The iPhone 5 hit stores last Friday. It’s the lightest, thinnest, most sleek iPhone yet. But owners are quickly discovering that with those advantages, there are some inherent downsides. The slender iPhone 5 has an anodized aluminum backplate rather than one made of Corning glass as in the iPhone 4/4S. And since aluminum is a relatively soft material, the iPhone 5 shows more wear and tear than previous models. The iPhone 4 was a magnet for fingerprints. The iPhone 5 attracts scratches and scrapes nearly as easily. → Read More
SimpliVity has raised $25 million in a Series B round for its “data center in a box,” technology. Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB) led the round with existing investors Accel Partners and Charles River Ventures also participating. The funding brings SimpliVity’s total to $43 million. The company came out of stealth last month just before VMworld.
SimpliVity’s value derives from what analysts say is its capability to simplify an ever complex IT environment while simultaneously providing a high degree of functionality that addresses the underlying issues with existing data architectures . OmniCube is the company’s flagship product. Analysts say it’s the technology’s capability to consolidate multiple products within one infrastructure that makes it formidable. Currently, companies may have mainframes from IBM, servers from HP, networking gear from Cisco and storage drives from EMC. SimpliVity’s scalable pool of shared resources means it can simplify a complex data center down to one or two boxes. → Read More
Modelled after its New York-counterpart, London is to get its own FinTech Innovation Lab. Supported by the mayor of London, the City of London Corporation and the Technology Strategy Board, and backed by Accenture, leading banks and VCs, the new programme is designed to help financial tech startups “test and fine-tune their innovations” under the mentorship of executives from some of the major financial institutions who have a presence here in London, as well as the wider local investment community.
Anything that the Big Apple can do, London can do too. → Read More
PETA, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, is offering to sponsor software that lets students poke around the innards of frogs — without actually, you know, poking around the innards of frogs. The offer is being made to schools and colleges in India that agree to give students a choice of cutting into real or virtual frog flesh — or indeed replacing traditional dissection with other “humane” alternatives. → Read More
The German online tutoring platform, Sofatutor.com, has raised a new round led by Acton Capital Partners, with participation from existing investors J.C.M.B. Beteiligungs GmbH and “VC Fonds Kreativwirtschaft Berlin” (managed by IBB Beteiligungsgesellschaft). The size of this new round isn’t being fully disclosed but is said to be in the “mid single-digit million Euro” range* → Read More
Samsung has begun rolling out Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean) to its Galaxy S III smartphone in Europe — which could mean it’s the first non-Nexus Android phone to get the 4.1 update. → Read More
Another step ahead for Facebook’s strategy to make more money out of its mobile business: the company is accepting mobile payments for its mobile web service via carrier billing in the U.S., UK and Germany and it has now been confirmed that it is Bango powering the service. The option of letting users bill services like virtual gifts and game credits to their mobile phone operators was first announced in February 2012, and means that users do not need to use premium SMS or credit cards in order to buy these: it’s a one-click system. Bango also provides similar services for BlackBerry’s App World, Opera’s Mobile Store and Google Play. It is also working with Amazon on a similar service. Bango says it will be rolling Facebook carrier billing out to further countries later in the year.
→ Read More
Last week online commerce and design powerhouse Fab was admitting, with some irony, that the design of its user experience had not been great, given that it required users to log-in before viewing items. With that requirement dumped, the stage is set for its next move: a full blown assault on the European market following its acquisition this year of Germany player Casacanda and most recently Llustre in the UK. The new ‘Fab Europe’ site opens today. → Read More
A group of long-running alternative weekly newspapers is changing hands. Village Voice Media Holdings — whose titles include the LA Weekly, Westword, and, yes, the Village Voice — is selling its publications (and their associated web properties) to a new holding company, the similarly named Voice Media Group.
The financial terms are not being disclosed. The deal includes all 13 of VVMH’s alt-weeklies, but not the online classified site Backpage.com, which will operate as its own company. → Read More
Editor’s note: Saad Khan is a seeker of bad-assness. He found it at Evolution Robotics (not to mention Blekko, Zaarly, Jobvite, Luminate, and LendingClub). He’s a Partner at CMEA Capital. And he’s doing the robot today. Follow him @saadventures or SaadWired.com.
This past week it was announced that Evolution Robotics, maker of the Mint floor cleaner, is now iRobot. The announcement is hot off the presses, the implications forming. But one thing is clear: the robot era has begun, and no one is safe, not even from their short arms and incessant nagging. → Read More
Evan Williams and Biz Stone are probably still best known for their roles in co-founding Twitter, but what many people in the general public don’t realize is that Twitter was actually born as just a small project within a technology startup called The Obvious Corporation.
In recent months, Williams and Stone (along with Jason Goldman) have shifted a good deal of their focus back to Obvious, making it into a very unique kind of company — part incubator, part investment vehicle, part idea lab — with the simple goal of “creating products that matter.” → Read More
Everywhere you turned last week, there was another story about iOS 6 Maps. Some feel like it’s a great new direction for Apple, but people like me feel like we’re left with an ugly experience that shouldn’t have been introduced to the public in its current state. → Read More
Richard Lai is reporting that over 2,000 employees of the Taiyan Foxconn plant rioted last night, causing damage on the factory campus after a guard allegedly hit a worked at 10pm.
The Taiyuan plant is notorious for their mandatory overtime requirements. Quoth Lai: → Read More
Editor’s note: Jon Bischke is a founder of Entelo and is an advisor to several startups. In the interest of full disclosure, the author is a National Co-Chair for Technology for Obama (T4O). You can follow Jon on Twitter here.
It’s election season again and 2012 is likely to be remembered for many things, one of which is the amount of money spent on political advertising. Indeed, this year’s Presidential Campaign is likely to be the most expensive in history. But amidst the talk of Super PACs and $50,000-a-plate dinners attended by amateur videographers, an interesting and inspiring shift is taking place: The increasing ability of the average citizen to connect directly with candidates through technology. → Read More
The handsomest man in the world, Bre Pettis, gives the second handsomest man in the world, Phil Torrone, a nice visit to the Makerbot Store in Manhattan. The store is now selling Makerbots, filament, as well as pre-made items like watches and toys.
The store is at 298 Mulberry Street. → Read More
Editor’s Note: Tadhg Kelly is a game designer with 20 years experience. He is the creator of the leading game design blog What Games Are, and consults for many companies on game design and development. You can follow him on Twitter here.
The really big change that social games brought about was proving that the Asian model of monetising games through virtual goods and other free-to-play business models works just as well in the West. Now big videogame makers want to try and adapt that idea to existing hardcore markets. Is that realistic? → Read More
Intel’s second bite at the smartphone market has been more akin to a gentle nibbling around the edges. At the end of last year the chipmaker teased a smartphone reference design running its new Medfield x86 chip. Nine months Intel chips have found their way inside six smartphones, yet none apparently destined for the U.S. → Read More
Editor’s note: Michael Weinberg is a staff attorney at Public Knowledge, an organization that preserves the openness of the Internet and the public’s access to knowledge; promotes creativity through balanced copyright; and upholds and protects the rights of consumers to use innovative technology lawfully. Michael focuses primarily on copyright, issues before the FCC and emerging technologies like 3D printing. Follow him on Twitter.
FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski wrote last week on TechCrunch about the importance of speed. Specifically, he highlighted the importance of speed in the next wave of Internet innovation. While he is right about the importance of speed, he missed one key point: broadband speed isn’t worth much if it is crippled by data caps. → Read More
It seems that the Iranian government is working to take even tighter control of the country’s already heavily-censored version of the Internet.
The government said that it’s going to launch its own domestic Internet, and that the system will be fully operational by March 2013, according to Reuters and others (who, in turn, seem to be basing their reports on the Iranian media). It’s not clear whether all access to sites outside of Iran will be blocked once the domestic system is live. → Read More
Apple is pursuing people with experience working on Google Maps to develop its own product, according to a source with connections on both teams. Using recruiters, Apple is pursuing a strategy of luring away Google Maps employees who helped develop the search giant’s product on contract, and many of those individuals seem eager to accept due in part to the opportunity Apple represents to build new product, instead of just doing “tedious updates” on a largely complete platform. → Read More
Editor’s Note: Leonid (“Lenny”) Kravets is a patent attorney at Panitch, Schwarze, Belisario and Nadel, LLP in Philadelphia, PA. Lenny focuses his practice on patent prosecution and intellectual property transactions in computer-related technology areas. He specializes in developing IP strategy for young technology companies and blogs on this topic at StartupsIP. Follow Lenny on Twitter: @lkravets and @startupsIP.
While perusing the latest patent lawsuit filings on PriorSmart this week, I was drawn to a series of cases filed by a small company called PersonalWeb against RackSpace (possibly for hosting Github), Nexsan, Facebook, Apple, Yahoo, Microsoft, and IBM. → Read More
Just about an hour after Apple’s iPhone 5 became available for pre-order, the company’s website started alerting customers that their phones would likely arrive a week or two after the phone went on sale in its retail stores on September 21. Clearly, most pundits assumed, this meant that the demand for the iPhone 5 was so overwhelming that even Apple’s finely tuned supply chain couldn’t quite keep up with demand. It turns out, however, that instead of having to wait two weeks or more, many of these customers who were originally told their phones would arrive on October 5 or later are now getting their phones delivered tomorrow or a bit later in the week. → Read More
Most Apple fans become slightly uncomfortable at the sight of Apple’s latest television commercials featuring celebrities talking aimlessly to their iPhones. A subtle message in these ads is that consumer technologies can now place virtual assistants in the palms of our hands. The advertising logic is as follows: get a new iPhone, ask it for information or to run tasks, and it will oblige. In the case of those celebrity commercials, it almost feel as if they’re talking to a digital version of the real life assistants they employ.
When it does work, Siri helps Apple create a deeper emotional bond between the consumer and their technology. While handheld technologies are providing varying levels of assistance to users, a similar wave is taking over the San Francisco Bay Area, not just with bits, but humans, too. A number of separate forces are converging to make segment, organize, and mobilize human workforces for just about any human-powered task one could imagine. → Read More
Editor’s note: Daniel Gross is CEO and co-founder of Cue. You can follow him on Twitter here.
After meticulously analyzing virtually every aspect of his digital life since 1989, Stephen Wolfram noticed this: “The more routine I can make the basic practical aspects of my life, the more I am able to be energetic—and spontaneous—about intellectual and other things.” → Read More
The legal fight between mega-listings site Craigslist and third parties that have used its data in their own applications looks like it is taking on a new dimension this week. 3Taps, the company sued by Craigslist in July over 3Taps’ Craigslist data API, is planning to file a countersuit against Craigslist, citing unfair and uncompetitive business practices in violation of federal and state antitrust laws, TechCrunch has learned. The suit will be filed in Federal Court in the Northern District of California on Monday.
At issue is the claim that the information on Craigslist is already publicly available through searches on sites like Google. Here’s one example: → Read More
Editor’s note: Sarah Downey is a senior privacy strategist at Albine, provider of online privacy solutions. Keep track of her on her blog and on Twitter.
The ad industry says that Do Not Track will destroy the free Internet. We love the Internet and would be pretty upset if it died, so we looked deeper into this claim.
→ Read More
Editor’s note: This guest post was written by Mike Shema, director of engineering at Qualys, a leading provider of cloud security and compliance solutions. Mike is also author of the recently published book “Hacking Web Apps: Detecting and Preventing Web Application Security Problems.” Contact him here.
HTML5 reinvigorates a technology that’s been driving web content for more than 20 years. Notably, modern browsers can still render the majority of decades-old sites still lingering from the web’s early days, but modern sites expect browsers to be a significantly more powerful platform than their predecessors. → Read More
Yes, Apple Maps redirect to Google Maps on desktop, Android and any non-iOS 6 phones when you share your location. Womp. Obviously this is happening because there’s no hub for Apple Maps on the web, but still, the absurdity of this loop is exemplary of how ill-thought out this whole Maps switch was. → Read More
I was always a smart kid. Did very well on tests all through grade school, didn’t have to do much work because the work I did do suggested to my teachers that there wasn’t an issue. Just a couple missing worksheets, he’ll do fine. When I got to middle school, I took the usual approach to things, which, for me, was always to just do them. That had worked brilliantly before, so I kept right on going.
I failed. And I don’t mean I got an A- and fretted about it like an overachiever. I fully failed math, test after test, almost ended up in remedial classes. Eventually I got it together, but years later I’ve accepted that among the things I have talent in, math is not one of them. Learning that about myself was an important step. Learning it about others is also important, but sometimes it has the distressing but necessary side effect of disillusionment.
Apple’s wretched maps app is a good opportunity for the company to learn something similar about itself, and for the world to recast its opinion of them. We’re all grown-ups here. Why don’t we relate like grown-ups to the companies we love — and hate? → Read More
Editor’s note: Ronen Shilo is the founder, chairman, and CEO of Conduit, a provider of cloud-based solutions that empower web and mobile publishers to engage their users across multiple platforms. Follow him on his Conduit blog and on Twitter.
Every day I thank the universe for my inexperience. Why do I say that? Because one of the distinct advantages of not focusing one’s energies on becoming CEO of a big company – big, at least, by Israeli standards – is that you aren’t a prisoner of expectations. Or convention. → Read More
