 | Monday, March 1, 2010
Source: Venture Beat | Category: Technology
Just as the American Southwest is striving to become the epicenter of the country’s solar market, the Midwest is poised to lead in wind power. But both regions are facing the same, somewhat ironic hurdle: environmental groups who see renewable energy developments are anything but green. Efforts to install turbines literally in the Great Lakes have run into a wall of opposition.
Earlier this month, formidable solar thermal plant builder BrightSource Energy had to scale back plans for a major array in Southern California due to an endangered species of desert turtle. [...]
Read more | Monday, March 1, 2010
Source: Venture Beat | Category: Technology
Twitter gave access to its ‘Firehose’, a special real-time feed of every single public tweet delivered, to more than a half-dozen startups today. The company is also asking the community whether there are any other startups that might be worthy of a partnership. This is all part of a broader plan to give all developers an equal chance to create valuable services out of Twitter’s data stream.
Twitter has competing priorities; it must find a revenue model to satisfy the investors that have valued it at $1 billion and it needs to cultivate an equitable developer ecosystem where a one-man shop can innovate and compete with the biggest players like Google. [...]
Read more | Monday, March 1, 2010
Source: Venture Beat | Category: Technology
Tesla Motors has been fairly quiet since filing for its IPO last month, aside from announcing that it will now be leasing its electric Roadsters for $1,658 a month. Today, it released a fun bit of news: it will be teaming up with Swiss luxury watch company Tag Heuer to produce a special edition of its Roadster.
The vehicle will make its debut at the Geneva Auto Show this week. The idea is for both brands to get a global boost from their mutual prestige. Tag, which is unveiling a new tech-savvy watch on March 18, has yet to become a major presence in the U. [...]
Read more | Monday, March 1, 2010
Source: GigaOM | Category: Media
The prepaid market continued to expand in the fourth quarter of 2009 thanks to a price war that seems to get more brutal by the week. Meanwhile, AT&T and Verizon Wireless built on their dominance with postpaid subscribers.
Read more | Monday, March 1, 2010
Source: Venture Beat | Category: Technology
Major electronics maker Toshiba is getting serious about the rooftop solar game, with plans to resell highly-efficient photovoltaic panels made by Bay Area-based SunPower. The two companies just struck a supply deal for 32 megawatts worth of panels in 2010 — enough to power as many as 32,000 homes.
The contract is significant for two reasons. Not only is it expanding SunPower’s global footprint and broadening its portfolio of projects, it also signals increased interest in solar energy in Japan, where Toshiba hopes to launch its residential solar business on April 1. [...]
Read more | Monday, March 1, 2010
Source: Venture Beat | Category: Technology
Endpoint Clinical, provider of integrated response software allowing clinical study administrators to change parameters and tests on the fly — considerably speeding up their processes — has brought in $1.7 million in equity, debt, and options, according to a filing with the SEC. Based in San Francisco, the company has become known for creating computing platforms that aid life sciences industries. Its newest creation in PULSE.
Companies: Endpoint Clinical
Read more | Monday, March 1, 2010
Source: Venture Beat | Category: Technology
Platial, a social mapping startup looking to make it big in that segment, has decided to call it quits. The company announced its plans to shut down in a blog post on Saturday. The site may go offline as soon as Tuesday.
The Portland, Ore.-based company’s product allowed users to create and share their maps. Its product was built on the Google Maps application programming interface and designed to let users place markers over points on a map and sprinkle them with pictures and commentary. [...]
Read more | Monday, March 1, 2010
Source: GigaOM | Category: Media
As in so many other cities that aren’t located in or near Silicon Valley, the startup scene in Toronto is a fairly small and close-knit community. It benefits from events such as “Demo Camp” and “Bar Camp,” where young entrepreneurs can come and bounce their ideas [...]
Read more | Monday, March 1, 2010
Source: Venture Beat | Category: Technology
Publishers of novels, business how-to’s and technical manuals have managed to avoid having their products ripped and burned by online pirates. Unlike music and movies, scanning a book into digital format isn’t something anyone with a laptop can do.
That’s about to change. As e-books and e-readers become more popular, it’s inevitable the book industry will have to deal with cracked copies of its wares being passed around the Internet.
People who share copyrighted books will be able to invoke the same justification used for sharing music and movies on BitTorrent: Most book authors only receive a fraction of the money readers pay to read their works. [...]
Read more | Monday, March 1, 2010
Source: Venture Beat | Category: Technology
Data just released from web analytics firm Quantcast show that Android’s share of North American mobile web consumption was up 8.3% from January 2010, to 15.2% of total mobile web consumption for the month of February. Apple’s iPhone OS share, which so far has seemed untouchable, dropped 3.2% from January to February 2010, while the share for RIM OS (Blackberry) grew 13.2% in that period, to 9.2%.
What we don’t know is how much of the share growth for Android and RIM OS is a result of organic growth in the number of smartphone users versus iPhone users making a switch. [...]
Read more | Monday, March 1, 2010
Source: Venture Beat | Category: Technology
Wireless camera maker Dropcam has launched a new iPhone application that makes it easier than ever to view your home surveillance cameras while on the go.
Dropcam’s $199 cameras allow users to stream surveillance video online without a computer, making it easily accessible via web browser. The addition of the free iPhone app allows users easy mobile access to their Dropcams as well. The app currently only supports live viewing, but the company says that a future update will enable DVR functionality. [...]
Read more | Monday, March 1, 2010
Source: Venture Beat | Category: Technology
Wireless camera maker Dropcam has launched a new iPhone application that makes it easier than ever to view your home surveillance cameras while on the go.
Dropcam’s $199 cameras allow users to stream surveillance video online without a computer, making it easily accessible via web browser. The addition of the free iPhone app gives users mobile access to their Dropcams as well. The app currently only supports live viewing, but the company says that a future update will enable playback by DVR. [...]
Read more | Monday, March 1, 2010
Source: Venture Beat | Category: Technology
While the blogosphere was buzzing over the patent Facebook won for its news feed last week, Google earned a killer one too. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office awarded the search giant a patent for using location in an advertising system last Tuesday, which is the emerging business model for most location-based startups today.
Filed six years ago, the patent is fairly broad. It covers using location for targeting, setting a minimum price bid for an ad, offering performance analytics, and modifying content of an ad. [...]
Read more | Monday, March 1, 2010
Source: Venture Beat | Category: Technology
The initial supply of Apple iPad tablet computers may be limited, so much so that the launch may be delayed a month into April, according to a research note by a Canadian analyst.
Peter Misek, who covers Apple for Toronto-based research firm Canaccord Adams, claims that inside sources tipped him off to problems on the other side of the world:
We have…heard that the upcoming iPad launch may be somewhat limited as a manufacturing bottleneck has impacted production of Apple’s newest device … An unspecified production problem at the iPad’s manufacturer, Hon Hai Precision [the company is better known to Americans as Foxconn, producer of the Mac mini, iPod and iPhone,] will likely limit the launch region to the US and the number of units available to roughly 300K in the month of March, far lower than the company’s initial estimate of 1,000K units. [...]
Read more | Monday, March 1, 2010
Source: Venture Beat | Category: Technology
Conde Nast is preparing to embrace the iPad with some of its biggest magazines. In addition to a tablet version of Wired — which we’ve covered before — the publisher is developing iPad versions of GQ, Glamour, Vanity Fair, and The New Yorker.
According to the New York Times, Conde Nast will officially announce the plans in an internal memorandum today. The publisher likely won’t be alone in dishing iPad plans over the next few weeks — Apple expects to ship the Wi-Fi-only version of the iPad in late March, and the 3G-equipped version in late April. [...]
Read more | Monday, March 1, 2010
Source: GigaOM | Category: Media
The gift card business has nearly quintupled from $20 billion in 1999 to $100 billion in 2010. Along with the growth has come a unique problem: nearly $5 billion worth of cards go unclaimed every year. Cardpool, a San Francisco-based startup, wants to solve that problem.
Read more | Monday, March 1, 2010
Source: Venture Beat | Category: Technology
Sony confirmed today that it has had an outage for its PlayStation Network that affects gamers with older PlayStation 3s.
The Japanese company apologized to users and said the network went down over the weekend because of a bug with the system’s clock. It does not affect those who have the newer PS 3 Slim models that launched last August.
The errors in the system include:
* The date of the PS3 system may be reset to Jan 1, 2000.
* When the user tries to sign-in to the PlayStation Network, the following message appears on the screen; “An error has occurred. [...]
Read more | Monday, March 1, 2010
Source: Venture Beat | Category: Technology
Electronics market intelligence firm iSuppli issued a report Monday morning that claims 78 million television sets with 3D capability will be sold in the year 2015. ”The market so far has been more talk than action,” researcher Riddhi Patel wrote in a note accompanying the report. “However, announcements made before and after the 2010 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in January indicate that 3D TV is becoming a reality.”
At CES, Patel wrote, Sony, LG, Panasonic and Samsung demonstrated home 3D sets. [...]
Read more | Monday, March 1, 2010
Source: Venture Beat | Category: Technology
The clear and obvious growth path for iPhone app developers is to leap to other smartphones. Apple’s competitors have yet to kick the iPhone out of first place as an apps market for software developers. Still, as iPhone sales settle down after a crazy initial climb, the potential income from an Android or BlackBerry app — or better yet, both – makes these smartphones worth building for.
That’s why mobile advertising and analytics company Medialets has added BlackBerry and Android support to its software development kit, used by app makers who want to track the use of their creations. [...]
Read more | Monday, March 1, 2010
Source: Venture Beat | Category: Technology
Electronic book readers are gaining so much traction that chip makers are starting to design custom chips to power them.
The latest example is from Freescale, which is launching the i.MX508 applications processor today. The chip uses an ARM Cortex A8 as its core brain and gathers a bunch of eBook functions together on a single chip. That eliminates other chips from the system and will help lower the cost of eBook readers.
The chip incorporates the hardware-based display controller from E Ink, which has created the popular display technology used in eBook readers such as the Amazon Kindle. [...]
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