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Jan 04, 6:16AM
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In an unusual hybrid, British industrial designer
Phil Pauley created
Marine Solar Cells that harness energy from both the sun and water. The web of energy generators capture energy off-shore, using a combination of floating photovoltaics and natural buoyancy displacement. Thanks to the reflective nature of water, the solar component's efficiency is up to 20% greater than it would be land-locked.
Jan 04, 5:01AM
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Ultrabooks are all the rage for 2012, and we'll probably see quite a few of them at CES next week. But there are still some of us who prefer a more robust computing experience, which is why HP has today announced the Omni 27-inch all-in-one and the Pavilion HPE h9 Phoenix, the most powerful Pavilion model to date.
Jan 04, 4:44AM
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I've heard like a billion people complain about this recently so here goes: When you're starving you don't want to read through thousands of Yelp reviews on your phone or download a random PDF from a terrible restaurant website that's so slow-load it's indecipherable. You just want to know where a restaurant is, what it has to eat, and whether or not it's open.
'Menu and Hours' is a Kickstarter project designed just to give you just the menu, hours, contact info and location of local eateries -- the antidote to unnavigable mobile restaurant websites and TMI foodie services like Urbanspoon. Brilliant, right?
Jan 04, 4:11AM
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Sales effectiveness cloud SaaS company Callidus Software Inc today
announced its acquisition of LeadFormix, a B2B cloud-based lead intelligence SaaS.
LeadFormix lets B2B vendors turn anonymous visits to their websites into qualified leads by identifying potential customers and reporting their intent. This solution will join the
Callidus multi-tenant SaaS sales performance and effectiveness solutions that help companies hire better sales people, close deals, and incentivize sales performance.
Jan 04, 3:17AM
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Most investments fail but the few successful ones more than make all the money back -- or so startup investors hope. But what sort of returns do these profitable exits bring in? According to a new analysis of all the exits listed in
CrunchBase, the average successful company has raised $25.3 million, and sold for $196.8 million, for investor profits of 676% (if you assume the investors own 100% of the company, which they normally don't). Meanwhile, IPO-bound companies generated lower percentage returns, but made a lot more money per exit. The average one raised $580.3 million while private, then went public with a market cap of $2.3 billion on its first day of public trading for 303% profit on investment. Mouse over the dots below for more details.
Jan 04, 3:14AM
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In Facebook's early days the
company planned a national beer pong tournament, but then cancelled it out of fear it would promote underage drinking. Tomorrow, that dream will be revived in a new way when social video and ecommerce company
Milyoni streams The World Series of Beer Pong through its Facebook app. For 50 Facebook Credits/$5 PayPal pre-sale or 70/$7 once the games begin, viewers can tune in to all the boozy action from doubles to rebuttals. The stream could demonstrate whether live sports could work as Facebook pay-per-view programming.
Jan 04, 2:53AM
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Google has posted a bit of new info to the
Android Developers blog that is probably less of a big deal than people are making it into, but still worth looking at. The post details a requirement that all manufacturers include in their Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) devices the default Holo theme. They don't have to use the theme, they just have to have the data composing it on the phone. This is less a blow aimed at third-party UIs and more a general integrity check that ensures apps and services will have the choice to provide a consistent face to the user across many devices.
Jan 04, 1:46AM
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The game is on. The Iowa Caucus (important because it kicks off voting and is viewed as an indicator of which Presidential candidates have a chance at winning the Republican nomination) results started pouring in around 7pm CST tonight. So far it looks like it will be
a three-way race between Ron Paul, Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney, according to analysts and preliminary polls.
Jan 04, 1:26AM
Vizify, a social tool for creating a great first impression online and a recent grad of
TechStars' Seattle accelerator program, is announcing today that it has raised $1.2 million in seed funding from a group of entrepreneurs and investors, which includes
Picnik Founder Jonathan Sposato, Founder and Managing Director of Draper Fisher Jurvetson,
Tim Draper, Bill McAleer of
Voyager Capital, and Co-founder of
Feedburner Matt Shobe, among others. Vizify is also a member of the inaugural class of the
Portland Seed Fund, a seed fund and 90-day accelerator program that invests $25,000 in six to eight Oregonian companies every six months.
Jan 04, 1:09AM
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The question of how music will be distributed in a year, five years, or ten years, is an open one. The landscape has been altered so drastically over the last ten years that the only thing that seems sure is that major changes will continue to come.
Bandcamp hopes to be part of those changes, and they're showing healthy growth: the site pulled in a million dollars in sales just in December. Not, of course, much of a challenge to the sudden empire of iTunes and the
inverted economics of streaming services of Spotify — but the Bandcamp approach to the distribution question is building legitimacy.
Jan 04, 12:55AM
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After a decade of iPods, Apple's little white charging cable seem to be pretty much everywhere these days. Open a random drawer, there one will sit. Ask a pack of strangers, "Hey — anyone got an iPhone cable?" and half a dozen will be thrown your way. At this point, it's almost hard to
not be within reach of one... until you actually
need one. Then the damned things seemingly don't exist. Looking to make sure no iThing owner is ever caught out-and-about without a charging cable in tow is the
Cord-On-Board, a (rather cleverly named) shock-resistant iPhone case with a 9.5" charging cable tucked inside.
Jan 03, 11:48PM
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We are only one working day into 2012, and already two data startups announced funding rounds. Klout confirmed its
Series C, and now social music data gatherer,
Next Big Sound, is set to announce a $6.5 million Series A. The TechStars startup (
Class of 2009) just got backing from IA Ventures and Foundry Group. It will also be opening an office in New York City (it is headquartered in Boulder, CO).
Jan 03, 11:17PM
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Imagine a candlelit dinner, a private art gallery tour, and round-trip black car service for you and your significant other. Now imagine how nice it'd be if you didn't have to plan any of that awesome date.
BeCouply is a new subscription service for couples where each month they get a unique, all-inclusive date set up for them. It's like ShoeDazzle for romantic experiences. With pre-seed funding from
Mitch Kapor, BeCouply Dates
launches today in San Francisco with plans to expand to more cities and a mobile date idea app soon.
Jan 03, 11:11PM
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This week's guest on Speaking Of is no stranger to the world of television. She's
Jesse Draper, creator and host of online talk show,
"The Valley Girl Show." The show profiles entrepreneurs and businesspeople, but in a format not often seen in Silicon Valley: on a pink-themed set, Draper draws her guests out of their shells in fun, light-hearted interviews that focus less on numbers and more on what the guests are like outside of their work lives. A Silicon Valley native, Draper grew up around entrepreneurs. Her inspiration for The Valley Girl Show came from watching her father's friends – her heroes – being grilled in television interviews, and noticing that no one was talking about the fun, creative sides of these entrepreneurs. She set out to create an entertaining business talk show, decided to play off of the stereotypical Southern California "valley girl" persona, and ran with the pink.
Jan 03, 10:48PM
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Talk about starting your year off on the right foot. Two days ago,
Codecademy — a startup that's looking to bring programming to the masses — launched a nifty initiative called
Code Year. It's pretty straightforward: sign up, and each week you'll receive some programming lessons in your email inbox. And apparently, there are a
lot of people who want to learn how to code. Code Year just had its 100,000th user sign up — a remarkable milestone given that the site has only been up for 48 hours. And that number continues to grow at a rapid pace.
Jan 03, 10:08PM
Klout's reputation is
growing among investors. The startup, which provides a social credit score for more than 100 million public profiles across various social networks, raised C round of financing of around
$30 million. Business Insider was the first to report the funding. The company declined to disclose the exact amount it raised, but we've confirmed that $30 million is close to the correct amount. Kleiner partner Chi-Hua Chien, who has been a board observer since Kleiner led Klout's $8.5 million B round last January, is now a full board member, along with another Kleiner partner, Bing Gordon, Mayfield's Allen Morgan, and CEO Joe Fernandez.
Jan 03, 8:22PM
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The low-cost Indian tablet known as the
Aakash, which we have followed in its career over the last year, is finally shipping. In late December they opened up orders for the first batch of 30,000 units, and brought so much traffic to their retail site that an Indian cyber regulation agency called to inform them they were possibly under attack. And in the last two weeks,
they've racked up over 1.4 million pre-orders — iPad-scale numbers. It's being sold for Rs2500, which translates to
just under $50. The government then subsidizes sales to students, bringing the cost down to $35. But while the government originally suggested a million devices would be on the ground before the end of 2011, the Indian manufacturer won't be pushing out devices at a decent rate until this coming April, and at that point the Aakash may find itself an orphan device.
Jan 03, 7:35PM
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A blogger paid to publish a Chrome video is responsible for violating Google policy, not Google or its ad agency Unruly Media that sponsored the post. However, Google says it never authorized Unruly to run a sponsored blog post campaign in the first place. Yesterday we covered that
Google was sponsoring bloggers to post a Chrome video, but that at least one post linked directly to the Chrome download page in violation of Google's paid link policy. The author chose to include the link, and her post has now been deleted.
Jan 03, 7:35PM
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As TechCrunch's
resident Super Meat Boy fanboy, I feel like it's my duty to pass on the good news: Team Meat's rage-tastic, "Just five more tries. Seriously. Maybe Six."-inducing twitch platformer has officially cruised through its 1 millionth sale.
Jan 03, 7:26PM
Parse.ly, the stealthy data-driven predictive content optimization platform for publishers, is preparing to launch its first product called
Dash at the end of the month, we've learned. The startup first emerged from DreamIt Ventures in 2009, with $20K of seed funding in tow. It raised an A round from
ff Venture Capital and
Blumberg Capital in December 2010 totaling $1.8 million. Dash aims to help publishers increase pageviews by providing insight into what topics are trending and what topics they should write more about or less about, among other things. But most importantly, its predictive analysis engine is able to recommend what topics publishers should cover
right now to be on top of future trends. Simply put, it's a pageview-generating machine.
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