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AT&T Reveals The $49 Samsung Focus 2, Their Cheapest LTE Windows Phone Yet
May 07, 2:07PM
Well, this morning seems like it's going to be all about sequels. Not only do we have a shiny new Droid Incredible to wait for, AT&T has just pulled back the curtains on a new device in their Focus series of Windows Phones: the LTE-friendly Focus 2, which will launch on May 20 for a mere $49.99 with a two-year contract. The Focus 2 may lack the star power and the marketing muscle behind devices like the Lumia 900, but it has managed to turn a few heads in recent weeks back when it was still known as the Samsung Mandel.comScore: Google Sites Top Facebook On Mobile, But 4 Out Of 5 Mobile Media Minutes Spent In Apps
May 07, 1:59PM
Online and mobile research company comScore just released its newly rebooted and retooled Mobile Metrix report this morning, which examines mobile media usage across both apps and mobile web browsing. According to the new data, Google sites led as the top property on iOS, Android and RIM devices, reaching 96.9% of the U.S. mobile audience, followed by Facebook, Yahoo sites and Amazon sites. But apps dominated in terms of usage, says comScore, with 4 out of every 5 mobile media minutes spent in apps.HTC Reveals The Verizon-Bound Droid Incredible 4G LTE
May 07, 1:45PM
When we first took a look at the HTC One S, we felt that it was just another Android phone, despite the quality hardware. With today's introduction of the HTC Droid Incredible 4G LTE, the same sentiment rings true. All the specs you'd expect are present and accounted for, including Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich and HTC's Sense 4 overlay, but I have yet to find a really stand-out feature on this third-generation device.Beyond The Daily Deal: Groupon's 170M Deals And 33M Users; Aims To Be 'The OS For Local Commerce'
May 07, 1:42PM
Groupon's CEO Andrew Mason today posted a letter to shareholders with some updated figures on how the company is doing, and a more specific outline of what Groupon plans to do to to move beyond daily deals: "To become the operating system for local commerce." The move is a significant one as Groupon attempts to shore up investor confidence amidst a series of accounting issues, and the fact that some believe interest in the basic service of daily deals is beginning to wane. It also underscores some of the challenges Groupon still faces as a company. Mason notes that at the moment there are "10 million geo-located subscribers engaging with Groupon every month who have yet to make a purchase."Personal Takes Its Secure Vault For All Of Your Private, Digital Data Mobile With iOS App
May 07, 1:14PM
Startup Personal, which aims to give consumers control over their digital data, is debuting an iPhone app today, adding to the company's existing web and Android apps. Personal is a free web and mobile service that helps you take control of all the digital information about yourself and your life, decide who gets access to it, and use it for your benefit. This information ranges from your passwords, your kids allergies, emergency contacts, credit card info, and more. Basically, any information you may not want to store in email but want to be able to share with your loved ones or friends.MasterCard: Singapore, Canada, US, Kenya And South Korea Most Ready To Adopt Mobile Payments
May 07, 1:00PM
Credit card giant MasterCard is debuting a new study today, called the MasterCard Mobile Payments Readiness Index, which analyzed 34 countries and their readiness to use three types of mobile payments: person to person, mobile commerce and mobile payments at the point of sale. MasterCard actually developed a proprietary algorithm that takes publicly available data as well as MasterCard-owned data to rank countries on their potential to adopt mobile payments. The study showed that while it is still early stages for mobile payments adoption, Singapore, Canada, the U.S., Kenya and South Korea are the most prepared markets to accept this technology. Additional findings include that young affluent consumers between the ages of 18 and 34 years old are the most willing to use mobile payments as they recognize the value of using mobile payments instead of cash or payment cards. While this demographic was predominantly male in most countries, women showed higher levels of interest in countries such as China, Egypt and the Philippines.Another Move To Make The iPad Enterprise-Friendly: Harmon.ie's iOS SharePoint Collaboration
May 07, 12:17PM
The iPad has, quite quickly, become the tablet of choice for enterprises, with some 97 percent of all tablet activations in Q1 of 2012 attributable to Apple's tablet, according to Good Technology. So it comes as no surprise that apps are rushing into the wake of those purchases to make the iPad more work-friendly. The latest in that story is a release of some social software from harmon.ie that will make SharePoint, the collaboration software from Microsoft, usable on the iPad, as well as the iPhone. Harmon.ie's CEO, Yakov Cohen, says this marks the first time that business users can access SharePoint from both the iPad and desktop with the same user experience.Rovio's Big Year: Angry Birds Helps Gaming Company Soar To $106M In Sales, 648M Downloads
May 07, 10:26AM
We all know what a wild success the Angry Birds franchise has been for Rovio, with the best-selling mobile games spawning cookbooks, toys and much more besides. Today the company revealed just what kind of an impact that has had on its bottom line for its really Big Year. The company today issued a statement that noted that the company made $106.3 million (€75.4m) in revenue in 2011, with earnings before tax at $67.6 million (€48m) -- with 30 percent of that coming from its merchandising and licensing activities. Monthly active users of the app are now at 200 million, with 648 million games downloaded in total.Apple's Lion Security Hole Could Be A Wider Issue Than Just FileVault?
May 07, 10:05AM
As you may have seen over the weekend, someone has discovered a security hole in FileVault, which arose with the OS X Lion security update, version 10.7.3, back in February: FileVault encryption passwords are now visible in plain text outside of a computer's encrypted area. The hole was apparently spotted by someone back in February, although it was most publicly first pointed out by security consultant David Emery on the Cryptome blog a few days ago and the rest of the blogosphere has run with it. Now, it appears that the problem could be bigger than previously thought: it turns out that the developer who first noticed the hole back in February has discovered that it exists outside of FileVault, too, with at least one other company's security encryption software, Lion VM, from VMWare Fusion, showing the same behavior.Wonga Extends Its Payday Loans To Small Businesses In UK
May 07, 8:49AM
Wonga.com, the successful but controversial payday loans provider, is extending its credit service to small businesses in the UK. The move is a smart one given the current economic climate. Banks have been lambasted for not lending to small businesses - Wonga is simply going to try and fill in the gap - and take advantage. Needless to say this could end up being a huge business for Wonga. Despite attracting the ire of financial journalists - including the Daily Telegraph, which prevented it from winning its Startup 100 awards - Wonga has made as many as 4 million short-term loans to consumers since its launch in 2007.Google Play About To Pass 15 Billion App Downloads? Pssht! It Did That Weeks Ago
May 07, 8:02AM
Way to blow your own horn, Google. Yesterday a newspaper in the UK, the Independent, ran a short item about how Google was about to reach an app milestone -- 15 billion apps downloaded! So we reached out to Google to ask about this... and guess what? It already happened. A Google spokesperson, Gina Weakley Johnson, tells us that the milestone was passed "a few weeks ago."Scouting Deals? Use These Apps
May 07, 6:58AM
Oh the "where do I find hot startups?" problem … VCs have been grappling with this for ages, resorting to such avenues as rampant gossiping, reading TechCrunch, informally tapping into early stage investor networks for intros to later stage deals and apparently, according to PandoDaily's Sarah Lacy, setting up formal programs where entrepreneurs who are "network rich and cash poor" serve as deal scouts. Makes sense. Thus becoming the platform for startup discovery presents a huge opportunity for anyone who comes up with a grand solution: And, because which hot startup isn't mobile these days, Apple itself is rumored to be trying to solve the problem with its own app discovery and promotion platform, aiming to go beyond its Featured section and expand into more intensive forms of app publicity. Its recent acquisition of Chomp harkens to this ambition and project, though as far as I can tell it still has a long way to go.Strategic Healthcare Investors' Investment Thesis
May 07, 6:00AM
This is the second part in a two-part series on strategic investors in healthcare. Healthcare IT departments have focused much of their attention on the $19 billion portion of the stimulus bill that is providing billions of subsidies for the adoption of electronic health records. While this is logical given the available money, it is paying for health IT systems optimized for the "do more, bill more" model of reimbursement that is rapidly being replaced by a value and outcomes based - a 180 shift in focus. It's hard to argue with modernizing the record-keeping in healthcare that isn't far beyond how medicine was recorded in the time of Hippocrates. Thousands of lives are saved as a result of this modernization (e.g., avoiding frequent, deadly prescription errors). On the other hand, most companies benefiting from the stimulus have two massive gaps that will need to be addressed for health systems to thrive in the new environment they are facing.AT&T Introduces Digital Life: IP-Based Home Automation And Security System With 24/7 Monitoring Centers
May 07, 4:57AM
AT&T has just announced a new security and home-automation system called Digital Life, which will be an IP-based platform that allows users to monitor and detect activity throughout their house remotely, and "take action" (as AT&T put it) on devices like PCs, tablets, and smartphones. AT&T actually goes so far as to say "there are no capacity limits to the number and variety of devices [they] can connect to and integrate," since it's an all-digital system. Functions include access to automation, energy and water controls, and security systems. AT&T will thus be introducing a new branch called the Digital Life group, which will work in "AT&T owned-and-operated 24/7 security monitoring centers."Mobile Could Be What Makes Private Social Networks Succeed
May 07, 3:08AM
Photos, location, professional networking, or all your real-life friends... Instagram, Foursquare, LinkedIn and Facebook lead social networking today because they've found existing the types of networks to connect users around. Now a new generation of startups has been showing up in recent months, trying to nail another type of networking that so far has yielded no big success: small, very personal networks. Like you how use texts with your closest friends.DJ Platform Dubset Becomes Thefuture.fm, Doubles User Base To 100K
May 07, 1:47AM
Naming your company Thefuture.fm is kind of a bold move. Sure, it's fun at first, but if things go badly, you're setting yourself up for lots of bad puns ("No future for Thefuture.fm," etc.). Luckily, the site seems to be off to a good start. Founder and CEO David Stein says the service first launched about eight months ago as Dubset, which he now describes as a beta test. After refining and iterating on that initial version, the site relaunched on April 25 under its current, awesomer name. In the first three days after the launch, Thefuture.fm claims to have doubled its user base to more than 100,000.The MB&F HM3 Goes To The Moon
May 07, 1:22AM
No self-respecting gadget lover can deny that MB&F's very high-end artistic wrist machines are overall cool. Most of us can't afford them, but items like this certain stir our ambitious sides. Recently MB&F released a new limited version of their Horological Machine Number 3 (HM3) watch that was designed and produced in collaboration with a boutique Finnish watch maker named Stepan Sarpaneva. This isn't the first time that MB&F (Max Busser & Friends) has collaborated with artists and watch makers on even more limited editions of their already limited watches.The Era Of The Porn Superstar Might Be Coming (Hah!) To An End
May 06, 11:00PM
The Internet is a lot like the American Dream. It's this huge opportunity for anyone who wants to make something of themselves — a nearly ubiquitous platform to showcase skills and talents. Yet, it is so incredibly saturated with people trying to do exactly the same thing that the opportunity gets smaller and smaller, shrinking to the size of a pin point as more people hop online. Countless industries have seen this saturation play a role in who rises to the top, and who fizzles out as one of the millions of never-will-be stars. And porn isn't exempt from this rule.SF Climates iOS App Offers Neighborhood Specific Weather Reports
May 06, 9:44PM
As a resident of NYC, I find little use for the SF Climates iOS app that all of my San Francisco-based friends (read: social media whores) are boasting over today. But a lot of you do live there, so you might find it useful. Let's say you live in the Marina and for some reason need to go to the Dogpatch or vice versa but you're unsure what the weather is like. Or maybe the grit of the Mission is getting to be a bit much and you want to hang out with a bunch of babies in Noe Valley. Do you pack a sweatshirt or put on shorts?Eat the Document
May 06, 8:37PM
With all the press releases masquerading as news, Techmeme has felt more like Craiglist for articles in the past few months, or is it years. But recently we finally got some real news, when Google of all people released Gdrive. We knew of course that it was coming, but not how it would actually feel when it got here. I haven't signed up yet, but already it's a big deal for me. I haven't signed up because the iOS versions are not done, or ready, or whatever imminent means. When they are shipped, I'm there. Gdrive is the kind of disruption that lurks beneath the surface, behind the marketing campaign, irrespective of even Google's position in the market. It is like Gmail was when it started, a harbinger with real muscle that marks the beginning of something bigger than a single vendor.If at any time you'd like to stop receiving these messages, just send an email to feeds_feedburner_com_techcrunch+unsubscribe-hmdtechnology=gmail.com@mail.feed2email.net.
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