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Evernote 5 Lands On Android With Updated Camera, UI Tweaks
Evernote has just updated its Android app to version 5.0, the same update that recently hit both iOS and Mac OS X. The update brings with it an updated UI, as well as a number of new features such as a Shortcuts page which pops up when you swipe left, and an updated camera.
Page Camera mode, in particular, should be a blessing to those of us who use Evernote to capture pictures of notes more than we do to actually take notes. It lets you snap photos of text, automatically adjusting settings to reduce shadow and increase contrast for legibility. The newly updated camera will also let users snap multiple shots and add them to a note all at once.
Version 5.0 also integrates with Evernote’s Smart Notebook by Moleskin products.
Premium users also get to enjoy some new goodies, namely in the form of Document search. Evernote will now search through attached documents, spreadsheets and presentations from the universal search.
While version 5.0 of Evernote hit both iOS and Mac OS X already, Android is getting a feature that iOS hasn’t enjoyed yet in the form of shortcuts.
Evernote has continued to expand into international waters, but struggled to get its UI in shape. The 5.0 revamp across multiple platforms is a good start, but still laggy on mobile and perhaps too similar to the desktop version. As we all know, services with cross-platform support often need to tweak UIs and features differently on various platforms to meet user needs.
It’s also worth remembering that a recent hack forced Evernote to change everyone’s password. However, it looks like the storm has cleared, so if you’re interested in the Evernote 5 update for Android, click here.
Long before the advent of the Jawbone Jambox, there was a portable speaker that was decently rugged, had tremendous battery life and amazing sound, and that was the Tivoli PAL. The PAL boasted an audiophile peidgree and an auxiliary input that made it a good partner for early iPods, but the introduction of decent stereo Bluetooth streaming made it fall behind somewhat in convenience when the Jawbone and its ilk came around.
At the end of last year, Netflix suffered a prolonged outage because Amazon’s cloud services, which Netflix uses to host most of its infrastructure, went down. At the time, Amazon’s own video services continued to function without any issues. Last night, it was Amazon’s turn to suffer from a multi-hour outage. According to a number of tips we received, as well as a number of reports on Twitter and other social networks, Amazon’s Instant Video service and Prime Instant Video went down sometime in the late afternoon yesterday and remained offline for a large part of the evening. So far, Amazon hasn’t publicly acknowledged last night’s outage and its @amazonvideo account has remained silent since the first reports came in. Amazon Web Services, which powers Amazon’s Video Services, continued to work without issues last night. One of our readers provided us with a boilerplate email he received from Amazon last night after he complained about the outage: Hello, We’re sorry for the trouble you had while trying to connect to Amazon Instant Video. If you try again, you should be able to connect without encountering further problems. We look forward to seeing you again soon. We have contacted Amazon for more details about this outage and will update this post once we hear back from them. Hey @AmazonVideo maybe mention VOD is down right now. It's nice when the marketing tweets come with useful info between them.— Ry4an Brase (@Ry4an) March 30, 2013 Seriously, I get emails from @amazon every day, you'd think they could use one of those to let us know why @AmazonVideo is down.— Aaron Gardner (@Aaron_RS) March 30, 2013 @amazonvideo #fail. A little notice of when you're going to do maintenance would be nice. I expect a credit, or will cancel Amazon Prime.— (@djdeedle) March 30, 2013
Right after it launched the iPad mini, Apple filed a trademark application for the name with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). As Patently Apple noticed earlier today, however, the USPTO will likely refuse Apple’s trademark filing because, the reviewer argues, “the applied-for mark merely describes a feature or characteristic of applicant's goods.” The letter was mailed to Apple on January 24, but only made public in the last few days. Apple can still respond to this notice and correct its application, though it’s hard to see how Apple could argue against the USPTO’s argument that ‘mini’ is ‘merely descriptive.’ “The applied-for mark merely describes a feature or characteristic of applicant's goods.” The word ‘mini,’ the reviewer argues, just describes that the iPad mini is indeed “a small sized handheld tablet computer” and just describes the mini’s features. It is not, the reviewing attorney says, “a unitary mark with a unique, incongruous, or otherwise nondescriptive meaning in relation to the goods and/or services.” The USPTO would only grant Apple the trademark to the full iPad mini name if the company could show that the word ‘mini’ has now acquired a “distinctiveness.” In addition, Patently Apple also notes, the reviewer also denied the application for now because Apple should have provided the USPTO with a specimen other than its own product website, even though Apple always uses these for its trademark applications and this was never a reason for a denial before. The reviewer also believes that there is a “likelihood of confusion” between Apple’s existing iPad trademarks and this new iPad® mini application, which, to be honest, doesn’t make a lot of sense. Here is the letter the USPTO sent to Apple in January: USPTO Refuses Apple’s iPad mini Trademark Application
The Gillmor Gang — Doc Searls, Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — takes turns sizing up the new season. With Steve Ballmer running out of room and close to the warning track, we talk about who might be called up from the minors. Dave Winer is back with a nifty pivot on Google Reader's trip to the showers. More than anything, Winer made the hard stuff look easy and gave the tech generation a voice.
Editor's note: Derek Andersen is the founder of Startup Grind, a 40-city community bringing the global startup world together while educating, inspiring, and connecting entrepreneurs. As an Electronic Arts’ intern eight years ago, I asked Bing Gordon then the chief creative officer and the only remaining early founding team member, a question about vision. "How can I know where the puck is going to be?" While he delivered a satisfactory response, two weeks later I received an email from Bing saying, "I answered that question poorly a few weeks and I wanted to try again." A few weeks ago Bing joined me at Startup Grind in Silicon Valley where he delivered some great advice that has become one of his trademarks. In 2010 Mark Pincus called KPCB general partner Bing Gordon (look for a bald guy on the front row) one of the world's "great CEO coaches" supporting founders on the boards of companies like Amazon, Zynga, Klout, and Zazzle. Here are some excepts from our recent interview. Derek: Tell us about your family and where you grew up? BING: So I grew up in a suburb of Detroit. My dad was a first generation Scotsman and his dad was a janitor. And he was somebody that believed the grass was always greener and didn't have, kind of, context or resources. Thanks, Dad! We were the first to move in to a subdivision built out of farmlands surrounding Detroit, so I grew up kind of in the creek. Playing sports with my brother who remembers growing up in the House of Pain. So I had a good Midwestern upbringing. I didn't work in an office before going to Stanford business school, but I did think I was a pretty damn good teenage caddy. I played hockey and lacrosse at the university level and played both, kind of, for most of my adult life. Derek: What was your plan heading to college? BING: Well I went to Yale thinking I was going to be a math major and a writer, and I got there and Yale was lousy at math and it seemed socially irrelevant, so I kind of became an athlete-near-college-dropout. I realized I was flunking a third of my classes going into the final. My proud accomplishments in college other than sports achievements was I wrote poetry. Kind of light verse, in a coffee shop, and Peter Faulk when he was doing Columbo came, and liked it so much he took
So there's this startup called 
It's approaching three years since I emailed and got a reply from the late Steve Jobs. The topic of my caffeine-fueled missive that sunny day in June 2010 was the industry's move towards touch-based interfaces and, specifically, Apple's one-size-fits-all approach regarding the iPhone's lack of a physical QWERTY keyboard.
Editor's note: Maria Rocio Paniagua currently works as a project manager at 
When Sequoia Capital India landed in Singapore quietly in 2012, the buzz around town was that a big-name US fund being in the country was going to really jolt the market and provide serious cred to the startups here. The Indian team running operations here, however, appears to have spent the last year of its time in the island state helping startups in its India portfolio expand into Singapore, rather than directly investing in startups here. However, the company just moved into a fancy new co-working space called The Co, and is its anchor tenant, so it could be a sign that it's trying to get closer to local startups. Previously, it operated out of a service office in High Street. Singapore is a popular choice as a base for foreign companies looking to expand into Southeast Asia, because it’s a mature market with plenty of infrastructure available. But as a tiny country, it’s not often the main addressable user base, and startups originating from Singapore are also taught to have expansion plans charted. Early last year, Sequoia Capital India MD, Shailendra Jit Singh, expressed interest in having the fund's companies expand into the region. Sequoia Cap in the US also appeared to have been eyeing activity in Singapore for a while—it had its first offsite meeting in the country in 2011, and was in discussion with Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong about its presence here. The Prime Minister's Office oversees its R&D arm, the National Research Foundation (NRF), which has been busy backing local venture capital firms here over the past few years. Its Technology Incubation Scheme is a program that distributes seed funding to startups picked by 11 NRF-appointed VCs. The NRF matches investment values in the proportion of 85 percent to 15 percent—the larger portion dished out by the government. This allows the VCs here to provide bigger sums of seed capital to startups, with much of the risk absorbed by the NRF. Former NRF projects head, Yinglan Tan, was also pulled over to Sequoia Capital India's team in July last year, where he is now a venture partner based in Singapore. When I ran into Tan in Manila a couple of months ago, he was evasive about Sequoia’s activities in Singapore, but was happy to try to set up meetings with their existing portfolio companies in Singapore—all Indian-based startups, except for Airbnb and Evernote. Some of these companies
I love my tiny little Mazda, but I'll be honest -- I still don't completely understand how it works. That's never really bothered me before (I'd much rather geek out over a phone or something) but a 
Editor's note: Jonathan Barouch is the founder and CEO of location-based startup Roamz, developer of social media business product Local Measure. Foursquare has become entrenched in the fabric of the local web, providing an API that delivers common good for developers. Any destabilization in Foursquare or its developer tools would fundamentally affect the stability of the mobile web.
My old boss 
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is “partially” opposing a request by the estate of Aaron Swartz for the release of documents related to the investigation that led to Swartz’s arrest and prosecution in federal court. In court papers filed today, MIT counsel states that its opposition stems from two factors: its concerns about people in the MIT community named in the documents and the security of its computer networks. MIT has previously stated that it would release the documents with redactions of names and other information. MIT President L. Rafael Reif said in email to the MIT community earlier this month: On Friday, the lawyers for Aaron Swartz's estate filed a legal request with the Boston federal court where the Swartz case would have gone to trial. They demanded that the court release to the public information related to the case, including many MIT documents. Some of these documents contain information about vulnerabilities in MIT's network. Some contain the names of individual MIT employees involved. In fact, the lawyers' request argues that those names cannot be excluded ("redacted") from the documents and urges that they be released in the public domain and delivered to Congress. The paper filed today reiterates this position, basing it on threats already made to MIT staff and three separate hacking incidents at the university. The information includes “email, the names, job titles, departments, telephone numbers, email addresses, business addresses, and other identifying information of many members of the MIT community.” Swartz has become a symbol in the Internet community since his suicide. His supporters have led the debate about the role MIT played in Swartz’s prosecution and the vigilance of the U.S. Attorney General in the case. MIT claims it is fully cooperating in the investigation that has come since Swartz’s suicide.
Dell 
Super Awesome Party A has just ended, and you need to figure out how to get to Super Awesome Party B stat... and preferably by spending as little money as possible. So what do you do? Muni? Uber? Lyft? Sidecar? Hoof it? You could switch between half a dozen different apps and try to figure out which of the options is cheapest and fastest... Or you could just open Corral Rides.
Flipboard this week announced a new version of its app that allows anyone to make a “Magazine,” which is a curated collection of stories based on any topic that you can think of. The company has shared that over 100,000 magazines have been created since the feature launched. We’ve decided to put together our own magazine called “TechCrunch Weekly,” which will be full of the best TechCrunch stories from the past week, refreshed every Friday afternoon. As you know, our staff works hard to write about every technology topic imaginable, and it’s hard to keep up with all of it. Along with the really great “flipping” experience of Flipboard on mobile devices, using the app is one of the best ways to catch up on news that you missed because you were checking Facebook working, or to give yourself a chance to re-read something that you only skimmed the first time. Just to give you an idea of what you’ll find in this week’s edition, there’s possibly a Facebook Android OS coming out, Bitcoin’s worth a billion, Google Glass explorers got the boot, BlackBerry did things wrong, OUYA is a real product and paying for things with fingerprints is a thing. We’ll also be sharing some of our more interesting guest posts from the weekend. That’s a pretty full week of news, and now you can sit back, relax and flip through all of the stories with Flipboard and TechCrunch Weekly on your iOS or Android device. Click or tap here to check it out, or search for TechCrunch on Flipboard. Under the main navigation up top, find the magazine, subscribe, read and wait for a new edition to show up with new content every Friday afternoon. This is the future of publishing and it’s fun to be involved.
AngelList’s Naval Ravikant joined us in the TechCrunch TV studio for our Ask A VC series, where we put VCs in the hot seat. Ravikant talked about the currency of Silicon Valley, which he says is deals shared, talent referred, and acquirers introduced. He explains that AngelList, a service he co-founded that matches early-stage startups with investors, puts these transactions online. We also chatted about his secret to picking the right startups for angel investments (Ravikant invested in Twitter, Foursquare, BranchOut, Codecademy, Uber, Heyzap and Disqus). Check out the video above for more!
Constant, close contact with your friends. That's the promise of a "Facebook phone". The modified Android OS and mobile homescreen replacement sources tell us Facebook will unveil April 4th pushes your social life to you so fetching it isn't interruptive. The News feed brought us ambient intimacy, but Facebook's homescreen could turn that social graph awareness into a sixth sense.
The next version of jQuery, the popular JavaScript library, will drop support for Internet Explorer 6, 7, and 8, but that doesn’t mean Microsoft isn’t very bullish about getting developers to use jQuery 2.0 and HTML5 to develop “a new wave of jQuery-based Windows Store applications.” As Microsoft announced today, Microsoft Open Technologies, the company’s wholly owned open source-focused subsidiary, and the JavaScript experts at appendTo, have been working with the jQuery community to ensure that the next version of the framework offers full support for Windows Store applications. Developers could obviously already build Windows Store/Metro apps with jQuery, but thanks to this cooperation, the process for developing jQuery 2.0-based Windows Store applications should now be smoother, safer and more streamlined. As appendTo’s director of support Jonathan Sampson wrote in today’s announcement, jQuery always met the language criteria for Windows Store applications, but “Windows 8 exposes all the WinRT APIs within the HTML5 development environment, which comes with a new security model that made some code and common practices of jQuery flagged as unsafe in the context of a Windows Store application. AppendTo reviewed and re-authored portions of jQuery core to bring it into alignment with the Windows security model, as well as identified key areas where alternative patterns would need to be substituted for actually-used conventions." Even though Microsoft has always stressed this in the run-up to the Windows 8 launch, quite a few developers are still unaware that they can use their web development skills to write desktop apps for Windows 8 and Windows RT. Developers, by the way, can already use a number of other open-source JavaScript frameworks, including backbone.js, Knockout.JS and YUI. As Deve Methvin, the president of the jQuery Foundation noted in a prepared statement today, that’s also something his organization is interested in. "The jQuery team is excited about the new environments where jQuery 2.0 can be used. HTML and JavaScript developers want to take their jQuery knowledge with them to streamline the development process wherever they work. jQuery 2.0 gives them the ability to do that in Windows 8 Store applications. We appreciate the help from appendTo for both its patches and testing of jQuery 2.0 and MS Open Tech for its technical support."
Gillmor Gang - Doc Searls, Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor. Recording for today has concluded.
It's only been six months since cloud data warehousing company Treasure Data launched its services, but they're already reporting some impressive growth figures. Treasure Data achieved month-to-month profitability last year, and they're well on track to achieve a 500 percent increase in revenue this year. They've also amassed 50 high-profile clients, which include a leading social gaming company, a mobile advertising platform based in France, and some other Fortune 500 companies – unsurprisingly, Treasure declined to name names. Treasure Data is basically a massive warehouse in the cloud for companies to store their data. Big companies like IBM, Oracle, and Teradata offer data services as well, but with their rates going as high as $5 million, that's not something every business can afford. Treasure Data, on the other hand, costs $1,500 to $2,500 a month with a year-long commitment. That’s a low enough price point for companies that can’t afford or do not have the resources to roll out services of their own. They're also launching a new distributed database called Plazma, which offers significant improvements over HDFS (Hadoop Distributed Files System). Plazma is significantly better than HDFS precisely because it's more efficient and is able to compile and parse data at a much faster rate. "The reason we did this was for robustness, reliability, and performance," says Kiyoto Tamura, VP of Product at Treasure Data. "Hadoop distributed several problems around reliability, and we knew we could do better." With Plazma, Treasure Data boasts that their systems are processing more than 300 billion data points every day.
Happy Friday, everyone. As you know, we love giving things away here at TechCrunch, and this week, we have a Fitbit One Wireless Activity + Sleep Tracker and an Aria Wi-Fi Smart Scale to give away. But that’s not all! TechCrunch Disrupt NY is right around the corner and tickets are going super fast, so we want to give away another ticket to a deserving person who would like to attend (and then party with us). The winner of this giveaway will win all three — the Fitbit One ($99.95), the Smart Scale ($129.95) and a free ticket to Disrupt NY (valued at $1,995 right now). Want a shot to win all three? Follow the steps below. 1) Become a fan of our TechCrunch Facebook Page: 2) Then do one of the following: Retweet this post (making sure to include the #TCDisrupt hashtag), or Leave us a comment below telling us something fun – anything! The contest will start now and end April 5th at 7:30pm PT. Please only tweet or comment once, or you will be disqualified. We will make sure you follow the steps above and choose our winner once the giveaway is over. Please note the winner will only receive one (1) free Disrupt ticket, and it does not include airfare or hotel. Our sponsors help make Disrupt happen. If you are interested in learning more about sponsorship opportunities, please contact our sponsorship team here sponsors@techcrunch.com.
Video question-and-answer site VYou launched several years ago with a unique premise -- allow users to create video responses to questions posed to them by other community members. Now, about two-and-a-half years later, the company is sending an email to its community members informing them that its site will be shut down next week.
I've long believed that touchscreens leave a certain something to be desired when it comes to playing games, and if a new (and very curious) report holds true, Apple may feel the same way. According to 
This week on the 
Video ad distribution company 
Twitter's Vine app received a small, but notable, 
The spring tech tour continues next week in Santa Clara with Deploycon, and I will be there to discuss the spectrum of PaaS providers and how they play across this broad, malleable and often manipulated sector of the market. It has become apparent that the platform as a service (PaaS) market has reached a pivot point. I have written about two companies that have pivoted in recent weeks, and we should expect the transformation to continue as the forces build apps faster with ever more data. It’s also evidence of a greater shift in the market to more standard ways to build apps and APIs. Developers often build out apps that require multiple APIs to connect. Data has to be accessed, signaling a greater need to develop a linking structure and visual way to see updates and interactions in the lifecycle process. For context, I thought it would make sense to look at Krishnan Subramanian’s spectrum of the PaaS market and where the market players fit. At every space on the spectrum is some level of abstraction. On the far left, business users get a high degree of abstraction but primarily so they can focus on creating apps out of custom processes, tasks and other business functions. Coding is not a requirement. Everything except making the connectors is done on the backend. Force.com and OrangeScape are the two most noticeable players while companies such as workXpress also compete in this market. The further you get to the center, the abstraction comes with creating more sophisticated apps by having some control over the infrastructure. For example, Subramanian said use cases could be some big data applications or some real-time processing based on various performance parameters. It is about offering different choices. Cloudbees, Heroku, Appfog, and Google App Engine play in this space. With private PaaS, the difference is choice. The developer can have a granular level of control but not necessarily have to worry about middleware or finely tuning the infrastructure. Extensible architectures give developers a way to scale if need be. Cloudfoundry.com, Cumulogic, Apprenda, OpenShift, Uhuru, ActiveState and Iron Foundry (Tier 3) are companies in this space. PaaS players further to the right give developers the capability to do continuous development and provide access to the infrastructure but not worry about backend operations. These platforms also offer open-source plugins and other advanced features. DevOps PaaS simplifies the “assembly” of services, providing capsules
Adobe today launched Adobe Blank, a new open-source OpenType font that, at first glance, does absolutely nothing. Indeed, the whole point of the font, as its creator Ken Lunde writes today, is to render every Unicode character as a “non-spacing and non-marking glyph.” This may sound like a lame and early April Fool’s joke and even managed to inspire the only pun-thread on HackerNews in recent memory that wasn’t immediately downvoted into oblivion, but this is actually a pretty useful tool for web developers. Lunde says there are two good reasons to use a font that nobody will ever see: Invoking this font, as a temporary measure, prevents OS- or application-level font-fallback from kicking in before the intended font can be rendered. Related to the above, using the font allows one to detect when a web font is actually loaded, which is arguably a hack to overcome a limitation in CSS. The idea here is to use Blank to avoid seeing your operating system’s or browser’s default font before the actual web-font has rendered. As more designers now use non-standard fonts on their sites to differentiate them from all the other sites that also use Helvetica, it’s become increasingly common for users to see this rather jarring switch between different fonts. As the Blank font is extremely small, it loads instantly and the user never sees the default font. Lunde’s second use case – allowing developers to detect when a web font is loaded – is definitely a bit of a hack, but Adobe itself is using this trick in its Edge Web Fonts extension for its Brackets code editor and other developers will surely find more uses for it. The font is now available on SourceForge and will soon be on GitHub, too.
Didn't get a chance to back the ambitious 
It looks like some changes are afoot at 
Today, Amazon has announced the acquisition of social reading service, Goodreads. Specific terms of the deal weren’t disclosed and it should close by the end of Q2. Goodreads had raised $2.75M in funding from the likes of True Ventures, since launching in January 2007. When we talked to them last August, the site had over 10M members and had catalogued more than 360M books, adding 22M each month. Now, the site boasts over 16M users. This type of social integration could give Amazon a major advantage over e-sellers like Apple, who have no social components to their product whatsoever. With people actually discussing and sharing the books that they’re into, having an Amazon direct connect makes complete sense. The site can offer special deals to Goodreads users, which in essence is now Amazon’s book-reading social network. Here’s a look at the spike in books added per month in a graph from last August. With a connection to Kindle, those numbers will skyrocket: Amazon VP of Kindle content, Russ Grandinetti discussed how important this integration could be for its e-book division: Amazon and Goodreads share a passion for reinventing reading. Goodreads has helped change how we discover and discuss books and, with Kindle, Amazon has helped expand reading around the world. In addition, both Amazon and Goodreads have helped thousands of authors reach a wider audience and make a better living at their craft. Together we intend to build many new ways to delight readers and authors alike. Goodread’s CEO and co-founder, Otis Chandler, discussed the acquisition and the opportunity for the site to infuse some social into Amazon’s bookselling strategy: Books – and the stories and ideas captured inside them – are part of our social fabric. People love to talk about ideas and share their passion for the stories they read. I'm incredibly excited about the opportunity to partner with Amazon and Kindle. We're now going to be able to move faster in bringing the Goodreads experience to millions of readers around the world. We're looking forward to inspiring greater literary discussion and helping more readers find great books, whether they read in print or digitally. Goodreads has also posted its own note on their blog, going a bit deeper into why the deal makes sense and making it clear that Kindle integration is a top priority, as its something that users had been asking for. Chandler said: I’m
While the media 
Supercell is a very quiet, humble mobile gaming company out of the very quiet and humble city of Helsinki, Finland. Unlike their brasher, Angry Birds-making brethren a 15-minute drive away in Espoo, they don’t like to talk much about anything beyond making games and about the company culture they’re deliberately cultivating. All of this belies what has become a phenomenal business over the last nine months — one that makes around $1.3 million per day off two iOS games called Clash of Clans and Hay Day. After about three months of considering whether to do a huge secondary round with the help of boutique investment bank Code Advisors, we’ve heard they sold somewhere between 16 and 20 percent of the company’s common shares in a deal that would value the company at around $800 million. We’re still trying to figure out the exact amount. It’s somewhere between $100 and 150 million, but closer to the lower end of the range. We heard they got close, but didn’t quite get to a $1 billion valuation, not that this should be the goal anyways. Supercell declined to comment on the financing round. “We simply will not comment on market rumours,” said spokesperson Heini Vesander. “We’ve never really done that and will not do that now.” We’ve heard that Institutional Venture Partners, Atomico and Index Ventures are the new investors. Tencent and DST had done some due diligence on the company in February, but didn’t end up going in for whatever reason. Index declined to comment, and Atomico and IVP did not reply for comment. It’s a bold, ballsy bet for what is basically a two-product company in a notoriously hits-driven business. While the macro trends behind mobile gaming are hard to argue with, the business is unpredictable. Several of the companies that were leading the charts two years ago are now much farther down, even if their businesses are still profitable. Last year, the whisper numbers for top grossing titles ranged in the $40-80 million range annually. At around $1 million a day, the industry is looking at mobile gaming franchises that could gross between $200 and 400 million in 2013. A few days ago, Japanese carrier Softbank increased its stake in Gung Ho Entertainment, the maker of what is probably the most valuable iOS game in the world today — Japan’s Puzzles and Dragons. That deal valued that company at $4.1 billion,
For a team that has somehow stayed mostly off the tech press' radar, TiKL has had a pretty friggin' good year. With $0 spent on marketing, their two apps, TiKL and Talkray, have nabbed a total of 28M downloads. After taking part in YC's Winter 2012 class, they raised $2.1M from some of the Valley's biggest names. Today TiKL is unveiling the other half of their business strategy: the Talkray API
"In The Studio" welcomes a digital media 
The SEC today paved the way for a new era of venture capital investing by stating it won't pursue enforcement action against FundersClub, whose platform lets any accredited investor fund startups in exchange for equity. Before, some thought FundersClub's founders could face jail time for violating finance laws. FundersClub's model could be used by others before the JOBS Act goes fully into effect.
Last October, Google introduced the new email compose window as an option for Gmail users and starting today, this will become the default. The new compose experience, which is essentially a pop-up window that appears on the right side of the screen, is easier to use, faster and makes it easier for Gmail users to multitask, Google says. In return, however, it’s now a bit harder to find text formatting options like underline, indent, numbered and unnumbered lists, etc. (you can, of course, also still use the same keyboard shortcuts as before). The new compose experience will roll out over the next few days. It looks like Google will still allow users to switch back to the old compose windows for a while, but it’s not clear for how long. A Google spokesperson told me that the company has not set a timeline for this. The new experience breaks the integration with Rapportive (recently acquired by LinkedIn) and similar services (though Boomerang apparently works just fine with it) which previously lived in the right-hand sidebar of the compose screen. You can still use Rapportive while you are reading emails, of course, but the new compose windows have no sidebar (and hence also no ads), so it’s not clear where these tools would present their information while you are composing emails. Thankfully, it looks like the old compose window will still be around for a bit longer, but we’ll have to see for how long. On the positive side, though, the new compose window makes it easier to multitask, as you can open multiple compose windows next to each other, though things get rather confusing once you open more than two. The new compose window is also close integrated with Google Drive and makes it very easy to attach documents from Google’s cloud storage service.
Anytime there's a lull in our outrage over the public nature of social media, a new site shows up to again demonstrate its dangers. Like clockwork, the latest to play on users' fears is 
Sometimes the smallest, most mundane tasks are the things you really dread -- and put off for weeks. Like booking an oil change for your car, or finding a nice play for an anniversary date and buying tickets, or finding a good dentist in a new city and scheduling an appointment. It's stuff that any patient person with internet access and a cell phone can do, but takes up just enough time and mental energy that it can be a huge drag. That's why wealthy people have personal assistants. And lately, that's why I've been using 
My recently-purchased car has Bluetooth built-in to let me use my phone hands-free from the steering wheel, as do most cars coming off the line new these days. The one issue is that there's no way to activate Siri using the car's default controls, which is another unfortunately common thing for modern cars and aftermarket Bluetooth stereo kits. But Plano, Texas-based Beanco Technology offers a really simple solution called the Mobile Home, which offers a fix in the most minimalist way possible.
Online shopping is happening at the expense of big national retail chains, which are having a difficult time keeping up with online competition. A new startup called Deliv hopes to provide retailers with a new way to please tech-savvy shoppers, by offering same-day local delivery for the same price — or less — than having items shipped.
After the 
Fresh from putting smiles on the faces of tabletop gaming geeks everywhere, with yesterday's news that it would be helping to bring Dungeons & Dragons to iOS devices later this year, mobile game publisher Playdek has closed a $3.8 million Series A funding round. The round was led by Qualcomm Ventures, with IDG Ventures and ff Venture Capital also participating.
Google Analytics’ real-time feature is very useful for those who don’t need more specialized tools like Chartbeat or Woopra, but still want to get a basic overview of what’s happening on their site right now. Compared to the breadth of features Analytics offers, though, it’s still a very limited tool. Today, however, Google is making a few changes to Analytics’ real-time reports that make it a more powerful and easier to use service. Analytics, for example, now also shows you a breakdown of how many of your current visitors are on a desktop, tablet or on their phone. The main feature of this update, however, is the addition of event reports. Google Analytics’ event reporting takes a bit of extra work to set up and is also a major part of the new Universal Analytics feature the company launched as a public beta last week. This feature allows developers to create custom events for interactions that go beyond just loading a site, including downloads, video plays, ad clicks and other actions a developer might want to track on a site. Starting today, website owners can track these events in realtime, too. This, Google says, means “you can now not only see the top events as they occur but also filter on particular event categories (and actions).” With this update, Analytics also introduces shortcuts for real-time segments, so if you just want to see what your U.S. visitors on smartphones are doing on the site right now, you can create this segment and easily recall it from the Google Analytics sidebar. The ability to create segments and filter your real-time data this way is obviously a major feature of Google Analytics, but the only way to really fully make sense out of this data is to compare it to your overall traffic. Today’s update adds the option to always see a breakdown of your overall traffic in the background, so you can put the data from your segments into the context of your site as a whole.
A federal judge has thrown out a patent claim against 
