Thursday, December 1, 2011

Y! Alert: TechCrunch

Yahoo! Alerts
My Alerts

The latest from TechCrunch

2011 Holiday Gift Guide: iPhone Accessories For Every Type Top
giftguide11-bug3Apple has sold over 17 million iPhones in this past quarter alone, so chances are that someone you'll have to buy a holiday present for will already have one. Instead of the usual "cheesy card and sweater" combination, why not give them something that takes advantage of their constant electronic companion? Here are a few iPhone-friendly gift ideas to consider, all organized by personality type. Happy hunting!
 
Solving Email Overload With A Company-Wide Ban Top
shutterstock_emailThe CEO of a large European-based tech firm hates email and wants his 74,000 employees in 42 countries to stop using it. Thierry Breton, CEO of Atos, wants his "zero email" policy to be in place within a year-and-a-half. He told the Daily Mail only 10% of emails turn out to be important and that "email is no longer the appropriate tool. It is time to think differently."
 
YouTube's New Homepage Goes Social With Algorithmic Feed, Emphasis On Google+ And Facebook Top
NewYTLogoYouTube is launching what the company calls the biggest redesign in its history today, including sweeping changes to its homepage and channel pages. The goal is better personalized video discovery and viewing, with a notable emphasis on social features. Think of the changes as the latest example of Google's campaign to create a unified social layer for all of its products. The new homepage looks a lot like Facebook, or Google+ for that matter. An activity feed view dominates the middle of the page, while a left-hand navigation bar provides a set of filters for what you see in the feed. The default Subscriptions feed appears to include algorithmically determined video content based on information like what videos you've watched and which channels you've subscribed to, although YouTube group product manager Noam Lovinsky wouldn't tell me exactly how it worked. The previous version of the homepage feed, which launched early this year, wasn't algorithmically tuned to the same degree.
 
Apple: We Don't Use Carrier IQ… In Most Of Our Products… Anymore. Top
carrierIQThe tech world is up in arms this week about Carrier IQ, the mobile data logging software that comes pre-installed (and rather well hidden) on an increasingly huge number of handsets. It's still entirely unclear as to what's being logged and, more importantly, what (if anything) is being sent off the handset — but one thing's for sure: people don't like it. As the controversy swells, companies are rushing to distance themselves from the matter. The latest ones looking to get on the right side of the air gap? Apple.
 
Dwolla Drops Fees For Transactions Under $10 In Prelude To Larger Announcement Top
dwollalogoOnline and mobile payment service Dwolla has announced that all transactions under $10 will have no fee from now on. This is of course great news for small businesses and merchants whose average transaction is below that. The company has a history of experimentation, and the payments space is certainly ripe for disruption from any number of angles, but it's still not clear what has enabled this particular move. After all, operational overhead is a real thing, and while nobody doubts the company's honest interest in changing payment processing, it's not likely they just did this in the spirit of the season.
 
With Facebook At Its Core, Color Will Relaunch As Champion Of The Video Status Update Top
colorshotColor is almost ready for round two. The company — which famously raised $41 million and launched last spring only to watch its initial product bomb (which in turn spurred plenty of Schadenfreude) — has spent the last eight months trying to figure out what went wrong, and where it's headed next. And now it's back with a product that has a mission statement as simple as its original vision was complex: it wants to reinvent the status update, in the form of 30 second long, muted video clips. Actually, Color says it isn't really thinking of these updates as video at all, but rather as "visual" status updates that fall somewhere between videos and photos. The last time we heard from Color was back in September, when it announced that it was going all-in on Facebook's platform (the original version of the product tried to build a new, elastic social graph). The app they previewed in September combined aspects of live video-streaming service Qik with Facebook's Photos product. And over the last few months Color has been running a private beta program at Texas A&M, where they've been monitoring the various use cases students come up with. They've tweaked the product significantly as a result of that testing, and they'll be shipping the new Color to users on both iPhone and Android in the next few weeks.
 
Rumble To Build and Publish Games Using $15M Series A From Google Ventures and Khosla Top
Rumble_Stacked_teal"We're a developer and a publisher trying to make triple A games that fit the digital lifestyle, are instantly accessible from anywhere, free to try, don't require a PhD to control, and that you can play for a short session length. It's an Activision Blizzard meets Zynga model." That's how CEO Greg Richardson describes his new gaming company Rumble, which just closed a $15 million Series A round from Google Ventures and Khosla Ventures. Rumble will build its own titles for the web, mobile, and social. It will also invest in and publish games from third-party developers through its system which provides analytics, CRM, and distribution across devices and platforms. This allows partnered developers to concentrate solely on building great games. With top industry talent, wise investors, solid funding, and a mission to bring console game quality where it's not usually, Rumble is looking to disrupt game companies overly focused on manipulative monetization.
 
Sprint Inks Deal To Support Clearwire With $1.6 Billion Top
clearwireClearwire's WiMax network. Without it, Clearwire would have had to choose between paying up on a $237 million interest payment or continuing to build out its LTE network — a necessity in terms of competition for both Clearwire and Sprint. The deal consists of Sprint paying $926 million for unlimited 4G WiMax services between 2012 and 2013. In the meantime, Sprint is also pledging an advance of $350 million paid over a two-year period for Access to Clearwire's forthcoming LTE capacity. This will allow Clearwire to pay off its debt without derailing plans for its LTE network. That said, Sprint needs LTE just as desperately, so it only makes sense that Sprint would cover for its struggling partner.
 
Former Twitter Engineering VP And Benchmark EIR Mike Abbott Joins Kleiner Perkins As Partner Top
As AbbottIn October, AllThingsD reported that Twitter VP of engineering Mike Abbott was leaving the company to be an entrepreneur in residence at Benchmark Capital (Benchmark and Twitter both confirmed the move). It looks like that position only lasted a month, as Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers has just announced that Abbott has joined the firm as a partner on its digital team. At Twitter, Abbott (who joined in April 2010) led the company's engineering efforts and helped the team from 80 to more than 350 engineers. Abbott's team mainly focused on rebuilding and solidifying Twitter's infrastructure.
 
Google+ Now Lets You Conference People Into Hangouts With Free Voice Calls Top
Hangouts Voice CallsHangouts could be the new way to conference call. Google employee Jarkko Oikarinen has just announced that free voice calls to people in the US and Canada can now be made from within Hangouts with extras. This means people no longer have to be by a computer, or even have a Google account to join a G+ video chat. You just call them up and their voice can be heard by anyone in the Hangout, and they can listen in on the session. This could be great way to onboard people into Google+'s most innovative feature, and also fill up Hangouts that can be a bit sparse due to the social network's low current user count.
 
Finally! Flickr Alternative 500px Launches Its Lightroom Plugin Top
500px-lightroomFinally? Yes, that's what the users of the Toronto-based photography community 500px will be saying today, as the service publicly launches its long-awaited Lightroom publisher plugin. Although often pitched as a Flickr alternative (ahem), 500px is actually targeted more towards professional photographers and those who make a living off selling their photos, than is towards the mainstream consumer user base who needs a place to archive hundreds of baby photos and vacation pics. And that's why the Lightroom plugin is such a big deal.
 
Q&A Platform LawPivot Raises $1M; Launches Legal Services Marketplace Top
mlawGoogle Ventures-backed LawPivot , a "Quora for legal advice," is announcing a $1 million round of additional seed funding from Vaizra Investments, Venture51, Quotidian Ventures and angel investors. Previous backers include Google Ventures, Deep Nishar, David Austin, David Tisch, Richard Chen and Allen Morgan. As we've written in the past, LawPivot allows technology companies and startups to confidentially ask legal questions to expert attorneys. On LawPivot, startups can post questions on the site, and lawyers message these companies back with advice. Questions are completely confidential, so companies still have privacy within the platform.
 
Carrier IQ: How To Find It, And How To Deal With It Top
ciqevoBy now, you've probably heard all about Carrier IQ, the mobile logging software that an intrepid researcher named Trevor Eckhart found lurking on a number smartphones from multiple manufacturers and carriers. According to Eckhart's research, Carrier IQ is capable of tracking what apps you're running to where your phone is to what buttons are being pressed -- it sounds scary, but Carrier IQ claims that collecting that information ultimately helps end-users. Carrier IQ maintains they summarize performance information to help improve the quality of a carrier's customer experiences, but what if you don't want anyone else to have access to the sort of fine-grained data that Carrier IQ is capable of accessing? Here's how you can figure out if your phone is affected, and how to go about fixing things if it is.
 
Formspring's Social Evolution Continues, Now Connects Users Based On Interests Top
formspring-interests-2Earlier this month, the Q&A-cum-social-networking service Formspring launched its first ever user Directory, with the intent on better highlighting the most popular users within a given category like "Music," "Sports" or "Fashion." Today, the company is expanding its focus on connecting users based on interests, and is rolling out an update that will allow users to click on any tag in their own profile to discover all those on Formspring who share that same interest.
 
AT&T On The FCC Staff Report: Nuh-Uh! Top
attfccbackandforthSo remember that staff report the FCC released a few days ago? It was basically a novella-length rant on how horrible the AT&T/T-Mobile merger would be, and how many of AT&T's arguments were flawed. Releasing the document in the first place was a bit unorthodox, as AT&T had withdrawn its application before the FCC had opened the report up to the public. The FCC offered up reasons for releasing it though, transparency being the most important one. Still, AT&T is seriously displeased with the alleged one-sidedness of the report, and has released its own lengthy response to the report's findings:
 
First Nvidia Tegra 3 Benchmarks Score The Quad-Core Chip Just Slightly Faster Than Apple's A5 Top
Fight Club fightclub fight-clubForget that specs do not matter for a minute. The first bit of competitive benchmarks of the Nvidia Tegra 3 are just now hitting thanks to the Asus Transformer Prime. Nvidia's quad-core mobile platform will likely be the de facto chipset to power Ice Cream Sandwich tablets; it will be everywhere next year. Nvidia has long touted the Tegra 3's processing power, stating that the platform will absolutely trounce all competitors including the aging dual-core Apple A5. That doesn't seem to be the case though. Early benchmarks are stating the A5 keeps up just fine.
 
Khosla, Google Ventures And Hearst Put $4M In Social TV Platform Miso Top
misoThe social app for TV content Miso has just raised $4 million in new funding from Khosla Ventures, with existing investors Google Ventures and Hearst Interactive Media participating in the round. This brings Miso's total funding to $6 million. Similar to GetGlue, Tunerfish and others, Miso launched as a check-in app for television content. The idea behind Miso is that as you watch TV shows and movies, users can check-in to this content, follow specific shows and earn points and badges for interacting with this content. Miso offers iPhone, iPad and Android apps for users on the go as well as a web app.
 
CrowdStar Brings Mobile Social Game Top Girl To Android Top
Top GirlSocial gaming company CrowdStar is bringing its social mobile title Top Girl to Android phones with the launch of a native app. Top Girl will be sold exclusively through the Amazon App Store for two weeks after launching. Top Girl is a female-focused mobile role-playing game that allows players to create a fashionable avatar and then climb up the fashion social ladder, collecting money by doing modeling jobs, buying new outfits, and going to clubs. The app is free to play but charges users for virtual goods.
 
Smule Acquires Khush To Further Boost Their Music Cred Top
khushSmule, makers of such fine musically-tuned iOS apps as Ocarina, Magic Piano, and I Am T-Pain, have just announced their intentions to acquire Khush, the equally music-minded company behind LaDiDa (you sing, it generates a beat) and Songify (you sing/talk/cough/howl, it bends the tune into a song). Wonder Twin powers, activate!
 
The White Samsung Galaxy S II Skyrocket Will Hit AT&T Shelves December 4 Top
skyrocketwhite1White phones can be hit or miss. The white BlackBerry Pearl, for example, is an ugly phone. Period. But some white phones can be sexy little beasts, as is the new snow-white Samsung Galaxy S II Skyrocket. That's right, just a few weeks after hitting AT&T shelves in black, a white version of the phone will be made available on December 4.
 

CREATE MORE ALERTS:

Auctions - Find out when new auctions are posted

Horoscopes - Receive your daily horoscope

Music - Get the newest Album Releases, Playlists and more

News - Only the news you want, delivered!

Stocks - Stay connected to the market with price quotes and more

Weather - Get today's weather conditions




You received this email because you subscribed to Yahoo! Alerts. Use this link to unsubscribe from this alert. To change your communications preferences for other Yahoo! business lines, please visit your Marketing Preferences. To learn more about Yahoo!'s use of personal information, including the use of web beacons in HTML-based email, please read our Privacy Policy. Yahoo! is located at 701 First Avenue, Sunnyvale, CA 94089.
Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)