Thursday, March 29, 2012

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Barnes & Noble Incorporates In Germany, Closest Sign Yet Of European Nook Launch Top
barnes_and_noble_nook_tablet_1161200_g2Just as Amazon is launching a new Kindle (but not the Fire tablet, yet) in Europe, one of its big competitors is taking one more step in its bid to enter the European market: Barnes & Noble has incorporated a new company, Barnes & Noble Digital Media GmbH, in Germany. The company filing dates from March 15, just around the time that the U.S. company came to London to promote the Nook to developers -- an event that seemed to leave those developers with more questions than answers.
 
Developers Are Divided Over Adobe's Plan to Take Revenue Share For Higher-End Flash Games Top
Screen shot 2012-03-28 at 10.19.40 PMDevelopers are at odds over Adobe's plan to charge a 9 percent revenue share for higher-end Flash games that make more than $50,000 in revenues. So today, Adobe announced a new set of features for developers who create very graphics-heavy games with the launch of Flash Player 11.2. It also unveiled a partnership with Unity Technologies, the Sequoia-backed company with a gaming engine that powers titles like Mika Mobile's Battleheart. This could bump up the overall quality of browser-based games, considering that the new version of Flash has powers to tap into hardware for rendering 3-D graphics. But if you read the announcement closely, there's the fact that Adobe is going to start charging a 9 percent revenue share for games that make more than $50,000 in net revenues. It affects developers who call two APIs: one that provides access to domain memory, and one that's for hardware acceleration.
 
RentSocial, Launching Today, Adds A Social Layer To The Rental Process [TCTV] Top
Looking for an apartment is usually pretty simple: you go on Craigslist, find three apartments that look like they've been used to chop up beeves, and then move in with your buddy whose roommate made meth in the basement. At least that's how it worked for me a few years ago. Now, however, you have stuff like RentSocial. RentSocial is the front end for Yield Technologies property management systems. Yield, for example, makes a product called RentSentinel for property managers to handle renter rolls for large buildings. By plugging into this existing install base, Yield has been able to create a rental research site with real-time updates from each apartment complex, thereby allowing you to find other people who live in a complex you're looking at or, barring that, read reviews of places people have lived.
 
Box Adds Social Workflow Features To Improve Mobile Collaboration Top
SocialWorkflow - Blog imageBox already made news earlier today with the launch of OneCloud, its suite of productivity applications that are accessible from mobile devices. But it wasn't done — the company also hosted the last stop of its World Tour in San Francisco, where CEO Aaron Levie demonstrated what he called a "reinvention" of collaboration on Box. These features fall under the umbrella of what Box is calling its Social Workflow. He argued that while there are plenty of social business tools, these innovations haven't made their way into content management systems, which he said are "stuck in time and not being updated to move to this post-PC era." The goal is to bring some of the innovations from social network into Box, and also to make the collaboration process work better on smartphones and tablets.
 
Joshua Schachter Launches Newest Tasty Labs Project, Skills.to Top
Screen Shot 2012-03-28 at 6.23.19 PMFounder and investor Joshua Schachter has spent a great deal of time trying to solve the problem of not being able to easily find relevant things and people; initially with his first startup Delicious -- which he sold to Yahoo for a reported $30 million -- and now with his latest efforts at incubator Tasty Labs. Tasty Labs, which has $3 million in funding from Andreessen Horowitz and others, launched its first project (Jig) in August and has now come through with its second service, Skills.to.
 
Zynga Prices $515M Secondary Offering At $12 Per Share Top
zynga-logoAs reported previously, social gaming giant Zynga is holding a secondary offering of its shares. The company just announced the pricing, which is $12 per share, for 42,969,153 shares. All of the shares will be sold by existing stockholders, says the company, and Zynga will not receive any proceeds from the sale of shares. Zynga revealed in an S-1 filing from last week that CEO Mark Pincus will sell 15 percent of his shares, and his voting power post-sale will go from 36.5 percent to 35.9 percent. Investors IVP, SilverLake, Union Square Ventures, Google, Reid Hoffman are also selling in the offering, as is board member Jeffrey Katzenberg. Owen Van Natta, General Counsel Reggis Davis, COO John Schappert and CFO Dave Wehner are selling shares as well.
 
Not All Markets Are Created Equal Top
stock marketThe SEC recently concluded its investigation of the emerging market for pre-IPO shares of private companies, resulting in charges being brought against three market participants. I am proud to say that SecondMarket was not among those investigated or charged with wrongdoing. While the press focused on the SEC "cracking down" on the private company market, the investigation actually focused on wrongdoing that has existed in the securities markets for decades: broker-dealers using improper sales practices and charging inappropriate fees, and unregistered middlemen improperly acting as broker-dealers.
 
Dating App Yoke Hooks You Up Based On Amazon, Netflix, Spotify, And Facebook Data Top
Yoke Dating SiteFinally, a dating site where you can find someone to actually date, not just sleep with. New dating app Yoke matches you with single friends of friends you're truly compatible with but who don't even need to be Yoke users. Yoke does this by comparing  you and their Facebook Likes and listening activity with datasets from Amazon, Netflix, Echo Nest, and a proprietary college graph. That lets Yoke show you potential dates because "you listen to Lil Wayne and she listens to Jay-Z", or "You went to Stanford and he went to MIT". It's got a dead simple Facebook app interface, and  lets you ask mutual friends for introductions. These all combine to give Yoke the power to challenge sites like OkCupid and succeed where strict matchmaking sites like Thread failed.
 
New Government ePayment Regulation Costs Small Business $10 Billion Top
taxThe small business economy is suffering considerable harm from new regulations being enforced by the IRS this year. There's a new tax form that's causing this trouble for small business owners who collect ePayments and conduct eCommerce. The IRS Form 1099-K requires merchant processors and third-party payment processors, such as PayPal and Square, to report the income that individuals and small businesses were paid through their services to the IRS in 2011.  The IRS estimates that 53 million of these forms should have been sent for tax year 2011, making it the 10th highest volume tax form in it's first year of existence. That's a lot of small businesses being hit by the implementation of Internal Revenue Code Section 6050W.
 
Hitting 20M Downloads Across iOS Apps, Azumio Releases Sleep Time To Measure Your Zs Top
Screen shot 2012-03-28 at 4.07.29 PMPalo Alto, Calif.-based Azumio isn't exactly a household name when it comes to mobile apps, so one might be surprised to learn that, collectively, their apps have pulled in over 20 million downloads. That's because Azumio is plugging away at building a suite of biofeedback apps that measure your heart rate, stress, and sleep. Azumio is tapping into a hot trend, as health devices and mobile apps are on the rise and have found eager users outside of the tech community. Companies and devices like Fitbit, Lark, Up, and more have found traction among consumers, but most of them involve external hardware that is worn while you sleep. That's why today Azumio is releasing an app appropriately called Sleep Time, which measures the quality of your sleep and provides you with an alarm clock -- without the extra hardware.
 
Kindle Fire Update Brings Sharing, Book Extras, Print Replica Textbooks To The Masses Top
amazon-kindle-fire-tabletHey there, Kindle Fire owners -- Amazon's rolling out a brand new software update for you, and it packs quite a few worthwhile (and arguably overdue) tweaks for your budget-conscious tablet. Take sharing, for example. Oddly absent from the Kindle Fire at launch was the ability to share interesting snippets of text like its e-ink brethren, but that functionality has been added, along with the ability to tap into Amazon's people-powered Shelfari service for what the company calls Book Extras -- extra related information pertaining to the book a reader is poring through.
 
Have Money, Will Explore: Amazon's Jeff Bezos Aims To Recover Lost Apollo 11 Engines Top
nasaf-1Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has a knack for using his considerable net worth in interesting ways -- 10,000 Year Clock anyone? -- but for space buffs like me, one venture in particular takes the cake. In a new post on the Bezos Expeditions website, he announced that he and his team of savvy undersea explorers have located the Rocketdyne F-1 engines that helped propel the crew of Apollo 11 on their historic voyage to the moon in 1969.
 
House Shoots Down Legislation That Would Have Stopped Employers From Demanding Your Facebook Password Top
facebook-privacy-1Well, that didn't take long. A proposed Facebook user protection amendment introduced yesterday in the U.S. House of Representatives has already been shot down. The legislation, offered by Democratic Congressman Ed Perlmutter, would have added new restrictions to FCC rules that would have prohibited employers from demanding workers' social networking usernames and passwords. The final vote was 236 to 184, with only one House Republican voting in support of the changes.
 
Mobile Ad Network Millennial Media Prices IPO At $13 Per Share Top
screen-shot-2012-01-05-at-5-41-34-pm-11After setting a price range yesterday, mobile ad network Millennial Media has priced its IPO of 10.2 million shares of common stock at $13 per share. This is the high end of the range that Millennial reported yesterday, and values the company at $973.5 million. Millennial's shares will list on the New York Stock Exchange tomorrow morning under the symbol "MM." Millennial says that a total of 9.2 million shares are being offered by the company, and a total of 1 million shares are being offered by selling stockholders. Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Barclays, Allen & Company and Stifel Nicolaus Weisel are all underwriters for the offering.
 
YouTube Is Looking For The Next Vlogging Star Top
youtube logoYouTube is announcing a new program to nurture the next generation of video bloggers. The Next Vlogger initiative is part of YouTube Next Creator — where, as the name implies, the site tries to find and mentor future YouTube stars. It already held similar programs for cooking and fitness, as well as nonprofits.
 
Could The Birdy Be The Word In Simple Expense Tracking? Top
Screen shot 2012-03-28 at 3.50.14 PMWhen I was growing up, my dad had this yellow legal pad that sat right by the door. When he walked in at night, he wrote down numbers and codes. JCF - $12 JSM - $42 CCCl - $37 I didn't understand at the time, but the numbers were daily expenses (rounded up to the nearest dollar), and the codes were tags for which member of the family he was spending on, and the type of spending he was doing. Try as he might to teach me the way of the budget code, I just can't get in the habit. But you know what I'm in the habit of doing every day (no matter how grudgingly)? Email. And that's exactly what expense-tracking webapp The Birdy is banking on.
 
Google Maps For Android Update Packs Hi-Res Map Tiles, New Transit Tweaks Top
nav1Well, Google certainly seems to be having a productive day so far. In addition to the unveiling of their Account Activity feature and a handful of new Google+ Hangout apps, Google has also pushed out a considerable update to their Google Maps for Android app. Now at version 6.5, Google Maps now packs improved support for devices with high pixel density displays -- any device that falls into that category will now get high-resolution map tiles that make for more detailed views that are less cluttered by unnecessarily large labels.
 
Google Apps Debuts Archiving And Records Management System For Businesses, Vault Top
Vault – Google AppsFor a company facing litigation or even strict compliance guidelines, saving and organizing online records can be a challenging task. Today, Google is debuting a new archiving, records management and e-discovery solution for Google Apps for businesses called Vault. Google Apps Vault, which is priced at $5 per-user, per-month, allows businesses to reduce risks and costs associated with litigation, investigation, and compliance audits by providing an in-depth archiving system in the cloud. So all emails, documents and chat messages from Gmail can be accessed in one place. Businesses can define what needs to be retained for Gmail and on-the-record chat messages based on content, labels, and metadata.
 
DC, Richmond, and Points South: Let's Plan The First TC Mini-Meetup In The Virginia Area Top
shutterstock_47340232I've been digging through all of the various start-up emails I've received, and I thought it would be fun to start traveling down the Eastern Seaboard for a bit of mini-meetup action. In essence, we're going to hold small, casual get-togethers at a local bar in DC and Richmond and I'm open to stopping in one more location, depending on interest. Why? Because TC is for everyone. And just like the events Mike Butcher and I organized in Europe and Asia, it's more than worth our time to roll through your town to get the lay of the land.
 
Notey, A Super Simple Way To Share Sensitive Notes Top
important-letterGo here and use the password "techcrunch". Notey is that simple. Just put your super secret message in the text input box, create a password, then share the URL and password. Done. Adam Sewell of MyGeek Computer Services created the little app to more easily share sensitive data. With Notey, users can more easily share text documents, which are secured by symmetric key encryption. Sites like PasteBin could benefit from the simple interface and sharing method used by Notey.
 

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