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First I totally gave up. I thought there was no way to sell my web services business. It started when I was in the offices of Loud Records, run by Steve Rifkind. My company, Reset, was doing websites for the Wu-Tang Clan and other Loud artists. It was 1997. Ol' Dirty Bastard would call me on the phone sometimes. Mobb Deep would stop by. Trent Reznor would hang out (we did Interscope's artists as well). Steve Rifkind's dad, Jules Rifkind, was a music mogul from the 50s, signing acts like James Brown. He was infamously (supposedly) portrayed in The Sopranos as the character Hesh Rabkin.
You can't teach an old phone new tricks. Hah! Just kidding. Of course you can. This isn't 1998. Agent is an app that aims to make your Android smartphone just a little bit smarter, using all of your phone's sensors to detect what you're up to and tweak your settings automatically. Driving? It'll automatically respond to texts to let people know you're busy, and remember where you parked your car. Sleeping? It'll only let the most important calls through.
Gillmor Gang - Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor. Live recording session for today has concluded.
Israeli company IronSource has come up with a new way for developers to ask their users for money or other forms of support. Chief Design Officer Dan Greenberg told me that the product, called the KudosKit, evolved from an experiment conducted with the iOS app good weather, which was initially developed by Fried Cookie and distributed by IronSource (IronSource has since acquired Fried Cookie).
Happy Thanksgiving, dear readers. What are you thankful for? My list is short, but sweet: I'm thankful for you guys, gaming consoles, and 3d scanners. 
Wibidata, a big data application provider, has a new platform for building real-time apps that shows the increasing accessibility of machine learning and how e-commerce companies can provide an experience similar to a giant like Amazon.com. The new WibiEnterprise 3.0 platform allows a company to power a site with advanced analytics that fine-tunes itself, providing better recommendations and other features over time, including more relevant search results and personalized content. 
Just in time for the holidays, virtual gift card service Kiind today announced that it now offers an API, which will allow third-party vendors to hook right into its services and to create gift cards from their own systems. The company also today said that it has added Nike and Apple's iTunes as gift card options to its store. These are two major deals for Kiind, which already offered gift cards from major retailers like Amazon, Columbia Sportswear and Gap. Unlike other gift card services, Kiind's system, which launched earlier this year, is based on deferred payments. The sender is only charged when the gift card is actually claimed (and a surprisingly large number of gift cards remain unclaimed). For shops like Amazon, Kiind also offers gift givers the ability to pre-select certain items from their stores, though the receivers can always change these selections. The new API allows developers to easily create and send cards from Kiind, but also to create their own gift card marketplaces based on Kiind's inventory. As the company's CEO and president Leif Baradoy told me earlier this month, the Victoria, Canada-based Kiind has seen good traction in the B2B space and decided to focus on this over making its service available to consumers. In the business world, most enterprises already use similar services to offer their employees or good customers gift cards. Kiind hopes that at least some of these services will use its API to also offer cards through its service. Some businesses, the Kiind team believes, will also integrate this API into their regular CRM or HR tools (and real estate agents, apparently, have taken to it to send gifts to homebuyers after a deal closes). The idea here, Baradoy said, is to extend the reach of the Kiind platform as wide as possible. As for the relationships with Nike and Apple, Baradoy couldn't say too much, given that these deals tend to be confidential. He did, however, note that the company likes to create direct relationships with vendors whenever possible. He sees the fact that some of these major brands are now interested in the service as a sign that Kiind “has something interesting going on.” The company also recently launched a user-based referral program to attract more businesses to its platform. Referrers now get 5 percent of the first gift and 0.5 percent for every gift after.
Google's Android 4.4 KitKat update is rolling out to Nexus devices globally, and I was eager to get it on my Nexus 7 tablet. Turns out, it's possible I should've left well enough alone. Immediately after updating (via official, OTA channels), I noticed performance seemed to suffer, and now a study conducted by Finnish mobile video and touch testing firm OptoFidelity adds some solid data to back up my observations.
Alice, a single mom living in Daly City, was facing major roadblocks with her public school system. Her five-year-old son was advanced enough to enter first grade instead of kindergarten. And her older son, who was about to enter third grade and had been diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, hated school.
After a strong Thanksgiving holiday push in e-commerce spending, Black Friday online sales are already up more than 7 percent in 2013 over the same period last year.
Just in time for Black Friday, Bond is bringing its gifting platform to the web after spending a couple months as a native mobile app. Bond, created by Sonny Caberwal, takes all the heavy lifting out of gift giving, with a large focus on the enterprise and professional gifts. 
Last week, Om Malik at GigaOm reported that Instagram was working on a messaging feature to complement its already very-popular social photo app, now with some 150 million monthly active users. Now we've caught wind of something that could point to a possible feature on this would-be messaging product: @instagram.com email addresses. 
Detroit-based watchmaker Shinola is doing something pretty unique: hand-making watches in the United States, right down to the quartz movements contained within. The startup's founding team includes some who worked for Swiss movement maker Ronda previously, and they built the company by flying in high-tech watchmaking equipment from Europe, as well as experts to train their Detroit-based workforce in the fine art of assembling timepieces.
Are you tired of watching expensive gadgets turn your friends into Abercrombie models? Well, my pudgy popper, we've got a holiday gift guide that'll give you five more ab packs without breaking your piggy bank. Standing Desk Vs. Cardboard Box It's well-known that sitting all day long is slowing killing us, so a few savvy furniture manufacturers have begun to market chic “standing desks” boldly priced at $1,000 or more. The Stir Kinetic Standing Desk is an artificially intelligent $3,800 table that learns a users' habits and automatically adjusts its height throughout the day. Or, if you're like the former CEO of Hulu, you can use the good ol' 20th century technology of a cardboard box. This geometrically sound paper-based tech comes in all shapes and sizes; with enough digging users can find an ideal height for them. At TechCrunch, it took me five minutes to find some boxes laying about. Treadmill Desk Vs. SurfShelf According to Science, standing desks may not be all that healthy, since what the body really needs is constant movement throughout the day. Your best bet for being super-healthy is to walk while you work (it even makes doctors better at diagnosing!). But, these suckers are expensive: the cheapest quality LifeSpan Treadmill desk is $1,300 or you can DIY it for a few hundred dollars less. Or, for a price of Comcast's shoddy Internet ($39.95), you can own the portable miracle, the SurfShelf, a laptop shelf that attaches to the face of most treadmills. I brought it with me on a three-week tour of the East Coast and it worked marvelously. You still need a gym membership (or a hotel with a treadmill), but it's a great excuse to get out of the coffee shop and into a gym. Juicer Or Blender Vs. Teeth Getting one's daily allowance of vitamins can be a real pain, so nutrition-happy consumers have been more than willing to shell out their weekly paycheck for a gadget that shreds solid fruits and vegetables into a drink that can be gulped in between emails. The $300 Breville Elite Juicer makes bright shakes without the inconvenience of cutting, while the Costco holiday centerpiece, the $500 Vitamix, spins fast enough to prep uranium for a nuclear core. But both juicing and blending are probably terrible for your body. Fructose can be toxic to humans; Mother Nature naturally wraps its sugary sweetness in a fiber shield
For many years, Black Friday -- the day after Thanksgiving -- marked the start of the holiday shopping rush. But with many (not all) physical stores closed on Thanksgiving, a window of opportunity has emerged for e-commerce sites to push out offers and start selling a day earlier. That has proven to be big business: online sales in the U.S. this Thanksgiving were up nearly 20% (19.7%) on 2012, with an especially strong push from mobile devices, which accounted for over one-quarter (25.8%) of all sales on the day and nearly half of all e-commerce traffic. 
Walmart is already crowing about Black Friday and we're only a couple of hours into the actual day itself. That's because depressingly, Black Friday has somehow subsumed Thanksgiving Thursday and become the Day That Spans Many Days. Oh well; at least they sold a huge boatload of tablets. Walmart puts its one day sales of those mobile computing devices at 1.4 million, and while it doesn't break down by brand or model, the company also cites the iPad mini as one of a short list of top-selling items.
With the success of SnapChat, Line and others, many have been wondering who will own the next big messaging service. Now, we're not saying it's necessarily the next big thing, but it is interesting to us that PingTune (formerly named Tuneit) has appeared with a service which slices off a fascinating niche of the messaging space with an app for music fans that want to send slices of music to each other in an easy and simple way. The startup, based in London's 'Tech City' in the East, has also just raised £1m ($1.6m) worth of investment to do it. The seed investment comes from Rupert Hambro (former Chairman of Hambros Bank, currently Chairman of JO Hambro) and Dominic Perks (serial entrepreneur and active investor).
Apple has issued a formal objection to the court-appointed lawyer assigned to monitor its compliance with the decision handed down in its e-book pricing fixing case back in July. The monitor was assigned by the DOJ back in October, and has apparently been charging Apple a very high price for his services – he made $138,432 in his first two weeks on the job, according to Apple's official filing on the matter.
The holidays are often less than merry if you have to deal with things like balancing work with travel, financial stress or seasonal affective disorder. I usually cope by listening to Merle Haggard's "If We Make It Through December" over and over and over again. This year, however, I also plan to make visual journaling app LifeCrumbs part of my daily routine. Made by a startup called Tomofun, LifeCrumbs was created around the idea that even on the gloomiest of days, there is always at least one good moment to salvage. The iOS app, which will launch its Android version soon, lets you turn those moments into a visual calendar filled with photos of good memories. 
One thing the UK, a huge finance market, has been lacking in recent years is something equivalent to Mint.com. Now Money Dashboard hopes to fulfil at least part of that role. It's a 'smart' account aggregation service that automatically analyses online banking statements. It's now secured a £2.7 million ($4.4 million) investment round, led by Calculus Capital, a fund which manages private equity funds for individuals. Money Dashboard aims to now develop new services, including launching mobile apps.
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How To Sell Your Business And Make And Lose Millions
Nov 30, 5:00AM
First I totally gave up. I thought there was no way to sell my web services business. It started when I was in the offices of Loud Records, run by Steve Rifkind. My company, Reset, was doing websites for the Wu-Tang Clan and other Loud artists. It was 1997. Ol' Dirty Bastard would call me on the phone sometimes. Mobb Deep would stop by. Trent Reznor would hang out (we did Interscope's artists as well). Steve Rifkind's dad, Jules Rifkind, was a music mogul from the 50s, signing acts like James Brown. He was infamously (supposedly) portrayed in The Sopranos as the character Hesh Rabkin.Agent Makes Your Smartphone A Little Bit Smarter
Nov 29, 10:45PM
You can't teach an old phone new tricks. Hah! Just kidding. Of course you can. This isn't 1998. Agent is an app that aims to make your Android smartphone just a little bit smarter, using all of your phone's sensors to detect what you're up to and tweak your settings automatically. Driving? It'll automatically respond to texts to let people know you're busy, and remember where you parked your car. Sleeping? It'll only let the most important calls through.Gillmor Gang Live 11.29.13 (TCTV)
Nov 29, 9:06PM
Gillmor Gang - Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor. Live recording session for today has concluded.IronSource Announces KudosKits, Allowing App Users To Show Their Appreciation With Money
Nov 29, 9:00PM
Israeli company IronSource has come up with a new way for developers to ask their users for money or other forms of support. Chief Design Officer Dan Greenberg told me that the product, called the KudosKit, evolved from an experiment conducted with the iOS app good weather, which was initially developed by Fried Cookie and distributed by IronSource (IronSource has since acquired Fried Cookie).This Week On The TechCrunch Gadgets Podcast: PS4, Xbox One, And The Sense 3D Scanner
Nov 29, 8:00PM
Happy Thanksgiving, dear readers. What are you thankful for? My list is short, but sweet: I'm thankful for you guys, gaming consoles, and 3d scanners. Wibidata Machine Learning Platform Offers Capabilities Comparable To Amazon.com And Google
Nov 29, 7:00PM
Wibidata, a big data application provider, has a new platform for building real-time apps that shows the increasing accessibility of machine learning and how e-commerce companies can provide an experience similar to a giant like Amazon.com. The new WibiEnterprise 3.0 platform allows a company to power a site with advanced analytics that fine-tunes itself, providing better recommendations and other features over time, including more relevant search results and personalized content. Kiind Launches An API For Its Digital Gift Card Platform
Nov 29, 6:30PM
Just in time for the holidays, virtual gift card service Kiind today announced that it now offers an API, which will allow third-party vendors to hook right into its services and to create gift cards from their own systems. The company also today said that it has added Nike and Apple's iTunes as gift card options to its store. These are two major deals for Kiind, which already offered gift cards from major retailers like Amazon, Columbia Sportswear and Gap. Unlike other gift card services, Kiind's system, which launched earlier this year, is based on deferred payments. The sender is only charged when the gift card is actually claimed (and a surprisingly large number of gift cards remain unclaimed). For shops like Amazon, Kiind also offers gift givers the ability to pre-select certain items from their stores, though the receivers can always change these selections. The new API allows developers to easily create and send cards from Kiind, but also to create their own gift card marketplaces based on Kiind's inventory. As the company's CEO and president Leif Baradoy told me earlier this month, the Victoria, Canada-based Kiind has seen good traction in the B2B space and decided to focus on this over making its service available to consumers. In the business world, most enterprises already use similar services to offer their employees or good customers gift cards. Kiind hopes that at least some of these services will use its API to also offer cards through its service. Some businesses, the Kiind team believes, will also integrate this API into their regular CRM or HR tools (and real estate agents, apparently, have taken to it to send gifts to homebuyers after a deal closes). The idea here, Baradoy said, is to extend the reach of the Kiind platform as wide as possible. As for the relationships with Nike and Apple, Baradoy couldn't say too much, given that these deals tend to be confidential. He did, however, note that the company likes to create direct relationships with vendors whenever possible. He sees the fact that some of these major brands are now interested in the service as a sign that Kiind “has something interesting going on.” The company also recently launched a user-based referral program to attract more businesses to its platform. Referrers now get 5 percent of the first gift and 0.5 percent for every gift after.Google's Android 4.4 Update Seems To Hurt Video Playback Performance On Nexus 7
Nov 29, 6:18PM
Google's Android 4.4 KitKat update is rolling out to Nexus devices globally, and I was eager to get it on my Nexus 7 tablet. Turns out, it's possible I should've left well enough alone. Immediately after updating (via official, OTA channels), I noticed performance seemed to suffer, and now a study conducted by Finnish mobile video and touch testing firm OptoFidelity adds some solid data to back up my observations.Aardvark Founder Max Ventilla Is Trying To Turn Education On Its Head With AltSchool
Nov 29, 6:01PM
Alice, a single mom living in Daly City, was facing major roadblocks with her public school system. Her five-year-old son was advanced enough to enter first grade instead of kindergarten. And her older son, who was about to enter third grade and had been diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, hated school.Black Friday Online Sales Up 9.7 Percent; Mobile Is 37 Percent Of All Traffic And 21 Percent Of All Purchases
Nov 29, 5:59PM
After a strong Thanksgiving holiday push in e-commerce spending, Black Friday online sales are already up more than 7 percent in 2013 over the same period last year.Bond, The App For Giving Gifts, Lands On The Web
Nov 29, 5:00PM
Just in time for Black Friday, Bond is bringing its gifting platform to the web after spending a couple months as a native mobile app. Bond, created by Sonny Caberwal, takes all the heavy lifting out of gift giving, with a large focus on the enterprise and professional gifts. Is Instagram Eyeing Up @instagram.com Email Addresses For Its Users As Part Of A Messaging Service?
Nov 29, 4:53PM
Last week, Om Malik at GigaOm reported that Instagram was working on a messaging feature to complement its already very-popular social photo app, now with some 150 million monthly active users. Now we've caught wind of something that could point to a possible feature on this would-be messaging product: @instagram.com email addresses. Shinola's Runwell Is A Solid Watch With American Pedigree, But You'll Pay For The Homegrown Factor
Nov 29, 4:48PM
Detroit-based watchmaker Shinola is doing something pretty unique: hand-making watches in the United States, right down to the quartz movements contained within. The startup's founding team includes some who worked for Swiss movement maker Ronda previously, and they built the company by flying in high-tech watchmaking equipment from Europe, as well as experts to train their Detroit-based workforce in the fine art of assembling timepieces.Gift Guide: Be Super-Healthy On A Shoestring Budget
Nov 29, 4:00PM
Are you tired of watching expensive gadgets turn your friends into Abercrombie models? Well, my pudgy popper, we've got a holiday gift guide that'll give you five more ab packs without breaking your piggy bank. Standing Desk Vs. Cardboard Box It's well-known that sitting all day long is slowing killing us, so a few savvy furniture manufacturers have begun to market chic “standing desks” boldly priced at $1,000 or more. The Stir Kinetic Standing Desk is an artificially intelligent $3,800 table that learns a users' habits and automatically adjusts its height throughout the day. Or, if you're like the former CEO of Hulu, you can use the good ol' 20th century technology of a cardboard box. This geometrically sound paper-based tech comes in all shapes and sizes; with enough digging users can find an ideal height for them. At TechCrunch, it took me five minutes to find some boxes laying about. Treadmill Desk Vs. SurfShelf According to Science, standing desks may not be all that healthy, since what the body really needs is constant movement throughout the day. Your best bet for being super-healthy is to walk while you work (it even makes doctors better at diagnosing!). But, these suckers are expensive: the cheapest quality LifeSpan Treadmill desk is $1,300 or you can DIY it for a few hundred dollars less. Or, for a price of Comcast's shoddy Internet ($39.95), you can own the portable miracle, the SurfShelf, a laptop shelf that attaches to the face of most treadmills. I brought it with me on a three-week tour of the East Coast and it worked marvelously. You still need a gym membership (or a hotel with a treadmill), but it's a great excuse to get out of the coffee shop and into a gym. Juicer Or Blender Vs. Teeth Getting one's daily allowance of vitamins can be a real pain, so nutrition-happy consumers have been more than willing to shell out their weekly paycheck for a gadget that shreds solid fruits and vegetables into a drink that can be gulped in between emails. The $300 Breville Elite Juicer makes bright shakes without the inconvenience of cutting, while the Costco holiday centerpiece, the $500 Vitamix, spins fast enough to prep uranium for a nuclear core. But both juicing and blending are probably terrible for your body. Fructose can be toxic to humans; Mother Nature naturally wraps its sugary sweetness in a fiber shieldThanksgiving Digest (IBM E-Commerce Edition): Mobile 43% Of All Traffic, Over 25% Of All Online Sales
Nov 29, 3:34PM
For many years, Black Friday -- the day after Thanksgiving -- marked the start of the holiday shopping rush. But with many (not all) physical stores closed on Thanksgiving, a window of opportunity has emerged for e-commerce sites to push out offers and start selling a day earlier. That has proven to be big business: online sales in the U.S. this Thanksgiving were up nearly 20% (19.7%) on 2012, with an especially strong push from mobile devices, which accounted for over one-quarter (25.8%) of all sales on the day and nearly half of all e-commerce traffic. Amid Some Fistfights, Walmart Sells 1.4M Tablets On Thanksgiving, iPad Mini A Top Seller
Nov 29, 2:17PM
Walmart is already crowing about Black Friday and we're only a couple of hours into the actual day itself. That's because depressingly, Black Friday has somehow subsumed Thanksgiving Thursday and become the Day That Spans Many Days. Oh well; at least they sold a huge boatload of tablets. Walmart puts its one day sales of those mobile computing devices at 1.4 million, and while it doesn't break down by brand or model, the company also cites the iPad mini as one of a short list of top-selling items.PingTune Raises $1.6M And Unleashes Messaging App Based Around Music
Nov 29, 1:49PM
With the success of SnapChat, Line and others, many have been wondering who will own the next big messaging service. Now, we're not saying it's necessarily the next big thing, but it is interesting to us that PingTune (formerly named Tuneit) has appeared with a service which slices off a fascinating niche of the messaging space with an app for music fans that want to send slices of music to each other in an easy and simple way. The startup, based in London's 'Tech City' in the East, has also just raised £1m ($1.6m) worth of investment to do it. The seed investment comes from Rupert Hambro (former Chairman of Hambros Bank, currently Chairman of JO Hambro) and Dominic Perks (serial entrepreneur and active investor).Apple Not Impressed That Court-Appointed E-Book Compliance Monitor Made $138,432 In First Two Weeks
Nov 29, 1:10PM
Apple has issued a formal objection to the court-appointed lawyer assigned to monitor its compliance with the decision handed down in its e-book pricing fixing case back in July. The monitor was assigned by the DOJ back in October, and has apparently been charging Apple a very high price for his services – he made $138,432 in his first two weeks on the job, according to Apple's official filing on the matter.Journaling App LifeCrumbs Turns Your Favorite Photos Into A Visual Calendar Of Happy Memories
Nov 29, 7:59AM
The holidays are often less than merry if you have to deal with things like balancing work with travel, financial stress or seasonal affective disorder. I usually cope by listening to Merle Haggard's "If We Make It Through December" over and over and over again. This year, however, I also plan to make visual journaling app LifeCrumbs part of my daily routine. Made by a startup called Tomofun, LifeCrumbs was created around the idea that even on the gloomiest of days, there is always at least one good moment to salvage. The iOS app, which will launch its Android version soon, lets you turn those moments into a visual calendar filled with photos of good memories. Money Dashboard Gets $4.4M To Tell UK Bank Users What They Spend On
Nov 29, 12:19AM
One thing the UK, a huge finance market, has been lacking in recent years is something equivalent to Mint.com. Now Money Dashboard hopes to fulfil at least part of that role. It's a 'smart' account aggregation service that automatically analyses online banking statements. It's now secured a £2.7 million ($4.4 million) investment round, led by Calculus Capital, a fund which manages private equity funds for individuals. Money Dashboard aims to now develop new services, including launching mobile apps.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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According 
It's Thanksgiving in the States and tomorrow is the biggest shopping day of the year. In fact stores will be open tonight so you can elbow your way into a scrum of bargain hunters and frotteurists. I'm here to tell you it's a sucker's game, at least when it comes to consumer electronics and computer hardware. 
It's Thanksgiving! And, judging by the fact that you read tech blogs, you're probably at least a bit of a geek. Know what that means? Today's the day you get to answer all of your extended family's tech questions! Hurrah! This year, you'll probably get to explain what the heck this "Bitcoin" thing is at least twice. 
Google's decision to share user data across Google services, revealed in an update to its policy back in March 2012, isn't strictly kosher with Dutch privacy law, the Dutch Data Protection Authority said Thursday. Google doesn't "properly inform users which personal data the company collects and combines, and for what purposes," according to a statement by the DPA issued via press release.
If you thought the hype around mobile messaging apps had reached some pretty crazy heights already -- what with SnapChat apparently snubbing cash acquisition offers of $3bn and even $4bn, from Facebook and Google respectively -- expect even more craziness next year. A lot more, as usage of over-the-top messaging services reaches an "inflection point", as analyst Ovum puts it in a new report.
It's Thanksgiving, and 
So you think you want to be a VC. It sounds like a pretty cool job, after all. You have good pay and benefits, get to meet with lots of interesting entrepreneurs and play with cool technology, can hang out in khakis all day... But what about the dark side of venture capital? What's the worst part about having an office on Sand Hill Road and investing other people's money? (Hint: It's not eating breakfast at Madera, getting coffee at The Creamery, or having drinks at the 
Waterloo-based startup 
In a bid to get a slice of the lucrative karaoke market, 
Bitcoin burning a hole in your pocket? 
Tis the season for wish-lists. Addwish, a Danish startup offering online wish-list services for consumers and online businesses has closed $1.8 million in seed funding from Nordic-based early stage VC firm Sunstone Capital. The U.S. is a core focus for the startup so the funding will be used to hire staff to support this international push. 
Google has been rumored to be building a streaming music service into its YouTube property, which is a little confusing because it also has its catalogue-spanning Google Play Music All Access service. But there's even more evidence it's going forward with that plan in the latest YouTube app for Android, which contains code (via Android Police) indicating that a service called "Music Pass" is in the works for the online video site.
We can differentiate several steps in the life of a hardware startup: concept, minimum functional prototype (MFP), complete functional prototype (CFP), design for manufacture (DFM), first factory run (FFR) and retail. Capital needs vary according to the stage you're in and might come from different sources. In hardware, venture capital is essentially about growth. 
There's something intrinsically appealing about a choreographed blend of low and high tech. To wit, meet PowerUp 3.0: a Bluetooth device that turns a bog-standard paper airplane into, well, a smartphone-controlled lean, mean flying machine. Or so its makers claim. And if those claims stack up pranking your teachers is about to get a whole lot more sophisticated. 
Well that didn't take long. Google has removed Cyanogen Inc.'s alternative Android ROM installer app from its Play store. Cyanogen raised $7 million from Benchmark Capital back in September to turn its geek-beloved aftermarket version of Android into a mainstream flavour of the platform -- with the ultimate aim of using its Android variant to compete with standard Android (and iOS) for consumers' attention. 
Amazon Japan has 
We're entering the peak season for shopping, and along with it a big rush on e-commerce services and getting packages before the 25th. Timely news, then, that 
The Surface 2 appears to be easily besting the consumer interest that its predecessor, the Surface RT, engendered during its release in late 2012. In fact, the Surface 2 is now the most-searched-for single device among the larger Microsoft line of tablet hybrids. 
