Reader contest: What will be the Apple tablet's killer feature?
With Apple’s big secret product launch less than 24 hours away, we’re still looking for readers to comment below or email me with their predictions for what the Great Big New Feature in Apple’s tablet computer will be.
What will make this Apple gadget unique and special beyond the iMac and iPhone? We’re looking for very specific details on what you think will wow us. Not just “a new way to read newspapers,” but a … Continue Reading
Quest Discovery takes $3.75M for medical records outsourcing
Quest Discovery Services, maker of tools used to outsource medical and public record management, has brought in $3.75 million in a mezzanine round of funding. Based in San Jose, Calif., the company is backed by the Central Valley Fund.… Continue Reading
FunMail livens up text messages on Android too
FunMail, a free iPhone app that uses word-recognition technology to send pictures with your text messages, is now launching on Android and upgrading the current version in hopes of widening and building a core audience that can be monetized later.
“I’m trying to build the ‘devastation’ factor,” said FunMobility chief executive Adam Lavine, meaning that he wants users to be devastated if the application went away. Right now, 26 percent of survey respondents say they … Continue Reading
The Flash is always greener: Why the iPhone won't have Flash anytime soon
Editor’s note: Jeff Glueck is the chief executive of Skyfire, a company with a mission to dramatically improve the browsing experience on mobile phones. Skyfire’s browser in version 1.5 is available on Windows Mobile and Nokia Series 60 smartphones, and will be coming to more platforms in 2010. Glueck wrote this editorial for VentureBeat.
Internet web browsing has improved greatly since the days of WAP browsers, and mobile enthusiasts have been right to celebrate the … Continue Reading
Acorn Energy revenue jumped 51% — good news for clean coal
Acorn Energy, the publicly-traded energy holding company, has released preliminary earnings sowing a 51 percent jump in revenue from $20.7 million in 2008 to $31.3 million to 2009. Notably, these figures were buoyed by an 80 percent increase in revenue for its subsidiary CoaLogix, maker of clean coal technology.
That company, which specializes in filters that remove harmful agents like heavy metals and nitrogen oxides from coal-fired plant emissions, reported revenue of $18.1 million this … Continue Reading
Ustream debuts pay-per-view webcasting
Will people pay for online content served in real-time, and how much will they pay? Webcasting company Ustream will find out on February 6th, when comedian Dane Cook will offer a live video stream of the last show in his current tour for $5 as the first trial of Ustream’s new pay-per-view format.
Fans can buy a ticket for the show ahead of time at ustream.tv/danecooktickets. The five-dollar package includes a chat with Cook both … Continue Reading
Greystripe claims success for 99-cent mobile ads for app developers
There are, right now, basically two kinds of ads that you can buy to run on smartphones: Branding or performance. Branding ads are meant only to show big-spending phone owners your brand name with some sort of message about it. You pay for each time the ad is shown on someone’s phone.
Performance ads are meant to drive sales. The current pricing model is usually what’s called cost per click (CPC) or pay per click … Continue Reading
Justin.tv makes it easier to create and share live video
Popular video streaming site Justin.tv says it has made some successful enhancements to its video creating and sharing capabilities. As of two weeks ago, only 2 percent of of users who clicked on the button to “broadcast” a video actually ended up creating one. The biggest complaint? The process was too complicated.
San Francisco-based Justin.tv announced today that it has successfully made it easier to create and share live video on the site by by … Continue Reading
U.S. virtual goods revenue expected to hit $1.6B this year
Virtual goods are expected to hit $1.6 billion in revenue in the U.S. in 2010, according to a report from Inside Network.
The most interesting part of that number is that social gaming startups — which didn’t exist three years ago — will account for about $835 million of that total, said Justin Smith, founder of Inside Network and co-author with Charles Hudson of the Inside Virtual Goods report.
Virtual goods are digital items that … Continue Reading
Google Voice finally sneaks onto the iPhone
Google Voice finally made it onto the iPhone after a very long and unusually public dispute with Apple today.
Google did the runaround by making it a web app, not a native one in app store, as vice president of engineering Vic Gundotra hinted earlier this month. Instead of loading a proper app, a user will go to http://m.google.com/voice in their browser. It’s based on HTML5, which Safari now supports, and uses AppCache to let … Continue Reading
Embed real-time search results in your page with Collecta widgets
If you’re a real-time startup these days, it’s all about distribution, distribution, distribution.
That’s what Collecta is trying to do by launching widgets that you can embed into your pages with real-time search results streaming down the page. I’ve built one about Google Voice that’s pictured to the right.
The process of building a widget is fairly simple. All you do is enter in the search terms you’re looking for, the width and height of … Continue Reading
50 Three-word phrases that can make your start-up a success
(Editor’s note: Dharmesh Shah is a serial software entrepreneur and the founder and CTO of HubSpot, which provides marketing software for small businesses. This column originally appeared on his blog. )
For some reason, I like wordsmithing and trying to make phrases smaller (while still retaining some meaning). Not long ago, when I was up much too late, I tried to come up with some of my best startup advice and see if I could … Continue Reading
Sony launches MAG, a next-generation shooter game for the PS 3
Sony’s MAG is a very different kind of shooting game. When you step into the virtual battlefield of the persistent Shadow War in MAG, there are as many as 128 human-controlled enemy characters who will shoot you dead in a very short amount of time.
All told, 256 players can engage in first-person multiplayer-only combat in MAG, which launches today as an exclusive PlayStation 3 title. Sony’s Zipper Interactive game studio has been working on … Continue Reading
Fashion4Home launches social furniture site in the US
Updated.
Furniture site Fashion4Home, which launched in Germany in November of last year, is launching in the US today. The site will offer US shoppers 80 models of contemporary furniture across 12 categories, including exclusive designs, at 30-50% lower than traditional retail prices [update: a spokesperson for the company, tells us its prices are actually 50-70% lower than retail]. The launch comes just a few days after China-based on-demand furniture maker Myfab announced … Continue Reading
Roxio CinemaNow teams up with Cineplex in Canada
Roxio CinemaNow, the movie downloading service owned by Sonic Solutions, has teamed up with theater chain Cineplex Entertainment in Canada to power a new movie streaming and download service.
Canadian consumers who go to www.cineplex.com will be able to access the Cineplex-branded movie streaming and downloading service, which will be operated by Roxio CinemaNow. In other words, Roxio CinemaNow is providing a white label web-based movie service that Cineplex can market to its own consumers … Continue Reading
Who wants to build Apple tablet apps? Not just game developers (survey)
Almost every application developer out there is eager to start building applications for Apple’s long-rumored tablet, according to a new survey from Appcelerator. And although we’ve already written about the excitement from game developers, there’s actually greater interest in other kinds of apps.
Now, it’s probably a mistake to read too much into the specifics of this survey, since it doesn’t represent a comprehensive swath of developers, but rather a portion of those who use … Continue Reading
More potential photos of Apple's tablet emerge
Another hour, another Apple tablet rumor. Here are more potential photos of the “latest creation” Steve Jobs pledges to reveal on Wednesday.
These ones come from designer Dustin Curtis, who claims he has “reason to believe these are real, and that the person who took/released them purposefully manipulated the reflections to add doubt about their authenticity.”
So are they real? You be the judge.
Ground Truth debuts highly accurate way to measure traffic on mobile sites
A new mobile measurement firm, Ground Truth, today announced it has launched the first such service to use census-based measures of actual Mobile Internet usage. The data, which covers millions of mobile subscribers in the United States, will come directly from mobile operators and other data providers, allowing the company to aggregate figures on mobile data usage on any visited mobile site.
As a result, Ground Truth data will likely show a more realistic picture … Continue Reading
Waze has enlisted 500,000 users for its crowdsourced driving app
Waze, the company that offers driving directions based on crowdsourced data, is revealing some specific numbers to illustrate its progress. The company just shared its users numbers and also announced its first deal with a map provider.
The company first launched its mobile application in Israel, then moved to the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond last year. (It’s based in Israel and Palo Alto.) Now it has 500,000 users, who contribute to Waze’s data … Continue Reading
Cloudkick starts charging for (some) simple cloud management
For almost a year, Cloudkick has been offering tools that help web startups and developers manage their applications on cloud infrastructure like Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud. Now it’s finally ready to start making money from those services.
The San Francisco company’s existing features — including a dashboard with an overview of your cloud infrastructure, email alerts, and graphs that you help you visualize data like bandwidth requirements — will always be free, said co-founder and … Continue Reading
