Friday, September 30, 2011

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Disney Mobile Japan Announces Two (Cute) Android Phones Top
Picture 6Disney, which has been doing business as an MVNO in Japan (Disney Mobile) since 2008, took the wraps off two new Android phones [JP] yesterday. The DM010SH will be rolled out in Japan in October, followed by the DM011SH in December (prices tbd). Technically, the DM010SH is based on the Sharp's AQUOS 009SH [JP] and features Android 2.3, a 4-inch LCD with QHD resolution, an 8MP CMOS camera, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, a microSDHC slot, a digital TV tuner, an e-wallet function, infrared communication, etc.
 
You Know What's Cool? Not Myspace Top
Screen Shot 2011-09-30 at 1.09.54 AMMyspace savior Specific Media laid off 8% of its staff yesterday, about 50 people. Those laid off were mostly Myspace employees, according to one source, presumably eagerly awaiting their severance package; "The people that [sic] got let go were celebrating because Specific Media doesn't have a clue what to do." In the past three months Specific Media had gone from the excitement of new acquisition smell to post partum depression it seems like, recently scaling back this summer's grand Myspace relaunch plans because of unfavorable progress.
 
Orange To Bring Sharp 3D Android Phone To Asia And Europe Top
110929Is this finally the beginning of Japanese Android phones being made available outside their home market? Japan's biggest mobile carrier NTT Docomo yesterday announced it has inked a deal with French telco Orange to bring a Sharp Android handset to Asia and Europe. The handset in question is a pretty nice one, the AQUOS PHONE SH80F (pictured), that Sharp introduced (together with Docomo) in Japan back in May.
 
Daily Crunch: Time Spent Top
1435Here are some of yesterday’s stories on TechCrunch Gadgets: A Cheerful Memento Mori Clock For Your Home Or Office Lego Tries Augmented Reality With "Life Of George" Game Sony To Stop Comping 3D Glasses For Theaters – Because Movie Tickets Aren't Expensive Enough Already Sync By 50 Headphones Leak Early, Appear To Be Appropriately Street Huzzah! A Wooden Frame For Settlers Of Catan
 
GetComparisons: A Tale Of The Tape For Anything Top
Screen Shot 2011-09-29 at 10.36.41 PMNexus S or iPhone? Kindle Fire or iPad? Samsung TV or LG TV? When people try to make such decisions, they usually look for as much data as possible so they can compare choices. For many gadgets, that's relatively easy because you can compare similar specs such as CPU speed, RAM, screen size, etc. But what about for everything else? That's what the startup GetComparisons is going after. They aim to be the "Epinions for comparisons," founder Akshay Arabolu says. The service is all about gathering user-written product reviews and formatting them in such a way that it's easy to compare things. While a service like gdgt does a great job of this for gadgets, Arabolu found a pain point in trying to figure out if he should use WordPress or Tumblr for blogging. So that's the service he set out to build.
 
Googler Builds Site That Shows You What Top Tech Companies Pay Top
Screen Shot 2011-09-29 at 7.32.44 PMLast night at an informal gathering of tech people, someone likened Silicon Valley to a "Las Vegas for people who want to make crazy shit" equating VCs and angel investors to gamblers of sorts. Well if investors are gamblers, and startups are hands of cards, what does that make engineers? I don't know (in the Vegas analogy I'm Hunter S. Thomson), but it sure seems like they get paid a lot.
 
Nice Work If You Can Get It: Apotheker Leaves HP With $10 Million Severance Top
1000-dollar-bill-22Massive severance packages are nothing new, but sometimes you just feel the need to call attention to them. Ousted HP CEO Leo Apotheker is leaving the company with a $7.2 million severance payment, plus a $2.4 million bonus and $3.7m in stock (more if you count the other 440,000 vested shares). I understand that this high pay is part of our business culture, but really, now. Is it possible that HP was in a death spiral and only Apotheker's sound judgment caused them to get away with a mere 45% drop in value? It seems unlikely that they'd kick him to the curb after less than a year if that were the case.
 
Why No Kindle Touch Or Fire For EU, UK? Top
KW-slate-02-lg._V166950133_Jeff Bezos recently said that these days, "if you are just building a device you are unlikely to succeed." He certainly seems to be backing that statement up, with the launch of the Kindle Fire producing more optimism than the last ten non-iPad tablet launches combined. It seems that people do indeed like the idea of a purpose-built device that does a few things well, walled garden or not. But Bezos glossed over the other side of the "make your own ecosystem" coin: providing and administrating that ecosystem not only requires immense resources, but can occasionally cause major roadblocks. In this case it appears that the Kindle Fire and Touch will be unavailable UK or EU, for reasons and duration not specified. It wouldn't have anything to do with the fact that they're more than just devices, would it?
 
Spotify Hires Another Former Googler To Head Asian Expansion Top
Screen Shot 2011-09-29 at 5.59.10 PMSetting its sights beyond the west after a successful US launch and the recent unveiling of Facebook extended Open Graph integration, subscription music service Spotify has hired former Google executive Dan Brody as General Manager Asia-Pacific. I'm hearing that Brody is currently in Australia talking to potential recruits, and Spotify itself has confirmed the GM position and that Brody is looking to hire people in Hong Kong, Singapore and Sydney.
 
You Might Have Klout, But What's Your Kred? Top
Kred logoReputation on the Internet is a tricky thing to measure. But with the rise of social media—with its retweets, likes, +1s, replies, and followers counts—companies are trying to keep score. If you are a big user of Twitter, you have probably checked out your Klout score or at least heard of it. Well, soon Klout will have a competitor called Kred. It is currently accepting sign-ups for a gradual rollout starting next week. Kred is the latest product from social data mining startup PeopleBrowsr. "We have been receiving the firehose since 2008," says CEO Jodee Rich, referring to the full Twitter firehose, "indexing it since then. We have sorted it by community and topic. We look for small close networks of people and look for how they can be just as influential as rockstars."
 
Vienna-based Speedinvest Closes $10m Fund For Central Europe Top
speedinvestSlowly, but surely, Vienna is building its own reputation as a startup hotspot and eventually there might be a fight between Berlin, London, Copenhagen and Vienna, although London and Berlin are ahead at the moment. There have been a number of large exits driven by Austrian-born founders (exits from UCP, Jahjah, 3united and last.fm exceed 1 billion USD). Companies such as Wikitude, Runtastic and Lookk. However the growing startup community, especially with founders emerging from Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) countries, faces a lack of adequate investors. Now Speedinvest, an early stage Super Angel fund, has just announced that they've closed their first $10 million dollar fund targeted towards early stage mobile and web startups coming out of CEE.
 
Kobo Vox Android Tablet Leaks On Retailer Website Top
kobo voxIt looks like Amazon and Barnes & Noble aren't the only ones who want to get into the LCD e-reader scene. Kobo, who like them has a 6-inch touchable e-ink reader, must have felt left out of the 7" LCD device race, and apparently is releasing the Vox to fill that gap. We actually heard about the Vox in an FCC filing a couple weeks ago, but held off on posting because there wasn't much to say. But today the device was listed briefly on Canadian retailer Future Shop's website, where a number of specs were revealed — though we should take them all with a grain of salt.
 
Sony To Stop Comping 3D Glasses For Theaters – Because Movie Tickets Aren't Expensive Enough Already Top
cashSony, which provides many theaters with the projectors and hardware needed to display 3D cinema, has informed those theaters that starting this spring, it will no longer provide 3D glasses for free. From now on they'll have to foot the cost themselves — and by "they" I mean "we," because obviously the theaters aren't going to voluntarily pick up this extra expense.
 
Microsoft Cracks Down On Spammy Windows Phone App Submissions Top
junkapps2There may be more than 20,000 apps in the Windows Phone Marketplace now, but it seems as though some "developers" are intent on fiddling with the cool-to-crap ratio. As low-quality, low-functionality apps flood the marketplace, Microsoft will be limiting developers to 10 app submissions per day starting tomorrow.
 
Foxconn's $12bn Brazil Expansion Stalled In Negotiation Stage Top
brazilEarlier this year it was reported that Foxconn had decided it was going to try to diversity its global holdings by establishing an iPad factory in Brazil. Their reasoning seemed fine: the economy is expanding, there's a tech-savvy populace, and the government, they figured, would be game for few little sweetheart deals to get the ball rolling. As it turns out, not so much. "The project for a Brazilian iPad is in doubt," said one Brazilian official, speaking on terms of anonymity to Reuters. Foxconn is "making crazy demands" and the Brazilian government appears to be unyielding on tax and funding.
 
Sync By 50 Headphones Leak Early, Appear To Be Appropriately Street Top
SMS_350 Cent's wireless headphones are finally nearing release and I just received multiple pics and a full spec sheet concerning the upcoming high-end model. Sync by 50 uses the now-popular unibody casing but features full on-board playback controls -- something no other headphones can proclaim. Housed in each can is a 40mm driver, which is surrounded by a memory foam cushion. The 3.5mm wireless adapter is said to broadcast the signal 50 feet and somehow allow four simultaneous wireless connections through an unnamed wireless standard. The spec sheet brags that the headphones features a professionally tuned digital EQ along with 16-bit lossless digital sound. The headset apparently charges through micro USB and ships with a wired mic cable (classy) and a hard-shell carrying case. However, the spec sheet doesn't state the price or release date.
 
China Takes First Steps Toward A Space Station, Launches Tiangong 1 Top
Tiangong 1 LaunchAs NASA's steps get smaller, China's space program is making big leaps with plans to have a manned space station in orbit by 2020. This morning (around 9pm in China), the Tiangong 1 space station module blasted off from a desert in the northwestern area of China. The reported purpose of this mission is to practice docking with other modules, which is essential to building a space station (obviously).
 
Myspace Owner-Specific Media Hit With Layoffs Top
specificmediaMyspace owner-Specific Media has laid of a percentage of its staff today, we've confirmed with the company. Specific Media said these layoffs took place in sales and operating areas, and was part of a consolidation effort to eliminate redundancies between the two businesses. As Specific Media says in a statement: The company is consolidating forces to ensure greater alignment between its workforce and the direction in which it's headed. Specific Media says that "less than 8%" of the company's employees were laid off. Specific Media has about 750 employees, so around 50-60 employees may have been let go. Apart from Myspace, Specific Media is an ad technology company that aims to help drive viewership for content owners, engagement for brands and relevance for consumers. The company allows marketers to buy digital ads across the Web, TV, online video, mobile platforms. Of course, you may know that Specific Media (along with Justin Timberlake) bought Myspace earlier this year from News Corp. for around $35 million.
 
Google Analytics Catches Up With Real-Time, Launches Enterprise Tier Top
googlerealtimeGoogle Analytics, the immensely popular suite of tools that Google offers to help webmasters track their site traffic, is getting a big boost this week: the service has launched a real-time dashboard that updates with user events as they happen. That's a big deal, as it brings Google more in line with popular real-time analytics products like Chartbeat, which allows you to track things like how many people are currently on your site, and how much traffic each individual article has gotten in the last few minutes. Prior to today's launch of real-time, Google Analytics reports typically had a delay window upwards of three hours (and often longer), which meant this kind of tracking wasn't possible.
 
Swatch Announces Touchscreen Watches Top
scaled.sc01_11_swatch_touch_PRshot_All_Press(RGB)Ugly though they may be, these Swatch watches have a trick up their sleeves. Using the same technology found in the Tissot T-Touch line, these Swatch Touch watches are touch-sensitive and allow you to swipe through different functions and control most of the watch features with a simple finger tap. The Touch 2011 models support two timezones, a date display, chronograph, alarm, and timer. There are no buttons and it has a curved glass display and weirdly proportioned numerals. It has an integrated strap.
 

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