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iPad App mem:o Is A Simple Data Visualization Tool For Design Lovers
Sep 13, 5:15AM
Technology makes it easy to turn the minutiae of our daily lives into useful data sets, but sometimes it feels bleak to see every experience or memory broken down into pie charts and bar graphs. mem:o is a unique visualization tool that takes life-logging beyond spreadsheets by transforming data into striking images influenced by Dutch graphic design. The iPad app is free for download and includes two boards, with the option of adding more boards via an in-app purchase.Facebook Sunsets Credits, Transitions To Local Currencies To Boost International Payments
Sep 13, 2:37AM
Facebook launched its virtual currency Credits in June 2011 to simplify payments. In reality, Credits were a nightmare for international payments due to fluctuating exchange rates. But last night, the sun set on Credits and Facebook completed its transition to local currency payments. It will help developers make more money, smooth payments, and solidify Facebook as an international app platform.Import.io Turns Web Pages Into Spreadsheets For Getting Out The Data That Matters Most
Sep 13, 1:32AM
Import.io participated in the Startup Alley at TechCrunch Disrupt to show off its service, which makes data from a website more accessible by turning pages into spreadsheets for pulling relevant information. Chief Data Officer Andrew Fogg explained that web pages are designed for humans to read. But machines need other ways to understand information. Using Import.io, the data can be queried either manually or through an API.Outgoing Turner CEO Phil Kent Sees Big Opportunities For The Company's MediaCamp Incubator
Sep 13, 1:24AM
Before the five startups taking part in this year's San Francisco MediaCamp took the stage at Demo Day, the gathered investors, journalists, and tech/media industry folk were addressed by Turner Broadcasting CEO Phil Kent, who predicted big things for the startup accelerator. Apparently this was the first time Kent has attended a demo day — which isn't as bad as it sounds, since this isn't only the second one in San Francisco, and only the third MediaCamp demo day overall. Kent said he's "very proud" of the accelerator — the monetary investment from Turner is relatively small, but he pointed to the "time and talent of our executives" who are made available."Free Massive Online Education Provider, Coursera, Begins To Find A Path To Profits
Sep 13, 12:50AM
Online education providers may very well disrupt the higher education establishment, but, first, these for-profit companies need to find a way to finance the mammoth technical infrastructure needed to support millions of students. It's a challenge that all mission-based businesses wrestle with, and why many have wondered whether Massively Open Online Course (MOOC) providers will ever become big business -- or be around in five years -- let alone "transform higher education," as they've so often promised.Twitter's New "Verified" Filter Lets Celebs Hob-Nob In Peace
Sep 12, 11:34PM
Life is hard for famous people. You’re trying to @ reply with your celebrity friends on Twitter, but the conversation gets drowned out by rabid fans and spammers mentioning you. So Twitter’s begun rolling out to people with verified profiles two new filters for the Connect tab. Filtered, which attempts to cut down spam, and Verified, which only shows interactions with other verified profiles. Twitter noted the rollout earlier today and you can see them below in this screenshot, though. Keeping celebrities active and happy on Twitter is a big business for the company, which just filed its S-1 to go public today. Celebrities and their tweets are a big draw for users, who visit Twitter to absorb the latest updates from the actors, athletes, musicians, and other famous folk they love. Twitter capitalizes on that engagement with ad views, so the more celebs enjoy Twitter, the more money it makes. [Image Credit: Jimmy Kimmel]Microsoft Adds IMAP Support To Outlook.com To Entice Mac Users, Developers
Sep 12, 11:33PM
Today Microsoft announced that it has added IMAP support to its Outlook.com webmail product. Outlook.com has over 400 million active users according to Microsoft, making it not only one of the most popular webmail services around. Why IMAP? Demand, likely, and the fact that Microsoft wants developers to take a keener interest in its little email program. In a blog post announcing the move, Microsoft noted that “some devices and apps that haven’t made the upgrade to [Exchange Active Sync]” and that “IMAP is widely supported on feature phones and other email clients such as those on a Mac.” So, it built it in. Outlook.com is a viable Gmail alternative, though one that I fault for lacking a single feature (Priority Inbox, which I cannot live without), but it’s still worth noting that Microsoft managed to build a product that people tend to honestly dig. That’s in contrast to the Hotmail dog days. Outlook.com also supports OAuth, which allows for simple integration into other apps. It isn’t clear how many applications and things of that sort are currently integrated with Outlook.com, though the potential could be sizable given its massive user base. Outlook.com did fine on its own — 1 million users in its first day of life, and so forth — but it was when Microsoft folded the entire Hotmail user base into its roles that it became titanic in size. Finally, a note on something social. I first heard that IMAP support was coming to Outlook.com the same way as a great number of other folks today, on Reddit. The Outlook.com team held another Reddit question session today (an “AMA” in nerd parlance) that was, in fact, great. Answering questions honestly is always refreshing. If you want a look at how to Reddit properly, this is it. Top Image Credit: Bogdan SudituCodeBender.CC Makes It Crazy Easy To Program Your Arduino Board From Your Browser
Sep 12, 11:06PM
The official Arduino IDE is a dour piece of software designed for uploading code to the ubiquitous and super-cool micro controller. It is a standalone, non-networked app that isn't very pretty to look at. But what if you want to share code and upload programs right from your browser? That's where CodeBender.cc comes in.Give Microsoft Your iPad, And They'll (All But) Give You A Surface
Sep 12, 9:50PM
Happy Post-Disrupt Day, super troopers. I trust you are rehydrated and back at work. A pity. While we were watching Zuckerberg knock the U.S. government for misbehaving while others managed to toss the Constitution out with the PayPal water, Microsoft put together and released a new Surface promotion: Trade in your iPad, get mad store credit.Google Creative Lab Launches Coder To Turn Raspberry Pi Into A Basic Web Development Platform
Sep 12, 9:46PM
Coder, a new project that’s coming out of Google’s Creative Lab, is an open source tool that allows you to easily turn a Raspberry Pi into a basic web server with a web-based development environment. The tool, which was developed by Googler Jason Striegel, designer Jeff Baxter and a small team in New York, is meant to be an environment for educators and parents to teach kids “the basics of building for the web.” Setting Coder up should only take 10 minutes. The project, the team argues, gives learners a private platform for building a web program. For those who already know to code, though, it’s also a nifty platform to play and provides a cheap sandboxed environment for experimenting with new ideas. To get started, all you need to do is download the Coder Installer onto an SD card, insert it into the Pi and point your browser to coder.local. The tool includes a web-based code editor and everything else you need to start building HTML, CSS and JavaScript-based applications. The team says it first wanted to turn Coder into an even more complete package but then decided to just release it because the team believes that “the sooner this gets into the open source and maker communities, the more we'll learn about how it might be used.” With the Raspberry Pi going for $35 (plus a few more dollars for power supplies and a Wi-Fi dongle), the Pi makes a pretty nice development environment to play around with. While Google is mostly targeting learners with this project, I wouldn’t be surprised if they turned it into a more fully featured web-development environment.The Sixense STEM Brings Your Hands And Feet Into Virtual Reality
Sep 12, 9:40PM
Oh, you thought virtual reality headsets like the Oculus Rift were already cool? The folks at Sixense are trying to take it to a whole new level, with a set of motion tracking controllers that bring your hands and feet into the game (and improves the Rift itself, while it's at it.)A Photographer's Take On The iPhone 5S Camera
Sep 12, 9:17PM
The iPhone 5S announcement this week was punctuated with a lot of specs and buzzwords. Much of it centered around the new Touch ID fingerprint scanner and the 64-bit processor. But the most intriguing to me was the camera advancements. Apple has been putting a major focus on the camera in the iPhone for a couple of years now. A recent Apple ad touted that more people take pictures with the iPhone than any other camera. And a while back the iPhone became the number one camera on the photo sharing site Flickr and it has never lost its crown. Despite the proliferation of point-and-shoot cameras with impressive technology and ever-cheaper DSLRs, the smartphone is and will probably remain the primary camera for a lot of people. Unfortunately, cameras from many other phone companies like Samsung and Motorola simply don't match up to the quality of images coming out of the iPhone. I've tried many, many different Android devices over the years which promised better images but none have delivered. The only real smartphone contender in the camera space is Nokia, which is doing some great stuff with the Lumia line. But where Nokia is pushing the pixel-count boundaries with the 41 megapixel Lumia 1020, Apple has chosen to go in a different direction. Before I launch into the stuff that I found interesting about the new camera's technology, a bit of background. I’m a reformed professional photographer that has shot just about every kind of camera from film to digital, professional and pocket. Weddings, portraits, landscape, wildlife, sports, industrial, you name it. I've processed film and prints by hand and machine and have taught photography as well. I don't know everything photographic there is to know, far from it, but I've been around a bit. Over the last few years, the iPhone has really become my go-to camera. The DSLRs have sat on the shelf and even a compact Panasonic 4/3 camera only comes out infrequently. This means that when Apple introduces a new device I'm all ears when it comes to what they say about its camera. The iPhone 5S is no exception, and there is some pretty great stuff here. Obviously, this is not a review of the camera, just an exploration of the specs and what they might mean for other iPhoneographers. The sensor The sensor in the iPhone 5S remains at 8 megapixels, which isTwitter Is Going Public, Files S-1 With SEC
Sep 12, 9:04PM
Today Twitter confirmed that it has filed an S-1 with the SEC and is therefore on the road to going public. This is an important moment for Twitter, and for tech, as it shows that the IPO window is open. Here’s Twitter on its filing: We’ve confidentially submitted an S-1 to the SEC for a planned IPO. This Tweet does not constitute an offer of any securities for sale.— Twitter (@twitter) September 12, 2013 Count to 10 and let’s hope the damn thing leaks right away. We don’t know much, but expect Twitter to go public at a valuation of roughly between $15 billion and $20 billion, roughly. Its last private money came in at around a $10 billion valuation, and those investors will want a return on their funds. Goldman Sachs is said to be the lead underwriter of the offering. Facebook’s IPO, for comparison, valued the social giant at around $100 billion on the day of its flotation. The irony here is that Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg yesterday at Disrupt told the world that it should not be afraid of going public. Twitter did not decide to go public on the back of Zuck’s axiom, but it is nicely pat that it announced this news the day after his comments. Facebook’s public offering was marred with trading errors and a slipping stock price, and the company lost tens of billions of value before it recovered. Facebook is currently trading at fresh highs, helping to set the stage for Twitter: Whatever the Facebook IPO hangover was, it is no more. Twitter’s public offering has been a very long time in coming, and contains inside of it oodles of institutional pressure: With hundreds of millions of invested capital under its belt, Twitter has a number of investors that want their money back. It has been well-managed, sure, but cash has a certain feel to it. The IPO will be a zoo. But it will be a fun zoo, and that is all that matters. The NASDAQ and the NYSE are at war a bit on who gets to host more tech offerings, but I think that we’ll be seeing the NASDAQ scoop up this deal. Now, what are Twitter’s revenue and profit figures? We’ll actually get to know soon, though the fact they are filing in this fashion does imply that Twitter had less than $1 billion in revenue in 2012.Facebook Tests Silent Auto-Play For User Videos In Mobile Feed, Foreshadowing Video Ads
Sep 12, 9:00PM
In a test that could make News Feed more engaging and pave the way for video ads, Facebook's mobile feed will start auto-playing user-uploaded videos in-line when they're scrolled over for a small subset of US iOS and Android users. Videos play silently until tapped to full-screen, which feels slick. Facebook is expected to soon launch a new video ad unit, which might draw on this test's feedback.SAP Big Data Bus Part Of Overall Effort To Build Developer Community
Sep 12, 8:58PM
Big data is a catch-all term for describing any form of data analytics that requires the processing of data, be it by the gigabyte, terabyte or in the nose-bleed realm of petabyte-scale workloads. SAP’s big data push is embodied in a custom, decked-out tour bus that the company parked in front of TechCrunch Disrupt as part of its overall effort to promote its analytics offering and build out its developer community. SAP is reshaping much of its technology direction with SAP HANA, an in-memory data-analytics technology that it is promoting to startups. The company has a HANA venture fund that it is using to invest in venture funds around the world. In an interview last month, SAP’s Kaustav Mitra, vice president of the startup focus program, said the program started last year and now has 550 participating companies, five times the number of startups compared to last year. Now the company is funding developer events and giving out big checks to developers that build on the HANA platform. Check out the video about the bus at the top of the post. There’s a bit of marketing in what SAP is doing, but the effort to be more developer-driven is a rare thing to see at big enterprise software shops.Nettlebox Is A $28,000 Hologram Rig That Lets You View Real-Time 3D From All Angles
Sep 12, 7:10PM
Russian startup Nettle, which is based in the Skolkovo Tech City area, is showing off a $28,000 holographic gaming set-up at TechCrunch Disrupt SF's hardware alley. The Nettlebox rig consists of a 3D plasma display, with four fisheye lens infrared cameras sited at the corners to track the position of the gamer -- who wears a pair of 3D glasses with two infrared lights on board.Insightly Raises $10M For CRM Service Wrapped In An Email App
Sep 12, 5:44PM
Insightly has raised $10 million for its CRM service that integrates with GMail, Outlook, Office 365 and other services. Emergence Capital Partners, Sozo Ventures and TrueBridge Capital Partners participated in the Series B round led by Matt Holleran, founder and managing director of Cloud Apps Management. Insightly has now raised a total of $13 million.Mobile News App Circa Launches Its Web Platform For Browsing And Following Stories
Sep 12, 4:00PM
Circa, a startup that offers quick and mobile news consumption, is expanding its services to the web by launching its online platform for following and sharing news. While the website doesn’t have the full functionality of the iOS app, the company aims to complete it later this year. The mission of Circa News, the startup’s iOS app, is to give readers the main points of each relevant news story. Circa’s team of 10 writes stories optimized for mobile with several key points. This speeds up news consumption and potential bias that may come from long-form and opinion pieces. Users can browse specific categories and follow stories they are interested in. “We’re doing a lot of things to bring the web more in line with our mobile,” co-founder and CEO Matt Galligan tells me. “It’s about closing that loop.” The Circa website will allow users to access the news they want more often, which Galligan tells me is to expand the company’s reach. He declined to disclose user numbers, but the last time we checked he said Circa had seen a few hundred thousand downloads. Galligan added that according to Flurry, Circa users spend 50 percent more time in the app than on average in other news apps. Circa is also working on adding a breaking news feature, adding news categories and user interface improvements, Galligan tells me. New areas of coverage that Circa News is looking into include business, finance, entertainment and sports. Galligan says what sets Circa News apart is that the stories are written for mobile, rather than a longer reading experience. “Our intent is not to make a summary; it’s not to make something smaller,” he tells me. The app takes all the need-to-know facts and quotes only, which is a different approach from mainstream news apps or popular apps such as Flipboard. Circa has raised $1.65 million in seed funding and is planning on bringing its app to Android and iOS 7 soon.Fring, An Early Mover In Mobile Messaging And Video Apps, Sells For $50M To Genband To Build Out WhatsApps For Carriers
Sep 12, 2:51PM
Fring, an early startup that focused on creating group messaging and video calling apps for mobile phones, competing against the likes of Skype and WhatsApp, is calling it a day as an independent entity: it has been sold to Genband, a provider of services like IP gateways and billing and other services to mobile, fixed and cable carriers. Terms of the deal have not been officially disclosed, but we have heard from a source that the price was $50 million.Appcubator Helps Beginning Developers Easily Create Their Own Web Applications
Sep 12, 2:00PM
There are quite a few steps between starting to learn to code and developing a web application, and a new Y Combinator startup is trying to fill in those gaps. Appcubator has launched to allow users to create their own web applications with drag and drop, text inserts and custom themes, rather than having to endure the arduous process of learning to create a full-functioning website or hire a contractor. Co-founder Karan Sikka tells me Appcubator’s average user has some sense of the technical aspects of building a website, but aren’t professional developers. “Business people have a hard time grasping the fundamental concepts behind web applications, and they often lack the patience required,” Sikka says. “They’re often much more willing to pay and not have to spend a few hours.” Since most of the startup’s users have some knowledge of building an application, Sikka tells me they figure out how to navigate the site fairly quickly. I had a little trouble at first, but there’s a handy little chat box in the corner where users can ask questions. The founders have also created a lot of resources to help users out, with video tutorials, a demo guide and examples of what others have built. Your Appcubator website starts with a blank homepage, and you can then add customized features from a drag-and-drop toolbar. You can also edit the header and footer, with links to other pages created along the way (such as “About Us” or “Sign Up”). The webpage features range from basics like images, text and videos, to custom buttons and log-in through email, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. On the other end, Appcubator will show you your total users, visitors and page views. You can organize your data based on user information, as well as send an email to everyone signed up through Appcubator. From here, you can also change the theme, manage pages and change URLs. You can save your work as you go, and whenever you want to preview or publish, just hit the publish button. You will then get the URL of your new website and the option to download the code files. From there, feel free to go back and edit as much as you want. For those with more experience in coding, Appcubator lets users download the code for their applications. If you’re familiar with CSS, you can also go into “edit theme” forIf 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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