Computerinfo: 2012

Monday, August 20, 2012

5 Considerations For The Flash Market Now That Texas Memory Is IBM’s Darling

IBM’s acquisition today of Texas Memory Systems (TMS) is more proof that customer data demands will fuel a new wave of flash technologies to replace the hard drive systems that have dominated the market for the past 30 years.

The acquisition points to a number of shifts in the flash market. Alliances are changing, private companies face threats from publicly traded companies and the giants themselves now have to prove they have the chops to compete with the feisty startups.

In particular, eyes are on Fusion-io, which has had a cozy relationship with IBM. But now Texas Memory is IBM’s new darling so it raises questions about the impacts on the market.

Fusion-io has been tearing up the flash market with its PCI-flash card technology. IBM has made it the centerpiece of its high-end solid state storage offerings. Texas Memory competes with its RamSan family of caching cards. But TMS is privately held and that makes it difficult to compete with Fusion-io, which had its IPO last year and now has revenues approaching $700 million.

With that in mind, here are five considerations, based upon rumbles in the market and research I received from investment firm Sterns-Agee, which follows the flash market and Fusion-io:

IBM had to ask itself: Why are we not developing this IP ourselves? Now it can do that with Texas Memory in-house.Privately held companies will get snapped up as it will be increasingly difficult to compete with publicly traded companies such as IBM, Fusion-io and EMC.The Fusion-io team is an ambitious lot. And it has been making rumbles about developing to what amounts to an operating system for the storage system. Expect to hear more about this move at VMworld later this month. IBM saw these moves and said it is time to make a split.The pressure is on EMC that has to see some better results from VFCache, its flash equivalent, if it does not show better results in the first half of 2013. Will it have to make a bid for Fusion-io? That’s the big question.Look out for NetApp – they are the dark horse and could make a resurgence if EMC does not make the strides that the market expects from it. NetApp also now has a partnership with Fusion-io which spells more trouble for EMC.

The demand for SSD is a huge shift and proof that the storage and service providers will go through a major overhaul of their infrastructure to keep up with the massive scale that we will see as almost everything we can imagine begins to generate data of some kind.

There are billions, if not trillions at stake here. This should be a fun one to watch.

Texas Memory Systems, Inc. (TMS) is a privately-held 33-year leader of the enterprise data storage and digital signal processing industries. Since 1978, TMS has specifically focused on high bandwidth, low latency enterprise data storage and digital signal processing systems. The primary feature of TMS products has always been very high performance, and TMS achieves this performance without resorting to overly complex circuitry, overburdened software designs or unwieldy protocols. This emphasis on design and architectural simplicity allows TMS to deliver...

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Kayak For Textbooks: How BIGWORDS Raised $80M, Went Bankrupt, Then Got Profitable Again

Rip Empson is a writer and rabble-rouser at TechCrunch. He covers startups, music, social, mobile, health, and education. You can reach him at rip[at]techcrunch[dot]com ? Learn More

In 1998, seeing an underserved niche in the textbook market, Jeff Sherwood and his three co-founders launched BIGWORDS. By the beginning of 2000, they had grown from a team of four to a team of 250, had a warehouse in Kentucky, raised close to $80 million in outside funding, made a few commercials featuring Tom Green and even had a $100 million acquisition offer from a young Amazon. Although it stings a little in retrospect, Sherwood tells us that the board shot the offer down because it believed BigWords could be a billion-dollar company.

Not to be. The bubble burst, and less than a year later, the company was bankrupt and was forced to close shop — a familiar tale for those who went through the dotcom crash. And like so many others, the BIGWORDS team dispersed after the company closed shop and was left to pick up the pieces and move on. But now, after changing directions and getting smart, BIGWORDS is profitable and growing.

Sherwood, in contrast, couldn’t let the idea rest. He still saw a valuable brand and potential in BIGWORDS, so he decided (against better judgement) to borrow money from his dad. He bought the site, trademarks and domain at the company’s bankruptcy hearing and started again from scratch.

Today, nearly ten years later, BIGWORDS.com has no venture capital backing or celebrity endorsements and is a fraction of what it once was, but it’s growing and growing steadily. It’s a far more stable business, having reached profitability early on. In fact, Sherwood tells us that the company has seen a 15 percent year-over-year growth rate over the last five years and that this year BIGWORDS.com will do $20 million in referred sales. (He’s even paid his dad back on that early loan.)

Why is it “working” the second time? In the aftermath of the crash, the market was littered with dotcom failures, and so the founder remained focused not on PR or marketing, but being slavish to the company’s customers — to building a service that would, simply put, help students save money on textbooks. Plus, he puts 50 percent of the company’s revenues back into growth every year and made a vow to anyone willing to sign on that BIGWORDS wouldn’t expand or deviate from its mission “until they got textbooks right.”

While the company does do grassroots marketing on over 285 campuses, Sherwood says that it’s been hard to get the message out. Textbooks aren’t the sexiest topic. Actually, the mere mention makes most students grimace. Not only that, but if you’re looking to buy textbooks, the market offers plenty of options. Consumers have Amazon, Chegg and over 20 other sources where they can buy or rent textbooks.

But, avoiding the mistakes of the first go-round, BIGWORDS.com today doesn’t want to be an Amazon or a Chegg. That is to say Sherwood wants the site to be the best place to get textbooks online, but doesn’t want to deal with inventory, shipping, processing and all those margin-lowering supply processes.

Last week, Amazon launched its own textbook rental service to compete with the likes of Chegg and Barnes and Noble, and Sherwood says that the first company Amazon called to partner with was BIGWORDS. Why? Because today BIGWORDS is a price comparison tool, designed to bring price transparency to the space and give students advice on where to find the best prices on textbooks, no matter they live — Amazon’s new service or otherwise.

In other words, the company wants to sit in the middle of (and work with) all these textbook rental and sales marketplaces — to be an unbiased broker of information by becoming the equivalent of Kayak for digital and traditional textbooks.

Behind tuition and room and board, textbooks represent the largest source of costs today for college students. But anyone who’s searched for textbooks knows that the cheapest source for one textbook may not be the best place for another, so now gives students the ability to pick and choose, automatically finding the right permutation. Students can select four books, putting them in their shopping cart.

In the below example, you can see that retail price is $690.72, but BIGWORDS’ default setting crawls all textbook vendors for purchase and rental and brings back the best choice — for each book. Below, it recommends renting all four for $165, with 76 percent savings, but there’s also a “Considered Buyback” tool that will show you the price you’ll pay after you sell the textbooks back, if you instead choose to buy them. (More on that below.)

The company has contracts with each of its affiliate sites, searching and aggregating their inventories and serving them to the consumer. The student pays no extra money, prices are shown exactly as they appear on other sites, there’s no price hiking, and like Kayak’s lead-gen model, eBay (or whoever else) kicks the company a small commission when they deliver a sale.

While the industry is changing fast, moving to more interactive, gameified and mobile textbooks experiences, Sherwood says that it doesn’t matter to them how students are consuming, they will support those choices and find ways to give students the cheapest options. The site supports eTextbook rental and buying services, and Sherwood says they could care less whether or not students buy or rent their books.

However, the company did run a survey of all the top sites in January and found that students ended up paying less in aggregate when they bought textbooks and sold them back, rather than renting them. So the company just launched a “Considered Buyback” tool, which users can turn on with each search. The tool takes the price of the used copies and subtracts how much they would be able to get for selling it back and compares that on each of its affiliate sites.

And so far, it seems to be working. The founder said that students, on average, spend $1,137 each year on textbooks, compared to average annual savings of $1K on BIGWORDS. That statistic alone, Sherwood says, is proof enough that the service is helping to alleviate a huge pain in the wallet for students.

The site doesn’t have the sexiest site design — in fact, it’s pretty hideous — but it does offer iPhone and Android apps for those looking to use the service on the go. So really it’s the utility that leaves an impression, not the award-wining design. BIGWORDS is operating in a niche market and it just doesn’t have the same value that an airline price comparison site like Kayak has in the big picture, but as long as it can stay platform and rental/purchase agnostic, it would be surprising if this site didn’t get another chance to take Amazon up on that acquisition offer.

High school and college students will always need textbooks, and whomever can find those cash-strapped studiers the cheapest option stands to become a valuable service — both in their eyes and in those of affiliates and investors.

Hipstamatic Out Of Film? Camera App Lays Off Engineers And Others

Ingrid is a reporter for TechCrunch, joining February 2012, based out of London. She comes from paidContent.org, where she was a staff writer, and has in the past also written freelance regularly for other publications such as the Financial Times. Ingrid covers mobile, digital media, advertising and the spaces where these intersect. When it comes to work, she feels most... ? Learn More

Is Hipstamatic, the iPhone photo app that was an early hit on the App Store, on the rocks? TechCrunch understands that Synthetic, makers of the app, has recently had to let go of much of its engineering staff, among others, as part of a wider restructuring as it looks for cash. A number of public tweets (embedded below) also point to people leaving.

The news comes as a surprise, given that Synthetic says that it has been profitable since the second week after it launched. It is projected to make $22 million this year (from $10 million in 2011). Contacted for a response to the news, a spokesperson confirmed that Hipstatmatic is restructuring but nothing more: ”Business is moving forward as usual, and we’re heads down focused on making beautiful, creative and fun products for our community and the world.” The company to date has never had VC backing.

TechCrunch has been told from a reliable source that among those who are no longer at the company are Jon Wight (iOS Engineer), Justin Williams (iOS Engineer), and Stuart Norrie (designer), who were all let go today with severance. Kevin Smith (iOS/Rails Engineer) left on his own earlier in the week. In fact, our source says that apart from the “core team,” everyone (including the office manager, and the social media manager) is being let go. There are some who work there on contract who may be exempt from this move.

Hipstamatic’s app costs $1.99 to download. More recently the company, founded by graphic designers, has been focusing extending itself to other services like this iPad magazine.

As a paid app, Hipstamatic competes against a number of free and freemium apps that offer many of the same features of taking photos, applying filters and then sharing these pictures. Instagram is perhaps the most prominent of these. Ironically, before Instagram got gazumped by Facebook, it had struck a landmark deal with Synthetic for Hipstamatic photos to get imported into people’s Instagram feeds — the first deal of its kind. Pre- any news of Instagram getting acquired, the move hinted at possible business models that involved printing and other services that Hipstamatic offers to its users, which Instagram did not.

Hipstamatic currently has 4 million users, but it’s not clear how fast that number has grown, and whether it is picking up users now as quickly as it was in its earlier days. Hipstamatic may have had a blockbuster amount of downloads in its early days, it may have been hard to sustain that. And as you go down the App Store charts, it gets harder and harder to be seen. It’s a slippery slope.

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Y Combinator-Backed MicroEval Aims To Take The Pain Out Of Performance Reviews

Anthony Ha is a writer at TechCrunch, where he covers media, advertising, and startups. Previously, he was a staff technology writer at Adweek, worked as a senior editor at the tech blog VentureBeat, and was also a reporter at the Hollister Free Lance, where he won awards from the California Newspaper Publishers Association for breaking news coverage and writing.... ? Learn More

MicroEval, a startup in the current class of startups incubated by Y Combinator, is taking a new approach to the often painful process of employee performance reviews. The basic idea: Instead of having a single review every six or 12 months, break it up into quick bits of feedback that can be collected every week or so.

Co-founder Ryan Jackson says the idea came, in part, from a friend of the founding team, who went in to a performance review and was criticized for things like coming in to work at 10 instead of 9, and focusing too much on their laptop during meetings — in other words, feedback that really shouldn’t have waited six months.

Is that really a technological problem? Doesn’t it just suggest that some bosses need better communication skills? Jackson says that the issue is, in part, generational — that the old way may have made sense in the past, but technology has conditioned younger workers to expect “more frequent feedback.” By moving a largely paper-based process online, MicroEval makes it easier for supervisors to deliver feedback at that pace.

Jackson says the team’s goal is to offer evaluations that can be completed in less than a minute. They should consist of just a few questions, where supervisors hit a button to rate things like your productivity, your teamwork, or whatever is most important to them, and offering additional comments as needed. As an example, Jackson created a form that allowed me to rate his interview skills — there were three questions, and it took about 30 seconds to fill out. (You’re doing just fine, Ryan.)

microeval-evaluate

MicroEval offers some “pro templates” as samples for customers, but Jackson says the service is entirely customizable, since most companies want to create their own evaluations based on their needs and cultures. Companies can also customize the frequency of the evaluations — for some teams, it might make sense to fill out evaluations every week, for others, it’s more like every month.

Companies can also upload their org charts to MicroEval, so that all the relevant folks get regular evaluation requests. And if someone thinks they need more feedback from their boss, they can request an evaluation, too.

This probably won’t eliminate the need for those big, annual or semi-annual evaluations, Jackson admits — especially since that’s usually when people get raises. But MicroEval should make them a little less stressful for both sides. There should be less surprises for the person being evaluated, because they’ve been getting feedback the whole time. And a supervisor, meanwhile, doesn’t have to start an evaluation from scratch, and can instead draw on all the data that’s already in the system.

Jackson adds that over time, he wants to make it easier to “integrate all forms of feedback.” For example, if you give a killer presentation, your supervisor shouldn’t have to wait until the weekly evaluation to point that out — they should be able to log into MicroEval at that moment and note that your presentation was awesome.

Y Combinator is a venture fund which focuses on seed investments to startup companies. It offers financing as well as business consulting along with other opportunities to 2-4 person companies looking to take an idea to a product. Y Combinator looks for companies with “good” ideas over companies with experience and a business model. The company made its first investments in Summer 2005. Y Combinator selects companies to finance and consult with twice a year. They are located in...

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MicroEval will help you create modern, helpful performance reviews. It’s the day of your annual performance review. You’re nervous, and rightfully so! After this meeting you’ll know whether or not you got that raise, if your work has been acceptable or if you should start looking for a new job. No one likes them. In fact, we didn’t even like them…that is until we decided that they didn’t have to be this way. Why shouldn’t performance reviews be helpful? Why shouldn’t...

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Sunday, August 19, 2012

Online Payments Service Braintree Acquires Social Payments Startup Venmo For $26.2M

It’s a busy day in the mobile payments world and it’s about to get busier: according to the New York Times, Braintree, the startup that powers the credit card payments systems of companies like OpenTable, Fab.com, AirBnB and Uber, just acquired Venmo, a social payments platform make and share payments your friends, for $26.2 million. Venmo’s investors include Accel Partners, Greycroft Partners, RRE Ventures, betaworks, Founder Collective, Dave Morin, Sam Lessin, Dustin Moskovitz,VaynerMedia and Lerer Ventures. The company raised a $1.2 million seed round in 2010 and a Series A round in August 2011. The service only opened its door to the public in March 2012 and has been growing quickly ever since.

According to the New York Times’ Janna Wortham, Venmo’s team will continue to work from its New York offices and will not relocate to Braintree’s headquarters in Chicago. The Venmo will continue to develop its current service. Wortham also notes that Braintree CEO Bill Ready “hopes that Venmo’s established footing among the early adopter tech crowd will help foster its adoption and gain an edge against other payment processing start-ups, such as Stripe and Dashlane.”

Just a few weeks ago, Venmo launched its redesigned app with a focus on its new “news feed of payments.” At the time, Venmo co-founder Andrew Kortina told our own Josh Constine that he believed Venmo’s social approach to payments would “succeed where apps like Blippy that automatically shared your credit card charges failed” because the company’s focus is on payments to friends which “naturally involve a social experience.” That company says it is currently processing about $10 million every month.

Braintree itself raised about $34 million from Accel Partners in June 2011. At that time, Braintree founder Bryan Johnson noted that his company was “growing, profitable and bootstrapped.” By September 2011, Braintree was already processing about $8 million worth of transactions every day.

Braintree powers payments for innovative and high-growth mobile and online businesses. Braintree provides an easy-to-integrate API for developers while ensuring the merchants’ end users have a frictionless and secure experience at checkout. Braintree’s full-stack payments solution includes a payment gateway, merchant account, recurring billing, and credit card storage. Braintree’s solution has been proven to scale and support many of the most discerning, high-growth companies on the web, including Rovio/Angry Birds, LivingSocial, 37signals, Airbnb, Fab.com, OpenTable, Uber, HotelTonight, Heroku, Engine Yard...

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Venmo is a social payment app and service that makes it fun and to pay friends. Venmo works via SMS messages, mobile iPhone and Android apps, or the Web. Users can leave notes and comments, push their payments to Venmo’s social network and/or to Twitter, foursquare and Facebook.

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I, For One, Welcome Our iBam 2 Bamboo Speaker Overlords

Biggs is the East Coast Editor of TechCrunch. Biggs has written for the New York Times, InSync, USA Weekend, Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, Money and a number of other outlets on technology and wristwatches. He is the former editor-in-chief of Gizmodo.com and lives in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. You can Tweet him here and G+ him here. Email him directly at... ? Learn More

With all the rumors about a new 9-pin connector on the iPhone, what could be better than a tube of bamboo that amplifies your iDevice or Android phone in a sustainable way? The iBam 2 is basically a tube of bamboo that channels sound out and away from the phone, thereby creating a superior, bamboo-infused experience.

The sad thing? It costs freaking $63.22 and they’re only sold in Singapore so you may have hop on a slow, sustainable solar boat to pick one up. However, as you see from the above video, a honking big bamboo tube can really spruce up an iPhone.

The creators, Pasargora, are a sustainable-living maker space and a portion of the proceeds go to supporting DIY activities in Singapore, so there’s that. Otherwise, get yourself to Pier 1 Imports and grab some bamboo and rock out.

Product Page

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Yes, Apple Is In Discussions With Cable Operators, And Everyone Has Known This For Months

Ryan has spent more than five years covering business, technology, and telecom-related subjects for a variety of publications based in New York and San Francisco. Ryan currently works as a writer for TechCrunch. ? Learn More

August Journalism, anyone? Just because some outlets have a short memory, let’s get this out of the way right up front: Yes, Apple is in discussions with cable operators, and has been for months. Of course, just because Apple’s strategy hasn’t actually changed recently won’t stop some other sites from acting like the heavens have opened up and Steve Jobs himself is negotiating these deals.*

Anyway, just to bring everyone up to speed about why I’m even writing this today: The latest non-news in the Apple TV saga comes from the Wall Street Journal, which reports that Apple is “is in talks with some of the biggest U.S. cable operators” about getting them to deliver live TV through one of its products — maybe a next-generation set-top box or even (gasp!) a TV.

Well, that’s great except Bloomberg reported that Apple was talking to carriers like AT&T and Verizon about some sort of TV back in February. Oh yeah, and the Globe and Mail reported Apple was pursuing partnerships with Canadian operators Rogers and BCE around the same time.

Apparently the news here is that the companies Apple is talking to are really fucking big. After all, AT&T and Verizon are relative newcomers on the TV market, compared to industry stalwarts like Comcast or Time Warner Cable.

Or maybe it’s that Apple is offering up one of its own devices as a set-top box replacement? If true, it’s not that revolutionary of an idea, and it’s not that surprising. After all, Apple has pay TV providers like Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Cablevision, AT&T, Verizon, DirecTV, Dish Network, etc. are all already building iPad apps… So why not get them on board with apps that would take their live and on-demand video streams over the top and put them on their subscribers’ TV, without needing a second or third set-top box? (Microsoft’s Xbox already allows cable operators to do this, and they seem just fine with that.)

So there are plenty of reasons why this isn’t news, and isn’t particularly earth-shattering, but here’s why it would make sense:

Cable companies know that users are already buying Apple products like iPads and the Apple TV anyway, so why not build apps for devices that they already own, or may want to.The current generation of set-top boxes sucks, and they could most likely build a better user interface on an Apple device with an open SDK, and update and iterate on it more quickly than some legacy piece of shit from Cisco or Motorola.Cable companies would rather have the consumers bring their own devices, rather than having to pay for crappy set-top boxes themselves and leasing them out to subscribers.

Maybe the reason we’re all talking about this is that it finally sort of shuts the door on Apple’s long-rumored plans to build its own over-the-top TV service. Or maybe it’s because the mythical iTV, which Gene Munster has been saying will come any day now, looks like it’s not coming by the end of the year after all?

Or maybe, well, maybe it’s just because it’s August and there’s nothing else going on.

==
* Seriously, Business Insider? What the fuck?

Started by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne, Apple has expanded from computers to consumer electronics over the last 30 years, officially changing their name from Apple Computer, Inc. to Apple, Inc. in January 2007. Among the key offerings from Apple’s product line are: Pro line laptops (MacBook Pro) and desktops (Mac Pro), consumer line laptops (MacBook Air) and desktops (iMac), servers (Xserve), Apple TV, the Mac OS X and Mac OS X Server operating systems, the iPod, the...

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Apple TV is a network device for both Macintosh and PC computers that allows users to download, stream, and view High Definition television shows on demand via iTunes.

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That Flickr Account Wasn’t Marissa Mayer, But She Is Currently Looking For A New Head Of Flickr

Alexia Tsotsis is the co-editor of TechCrunch. She attended the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, CA, majoring in Writing and Art, and moved to New York City shortly after graduation to work in the Media industry. After four years of living in New York and attending courses at New York University, she returned to Los Angeles in... ? Learn More

Oh Process Journalism, how lucky we here at TechCrunch are that we get to practice you. Anyways, here’s what I got: That “Marissa Mayer” account that went up on Flickr earlier today isn’t actually Marissa. While Mayer does have a personal Flickr account, it’s currently set to Private: We should have known she would never use a corporate Google photo on a Yahoo account!

Note: Yahoo PR *still* hasn’t responded to Anthony Ha’s email request for clarification.

While we’ve also learned that the increase in Flickr hiring started well before Mayer arrived, there is one key development that can be attributed to the new CEO: The hunt is on for a new, executive Flickr Product Head, because the site is currently being held together by Product Director Markus Spiering. Spiering is presently the de facto Flickr lead within Yahoo despite answering to Flickr General Manager Douglas Alexander.

Mayer is hoping to fill the position via acquisition, and is currently sniffing around the startup ecosystem for likely candidates; as it will probably be difficult to find the talent the company is looking for through a simple hire. The strategy is to have an entrepreneur in charge. And there are rumors that much of the existing team is being completely reorg’d, which is big company speak for dismantled.

Flickr, founded by Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake in 2004, has had tumultuous leadership and cultural change before being left in its current beleaguered state — going from the guidance of its original founders, to PM Matthew Rothenberg to Spiering. The changes left it slow and vulnerable to more nimble and mobile focused competitors like Instagram.

The product is the number one thing The Internet would like to see Mayer fix during her tenure at Yahoo, so it’s no surprise she’s made it a priority. Now if she’d only make her real account public.

Former game designers Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake created Flickr, an online photo sharing network, in 2004. Flickr, which began as a photo-sharing feature of their gaming project, has since then blossomed into one of the premiere photo-sharing sites on the web. Yahoo purchased Flickr for $35 million in March of 2005. Since then Flickr continues to compete with other photo-sharing giant Photobucket.

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Back To School: How To Ace Taking Notes

Jordan Crook studied English Literature at New York University before entering the tech space. Prior to joining TechCrunch, Crook dabbled in mobile marketing and mobile apps as well as doing device reviews for MobileMarketer and MobileBurn. Crook is fascinated with alternative energy production and greentech. She is now a writer for CrunchGear. ? Learn More

Back in the day, before the printing press made books a widely available commodity, students sat through class transcribing each and every word of a published work, as dictated by the teacher. We still take notes today, sure, but note-taking and lectures themselves have come a long way.

So as you tie your shoes, zip up your backpack, and head off to your first day of college (or second, third, or fourth first day of college), take these five methods into consideration for all your note-taking information-retaining needs.

While I maintain that there are plenty of better ways to jot down information in class, some of us are still hooked on the smell of paper, the feel of a book, and the soft glide of a brand new ball-point pen across the page. If that sounds like you, might I recommend Moleskine’s line of Folio and Volant professional notebooks.

Particularly, the Folio Professional Large Notebook seems to be the way to go if you prefer hardcover notebooks. It comes in both blank, graph, and ruled, with project planning sections in the back.

There are also numbered pages, an index, and included sticky tabs for added organization. The notebook costs $21, which is clearly a bit pricey for one item of your school supplies, but I find that the Moleskine route is always worth the investment.

Another option, which is a bit cheaper, is the Volant Extra Large Ruled Notebook. For $18.95, you’ll get a set of two of these 96-page softback notebooks, and they add a bit more color to your class time as opposed to the Folio line.

Along with the pen-wielding, page-turning students of yesteryear, a whole lot of us have made the staggering realization that typing is, in fact, faster.

Evernote, then, is an excellent service to turn to. The note service comes in the form of an iOS app, desktop app, Android app, and a web app, meaning you can basically sync all of your notes across each one of your devices and never be without all your information.

Evernote lets you save links, photos, text, and scanned PDFs, all in the cloud. Chances are, as a student, you’ll need to go Premium to get the absolute most out of the service, but luckily that only costs $5/month or $45/year. Going premium will get you offline notes, a 50MB note capacity, and 1GB of monthly upload allowance (not storage, there’s a difference).

You’ll also tap into all kinds of fun features like notes history, group editing, and offline notes.

Livescribe is this clever company that has found a way to put a computer inside a ball-point pen. Granted, you have to buy special paper, but once you do, the pen will record your marks and the accompanying audio so you can search within your notes for various bits of a lecture, etc.

Livescribe also lets you share notes with others via social networks, Google Docs, Evernote or email, which will make it easy for you to collaborate with class-mates when it comes to mid-term/final time.

For those moments when life (read: class) gets really boring, many of the Livescribe smart pens have games, including one where you draw a piano and then tap the keys to play it. It may not be the best service for everyone, but intensive note-takers (and especially journalism students) could probably really use something this meticulous.

Right now you can save $20 on an 8GB Echo pen here.

Raise your hand if you have an iPad.

If your hand is in the air, first put it down, and second check out this pen/stylus from Platinum Pen. It’s a slick aluminum ball-point pen with a relatively slim body and clean look. But at the top, right where you click to open up the pen, there lies the head of a capacitive stylus.

This means you can actually use this little utensil as both a pen and a tablet or smartphone stylus, letting you switch back and forth between drawing digital diagrams and taking physical notes (or whatever combination of old school and new school you prefer).

The pen costs only $8.50 from Jetpens.

For the Android fan who needs the very latest and greatest, picking up one of the brand new Galaxy Note 10.1 tablets Samsung just released before hitting up European History class isn’t a bad idea. See, the magic here lies in the fact that this is one of the first full-featured tablets to come out with a pressure-sensitive (almost Wacom-style) stylus.

Samsung calls it an S-Pen, and it will let you take notes, take screenshots, mark up pictures, and create drawings all onto the tablet directly. It also comes with up to 64GB of memory via an SD card so there really isn’t any need for Evernote, Livescribe, or any other paid cloud storage service.

Plus, you can download apps, surf the web, send email, etc. all from your GalNote 10.1. Unfortunately, I wouldn’t recommend this to a student who’s solely looking for a good way to take notes. If, however, you’re looking for a tablet that might be useful for note-taking, I’d say the $499 Galaxy Note 10.1 is the way to go.

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Saturday, August 18, 2012

Google Quietly Launches Google Play Movie Rentals In Germany

Google today quietly rolled out movie rentals in Germany. German Google users have long been able to buy movies through the Play Movies store, but according to German blogger Carsten Knobloch, the rental feature only went live earlier today. So far, Google hasn’t officially announced this launch and the Google Play help page doesn’t acknowledge it either, but a growing number of German users now report that they are able to rent movies from the Play store on the web and on their Android phones.

Movie rentals in the German Play store cost between 2.99 Euro or 4.99 Euro, depending on the movie and whether users want to see the SD or HD version.

Just like in the U.S. German users will have up to 30 days to start watching a video after they rent it. Unlike in the U.S., though, where you can only continue to watch the movie for 24 hours, German users will have 48 hours to finish watching it after they hit the play button for the first time. At almost $5 for a movie rental, the prices in the German store are significantly higher than in the U.S., though.

Earlier today, Google also brought Hangouts on Air to the German market. One Google Play feature that is still missing in Germany is the music store. German users also can’t currently buy the Nexus 7. The launch of more content services, however, could foreshadow the impending Nexus 7 launch in Germany.

Image credit: Cachys Blog

Launch Date: September 7, 1998

Google provides search and advertising services, which together aim to organize and monetize the world’s information. In addition to its dominant search engine, it offers a plethora of online tools and platforms including: Gmail, Maps, YouTube, and Google+, the company’s extension into the social space. Most of its Web-based products are free, funded by Google’s highly integrated online advertising platforms AdWords and AdSense. Google promotes the idea that advertising should be highly targeted and relevant to users thus providing...

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Fab Sues Flash Sales Site TouchOfModern For Alleged Trademark Infringement

Colleen Taylor is based in San Francisco where she is a reporter for TechCrunch TV. Previously she worked for GigaOM, where she reported on startups and Silicon Valley. Earlier, Colleen reported for Mergermarket, an online newswire and subsidiary of the Financial Times focused on M&A. Before that, she was a contributing editor for Electronic News, the semiconductor industry trade newsletter. Colleen... ? Learn More

Updated. When you’re a company that’s grown as quickly as Fab.com, the design-oriented flash sales site which is on track to make more than $100 million in revenue this year and recently closed on $105 million in funding at a rumored $600 million valuation, it’s pretty much a given that some people might look to emulate your path to success. But according to Fab, one startup may be taking the imitation a bit too far.

On August 9th, Fab filed a lawsuit against a San Francisco company called Whitehawk Ventures, which does business as TouchofModern.com, a design-oriented flash sales site that debuted earlier this year (click here to read TechCrunch’s coverage of that launch.)

The 25-page lawsuit, which TechCrunch has obtained and embedded below, alleges that Whitehawk is infringing Fab’s trademarks, trade dress, and copyrights. Fab also alleges that Whitehawk has engaged in unfair competition by allegedly copying key elements of its site design, including its overall look and feel, visual icons, and lifting exact copy.

I reached out to Fab’s CEO Jason Goldberg, who confirmed that Fab has indeed filed suit and provided the following comment about the situation:

Like the people who create the products we sell, we’re designers. We build all of our own technology, and we take pride in the unique design of our website and mobile apps. We have gathered a significant amount of evidence to support our lawsuit, and the copycat claim against Touch of Modern is very strong. We are hopeful that this matter will be resolved quickly. In the meantime, we will continue to focus on bringing everyday design to Fab’s 6 million-plus members.

We have also contacted TouchOfModern founder Jonathan Wu for comment, and will update this if we receive any word back. UPDATE: TouchOfModern has responded with the following statement:

“We are aware of the lawsuit brought against us by Fab.com. We believe the allegations are baseless and we fully intend to defend ourselves.
The claims in the lawsuit are unsupported and lack any substance. All of our design elements utilize open source frameworks and are developed in-house.
Our vendors have consistently told us that they prefer working with us over Fab.com. And the $100M+ that Fab.com has raised allows them to engage in such bullying tactics to stifle competition.
While we’re only a fraction of Fab.com’s size, TouchOfModern appeals to a higher end audience and we strive to offer not only beautifully designed modern products, but products that are high in quality and worthy of distinction.”

Here are images that Fab included in its legal complaint that show the two sites side-by-side (click to enlarge):

And here is the lawsuit in full:

Fab is on a mission to help people better their lives with design. Fab was founded by serial entrepreneur Jason Goldberg in February 2011 and launched on June 9, 2011. Fab’s founders are Bradford Shellhammer, Nishith Shah and Deepa Shah. Fab’s headquarters are in New York. The company also has offices in Berlin, London and Pune. Over 6 million people around the world use Fab to discover everyday design products at great prices, to connect with the world’s most exciting...

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A $12-Million-A-Month iOS Game? NaturalMotion Has It With CSR Racing

Kim-Mai Cutler is a technology journalist who has worked for Bloomberg, VentureBeat and The Wall Street Journal. Before she joined TechCrunch, she led mobile coverage at Inside Network, a six-person media startup that was acquired by WebMediaBrands in 2011 for $14 million in cash and stock. She specializes in covering gaming, distribution and monetization of mobile applications and venture... ? Learn More

As the iOS platform has gradually amassed more than 365 million units in cumulative device sales, it has created a rising tide for all mobile app developers, who have seen increasing monthly revenue run-rates with each year.

Now comes a new high point from Benchmark Capital-backed NaturalMotion, which said its highly hyped title CSR Racing passed $12 million in monthly revenue. That’s a big jump up from previously reported high water marks like the roughly $5 million or so Infinity Blade apparently pulled in during the very lucrative holiday month of December. The game had quite a bit of an advantage though as it was featured during an Apple keynote at the last Worldwide Developers Conference — an extremely rare feat for a game developer.

CSR Racing is, as it eponymously suggests, a drag racing title. There are partnerships with Ford, Mini and so on to provide customized cars. The game monetizes through in-app purchases where players can spend either earned or paid currency they buy in the game.

“We tried to monetize many parts of the game, but not too aggressively,” said chief executive Torsten Reil. “We think this is a more sustainable and defensible approach that’s ended up working.”

Boss Alien, the Brighton, U.K.-based development shop that worked on CSR Racing, is also joining NaturalMotion through an acquisition. The terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.

NaturalMotion was started more than a decade ago and specializes in doing realistic 3D animation of human bodies. Its technology has been licensed out to studios like Rockstar Games, which used it in Grand Theft Auto 4 and movies like Troy, which starred Brad Pitt.

The company initially raised funding from Balderton Capital, but just tacked on an additional $11 million in funding from Benchmark Capital. That round put gaming veteran Mitch Lasky, who sold JAMDAT to EA more than five years ago, on the company’s board.

The company’s previous big hit before CSR Racing was an uber-realistic animal care-taking game called My Horse. The company differentiates itself from other freemium developers with very photo-realistic 3D animation, instead of 2D art that resembles titles from the social gaming world.

“What’s happening overall is that Wave One of mobile-social games is coming to an end,” Reil sad. “Two-dimensional resource management games, like clickfests, are fading.”

The company is working on six games simultaneously at the moment and is up to 160 people with offices in the U.K. and the U.S.

NaturalMotion Ltd is the creator of Dynamic Motion Synthesis (DMS), a break-through in 3D character animation. Based on Oxford University research, Dynamic Motion Synthesis creates high-quality 3D character animation in real time by combining artificial intelligence, biomechanics, and dynamics simulation. NaturalMotion’s first product, endorphin, utilises this approach to dramatically accelerate the production of offline 3D character animation. In March 2006, NaturalMotion announced euphoria, which brings Dynamic Motion Synthesis live onto Playstation 3, Xbox 360 and PC. euphoria is able to create...

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Suunto Adds Active Mapping To Their Ambit Smart Watch

In a real first for a GPS watch, Suunto has added a mapping feature to their Ambit smartwatch via a free update. The watch previously supported GPS tracking, waypoints, and training functions but this upgrade adds a live map to the mix, allowing hikers and runners to pinpoint their location on a trail or course.

From the Suunto website:

With this update, users will be able to download routes online or input their own waypoints. Out on the trails, users will be able to see their route in real time, including their start point, position and the route ahead.

Another upcoming update will add Suunto foot pod and ANT+ accessory compatibility along with improved training instruments like interval timers. It will also support “community-crafted” features uploaded by users to Suunto’s support site.

This is a real first for these sorts of watches. First, this update is wildly compelling and that it comes free, after the watch has been on the market for a few months. The watch itself is pretty cool, as evidenced by this in-depth review and it’s fascinating that it can be upgraded via software to unlock new features.

The community features are also compelling in that they allow groups of people – runners, bikers, onanists – to upload various readout settings and programs. All of this, of course, inside a package the size of a silver dollar. The watch itself is $500 and these updates will be free at Movescount.com in September.

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The Invisible Bike Helmet: An Airbag On The Go

Josh Constine is a technology journalist who specializes in deep analysis of social products. He is currently a writer for TechCrunch. Previously, Constine was the Lead Writer of Inside Facebook, where he covered Facebook product changes, privacy, the Ads API, Page management, ecommerce, virtual currency, and music technology. Prior to writing for Inside Facebook, Constine graduated from Stanford University... ? Learn More

People die trying to look cool. Vanity is the sad reason why people don’t wear bike helmets. So two Swedish women set out to invent “the invisible bicycle helmet”, They’ve succeeded, and the end product isn’t a made of clear plexiglass and there’s no lightbending-stealth technology. In fact it’s not really a helmet at all.

Hövding is a rapidly-inflating airbag that deploys from a collar around your neck when you’re in an accident. Here’s how it works, and a video demonstrating this amazing, but still expensive, invention.

The invisible bicycle helmet uses rechargeable battery-powered accelerometers and gyroscopes that detect the typical motions involved in a bike crash. They trigger a tiny gas inflator which instantly fills a nylon airbag with helium. The bag forms a hood around your head that cushions the impact of the street, a car, or anything else you slam into.

The product and company named Hövding began as the industrial design master’s thesis of two students, Anna Haupt and Terese Alstinat, at Sweden’s Lund University. After five years of research and $10 million in funding, they’re now selling the invisible bike helmet. It’s not cheap, though.

Hövding costs $600 and only works once. But considering the potential hospital bills, and you know, the risk of death, it might be a good investment for fashion-forward bikers. Really you should just be confident and realize that wearing areal bike helmet doesn’t make you uncool. But if that’s too much to ask, at least get a Hövding.

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Cisco Beats Fourth Quarter Analyst Expectations of 45 Cents Per Share – Revenues Up 4%

Cisco beat fourth quater analyst expectations with net sales up 4% compared to last year. Overall revenues were $11.7 billion with reporting of 47 cents per share. For the year, net sales were $46.1 billion , up 7% compared to last year.

Analysts had forecast a profit of 45 cents a share, on revenue of $11.62 billion, according to FactSet.

Looking ahead to its fiscal first-quarter, analysts expect a profit of 46 cents and revenue of $11.67 billion, or year-over-year growth of 4%.

Net income for the year was $8 billion.

Cisco CEO John Chambers warned analysts back in May of a “cautious IT spending environment” and a “very slow painful progress” in a market recovery. But that may been an over cautious view for the telecommunications giant.

Most noteworthy is the growth in data center revenues. Revenues were up 90% compared to last year. Revenues compared to last year were up 42%. Chambers cited its unified data center strategy as a driver for the company’s growth. He referred to the company’s focus on unified network, compute and storage as a driver for the growth.

Chambers made a point of discussing VCE, Cisco’s partnership with VMware and EMC to offer converged infrastructure environments. He said orders were up 58% compared to last year.

Story is developing. We’ll continue to update as mor news comes available.

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Google Maps Now Features Schedules For More Than 1 Million Transit Stops Worldwide

Google Maps now features public transit schedules for more than 500 cities and one million transit stops worldwide. To make all of this information more accessible to its users on the go, Google today launched an update to Google Maps for Android. The updated Google Maps app now, for example, allows users to choose which specific mode of transportation (train, bus, tram or subway) they want to see on their maps.

Additionally, Google’s redesigned station pages now make it easier to find information like departure times, which lines serve a specific station and the distance to nearby stations. Users just have to tap on the name of a station to get to these new station pages.

While Google’s announcement puts the emphasis on the new public transport features, the Google Maps team also made a number of other changes to the app. Whenever you search for a city or postal code, for example, you will now see the borders of that region (just like on the desktop).

The My Places feature now also makes it easier to access your saved offline maps and custom maps, and if you have Location History enabled, you can now use the app to “browse the places you’ve been on a daily basis with an updated Location History dashboard.”

For the time being, of course, all of these features are only available on Android. Now that Apple has decided to use its own maps on iOS, however, chances are we will soon see a dedicated Google Maps for iOS app, too. In the long run, that may actually prove beneficial for Google and its users, given that Apple only updates the maps app with every major OS release.

Google Maps is Google’s free web-based mapping application. As of May 2008, Google Maps includes photos, videos, and user-created maps along with location searches. It uses Panoramio and YouTube for the content.

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A Google project headed by Vic Gundotra and Bradley Horowitz, Google+ is designed to be the social extension of Google. Its features focus on making online sharing easy for users. “Circles,” think social circles, akin to Facebook’s lists. “Sandbar,” a user-unifying toolbar. “Sparks,” a search engine for sharing content between users. “Messenger,” a group messaging app that allows users to share with certain “Circles.” “Hangouts,” group video chatting designed to allow up to 10 users video chat at once. Each Google+ user can replace his...

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Friday, August 17, 2012

Another Top Googler Jumps To Social Network Badoo

Leena Rao currently works as a writer for TechCrunch. She recently finished graduate school at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, where she studied business journalism and videography. From 2004 to 2007, she helped lead Congresswoman Carloyn Maloneyâ€™s community outreach and relations efforts in New York City. She graduated from Columbia University in 2003, where she was... ? Learn More

After losing long-time Googler Benjamin Ling to social network Badoo, the search giant is seeing another exec head to the UK site. This time, Jeff Hardy, who was Head of Global Partnerships for Google+ Local, is leaving the company to join Badoo as VP of Partnerships and M&A.

At Google, we’re told Hardy was instrumental negotiating content deals and partnerships for Google+ local listings, including those with Open Table and other business listings relationships, an area that Google is clearly bulking up on post-Frommers and Zagat acquisitions. And interestingly, Hardy also worked directly for recently departed Googler and newly appointed Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer.

At Badoo, Hardy will spearhead all partnerships globally and corporate development and M&A. Badoo, whixh currently has users across 180 countries, has been best known for expanding into emerging markets like Russia and Brazil. Clearly it’s now growing in the US as well.

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Looking For Discounts On Grass-Fed Beef & Truffles? Delicious Karma Debuts Its Online Gourmet Food Shop

Sarah currently works as a writer for TechCrunch, after having previously spent over three years at ReadWriteWeb. Prior to becoming a professional blogger, Sarah worked in I.T. across a number of industries, including banking, retail and software. ? Learn More

Playing in the same general space as 500 Startups-backed Love With Food, but going the traditional e-commerce route instead of the “box of the month” club, new San Francisco-based startup Delicious Karma is officially launching its own artisanal and gourmet food shopping site today. The site currently features over 500 different products from nearly 100 different artisanal food companies and has already signed up 2,000 customers during its private beta. The big idea? Offering artisanal food vendors a better, more efficient way to get their products in front of customers, so they can go back to making their fancy cheeses.

The service will be dabbling with a mix of different approaches to entice customers to the site. For starters, members are introduced to foods through special three-day sales where they’ll be able to buy at discounted prices before the items are moved into inventory. Customers who purchase through more traditional means will be incentivized to return to the site through marketing initiatives that will include both email and social efforts. (Shoppers today can already collect their favorites on Pinterest-like “Crave” boards.) And soon, the company will also offer “sample box” subscriptions containing a half dozen or so items, so shoppers can learn what foods they like and want to buy again.

Nope, you can’t entirely avoid the box-of-the-month model these days, it seems.

Delicious Karma isn’t working off an affiliate model for revenue generation, but is instead buying foods wholesale or discounted from wholesale. The team developed its own backend infrastructure that automates the ordering process. Vendors have their own unique portal where they can log in, run reports, print out shipping labels, and set up deliveries using Delicious Karma’s shipping carriers.

Founded by Jim Ritchie, whose background is in engineering, and wife Michelle, who most recently held an executive role at Jamba Juice, Delicious Karma isn’t only about selling its tasty treats, it also wants to give back to the artisanal community. Ritchie says that 1% of the company’s time, equity and profits will be returned to its partners through something called “Karma Kauses.” The “Kauses” are actually organizations that promote and support this community. Currently, the site lists San Francisco-based non-profit incubator kitchen La Cocina and non-profit Seedling Projects as its first “Karma Kauses.” Soon, customers will also be able to donate their own Karma Kredits (points awarded for participation) to the Kause of their choice too, in order to have Delicious Karma donate cash on customers’ behalf. Those Kredits can also be applied to on-site purchases (10 Kredits = $1.00).

The beta has only been open for a matter of weeks, so numbers regarding transactions or orders per day don’t make sense right now. Jim did say they were seeing multiple orders per day, however. Until now, the five-person startup has been self-funded, but Jim, a 20 year Silicon Valley resident, is now planning to use his connections in the industry to help raise a seed round of around $1.5 million to $2 million to grow the site further.

Delicious Karma is an online market that makes it fun and easy to discover, learn about, and buy exceptional artisanal and gourmet foods, at great prices, while supporting the community of artisanal food producers. People are becoming more interested in eating great-tasting, wholesome foods made with local, natural ingredients, yet these foods can be difficult and time consuming to find and expensive to purchase. Delicious Karma solves this problem by providing a trusted, online marketplace that makes it fun and easy...

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