Editor’s note: Jeff Ma is the founder of tenXer, a startup that provides tools to help people better understand their performance, progress, and productivity at work. Previously, he helped start GolfSpan.com, CircleLending, and Citizen Sports. Follow him on Twitter.
The first thing you learn when you start playing Blackjack is something called basic strategy - a decision matrix that tells you the correct play for every hand based on your cards and the dealer’s exposed card. Data and statistics will tell you that basic strategy is always the optimal strategy. In fact, following it perfectly reduces the casino’s edge over the average player from 3 percent to 0.5 percent. → Read More
Earlier this month, I wrote about Silicon Valley Voice, a karaoke competition for the tech world hosted by Silicon Valley Bank and Coverflow (a cover band made up of techies including Mayfield Fund’s Tim Chang, Facebook’s Ethan Beard, and Fandalism’s Philip Kaplan). Now, the finalists have been selected, and you don’t even have to wait until next week’s event to hear them sing.
Coverflow member (and Mayfield managing director) Raj Kapoor tells me that all of the regular tickets have sold out, with 800 RSVPs. But the organizers convinced Silicon Valley Bank to expand the budget, which means there’s room for another 200 people. → Read More
Decades before Steve Jobs, the Google founders, and Mark Zuckerberg, small groups of unglamorous technologists turned Santa Clara Valley into the world-changing region we are still reinventing today. My grandpa, Charles Alfred “Bud” Eldon, was one of them, a Hewlett-Packard engineer and executive since the days of the apricot orchards. He passed away at 7:45am this morning.
I’m going to share a little bit about his life below, because my generation in Silicon Valley and the tech world needs to know about all the shoulders of giants we are standing on, and the heights we can also reach. Too many of us don’t right now.
His story begins in Hawaii during the Great Depression. → Read More
When you think about Detroit, you don’t often think first about technology; you think about automobiles. But the reality is that nowadays, the two industries are more intertwined than ever. Indeed, it’s becoming increasingly apparent that, as Marc Andreessen likes to say, “software is eating the world” and becoming more central to the future of many traditionally non-techie companies.
Ford Motors is no exception to this trend. → Read More
A little more than a week after announcing its acquisition by telecom giant SingTel, Pixable is releasing a substantially redesigned version of its iPhone photo aggregation app.
As with the old version, the Pixable app aggregates photos and videos from social networks, highlighting the ones that are most likely to be interesting to you. The big theme with the redesign, the company says, is “letting the photos shine.” That may seem like an odd claim for a photo app — weren’t the photos front-and-center before? Well, the change is obvious when you compare at the old home page and the new one. → Read More
Apple has made a small but significant tweak to its App Store for iOS 6 users, changing the Apps for Passbook section of the store. Before, when you clicked through in Passbook the link that brings you to a list of apps, that’s all you saw: a simple listing of compatible apps. Now, there’s a new paragraph describing what Passbook is, and what Passbook-enabled apps are capable of. → Read More
Happy Friday! We have something special to give away. Box is hosting its annual BoxWorks event October 7-9 in San Francisco and we have a bunch of tickets.
Box has some amazing speakers on tap. Box CEO Aaron Levie kicks things off, followed by Marc Andreessen, John Donahoe, and Clayton Christensen. There’s also Tony Fadell, Gary Reiner and Gary Kovacs along with Adam Lashinsky, Andreas Bechtolsheim and our own Drew Olanoff. It’s three days, six keynotes, 55 speakers, and a ton of fun. → Read More
As of today, one more enterprise cloud startup is now a publicly-listed company. Qualys — trading as QLYS — opened trading today on the NASDAQ with shares priced at $12, in the mid-range of the expected offering of between $11 and $13. After a slow start in the morning, the shares climbed up to $14.85 during the day, to settle down at $14.12 at close. Not quite as much of a rise as Palo Alto Networks when it had its IPO in July 2012 — where it saw a 26% increase on its opening price of $46 — but still an increase of 17.7%.
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As part of its latest round of “spring cleaning,” Google just announced that it is shuttering AdSense for Feeds. The service, which allows publishers to earn a bit of extra revenue by adding Google’s ads to their RSS feeds, will be retired on October 2 and will close on December 3. Given that Feedburner has long been expected to be on one of Google’s next spring cleaning lists, it doesn’t come as a surprise that the company is now shutting down the only way it was actually making money from the product. → Read More
It’s that time again when Google does its “Spring Cleaning.” Basically, that means the company axes the stuff that really isn’t working and takes up too much time or resources. But lets’ call it what it is, these things failed or fizzled. → Read More
Well, Facebook shareholders sure like the sound of Gifts.
Around Wall Street’s close yesterday, the company launched a much anticipated e-commerce initiative that lets Facebook users send real, physical gifts to friends and family on birthdays and special events like engagements and weddings. It gives the company a third business model beyond advertising and payments revenue. Shares have jumped by 6.6 percent today to $21.66.
So what could Gifts mean for Facebook’s bottom line? Let’s do some guesswork. → Read More
Earlier this month, Evernote launched version 2.0 of Skitch, the popular screenshot tool the company acquired in 2011. Sadly, Skitch 2.0 didn’t just do away with Skitch’s idiosyncratic but highly functional user interface, but it also dropped a number of features in the process. Version 2.0 currently has a 1.5-star rating in the Mac App Store and almost 600 1-star reviews. Today, Evernote is launching version 2.0.1 of Skitch and thankfully, this version brings back a number of features that went missing in the first update. In addition, Evernote is making Skitch 1.0 available for download again. → Read More
The churn at Groupon’s executive level continues apace. The company has just announced that it has appointed a new vice president for North America, Rob Kilgarriff, who is taking over the role from Chris Muhr. Earlier today Reuters reported that Chris Muhr was being shipped out to Europe, where he had first started his career with Groupon, to become the new SVP for the Europe, Middle East and Africa as the daily deals company looks to fix its flagging European business.
Muhr has replaced Veit Dengler, who had joined from Dell only in April to take up the reigns as the Sawmer brothers began their gradual stepping away from management roles at the company. (The Sawmers’ CityDeal, acquired by Groupon, forms the basis of Groupon’s European operation.) Kilgarriff will report to SVP of global operations Kal Raman.
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Ever since Paranormal Activity hit it big in movie theaters five years ago, fans have been making their own spoof videos, essentially trying to replicate the found footage style of the movies in homage to the original. Shot on a shoestring budget, Paranormal Activity became a huge hit and has inspired a series of sequels, one of which — Paranormal Activity 4 — is set to be released next month, just in time for Halloween.
Making reservations just got really easy, thanks to a new partnership. Here’s what Foursquare had to say about its parntership with OpenTable today → Read More
Cloud-based data warehouse company Treasure Data officially opened its doors this week with $1.5 million in funding that includes an investment from Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto – the creator of the Ruby programming language.
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Earlier today KTVU got a major component of the Apple Maps apology story wrong, tweeting that: “Apple CEO Tom Brooks apologizes for new Maps application http://t.co/YJbhg7tj.” Obviously, KTVU got mixed up and has since corrected the error, but it sparked some funny tweets. And I couldn’t get the image above out of my head until I made it real and shared it with the world. Meet “Tom Brooks.” → Read More
MyStream, a mobile music-sharing app that launched on iOS more than a year ago, plans to go cross-platform next week with the launch of its Android app. Founder and CEO Richard Zelson also tells me the company is working on features that go beyond music-sharing, and that it’s about to raise a Series A. → Read More
HP’s TouchPad and Palm phones are dead, but webOS continues to enjoy some kind of existence as open-source technology. Following an initial beta release back at the end of August, Open webOS graduates to a 1.0 release today. This release makes it possible to fully port the OS to a host of new devices. → Read More
Sources tell us there is turmoil at the executive levels of Color Labs, the startup that launched with a focus on photo-sharing but quickly became a poster child for Silicon Valley hype after landing more than $40 million in Series A funding but failing to gain any real user traction. In recent months the company’s leadership has been in a state of flux, we’re told — and some are attributing the instability to Color’s charismatic but controversial founder Bill Nguyen.
As with any startup drama, there are many moving pieces here. But after weeks of discussions with multiple sources very close to the situation, we’re pretty confident that Nguyen has backed away from the typical duties of being CEO, although he retains the title in name. → Read More
Well, if you still harbored any doubts that HTC was working on a slightly-tweaked version of its flagship One X smartphone, some new images courtesy of Pocket-Lint should help put them to rest.
The new front and back shots provide the best look yet at the device-in-progress, and they confirm what many have already claimed — it looks nearly identical to the original One X.
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Facebook is dipping its toes into the teaching space with a new class at General Assembly, a popular education venture for startup co-working and vocational training. The new co-designed curriculum will teach aspiring developers how to develop social applications on the Facebook platform. “Facebook is happy to be working with General Assembly to help developers and would-be developers learn how to leverage the power of social,” they write in a statement to TechCrunch. → Read More
Microsoft is really trying to increase the appeal of Window Phone to developers, and a new tool just released adds a small, but very useful feature: instant translation of user reviews from one language to another. Microsoft is calling this one a “fun surprise,” but it could actually be a very helpful convenience feature in helping developers understand their audience. → Read More
Now that Motorola is owned by Google, you may think that past and present Motorola devices should get the latest and best version of Android. With Sprint announcing quietly on its forum that the Motorola XPRT will be updated to Android Gingerbread (2.3), it shows once again that the update rollout process for Android is broken — Android 2.3 was released two years ago. → Read More
The U.S. Federal Circuit Court of Appeals ruled today that U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh can decide whether or not to lift the ban on U.S. sales of Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 10.1-inch tablet, the court said today, Businessweek reports. That means Koh, who had previously refused to rule on the matter despite Samsung’s request, could overturn the ban pending this decision, making Samsung’s tablet available once again to consumers. → Read More
Google just announced an update to its Flight Search feature that makes it easier for tablet users to search for and book travel from the couch. According to a recent study, 47 percent of all U.S. tablet owners who search for travel on their tablets also end up making purchases on the device. Starting today, travelers who use their iPads or Nexus 7s to use Flight Search will get to see this new tablet-optimized user interface. → Read More
Today, Twitter announced some updates to its Discover offering. Here’s what the company had to say: → Read More
Now that Apple has told the world that it didn’t come with its best offering for Maps, the company is now featuring other map applications heavily within the App Store. → Read More
I’ve seen a lot of iPad stands in my day. Comes with the territory. But only one has ever earned a regular place in my gadget bag and on my desk: A scrappy upstart from Kickstarter that made it to big box retail called the PadPivot. And now that device just got better, with an update that fixes its sole noteworthy weak spot. → Read More
If you’re a heavy user of the startup community that is AngelList, there’s a useful little application that you should know about. The under-the-radar iOS app called “AngelList Wings” is a native app for browsing, searching, following and reading about the startups, founders and investors on AngelList. The app uses the AngelList API, allowing you to track your AngelList news feed, in order to see who has updated their status, invested, followed a company and more. It also lets you tap on each item to view more details and tweet to your favorite companies right from within the app.
While the app’s current focus is only on AngelList, the developer tells us the eventual plan is to expand AngelList Wings’ focus to become more of a resource for the startup community as a whole. He plans to do this by incorporating other APIs, including TechCrunch’s own CrunchBase API, for example, into the app’s interface. → Read More
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