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Dec 31, 8:25AM
It was only days ago that we wrote that after nearly a year of delays, the first
WakeMate units were
finally shipping to customers. And now there's some more bad news — really bad. Some of the initial units are apparently bursting into flames because of any issue with the USB charger included.
Repeat: Do not use the USB charger included with the shipping WakeMate units. The company has just sent out the following notice to customers:
Dec 31, 4:43AM
If you've ever gone shopping on eBay, you know how important seller ratings can be — take a stab with someone who has less than a 90-something approval rating, and you're testing your luck. And even when you've found someone with a satisfactory rating, the descriptions left by other buyers tend to be mostly useless (
A++++, anyone?), which makes the whole thing feel a little risky regardless. Oh, and sellers can always get scammed by buyers, which makes it even more fun.
Addoway is an e-commerce site that looks to help reduce these feelings of anxiety by using Facebook Connect to help you find sellers that your friends have had good experiences dealing with in the past. The site launched eight months ago, and is currently drawing 90,000 uniques a month.
Dec 31, 2:37AM
It was just about a year ago that
we first wrote about BarMax, an iPhone application meant to help law student pass the Bar exam. But if you've heard of the app, it's more likely because of its price: $999.99. And now you'll be able to part with the $1,000 at the click of a button for the iPad too. BarMax, which, believe it or not, actually seems to be a good deal at $1,000, has just launched the iPad version into the App Store this evening. Specifically, the California (each state has different Bar exams) version is ready to roll.
Dec 31, 1:38AM
Have a great idea, but don't have the time or money to actually bring it to market? A new startup called
OpenInvo wants to help you turn it into a nice chunk of change by selling it to existing businesses that are looking for an extra dose of innovation. Now, there are other platforms for sharing business ideas — you may be familiar with
Kickstarter, which has gotten attention for projects like the
iPod Wristwatch. But Kickstarter is for people who want to bring their ideas to fruition and just need funding — OpenInvo is for people who have an idea and are willing to put the time in to flesh it out on paper, but don't want to have to deal with actually starting a company.
Dec 30, 11:02PM
According to an SEC form D filed today, the Chicago based
Centro.net has just raised a whopping $22.5 million in equity only funding. Listed on the SEC form are Centro CEO
Shawn Riegsecker and
FTV Capital Partner
Eric Byunn as Director. Centro is a digital media and technology services company founded in 2001, serving over 350 ad agencies world wide . The company's recently launched platform Transis automates and centralizes the media buying and selling process so agencies can save time and money.
Dec 30, 9:49PM
According to a recent
comScore report, Canada has beaten out the US, the UK, France, and everyone else in the world in various metrics relating to broadband and internet use. While the conspicuous absence of the likes of Sweden, a perennial leader in these categories, fills me with suspicion, the numbers are still fun, and slightly surprising. One statistic calculated to both please and terrify is that, by comScore's measurements, just over half the population of Canada is on Facebook. That amounts to about 16 million people — a drop in the bucket with Facebook's user base — but it's the proportion that matters. US usage is around 40% by some estimates, which is of course significant, but it's fun that Canada has passed us up in this race. I'm guessing it has something to do with the weather up there.
Dec 30, 9:19PM
I've often wondered if the early Web pioneers had it all to do over again if Web companies would have put less of an emphasis on free. People have been conditioned against paying for services or content on the Web, and the Web elite only have each other to blame. For all the talk of Web companies getting users first and "figuring out" how to make money later, the only two jaw-droppingly, multi-billion-dollar, innovative new ways to advertise online have been Google's paid search ads and Groupon's solution to unlocking local ad dollars on a mass scale. Those who win big--like Google-- just perpetuate the cult of free content and services as a way of spoiling would be competitors. Witness a big disconnect between popularity and money. Exhibit A: Yahoo. But on the mobile Web it's a do-over, and it's a totally different playbook from FREE!
Dec 30, 8:55PM
We've reported before about how the
escalating war for talent in Silicon Valley is effectively creating a kind of arms race between tech companies. For example, Google is offering employees a 10% pay increase for 2011; companies like
About.me are getting acquired
days after launch; and job postings in the IT industry are shooting to astronomical levels. Even Google's Eric Schmidt has admitted to
this battle. Facebook, Google, Zynga and Twitter are hiring like crazy - and this insatiable desire for staff is likely to spill over into other countries. And perhaps the obvious first target outside of the Valley is London: English speaking, and a magnet for existing tech people in Europe working for US multinationals. And the latest to consider extending its reach there is
Twitter.
Dec 30, 8:23PM
CNNMoney published an interesting piece by David Goldman this morning entitled,
Google: Your new phone carrier? In it, Goldman lays out what he sees as the preliminary steps Google has taken to become a wireless carrier themselves down the road. He also gives some reasons for why they would
and would not want to do that. In my mind, the concept is much more straightforward. Goldman ends the title of his piece with a question mark — but it should be a period. It's not a question of "if" Google will try to become a carrier. It's just a matter of "when" they'll try to. Now, to be clear, that doesn't mean I think they'll actually be able to become a carrier. The biggest hurdle there has nothing to do with the technology needed, the money needed, or the expertise. Rather, the major issue would be the government. Would they allow Google, already one of the biggest corporations in the United States, to enter a new area that could extend their control (particularly in the advertising space)? Probably not. Actually, I have a feeling it might have more to do with Verizon and AT&T lobbying dollars influencing the government to block Google in such a cause.
Dec 30, 8:09PM
Developer Roberto Martinez wanted an easy way to see what was popular on any given social content site on any given day so he built
Rrrewind, which lets you see what was hot on Delicious, Digg, Hacker News, Reddit, Hulu, Yahoo Videos, YouTube, Dribbble, Flickr, Amazon and Yahoo Buzz for any day in 2010 and some in 2009. Like a snapshot in virality or a
Popurls with a history focus, Rrrewind allows you to go back in time and see an archive of the most viewed items on the Internet. Says Martinez,
"It is NOT a social, local, deal related, disruptive app, just a damn useful site that let you go back in time and see what was popular on some sites. I built it because I hate to miss hot stuff on Delicious (snif), Hacker News, etc."
Dec 30, 7:20PM
TechCrunch50 demopit company
Image Space Media (formerly
Picad Media) has raised $1 million in new funding according to
an SEC filing. ISM's ad network, which recently
launched an analytics offering and a
self service tool, helps publishers monetize images on their websites with ad overlays. Its proprietary technology allows for audience targeting and matches ads to the most appropriate images available.
Dec 30, 6:35PM
Because everything eventually becomes an academic field (I'm still waiting for "Internet" to become a major), researchers from MIT, University of Southampton and Georgia Institute of Technology have teamed up to build
Who Gives A Tweet, a Twitter app that allows users to anonymously rate their friends' and strangers' tweets in order gain more insight into status update perception. Kind of like
Hot Or Not, but for tweets. While plenty of apps like
Twitalyzer and
Twitter Grader try to measure your social media engagement whatever that means, the
Who Gives A Tweet study attempts to parse what is valuable and not so valuable about microblogging content. Says Michael Bernstein, PhD student at MIT, "Analysing the negatively rated tweets, and the consensus that forms around them, will help us understand the emerging approved or accepted norms in these new forms of online communication."
Dec 30, 6:18PM
Just as the Securities and Exchange Commission is starting to take a
closer look at the increasing amount of trading in private company stock, a new startup that's been in stealth mode since August, 2009 is preparing to launch another way to trade private shares. The company is
Xpert Financial which, through its registered subsidiary, Xpert Securities, brings to the table a tacit stamp of approval from the SEC and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (
FINRA), or at least approval to begin operations as an alternative trading system (
ATS). Existing secondary markets for private shares such as
SharesPost and
SecondMarket do not have the same standing in the eyes of the SEC, although it is not clear
how much that matters at this point. Xpert Financial will operate an electronic trading platform for private company shares. It is a registered broker-dealer with FINRA and it recently got approval from the SEC to run an alternative trading platform. Xpert Financial will be the first ATS approved for private stock sales. More common alternative trading systems are ECNs, or Electronic Communication Networks, for publicly traded securities. As an ATS, Expert Financial cannot call itself an exchange, which is why it changed its name from Xchange.
Dec 30, 5:19PM
It seems, at least at first blush, that we are out of the slimy gullet and into the potentially less dangerous teeth of this recession. Joblessness is still high but folks I know who are working in IT and CS are in high demand. People are hiring, but not out in the open, and shoppers, as evidenced by this year's holiday season, have a little bit of cash. But CE manufacturers, back in 2008, pulled into their turtle shells and haven't come out. The past few years have passed in a slothful haze and I'm worried that 2011 will be another year of negative innovation. Consider what happened this year: we saw a load of Android phones, we saw an iPad and a new iPhone, and saw some tablets. That's it. 3D TV was a flop, most other product lines saw little or no improvement, and generally CE industry sat this year out. CES, if all
portents can be believed, will be a bust as well. People ask me every year what my favorite gadget is. That's almost impossible to answer. Sadly, for me, it's like asking a proctologist about his favorite patient: they all sort of blend together and none of the experiences are very nice. So what is my favorite gadget? The gadget that truly stood out? It's the freaking
Parrot AR.Drone. That's right. A toy. Here's why, and here's what manufacturers can take away from this toy.
Dec 30, 5:00PM
In a few short weeks, the
NookColor sold "nearly a million units," at least according to B&N, making it the company's best selling product. Launched in October, the
NookColor is a hackable Android tablet originally designed to only read B&N's line of ebooks and play a few games. Since its launch, however, it's become a
hacker's plaything and a popular alternative to the do-it-all
iPad. In short, the NookColor could be B&N's ultimate weapon against Kindle hedgemony and has definitely put them firmly in the ereader race. Full PR after the jump.
Dec 30, 3:58PM
As we
first reported last night, Groupon has already closed $500 million of a whopping $950 million funding round. Now the
SEC filing is out showing that the first sale occurred on December 17, and that there is still $450 million worth of securities available to be sold in the current round. The new round gives Groupon a
valuation of $4.75 billion. We noted that most of the proceeds of the round is going back to founders and existing shareholders, with DST leading the round (Fidelity and Morgan Stanley also participated). Now we know exactly how much. The filing specifies that $345 million of the proceeds (from the $500 million raised) will go directly to "executive officers, directors or promoters."
Dec 30, 3:28PM
The Pew Internet organization put out results of a
survey on how many people pay for digital content online. The study found that 65 percent of people online have paid to download
some form of digital content or for a subscription to a digital media service. The survey excluded physical goods bought online and was focussed only on digital content such as music, software, news, and other online or electronic publications. For those who do spend money online on digital media, most spend between $1 and $10 a month, with 68 percent spending less than $30 a month. (You can see the distribution of amount spend in the chart above). The two kinds of digital goods people are most willing to pay for by far are music and software. One third of respondents (33 percent) say they have paid for either digital music or software online. And 21 percent have paid for mobile apps. So if you combine mobile apps and other forms of software, that is the largest single category even accounting for overlap in the numbers. Paying for digital games comes in fourth at 19 percent. What about digital newspapers or magazines behind paywalls or for sale for tablets like the iPad?
Dec 30, 1:55PM
Blue State Digital, the communications firm responsible for coordinating President Barack Obama's online fundraising and social networking campaigns in the 2008 election, has been
acquired by advertising giant WPP. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Blue State Digital is a digital agency that helps form online strategy, and advocacy, membership and fundraising campaigns for nonprofits, educational and cultural institutions, political campaigns and corporate brands. According to a release, Blue State Digital's revenue has grown more than 30% per year since its founding in 2004 (and the company's strategy and technology has helped raise $800 million to date).
Dec 30, 1:45PM
Glassdoor.com, a
venture-backed online career and workplace community, has self-reportedly culled through tens of thousands interview questions that job seekers have shared on the site in 2010, and selected a number of weird ones. Some of them are pretty bizarre, some are downright hilarious.
Dec 30, 12:35PM
Making the rounds on Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr right now is
Three Words, a super simple but mighty fun application created by teen tinkerer
Mark Bao. What does it do? Well, it tells you who you are
in three words, at least according to the people that visit that Web page, that is.
Dec 30, 7:58AM
It was almost exactly a year ago that we wrote about
the Googlle Institute of Software Studies, a cleverly-named online university based out of India. After our post on the institution offering students such degrees as a "GCPA" — Googlle Certified Professional in Advanced Computing — it didn't take long for the website of the school to be shut down. But the person who originally tipped us off to those shenanigans is now back with another fun one. And apparently, it's based out of the
same city in India. Say hello to the "Hostel Microsoft".
Dec 30, 6:35AM
We've been hearing
reports that Skype is debuting a mobile video chat service and D-Day has arrived. The company is launching a brand new version of its
iPhone app that includes the ability to turn on video in any Skype chat. The beauty of the app is that it brings free video calling to iPhone 3G devices, iPad and iPod Touch, all of which couldn't run Apple's video calling feature Facetime (the feature only works with iPhone 4 devices and Mac computers). Of course, iPad owners won't be able to initiate a video call, but these users can receive any video chats from contacts.
Dec 30, 6:25AM
When
word got out two weeks ago that Yahoo is not 100% committed to Delicious, people who still use the bookmarking service started to panic and look for alternatives. One competing bookmarking site that some people turned to is
Pinboard, a barebones bookmarking site which looks a lot like Delicious did in its early years: lean, no-frills, and very useful. The company saw an influx of traffic and activity. The chart above shows requests per minute to its servers in the three days following the Delicious news compared to the week before. A couple hour ago, Pinboard Tweeted out a
link to the chart:
Dec 30, 3:59AM
Yesterday we reported that fast growing ecommerce startup
Groupon was in the process of raising nearly $1 billion in new venture capital at a
$4.75 billion valuation.
"The deal should be closed in a few weeks," we heard from a source. And in fact the deal hasn't closed yet - at least, not all of it. But the company has raised a healthy half billion dollars in new venture money at that valuation in the last couple of weeks. Documents signed, checks cashed, the whole nine yards. Now they're talking to other investors about filling out the round. So who invested?
Dec 30, 3:10AM
Every year, it seems the buzz starts building around now for CES, the giant consumer electronics expo in Las Vegas. And every year at CES, much of the buzz seems to be around the one company that isn't there — perhaps the most important consumer electronics company these days: Apple. And this year will be no different. Except that this year, the CES buzz-kill may be more intensified as there are not one, but two key Apple products expected to be announced shortly after the expo: the iPad 2 and the
Verizon iPhone.
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