Sony buys out Ericsson for $1.5B and tries to become more like Apple

Sony is moving forward with its long-rumored plans to buy out Ericsson from its joint mobile venture in a bid to wrangle control of its future smartphones.

The deal, worth some 1.05 billion euros (or $1.5 billion), is a significant move for Sony. By taking full control over its mobile outfit, Sony has the potential to develop even more innovative smartphones and tie all of its devices more smoothly into its content ecosystem. Basically, Sony … Continue Reading

Review: Battlefield 3 is EA’s biggest fumble since Medal of Honor

Battlefield 3 is easily the most important holiday release for Electronic Arts. All year the publisher has aggressively hyped the DICE-developed sequel as a Call of Duty-killer, and with Modern Warfare 3 still two weeks from release, EA has the vital first-to-market advantage. Although EA seems to have bet the farm on this title, analysts still expect Modern Warfare 3 to outperform Battlefield 3 by a 2:1 margin. Last year’s Call of Duty game, Call … Continue Reading

Farmers turn grass into cash with the Grassometer

The well-dressed dairy farmer may soon be sporting a new gadget clipped to his Wellington boot — the Grassometer. The device just landed 50,000 EUR ($70,000) in funding from Enterprise Ireland’s Competitive Start Fund. The Grassometer uses ultrasound to take up to 200 measurements of the length of grass in a field as the farmer walks around it. The measurements are triggered by an accelerometer, mapped with GPS and sent to the farmer’s smartphone using … Continue Reading

Alfred digital concierge now does group recommendations

Cleversense today released a powerful update to its robotic concierge app, Alfred: group recommendations. Alfred is the public face of a very brawny recommendation algorithm, perfected over three years by cofounders Babak Pahlavan and Nima Asgarbhegi.

Understanding context is vital to Alfred’s function. Unlike many web apps that rely on data, Alfred learns your tastes by discovering patterns. By connecting those patterns to places in its database, Alfred starts to develop a picture of the … Continue Reading

Discovr releases Mac app, hits 1M downloads, gets $1.1M funding (exclusive)

Australian mobile music startup Filter Squad hit one million downloads for its iOS app Discovr today, released a version of the app for Macs and closed a $1.1 million seed round of funding.

Discovr lets you find music by entering an artist you like in the search field. Based on that artist, the app will show you an interactive map of potential songs and artists you would enjoy. And believe it or not, the company … Continue Reading

Battlefield 3 suffers severe launch issues, players outraged [Updated]

Update [11/07/11]: EA has sent along some information on the current status of the Battlefield 3 servers. According to VP of Public Relations Tammy Levine, “Server stability has remained consistent at 98.9%.” However, to address connectivity concerns and provide “full transparity” EA has also launched a server status page, which tells whether the online features are operational on each platform, though it lacks any in-depth view at individual servers.

EA is also reportedly addressing a … Continue Reading

Lawyer Up! Massive RIM outage prompts class action suit

A class action lawsuit was filed today against Research in Motion (RIM), the makers of BlackBerry, after a massive, three-day service outage affected millions of its subscribers worldwide in October.

The lawsuit was filed Tuesday in Quebec Superior Court by a Montreal law firm, “on behalf of individuals who have BlackBerry smartphones and who pay for a monthly data plan but were unable to access their email, BlackBerry Messenger service (BBM), and/or Internet for the … Continue Reading

Google quarterly report reveals $151M Zagat purchase, 54 other buys

Google paid $151 million in cash for restaurant review company Zagat, only one of the 54 acquisitions the company made in the first nine months of 2011.

The numbers were revealed in a quarterly report submitted by the company to the Securities and Exchange Commission.

In order to become more vertical, Google snaps up relevant companies around it, often supplementing programs or products already in the Google roster. Most recently, Google purchased German site DailyDeal … Continue Reading

Report: Netflix hogs 32 percent of peak Internet bandwidth

Netflix again leads the pack as North America’s largest consumer of Internet bandwidth, creating 32 percent of peak downstream traffic, according to the 2011 Sandvine Internet Phenomena Report, which was released today.

The top four largest Internet services in North America account for 64.4 percent of all network traffic, according to the report. They are Netflix, HTTP, YouTube and BitTorrent, according to the report’s executive summary.

The video-streaming component of Netflix is responsible for nearly … Continue Reading

During market slump, traders turned to secondary markets to get a piece of hot startups

During a wobbly late summer and early fall in the general financial market, more investors than ever used secondary markets to pin their hopes (and dollars) to a few rising stars in the startup world.

SecondMarket is one such venue. On that community’s Private Company Market, you can buy equity in startups that are not yet publicly traded, such as Facebook, Twitter and Zynga.

The company says it saw more trading of shares in privately … Continue Reading

Want your links to live longer? Share them on StumbleUpon (infographic)

StumbleUpon has released new information about the level of activity that’s added to a link when shared through its content discovery service.

StumbleUpon’s service lets people discover and share new web content based on a broad spectrum of categories. Users click a “stumble” button to discover new content, and then have the option of voting and commenting on the selection.

On average, the company said a link shared through StumbleUpon gets 83 percent more “likes” … Continue Reading

Mint finally brings its personal finance service to the iPad

Intuit-owned personal finance service Mint.com has finally launched an application for Apple’s iPad, which will help users who prefer the interactivity of tablets for tracking and analyzing their spending habits.

It’s strange that Mint.com has taken so long to launch on the iPad since the company has been generally fastidious about mobile development. Mint launched its iPhone app in late 2008, and moseyed its way to Android in May 2010. Regardless of how long … Continue Reading

Research in Motion pushes back PlayBook OS update to February

If BlackBerry fans weren’t already angry at Research in Motion (RIM) for the recent worldwide BlackBerry outage, they’re going to be peeved today. RIM has said it is delaying the release of a much-needed software update for the PlayBook tablet until February.

“As much as we’d love to have it in your hands today, we’ve made the difficult decision to wait to launch BlackBerry PlayBook OS 2.0 until we are confident we have fully met … Continue Reading

No Android Ice Cream Sandwich for Nexus One

The Nexus One, the first Google-branded Android phone, won’t be getting an upgrade when Android 4.0 (a.k.a. Ice Cream Sandwich) is released to the public, Google confirmed today.

The Nexus One debuted in January 2010 as one of the first phones to run pure Android — meaning, a version of Android that didn’t feature any add-ons from the hardware manufacturer. Google also had a degree of influence over the hardware inside the device to make … Continue Reading

Google Maps rolls out business interiors in Street View

Google is taking its Street View feature indoors. The company announced last May it would be taking interior shots of stores, but now it is moving out of its pilot phase with more 360 degree interiors cropping up online.

Street View on Google Maps has provided many hours of novel entertainment in looking up houses, friends’ houses, your elementary school, that park you fell asleep in that one time. But satisfying a small bit of … Continue Reading

Nokia’s Lumia 800 shows off smart style and smooth Mango UI (video)

Nokia has bet the house on the Windows Phone 7 mobile operating system, and the first fruits of Nokia’s relationship with Microsoft were finally shown today with unveiling of the new Lumia 800 and 710 smartphones.

Between the two, the Lumia 800 is the flagship device with the better design and internals. Its design looks and feels expensive with a solid body that decidedly European. The Lumia 800 features a 3.7-inch AMOLED screen, 1.4-GHz single-core … Continue Reading

Apple’s North Carolina data center getting its own solar farm

Apple is beginning construction on the “Project Dolphin Solar Farm” for its data center in Catawba County, North Carolina.

The tech giant has been granted a permit to start preparing around 171 acres of land for a solar energy farm, the Charlotte Observer reports.

The facility will be adjacent to the company’s $1 billion data center, codenamed Project Dolphin.

Currently, Apple’s local data center runs on electricity from Duke Energy, a utility powered mostly by … Continue Reading

Kohlberg Kravis Roberts is raising a new $6B fund for Asian investments

Kohlberg Kravis Roberts (KKR), a private equity fund, is looking to raise $6 billion to establish a new pool for Asian startups.

Reuters reports that the new funding will be raised during the beginning of 2012 and that the firm had originally planned to raise $4 billion but will now be aiming as high as $6 billion.

Already, KKR represents the largest Asian-focused fund from a private equity firm. The firm maintains a $4 billion … Continue Reading

PayPal co-founder launches Breakout Labs to fund early-stage science and tech research

PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel has launched a new program called Breakout Labs that will fund early-stage science and technology research ideas, the entrepreneur said Tuesday during at speech at Stanford University.

Breakout Labs, which will operate under Thiel’s non-profit organization the Thiel Foundation, will focus its investment efforts on research proposals that are either too early stage or too radical to obtain funding from venture capital firms or grants. Breakout Labs will consider all types … Continue Reading

“The ugly cousin” no more: inside Android’s beautiful new design

For too long, Android has been the ugly cousin to Apple’s iOS in terms of design. But with the release of Android 4.0, a.k.a. Ice Cream Sandwich, all that is changing.

For perhaps the first time, “The way things look and make people feel are just as important as the speed and features,” said Matias Duarte, the Chilean-American designer who currently serves as Google’s director of Android user experience, in an interview with VentureBeat.

“Every … Continue Reading