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Bill Gates On Nuclear Energy: Compared To Coal, It Is Still Safer In Terms Of People "Killed Per Kilowatt Hour"
May 03, 2:23PM
After the nuclear disaster in Japan at the Fukushima reactors, the general public is understandably skittish about nuclear energy once again. But not Bill Gates. Speaking today at a Wired business conference in New York City, he is talking up the benefits of nuclear energy, particularly next-generation designs. The backlash, he thinks, is overblown. "If you compare it to the amount that coal has killed per kilowatt hour," he points out, "it is way, way less." When an accident does occur, however, its effects are much more visible. "Coal kills fewer people at one time, which is highly preferred by politicians," he says. Gates is putting his money where his mouth is. He is an investor in his friend Nathan Myrhvold's nuclear reactor startup Terrapower, which is designing one such next-generation nuclear reactor which produces one thousandth as much radioactive waste. But he also has investments in "dozens" of other energy companies, from battery companies to solar to biofuels. "We should pursue them all," he says. "The amount of IQ working on energy today and the tools they have to simulate compared to 20 years ago is night and day, but it is unpredictable whether we will get a breakthrough."
Kima Ventures Invests In YellowBrck, A Foursquare For Parents
May 03, 2:06PM
Social networking is definitely no longer targeting just the young adult demographic - and Kima Ventures wants a piece of the larger social networking pie. Xaiver Niel and Jérémie Berrebi's seed fund has just announced a $150K investment in YellowBrck, a Foursquare-like social network for parents.
With Big Graphics, HD Cameras, And Triple Monitor Support, iMacs Are More Pro-Like
May 03, 2:02PM
For the past six years or so, my main desktop machine has been a string of iMacs. As an all-in-one machine, they're both great to look at and simple to set up and use. But the power user side of me was always left a bit wanting. And it sounds like the iMac upgrades Apple has just unveiled this morning may fix that. First of all, they've solved perhaps my single biggest complaint about the iMac: there's finally a way to hook up two external monitors to the machine, giving you a total of three screens. Ever since I started using dual monitors a few years ago, I quickly realized only one thing would be better: three monitors. But the iMac could not do it — only the Mac Pro could. Again, not anymore.
Munchery Wants To Bring Personal Chefs To The Masses
May 03, 1:31PM
A new startup has launched hoping to disrupt the food services industry and democratize the experience of having a personal chef. Munchery aims to bring personal chefs to the masses, giving consumers a way to access high-quality meals delivered to their home by professionals. For most of us, employing a personal chef is not financially possible. But many consumers don't have the time, patience or interest to cook healthy, delicious, well-balanced meals. Carry-out is an option, but this doesn't ensure the quality of the food. Munchery allows personal and professional chefs to sell their meals online, upload menu choices, set minimum orders (you order by meal), specify areas where they deliver, schedule of delivery, and more. 
RIM Sold 150 Million Phones In 12 Years, 15 Million Last Quarter
May 03, 1:16PM
I don't often like to post "numbers" news since we're hardware guys, but this particular stat sticks out: Mike Lazaridis just reported that BlackBerry sold 150 million phones in the past 12 years and sold 15 million last quarter. To put this into perspective, Nokia shipped 108.5 million mobile devices in Q1 2011 while AT&T alone sold 3.6 million iPhones last quarter. Like the baby bear's bowl of porridge, RIM isn't too hot nor is it too cold. Some would say, in fact, that those sales are just right or, barring that, tepid. 
Amazon Launches Private Fashion Sales Site MyHabit.com
May 03, 1:09PM
Amazon this morning announced that it is debuting a brand new private sales site, featuring fashion items straight from designers and boutique brands. The membership-only website, MyHabit.com, will offer daily events featuring up to 60 percent off a selection of styles, along with free four-day shipping shipping and returns.
Amazon Has Ordered Color Kindle Tablets, Expected Before Holidays
May 03, 12:45PM
Quanta, a Chinese hardware manufacturer, is reporting that they have received an order from Amazon to build new Kindle tablets, potentially with fringe field switching display touchscreens that may or may not mimic the screens found in devices like the Nook Color.
BuyWithMe Buys Chicago Daily Deal Site DealADayOnline
May 03, 12:43PM
Groupon rival BuyWithMe has acquired a daily deal site in the former's home turf, Chicago, in order to expand its regional offering. With the acquisition of the group buying site, DealADayOnline (DADO), BuyWithMe will offer daily deals in 13 major cities across the United States.
Apple Updates The iMac With New Quad-Core Intel CPUs, Thunderbolt I/O
May 03, 12:41PM
Smell that? Yeah, it's the crisp smell of Sandy Bridge chips. The iMacs were starting to smell a bit stale with older Intel Core CPUs and low memory ATI graphic cards. Not anymore. Apple just rolled out the latest models and as expected, rock Intel's latest i5 and i7 Core CPUs along with ThunderBolt I/O. The base model 21.5-inch model no longer slums with a Core i3 CPU. The budget iMac now has a Core i5 and 4GB of RAM. Likewise, the Core i3 option is gone from the 27-inch model range as well as the whole model range are rocking at least new quad-core chipsets. 
The Five (Minor) Differences Between The Motorola Xoom And Acer Iconia Tab
May 03, 12:31PM
The march towards the generic Android tablet has begun. Most of the first Honeycomb tablets are indistinguishable from each other save one or two tiny differences. The Xoom hit the market first and still has arguably the best reviews while the G-Slate made a name for itself with 3D movies. Then there's the Asus Transformer with its $150 optional keyboard dock and the Acer Iconia Tab with, well, a full size USB port. So now the buying points come down to the minutiae. Take the Xoom and the Iconia Tab. There's a $150 difference in price with the only major hardware difference being the Xoom rocks 32GB of flash memory rather than 16GB. Still, I've found several, five to be exact, notable difference between the two. Spoiler: The Xoom isn't worth the extra money if you don't care about storage.
Gogobot Gets Lots More Interesting With Foursquare & Facebook Integration
May 03, 12:30PM
I like to think of Gogobot as a Yelp for travel, or a TripAdvisor that puts users first. If you travel a lot and want to write about the things you did, or if you want good tips on travel, it's an excellent resource (see our launch post from last year for a detailed review). You can navigate Gogobot by searching for places or things. Or, you can see where a particular user has gone by navigating his or her "passports." To date users have added 300,000 places they've visited and/or written reviews. Which is great. But Gogobot wants more data. Lots more. 
Stipple Opens The Kimono To Reveal A Product Tagging Platform With Massive Potential
May 03, 12:00PM
When we first covered Stipple in September of last year, it seemed like a really cool idea: tag people in images no matter where they reside on the web — not just on Flickr or Facebook. It was quickly clear that investors like Kleiner Perkins, Mike Maples, and even Justin Timberlake agreed, as they poured $2 million into the company just three months post-launch. And now that Stipple is ready to reveal the full product they've built, it's pretty clear why the initial investment came so quickly. This platform has potentially to be really big, and make a lot of people a lot of money. So what is Stipple now? Well, there's still the people-tagging element for sure. And that's still really cool. If you tag a person in a photo on the web, you can enter their Twitter name or Facebook name and then anyone can see their most recent updates as overlays on that picture. But the much bigger idea is that Stipple is teaming up with photo services, fashion brands, publishers, and others to possibly alter the way people browse and buy things on the web.
TrueCar Acquires News Corp-Backed Automotive Social Network Honk.com
May 03, 11:53AM
TrueCar, which helps people research new and used car prices and find local dealer savings, has acquired automotive social media company Honk.com, dubbed the 'Facebook for car buyers' in the news release. Interestingly, Honk.com was co-founded by Tom Taira, who is also the co-founder and former president of ... TrueCar. News Corporation, an early investor in Honk.com, will retain an equity stake in TrueCar as part of the agreement. Financial details of the transaction were not disclosed.
Angels Club Together To Invest In Friendfund
May 03, 10:43AM
Friendfund, the group payments startup that lets friends club together to make a purchase, has announced an undisclosed round of funding from a group on Angel investors described as, well, friends. The investment was led by Bjoern von Siemens in partnership with Linden VC. However, cheesy PR aside, Friendfund is operating in an increasingly crowded and hot space right now. The Berlin-based startup competes with a host of sites that enable friends and other groups of people to club together to raise money for a purchase or occasion, most of which are probably better funded. These include WePay, The Gifts Project and Giftiki, who have all taken not insignificant investment. 
Tigerlily Raises $1.3 Million To Help Brands Avoid Nestle-like Fan Page Disasters
May 03, 10:13AM
Recently, Paris-based Tigerlily seemed like it was slipping under the radar. It'd been a while since we'd heard anything from the company that we suggested Nestlé take a look at when the brand came under fire on social media platforms last year. Tigerlily had also caught a bit of attention before, as it was a finalist for LeWeb in 2009 and the Europas last year. But the startup that specializes in social marketing or Facebook fan page solutions has just announced that it has raised €900K or $1.3 million.
Renren: Big but not the Facebook of China
May 03, 9:46AM
The Financial Times yesterday reported on the upcoming IPO of Chinese social network Renren.com: The strong interest [in Renren's IPO] stems from the fact that there is no major social media or social networking company open to public investment. With a Facebook IPO at least a year off, many investors are keen for a slice of "the Facebook of China". The offering is set to price on Tuesday in the US and begin trading on Wednesday. Highlighting the success of the pitch to market Renren as a Facebook proxy, the price range was raised on Friday from the initial $9-$11 to $12-$14. That could increase the deal size to as much as $743m, from the $584m planned originally.The link in the excerpt above is from another Financial Times story that questions Renren's valuation and user numbers, and is one of many signs that investors should take a cool and calm look at the company. But before looking at the doubts, let's look at why the company is worth the excitement:
Getty Images Acquires Rival Photolibrary To Expand Digital Content Offering
May 03, 8:34AM
Getty Images has acquired competitor The Photolibrary Group, which provides access to over 10 million images, footage and music files. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. Founded in 1967 and headquartered in Sydney, Australia, Photolibrary brings to Getty Images a broad range of content, some with regional appeal, including renowned collections such as Peter Arnold and Oxford Scientific.
The New Whuffie? — Dapsem's iPhone App Lets You Give Anything A Dap
May 03, 8:33AM
We wrote about Dapsem when they showed off their to-be-launched iPhone app at Techonomy3 in Tel Aviv a few weeks ago. I was impressed by the simplicity of the app, which simply allows you to give a maximum of three 'daps' (like a Facebook Like) a day to something or someone you want to praise or just acknowledge. It is a stupidly simple concept but one which has lots of potential to scale and become another kind of reputation system. It's now live in the app store so check it out [iTunes link]. Writing LinkedIn Recommendations for people or reviews of Yelp is just too hard - Dapping someone with Dapsem is easy. 
Post-"Orgy" And Huge Nasdaq Bite, Apple's Stock Emerges Unscathed
May 03, 7:31AM
Reading the headlines a month ago, you would have thought Apple's insane run in the stock market was over. "Apple Crunched in Nasdaq Rebalance," read the key Wall Street Journal headline. But the reality of the situation was much calmer. And actually, Apple ended up a little ahead of where they were when the news first hit. Here was the situation: because Apple's stock had risen so quickly over the past couple of years, it was accounting for a full 20.5 percent of the Nasdaq 100 index — a hugely traded collection of 100 stocks on the market. To put the percentage in context, Google was accounting for just 5.8 percent of the index, and Microsoft just 8.3 percent. So the Nasdaq decided to rebalance the index to lower Apple's influence.
Nico Pitney To Replace Jai Singh As AOL HuffPo's Managing Editor
May 03, 6:30AM
Earlier tonight, Yahoo announced that they grabbed one from our side to be the new Editor in Chief of their Yahoo Media Network: Jai Singh. Singh had been the Executive Editor at Huffington Post (and more recently, AOL HuffPo) for the past two years, where he helped shaped the company into the news and information juggernaut that it has become. Now we know who his replacement will be: Nico Pitney. Pitney was previously the Executive Editor of The Huffington Post, having risen through the ranks after serving as the Politics Editor during the 2008 Presidential campaign (and eventually becoming the National Editor and Washington Bureau Chief). Below, find Arianna Huffington's brief memo on the move (meeting place and time redacted in case of weirdos lurking around the NYT office):
Social App Maker NoiseToys Raises $1.2M
May 03, 5:08AM
Hitmaker and Apptitude creator NoiseToys has raised $1.2 million in seed funding this week, to continue to focus on apps that bring together social sharing and game mechanics. Noise Toys launched at TechCrunch Disrupt NYC last year. Investors in the round included DCM, former Playdom Chairman Rick Thompson, Guitar Hero founder Charles Huang, Coveroo CEO Karl Jacob, NEA general partner Kittu Kolluri, Triple Point Ventures president Ben Narasin, Imeem co-founder Jan Jannink, Ty Danco, Akash Garg, Aren Sandersen, Marco Magnocavallo, Alex Fries and Andie Simon. 
Yep, Google Just Pushed Chrome Canary For Mac Out Of The Nest
May 03, 1:28AM
This morning, we noted that Google was getting ready to release an OS X version of the Chrome Canary build. Sure enough, just hours later, here it is. Canary is the pre-Dev build of Chrome meant for users who enjoy testing new things early and often and don't mind some bugs and hiccups along the way. It's meant to be run alongside the more stable builds of Chrome, so you can have the best of both worlds.
Videolicious For The iPhone Helps You Edit Quality Videos, Fast
May 03, 12:50AM
Videolicious for the iPhone and iPad is a free app designed for those of us who aren't professional video editors but still want to have our important moments preserved in quality video. By walking people through the step by step combining of video footage, photos and music, Videolicious lets users create their own documentary style clips and share them to Twitter, Facebook and email. 
Pandora Is Now 10 Billion Thumbs Strong
May 02, 11:31PM
Personalized radio service Pandora has reached a major milestone: last week it recorded its 10 billionth thumb (and it was a thumbs up). Avid fans of the popular service already know what that means — for the rest of you, Pandora lets users mark the song that's currently playing with a Thumbs Up or Thumbs Down. The effect is pretty straightforward: hit a thumbs up and Pandora will try to play more music that sounds like the song you're listening to, thumbs down and Pandora will immediately jump to the next song and send a minor electric shock to CTO Tom Conrad. In other words, these thumbs are explicit signals that users are sending to Pandora to help fine-tune their radio stations, and it shows that plenty of people actually try to take advantage of the personalization features as opposed to just letting the radio play in the background all day. 
TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon BCC Fail. We Apologize #TCLeakers
May 02, 11:02PM
A couple of years ago RockYou couldn't seem to send an email to partners without screwing up and cc'ing everyone. We pointed each screwup out, with catchy headlines. I knew that someday, somehow, we'd probably do the same thing. And I knew we'd have to take extra criticism for it because we've called out others. Today's payback day. We sent a mass email and we failed to use BCC. It's Amateur Hour at TechCrunch, and we deserve derision. Consider us rolling over on our backs and showing you our submissive belly. We apologize, sincerely. We sent out a simple email to all applicants of the upcoming Disrupt Hackathon in New York. There are a lot of them - 452, I believe, which is more than any of our previous hackathons, and we still have a month to go. It's going to be a very fun event.
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