Thursday, December 1, 2011

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Real Simple Teams Up With Punchbowl To Offer Digital Greeting Cards Top
punchStart to finish party planning site and digital greeting card company Punchbowl has announced a technology-licensing agreement with magazine Real Simple to allow the publication's readers to create and send free digital greeting cards for all occasions. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. As we've written in the past, Punchbowl's platform allows users to create beautiful online invitations and most recently, digital greeting cards. The startup also provides tools that let you find supplies, organize an after party, set a date, track RSVPs, and much more.
 
Google Mulling Quick-Shipment Partnerships For Online Shoppers Top
white_truckWith online retail shopping growing every year, it's no surprise that practically everyone wants in. Web-based companies are falling over themselves providing recommendation engines, web storefronts, payment systems, and backend management. Google is in most of those fields already, but it's probable that they feel somewhat frustrated at being unable to siphon users away from major retailers like Amazon. So many searches lead right there, but Google is unable to monetize what are clearly purchase-oriented users. It's not a new situation, of course: if you want to find stuff, you use Google. If you want to get stuff, you use Amazon. But Google has increasingly been placing itself in the getting stuff business, and may soon expand into real goods, by way of partnerships with retailers and shipping providers.
 
AT&T's 4G/LTE Network Already Live In Parts Of NYC Top
OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAEarly in November, AT&T exec Larry Solomon mentioned that their 4G/LTE network would be extending its reach to New York City sometime "soon." Turns out, "soon" means "sometime around December 1st" — as of this evening, reports started coming in that some devices within the Big Apple's limits were lighting up with 4G/LTE signal.
 
LG Nitro HD For AT&T: Hands-On Top
Nitro HDTonight at LG's media event in New York City, we were lucky enough to get some quality time with the LG Nitro HD. The third in AT&T's line of LTE-capable phones, the Nitro HD was announced earlier this week with a launch date of December 4 for AT&T. Some of its spec highlights include a 4.5-inch 720p display (like the HTC Rezound), a 1.5GHz dual-core processor, an 8-megapixel rear camera and 4G LTE support from AT&T, of course. Since the Nitro was announced before its dedicated media event (and since it's basically the Optimus LTE we're seeing over in Europe), there's really no reason to hash out all the specific deets. So let's just get down to business, shall we?
 
Vitrue 1st To Let Brands Offer Mobile Access To Their Facebook Page Tab Apps Top
Vitrue Mobile Facebook Page AccessFacebook's mobile apps and websites don't support access to Page tab applications, which let brands host signup forms, coupons, sweepstakes, games and more. Considering roughly 40% of Facebook's users are accessing the site via these mobile interfaces, brands are missing out on serving their content to hundreds of millions of people. But Page management platform Vitrue announced a workaround today at the Appnation III conference, inspired by encouragement from Facebook itself. Soon when mobile users try to visit tab apps on the Pages of its clients, Vitrue's system will recognize the user is on a mobile device and redirect them to an HTML5 mobile site version of that app. Expect other Page management companies to copy this fix if Facebook doesn't solve the problem for everyone first.
 
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:
 

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