Monday, February 27, 2012

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A Swedish Company Claims It Owns A Swipe Patent That Is Used By Apple Top
Image (1) slide_to_unlock.jpg for post 87958Another front has opened in the multi-faceted story of patent battles: Neonode, an optical touchscreen tech company based in Sweden, says that it has been granted a patent in the U.S. that covers the touch-and-glide gesture that it claims is used on devices like the iPhone and iPad. The patent is notable not only because Neonode says the patent covers functions like the horizontal touch gesture that Apple uses between screens on its iOS devices, as well as in the slide-to-unlock feature. But also because slide-to-unlock is the same feature that Apple has been citing in its own patent lawsuits against Android device makers Motorola and Samsung.
 
Texas Instruments Announces New Partnerships For OMAP 5, But Wait…There's More Top
TI2Texas Instruments announced earlier today that they are partnering with Harman and iRobot to provide OMAP 5 as the core processor for new products being developed in these two companies. To understand what this means in TI's greater strategy, we need to back up a bit to take a look as some other initiatives they have going on and see where they all tie together.
 
Dude, You're Getting An Enterprise Solution Based On Best-Of-Breed Dell Technology! Top
Dell_DudeBarring a change of heart or a wild, consumer-driven financial upturn, it looks as if Dell is out of the consumer PC business and is turning its Sauron-like eye towards the enterprise - the one place where people upgrade their PCs at least once a year. According to PCPro, Dell will is "dramatically changing" their entire business with a focus away from "shiny boxes" and more focus on barebones server and fleet hardware. To be fair, the statement could portend far less than we should expect. Dell has been among the walking dead in PC hardware for most of this decade, producing little of interest (the Adamo was their big consumer play and presumably Alienware will remain a consumer-facing company) but there's still money to be made in selling commodity hardware for a few percentage points over cost. I doubt the outcry will be as vociferous as it was when HP threatened to pull its consumer business, mostly because Dell has no products of any interest to the enthusiast. The anger at HP was more about their destruction of Palm rather than the possibility that we wouldn't be able to by a handsome, staid PC in a black/grey case.
 
Goodbye Erick, Hello Eric Top
Screen Shot 2012-02-27 at 1.50.21 PMTechCrunch has been through a lot lately, and we need to focus on what truly matters: covering startups and innovation. So, this post is going to be short. But here is what's going on: Erick Schonfeld is leaving and Eric Eldon is replacing him as editor. What can you expect from TechCrunch now?
 
Office Wars Top
officewarsOffice represents an increasingly minor amount of screen time in my computing experience, while social computing is transitioning much of that work to stream-based objects. Google's forced march of Google + data into its social experience may be a good long term move for the search company, but it comes at the cost of meshing with Apple's accelerated Twitter interoperability. As Chatter builds out support for Customer Groups across Salesforce business customers and their partners, Twitter's direct messages and @mention authority model are being extended in this new form of collaborative communication.
 
Your Google+ Is In My RSS Feed! No, Your RSS Feed Is In My Google+ Top
Screen Shot 2012-02-27 at 4.36.28 PMIf there's one thing wrong with Google+ it's a lack of a real non-browser interface. There are workarounds and widgets, but there's never been a real way to pull your G+ feed into a more comfortable format. While many would complain that RSS isn't even close to a comfortable format, it's bettern' nuffin'. That said, a new free service called GPlusRSS allows you to create a public RSS feed of your G+ account. You can potentially share this feed with others (here's mine) or you can keep it for yourself. The feed consists only of public pronouncements so private messages won't show up.
 
AT&T's Latest Boondoggle Is To Let App Makers Pay For Users' Data Top
att-logoThe Wall Street Journal reports that AT&T is considering giving app makers the option of being charged for the data their users are gobbling up while playing with the app. Let me just start out by calmly saying that this is absolutely ridiculous, and I'd like to call for a People vs. AT&T overturn of the decision right here and now. See, a study emerged recently showing just how much data the average smartphone user consumes. It's between 3.2 and 3.9 GB per month. Now before we get into all the app dev data charge nonsense, there are a couple things that need to be clear.
 
French Birchbox Competitor JolieBox Acquires Spain's Glamourum Top
OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAJolieBox, which is basically a French version of Birchbox, has just acquired the Spanish version of Birchbox, a service known as Glamourum. The acquisition comes a few months following the company's Series A with Alven Capital, and the acquisition of its U.K. competitor Boudoir Privé. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but it was for a mix of cash and stock, the company says.
 
Facebook Mobile Operator Billing Opens App Economy To The Credit Card-less Top
Facebook Mobile Operator BillingThe mobile web, not the smartphone or traditional web, is Facebook's most popular interface. Now those hundreds of millions of users, including prepaid mobile customers in emerging markets who lack credit cards, will be able to make in-app purchases and earn Facebook money thanks to its announcement of mobile operator billing for Credits virtual currency purchases. This is a big step towards Facebook's monetization of mobile despite smartphone platform domination by Apple and Google. For people without credit cards where Facebook Credits gift cards aren't available, operator billing won't just be a convenience, it may be the only way for them to participate in the Facebook mobile app economy.
 
Quietly Brilliant, But HTC Sure Made Some Noise At MWC Top
htc-logoWow. We expected a lot of news out of Mobile World Congress but who knew HTC would have so. freaking. much. I was having trouble keeping track of it myself, so for the good of the both of us, I thought it might be fitting to bundle all this news up into something a tad more easily digestible. And off we go...
 
Social Email Contact Manager Xobni Raises $10 Million From 'Commercial' Partner Top
xobniSocial email startup Xobni, the social email plugin that makes your inbox smarter, has raised $10 million in new funding, according to an SEC filing. We confirmed the new round with the company. This brings the startup's total funding to $42 million. Xobni says that it signed a commercial agreement, and as part of that agreement, the partnering company invested money in Xobni. We've been told that the agreement will eventually be disclosed as the company rolls out products.
 
Stay of Execution — Evi May Stay In App Store If It Doesn't Look Like Siri Top
stay-of-executionOnly yesterday we reported that Evi, a new iPhone (iTunes link) and Android app (link) which was incredibly Siri-like - and some say it's better - had gotten a call from Apple that it was about to be pulled from the App store. Why? For being - as far as we could figure out - too much like Siri, and maybe, well, just too good. Today, the buzz at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona is that Apple has climbed down from that position, and in particular as a result of our story.
 
Pinweel Launches Group Photo App, Wants Caterina Fake To Cut It Out With "Pinwheel" Top
photoDo you really need another photo-sharing app on your iPhone? The founders of a startup called Pinweel think you do — specifically, one that's focused on group albums. I've been playing with Pinweel this morning, and I have to admit that it's a good-looking app. There's a simple, colorful interface, with nice touches like the fact that the photographer's profile picture shows up at the bottom corner of each image. And it has the usual photo app features, like filters, comments, and the ability to give a photo a thumbs up or a thumbs down.
 
Keen On… Marcus Whitney (TCTV) Top
Screen shot 2012-02-27 at 11.27.52 AMAndrew Keen interviews Marcus Whitney, Co-Founder and CTO of Moontoast at SF MusicTech Summit 2012
 
The Rightsizing Of RIM: 41 Megapixels Is Completely Meaningless, And So Is 500k Apps, Says RIM VP Top
alec saundersIt's not nice to knock a company when it's down, but I had a briefing earlier today in Barcelona with Alec Saunders, the head of developer relations at RIM, which -- depending on whether you support RIM or not -- either speaks to the company's new, original attack on the market, or a sign of why it won't succeed. The bottom line is that RIM, in a way, seems to think that size doesn't matter these days.
 
Keen On… Audience: Why Fans Are The Real Future Of The Music Business (TCTV) Top
Screen Shot 2012-02-25 at 2.57.55 PMThe most profound of all the digital disruptions that have occurred over the last 20 years has been the breach in trust between the creative artist and audience. It's this disruption that decimated the traditional recorded music industry; and it's only by curing this distrust that the music industry can rebuild itself.
 
ZenCash Syncs With Invoicing Apps, Helps You Actually Get Paid Top
zencash-logoA new cloud-based service for collecting payments called ZenCash has launched today, with support for integration into popular invoicing applications like QuickBooks, Clio, Freshbooks, Harvest and more. With ZenCash, the goal is to automate a business's customer relationships surrounding the invoicing process, especially the often uncomfortable part where you have to ask for overdue payments. The idea for startup comes from serial entrepreneur Brandon Cotter, now ZenCash CEO, who says he realized the need for more automation in the invoicing and collections process after having spent hours calling customers in an attempt to collect money his small business was owed.
 
Facebook: Privacy Needs To Be Just As Easy To Control On Mobile As On The Web Top
fbdudeFacebook, currently in a quiet period as it prepares for its IPO, is stone-cold silent on whether it really will ever launch a mobile device, and whether it plans to launch mobile advertising to complement its main revenue driver on desktops. But that does not mean it is sitting still on mobile -- the company's biggest area of growth at the moment. In an interview today in Barcelona with TechCrunch, Facebook's CTO, Bret Taylor, described how the social network is taking privacy seriously on mobile, an incendiary issue that only yesterday got flamed once again, and also about how developers were behind its move toward carrier billing.
 
YC-Backed Coderwall Wants To Be The Reputation System for Developers Top
coderwallIf coders want to demonstrate their prowess, they can share code on GitHub, answer programming questions on sites like Stack Overflow and Quora, or just blog their thoughts and advice. What's missing, however, is a site that aggregates all this activity — at least according Coderwall, which is part of the current batch of startups incubated at Y Combinator. Naturally, Coderwall wants to be that site, functioning essentially as the online reputation system for developers. Even though it's officially launching today, the site has been live since last summer. It's growing at about 20 percent each month, with sign ups coming in entirely from Twitter, and there are now 13,000 individual profiles. Founder Matt Deiters tells me he's already seeing job postings that specifically ask applicants to send their Coderwall profile.
 
Now On iOS And Android, 2tor Brings Higher Education To Mobile Students Top
5There's a growing focus on the intersection of education and technology, from Apple's initiatives to reinvent the textbook and Inkling's efforts to take virtualized textbooks to professional publishers to Bertelsmann and others backing a $100 million fund for innovative education.
 

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