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• May 08, 2012
• 7:25

  Is Nvidia’s GTX 690 Priced Too High?

  Nope.
• 7:38

  Nvidia’s five new Keplers raise a red flag

  Nvidia released five 'all new' video cards last week, and it is a cause for celebration, right?
• May 09, 2012
• 7:13

  Memjet buys the IP it needs to spread

  Memjet has purchased all the IP behind their printers, likely allowing them to spread the tech out to new markets.
• May 11, 2012
• 7:57

  Intel outs Merrifield and 6331

  Intel has two new 22nm phone chips to talk about, and one platform gets pushed out to 2014.

• May 12, 2012
• 12:35

  Never Mind The Servers: AngelPad Start-Up ElasticBox Makes It Easy To Set Up Web Apps

  If your response to virtual infrastructure installations is a derisive "Boring, Sidney, booring" then maybe AngelPad startup ElasticBox isn't for you. However, if you love cloud computing like Nancy loved heroin, I think you may be in luck. ElasticBox, founded by former Microsofies Ravi Srivatsav, Alberto Arias Maestro, and Amadeo Casas Cuadrado, is a service that makes setting up and running a cloud-based service quick and easy. With the service you don't have to set up the environment in order to run an app. Instead, you can focus on the actual functionality and far less on server maintenance.
• 13:00

  Gillmor Gang: Tomorrow Never Knows

  The Gillmor Gang — John Borthwick, Robert Scoble, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — turned off their minds, relaxed, and floated downstream on the push notification inbox of tomorrow. Borrowing a page from the Tibetan Book of Windows, the Gang debated the impossibility of multitasking, the existence of a new uber operating system, and the overall impact of surrendering to the void. Revolver marked the exact center of the Beatles arc; everything before was prologue, everything after continues to expand as the media is transformed. A quarter of a million may seem like a lot of dollars for playing one song once on a TV show, just as we await the size of the Facebook IPO. Recorded first and sequenced last, Tomorrow Never Knows is the end of the beginning.

• 13:01

  Destroying stuff for the good of all mankind

  NC state’s constructed facilities laboratory is a place where things get broken for science. We’ve shared several videos lately of things being sliced, diced, sheared, exploded, and smashed, purely for the fun of it, and now we feel like we should compensate a little bit. No, we’re not going to undergo physical punishment, instead, we’ll [...]
• 14:01

  Heathkit closes down, again.

  With this rather large flip flop, Heathkit has closed its doors… again. The company that so many of us remember fondly from their myriad of electronics kits originally closed its doors in 1992. Last year, there was an announcement of a revival and a call for kit submissions. Unfortunately, it looks like that just didn’t [...]

• 14:06

  No, Snapchat Isn’t About Sexting, Says Co-Founder Evan Spiegel

  “The minute you tell someone that images on your server disappear, everyone jumps to sexting.” Evan Spiegel laughed and leaned back into his chair during his first sitdown interview since his iPhone app Snapchat blew up over the last month. Snapchat is #12 on the free iOS photo app charts in the U.S. and just scored some mainstream media attention in The New York Times.  Why? Snapchat is a photo-sharing app that changes privacy norms in a very novel way. The free app allows users to send others photos and control how long receivers can see them. These photos last for up to 10 seconds, before they disappear forever. “It seems odd that at the beginning of the Internet everyone decided everything should stick around forever,” Spiegel said. “I think our application makes communication a lot more human and natural."
• 15:00

  Mobile – Facebook And Google Can’t Live With It And They Can’t Live Without It

  This week Facebook did a virtually unprecedented thing. In the middle of its IPO roadshow it modified its S1 filing in reaction to questions it had been being asked by analysts. The modification I refer to stated that Facebook wanted to acknowledge a trend; that trend is the declining ARPU (average revenue per user) being seen in its current quarter. This trend is being driven, Facebook said, by the growth in its usage on mobile platforms and its inability to monetize those platforms in the same way, or at the same rate, as its desktop/laptop offerings. The previous iterations of the S1 had all contained the possibility of this trend. Even the likelihood of it. But the actuality of the trend was noted here for the first time in the S1.

• 15:01

  Putting a software defined radio on a mac

  A few months ago [Antti Palosaari] discovered cheap USB TV tuners could be used as a software-defined radio. Since then, we’ve seen these TV tuners receive signals from GPS satellites and even the signals between air traffic control and passenger aircraft. Like everything cool, Mac support for these drivers is slightly terrible so [hpux735] wrote his own [...]

• 16:00

  Postmates Get It Now Users Spend $100+ A Month — At Least In Month One

  Last December, Postmates launched with the plan to offer up a courier delivery service for local businesses throughout San Francisco. But then the team had a brilliant idea: What if it gave its couriers pre-paid debit cards, which would let them purchase goods for customers and then deliver them anywhere in the city? That idea evolved into the Get It Now app, which Postmates launched in private beta in mid-April. Since then, the app has attracted more than 1,000 users in just four weeks. Not surprisingly, many of those users come from tech startups themselves, with employees of Twitter, TaskRabbit, Square, Cherry, and Yelp all signed up to use the service.

• 16:17

  Hacking the Kingston Wi-Drive

  [Andrew] got his hands on a Kingston Wi-Drive, and being the responsible Hackaday reader he is, spent the better part of a weekend figuring out how to get root on this shiny new toy The Kingston Wi-Drive is a small battery-powered Flash drive with a wi-fi adapter in a small, compact case. Even though Kingston is going [...]

• 17:00

  Digital Wallet Battle Heats Up As Visa And MasterCard Enter The Game

  This week, two of the major players in the credit card industry, Visa and MasterCard launched their online digital wallet services. Known as V.me (Visa's) and PayPass Wallet Services (MasterCard), both are very similar initiatives which see the companies clamoring to become the credit card of choice for digital transactions, the way they fight today to be the credit card for all the other transactions taking place out there in the real world. And, to be clear, a "digital" wallet isn't necessarily the same as a "mobile wallet," although a digital wallet service could also be housed in a mobile app interface, as both MasterCard and Visa plan on offering in the near future.

• 18:02

  Google’s head of news: Newspapers are the new Yahoo

  In an interview about the future of the media industry, Google's head of news products Richard Gingras said that newspapers are like old-fashioned internet portals such as AOL and Yahoo, and that unless they can adapt to the web instead of fighting it they are doomed.

• 19:30

  Five Ways Native Monetization Is Changing Silicon Valley

  With a $100 billion IPO pending, it’s with confident defiance that Facebook has thumbed its nose at traditional web advertising models. On Facebook, despite their $5 billion 2012 forecasted ad revenue, you’ll see no prerolls, no rich media ads, no “punch the monkeys,” and no interruption. Facebook is leading the charge for a new generation of media companies who are building their businesses on “native” advertising models, a fundamental shift away from the traditional interruptive ad models that users have learned to ignore. Facebook’s commitment to native monetization signals significant change to come.
• 23:00

  Pornterest Vs. Pornstagram Vs. Tumblr’s #NSFW

  Wow, Pinterest’s porn section is fairly tame. I was just curious about the type of not-so-mommy-friendly content that might be popping up on what’s now the third-most popular social network after Facebook and Twitter. (Also I’m bored). After all, Tumblr houses, like, a lot of porn. Both services aim to help their members find platforms for self-expression, one through pinning images for inspiration, the other through blogging, and both have also had to fight unwanted content on their networks.

• 23:50

  Charlie’s cat almost breaks an embargo

  Most people can't wait for embargoes to lift, digging for details and specs before launch.

• May 13, 2012
• 0:33

  Marc Andreessen Visits Peter Thiel’s Stanford Class To Talk Startups, How He Invests & The Future

  It wasn't so long ago that Peter Thiel began publicly pushing the somewhat controversial idea that higher education is in a bubble, or launching an initiative to help smart young people "stop out of school." For these reasons, Thiel's decision to teach a higher ed course was unexpected, even controversial. Last month, he began teaching a class at Stanford called "Computer Science 183: Startup." One of his students, Blake Masters, provides a glimpse into Thiel's lectures through his comprehensive class notes. Masters has turned his notes into essays and posted them on his blog, one of which is a fascinating conversation between the investor and Marc Andreessen on the past, present, and future of the tech industry, which we've highlighted herein.
• 2:00

  Help! There’s A Patent On My Idea! What Now?

  One of the most frequent questions I get asked goes something like this: “I have a really great idea, but (name of big company or university) has a patent on that. What do I do?” With over 8,000,000 patents issued to date and thousands of new patents issued weekly, chances are good that patents have been issued that are relevant to your business or idea. Knowingly infringing an active patent can lead to disastrous consequences for your business. So what do you do?

• 3:01

  What mamas want: CafeMom aims for right tone on YouTube

  When we talk about making web content for niche audiences, moms come up a lot. But CafeMom, a web community for moms that is also now one of the latest participants in YouTube's Made For Web channel initiative, believes that it has a unique approach.

• 3:08

  PayPal Gets Its Own Share Of The Yahoo Diaspora, Hires JavaScript Icon Douglas Crockford

  The reorganizing and downsizing at Yahoo -- and possibly the executive scandal at the very top of the pyramid -- are leading to a wave of talent departures at the company: the latest in that story is that Douglas Crockford, a trailblazing Java guru most recently at Yahoo, is joining eBay's payment giant PayPal. The news was announced by Bill Scott, PayPal's senior director of UI engineering, on his own blog, yesterday. Scott himself had also worked at Yahoo years ago.
• 6:00

  Convertible Note Seed Financings: Econ 101 For Founders

  What Is a Conversion Discount? In the context of a seed financing, a convertible note is a loan that typically automatically converts into shares of preferred stock upon the closing of a Series A round of financing.  A conversion discount (or “discount”) is a mechanism to reward the noteholders for their investment risk by granting to them the right to convert the amount of the loan, plus interest, at a reduced price (in percentage terms) to the purchase price paid by the Series A investors. In other words, the founders are saying to the investors, in effect, if you take this risk and give us money today, we’ll reward you by giving you “20% off” at our Series A round down the road (20% being the usual discount, as discussed below).  For example, if the investors in a $500,000 convertible note seed financing were granted a discount of 20%, and the price per share of the Series A Preferred Stock were $1.00, the noteholders would convert the loan at an effective price (referred to as the “conversion price”) of $0.80 per share and thus receive 625,000 shares ($500,000 divided by $0.80), which is 125,000 shares more than a Series A investor would receive for its $500,000 investment and a 1.25x return on paper ($625,000 divided by $500,000).  (The foregoing example does not include accrued interest on the loan, which is typically about 5%-7% annually, as discussed below.)

• 8:00

  CTIA: The good, the bad and the very, very ugly

  I have a confession to make: I like CTIA Wireless. I'll be the first to admit that the show is dying, but the problem isn't it's place on the calendar like most people think. The problem is much simpler: It's the carriers.

• 9:00

  Box: The Path From Arrington’s Backyard To A Billion Dollar Business

  It's no secret that many deals have been struck and key relationships formed at TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington's former house in Atherton. In case you aren't familiar, Arrington threw epic parties at his home for the tech community in the early days of TechCrunch. Police were called, booze was flowing, people passed out. I don't have enough fingers to count how many times I've spoken to a Silicon Valley entrepreneur or VC who said he or she used to frequent Mike's house parties back in the day. Clearly this was the place to be for anyone looking to meet their next investor, acquirer, co-founder etc. And that's exactly what Box co-founders Dylan Smith and Aaron Levie were thinking when they showed up to Mike's house in early February 2006 for the Naked Conversations TechCrunch Party. It was in Mike's backyard where they met then Draper Fisher Jurvetson partner Emily Melton. Beers in hand (actually only Levie was of age-barely, so Smith was drinking water), the pair pitched Melton on their idea. She was so impressed and their passion for what they were building cloud storage, that she immediately introduced them to the DFJ partner covering SaaS and enterprise investments, Josh Stein, who months later led Box's first round of institutional investment.

• 11:01

  Hackaday Links May 13th 2012

  Amazing ass… for a robot Yep, Japan still has the creepy robotics market cornered. Case in point is this robotic posterior. Don’t worry, they’ve included a dissection so you can see how the insides work too. [via Gizmodo] Time-lapse camera module results As promised, [Quinn Dunki] sent in a link to the photo album from [...]

• 11:04

  To 4G Or Not 4G? Apple Pulls “WiFi+4G” Branding For iPads

  What is 4G? Many an armchair philosopher over the past few weeks has pondered this concept and now, thanks to a minor tempest caused by upset customers, Apple has changed their iPad branding from "WiFi+4G" to "WiFi+Cellular." Although the iPads were compatible with US 4G networks, the iPads didn't work with international 4G connections, thereby dropping a few folks in Australia into a tizzy. To prevent this, Apple put the old moniker down the memory hole and replaced it with the new naming convention.

• 11:07

  What we are listening to: Sincerely CEO Matt Brezina

  This is second edition of our weekly What we are listening to series.This week, I asked Matt Brezina, co-founder and CEO of online-to-offline photo service, Sincerely. In his past life he was co-founder of Xobni, and is an avid music listening.

• 11:19

  TC Gadgets PSA: Nickelodeon’s Gak And Floam Are Back

  If you're thinking of a gift for mom, you probably can't go wrong with Nickelodeon's Gak or Floam, two toys made back in the 1990s. Gak is, as the name suggests, a sloppy sort of slime while floam is the same slime with foam balls suspended inside. The toys cost $6.99 each and are available now.
• 11:41

  Hold The Phone — How The Future Of Web Advertising Is Linked To The Call

  We're all now familiar with how adwords campaigns on Google work. You buy keywords commonly used in search terms, such as "plumber in X town", and send people to a response mechanism, usually a web site. But increasingly that response mechanism is not a just a web site but a phone number as well - sometimes it's even just a phone number. But these days it's rarely an ordinary number - it's usually a 'smart number' that performs certain kinds of actions and sends data, just like browser calls a web page and sends data from that page. These smart numbers can be made to grab an RSS feed, play a sound file, make the caller fill out a form with their voice - just about anything. Increasingly we are seeing tech startups address what you do with that phone call and the data and analytics that can be pulled from it, just like on the Web. While Google and Facebook look at this area with their pet own projects, startups have appeared on the market to address this, such as AdInsight, Tropo, Twilio and Iovox, among others.

• 12:33

  Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson is out

  Yahoo chief executive officer Scott Thompson who has been caught in a resume gate is leaving the company, reports AllThingsD. He is going to be replaced by Ross Levinsohn. A settlement with activist investor Dan Loeb of ThirdPoint Capital is also in the works.

• 13:01

  Hacking magnets into your skin

  [Dave] loved his iPod nano so much that he implanted 4 magnets in his arm to hold it. Ok, go ahead and shout “fanboy” at your screen and say something snide about apples products or lament the poor working conditions at foxconn. Got it out of your system? Cool. Actually, if we had to guess, [...]

• 13:25

  Minuscule Microprojector Promises Bright, Touchable Displays Of The Future

  These Fraunhofer microprojectors are still quite a ways off from being implemented into real phones, but the technology is certainly interesting. Based on an insect's compound eye, the projector is a wafer of tiny LEDs that can twist and turn depending on position. This means there is no "keystoning" and the beams striking the surface will always be "crisp and clear." “Our projector consists of hundreds of tiny microprojectors in an array, each of which generates a complete image," said Marcel Sieler, a researcher. "This technology, known as 'array projection,' is modeled on nature – on the compound eye found in some insects – and with it for the first time we can create very thin and bright LED projection systems with tremendous imaging properties."

• 13:40

  Facebook’s delicate balance between revenue and privacy

  If Facebook really is overvalued leading up to its IPO, privacy might be the underlying cause of the company's missed expectations. As it turns out, pleasing both investors and users isn't easy for a company that relies heavily on advertising and personal data.

• 13:42

  Report: Thompson Out, Media Man Levinsohn In As Yahoo’s Interim CEO

  We're still confirming the news with Yahoo but AllThingsD's Kara Swisher is reporting that as of tomorrow, Scott Thompson will be leaving his role as CEO of Yahoo, and getting replaced, on an interim basis, by Ross Levinsohn, currently the global media head. Update: Thompson's now officially out and Levinsohn's in. Read the updated report here. Thompson's position has been mired in controversy since news broke the other week that he had lied about his qualifications -- and that situation seemed to be going from bad to worse as the company failed to act on the news in any significant way -- and Thompson remained in control. Some may even find the method in which he is finally going unsatisfactory: the company will apparently cite "personal reasons" for his departure, according to AllThingsD.

• 15:00

  Big data: The quick and the dead

  The IT hype machine has everyone jumping on the big data bandwagon. But before we start saving every scrap of data in the enterprise for fear that we will miss a nugget of insight, shouldn’t we focus on what we already have?

• 15:00

  More pins and more power with a DIY Sanguino

  Not long after [CulinarilySpeaking] got into the Arduino game, he began to want more IO pins and a larger program space for more ambitious projects. This, of course, led him down the path towards the Sanguino, the ATMega644-based dev board with many more IO pins than Arduino boards based on the ATMega328. Instead of buying new, [CulinarilySpeaking] [...]

• 15:46

  No More Beating Around The Bush At Yahoo: Thompson Is Out, Levinsohn In As CEO, Effective Immediately

  Well, after days and days of nothing, suddenly things are moving at a fast clip. After news came out just hours ago that Thompson might be leaving the company tomorrow, moments ago Yahoo officially confirmed the news, as we reported earlier: Ross Levinsohn is now interim Chief Executive Officer, replacing Scott Thompson, and Fred Amoroso is chairman of the board. Scott Thompson's departure and the reasons for it are not mentioned at all in the statement, which simply says he has left the company. (Earlier a report in AllThingsD had said he would resign for personal reasons, although at least in this statement nothing at all is mentioned for why he has left.) The announcement from Yahoo also underscores how activist shareholder Third Point is very much a key player in all of this.

• 16:00

  Accessing an SD card through a parallel port, just because

  [Vinod] sent in a very cool build he says is somewhat of a ‘mad project’: he mounted an MMC and SD card under Linux using the parallel port on his computer. Even though parallel ports are getting rarer these days, we absolutely love [Vinod]‘s dedication and willingness to dig around the Linux kernel. The hardware portion of the [...]
• 17:00

  Getting started with OpenCV

  [Eric Gregori] sent in an article he wrote for EETimes to introduce the concepts behind computer vision to the masses. As a nice little bonus, [Eric] included a VMware image containing Ubuntu and all the packages and examples necessary to write your own OpenCV apps. There’s a ton of awesome stuff you can do with [...]

• 17:25

  Did Yahoo sow the seeds of its own demise with Hadoop?

  As the world once again starts analyzing Yahoo's myriad woes after Sunday morning's ouster of embattled CEO Scott Thompson, I'm left wondering if its investment in Hadoop didn't aid in the company's demise, even if it's a way down the long list of Yahoo's mistakes.

• 17:33

  With Its New Google+ App, Google Finally Gets It Right

  Some people just love Google+ and others just hate the company's efforts to create a social network and a social layer across all of its services. Google itself seems to be pretty happy with the results it is getting from Google+ so far - or at least that's what the company is saying publicly. No matter your overall feelings about Google+, though, Google's new native Google+ app for iPhone is worth a look, especially because it's hopefully just a first glimpse at what more of Google's mobile apps will look like in the near future.

• 18:10

  Deal or die time for LightSquared; Will Dish swoop in?

  LightSquared is preparing for a potential bankruptcy filing on Monday as it has made little progress in its negotiations with debtholders. If LightSquared does enter into bankruptcy it might find Dish Network waiting, eager to relieve it of its spectrum.

• 18:12

  Facebook to Let Users Vote On Its Privacy Policies

  

  Facebook shareholders may be grumbling about the inordinate amount of control founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg holds under the company’s relatively unique corporate structure, but new privacy-policy explanations the company announced on Friday - and will explain in a conference call Monday - return some privacy control back to users.

  How Many Users Does It Take to Change a Policy?

  "If we receive more than 7,000 comments concerning a particular change, we will put the change up for a vote. The vote will be binding on us if more than 30% of all active registered users as of the date of the notice vote,” the company’s updated terms of use read.

  “This one is a fresh one,” said Kapil Raina, director of Product Marketing at Zscaler.  “Given that most of the Facebook stock is under a dual class control, it is refreshing that at least privacy is not. Then again,” Raina added, “note the emphasis on ‘active’ – which is defined by what?”

  A spokesperson for Facebook could not be reached for comment Saturday, but that question could presumably come up at a live Q&A Facebook has scheduled for noon ET/9 am PT tomorrow. The company is seeking feedback on the new policies, perhaps trying to reverse its image of being a company that acts first and asks questions later when it comes to policies on user data.

  The company outlined the policy changes and announced Monday’s Q&A in a blog post. Anyone can join the discussion at [on.fb.me].

  A New Privacy Hub

  The most notable change is a new policy hub, which makes it easier for users to find pertinent policies on acceptable use, rights and responsibilities and how Facebook uses your data. The company still takes liberties in its control over user data and privacy.

  “Facebook talks a lot about data they 'receive', but they are still very vague about what they are storing and for how long,” said Jay Herbison,CEO of Priveazy, a startup dedicated to educating users about online privacy and safety issues. “Facebook is also not giving users full access to the things that Facebook is storing about them.”

  For example, Herbison said he had issues with the data collections received through Facebook social plugins on non-Facebook sites. Facebook has previously acknowledged that it keeps social plugin data for 90 days but there has never been a mention in the privacy policy about this, Herbison said. 

  “It is very likely that as Facebook rolls out an ad network, the length of the storage will be extended and this data will be used to create permanent 'Web browsing profiles' that could outlast the Web browsing data that was initially captured,” Herbison said.

  The privacy policy changes most likely stem from last year’s dust-up with the Federal Trade Commission and the company’s initial public stock offering later this week.

  
  

  

• 18:55

  Convertible Note Seed Financings: Founders Beware!

  This post is the third part of a three-part primer on convertible note seed financings. Part 1, entitled “Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Convertible Note Seed Financings (But Were Afraid To Ask),” addressed the basics. Part 2, entitled “Convertible Note Seed Financings: Econ 101 for Founders,” addressed the economics. This part will address certain tricky issues.

• 19:02

  Where To Now For Yahoo? Thompson Out, Loeb & Co In

  Over the weekend, Yahoo's embattled CEO Scott Thompson finally did the honorable thing and stood down. Ex-President of News Corp's Fox Interactive Media division, Ross Levinsohn, has been named interim Chief Executive Officer. Hedge fund shareholder Daniel Loeb - whose firm Third Point owned 5.8% of Yahoo - and his three cronies have effectively won their long-running battle for seats on the Yahoo board. The board also has a new chairman: Fred Amoroso, the ex-CEO of digital entertainment company Rovi. Amoroso only joined Yahoo's board in February and is said to be "one of Silicon Valley's most enthusiastic proponents of patent warfare."

  So now that Daniel Loeb has gotten his way, what can we expect from Yahoo in the coming months? Clearly more patents, if Amoroso's appointment is anything to go by. But Loeb had an agenda, too...

  Loeb ran a website called Value Yahoo, which at time of writing is down with a server error. The website promoted the views of Loeb and three other board-seeking Yahoo shareholders: Harry Wilson (who specializes in corporate restructurings and turnarounds), Michael Wolf (ex-President and COO of MTV Networks) and Jeff Zucker (the one who didn't get appointed; he was ex-President and CEO of NBC Universal). Collectively, these four men called themselves "The Shareholder Slate."

  

  The Shareholder Slate is only interested in one thing: increasing Yahoo's share price in order to make a buck. Loeb and co talk about "increasing value," but they are referring to monetary value. This isn't about creating "societal value," as Henry Blodget described Mark Zuckerberg's mission at Facebook.

  Loeb & Co's Vision For Yahoo

  Plainly put, Loeb and his partners want to optimize Yahoo's assets. Their main complaint with Thompson was that he didn't do enough with Yahoo's Asian interests. In particular Yahoo currently owns 42 percent of Alibaba, a Chinese B2B e-commerce company. Alibaba connects Chinese manufacturers to companies around the world looking for suppliers. According to Loeb and co, Alibaba is worth $35 billion and has "significant growth potential." Specifically, they think it will help drive Yahoo's share price upwards: "a 20 percent increase in the value of Alibaba would drive almost $2.00 in value per Yahoo share."

  On its Agenda page, Loeb and co outlined their desire to implement "significant organizational changes to strategically allocate capital and talent toward Yahoo!’s greatest strengths and brightest opportunities." Its list of nine initiatives is wide-ranging - and rather vague. For example, they want Yahoo to grow in the video and mobile segments; which would be in the strategic plan of just about any media company you could name these days.

  How Did Scott Thompson's Strategic Plan Differ From Loeb's?

  At his first earnings call last month, Yahoo! CEO Scott Thompson talked about reducing Yahoo's size and becoming more focused on its core business. He remarked that Yahoo would be "doing away with everything that does not contribute to its core business of profit-driving ads and e-commerce." He went on to say that Yahoo will get smaller by consolidating its various platforms and jettisoning 50 properties. Yahoo! has already cut 2,000 jobs in order to reduce costs and streamline the business.

  

  So it seems like Thompson had a narrower strategic focus and was more intent on cost-cutting. He also wanted to find new revenue by aggressively licensing Yahoo's intellectual property, a plan he put into place in March by suing Facebook for alleged patent violations.

  Patents aren't mentioned at all on Loeb's website, however new chairman Fred Amoroso will likely push for more legal maneuvers. 

  What can we expect of new interim CEO Ross Levinsohn? Even though he has a proven track record as a leader in Internet corporations, it's likely his role will be focused on steadying the ship while Amaroso and Loeb agree on the new strategic direction for Yahoo. Loeb has been plotting for many months to steer the Yahoo ship into higher stock price waters; now it looks like he will get an opportunity to do that.

  Where To Now For Yahoo?

  I'm not entirely convinced that Daniel Loeb's motivations are good for Yahoo long term. They seem more focused on making money for Wall Street shareholders, than returning Yahoo to its roots of being a true innovative force on the Web.

  However, the Value Yahoo website and its suggested solutions for Yahoo do at least demonstrate the passion needed to turn Yahoo around. The Yahoo! board has gone through five CEOs in recent times, so it really is desperate times. Let's see if Loeb and co can turn the beleaguered company around - for the benefit of shareholders, employees and Internet fans in general.

  
  

  

• 19:52

  A Tale Of Two Thunderbolt Storage Devices: Seagate's GoFlex Desk and Western Digital's Thunderbolt Duo

  I remember the early days of the USB-vs-FireWire wars like they were yesterday, although Wikipedia reminds me that they were more than a decade ago (sigh). USB 1.0 arrived in 1996 but didn't begin to see broad adoption until two years later with version 1.1. When FireWire 400 (aka IEEE 1394a) emerged on Apple systems in 1999, its backers scoffed at USB's comparatively diminutive 11 Mbps peak (and much lower practical) bandwidth.

  Intel and its partners' response was swift; USB 2.0 came on the scene in 2000. Its 480 Mbps theoretical peak bandwidth, coupled with Intel's refusal to integrate FireWire support within its core logic chipsets, doomed FireWire to niche status in spite of the subsequent emergence of the 800 Mbps IEEE 1394b variant.

  Yet as anyone who's used a USB 2.0 hard drive or flash drive knows, the external bus's read and write performance still leave a lot to be desired, especially for video and other large-file-size material. eSATA attempted to address the issue, but its storage-centric focus left OEMs unwilling to adopt it en masse, from both incremental-cost and incremental-connector perspectives. What the industry wanted was an equally versatile but speedier successor to USB 2.0...

  ...and now it's got two. Yep, another standards war - except not in the traditional sense, as these two are complementary. The USB 3.0 specification was released in late 2008, with first products available beginning one year later. Designed primarily as a replacement for USB 2.0, it delivers 4.8 Gbps transfer speeds, along with discrete transmit and receive data paths. And courtesy of Intel's Ivy Bridge integration, USB 3.0 will soon become pervasive in a diversity of PC platforms and form factors. But more than a year ago, Intel and partner (and customer) Apple productized a copper-based version of an Intel-proprietary interface called Thunderbolt, formerly known as Light Peak.

  Each Thunderbolt port handles 40 Gbps of aggregate bandwidth, consisting of two pairs' worth of distinct 10 Gbps transmit and receive lanes. Thunderbolt isn't so much about enabling the connection of discrete storage devices (although it has been used for just that by many early peripherals), but new PC form factors instead. If you have to give up GigE, Firewire 800 and a gigantic screen to build a sleek Ultrabook, Thunderbolt will give you access to those things via an external display. Did I mention that Thunderbolt carries DisplayPort as well as PCIe? 

  To date Thunderbolt has mostly only appeared on Macs, but the Apple exclusivity period is now over. This year we'll see the emergence of more affordable second-generation controller ICs, resulting in Thunderbolt showing up in a diversity of PC platforms and form factors.

  Anand has done several in-depth Thunderbolt peripheral reviews so far. And today we've got two more products up for evaluation; Seagate's 2 TByte GoFlex Desk HDD coupled with the company's just-in-production Thunderbolt Adapter, and Western Digital's two-HDD Thunderbolt Duo. Let's have a look, shall we?

• 20:00

  StrayBoots CEO Discusses Making $12 Per Game, And It’s Only On SMS!

  Very rarely do we see gaming startups launch on the rather limited platform of SMS. Mobile games are all about the graphics, the functionality, and the ability to leverage the very best of technology through an app. But StrayBoots, a real-world scavenger hunt via text, has managed to generate $200,000 in revenue over the past 12 months, with nearly 50,000 paying customers. Oh, and did I mention that it's all through SMS?
• 21:01

  How To Raise A $1M Seed Round

  When I talk to my friends who are not currently at startups, or the Silicon Valley, the perception is that VCs and individual investors are throwing around investment dollars like drunken sailors. Outsiders think that there is a bubble, and that any company with two engineers and an idea will get funded (though there is some truth to that in certain cases). The reality is, competition has never been fiercer for startups, especially at the seed stage, to close a round. The pendulum may have swung for Y Combinator companies, but not everyone else.

• 21:54

  Amazon adds billing alerts to cloud services menu

  Amazon cloud services may be cheap, but they can add up. Following a raft of third-party companies that offer AWS monitoring services, Amazon has stepped up to offer its own proactive billing alerts for Cloudwatch customers that enable it.

• 23:00

  Companion Is The New Assistant

  Did you hear that 2012 is the year of the assistant? It’s clear: Siri was only the beginning. Today, assistants can do my bidding for a bunch of transactional, task-oriented use cases, saving me a few precious steps along the way. In the future, assistants will be capable of doing more and more non-trivial things. And, Norm Winarsky is right -- Siri isn’t one assistant to rule them all. We’ll soon have a cadre of specialized software agents at our side.

• 23:54

  Can startups afford to be socially responsible?

  it’s challenging enough for startups to manage the traditional bottom line of profits, let alone the “triple bottom line” of social and environmental impacts. But, increasingly, they're supporting business models that benefit not just their shareholders, but customers, workforce, environment and greater community.

• May 14, 2012
• 1:54

  Europe’s ‘OpenTable’ Livebookings Eats Up Another $24M From Balderton, Wellington, Ekstranda

  Livebookings, the restaurant booking and marketing service that competes with services like OpenTable, is announcing today that it has picked up another $24 million (£15 million) in funding to continue growing its business in Europe and beyond. The news highlights two trends we've seen emerging recently around here: companies dedicated to eating out are not going hungry in the current economic climate; and the more local, European counterparts to U.S.-based tech companies are getting a lot of attention from investors and consumers. Today's round of funding, Livebookings' fourth, is being led by existing investors Balderton Capital, Wellington Partners and Ekstranda and takes the total amount raised by the company to about $62 million.
• 2:33

  Qmerce Brings Brand-Customizable Social Games to Facebook

  With $450K behind it in funding, Israeli-based Qmerce is helping business large and small add social games to their communities, particularly on Facebook. The premise behind Qmerce's value proposition isn't new. That is, branded social games aimed at driving user engagement via rewards, achievements and consequently, loyalty. With over 40 customers to date, including Crocs and Pizza Hut (the Israeli franchises), and 300,000 games played, it looks like this upstart might be going somewhere.

• 3:00

  A preacher, 500 startups, and a dream to change it all

  What Billy Beane is to baseball, Dave McClure wants to be technology startups. And like Beane, he is willing to go anywhere in the world to find a slight edge to beat his richer, bigger and fancier rivals on Sand Hill Road.
• 4:00

  The world’s hottest digital markets: a music map

  Unlimited-access digital music services are racing to beat iTunes - and each other - in new countries each week. Our map breaks down the world's digital music market, country by country.

• 4:06

  Zynga Picks Up Mobile Gaming Startup Wild Needle In A Talent Deal

  Zynga has done a small acquisition of Wild Needle, a female-focused casual games company that was backed by Playdom co-founder Rick Thompson. Wild Needle was raising funding back in late 2010 to build casual, mobile games for women and closed a round with Thompson and Shasta Ventures. They didn't release their first title until more than a year later in March (which is a pretty long time to be building a casual, freemium game). It was called Shoptown Hero and it looks like it lasted in the store for about a month before they pulled it two weeks ago (see chart below).

• 4:30

  Who is Ross Levinsohn?: Yahoo’s new salesman-in-chief

  Ross Levinsohn has a lot of new responsibilities as interim CEO of Yahoo but one of the most important roles is as salesman-in-chief. He not only has to pitch the media company to advertisers -- he has to sell the image of what Yahoo does right.
• 5:24

  Apple drops iPad ’4G’ marketing — but not everywhere

  Under pressure because the new iPad's 4G connectivity does not work outside North America, the company has started dropping its claims in some international markets -- like the UK and Australia -- but not in others.
• 5:28

  Apple TV rumor mill makes millions as iTV ‘confirmed’

  Apple may not be buying a high-design German home entertainment device maker, but that doesn't mean investors in the rumoured target company won't make a killing - and it doesn't mean it won't still have a part to play in Apple's iTV.

• 5:39

  NTT Docomo Will Pay Up To $300M To Buy Italian Mobile Content Company Buongiorno

  Mobile carrier NTT Docomo today announced a move in its strategy to grow its content business outside of its traditional base of Japan: it issued a tender offer to acquire Buongiorno, a mobile content company based in Italy, paying up to ¥24 billion ($300 million) for the assets. Docomo notes in a statement that the acquisition would be made by its Germany-based subsidiary, Docomo Deutschland, and that Maruo del Rio, Buongiorno's majority shareholder and chairman with 20 percent of Buongiorno's stock, has already agreed to sell his stake to the carrier. The deal would see Buongiorno become a subsidiary of NTT Docomo.

• 7:01

  Amphi-Cycle lets you ride the trails, the waves, and back again

  Hackaday regular [Berto] is always looking for new ways to get around, and wrote in to share his most recent creation, an amphibious bicycle. He bought an off-the-shelf inflatable boat and constructed a rig that allows him to stably mount the bike on it. Once [Berto] comes across a body of water he wants to [...]

• 8:00

  Buffalo Technologies Announces Availability of 802.11ac Router and Media Bridge

  

  At the 2012 CES, we reported on one of the first public 802.11ac technology demonstrations at the Buffalo Technologies booth. Fast forward a few months, and Netgear seemed to have stolen the march on Buffalo Technologies by announcing their R6300 802.11ac model on April 26th. However, Netgear's announcement turned out to be a paper launch. Today, Buffalo Technologies is announcing their first 802.11ac router model and also making it available for purchase right away. Coupled with their 802.11ac media bridge (also launching today), it enables consumers to take advantage of the 802.11ac's Gigabit Wi-Fi capability right away.

  

  AirStation WZR-D1800H Wireless Router

  The WZR-D1800H wireless router has 5 GbE ports (1 WAN (Internet access, connected to the modem) + 4 LAN (for the internal network)) and 1 USB 2.0 port with a physical eject button. The industrial design is also improved over the earlier AirStation models, with the sharp edges being replaced by the more pleasing rounded corners.

  

  Internally, the router's 5 GHz band supports 1300 Mbps theoretical throughput  with 802.11ac, which is also backward compatible with 802.11n. The 2.4 GHz band is supported with a 3x3 802.11n radio for 450 Mbps of throughput. Simultaneous dual band operation is possible, and so, Buffalo Technologies advertises this as having a total throughput of 1750 Mbps across both the bands. Note that in the pure 802.11n mode, one can get 900 Mbps of total theoretical throughput (450 Mbps in 5 GHz and 450 Mbps in 2.4 GHz).

  The absence of any PCs / computing devices with 802.11ac support might turn out to be a bit of a dampener for prospective consumers, but Buffalo Technologies is also introducing a 802.11ac wireless media bridge to enable consumers to take advantage of their 802.11ac router's full capabilities.

  WLI-H4-D1300 Wireless Media Bridge

  The AirStation AC1300 / N450 is a 4-Port Gigabit Dual Band Wireless Ethernet Bridge intended to extend the capabilities of wireless networks. It makes for an ideal companion to the WZR-D1800H router because of its ability to extend 802.11ac wireless signals to wired devices.

  

  The device has two wireless radios to support 802.11ac and 802.11n in the 5 GHz and 2.4 GHz spectrums. The 802.11n network is dual band (450 Mbps / band), and the wired ports are all Gigabit. We have backward compatibility with 11a, 11b, 11g and 11n.

  Buffalo Technologies indicated that both of these products would carry a street price of $179.99. They are available for purchase starting today at Fry's, Frys.com and Newegg.

   

• 8:01

  The making of a Vacuum Tube

  With the death of Heathkit looming  in our minds it’s high time for a a heartwarming story. [Ronald Dekker] has done a wonderful job documenting the history of the E1T beam counting tube, detailing everything from the work led up to the invention of the tube to the lives of the inventors themselves. For those who [...]

• 8:13

  Amazon updates CDN for dynamic content

  Amazon says its updated Cloudfront content delivery network will better handle dynamic, interactive web content. To date, Cloudfront handled static web pages while Amazon left a lot of the heavy lifting of dynamic content to partners like CDN market leader Akamai.

• 8:31

  Expect More Proxy Fights for Tech Companies in Wake of Yahoo Controversy

  By using the threat of a proxy fight to win significant change at Yahoo, Daniel Loeb and his Third Point LLC hedge fund did something that may become increasingly common as a result of new rules to increase shareholder oversight of publicly traded companies.

  And tech companies, with cultures that often clash with the straitlaced, profit-driven motives of Wall Street, seem particularly vulnerable to proxy fights. While Third Point’s power play - which resulted in three new board members and the company’s sixth CEO in five years -- is expected to benefit shareholders, it is less clear what impact it will have on Yahoo employees or the people who still visit the Web portal more than half a billion times each month.

  Earlier this month, Loeb released documents showing that CEO Scott Thompson had listed on his resume a degree in computer sciences that he had not earned. By last week, International Game Technology CEO Patti Hart said she would not seek re-election to Yahoo’s board of directors after Loeb raised questions about her role in hiring Thompson. And by Sunday, Yahoo had reached a deal with Third Point that included Thompson’s resignation, a new chairman and seats for Loeb and three allies on Yahoo’s board.

  The dustup, however, has far broader implications than a simple case of calling someone out on an embellished resume. It shows the considerable sway that hedge funds hold over the companies in which they invest, and how the Wall Street culture often clashes with the tech darlings into which they've put money.

  When times are good, companies such as LinkedIn and Groupon, which went public last year, and Facebook, which will go public later this week, benefit from the relationship. But when times are bad, the public companies quickly realize they are never completely in control of their operations. Experts also believe that the rise in shareholder activism is a direct result of hedge fund involvement, and investors, companies and customers can expect more activism going forward.

  Hedge funds “are better at organizing people. They have tremendous resources, and proxy fights are one of their tools,” Franklin Allen, a finance professor at the Wharton School, said in an article on the school’s website. "Proxy fights are one way they can make money." 

  Hedge Funds Profit Through Control

  Even after Thompson's resignation, Yahoo is continuing to investigate Thompson to see if his departure can be considered to be for cause, which would save the company millions of dollars in severance. It’s an abrupt about-face from just last week, when Yahoo called Thompson’s listing of a degree from Stonehill College an “inadvertent error” that “in no way alters the fact that Mr. Thompson is a highly qualified executive with a successful track record leading large consumer technology companies.” 

  What happens now will be bottom-line driven. Wall Street analysts are already praising the shakeup, saying it would boost long-term growth prospects.

  Loeb may push Yahoo to drop its patent lawsuits against Facebook, as Facebook has retaliated with what could be costly countersuits. As Richard MacManus noted Sunday, Loeb and Third Point will be fixated on boosting profits (and, by extension, their 5.6% stake in the company). That could ultimately mean selling off certain assets and streamlining Yahoo down to its core (and most lucrative) assets.

  “I'm not entirely convinced that Daniel Loeb's motivations are good for Yahoo long term,” MacManus wrote. “They seem more focused on making money for Wall Street shareholders than returning Yahoo to its roots of being a true innovative force on the Web.”

  Given the context and Third Point’s true motives, it seems more and more as though Thompson is just a convenient casualty as opposed to the real target of Loeb’s attack.

  While shareholders tend to vote with management, making proxy fights ineffective, Allen said that could change as they become more common. Allen said hedge funds aren't opposed to stepping in and running the business.

  "Mutual funds don't want to run the business. If they don't like something, they will just sell shares,” he said. “Hedge funds will try and run the business to improve the value of the firm. All shareholders can benefit."

  Scott Thompson photo courtesy of Yahoo

  
  

  

• 8:41

  ITU: There Are Now Over 1 Billion Users Of Social Media Worldwide, Most On Mobile

  What does it mean when Facebook says it has 901 million monthly active users on its network? According to figures out from the International Telecommunication Union, it effectively signifies that Facebook is the world's largest social network by a very long shot. The ITU says in a new report that that the number of people using all social media services have passed the 1 billion mark. That is just 100 million shy of Facebook's usage figure, giving Facebook a 90 percent share of all social networkers. In contrast to the very biggest players of all -- Facebook (900m+ users), Twitter (200m+ users) and LinkedIn (120m+ users) -- the rest of the playing field is heavily localized, with services like QQ in China, Vkontakte in Russia, Mixi in Japan, and Google's Orkut in Brazil, India, and Paraguay among those competing in the space, the ITU notes. The ITU, which is focused on telecoms regulation, flags social media in its report as an area of growing scrutiny for telecoms regulators: not only are social networks becoming more ubiquitous, but services like Facebook are becoming communications mediums in their own right, with voice and text offerings that go head-to-head against similar services from carriers.

• 8:55

  Hitting a home run in the cloud

  GigaOM Pro and New Relic present “Hitting a home run in the cloud,” a free analyst roundtable webinar on May 16. This webinar explores the challenges of Web application performance management and how BleacherReport.com is meeting its self-imposed goal of 99 percent uptime to its fanbase.

• 9:07

  Kickstarter Exposes 70,000 Unlaunched Projects

  According to the Kickstarter API blog, a bug caused 70,000 unlaunched projects to be publicly visible over the weekend, allowing folks to see goals, funding plans, and descriptions on projects that haven't yet appeared on the site. Of the 70,000, visitors only viewed 48. The bug exposed no financial information.

• 9:10

  Corsair Performance Series Pro (256GB) Review

  Shortly after the Plextor M3 review went live, I received numerous emails asking us to review Corsair's Performance Series Pro. Your voice was heard and we went and asked Corsair for a review sample, and here we are with the results.

  

  There aren't too many Marvell SSDs on the market so the Performance Pro stole my attention immediately. When testing a SandForce drive, you pretty much know what to expect. Only Intel uses in-house firmware whereas the rest use the firmware that SandForce provides. That limits differentiation a lot. When it comes to Marvell, things are a lot more open and interesting. Firmwares are often proprietary and that's why you never know what to expect. Several readers pointed out the similarity between Corsair's Performance Series Pro and Plextor's M3 & M3 Pro. Maybe all Marvell drives don't carry an in-house firmware after all? Read on to find out if that's true and see how the Performance Pro fares in our tests.

• 9:10

  How To Appeal To Investors: Top VCs Reveal The Anatomy Of A Successful Entrepreneur

  At a very fundamental level, the venture capital business is being reshaped. Speaking to a crowd at the Grind work space in New York last week, Fred Wilson addressed this ongoing shift, saying, "there’s two times as much capital in the venture capital business today than we, the professional investors who make up the venture business, can actually put to work intelligently." Bad for VCs, Wilson says, but good for entrepreneurs. Of course, the fact of the matter is that the top investors are custodians of an equally valuable currency -- information. With the noise and hype growing, it's becoming even more essential to understand what it is about the anatomy of startups that makes them appealing to the right investors -- or perhaps more importantly -- why some of the best fail in spite of themselves. In a new book, called Venture Capitalists at Work, Tarang and Sheetal Shah set out to provide entrepreneurs with real insight into how some of the top investors in the game evaluate, invest in, and mentor their startups -- information that can be extremely powerful if put to use correctly -- and that has thus far remained, they say, in a "black box."

• 9:25

  Streamed music chart has short long tail, more Rihanna than Rita

  The UK's current best-selling single is nowhere to be seen in the first ever dedicated streaming music chart - but, elsewhere, anomalies are harder to spot.

• 9:30

  How and Why Your Startup Should Go Virtual

  Working virtually sounds like heaven to many startups. After all, not having a central office staffed with employees saves money on rent, utilities, parking, etc., freeing you to invest in research, development or marketing.

  On the other hand, operating virtually is no panacea. Before you make the virtual leap, you need to figure out exactly what working virtually means to your business.

  The concept of virtual work has many names, from telecommuting and teleworking to distributed companies and remote workers. And virtual companies can be structured in several ways:

  1. Lead a distributed workforce, consisting of full- and part-time employees, independent contractors or some combination, all working out of their respective homes.

  2. Operate out of an office space (either your own or shared). You allow your staff to split their time between working at the office and working at home.

  3. Be the only actual employee of your company. When you need something done, you outsource it to freelancers and independent contractors.

  Thanks to improvements in broadband and collaboration technology, the ranks of virtual workers are swelling. According to the latest (albeit a little dated) numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2010:

  • 64.2% of self-employed and contract employees worked at home

  • 25.8% of part-time employees worked from their homes.

  Good for young and old companies

  While it obviously makes sense for brand-new startups to begin virtually, the concept also works for existing startups that began life in more traditional offices. My own company - GrowBiz Media - did just that. We leased space for about 18 months before realizing we could save many thousands of dollars by working from our homes.

  Even established businesses can benefit from virtual arrangements. Matthew Goldstein founded Idea Consulting about 12 years ago, but the company went virtual about seven months ago. The firm’s 53 freelancers and part-timers are now happily collaborating on a huge project, the EuraMedia 2012 summit, while scattered across the United States, the United Kingdom and Russia.

  But Goldstein admits: “We are still making mistakes.” His biggest hurdle was finding high-quality virtual workers.“The majority of the people we found were not qualified and overcharged,” he explains.

  Goldstein also found that, despite what the virtual job placement agencies he worked with (Odesk and Elance) promised, “There is very little accountability" when it comes to contractors. You may not be satisfied with the completed work, but since the placement companies get a commission, “they tend to always side with the contractor.”

  So how can you make virtual work fly at your company?

  “You must put in systems of accountability that replicate those of a brick and mortar office,” advises Goldstein. “There needs to be constant monitoring, incentives and penalties, and strict management.” Also key is finding the right technology to make your project work. “Collaborative sites like Basecamp are great for helping to engage workers and get them to collaborate,” says Goldstein.

  Ask the Expert

  Sara Sutton Fell, CEO and founder of FlexJobs, a website for flexible jobs, offers more tips for virtual startups:

  • Plan ahead. If you want to take a physical business virtual, you first have to think about all the facets of your business and how you envision them continuing to run virtually. What will this change mean for outside stakeholders — clients and partners? How can you make sure the transition goes smoothly for everyone? Sometimes the best way to go virtual is gradually, transitioning existing staff to home offices [or adding contractors] in small increments, so that your clients and partners barely notice the changes.

  • Think about the technologies (computers, software, services, phones, etc.) that are essential for working virtually. Security and usability are two big concerns for teleworkers. You want to make sure everyone can access important information securely and easily, using reliable technology. Sometimes [usually] your workers' home computers just won’t cut it. If possible, provide remote employees with a complete suite of required hardware, such as laptops, monitors, scanner/copiers, webcams, microphones and more. If you use independent contractors, don’t give them equipment, it can raise questions with the IRS.

  • Consider communication services. When you’re managing a remote team, it’s vitally important to keep everyone communicating with each other. This helps keep people on task, reduces feelings of isolation and boosts engagement. Employing a wide range of collaboration tools like Yammer, instant messaging (IM), email, Join.Me and Skype can help keep everyone in the loop.

  Technology isn’t everything. Schedule regular meetings (at least weekly). It’s also helpful to create channels and leave time for virtual water-cooler conversations to let the team connect and build camaraderie and trust informally.

  No matter what you do, don’t expect an overnight transition. “Working virtually is not easy,“” Goldstein says, “and you must be ready to put aside at least three months to track people and test them out before you can count on truly developing a team.”

  Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

  
  

  

• 9:36

  SaaS For SMBs: InsightSquared Picks Up $4.5M From Atlas, Bessemer, Salesforce and NextView

  As the software-as-a-service market continues to mature, there are companies emerging that are targeting specific sectors within the enterprise with solutions especially tailored and priced for them: the latest of these is InsightSquared, which has announced a Series A round of $4.5 million for its a business intelligence platform aimed specifically at small and medium-sized businesses. The round was led by Atlas Venture, with participation also from NextView Ventures and new investors Bessemer Venture Partners and Salesforce.com. This brings total funding in the company since February 2011 to $5.5 million.

• 9:46

  Imagination makes the case for mobile OpenCL

  Imagination was showing off GPU compute on a cell phone chip at GDC, physics in your pocket.

• 9:48

  Goodbye, Exynos: Benchmark Points To Dual-Core Processor For Verizon’s Galaxy S III

  Samsung confirmed well in advance of the Galaxy S III's official announcement that their new flagship Android handset would sport the company's new Exynos 4 Quad chipset, but it seems even clearer now that we Stateside phone geeks may have to live without it. Droid-Life reported over the weekend that a benchmark entry for the Verizon-bound Samsung SCH-i535 appeared on Nenamark, and it seems to confirm rumors that Big Red's Galaxy S III will indeed sport a dual-core Snapdragon S4 processor.

• 10:01

  Mapping the motor cortex

  [Bruce] sent us another fantastic final project from the ECE4760 class at Cornell. What you see above is an array of 36 near infra red LEDs shining into this young man’s brain for the purpose of spectroscopy. Light bounces back differently based on brain activity (blood flow). For this project, they are mapping their motor [...]

• 10:05

  One Year Post-Launch, E La Carte Has Put 20,000 Of Its Tablets In 600 Restaurants Worldwide

  It's been a year since E la Carte launched its customized tablet for restaurants, which brings menus, wine lists, nutritional info, play-while-you-wait games, and payment options tableside, and now the company has new numbers to reveal. This time last year, there were around 20 restaurants using the tablet; today there are now over 600, including national chains Pizzeria Venti and Umami Burger, as well as Faz Restaurant Group in the San Francisco Bay Area and Classic Restaurant Concepts in Boston. In total, there are around 20,000 tablets in 20 U.S. states, and seven countries worldwide.
• 10:25

  Apple Poised To Keep The “Pro” In MacBook Pro, Says Rumor

  If the rumors pan out, Apple's next MacBook Pro line will set the notebook world ablaze with a thinner chassis, USB 3.0 and a 15-inch high-resolution, so-called retina display. Of course it would pack the latest Intel silicon with rumors and logic pointing to an Ivy Bridge chipset. Sounding a different from the long-rumored 15-inch MacBook Air, this model, if it really exists, seems appropriately equipped with impressive hardware to retain the Pro designation and lead Apple's charge against the onslaught of so-called Ultrabooks.
• 10:47

  With Smartphone-Assisted Shopping, How You Shop Depends On Where You Shop

  This morning, Nielsen is putting hard numbers to how consumers like to shop with their smartphones, backing up trends we already suspected to be the case. In particular, the new report examines how consumers use their phones when shopping out there in the real world (what's that?) - using phones to compare prices, scan barcodes and even redeem coupons. Not surprisingly, how you use your phone has a lot to do with where you're shopping and what you're shopping for, says Nielsen. The trends are sort of obvious, but there are some interesting bits to be pulled out of the data.

• 10:49

  PRO: Microsoft raises bar for social search

  Microsoft has balanced social search integration without compromising core results far better than Google has demonstrated. Bing represents social done well, and it could lead to minor market share [...]

• 10:52

  Former Best Buy CEO’s “Extremely Close” Relationship With Employee Leads To Boardroom Shakeup

  When former Best Buy CEO Brian Dunn resigned after announcing a dramatic restructuring of the company's retail operations, it looked like a reaction to the company's recent financial woes. The timing of Dunn's resignation provided him with ample cover -- his announcement coming just days after Best Buy posted disappointing earnings, and revealed that they would soon be shuttering 50 of their big-box locations. Still, that didn't stop the press from digging around, and it wasn't long before Best Buy revealed that Dunn left just prior to the completion of an independent investigation of his "extremely close personal relationship" with a female employee. The results of that investigation were revealed today, and they have prompted company founder Richard Schulze to give up his role as company chairman.

• 11:01

  Improving a software defined radio with a few bits of wire

  Impressed by the recent advances in the software defined radio scene, [Jason] picked up a $20 USB TV tuner dongle to check out his local airwaves. Unfortunately, the antenna included with the little USB dongle is terrible at receiving any signal other than broadcast TV. [Jason] wanted to improve his reception, so he got some [...]

• 11:05

  Techies: Got Questions For SF Mayor Ed Lee? Join Him (And Me) On Google+

  Over the past few months, San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee has become a familiar face at local startup events — whether it's at the Crunchie Awards, the opening of Dropbox's new office, or the NewMe Accelerator Demo Day, where he was interviewed by Colleen Taylor (to name a few). Now he's offering the tech community a chance to weigh in on the city budget. Mayor Lee has already held a number of town hall meetings to discuss the budget, but if you're working startup hours, those can be hard to get to. So following the lead of President Obama, Mayor Lee is jumping on Google+ to get your perspective.

• 11:12

  Look to silicon nanotubes for really long lasting batteries

  How many of us have gone through numerous batteries for our laptops, because aging batteries start to lose their ability to charge? Yep, me too. Stanford's materials scientist Yi Cui is working on a lithium ion battery that could last six times longer.
• 11:20

  Facebook giveth, Facebook taketh: A curious case of video apps

  More than nine million apps and services use Facebook Connect, the Open Graph developer platform, which gives company powers to predict the future. It can turn on the traffic spigot for some apps such as Socialcam. But it can turn off the spigot, equally fast.
• 11:32

  Need faster Wi-Fi? Buffalo ships first 1.3 Gbps router

  Buffalo Technology has wasted no time using the newly approved 802.11ac Wi-Fi standard: The company is now shipping its AirStation router that is capable of pushing wireless bits and bytes at 1.3 Gbps. The $179.99 device is also backwards compatible with older Wi-Fi standards.

• 11:45

  Study: Facebook Timeline Improves Fan Engagement For Brands

  

  Facebook posts by brands live longer on Timeline than they did prior to the social network’s massive overhaul, according to a study released Monday.

  While the analysis by London-based social media analytics firm Sotrender is limited in scope, covering just 130 brands headquartered in the U.K. and 5,000 posts, it is the first such empirical review since Timeline became mandatory for all Facebook brand pages at the end of March.

  Before April 1, half of all comments made on a brand’s Facebook post were made within the first hour. Since all brands were required to switch over to Timeline, that window has extended to 2.5 hours. The study also found a 13% increase in the average number of people that interacted with a brand’s post, from 158 before the Timeline switch to 179 after.

  

  The study also found that 80% of comments on a post are made within the first 8.5 hours, about two hours longer than the window prior to the switch to Timeline.

  “It’s important information from the marketers’ point of view,” Sotrender's Jan Zajac, one of the study's authors, said in an email. “If a company writes too often, the new posts may cannibalize users' engagement of the previous ones."

  The study did not, however, find significant changes in the number of fans for a brand’s overall page. Other factors that held steady include the number of posts per day that brands make, the content distribution, the average number of likes, posts and comments per user, and cross-page engagement.

  Some brands had reported a dip in fan engagement immediately after Timeline for brands became mandatory. The Sotrender study suggests those concerns may have been short-lived.

  

  
  

  

• 11:59

  Doccaster Debuts A Platform For Location-Based File Sharing And Discussion

  Doccaster wants to disrupt document-sharing, but it's attacking the space from a new angle: it's not just about storing files in the "cloud," it's about tying files to a location. The company is launching a beta version of its web-based utility today that lets users upload then broadcast any number of files. Those files immediately become available to anyone within a 15-mile radius and can be searched for either by proximity or by a Doccaster ID (similar to a Twitter ID).
• 12:00

  Exec Goes Out To The Ball Game, Will Deliver Hot Dogs And Stuff To Lazy Giants Fans

  If you're like me, the worst part about going to a baseball game -- other than watching your team lose -- is having to deal with lines at the concession stands. You inevitably end up missing at least half an inning wandering throughout the ballpark trying to find the stand you want. And once you do, you inevitably find yourself behind the one person who somehow doesn't know whether he wants a hot dog or popcorn, and has waited until he gets to the very front of the line before beginning to contemplate this oh-so-important decision. Anyway, no more of that -- at least for this week, if you happen to be in San Francisco and plan to attend one of the many games that the homefield Giants will play against the Colorado Rockies, the St. Louis Cardinals, or the Oakland A's. Starting Monday, May 14 and extending through Sunday, "Uber for odd jobs" startup Exec will have some of its people in the stands of AT&T Park, ready and waiting to pick up and deliver food goods for fans too lazy or too enthralled with the game to do it themselves. All those users have to do is open up the Exec app, tell it what they want and where they're sitting, and an exec assistant will be dispatched to fetch that food for them.

• 12:01

  Hackaday around the web and into the future

  Like everyone else, we’re scattered all over the web. We would be silly not to be getting our information out there in as many ways as we can manage. We promise that the site always comes first, but you can also find us on Facebook, G+ (yes, we’re approved this time), twitter, and we even [...]

• 12:03

  Refer.ly Lets Regular Folks Earn Affiliate Revenue For Recommending Products They Love

  Danielle Morrill's been thinking about this idea for at least three years. I know this because it was almost all she could talk for an hour straight at a dinner party several years ago. If you're an entrepreneur and you get bit with an idea, you just can't shake it. And so, after several years of apprenticing at building companies like Twilio, Morrill is finally striking out on her own with Refer.ly, a concept that's been admitted to the next Y Combinator class. What's the idea? On the web, there's a whole secret $3 billion world of affiliate commerce where large online stores like Amazon reward other companies or people for referring them customers. Regular people don't really have a part in this, so Morrill's company Refer.ly gives them access. At Refer.ly, you can go and create special links that track whether you're driving sales to other sites.
• 12:25

  Stock Photography Service Shutterstock Files For IPO, Plans To Raise Up To $115 Million

  The online stock photography service Shutterstock filed its plans for an initial public offering today. The company plans to list its stock on the New York Stock Exchange. The number of shares to be offered and the price range for the offering haven't been decided yet, but the company's S-1 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) notes that it plans to raise around $115 million through this IPO. That's the number Shutterstock used to estimate its filing fees with the SEC, though, so the actual size of the IPO could still turn out to be different.

• 12:28

  Does Yahoo even know how to be a modern media company?

  The appointment of Ross Levinsohn as CEO is a sign that Yahoo wants to focus on media as the core of its rebirth, but does the company Yahoo have what it takes to succeed as a new-media entity? There are plenty of reasons to be sceptical.
• 12:30

  Superstacks: How consumers trade convenience for choice

  Welcome to the concept of the superstack -- which acts to circumvent the openness that the Internet and the digitization of content has enabled and once again lock consumers into a single platform for their content determined in part by the hardware they choose.

• 12:33

  Easel.ly Makes Infographics Easy... But Should It?

  Infographics are still a thing with a lot of companies, if my inbox is any indication. Easel.ly, a service that recently debuted in beta, is making it easy to create infographics online. Whether it should is another question.

  Easel.ly is a Web-based tool for creating infographics. It's still in its early stages, so you'll find some rough edges, but it does live up to the "easy to use" promise. Select a theme, your objects and shapes, plop in some text, and you can have a passable-looking infographic in a very short amount of time.

  Right now it seems to be missing a way to actually develop charts inside the tool - there's just a placeholder for charts that drops in one static chart image. The color palette is "coming soon," and the SVG export contains errors - at least as far as Chrome and Firefox are concerned. But, this is a beta product. Assuming the Easel.ly folks get the kinks worked out and fill out its features, it should be able to generate decent-looking infographics pretty soon.

  Easel.ly doesn't seem to be the only game in town for quick-and-dirty infographics, either. There's visual.ly, which seems to have a few stock infographics you can create. I haven't tried that one, though, because it requires authorizing via Twitter or Facebook. (Sorry, kids, I am not willing to give you access to my social media accounts just to create a lame infographic.)

  Does the World Need More Infographics?

  Judging by the number of infographics that are pitched to ReadWriteWeb, there's a lot of demand for creating infographics. Unfortunately, there's a lot more pink slime in infographics than actual beef these days.

  To put it another way, most infographics suck. It was true when we wrote that last November, and it hasn't gotten any better; if anything, it's gotten worse, as companies keep churning out infographics in the hopes of a "viral" campaign. When infographics started to become popular, many were just thinly disguised promotional vehicles with dodgy data and a lot of self-promotion. Lately, they've dropped the pretense and just gone whole-hog on the self-promotion.

  Want an example? I'll pick on one of my former employers, who pitched me an infographic on 20 years of SUSE history (PDF). Now, there's nothing wrong with SUSE promoting its 20th anniversary. There's really nothing wrong with creating a nifty graphic that illustrates SUSE's achievements over the years. But calling this an "infographic" is stretching the term to near breaking. At best, it's a timeline with a few numbers thrown in. (Also, somebody needs to get the chameleon to the vet, pronto. It's not looking very good.)

  There's this one from RewardLoop that is entirely self-promotional. Domo has one about "the incredible data explosion" that is as confusing as it is light on actual data. In the "Competitive Edge" section, it is entirely unclear whether individual companies are being compared, or industries as a whole.

  The point isn't to pick on these companies, though, but to illustrate a point: Infographics are apparently not that difficult to create. The Web is littered with them. But good infographics are difficult to create, because it means having worthwhile information and putting it in context - not just slapping some pixels together in a semi-pleasing manner to help with your branding.

  When there's a Web-based app that does that, I'll be very interested.

  
  

  

• 12:45

  Yahoo’s big data play Genome is smart, but …

  Yahoo is looking to leverage its big data prowess with a new tool for marketers called Genome. It looks like an acknowledgement that while Yahoo might not rule the the web anymore, it knows a heck of a lot about analytics.

• 12:55

  Read/Write Daily: How To Seduce a Robot

  Today's theme is missing pieces. We fancy ourselves to be a pretty smart species. But when you get down to the fundamentals, we don't understand the world very well at all.

  We don't even know how to behave on our first date with a robot.

  Our popular culture is obsessed with the Mayan "apocalypse" this year, but archaeologists have proven (again) that we have no idea what that ancient calendar actually says.

  We're on the verge of building robot sex companions, but we don't know how to treat them.

  As for the people who are alive, we don't know how our minds arise from our brains.

  We don't understand where life came from, but a new mathematical approach might explain it.

  Are particles particles? Are they waves? Is there a difference? We don't know yet.

  And of course, there's still that mystery of the proportions of the entire universe.

  Image via Shutterstock.

  Past entries from Read/Write Daily

  
  

  

• 12:55

  It’s On: Facebook Gets Rubberstamp To Trade On NASDAQ Stock Exchange

  Buckle up everybody: Facebook's initial public offering, the most highly anticipated tech stock market debut since Google's 2004 IPO, is one step closer to actually happening. This morning Facebook filed an 8-A form with the Securities and Exchange Commission, which indicated that it has received approval from the NASDAQ stock exchange to offer its shares to the public.

• 13:00

  Counting Crows: Don’t bribe radio, use BitTorrent

  Labels used to spend big bucks to promote their music on radio stations and in record stores. They should embrace file sharing instead, argues Counting Crows singer Adam Duritz. The band just released four tracks of its new album as a free BitTorrent download.

• 13:01

  Designing a self-replicating milling machine

  For his senior design project at Swarthmore College, [Julian] decided to build a metalworking equivalent to the RepRap. [Julian]‘s final project is a self-replicating milling machine, and hopefully giving some serious metalworking power to all the makers with CNC routers and RepRaps out there. At first glance, [Julian]‘s mill doesn’t look like something you would find [...]

• 13:13

  AT&T’s Chicago problem: Why LTE slows down in the Windy City

  A new RootMetrics report finds that AT&T's industry-leading LTE speeds take a big dip in Chicago. The report highlights a problem AT&T has with several of its markets: it doesn’t enough spectrum to offer the big fat pipe it has in the rest of the country.

• 13:14

  Droid RAZR Maxx Cut To $199 At Verizon Wireless, Source Says RAZR Price Cut To Follow

  Watch out for falling prices! Verizon Wireless just cut the price of the RAZR Maxx to an attractive $199. That puts it on par with the iPhone 4S and Galaxy Nexus, making the 32GB iPhone 4S and BlackBerry Bold 9930 as Verizon's only phones north of $199. Interestingly enough, even though the standard-strength RAZR was on sale for $99 the last two weeks, Verizon Wireless actually raised the price back to its MSRP of $199. However, that might be changing rather quickly according to our sources.
• 13:20

  From TC50 To A $25M Funding Round And A Spin-Off, Yext’s Howard Lerman Tells All

  Yext has been making waves of late, what with the spin-off of their original pay-per-call ad business which has been renamed Felix and the launch of their new business, PowerListings. But this is far from the beginning for Yext — the company first hit the scene way back in 2009 at our TC50 conference. That means founder and CEO Howard Lerman is about as close to a Disrupt veteran as you can get, seeing as though he was launching at Disrupt before we even called it Disrupt (tickets here). I asked him to come into the AOL headquarters to discuss what TC50 did for his brand and the company's overall success, as a part of my "Disrupt Alumni: Where They Are Now" series.
• 13:34

  After 5 Years Of Bootstrapping, Behance Nabs $6.5M From USV, Jeff Bezos, Dave Morin & More

  At the end of March, we covered Behance's major site redesign, at which point we learned that the startup was launching over 20K new projects every week, with 1 million projects created to date, and its network had doubled over the last month, with 10 million visits to its network in the last 30 days. Since its founding in 2006 and launch less than a year later, Behance, which, for those unfamiliar, is an online platform on which creative professionals can connect, showcase and discover creative work, has been a bootstrapped enterprise, Behance CEO Scott Belsky tells us. But, no longer. Today, the startup is announcing that it has raised its first round of outside funding, a $6.5 million round, led by Union Square Ventures, with noted investors like Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos (via Bezos Expeditions, his personal investment fund), Path Founder Dave Morin, Yves Behar, Chris Dixon, Dave Tisch, Dave McClure, Alexis Ohanian, and Garrett Camp.

• 13:40

  Looks like iCloud will get some big upgrades at WWDC

  The WSJ says iCloud will get new photo and video syncing capabilities, which will be announced at WWDC in June. It's remarkable how quickly Apple has moved to build up iCloud, particularly for a company that previously hasn't had much success with networked services.

• 13:50

  Virgin Atlantic To Launch In-Flight Cell Phone Service

  Having in-flight access to WiFi is quickly becoming a standard feature on modern airliners, but (thankfully) in-flight  cell phone service for voice calls is still a rarity and even outlawed in a number of countries, including the United States. If you're flying Virgin Atlantic between London and New York in the near future, though, chances are that at least a few of your fellow travelers will be happily chatting away on their cell phones while you're riding the jetstream somewhere over the Atlantic. Later this month, Virgin Atlantic is launching cell phone service on this route and plans to expand this service to ten more routes by the end of the year.

• 13:56

  Cosmos: A useful free 3-in-1 software utility for Androids

  Looking for a basic Android battery optimizer, trash cleaner and a very informative security function that monitors third-party application permissions? Check out Cosmos, a free app that officially launches next week but is available now in a stable beta for Android 2.2 and up.

• 13:58

  Google Prices its Cloud SQL Offering, Solidifies Cloud Database Market

  The cloud database market continues to solidify as Google puts a price tag on its Cloud SQL offering. With actual charges to begin on June 12th, the move finally gives developers a way to see what they'll be spending on Cloud SQL, but comparing Google's offering to Amazon, Microsoft and others might still be a bit tricky.

  Google's Cloud SQL is MySQL-based and is intended to be used with Google App Engine (GAE). Google's pricing structure is very simple, though not as comprehensive or as expandable as Amazon or others.

  Google has two billing plans: a package plan and a per-use plan. The package plan has four tiers, each of which includes a set amount of RAM, storage and I/O per day. For instance, Google charges $1.46 per day for the D1 tier, which has .5GB of RAM, 1GB of storage and 850,000 I/O requests. The top package (D8) includes 4GB of RAM, 10GB storage and 8 million I/O requests for $11.71 per day.

  The same instances are available on an on-demand basis, starting at $0.10 per hour, with storage and I/O extra.

  The cheapest package from Google, then, runs about $45 a month and the most expensive runs about $357. That doesn't count any overages for I/O or storage.

  Sizing Up Google's Pricing

  Trying to compare Google pricing with Amazon, Azure or databases offered with PaaS services such as Heroku and Engine Yard is tricky, at best. Heroku's database offerings start at $50 per month, but the specs for its database differ considerably from the other providers. For example, Heroku features data clips for developers, and the hstore extension for key/value data storage.

  Amazon's DB instances seem to be a bit more powerful than Google Cloud SQL instances, and Amazon has features that Google Cloud SQL doesn't. For instance, Amazon's Small DB instance has 1.7 GB of RAM and has the equivalent of a single CPU. You're also limited to Google App Engine supported languages, Python and Java.

  Developers can choose between 5GB and 1TB of storage (the max for Google is 10GB storage). The Small DB instance runs about $77 a month, if it's on-demand. But, choosing a one-year reserved instance brings that down to about $45 a month. The pricing, then, seems to line up for the "small" instances for Amazon RDS and Google Cloud SQL, but Google has fewer features and what looks to be less compute power.

  But if you're using GAE, then Cloud SQL is the natural choice - so it's nice to see Google finally getting this into developers' hands. If you're using GAE and Cloud SQL, we'd love to hear what you think.

  
  

  

• 14:01

  Recycle lithium cells by building custom flashlights

  This isn’t a brightest flashlight in the world type of hack (but it does manage to push about 1000 lumens). [Stephen Webb] is finding a use for leftover parts by building his own simple LED flashlights. As you can see, he uses PVC parts available at any hardware or home store. These are a good [...]

• 14:15

  Announcing GigaOM Jobs!

  Today, we’re excited to launch a great new addition to GigaOM. GigaOM Jobs offers up a selection of job listings from some of the best and brightest companies in tech — companies like Akamai, Intuit and Makani Power. We’ll focus specifically on openings in the cleantech [...]

• 14:16

  Facebook Takes A Cue From Instagram, Redesigns Mobile To Make News Feed Photos 3X Larger

  If you're sick of interrupting your news feed reading to open and load photos, you'll like a new Facebook mobile site, iOS, and Android app redesign rolling out today that makes photos three times larger. Shares of single photos now look a lot like Instagrams, as they appear full width so there's less need to stop and open them. Meanwhile the bigger previews of photo albums will help you instantly assess whether to dive in or breeze past. As Facebook's user base shifts to mobile where it can't show as many ads as easily, it will need to keep mobile session length and return visit frequency high. Making the news feed less tiring to browse should keep us scrolling for longer as we ravenously peer into the lives of our friends our friends. Here's the before and after photos...of photos.
• 14:28

  Apple Said To Debut iCloud’s New Photo Sharing Features At WWDC

  With Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference just weeks away, expect plenty of reports of new features to come crawling out of the woodwork. In fact, here's one from the Wall Street Journal -- they claim that Apple has been doing some major tinkering with their iCloud storage service, the fruits of which will be unveiled on June 11. First up is the ability for users to share and comment on each other's photos, a pretty dramatic shift away from iCloud's current approach to photo storage. As it stands, each user has a single Photo Stream meant mostly to make sure images are on the devices they need to be on. This shift in sharing actually sounds a little reminiscent of Apple's recently-killed MobileMe service, though how exactly the sharing process would play out within iCloud is still up in the air.
• 14:32

  Announcing Your Disrupt NYC Finals Judges: Chien, Wilson, Arrington, Botha, Mayer and Dixon

  Our action packed Disrupt conference is coming to Pier 94 in New York in less than a week. Get ready, because the agenda is chock full of leaders from the city's up-and-coming tech industry and, of course, Silicon Valley and the world. Thirty startups have also been working around the clock to launch at the show. But only one of them can win the Disrupt Cup, take home the $50,000 check and everlasting glory. On hand to judge the best contestants and pick the winner, we're excited to announce a top set of finals judges....

• 14:48

  DoubleClick co-founder targets publishers with content-meets-commerce service

  In the mid-1990s, DoubleClick co-founder and CEO Kevin O’Connor developed a platform for data-driven advertising. With his latest startup, FindTheBest, he’s aiming to do the same thing for content.
• 14:55

  paidContent 2012: Get the big picture for what’s next

  The digital world changes constantly and often head-spinningly fast. With so much happening at once, how can you grasp the big picture behind all the headlines? Find out how on May 23 at paidContent 2012 in NYC.

• 15:00

  A Discreet Guide to Using Mobile Devices in the Loo

  Last year, British researchers swabbed 390 cell phones and analyzed what they picked up. Know what they found? One in six phones has poop on it. Four out of five are contaminated by some kind of bacteria. Sure, we all like to make our own calls while answering Mother Nature's, but that's just gross. Here’s a surefire way to avoid a crappy user experience on your smartphone or other mobile device.

  Step 1. Wash Your Phone (Carefully!)

  Here are the only Apple-approved instructions for cleaning an iPhone. They seem like good advice for any mobile device user. Don't do anything else. It will void your warranty. If you use water, do it carefully, and keep the wetness away from all openings. Don't use any kind of chemical. If your mobile is already contaminated, you'll just have to live with it.

  Step 2. Choose Your Phoning Hand

  Before you even walk into that bathroom, decide which hand is for the mobile and which is for wiping. If your device hand touches anything nasty, it's out of play. So make a choice and stick with it.

  Step 3. Commence Your Business

  Hopefully you don't need instructions for this part other than a reminder to keep your device hand well away from the drop zone, as it were.

  Step 4. Return the Phone to Your Pocket (With One Hand)

  This is the most delicate part of the procedure. When you're ready to rejoin polite society, you can restore your device to your pocket - but you must do so one-handed, taking care to avoid contact with potentially soiled items and surfaces. Once your device is securely stowed, you may wipe, stand and flush.

  Step 5. Wash Your Freaking Hands

  I'm embarrassed to feel it necessary to include this step, but once you have evacuated, and before you touch your mobile device again, wash your hands thoroughly with soap and warm water.

  After researching this topic, I don't think I'll ever again feel comfortable borrowing someone's phone unless we all promise to follow this protocol. I promise. Do you? 

  Please leave your promise in the comments.

  
  

  

• 15:01

  Helicopter light painting continues to snuff out physics lesson on your brain

  Cool picture, huh? Wait until you see the video footage of this LED-adorned RC helicopter flying on a dark night. But this isn’t an art project. Analyzing the long-exposure photography turns out to be a great way of clearing up some of the physics of flight which otherwise are not at all intuitive. The helicopter [...]

• 15:04

  Creative portfolio showcase Behance gets $6.5M from USV, Jeff Bezos

  After bootstrapping itself for more than five years, New York City-based Behance, an online destination for creative galleries and portfolios, has finally turned to outside funding, securing a $6.5 million investment from Union Square Ventures and a host of investors including Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos.

• 15:07

  Zuckerberg Will Ring In Facebook IPO From Menlo Park HQ On Friday

  He's not taking off the hoodie, and he's not going to NYC. TechCrunch has learned and confirmed that Facebook will IPO on Friday with CEO Mark Zuckerberg ringing the NASDAQ bell remotely from his company's new Menlo Park headquarters. This follows the trend of companies like Zynga who also rung the IPO bell from home base rather than New York. CNBC tweeted the news this morning and we've verified this with another source close to the IPO proceedings. Some investors worry about Facebook's ability to earn revenue on mobile as more users migrate away from its classic web interface. But now Bloomberg reports that Facebook will cease taking orders for shares tomorrow and that the IPO will be massively oversubscribed, despite citing underwhelming demand from investors a few days ago. Wall Street pros aside, national fervor over the popular social network's entrance into the public market has amateur investors pleading with their brokers to get them stock.
• 15:12

  Social Talent Management Solution SilkRoad Secures $35M Series C Round, Preps For Potential IPO

  Online human resources and social talent management solution SilkRoad just announced that it has raised a $35 million Series C financing round. The investors in this round include new investors Keating Capital and NTT Finance, as well as existing investors Intel Capital, Crosslink Capital, Foundation Capital, Azure Capital and Tenaya Capital, amongst others. In its announcement today, SilkRoad stressed that this was an oversubscribed round. The company plans to use this new funding to support its international expansion and "product innovation." SilkRoad also expects to use this money to prepare for "a potential 2012-2013 initial public offering."

• 15:21

  Facebook brings bigger pics and posts to mobiles

  Facebook users on Android, iOS and mobile browsers aren't stuck with postage-sized pictures and posts any more. Facebook announced on Monday that it now supports full-sized pictures on all three platforms as well as posts that will automatically scale from edge-to-edge of a handheld device.
• 15:22

  It’s official: LightSquared goes bankrupt. What’s next?

  Hours away from defaulting on debt, LightSquared filed for bankruptcy protection. The company has said it would use the shelter of Chapter 11 to buy time in its fight to build its nationwide LTE network, but this could just be a prelude to a liquidation of assets.

• 15:30

  The Bowden And Sheffield iPad Cases Are By Designers, For Designers

  There are about a million case vendors out there ready to hook up your iThing with the utmost in protection and style, but very few differentiate in a cool way. This Kickstarter project, however, has really caught my eye with a minimalist design and smart functionality. A company called FineGrain has recently posted their Bowden and Sheffield cases to Kickstarter with a goal of raising $20,000 by May 22. They're nearly halfway there. The Bowden and Sheffield solve the same problem that the Cygnett iPhone case solved for me. The iPad is beautiful, so putting a full-time case on it detracts from one of the tablet's best qualities: its design. The Bowden and Sheffield keep your iPad safe in transit, and offer up a stand-type functionality so you can prop it up while you type or what have you, but they aren't meant to stay on your iPad at all times.
• 15:33

  Wholesale Wireless Service Provider LightSquared Files For Bankruptcy

  Thing have looked grim for upstart wireless service provider LightSquared ever since the FCC officially withdrew their conditional approval to build out the terrestrial part of their LTE network, and now it seems like it may all come to an end. After the demise of their partnership with Sprint, the resignation of CEO Sanjiv Ahuja, and the laying off of nearly 45% of their employees, Bloomberg reports that the Virginia-based company has just filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy today.
• 15:41

  Twitter Now Putting Tweets In Your Inbox With A Weekly Email Digest

  Not content just to be your source of 140-character communications on the web, in its desktop app and on your mobile device, Twitter is now trying to creep into your email inbox. Twitter announced on its company blog Monday that it is launching an email digest, which will highlight Tweets that you might not have otherwise seen. The email digest, which will start appearing in users' inboxes over the next few weeks, is designed to emulate the "Discover" tab in Twitter's mobile apps. The idea is to feature the "best" content that appears on the network, even if it was written or promoted by folks you don't follow.

• 15:46

  Ask the Experts: Heterogeneous and GPU Compute with AMD’s Manju Hegde

  AMD’s Manju Hegde is one of the rare folks I get to interact with who has an extensive background working at both AMD and NVIDIA. He was one of the co-founders and CEO of Ageia, a company that originally tried to bring higher quality physics simulation to desktop PCs in the mid-2000s. In 2008, NVIDIA acquired Ageia and Manju went along, becoming NVIDIA’s VP of CUDA Technical Marketing. The CUDA fit was a natural one for Manju as he spent the previous three years working on non-graphics workloads for highly parallel processors. Two years later, Manju made his way to AMD to continue his vision for heterogeneous compute work on GPUs. His current role is as the Corporate VP of Heterogeneous Applications and Developer Solutions at AMD.

  

  Given what we know about the new AMD and its goal of building a Heterogeneous Systems Architecture (HSA), Manju’s position is quite important. For those of you who don’t remember back to AMD’s 2012 Financial Analyst Day, the formalized AMD strategy is to exploit its GPU advantages on the APU front in as many markets as possible. AMD has a significant GPU performance advantage compared to Intel, but in order to capitalize on that it needs developer support for heterogeneous compute. A major struggle everyone in the GPGPU space faced was enabling applications that took advantage of the incredible horsepower these processors offered. With AMD’s strategy closely married to doing more (but not all, hence the heterogeneous prefix) compute on the GPU, it needs to succeed where others have failed.

  The hardware strategy is clear: don’t just build discrete CPUs and GPUs, but instead transition to APUs. This is nothing new as both AMD and Intel were headed in this direction for years. Where AMD sets itself apart is that it is will to dedicate more transistors to the GPU than Intel. The CPU and GPU are treated almost as equal class citizens on AMD APUs, at least when it comes to die area.

  The software strategy is what AMD is working on now. AMD’s Fusion¹² Developer Summit (AFDS), in its second year, is where developers can go to learn more about AMD’s heterogeneous compute platform and strategy. Why would a developer attend? AMD argues that the speedups offered by heterogeneous compute can be substantial enough that they could enable new features, usage models or experiences that wouldn’t otherwise be possible. In other words, taking advantage of heterogeneous compute can enable differentiation for a developer.

  That brings us to today. In advance of this year’s AFDS, Manju has agreed to directly answer your questions about heterogeneous compute, where the industry is headed and anything else AMD will be covering at AFDS. Manju has a BS in Electrical Engineering (IIT, Bombay) and a PhD in Computer Information and Control Engineering (UMich, Ann Arbor) so make the questions as tough as you can. He'll be answering them on May 21st so keep the submissions coming.

• 15:47

  How’s The Gold Rush Panning Out? 70% Of Mobile App Users Pay Little Or Nothing, Study Says

  There's been a lot of buzz about how important mobile apps are for years now, and an increasing number of tech startups are launching with mobile-only strategies. But a new study indicates that the sector still has a ways to go before it attracts significant money from a wide breadth of users. According to a recent study of US consumers conducted by ABI, some 70 percent of mobile app users spend "either nothing or very little" on or in applications. It turns out that, much like gambling or gaming, the mobile app market of today relies mostly big-spending "whales" to account for a bulk of its direct sales. The highest-spending three percent of all app users account for nearly 20 percent of the total spend in the market, ABI said.

• 15:57

  AmEx builds a mobile home for its social offers

  American Express has been using social channels such as Facebook, Foursquare and Twitter to deliver offers that can be synced to a user's card account. But up until now, there wasn't one place to find and get recommendations on all those offers.

• 16:01

  Arduino compatible home automation for smart phone or voice control

  [Joseph] wrote in to share this home automation system he’s working on as a college project. He calls it the Room Engine and the house-side of the hardware is built on top of the circuit you see here. This is the most basic part of the REBoard, which is meant to connect to a computer [...]

• 16:30

  As prices drop, when’s the best time to buy a new phone?

  As the pace of advances in mobile technology accelerates, waves of new smartphones are appearing every few months. That can mean some savings in the form of a price drop on recently launched phones by the carriers. But how long should you wait?

• 16:35

  Just 24 Hours Left To Enter The Le Web London Startup Competition

  The Le Web conference in Paris is an annual TechCrunch favourite, so be aware that there are just 24 hrs left to register for the startup competition for the new Le Web London event coming up. Selected startups get a chance to be onstage and also get free expo space. Here are some highlights from the programming that are emerging:

• 16:45

  Apple Gets Serious About Photo Sharing With iCloud Update

  Apple's Wordwide Developers Conference is still a few weeks away, but as usual, there's no shortage of clues about what to expect. 

  The latest news suggests that Apple is putting more focus on photos and their inherently social nature. The company is expected to push out an update to iCloud that enables users to share and comment on photos. 

  Details are sparse, but according to The Wall Street Journal, some are expecting a service akin to Flickr to emerge within iCloud. Whether it's a full-blown social service or something a bit more limited, the importance of photos and how they're shared among people is clearly not lost on Apple. 

  

  The iCloud update will come two months after Facebook agreed to acquire Instagram for $1 billion. The unexpected deal served as the latest - and perhaps most significant - measure of just how valuable social photography can be, especially on mobile devices of the sort that Apple manufactures (and on which Instagram existed exclusively until recently).

  Apple has never been known for building its own compelling social products. The most obvious example is Ping. There's no reason this tendency couldn't change, but what the company is likely cooking up will probably be designed to fit nicely into iOS and iCloud and not necessarily cater to a larger public.

  Currently, the way photos are handled within iCloud is pretty static. Photostream syncs photos across devices, but that's about it. The new upgrades will not only add sharing functionality but also the ability to sync videos. 

  What we'll see at the WWDC is, as always, the subject of widespread rumor and speculation, but the next iteration of iOS is a safe bet. In addition to these iCloud updates, Apple is expected to unveil its own proprietary, notably non-Google mobile maps application.  We may also learn more about Mountain Lion, the next version of Mac OS X, and see a hardware refresh or two.  

   

  
  

  

• 16:45

  First Look: Want To Know Who Got Funded? WhoGotFunded.com Has Got You Covered

  A lot of you have come to depend on TechCrunch for your startup funding news -- and hey, we're happy to be the first place you come when you're looking to see who's raising money. Which is why this new site, WhoGotFunded.com, is both a blessing and a curse: On the one hand, it'll be an awesome tool for those of us hoping to catch all the latest funding news first. On the other hand, it makes my job a bit obsolete? Anyway, WhoGotFunded is currently in private beta, and I've gotten a chance to check out the site, which hopes to provide a one-stop shop for funding news. It's a pretty straightforward setup, displaying a list of funding announcements that it's gathered from Twitter, web news sites, and of course, the Securities and Exchange Commission.

• 17:00

  LightSquared’s bankruptcy is Washington’s failure too

  LightSquared's bankruptcy is the conclusion of a process that is rigged against broadband competition. Maybe it would have failed for economic reasons, but before it got the chance it fell victim to politics, spectrum warfare, and interests that don’t want more wireless competition.

• 17:01

  Graphic equalizer display flashes LED sign to the beat

  Careful planning and a steady hand let [Leo Rampen] fit everything he needed to build a graphic equalizer display on his LED wall sign. There’s a lot of components that needed to fit on this board, and he decided not use to an etched board for the build. The idea for the project started off as [...]

• 17:01

  Groupon’s Q1 Earnings Beat Estimates: $559.3M In Revenue, $1.35B In Groupons Sold

  Groupon just published its second quarterly earnings report after going public in 2011. The Chicago-based company made $559.3 million in revenue during the first quarter of 2012, up 89% year-over year. Groupon also announced that the total amount of money it collected from customers for Groupons sold (excluding taxes and estimated refunds) increased 103% from $668.2 million in the same quarter last year to $1.35 billion in Q1 2012. Overall, though, Groupon still reported a net loss of $0.02 per share. The company's non-GAAP earnings, however, showed earnings of $0.02 per share.
• 17:13

  Svpply’s “We Want This!” Is A Tasteful Way Retailers Can Target Well-Dressed Shoppers

  Svpply, the New York-based startup that replicates the feeling of window-shopping online, is nudging its well-heeled clientele to turn their "wants" into real purchases. The company, which was co-founded by Vimeo designer Zach Klein, is unveiling analytics and targeting features for retailers in a program called "We Want This!" Shops like Free People, CXXVI and All Saints can reach influential members of the Svpply community with targeted promotions based on their "Wants." On Svpply, a "Want" is pretty much similar to the "Like" button on Facebook. Since the company was founded a few years ago, Svpply members have clicked "Want" more than 5 million times on the site and do it at a current rate of about 160,000 per week.
• 17:18

  Quora Raises $50M At $400M From Peter Thiel, D’Angelo Puts In $20M Of His Own Money

  Q&A site Quora has raised $50 million at a $400 million pre-money valuation according to a report by the Wall Street Journal and confirmed to me by the founders themselves. We had reported that Quora was raising in this range back in April and it looks like Facebook board member Peter Thiel has beat out many other investors including a much-rumored KPCB to lead the round. Also investing is Matrix's Josh Hannah and Northbridge's Jonathan Heiliger. According to our own sources, Quora co-founder Adam D'Angelo put $20 million of his own money into the Series B financing. Thiel is leading personally and not through Founders Fund, breaking up the remaining $30 million between Matrix and Northbridge.
• 17:29

  Remember Jitterbug Phones For Seniors? Here’s The iPad Equivalent

  Remember Jitterbug, the big-buttoned phones for seniors that made using those confusing, new-fangled cellphone thingies so much easier to handle? Well it looks like someone has gone out and built the equivalent for the iPad. Which literally made me laugh out loud when I read the news, because the iPad is the first computer I've ever seen seniors adopt in droves. But hello anyway, Family Ribbon.

• 17:30

  Meet Apple's Secret Feline App Tester

  UPDATE 3:22 PM: Is this for real? Well, she disappeared as soon as this article was posted, so what do you think? What goes on in Apple's app testing lab? Just ask Dive Apple. She may be a cat. She lives in San Francisco. She takes lots of photos of Apple products. And her Facebook posts are publicly visible were publicly visible (until we outed her). Let's take a look at what she has to say.

  Is Dive Apple Legit?

  We were introduced to Dive by a reputable developer, whose identity we will protect. The developer discovered this account through unusual activity on an upcoming iOS app while it was in review by Apple. It wasn't released yet, but here was Facebook user Dive Apple trying it out, mostly by taking pictures of Apple hardware.

  Why is Dive Apple's profile public? That's a reasonable question. The account has eight friends, and they all have various levels of account privacy. To rigorously test the Facebook components of apps, Apple would have to try out all the various privacy levels. There's nothing too juicy here, but unreleased apps are definitely represented, as well as photos and videos of a few square feet of an Apple office.

  UPDATE 4:57 PM: After reading this post, another app developer emailed ReadWriteWeb with more confirmation:

  "I read your article about Dive Apple. I can confirm that 'she?' was one of the very first users of our app when we first submitted it to Apple. When we first soft-launched, we did some research on anyone signing up in Cupertino and we uncovered the same things you did. A lot of photo posts and Apple gear, including a few shots of Apple branded mugs and things not generally found on a regular fanboy's desk."

  Dive Is Almost 4 Years Old

  Dive was born in 2008, and the first thing she did on Facebook was test Naked Touch, which is apparently some kind of touch drawing app.

  

  Dive Apple and Friends

  Dive's friends are mostly animals (or Mon Calamari, an alien species from Star Wars), and most of them have "Dive" in their names. That makes sense for accounts designed for diving into apps and testing all the little Facebook-related bells and whistles. The various Dives all have different levels of Facebook privacy. Dive Apple is the least shy.

  

  
  Hanging Out in Cupertino

  Dive lives in San Francisco, but she spends a fair amount of time a 45-minute drive south in Cupertino. Her favorite place is the Duke of Edinburgh Pub and Restaurant, conveniently located between areas of Apple's main campus.

  The Duke has pretty solid Yelp reviews, and it's located smack-dab in the middle of the techie part of Cupertino. After an Apple employee famously left an iPhone 4 prototype in a bar, The Wall Street Journal's MarketWatch called The Duke a "likely candidate" as a place to happen upon the next Apple lost-and-found prize.

  

  Dive Loves Apple Stuff

  Dive spends most of her days testing apps with names like Telefir Login and Zliq. Many of the apps on her Timeline don't appear in the App Store. Maybe they've been rejected; maybe they just aren't out yet.

  Dive takes tons of pictures of her desk, which is covered with Apple hardware. There are iPads still in boxes, iPhones and iPods littered among the Magic Mice, and one tantalizing shot of an iMac with a sticky note and a sheet of paper visible. 

  

  The page is clearly an app review checklist. The header is hard to make out, but it seems to say "App Review Checklist." It's easier to make out the text at the bottom: "...storing an app from complete, make sure to claim the app back," it says. The last visible line reads  "...complete until sonar is sent."

  There's also a shot that shows Dive's suspiciously human (and male?) legs.

  

  Dive frequently posts little snippets of video from various apps, but they don't give anything away. They're not embeddable either, but here's a post you can view on Facebook. (UPDATE 3:22 PM: Now that the account is gone, the video is gone, too.)

  

  Dive doesn't leak any top-secret Apple devices. But she does test lots of apps, even ones that don't officially exist yet, so her feed is fun to watch. Even though it's mostly keyboard pics, Dive's Timeline offers some rare insights into Apple's app testing process.

  You can could once find her at facebook.com/dive3452. Here's Bing's cached version.

  
  

  

• 17:51

  Fly Or Die: Skullcandy Hesh Headphones [TCTV]

  This shouldn't be the first time you've seen Skullcandy's Hesh headphones appear on TechCrunch, but I'll forgive you if it is. As a refresh, I reviewed the cans last week and found that it really came down to like vs. love. They're fine, but I can't necessarily justify a $60-$70 purchase. John felt the same way when we sat down to chat about the Hesh headphones in this latest episode of Fly or Die. But it extends far beyond that. As John would say, "friends don't let friends buy bad headphones."

• 18:00

  Stop Flying Blind: Use Big Data to Benchmark Your Startup

  Most startups fail. Nine out of 10 never amount to anything more than fond memories and a forgotten Facebook page. One reason is that they often lack a clear picture of exactly how they’re doing until it’s too late. But there are tools designed to help you assess your startup's progress compared to similar companies.

  The best way for startup founders to improve their chance of success is by learning to make better decisions. But if you want to make better decisions, you need better data. And that’s where Startup Compass comes in: It’s designed to help you benchmark your startup’s performance against thousands of others to identify what you’re doing right and what you need to improve.

  Startup Compass collects data from tens of thousands of startups around the world. It collects lots of data, then creates best practices, recommendations and benchmarks to help entrepreneurs make better product and business decisions.

  Big Data for Small Companies

  “This is a big-data approach to startup success,” says Startup Compass co-founder and serial entrepreneur Bjoern Lasse Herrmann. “Big companies have analysts to make sense of their data, and executives can make decisions based on that data. But startups don’t have any access to that kind of analytics. We wanted to put analysts in the cloud for startups.”

  “Startups can learn three key things,” Herrmann says. “First, which key performance indicators actually matter. Most startups don’t even know which KPIs they should track or why they should track them. Second, they learn how their KPIs compare to other companies’ KPIs so they will know if they’re on the right track. See, for example, their customer acquisition costs. The third thing they learn is what actions they need to be taking. We help businesses take the next steps.”

  Startup Compass calls its approach “cracking the code of innovation.” We call it “how not to kill your startup.”

  The 5 don'ts

  The real value of Startup Compass is comparing your company to others like it, but Startup Compass also summarizes its findings in its Startup Genome report. Here are nuggets of wisdom from the first Startup Genome report, five things not to do:

  1. Don’t scale too early. This is the No. 1 cause of startup failure. Startup Compass has found that 70% of startups crash because they scale prematurely.

  2. Don’t work part time. Sleepy? Get used to it. People who work full time on their startups raise an average of 24 times more funding than those who work part time.

  3. Don’t go it alone. Maybe you are the smartest guy in the room. But solo founders raise less than half the money that two to three co-founders raise.

  4. Don’t ignore customers. Yes, they’re annoying. (What do they know?) But startups that track customer metrics have 400% more user growth.

  5. Don’t forget about the technology. Startups without a tech-oriented co-founder are twice as likely to scale prematurely and have three to five times less user growth.

  If you want advice on an ongoing basis, you can join Startup Compass and in exchange for data on your startup, the company will benchmark your startup monthly, comparing you to similar outfits, so you can keep your priorities in line.

  Startup Compass has 17,000 companies now using the service for things like checking whether their churn rate is too high or their retention rate is too low - or if they should be spending more money on customer acquisition.

  “We have a number of companies that have gone through the process and tell us they used our product and realized they were falling behind on this or that metric and were able to fix those things and adjust accordingly. As a result they were better able to acquire customers in the long run and didn’t waste more money on things that were not productive.”

  Images courtesy of Shutterstock.

  
  

  

• 18:00

  Twitter tiptoes further into the media business

  Twitter describes itself as an information network rather than a media entity, but it is making some interesting moves into the content business, including hiring a sports producer to curate content and sending out a weekly email of highlighted content. How far will it go?

• 18:01

  Garden sensors measure soil moisture and greenhouse temperature

  [Andy] is getting his garden up and running. This year it’s been pretty cold so he decided to get small plastic domed tunnel which acts as a mini greenhouse. To help monitor that environment he built this sensor array which displays temperature and soil moisture readings. Temperature is quite simple. He’s using a TMP36 sensor [...]

• 18:01

  MarketWatch founder Larry Kramer is the new publisher of USA Today

  Next week, Larry Kramer is leading a session at paidContent 2012 called "The New Publishers". Now he is one. Kramer, the founder of MarketWatch and the first head of CBS Digital Media, is the new president and publisher of USA Today.
• 18:03

  Ikea TV to run YouTube, Vimeo, Dailymotion apps

  Ikea's Uppleva TV solution, which combines a Smart TV with living room furniture, will launch in select retail locations in Europe next month. Some of the apps available on the device at launch will offer access to services like YouTube, Vimeo, Dailymotion and TuneIn radio.

• 18:11

  In First Report As A Public Company: Millennial Media’s Net Loss Widens To $4M, Revenues Up 53%

  In its first-ever earnings report as a publicly traded company, mobile advertising network Millennial Media said its net loss for the first quarter widened to $4 million on increased costs. Revenues were up 53 percent year-over-year to $32.9 million. Millennial's shares fell by 7.7 percent in after-hours trading, as the company's annual forecast missed estimates.  For the year, Millennial is looking at $173 million and 176 million in annual revenues, which would be up by 68 percent from the year before. But that's actually lower than the $202.8 million analysts were expecting on average, according to a Bloomberg survey. When the company went public two months ago, its shares popped more than 100% on the first day and gave the company a nearly $2 billion valuation. Since then, they've settled and fallen by 67 percent, giving the company a market cap of $1.16 billion.
• 18:23

  BenchPrep Teams Up With The Princeton Review To Gamify Test Prep

  For a while now "gamification" has largely existed as a buzz word. It's felt just as ridiculous to write the word as it is to read it. However, as Tim Chang pointed out this weekend, although it's important to avoid thinking of "gamification as the panacea," it's real, it's moving beyond media and fitness, and it needs to be taken seriously. When it comes to educational tools, gamification has real value in its ability to make learning more fun and engaging. But as with all emerging trends, it can't be applied willy-nilly. BenchPrep, a young edtech startup backed by $2.2 million from Lightbank, launched last year to convert content from big educational publishers, like McGraw-Hill, into interactive web and mobile courses. While the startup expanded beyond college admission test prep in January, today it's announcing that it is teaming up with Princeton Review to contemporize test prep for students, using game mechanics, leaderboards, and social features to make the tedious and teeth-grinding process of test prep more engaging and, hopefully, more effective.

• 18:30

  Localmind CEO on how to make habit-forming products

  How many apps on your phone do you use on a daily basis? Moving your product from a novelty to a habit is tricky, but Localmind CEO, Lenny Rachitsky thinks he's found a way to make it happen and open up in this video interview.

• 18:37

  Market Research Startup EyeTrackShop Raises $3M

  EyeTrackShop, a startup that develops eye-tracking technology for measuring ad effectiveness, has raised $3 million from Northzone. The company says its technology works through a regular webcam, allowing market researchers to gather data quickly and affordably. You can run the test before you spend money on a campaign, or test how well the advertising works once it's live, and how it performed in different formats and sites. Customers include big tech companies such as Google, AOL, and Microsoft, as well as P&G and JCDecaux.
• 18:37

  Hungry Like A Wolf: How Apple Rumors Spread

  Remember last week when Foxconn president Terry Gou said that he was working hard at building the new Apple TV? The rumor was, as you might suspect, patently false. But just how false is the surprising part. Welcome to the magical world of Apple rumors. Before we begin, take a look at this delightful Fortune piece that shows us the truth behind the big Apple rumor mill. It's well-written and cogent and takes us all to task, including our own Matt Burns for jumping into the morass.

• 18:43

  Getting video right: 7 questions for Sugar Media’s Brian Sugar

  Brian Sugar and his wife, Lisa, have built a women's media and e-commerce empire that grew out of the company's flagship celebrity site, Pop Sugar. We caught up with Brian to learn more about how he made it in media. Here's some highlights from the chat:
• 18:53

  Does digital advertising need its own operating system?

  To address the fragmentation exploding across the digital advertising market, Luma Partners founder and CEO Terence Kawaja floated the possibility of an operating system for digital ad companies to use as a common building block for their products, just how mobile apps use iOS and Android.

• 19:00

  Unanswered Questions About Facebook's Data-Use Policy - Even After Public Q&A

  

  The harder Facebook tries to explain its data-use policy, the more questions it leaves unanswered. Erin Egan, the social networking behemoth's chief privacy officer, did it again during a 30-minute video conference on May 14. Here's what she did and didn't say - and a summary of outstanding concerns about how Facebook can and can't take advantage of user data.

  Egan’s session was window dressing on the announcement made on the company’s blog last week. While the exec answered the general questions read to her by Andrew Noyes, Facebook's public policy communications manager, most of her answers reiterated points covered in last week’s announcement. Even as more pointed queries piled up in the comments section beneath the streaming video, Noyes shifted the session at the 21-minute mark to answering questions not related to privacy.

  

  We kept a running list of all the questions Egan didn’t get to, and we've asked Facebook to provide answers. We’ll update if and when the company illuminates the following questions, which were posted on Facebook’s site during the video Q&A session:

  • “Will Facebook ever consider implementing a way that a user can globally determine the level of information they would be willing to share with advertisers instead of the per-app method as it is today?”
  • “Will Facebook be using the data it collects to target ads on 3rd party sites?”
  • “Also, will it be licensing out this data to 3rd party networks and tech providers?”
  • “And also, will Facebook amend its data policies that will prevent an app-owner from using data accrued through Facebook after a user has uninstalled that app?”
  • “The revisions mention that Facebook ‘scans’ photos and tags for facial information. Even if I disable Tag Suggestions, can I request that Facebook delete the facial data you already have on me?”
  • “Someone from my Friends list copied a personal timeline photo of my child. I don't know her friends. How might I control use of my timeline photos?”
  • “How does [Friday’s initial public stock offering] change...my personal privacy controls as a FB user?”
  • “Placing an ad blocker disrupts how the apps in Facebook work. Why is this a problem now (within the last month or so) and was not a problem before?”

  We’ve also asked once again for clarification on a question we initially asked over the weekend about a policy that seemingly allows Facebook users to vote down policies they don’t like.

  Throughout the talk, Egan insisted that last week’s updates, including a sleek new landing page that Facebook calls its policy hub, aimed to clarify the policies. She was careful to stress that there had been no policy changes and that last week’s move was a response to a request from the Irish Data Protection Commission to better explain existing practices and highlight recent changes.

  “Our goal here is to be really transparent with you about our practices,” Egan said.

  
  

  

• 19:01

  Your mug on an Etch a Sketch — automatically

  [Jim's] pretty serious about his Etch a Sketch. He’s gone to the trouble of building a rig that will automatically render a photograph as Etch a Sketch art. Do you recognize the US political figure being plotted in this image? He actually cracks these open and removes all of the internals to preserve the artwork [...]

• 19:10

  Wajam Brings Its Enhanced Social Search Results To Bing and Yahoo

  As all the major search engines continue to add social search features to their feature line-up, it can often look as if there isn't any space left for startups in this space. Wajam begs to differ. The Montreal-based company is probably one of the most ambitious players in the social search market right now and after launching its latest efforts for Google last month, it is now ready to bring its enhanced social search results to Bing and Yahoo as well.

• 19:45

  Carriers, policy groups join up to (sort of) stop Verizon-cable deal

  T-Mobile, Sprint, rural operatorsPublic Knowledge have teamed up to create a mobile version of the Super Friends, their sole mission to battle the Verizon-cable Legion of Doom, but they can’t seem to agree on exactly how they would plan to oppose their new sworn enemies.
• 19:45

  How smart analytics could thwart terrorist attacks

  There's nothing quite like a hypothetical about someone setting a whole block on fire after cutting off the fire department's electric supply in order to slow its response. Is it comforting to know that smart people and smart analytics could help stop it from happening?

• 20:00

  Founder Swap: Like Wife Swap For Startup Execs

  On June 1, Founder Swap aims to take six different startups and get them to exchange founders, in an effort to get a fresh set of eyes on whatever they're working on and foster new ideas. The New York City-based project was dreamed up by ScrollKit founders Kate Ray and Cody Brown, along with Jonathan Basker, VP of People at BetaWorks. Founder Swap hopes to mix and match founders for one day, basing the swap in part on the strengths and weaknesses of the founding teams. It's aimed at very early-stage startups, those with just two or three people working together, and is designed to provide a fresh perspective on the things they're building.

• 20:01

  Mapping the surface of a video game moon

  Writing for Hackaday isn’t all fun and games; occasionally I need to actually write posts and reply to emails from builders around the globe. Usually, though, I’m knee-deep in a personal project, or just hanging out playing a few video games. Recently I’ve gone off the deep end with Kerbal Space Program, an awesome little [...]

• 20:02

  Freshdesk Adds Support For Private Customer Service Messages On Facebook

  It looks like customer support via Facebook is about to get more useful, thanks to a new feature from startup Freshdesk. Freshdesk helps businesses manage their customer service through traditional channels like email and phone, as well as social networks like Facebook and Twitter. Now it's integrating with the messaging feature that was part of the new Brand Pages that Facebook launched in February. In the new Pages, users can send a private message to a brand the first time, and brands can respond.
• 20:03

  Rdio’s Major Redesign Gives Listeners A Unified View, Enhanced Sharing, Private Playlists & More

  There's currently a heated battle being waged between three of the biggest on-demand music streaming services -- MOG, Spotify, and Rdio -- each of which is trying to capture our hearts and ears by offering the best mobile experience for tunes on-the-go. You can check out Josh's in-depth comparison of the battle for mobile supremacy here. While it wasn't Josh's top pick for music streaming on the tablet, Rdio is today taking a big step forward, launching a completely redesigned music listening and discovery experience, starting with the web and its desktop apps. While the company unveiled its plans at SXSW, today marks the first time the new Rdio will be available to all.
• 20:13

  Enterprise, Video Led The $25.1B In M&A Deals Last Quarter, Ernst & Young Says

  Instagram, Schminstagram. While flashy consumer deals keep getting all the headlines, it was actually cloud computing, enterprise and video that fueled the biggest deals of last quarter's $25.1 billion in mergers and acquisitions, according to top-tier accounting firm Ernst & Young. The total value of all deals fell by 12 percent from the year before while the number of deals was about the same. While that's not too huge a drop, the firm attributes it to "ongoing economic uncertainty." (Thanks Greece.) Quarterly deal volume has apparently reached a plateau after two years of growth and is being restrained by concerns about the macroeconomic climate. If you're curious what the biggest deals of last quarter were, here are they below.
• 20:33

  Velti: In Mobile Ads, iOS Widens Its Lead Over Android

  Last month, mobile marketing company Velti reported that iOS had pulled slightly ahead of Android in mobile ad impressions, after being tied at the end of last year. Now, apparently, iOS has taken widened that lead, if not by much — it accounted for 55 percent of mobile ad impressions in April, compared to 45 percent for Android. The data is based on data from Velti's Mobclix Exchange, which serves ads to more than 33,500 apps, the company says.
• 20:51

  Makers Wanted: Are You A Hardware Start-Up? Talk To Us

  We're about to launch a new video series called Makers here at TechCrunch and we'd love to hear from any and all hardware based startups. I want to hear about robots, toys, and railguns. I want to hear about new distilling methods, winemakers, and electric vehicles. I want to hear about anything that whirrs, chops, grates, goes, or crashes into a fireball. Over the next few months Jordan Crook, Josh Zelman, and I will try to cover every hardware startup we come across. If you think you're worthy of inclusion, please drop us a line at john@techcrunch.com with the subject line "MAKER WANTED." Describe your product and maybe send a photo of your facility? Are you building in the US or Europe? Asia or Mexico? Let us know.

• 21:06

  Report: Facebook Will Sell IPO Shares Between $34 and $38

  Facebook's Friday-morning IPO will be priced between $34 and $38 per share, according to AllThingsD's sources. That puts the overall valuation up to $104 billion. Last week, Bloomberg reported that the Facebook investor roadshow was generating "lackluster interest," but that doesn't seem to be the case as the IPO gets closer.

  Indeed, the very same morning, Reuters reported that the Facebook IPO was "already oversubscribed." Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak says he would buy Facebook shares at any price. But many investors and analysts remain skeptical, pointing to Facebook's recently weak revenue and inability to monetize mobile access, which its users increasingly prefer.

  Last month, from Facebook's paperwork related to its acquisition of Instagram, analysts expected a lower price of around $31 per share. Despite negative news about Facebook's inability to capture mobile revenue, expectations have risen since then. Last week, Facebook announced App Center, a way to promote mobile apps for all major platforms, which could be a strong new source of revenue.

  The intense interest in Facebook's IPO is driving the industry into a frenzy, but the truth is that there really isn't a precedent for this. Facebook will be a new kind of public company. We'll just have to see how the market handles it.

  The official pricing will be announced Thursday, and Facebook will be listed as "FB" on the Nasdaq Friday morning.

  
  

  

• 22:19

  Innospring: The Incubator That Wants To Bridge The Gap Between China & Silicon Valley

  By now nearly everyone knows that China has emerged as an increasingly massive and very lucrative market -- but because of major differences in culture, language, business practices, and the like, it is incredibly challenging for even the most well-capitalized of U.S. technology companies to break into the Chinese market. So for small U.S.-based startups, it's nearly impossible. The same is true in reverse: Chinese startups have a very tough time entering into the U.S. market and gaining traction here. That's where a new startup incubator called Innospring is looking to help.
• 23:16

  To Capitalize On Demand, Facebook May Sell 50 Million Extra Shares At Increased $34-$38 Price

  Everyone wants a piece of Facebook, so the company's underwriters will likely exercise their option sell a "greenshoe" of up to 50.6 million additional shares, and Facebook will definitely increase its IPO share price range from between $28 and $35 to $34 and $38, I've confirmed with sources very close to the IPO. This means Facebook could sell up to 388 million shares to raise between $13.1 billion and $14.7 billion at a CNBC-reported valuation between $92B and $103B. A greenshoe is an SEC-permitted over-allotment option that can stabilize a stock's price by allowing underwriters to sell up to 15% more stock than the company originally planned to sell, but with the option to buy back the stock at the offering price if the actual price drops below this. By exercising the greenshoe, underwriters including Morgan Stanley, J.P. Morgan, and Goldman Sachs could help Facebook raise up to an additional $1.72 billion to $1.92 billion by selling up to 50.6 million shares, which could prevent high demand and limited supply from causing the share price to skyrocket and making the stock seem volatile. "Quite likable indeed, har har" laughs some monocle-wearing banker on Wall Street."

• 23:27

  Quora gets $50 million. Q: Why? A: Because it can…

  Quora, a Q&A service has raised a whopping $50 million in funding from co-founder Adam D'Angelo along with Facebook funder Peter Thiel, Northbridge Ventures and Matrix Ventures. One of the most over-hyped startups, the question is why is it valued so highly despite mediocre progress.

• 23:43

  Service As A SKU

  The biggest ecommerce opportunity today involves taking offline services and offering them for sale online (O2O commerce). The first generation of O2O commerce was driven by discounting, push-based engagements, and artificial scarcity. The still-unfulfilled opportunity in O2O today is tantamount to tacking barcodes onto un-warehousable services by standardizing and normalizing the units being sold, something I call "Service as a SKU." Just as Amazon figured out how to build the best warehouses and technology in the world for delivering boxes, somebody will do this for "unboxed" services, with customers driven not by discounts or scarcity, but rather by the Internet’s hallmarks of customer experience and convenience. And unlike how "ship stuff in a box" ecommerce seems to be gravitating towards a few winners, Service as a SKU is still a wide open playing field.

• May 15, 2012
• 0:00

  The AMD Trinity Review (A10-4600M): A New Hope

  AMD’s microprocessor history goes way back, predating even the now venerable x86 architecture. Their first foray into x86 territory came as a subcontractor to Intel, and from there AMD cut the ties and began making x86 compatible chips of their own design, starting in 1991 with the Am386. AMD went on to make the Am486 and Am5x86 before ditching the “86” part of the name with the launch of the K5. That’s where most of us started paying closer attention, and the K6/K6-2/K6-III and K7 were quite popular in their day. The real deal however came with the K8/Hammer family of processors—chips that not only competed with Intel offerings (Pentium 4 mostly) but actually outperformed them in the vast majority of benchmarks, and did so while using less power. It was a double whammy of performance and efficiency, and for several years AMD chips were the enthusiast’s CPU of choice.

  Unfortunately for AMD, they’ve never quite managed to reclaim the glory of the Athlon 64/Opteron launch. It took Intel a few years—and a scrapped Tejas architecture—but when they finally got things straightened out they struck back with a vengeance. Intel’s Conroe (Core 2) architecture turned the tables on AMD with the same double whammy of increased performance and reduced power, and since the launch in mid-2006, Intel has managed to hold onto the CPU performance crown. In fact, earlier this year AMD almost seemed to throw in the towel as far a high-performance CPUs are concerned, with their future strategy focusing on mainstream and value-oriented APUs. We’ve already seen some of that with their first APUs, Brazos and Llano, and today AMD brings out their third APU architecture: Trinity.

  

  If you’re hoping to see a repeat of the Hammer launch back in 2003 with Trinity today, you’re going to be disappointed. AMD has made no claims or even hints that Trinity is going to go toe-to-toe with Ivy Bridge or Sandy Bridge-E in processor benchmarks. Instead, the marketing material and reviewer’s guides are more about telling a story of good performance, balance, and flexibility with a price point that won’t have you looking for a loan. Sometimes the best way to take down a massive empire isn’t by lining up your heavy guns and trading blows until one side capitulates—in such battles, the larger/wealthier corporation almost always wins. Instead, it’s the plucky little ships that can outmaneuver the big guns that can sometimes come out ahead. Will Trinity be AMD’s X-wing to Intel’s Ivy Bridge death star? Read on for our full analysis.

• 0:00

  Smartphone customer satisfaction is hard to get right

  Adding smartphones to the American Customer Satisfaction Index's review of cell phone makers this year revealed that customers who buy plain old feature phones for calling and texting are generally happier with the product than their smartphone-owning counterparts. Apple is an exception.
• 0:01

  Hillcrest Labs open sources Kylo TV browser

  Hillcrest Labs' Kylo browser for TV viewing on home theater PCs is going open source: The company released the source code for the browser under the Mozilla Public License, hoping that others will pick up some of the development of the TV-optimized browser platform.

• 0:01

  AMD finally launches Trinity

  AMD's Trinity is finally here, and the first question on everyone's mind is what is launching.

• 1:28

  Cosm: Disappointing Redesign By Internet of Things Pioneer Pachube

  Early Internet of Things innovator gets a makeover and a new name: Cosm. It's attempting to become more social, but unfortunately it's likely to turn normal people off - rather than turn them on.

  When we first started profiling the emerging trend of Internet of Things back in 2009, one startup stood out as an early innovator in the field. It had an unpronounceable name, Pachube (pronounced: Patch-Bay), but it was the first independent, open platform for sensor data. This week Pachube announced a new name - Cosm - and a redesign that attempts to make the service more social and easier to use.

  The internet of Things is the catchphrase for when real-world objects - such as buildings, roads and household appliances - become connected to the Internet. Often it's via sensors, tiny microprocessor chips that record and log data such as sound waves, temperature, movement and so on.

  Our first review of Pachube was just over 3 years ago. Over the following couple of years, Pachube attracted a small but enthusiastic community of developers. Pachube was subsequently acquired by cloud computing service provider LogMeIn in July 2011.

  Internet of Social Things

  Ten months after acquisition, Cosm (nee Pachube) is now targeting the social Web. Founder Usman Haque commented, in an email newsletter announcing the re-brand, that it is "focusing on helping people connect with each other as well as their devices." He added that "we aren't just building behind-the-scenes infrastructure."

  

  Haque explained further:

  "The idea of the internet of things needing a piece of equipment (a 'patch-bay') has become less useful than the concept of it involving shared 'workspaces' and 'environments' ('microcosms' and 'macrocosms'). Cosm has an even bigger vision than Pachube: we want it to help people, teams, companies & cities build, share and make sense of their own 'cosms': devices, environments, communities."

  The problem is, the new design still emphasizes the "behind-the-scenes infrastructure" and the service is still too hard for normal people to use.

  Cosm's Consoles

  Cosm (which is a fantastic domain name, I wonder how much it cost?) is organized around the concept of a console. This is where you monitor feeds from real-world objects, either your own or other peoples. Cosm is hoping that you'll spend a lot of time following feeds of other people, such as team members, friends or family. Here is a screenshot of Usman Haque's console:

  

  Haque has feeds monitoring his home, office, weather stations, power generators, plants and more. There is even a feed monitoring his Twitter account. Twitter is by far the easiest way to get started with your own feed in Cosm, but unfortunately I got an error when I tried to add my account.

  In terms of following people, I managed to follow Usman ok - but I couldn't click on any of his activity. I don't know who his 15 other followers are or what comments he's made elsewhere on Cosm. This may be a design glitch, but if not then it's not particularly social.

  Still Too Geeky For Mainstream

  The problem Cosm has is that it's not very accessible to non-technical people. I'm fairly technically savvy - about as technical as a non-developer gets - yet when I browsed around Cosm I was dismayed at how little I could do. I couldn't even add my own feed, because the Twitter functionality wasn't working. I don't have any Arduino projects (basically this is an electronics DIY kit), so I didn't have many other options to create a feed.

  

  I did follow Usman, as he'd linked to his console in the email newsletter... but how do I find other people to follow? As noted above, I couldn't even see who Usman himself follows. I certainly can't imagine any of my family or non-technical friends using Cosm. So I'm mystified as to how Cosm is more social than Pachube was.

  However, This is The Future...

  I'm being a little hard on Cosm, because I was expecting something more user friendly. However, I still buy into the vision for Cosm. In the not too distant future, we will indeed manage various feeds from household and other devices. As I wrote in my original review 3 years ago, one of the original goals of Pachube was to "open up the production process of smart homes" - to provide an alternative to products by the likes of Microsoft and Apple.

  But for mainstream users, Cosm will need to become much, much easier to use. Otherwise the likes of Microsoft and Apple will win out. That's already the more likely scenario, regardless of Cosm's geeky user interface. But if Cosm is to have any chance at a wider user base, it needs to do more to encourage non-technical people to use the service. It also needs to help people understand the benefit of hooking up your plants (among other things) to Cosm. Right now there is little explanation of why I'd want to use Cosm in this way, let alone how to use it.

  
  

  

• 3:00

  Why Niklas Zennstrom thinks Brazil’s startups are hot

  Niklas Zennstrom, the founder of Skype and Kazaa and the founding partner of investment firm Atomico, tells me that he's been spending a significant amount of time in Brazil looking for and meeting with Brazilian entrepreneurs.

• 3:15

  Auction-Meets-Group-Buying Site BagThat Bags $3.2M From Oxford Capital

  BagThat, a new UK entrant to the daily-deals/e-commerce space, has picked up an investment of £2 million ($3.2 million) to develop its service, a mash-up of two well-known models for selling products online: auctions and group buying. The funding is being led by Oxford Capital and is the first close on this round. BagThat says it is expecting additional institutional investment in the round.

• 4:52

  Japan’s Docomo buying mobile content powerhouse Buongiorno for €224 million

  Japan's largest mobile telco is about to buy in to mobile media content in Europe and farther afield, by acquiring one of the space's pioneer companies.

• 5:56

  Baidu’s New Forked Android Phone: China’s Search Giant Wants To Make Windows Phone, iOS Versions Too

  Big mobile plans afoot for Baidu, the Google of China that leads in search and has launched a host of other services in the wake of that business. The company today unveiled the first smartphone to be built on its own platform, the Changhong H5018. And while that device is designed on a "forked" version of Android -- forked Android devices being very popular in China -- Baidu says that it doesn't want to stop there: the idea is to take its platform, the Baidu Cloud Smart Terminal, to other operating systems like Windows Phone and iOS. "We want Baidu's Cloud Smart Terminal to function as a platform that sits on top of all operating systems, such as Windows Phone and iOS," Kaiser Kuo, a spokesperson for Baidu, told TechCrunch today.

• 5:58

  2.6 million join Free Mobile’s French revolution

  After just three months of operation, France's disruptive Free Mobile -- which has upset the market with an innovative and controversial offering -- has won 2.6 million subscribers, an unprecedented number for a new European launch.

• 6:41

  Facebook Files New S-1, Pricing $34-38 Per Share, Raising $14.7B

  Facebook has filed a new S-1, and it contains more details on the IPO. It will offer underwriters the right to purchase up to an additional 50,612,302 shares of Class A common stock to cover over-allotments. Facebook anticipates that the initial public offering price will be between $34.00 and $38.00 per share.

• 7:00

  6 Navigation Apps That Go the Extra Mile

  With a smartphone and the right app, you can find any spot on Earth. But the best navigation apps do a lot more. Look out for that speed trap.

  Here are six mobile navigation tools. To make the list, an app needs to be different than your standard, run-of-the-mill route finder. You won't see Nokia or Google Maps. Or apps from navigation leaders like Garmin, TomTom or Telenav. These are seven true alternatives. Each one offers something special to help you get wherever you need to go in record time.

  Waze

  (Free: iPhone/iPad, Android)

  When we first wrote about Waze (for Android) in our Apps of the Month for December 2011, we wondered whether the app was useful, never mind safe. Interacting with your phone while driving is frowned upon these days. Waze's safety may be debatable, but its GPS features and ability to passively aggregate traffic data while you're driving may be useful. It's a social driving app that alerts you to traffic incidents, congestion and other roadblocks so you can "outsmart traffic and save on gas." Really, the last thing you need is to be scanning Twitter in traffic. It's especially worthwhile if you live in a city where the afternoon commute tends to be a nightmare (looking at you, Washington, D.C.). Just type in an address, and Waze passively sends traffic data to its servers and lets you know where the trouble spots are. 

  Where2Boss

  (Free: iPhone)

  I went to Fiji as a teenager. On the way home, I had a long layover at LAX before flying back to Logan Airport in Boston. A couple of people I had met in Fiji were also stuck at the airport, so we decided to take a cab to Manhattan Beach, where Baywatch was filmed. They ended up leaving earlier while I sat on the beach looking for Pamela Anderson in a red swimsuit. When it was time to go, I hopped in a cab back to LAX - and was taken for a ride. The taxi ride to the beach cost about $25. On the way back, the driver took a very long route, along with the last $50 in my pocket. This was the mid-1990s, and there was no smartphone I could use to track the route and stop the driver from fleecing me like the dumb teenager I was. 

  I sure could have used Where2Boss. It compares the route your taxi driver is taking with the one it thinks you should be taking. It also has a rate-your-driver function, forums to offer comments or complaints about drivers, and gamification badges that tell you whether you're beating public transit. Smartphones: keeping taxi drivers honest since 2007. 

  

  CoPilot GPS

  (Free: iOS, Android)

  I had a problem while traveling in London last October. First, I had no idea where I was. Second, I didn't have access to cellular data that would have enabled my Android or iPad to figure out where I was (no way was I going to spend on international roaming). I managed to duck into a Starbucks and grab some Wi-Fi for a couple minutes to get my bearings, but I got lost several times anyway. CoPilot GPS would have made it a cakewalk. Available for iOS and Android, CoPilot provides free navigation tools, including maps and directions, without a data connection. It also provides alternate routes and points of interest along your way. I was able to stumble toward Piccadilly Circus and then Westminster Abbey by blindly walking south, but that would not have been necessary if I had an offline maps and navigation service. 

  

  Trapster 

  (Free: iPhone, Android)

  Many U.S. states have outlawed radar detectors that enable drivers to avoid police officers when they're driving too fast. Police don't appreciate citizens skirting the law, and a radar detector really has no other purpose. But that doesn't mean you can't use an app to avoid speed traps. Trapster alerts you to speed traps, red light cameras, accidents and traffic. The newest version is packed with features, including a "blue line" navigation on the map to show you where previous Trapster users have driven recently without close encounters of the ticket kind. 

  HopStop

  (Free: iPhone, Android)

  HopStop is one of the more useful and intuitive navigation apps for city dwellers. It delivers not only walking directions, but precise information on public transit options. Very helpful if you're in a new city or an unfamiliar part of town. Enter your address and where you want to go, and HopStop will give you all the route information you need. 

  

  Extra Mile

  ($0.99: iPhone)

  Extra Mile is a voice navigation app that runs in the background while you drive. It automatically records distance traveled, fuel expenses, trip duration and driving patterns. It also taps into traffic cameras so you can see what you are getting into before you get into it. It offers a dashboard for easy in-app navigation and generates reports of your driving history. 

  

   

  
  

  

• 7:01

  You’ll throw your back out playing this analog TV synth

  While CRT televisions fall to the wayside as more people adopt flat-panel TVs, the abundance of unused sets gives hacker/artist [Kyle Evans] an unlimited number of analog canvases on which to project his vision. He recently wrote in to share his latest creation which he dubs “de/Rastra”. The “CRT Performance Interface” as he calls it, [...]

• 7:46

  Look Out: Pinterest Marketing Platform Curalate Lands $750k Seed From NEA, First Round, MentorTech

  A new breed of social media sites led by visual rather than text-based interactions looks like it is now spawning a new breed of marketing service catering to the new format. The latest of these is a startup called Curalate, which is officially launching today with $750,000 in seed funding from NEA, First Round Capital and UPenn-focused MentorTech for a service that lets brands search and track its images across the social network, whether they have been posted by the brands themselves or by everyday consumers. Although the site is only officially launching today, in its beta format it has already managed to pick up more than 150 brands as customers, its co-founder and CEO, Apu Gupta, tells me. That speaks to how, up to now, there hasn't been an analytics service available quite like the one that Curalate is offering.

• 8:00

  The Hottest IPO You've Never Heard Of

  With an expected valuation of close to $100 billion, it’s understandable that no one can stop talking about Facebook’s initial public offering this week. But while Facebook basks in the social media spotlight, companies tackling tough business problems are exciting investors, if not consumers. Workday, for example, is expected to be among the largest IPOs this year in the business software market.

  Founded in 2005, the Pleasanton, California-based Workday makes payroll, accounting and human resources management software available over the Internet to 280 corporations, including big names like Time Warner, Kleenex-maker Kimberly-Clark and giant electronics manufacturer Flextronics. So far, Workday has raised $250 million from venture capital firms and other investors.

  Dave Duffield Strikes Again

  The company is the brainchild of David Duffield and Aneel Bhusri. Duffield, cofounder and chief executive of PeopleSoft, was forced to sell the company to Oracle in 2005 for $10 billion in a hostile takeover. Duffield and Bhusri, who was vice chairman of PeopleSoft, decided that same year to start rebuilding their company in the cloud.

  As of the end of 2011, Workday had more than $300 million in revenue and an estimated value of $2 billion, AllThingsD reported last week. The company expects to launch its IPO in the fourth quarter with the help of bankers Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Allen & Company and JPMorgan Chase & Co.

  Ironically, while the hype has focused on high-profile consumer and social-media IPOs, business-focused tech companies may be a better bet. On the consumer side, as of Friday, the stock of online game maker Zynga had fallen 25% from its IPO price in December last year. Stock of coupon site Groupon has dropped 50% since November 2011.

  But Jive Software, which makes social business tools, has seen its stock climb 50% from its IPO price in December 2011. Stock in Guidewire Software, which serves the insurance industry, is up almost 60% since the company’s debut in January.

  Workday is going after a market that is expected to soar. Worldwide revenue from delivering business software over the Internet is expected to reach $240 billion in 2020, a six-fold increase from 2010, according to Forrester Research.

  Cloud Rules

  Companies of all sizes are looking at cloud-based software because it’s often easier and less expensive than deploying and maintaining on-premise applications. In an interview with Bloomberg TV in April, Bhusri claimed Workday’s HR software is half the cost and is much easier to use. “There’s no reason enterprise software needs a training manual,” he said.

  Early investors of Workday included Duffield and venture capital firms New Enterprise Associates and Greylock Partners, where Bhusri is a partner. In its last round of funding in December 2011, Workday raised $100 million from investors that included MSD Capital, owned by Dell founder Michael Dell, and Bezos Expeditions, the personal investment entity of Jeff Bezos, founder and chief executive of online retailer Amazon.

  Workday is not without competition. German software maker SAP bought rival SuccessFactors last year for $3.4 billion, and Oracle is expected to either buy or develop its way into the HR cloud. In addition, analysts are wondering how long it will be before Workday partner Salesforce.com begins to add competing capabilities to its cloud-based software for sales reps and customer relationship management.

  Despite the competition, Workday has built a solid business that investors and some analysts believe could make it a leading player in the HR software market – even though the general public has probably never heard of the company.

  Everyone knows Facebook, of course, but analysts are debating whether a company with slowing revenue growth and a potential valuation of 99 times earnings can possibly live up to its hype.

   

  Lead image courtesy of Shutterstock.

  
  

  

• 8:00

  Simplee Raises $6 Million Series A For Its Mint-Like Approach To Tracking Healthcare Expenses

  Simplee, a Mint-like platform for tracking healthcare expenses and then paying them online, is today announcing the close of its $6 million Series A round of funding. The round was led by The Social+Capital Partnership (aka "s23p"), and includes current investors, Greylock Partners Israel. As a part of the investment, s23p's General Partner Ted Maidenberg and Greylock’s Tilli Kalisky joined Simplee’s Board of Directors. The funding will help Simplee extend its product from bill tracking and payments to other areas, including plan recommendations, care recommendations, and more. The company is also preparing to roll out its B2B offering to partners, and launch its first mobile app.
• 8:01

  Honestly.com Becomes A Talent Search Engine, Renames Itself TalentBin

  Honestly.com, a startup that allowed professionals to submit anonymous reviews of their coworkers, has been pretty quiet for the past couple of years. Turns out that's because the company has been busy reinventing itself. Today it's unveiling a new product and a new name — TalentBin. Co-founder Peter Kazanjy says TalentBin addresses one of the big problems with Honestly — not enough content. Rather than relying on users to create all the reviews, TalentBin looks at the content that already exists on the Web, specifically people's activity on a variety of social networking site. Kazanjy calls that activity your "professional exhaust," and argues that it contains lots of relevant information about your professional interests and accomplishments. So TalentBin aggregates a person's activity across sites like Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, Meetup, Quora, Github, Sourceforge, and Bitbucket, then uses that data to create a searchable profile for recruiters.
• 8:15

  Kantar Worldpanel: Android Dominates Smartphone Sales Overall; In U.S. iOS Closing In

  New figures out today from Kantar Worldpanel ComTech -- a market research division of WPP -- show that Android is, overall, continuing to make large gains in the smartphone market, accounting for a majority of sales in the 12 weeks that ended March 18. Drilling down, Android is doing particularly well in some places. In Spain, Android is the platform to beat. It accounted for a 72.3 percent of smartphone sales in the period -- the highest proportion among the markets analyzed by Kantar. But Android's domination is not across the board: in the U.S., sales of devices based on Google's platform actually declined by about 6.6 percent over last year and accounted for 47.6 percent of all smartphone sales in the country. Apple, meanwhile, saw its percentage of sales in the U.S. go up by 12.8 percent to account for 43 percent of all sales. Kantar also says that while now the majority of consumers in the UK and Australia now own smartphones, in other markets that it analyses, the tipping point has yet to be reached.

• 8:30

  Everything You Need To Know About Facebook’s Latest S-1 Filing In Less Than A Minute

  Facebook filed what will most likely be the last of seven amendments to its S-1 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Tuesday morning. The company is expected to stop taking orders for shares tonight and will likely begin trading when Nasdaq opens Friday morning.

  Here's a succinct, just-the-facts list of changes in the latest filing.

  • The company now plans to offer an additional 50.6 million shares to cover over-allotments.
  • Despite what was called “lackluster demand” on its road show, Facebook raised the share price of its IPO to a range of $34 to $38 per share, from the prior $28 to $35 per share. That means the company could raise as much as $14.7 billion Friday.
  • The high end of that range would put Facebook’s valuation at $103 billion. The low-end is $92 billion.
  • Facebook, which had initially said it hoped to close its $1 billion acquisition of Instagram by the end of the second quarter, is now saying it hopes to close the deal by the end of the year.

  
  

  

• 8:30

  Intel Small Business Advantage is a security nightmare

  Intel doesn't understand security, but they are not shy about shouting it from the rooftops.

• 8:30

  Rock Health Grad HealthInReach Merges With PriceDoc To Bring Price Transparency To Healthcare

  Founded in 2009 by Scott Sangster and incubated in healthtech accelerator Rock Health's inaugural batch, HealthInReach has been on a mission to combat the high cost of healthcare and put consumers back in control of their healthcare by creating a transparent online marketplace for comparing the quality and price of health providers and procedures. The startup has built a consumer-focused (or B2B2C) complement to services like Castlight, whereby those who are uninsured or pay out-of-pocket for medical procedures can use its platform to search for and learn about doctors and dentists based on experience, reputation and prices. To date, over 3 million people have used the service to look for doctors. However, from the outset, HealthInReach intentionally limited its market to southern California (the startup is headquartered in LA), and, as a result, it's been looking to expand nationally and grow its database of doctors, optometrists and dentists. To do so, the company is today announcing a merger with PriceDoc, a similarly aligned marketplace for healthcare providers, in an effort to combine HealthInReach's proprietary tech with PriceDoc's national database of tens of thousands of providers.

• 8:34

  Structure 2012: the ongoing cloud computing evolution

  GigaOM's fifth annual Structure conference examines how cloud computing is changing the way business is done around the world and brings together the leaders innovating, shaping and defining the ongoing cloud computing evolution.
• 8:37

  Can VMware draw developers, developers, developers?

  VMware's set its sights on becoming a bona fide application development powerhouse. With the latest version of its Springsource-based vFabric Suite, VMware adds application deployment automation, vSphere-optimized Posgres and a SQLFire in-memory database layer -- all are geared to woo web scale developers.
• 8:38

  How a Mormon VC ended up betting everything on Mexico

  What's a Mormon white guy from Southern California doing running a tech fund in Mexico? Paul Ahlstrom, the founding partner of one of Mexico's rare venture capital firms, Alta Ventures, says he gets that question all the time.
• 9:00

  Buddy Media arms marketers with more social tools

  Social marketing platform operator Buddy Media is rolling out a bunch of updates to its suite of tools including a unified social data API, the ability to track conversions and campaigns across their entire social media efforts, and a new mobile content development platform.

• 9:00

  Personalized Music Video Service Cull TV Acquired By Twitvid, CEO Departs

  Social video network Twitvid has closed another acquisition today, following its March deal which involved bringing the team from daily deals aggregator Frugalo on board. Today, the company is announcing it has acquired Cull TV, an independent music video sharing site, which CTO John Hurliman describes as a little bit like Pandora mixed with MTV.

• 9:00

  Social inbox Engagio becomes a social conversations network

  Engagio, a social inbox that organizes people's online conversations, is take a big step toward becoming a social network of its own. The Toronto-based start-up is rolling out a handful of new features including the ability to follow the conversations of other users.

• 9:01

  Standalone USB temperature logger

  [Jean] wrote in eager to share his latest project, a standalone temperature logger with USB connectivity. Back in November, [Jean] found himself wanting a temperature logger that was roughly the size of a USB memory stick. What he found on the market was not quite adequate in terms of price or size, so he decided [...]

• 9:03

  Ikea’s Upcoming Uppleva HDTV System Further Detailed

  Taking the term home theater in a box to a new level, Ikea made waves a few weeks back when it announced plans to start selling a self-branded HDTV and home theater system with a starting price under $1000. However, the company didn't out all the tantalizing details at the time. Gigaom managed to get a bit more info on the system including the type of apps included on the rather impressive HDTV.
• 9:05

  Engagio Brings Its Social Inbox To Your Gmail Inbox

  What's the best way to manage our conversations across all the websites and social networks we're visiting? William Mougayar, founder and CEO of Engagio, says that it's through a Gmail-style social inbox — after all, that's the interface we use to manage most of our communication already (not that everyone's happy about it), and heck, it's the way many of us read our social network updates already. Now he's taking that approach a step further. Instead of accessing their Engag.io inbox in a separate website, they can install a Chrome extension, and then read Engag.io as a separate folder within Gmail itself.

• 9:17

  Coming soon: Chrome for iPhone & iPad

  Google's Chrome browser is will appear on Apple's iOS devices this quarter suggests Macquarie (USA) Equities Research, reducing the payments that Google makes to Apple for search results in Safari. That sounds great but Apple's third-party browser limitations will surely minimize any benefits for Google.

• 9:27

  BBC Worldwide Extends Its Partnership With Video Site Viki To Cover Advertising

  BBC Worldwide, the commercial arm of the BBC, today announced an extension of its relationship with social, online TV site Viki. On the heels of a strategic investment it made last year -- BBC Worldwide participated in a $20 million Series B round that also included SK Planet, Greylock Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, Charles River Ventures, Neoteny Labs and others -- and a content licensing deal, now BBC Worldwide will also working on advertising for Viki. Through its BBC Advertising arm, the BBC will be pooling together ad inventory from its own BBC Worldwide operations with that of Viki, which is accessed in over 200 countries and offers TV shows, movies and other premium content in over 150 languages -- with those translations powered by its user base. The deal will mean that BBC can add further scale to its own advertising operations to target a class of larger advertisers looking to reach that international audience on a wide scale.
• 9:40

  Factual Releases Three New Location And Mobile Ad Targeting Tools

  Open data platform Factual.com is beefing up its Global Places offering today with three new APIs that will provide mobile developers with access to a ton of new data which can help them build better location-aware apps. But the company notes that the APIs' launch will be of special interest to mobile ad providers, including mobile ad networks, demand-side platforms and agencies, who are looking for new data points around geography. This is particularly important on mobile where traditional methods of ad targeting - beacons and cookies - aren't viable.

• 9:45

  Optical vs Social: So what kind of engineering makes sense?

  Facebook is about to go public, making Mark Zuckerberg a mega-billionaire at the age of 28. He won't be the first social-oriented engineer to hit the jackpot. Which leads to the question - what is the future of classic engineering and what should kids be embracing. Debate

• 9:58

  How to Share Your Business Photos Online - Discreetly

  

  You have just returned from a corporate retreat or some other business event that was well-documented with several amateur photographers. Now you want to share all of these pictures amongst your co-workers. The challenge is that you want to keep them private to the participants and not plaster them all over the Internets. What to do?

   

  Assume that your requirements are to satisfy the ultra-paranoid in the group and also find something that is dirt simple to use. You don't want to make everyone join a new social network just to see the photos; most of us have too many logins already. That leaves out most of the microblogging sites. And you don't want to have to worry that someone will click on the wrong button and inadvertently share the entire photo collection with the universe, including the press, competitors and so on.

  Facebook, Instagram, Google+ and many other social-networking sites aren't very good at setting up discrete group-privacy controls, so they are out of the running for our purposes. And while there are dozens of file-sharing sites such as Box.net and Evernote, the idea is to find something that is designed around uploading and sharing images.

  With that in mind, we looked at the following five services:

  1. Shutterfly.com
  2. Photobucket.com
  3. Flickr.com (now part of Yahoo)
  4. Zangzing.com
  5. Posterous Spaces (now part of Twitter)

  None of these services is perfect, but they fall into two broad categories: those that have better privacy controls and those that are easier to use.

  Let's look at our requirements in more detail:

  First, we want a service that can create a private space that doesn't appear on search engines and can't be discovered by unauthorized users. Photobucket and Shutterfly both do this, by setting up a special URL (Photobucket.com/groupname or Groupname.shutterfly.com) for your group. In Photobucket, for example, you have three choices for each album's privacy controls: everyone can see them, no one else can see them, or you can password protect them by invitation only. The latter is perfect for this application, and you can set up an album password so that only those folks who know the password can see and download the photos. (See screenshot below.) Shutterfly has similar options with its Share Sites feature.

  The problem with both Photobucket and Shutterfly is that you need to become a member to upload photos: That is fine if you have just a few shutterbugs in your group, but if everyone wants to be able to contribute images, it can become cumbersome.

  Flickr offers URLs for groups, such as http://www.flickr.com/groups/groupname. But Yahoo really wants you to sign up to its service, and you will need to do so if you want to post any photos. Flickr has a guest pass option, but it is designed to work with individual photos. And Flickr users have to make sure to set up its autoposting/notification features to keep your photos from showing up in your Facebook Timeline or other places.

  

  Zangzing (which we have written about previously) is easier to use but that comes at a privacy cost. You can set up individual albums that have their own URLs, such as http://www.zangzing.com/username/albumname. But because there is no password required, anyone who knows the URL can access the entire album. And you must join the service in order to upload pictures, you will need to join. On the plus side, you can also email pictures to albumname@zangzing.com, and they will be automatically posted to the album.

  Finally, Posterous is more of a blogging site than a photo collection, but it can be used for sharing photos, as well. Indeed, if you want to mix your photos with other business content, Posterous could be a good choice and could serve as the base for a simple low-end Web presence. Groups of photos can have their own URLs, but you do need to become a member to post content. You can also email your photos and have them posted to your site, like what Zangzing does.

  Recommendations: Start with Zangzing

  We recommend you start with Zangzing, especially if you require the simplicity of a shareable URL and don't want to mess with having each person sign up for the service. If you need the additional security that a membership site offers, then look at Photobucket. It has more granularity for the security options than Shutterfly. Steer clear of Flickr: Its interface is somewhat long in the tooth, and it is too easy to click on the wrong button and end up sharing your entire photo collection to Facebook or Twitter. If you have more confidence in your users' abilities, you can set up private groups in Facebook or Google+.

  
  

  

• 10:01

  3d printing saves the day for time-lapse photography

  Several of us here at Hackaday have discussed how much we’d like to have some tools, like a 3d printer, but just can’t justify the cost. What would we make? Why do we really need one? Why don’t we just bother [Brian Benchoff] who already has one to make us parts instead. That’s usually how [...]

• 10:08

  Patent troll tries to mangle hand craft site Etsy

  Etsy is an online marketplace where users buy and sell handmade and vintage goods. Last week, the Brooklyn-based company with the folksy feel raised a $40 million investment.

• 10:14

  Watch Out Google, Zoho Just Launched A Better DIY Website Builder (And It Does Mobile, Too)

  Web-based productivity suite Zoho is launching a new app today which, again, puts it head-to-head against its biggest competitor, Google, while filling a much-needed hole in Zoho's business tools lineup. The company is debuting Zoho Sites, a drag-and-drop website builder that allows anyone to build a professional website in minutes, without needing to know HTML or CSS. The product takes on two of Google's own offerings in one shot, including Google's simple website builder known as Google Sites, as well as Google's latest addition, a mobile website conversion tool powered by DudaMobile.

• 10:27

  Video of Android apps running on…. Tizen?

  The Samsung- and Intel backed Tizen mobile operating system could give both companies an out from using Google Android. But without apps, how successful can Tizen be? Perhaps the platform should look to Android again, but only for the apps, which run on OpenMobile's solution.

• 10:56

  Inside Microsoft’s New Azure Accelerator — Will Redmond Get The Startup Mojo?

  Back in March this year Microsoft launched its first ever "direct" startup accelerator, based out of Tel Aviv, Israel. That meant it would, for the first time, be an accelerator owner/operator. Dubbed the Windows Azure Accelerator (WAA) it looked, at least on first inspection, to be designed to push its Azure cloud computing platform. Perhaps this was some paper-thin marketing initiative? "Look everyone, startups are choosing to use Azure!" seemed to be the initial message. Indeed, the move led to some confusion in the market. Microsoft already works with TechStars and all members of its Global Accelerator Network. It also has an ongoing BizSpark marketing programme to push Microsoft products, and numerous R&D centres around the globe. What on earth was going on? Was this going to be some sort of prison for startups, where they would be force-fed gruel and lashed like galley slaves if they didn't use Azure? It turns out, no, there's more to it than that. But there is a back story to this move and a strong hint that this single move may, in the not too distant future, lead Microsoft back to its roots and re-inject that essential startup DNA back into the corporate giant.
• 11:00

  White Label App Platform Appia Rolls Out Pay Per Install Service For Google Play

  Appia, an app marketplace and white-label app platform, is broadening its support for Android with the introduction of Pay Per Install App Advertising for Google Play (formerly known as the Android Market). Up until now, all the downloads generated through PPD (pay per download) were done through an Appia-powered app store, but now developers can purchase a Pay Per Install campaign and drive traffic back to Google Play. This, in turn, can then boost their app's install numbers and rank. The news comes at a time when Appia is hitting another notable milestone: its network has passed 500 million mobile consumers worldwide.

• 11:00

  Qualtrics gets $70M to boldly scale like no one has scaled before

  Qualtrics, a decade-old marketing research company has raised a $70 million first round of venture capital. This isn't a growth capital deal, despite Qualtrics' age and the large amount. This is designed to scale Qualtrics like a startup -- from 200 to 450 employees.
• 11:00

  Hit music app maker Smule launches on Android, finally

  Music app maker Smule has been one of the longest Android hold-outs, often citing the way Android devices handle audio as a reason it hasn't embraced the mobile platform. But the company is finally showing Android some love with the release of Songify.

• 11:00

  Qualtrics Raises $70M From Accel And Sequoia: “The Biggest Software Company You Haven’t Heard Of”?

  Two of the top venture capital firms have written a big check for Qualtrics, a 10-year-old company offering online data collection and analysis. The $70 million round is Qualtrics' first institutional investment — the company says it has been profitable since it was founded in 2002. The money comes from Accel Partners and Sequoia Capital, which both have growth funds targeting investments like Qualtrics — mature companies that have already achieved some success but have bootstrapped thus far. Apparently it's the largest investment the two firms have ever made together. (Past joint investments include AdMob, the mobile ad network acquired by Google for $750 million.)

• 11:01

  I build stuff too! Fire Cannon Edition

  After hanging around festivals and burners for a bit I decided that it was finally time to show my stuff and actually build one of these crazy fire cannons everyone is always talking about.  The easiest way to go about this would have been to just follow plans from any given website: replace the valve [...]

• 11:04

  Wil Wheaton to ISPs: Don’t throttle my torrents!

  Wil Wheaton needed a copy of Ubuntu over the weekend, but the download from one of Ubuntu's web-based mirrors simply took to long. So he turned to BitTorrent - and was reminded of the fact that many entertainment industry colleagues want ISPs to throttle it.

• 11:12

  Smule Finally Makes Their Android Debut With The Auto-Tuning Songify App

  Smule has been churning out scores of popular music-making iOS apps for years now, but they've been notoriously gun-shy about bringing those apps to other platforms. As of today though, that streak has finally come to an end -- the company has just released their auto-tuning Songify app into the Google Play Store.
• 11:25

  The Timeline Bump: Khan Academy And Quora Latest To Integrate With Facebook’s Open Graph

  Last month, Facebook drove 160 million visitors and 1.1 billion visits to third-party apps, an increase of 100 million visitors and 780 million visits from the month prior. And that's just for third-party mobile apps. Thanks to the size of its user base, and the increasing power of its referral funnel, Facebook now has the ability to take sites from 0 to 60 in a matter of weeks. While this is true for content of all stripes, be they photos, games, or news readers, the most recent and most-buzzed-about evidence has been Open Graph video apps, like Socialcam and Viddy. Unsurprisingly, app developers and websites are eager not to miss the train -- the Open Graph/Timeline Lift -- and these video apps are not alone in their Facebook integrations. Now, both the cult favorite community-directed Q&A site, Quora, and the fast-growing, increasingly popular non-profit educational video repository Khan Academy are on board. And, as a result, educational content is becoming social, gamified, and more discoverable. It's friends helping friends get smart.

• 11:29

  Virgin Mobile gets a Google Wallet phone: LG Optimus Elite

  As the only major U.S. carrier backing Google Wallet, Sprint is trying to help its cause, releasing the LG Optimus Elite for Virgin Mobile on Tuesday. The $149 Android 2.3 smartphone costs $149.99, putting an NFC-based smartphone in the hands of a wider potential audience.

• 11:33

  SaneBox Adds Smarter Reminders, Lets You Snooze Emails, Sync Reminders To Calendars

  SaneBox is definitely starting to get my attention. The company, which is focused on solving the very real problem of email overload, has just rolled out a minor, but clever, new feature: reminders that sync to calendars. With the so-called "SaneRemindMe 2.0" offering, you can quickly defer emails until you're ready to deal with them. It's essentially a "snooze" button for your email. Starting now, those reminders don't just bump up emails in your inbox at the appropriate times, they can also sync to your calendar.
• 11:51

  Tenable Network Security Creates A Gibson-esque Network Visualizer

  This video by Tenable Security is pretty wild. It shows a visualization of an office network. Using different colors and lines users can pin-point problem areas based on traffic and data being sent and received to each machine. The system lets you call out various aspects of the network using marker shape, color, and network lines. For example, you can change symbol colors depending on vulnerabilities and even change the shape and position of mobile devices. You can see a little more of the visualization over here.

• 11:56

  Read/Write Daily: Watch Out for Zombie Drones

  Today's theme is do it yourself. You know that saying, "If you want something done right... " Well, sometimes the status quo won't bring the future fast enough, so fired-up people have to do it themselves.

  Even if that means building space stations.

  As U.S. government support for its space program wanes, NASA is making legal room for entrepreneurs who want to take over.

  These new private space companies are teaming up to build whole space stations.

  The European Space Agency is looking for asteroids and other "space hazards," and amateur astronomers have volunteered their help.

  On the Web, companies want to serve us our future by monetizing our information. Maybe we'd have a better future if we became our own platforms.

  What happens if we don't do it ourselves? We lose control. We get driven around by robots...

  ... and we have to watch out for zombie drones.

  Image via Shutterstock.

  Past entries from Read/Write Daily

  
  

  

• 12:00

  Study: 3G/4G tablets suck up 3X more data than smartphones

  This probably won’t shock you, but tablets connected to 3G and 4G networks consume a lot more data than their smartphone equivalents. However, on Tuesday video optimization vendor Bytemobile reported exactly how much: iPads eat up three times more data than iPhones over the cellular network.

• 12:01

  An interview with [Justin Gray]

  When it comes to the subject of hacking, we all have different ideas of what is the coolest. Some prefer bits and solder, some prefer hammers and fire.  [Justin Gray] has built a name for himself doing a broad mixture of the two. Mainly known for his fire sculpture bots, [justin] also has a fab [...]

• 12:04

  HTC Sensation 4G gains Android 4.0, loses free tethering

  The good news: HTC Sensation owners on T-Mobile's network are getting a software update to Android 4.0, also known as Ice Cream Sandwich along with HTC Sense 3.6. The bad news: It will cost $14.99 monthly to keep using the phone as a Wi-Fi hotspot.

• 12:07

  Mayor Bloomberg Unveils The Made In NY Digital Jobs Map For Silicon Alley Startups

  Today Mayor Bloomberg rolled out the Made in New York Digital Map, an easy way to find New York City's tech startups and job opportunities. The interactive map keeps startups, investors, developers and designers in the know about what's going on in Silicon Alley. From the Made in New York Map site: "The Made in NY Digital Map is a visual testament to the vibrant state of New York's digital industry - showing a powerful constellation of over 500 homegrown startups, investors and coworking spaces across the five boroughs. Browse by neighborhood, review job postings, or add your own startup to the digital landscape - the Made in NY Map is a living resource that reflects New York City's dynamic innovation ecosystem."
• 12:15

  Facebook Hires Team From Android Photosharing App Dev Lightbox To Quiet Mobile Fears

  Facebook has just closed a deal to hire the full team of seven employees from Android photosharing app developer Lightbox, which should reduce worries that mobile will be its downfall. The Lightbox Photos app developed by the 500 Startups company automatically created personal photo blogs from a user's uploads. But now it will be shut down, has already been stripped from Google's Play marketplace, and people have until June 15th to download their photos. Along with the Instagram buy, the last-minute-before-IPO Lightbox hires will help assure investors that Facebook will do what it takes to win the very mobile-centric future of social networking. But the Lightbox talent acquisition still doesn't illuminate how Facebook will make more money off of little screens.
• 12:20

  Chrome 19 Launches, Now Features Built-In Tab Syncing

  Google today launched version 19 of its Chrome browser for Windows, Mac, Linux and Chrome Frame to its mainstream stable release channel. Besides the usual bug fixes and performance improvements, the highlight of today's release is the addition of tab syncing to Chrome. With this, Chrome users can now have their open tabs synced across all of their devices, including tablets and phones that run the Ice Cream Sandwich-only Chrome for Android beta.

• 12:34

  Does Europe lack ambition? No, but some Europeans do

  With the financial outlook gloomy across Europe, there's constant chatter about how hard it is not being Silicon Valley. But a growing number of people are challenging entrepreneurs to stop complaining and start building. Can they light a fire under the continent's startups?

• 12:35

  From Disrupt Battlefield Runner-Up To Veterans Of Proximity-Based Social, Sonar Tells All

  My first-ever Disrupt was a year ago, almost exactly. I had just started working for TechCrunch and Disrupt NYC 2011 was my initiation, of sorts. I had heard of Disrupt before — but witnessing the Battlefield first-hand, from the front row no less, is a totally different beast. Every uncertain moment or slip-up during a presentation left me worried, and each triumphant joke or wondrous moment made me clap as loud as the folks in the back. Looking back on that time, a handful of startups are still locked safely away in my memory, the most prominent of all being Sonar. That's because the second I heard the concept, I knew it would be a big deal. Considering a host of new apps on the market that do similar things, like Highlight and Crowded Room, I was right. But as Disrupt NYC 2012 (tickets here) draws nigh, I couldn't help but wonder what life has been like for Brett Martin and his social proximity company since launching on the main stage just a year ago. I set out on a mission to find out the answer, and Brett Martin was kind enough to oblige.

• 12:40

  Can Quora build a for-profit version of Wikipedia?

  The $50-million funding round that Quora recently closed has raised some eyebrows. Is this just another example of a bubble-style atmosphere in Silicon Valley's venture capital community, or is the crowdsourced question-and-answer site really onto something that could be a multibillion-dollar idea?

• 12:52

  LayerNation’s El Tirador Makes Classy Layered Drinks With Science

  Ask and ye shall receive: when I put a call out for cool hardware start-ups, little did I know that we'd be barraged by some amazing stuff. Case-in-point: the LayerNation El Tirador, a unique drinks maker that automatically creates layered drinks using different liqueurs. LayerNation is part of the Yes Delft! incubator and is currently being tested in Europe as a fast and easy way to make clever drinks for soccer games and special events. The initial version, shown above, has been replaced by a more commercial-friendly system that looks like it would be at home in an Ibiza club.
• 12:56

  MoboTap Inks Deal With KDDI, Dolphin Browser To Be Preloaded On New Japanese Android Phones

  MoboTap's popular Dolphin Browser has racked up over 16 million downloads worldwide, but that hasn't stopped them from taking steps to expand internationally. The company announced earlier this morning that they have entered into a new agreement with Japanese wireless carrier KDDI that will see their browser pre-loaded on a number of new Android handsets going forward. KDDI is Japan's second-largest wireless carrier with nearly 35 million subscribers under their belts, with just about 20% of those users owning smartphones. All things considered, it's a big chance for MoboTap to bolster their brand outside the confines of the United States.
• 12:57

  Teens In Tech Launches A Job Board For High Schoolers

  I always hear that startups are competing for young talent, especially on the tech side — but usually that means college students and recent grads. What about high schoolers?
• 12:57

  Betaworks’ Novel Way Of Funding Early-Stage Ideas: A Studio Deal With Brooklyn’s Fictive Kin

  Can early-stage tech startups be financed the way that Disney might fund a Pixar film? We're about to find out. New York's betaworks is crossing the Brooklyn Bridge to do a deal with design collective Fictive Kin. It's pretty unusual because it resembles the way a producer might bankroll a movie or a game publisher might work with a developer. In this deal, betaworks is paying Fictive Kin, a design collective, a lump sum every year to create three or four concepts. Those concepts will be the basis for companies that are majority owned by Betaworks. If one or two of them happens to take off, betaworks will jump in and figure out how to scale it with the help of Fictive Kin.

• 12:59

  Interview: BBC’s Olympics will deliver an ‘online legacy’

  BBC News & Knowledge general manager Phil Fearnley tells paidContent BBC Online has conceived Olympics Web, connected TV, mobile and tablet products as platforms for re-use on future large events.
• 12:59

  Video reveal: BBC super-sizing “the first truly digital Olympics”

  NBC may have been criticised for not streaming enough Olympics Games - but, in the UK, the BBC plans to stream all 2,500 hours of this summer's London 2012 events across web, mobile, tablet and connected TV.

• 13:00

  Brad Garlinghouse Becomes CEO Of Booming File Sharing Site YouSendIt

  Box has been grabbing headlines lately because it has been nailing a big market: enterprise customers who need to easily share and store big collections of documents online. But a quiet Silicon Valley rival has also been winning a bunch of this turf -- YouSendIt. Today, the company is backing up its position with some new stats, and a new chief executive, Brad Garlinghouse. He's coming off a two-year stint as the head of consumer products at AOL, and a previous five years heading up consumer and enterprise apps at Yahoo. He also has roots as an investor and entrepreneur, so this move is going back to that.

• 13:00

  Yahoo, AOL vet Garlinghouse named CEO of YouSendIt

  Brad Garlinghouse, who once headed up AOL's Silicon Valley operations, is now CEO of YouSendIt, a provider of file sharing, sync, storage and collaboration software for businesses. Garlinghouse replaces Ivan Koon who is leaving the company after six years.