sheets to the standards here.) While we've touched on these better ways to negotiate term sheets and relationships with advisors, founding a company also often entails bringing on co-founders to help you build your business. Of course, in doing so, it's important for co-founders to be able to establish a level of trust that allows each founding member to fairly share in the benefits of success.
 
Groupon Closes The Redemption Loop With Loyalty Rewards Top
Groupon RewardGroupon may be struggling to get its IPO out the door, but that is not stopping it from introducing new products. Up until now, Groupon has built a billion-dollar business by getting local merchants to offer great one-time deals to consumers. Those daily deals are all about attracting new customers. Now the company is about to roll out a new product called Groupon Rewards that tries to give merchants a way to increase customer loyalty. Merchants will be able to start signing up tomorrow and consumers will start seeing the rewards in October. With a Groupon Reward, a business that offers a regular Groupon deal will be able to follow up with another reward that gets unlocked after the customer spends a certain amount of money. For instance, after a customer spends $50 or $100 at a store over time, she might get a Groupon Reward of $20 worth of goods for $4. It's all tied to the credit cards people use every day so there is no need to change behavior. There are no check-ins required or NFC-powered mobile wallets that need to be waved over strange new terminals. Groupon already has millions of credit cards on file. Now it is going to turn those credit cards into digital versions of the buy-10-get-one-free punch cards from the coffee shop that you stick in your wallet.
 
Citi Analysts: Facebook Ads Are Taking Spending Away From Display, Not Search Top
billboard-facebookBack in May, we reported that Facebook now accounts for one out of three ad impressions in the U.S., and that, really, no other web property in the U.S. comes close (Yahoo was second with 10 percent). That means that Facebook served approximately 340 billion ads in the first quarter. It's probably not a surprise, then, that advertising makes up for about 89 percent of the social network's total revenues, which are estimated at about $1.6 billion for the first six months of 2011. Today, on Citi's third quarter search marketing trends call, the panelists discussed the current landscape of search advertising, among other things that Google is maintaining its dominant market share in advertising spend on search, at 80 to 81 percent of total spend. While the panelists said that they're not seeing much demand for social search ad targeting, there is obviously a ton of interest in marketing on Facebook.
 
Cable Providers Mull Switch To A La Carte Subscriptions Top
chanI remember when we first got cable, back in the late 80s I suppose, and even as a youngster one of my first thoughts was "man, do we really need all these channels?" That suspicion, that we were perhaps being sold the whole buffet when we knew exactly what we wanted already, only became stronger with time, and before long it was a running joke shared by many in the world. 500 channels and you end up renting a movie because nothing good is on. Selling the whole package, dozens or hundreds of channels, has been part of the cable TV business model for a long time. It enabled smaller networks to grow and flourish under the ownership and careful tending of larger ones. But cable providers never talked about it as a reality of the TV business. They always just said people didn't want a la carte. A funny thing to tell the people asking for it. Now, with those same people getting their content a la carte by whatever means necessary (and feeling justified after decades of mistreatment by cable companies), it appears that Comcast, Time Warner, and the rest of the cable giants are changing their tune.
 
Loopt Teams With Virgin America To Bring Check-In Deals To SFO Top
6176341658_4e078ddc14_oLocation-based service Loopt is getting some nice promotion for the next three months, courtesy of San Francisco's International Airport and Virgin America. And it might make your trip to the airport a bit less expensive. Beginning this week, travelers going through SFO's new Terminal 2 will be able to check-in on Loopt to receive an offer from one of six businesses located within the terminal, including Kiehl's and Natalie's Candy Jar — as well as hefty discounts from Virgin America itself. The difference between this and most other check-in based offers is that the deal you receive is chosen randomly from one of these merchants (you just need to check-in at Terminal 2). The promotion is being coordinated by Virgin America and Loopt, but travelers flying on American (which is also based in Terminal 2 at SFO) will be able to score the check-in deals as well.
 

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