Photo discovery startup Pixable raises $3.6M
Pixable, a New York City startup offering a new way to explore your friends’ photos, just announced that it has raised $3.6 million in a second round of funding.
The company has released several apps, but its focus seems to be on Photofeed, an app that launched earlier this year (Pixable launched the iPad version at the DEMO conference). Photofeed is supposed to help users explore photos that their friends have already posted on Facebook, … Continue Reading
Micro-lending site Kiva goes green
Kiva, a site that enables person-to-person loans, has just added a new category of green loans to help borrowers move to cleaner and safer forms of energy, green agriculture, transport and recycling. Loans made through Kiva generally go to individuals or entrepreneurs in the developing world, but some do go to people in the U.S.
With the new green loans, 66-year-old Concepción (pictured), a farmer in Tarma, Peru, got a 12-month $550 loan to buy … Continue Reading
Amazon's cloud collapse looks better on day 2, but problems continue
Sunlight is finally beginning to shine through Amazon’s disastrous cloud crash, which seemed impossible to avoid yesterday as it took down major sites like Foursquare and Reddit. Certain parts of the service are still struggling to get back online.
Downtime is to be expected for any web service, but the prolonged failure of Amazon’s cloud (it first went down overnight on Wednesday, April 20) is particularly painful, since so many companies rely on it for … Continue Reading
App search engine Quixey lets developers manage apps across app stores
Quixey, a new startup that’s developing a search engine dedicated to apps, announced today that it will also make life easier for developers by giving them an easy way to manage their apps across multiple stores.
Such a feature would be a boon to developers, since they can manage messaging for theirs apps in one location instead of having to visit each app store one at a time. Additionally, Quixey’s App Developer accounts will allow … Continue Reading
The pros and cons of dorm room startups
Aaron Levie co-founded Box.net from his dorm room, but he quickly learned that there were some strong advantages and disadvantages to that. While the company’s overhead was minimal, providing customer service from an accounting class is hardly ideal – and investors are instinctively more wary of entrepreneurs who don’t commit. Levie discusses how he weighed the pros and cons in this Entrepreneur Thought Leader Lecture, given at Stanford University.
http://ecorner.stanford.edu/swf/player-ec.swf
(Can’t see the video? Click … Continue Reading
Obama hopes Silicon Valley investment will pay off
President Obama’s busy trip to Silicon Valley included a private fundraiser at the home of billionaire Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com, and a town hall meeting with Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg at the Palo Alto, Calif. headquarters of the social networking firm. I felt his impact by getting stuck in the “Obama jam,” as the accompany traffic snarl in San Francisco was called.
Obama’s second pilgrimage in two months to tech magnates here will … Continue Reading
Select devs get souped up iPhone 4 with A5 chip to prep for iPhone 5
Apple is helping select game developers to gear up for the iPhone 5 by handing out super-powered iPhone 4s equipped with its new A5 chip, 9to5Mac reports.
The extra-powerful iPhone 4 — dubbed the “iPhone 4S” by the site’s insider source — would let developers test the potential capabilities of Apple’s next iPhone without waiting several months for prototype devices to become available.
Apple’s new A5 chip, which also powers the iPad 2 and offers … Continue Reading
Samsung files patent countersuits against Apple
Samsung Electronics has filed patent countersuits against Apple in South Korea, Japan and Germany, responding to last week’s lawsuit from Apple about how Samsung’s smartphones and tablets copied Apple’s products.
Samsung said that Apple infringes five patents, but didn’t specify the technologies involved. The stakes are high and the litigation is just one among a number of companies jockeying to become the ultimate power in smartphones. Other lawsuits involve Apple against Nokia and HTC, Microsoft … Continue Reading
Game journalist may cash in on the making of Portal 2
Geoff Keighley is a well-known game journalist who hosts the show Game Trailers TV with Geoff Keighley on Friday nights on Spike TV. He has written a 15,000-word story on The Final Hours of Portal 2, but he published it in a very non-traditional way.
Keighley’s story will be available to readers as a $1.99 app for the Apple iPad. It will be an interesting test for journalists who have a long story to tell … Continue Reading
Android startups get their own A-Fund from DCM
The tech world already has an iFund for iPhone and iPad startups, not to mention a BlackBerry Partners Fund for their BlackBerry counterparts, so hey, why not an A-Fund for Android too?
That’s what venture firm DCM annnounced today. The firm said in a press release that it’s “open to startups and developers from around the world, at any stage and size, whose products will shape the future of the Android ecosystem.”
It sounds like … Continue Reading
Japan's Gree buys OpenFeint mobile social game platform for $104M
Japanese mobile social network Gree has purchased mobile social game platform operator OpenFeint for $104 million.
Yes, it’s time to start yelling “The Japanese are coming. The Japanese are coming.” Gree’s purchase of the Burlingame, Calif.-based startup follows the $403 million acquisition of San Francisco mobile game firm Ngmoco by Japan’s DeNA, which is a big rival of Gree’s. The deal shows that mobile is heating up, and multiple companies see the value of building … Continue Reading
Kaspersky Lab stays quiet on kidnapping of founder's son
Reports surfaced in Russia today that the son of Eugene Kaspersky, chief executive of antivirus company Kaspersky Lab, has been kidnapped.
The Moscow-based company is one of Russia’s stand-out successes when it comes to technology. The kidnapping could draw attention to the business risks related to crime in Russia — risks that admittedly exist in any country — at a time when the Russian government is trying to establish a high-tech industry in Russia. It … Continue Reading
AT&T craps on T-Mobile, self, in FCC filing
Like the kid who beat you up at the bus stop because he felt bad about being obese, AT&T is a bully because it hates itself. At least that’s how the mobile giant appears in its enormous and unintentionally hilarious FCC filing, its first attempt at trying to convince regulators that acquiring T-Mobile will “promote, not diminish” competition among mobile carriers.
As first reported by Ars Technica, here are a few examples of how AT&T … Continue Reading
Sony's PlayStation Network suffers big outage
The good news is that Sony has more than 70 million registered users for its PlayStation Network online service for the PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Portable. The bad news is that they’re all angry because Sony suffered an outage today.
Sony is still investigating what’s wrong, but it predicted the service would likely take a day or two to bring back up. The outage comes on the same day that Amazon’s cloud-based web services business … Continue Reading
Is Facebook making another talent acquisition?
Here’s one from the rumor mill: Facebook may be acquiring a San Francisco-based social media company in the type of “talent acquisition” transaction that has become the trademark of the social web giant.
This rumor falls under the same category as the Zuckerberg $1 billion Mexican meal story (which shall henceforth be referred to as “TacoTip”): an item that could turn out to be interesting, or it could turn out to be nothing at all.… Continue Reading
AMD profit jumps, but not as high as Intel's
Advanced Micro Devices said its net income nearly doubled in the first quarter, but it still lags behind the performance of market leader Intel in the market for microprocessors for PCs.
Sunnyvale, Calif.-based AMD is the perennial underdog in the PC chip market, but it is an important counterweight to Intel’s near-monopoly power.
AMD saw its profit almost double to more than $510 million for the first quarter ended April 2, up from $257 million … Continue Reading
Groupon moves closer to IPO with COO from Google
Today’s Groupon deal is a 47-year-old Chicago-based Google executive who runs global sales planning and technology for the search engine giant. For an undisclosed salary, she’ll be your chief operating officer!
Sound good? It did to Groupon, who will bring on Margo Georgiadis as their COO. The Georgiadis hiring, which follows the hiring of Amazon’s Jason Child as CFO in December, is a key move toward an IPO for the daily deal site, who needs … Continue Reading
PlayBook beats odds with 50,000 units moved on day one
The BlackBerry PlayBook beat expectations by selling more than 50,000 devices when it launched Tuesday, according to estimates from RBC Capital Markets analyst Mike Abramsky.
That puts Research in Motion’s first crack at a tablet ahead of the Motorola Xoom and Samsung Galaxy Tab in regards to units moved on launch day. Several analysts said the strong first-day showing probably came from pre-sales to business customers already toting a BlackBerry smartphone, which is critical to … Continue Reading
News.Me: Another cockamamie NYT subscription service?
Hey, you know how you don’t pay anything for checking out the news stories your friends share on Twitter? Well, the New York Times and Betaworks’ Bitly would like to change that with News.me, a social news aggregator for the iPad that went live the App Store today.
News.me takes the news stories posted by the people you follow on Twitter, filters them based on how often the stories are clicked and shared, and then … Continue Reading
Mitsubishi Prices 2012 'i' Electric Car At $27,990 Before Tax Breaks
Driving electric just got cheaper, as Mitsubishi announced that its 2012 ‘i’ electric car would be priced at just $27,990 before incentives when deliveries begin in California next January.
That makes the 2012 Mitsubishi ‘i’ the least expensive plug-in car on sale in the U.S. market. It qualifies for a $7,500 Federal income-tax credit, plus a host of state, local, and corporate incentives.
The new pricing puts significant pressure on Toyota, which had vowed that … Continue Reading
