 | Friday, March 12, 2010
Source: GigaOM | Category: Media
Over the past few days I’ve watched this meme about the so-called “geowars” ahead of SXSW gather steam, both in the blogosphere and on Twitter. And it’s giving me a headache. For some odd reason, people believe that SXSW is going to be a full-blown coming-out [...]
Read more | Friday, March 12, 2010
Source: Venture Beat | Category: Technology
Hunch.com, the startup co-founded by Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake, has raised $10 million in a second round of funding, according to AllThingsDigital. Citing unidentified sources, the report says the funding was led by Khosla Ventures, with Khosla’s Gideon Yu (who was formerly chief financial officer at Facebook and YouTube) handling the deal.
A company spokeswoman declined to comment, except to say that she’ll let us know “if/when we do have a funding-related announcement.”
Hunch, based in New York City, helps users make decisions, often decisions involving products. [...]
Read more | Friday, March 12, 2010
Source: GigaOM | Category: Media
“Metcalfe’s Law” has long been accepted as characterizing the value — and value growth — of fully connected networks. But there are times when the “law” appears to overstate a network’s value. And if that’s the case, what can service providers do about it?
Read more | Friday, March 12, 2010
Source: Venture Beat | Category: Technology
Unquestionably, the major obstacle for indoor, or household-friendly light-emitting diodes is price. No matter how long a bulb lasts, nobody wants to spend $30 on one light. Exacerbating the situation, there are too many competing uses for LEDs, according to electronics market research firm iSuppli, slowing their development for home use.
Back-lighting for televisions is a huge growth market for LEDs, with 2.5 million LED-lit sets manufactured in 2009, and an estimated 25 million to be built this year. [...]
Read more | Friday, March 12, 2010
Source: Venture Beat | Category: Technology
Nissan says it has more than 56,000 pre-orders for the Leaf, its fully-electric model set to be released to the mass market in 2012. Just last November, the Nissan-led Electrification Coalition lobbied the U.S. government to fund electric vehicle projects. CEO Carlos Ghosn plans to sell the Leaf to fleet first to operators like taxi companies and governments as well. By 2013, Nissan will build a half million Leaf vehicles globally, he told BusinessWeek.
For the first time, it looks like Tesla Motors should be worried. [...]
Read more | Friday, March 12, 2010
Source: Venture Beat | Category: Technology
Despite everything the U.S. Department of Energy, President Barack Obama and common sense dictate, energy efficiency just isn’t very sexy. Energy management systems have fantastic rates of return — saving thousands, if not millions. And Cash upfront for installation yields much lower energy bills in the future. But energy management systems are still only penetrating 14 percent of the potential market, according to a new report from Pike Research.
For context, energy management systems do not have to be elaborate. [...]
Read more | Friday, March 12, 2010
Source: GigaOM | Category: Media
Structure, our premier conference devoted to Internet infrastructure and cloud computing, has been expanded to two days in order to fully explore both the progress the industry has made and how things are expected to evolve going forward. And discounted tickets are on sale now!
Read more | Friday, March 12, 2010
Source: Venture Beat | Category: Technology
Facebook may not turn out to be so much of a Foursquare killer.
In fact, the world’s largest social network drives the largest share of the location-based game’s web traffic, accounting for 33 percent of all upstream visits last week, according to web research firm Hitwise. Google follows closely behind, with a 22 percent share, and then Twitter clocks in at 8 percent.
Foursquare, the location game from Dodgeball creator Dennis Crowley, has been on a tear as of late, breaking past 500,000 registered users and logging 275,000 check-ins yesterday alone. [...]
Read more | Friday, March 12, 2010
Source: Venture Beat | Category: Technology
YouTube is taking a major step today with its first live sports broadcast deal. It will be streaming live the Indian Premier League Championships. Such live broadcast deals have hitherto been the bastion of traditional pay TV operators. The Google-owned site signed an agreement with the organizers back in January and retains rights for two seasons.
The IPL is a tournament of a short-form of cricket that has become extremely popular in the last couple of years. The tournament spans 60 matches over the next 45 days. [...]
Read more | Friday, March 12, 2010
Source: Venture Beat | Category: Technology
Twitter is abuzz today with a story attributed to popular news wire service The Associated Press. The new trending topic spotlights Formspring.me, a social network that lets users create profiles to post and answer questions anonymously, and its CEO, who was supposedly arrested two days ago for an elaborate scheme to release private customer information to the public on April 1.
But the story was just dubbed a hoax by news site The Inquisitr, which points out numerous “mistakes” in the supposed AP story: there’s no record of the story existing on the AP’s web site, there’s no set date for the story and it doesn’t fit AP style guidelines. [...]
Read more | Friday, March 12, 2010
Source: Venture Beat | Category: Technology
Facebook may not turn out to be so much of a Foursquare killer.
In fact, the world’s largest social network drives the largest share of the location-based game’s web traffic, accounting for 33 percent of all upstream visits last week, according to web research firm Hitwise. Google follows closely behind, with a 22 percent share, and then Twitter clocks in at 8 percent.
Foursquare, the location game from Dodgeball creator Dennis Crowley, has been on a tear as of late, breaking past 500,000 registered users and logging 275,000 check-ins yesterday alone. [...]
Read more | Friday, March 12, 2010
Source: Venture Beat | Category: Technology
Michigan is taking a lot of hits lately. Not only is its traditional automotive industry winding down, but new electric car companies are being lured elsewhere too, despite state efforts. It’s one ray of hope has been the advanced battery business, with $300 million in tax cuts successfully attracting major companies to the region. Today, that ray just got a bit brighter, with Korea’s LG Chem announcing plans to open a $303 million battery cell factory in Holland, Mich.
The location is pretty advantageous for the corporation, which has a deal to supply battery cells to Detroit-based General Motors for its much-hyped plug-in Chevy Volt. [...]
Read more | Friday, March 12, 2010
Source: Venture Beat | Category: Technology
Location-based gaming in the real world is a hit with gamers and a broader community of mobile app users. Booyah’s Keith Lee has learned that with the rapid growth of his company’s MyTown app on the iPhone.
Lee, chief executive of Booyah, was one of the speakers at our GamesBeat@GDC panel on disruptive innovation.
He said MyTown has grown to more than 1.3 million players in a short time, making it the most popular game that takes into account your real world location on the iPhone platform. [...]
Read more | Friday, March 12, 2010
Source: Venture Beat | Category: Technology
Location-based gaming in the real world is a hit with gamers and a broader community of mobile app users. Booyah’s Keith Lee has learned that with the rapid growth of his company’s MyTown app on the iPhone.
Lee, chief executive of Booyah, was one of the speakers at our GamesBeat@GDC panel on disruptive innovation.
He said MyTown has grown to more than 1.3 million players in a short time, making it the most popular game that takes into account your real world location on the iPhone platform. [...]
Read more | Friday, March 12, 2010
Source: GigaOM | Category: Media
Google CEO Eric Schmidt, speaking in Abu Dhabi this week, confirmed that the Chrome OS operating system is on track for the second half of this year. There are new reasons why its brightest future may be as an adjunct OS on netbooks and tablets.
Read more | Friday, March 12, 2010
Source: Venture Beat | Category: Technology
Sid Meier knows how gamers think. He has been making hit games such as Civilization for decades. Today, he shared his learnings about gamer psychology and how he has had to change his assumptions about how players behave. More often than not, he said, players just don’t act logically.
Early on, Meier learned that players are egomaniacs. If you want to create a civilization that rules the world, you’re by definition an egomaniac. That has a lot of implications, such as how you have to always tilt the odds in favor of the player winning, regardless of the true mathematical odds for things such as battles. [...]
Read more | Friday, March 12, 2010
Source: Venture Beat | Category: Technology
Sid Meier knows how gamers think. He has been making hit games such as Civilization for decades. Today, he shared his insights on gamer psychology and how he has had to change his assumptions about how players behave. More often than not, he said, players just don’t act logically.
Early on, Meier learned that players are egomaniacs. If you want to create a civilization that rules the world, you’re by definition an egomaniac. That has a lot of implications, such as how you have to always tilt the odds in favor of the player winning, regardless of the true mathematical odds for things such as battles. [...]
Read more | Friday, March 12, 2010
Source: Venture Beat | Category: Technology
About a month ago, email assistant startup Cc:Betty renamed itself Threadbox and said it was rebuilding the product into a more work-focused collaboration tool. At 5pm Pacific today, users will get a chance to try out the new app, as Threadbox enters an invite-only beta testing phase.
Previously, Cc:Betty was supposed to help users organize email conversations and find the important content like documents and locations. You sent emails into the system by cc’ing “betty@ccbetty.com.” That was cute, but according to chief executive Michael Cerda, it also confused the people users’ were emailing because they had no idea who “Betty” was. [...]
Read more | Friday, March 12, 2010
Source: Venture Beat | Category: Technology
About a month ago, email assistant startup Cc:Betty renamed itself Threadbox and said it was rebuilding the product into a more work-focused collaboration tool. At 5pm Pacific today, users will get a chance to try out the new app, as Threadbox enters an invite-only beta testing phase.
Previously, Cc:Betty was supposed to help users organize email conversations and find the important content like documents and locations. You sent emails into the system by cc’ing “betty@ccbetty.com.” That was cute, but according to chief executive Michael Cerda, it also confused the people users’ were emailing because they had no idea who “Betty” was. [...]
Read more | Friday, March 12, 2010
Source: Venture Beat | Category: Technology
Plastic Logic announced today that it will have to delay the release of its hotly anticipated Que eBook reader until this summer. The company was originally aiming for a mid-April release.
It’s an inopportune time to announce such a big delay, considering that Apple just opened up preorders for the iPad today. Plastic Logic’s CEO Richard Archuleta said that the delay is meant to “fine-tune the features and enhance the overall product experience”, according to the Wall Street Journal. [...]
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