FUNKY GREEN: 04/09/13

Tuesday, 9 April 2013

Outlook.com May Soon Be as Secure as Gmail

via Tech http://feeds.mashable.com/~r/mashable/tech/~3/7fd9lyVyeD4/

Melinda Gates: Tech's Responsibility to the Developing World

via Tech http://feeds.mashable.com/~r/mashable/tech/~3/afA7FaJ0NP8/

Blab Predicts Which Social Media Conversations Are Worth Joining

Blab is launching a platform that allows businesses to predict — up to three days in advance — which social media conversations are going to be important.

Co-founder and CTO David Snelling gave me a brief demo of the product yesterday. He showed off a visualization tool that highlights the up-and-coming topics at any given moment, a “magazine view” featuring the most engaging content in a given topic, and most uniquely, a chart predicting the extent to which the conversation will spread in 12, 24, and all the way up to 72 hours ahead, along with an indicator of how confident Blab is in its prediction.

To be clear, Blab can only make these predictions about conversations that have already started — it can’t predict what news will break in the next three days. But even though it’s not a crystal ball, Snelling argued that it can help companies decide which conversations they should join and which topics they should focus on. After all, those companies don’t want to hop on a bandwagon just as the excitement is dying down.

“If you’re going to create long-term content, you want it to be where [consumers] are going to be landing, not where they are now,” Snelling said.

Co-founder and CEO Randy Browning added that these predictions help companies “emerge the thicket of trees and get a view of the forest.”

The predictions can be made with as little as 30 minutes of data, Snelling said. To do so, Blab looks at the initial conversational patterns and compares them to past data, so that if things are unfolding similarly to a conversation in the past, the technology can extrapolate how the conversation will proceed.

When I asked if there are specific topics where Blab makes more accurate predictions, Snelling answered, “We’re really not concerned about the topic, we’re just concerned about the behavior.” He also warned that conversations are “a living thing” that change over time, so the predictions get more accurate as Blab collects more data.

Other Blab features include the ability to identify influential users and to find relevant comments even if they don’t use a specific keyword. In the future, Snelling said he wants to add more nuance to the predictions, so that they suggest which platforms are likely to see the most activity.

Blab has raised $3.5 million from strategic investors Horizon Media and Butler, Shine, Stern and Partners, as well as various angel investors.

via TechCrunch » Startups http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/techcrunch/startups/~3/v3Xg3tvKaFo/

Nintendo lands 'remotely controlled mobile device control' patent

via Engadget RSS Feed http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/CfZ4-nzNaHU/

Genius.box wants to put a different experiment on your doorstep every month

via Engadget RSS Feed http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/lqQIj4ZJbPI/

This Is How Google Glass Really Works

via Tech http://feeds.mashable.com/~r/mashable/tech/~3/XGZuoprFCXU/

After hours at NAB: A closer look at Red's Dragon upgrade operation (video)

via Engadget RSS Feed http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/FCohtPgV8Ww/

Google Play Store 4.0 redesign rolling out to Android phones and tablets today

via Engadget RSS Feed http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/NzgXgxnwzNQ/

Facebook adds new emotion selection tool, making it easier to converse

via Engadget RSS Feed http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/Ck__1A68TIo/

Engadget Giveaway: win one of two Amped Wireless router bundles!

via Engadget RSS Feed http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/LGq1N1ZH9Y0/

Insert Coin: Skydog brings cloud-based networking to the home

via Engadget RSS Feed http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/iybF4w4vIYk/

How Chrono24 Helps Bring Order To The Chaotic Watch Market

As TC’s resident watch lover, I often find myself browsing the horology forums while alone, scantily-clad, and drunk. However, in this era of connoisseur-nets and always-conntected trade, there are few bargains to be found and even fewer ways to find exactly what you want. That’s where Chrono24.com comes in. Founded by serial entrepreneurs Tim Stracke and Dirk Schwartz, the site has been live since 2003 but has just recently streamlined its operations to offer a sort of watch search engine that allows users to find timepieces of note from almost anywhere in the world.

The pair began by buying the site, originally a classifieds forum, in 2010. “We had to pay a steep price for just a domain and dealer contracts. But it gave us a great starting point to change the watch industry,” said Stracke. “Chrono24 is not only an industry changer but also one of the few truly global marketplaces.”

The site brings disparate watch markets and forums together and allows sellers to submit items for sale. Dealers in new and used watches – the so called grey market – submit their timepieces and users can then search for pieces from around the world. Many forums, for example, have sales boards but they are usually limited to fans of a specific type of watch or brand. BobsWatches, for example, has made a business out of selling Rolex and has even create a widget for users to assess the value of their pieces. Chrono24, on the other hand, is more all-encompassing in their approach.

The company recently acquired to competitors and they see about 130,000 visits per day. Mobile visits have risen to 20,000 per day and they’re doing transactions of up to 300 million Euro per year.

The company is expanding, as well. They have created a personal “buying agent” that scours the listing and notifies you when a specific watch appears and you can even call in and speak to an advisor who will tell you what to buy and wear. More important, however, is the plan to build an escrow system for buyers and sellers. When you’re dropping $62,000 on a Rolex you want to ensure your payment isn’t going to end up in some oligarch’s back pocket.

“One of our most relevant projects for 2013 is establishing a ‘Chrono24 Trusted Payment’ system where Chrono24 will act as a trusted escrow agent. All this differentiates us from eBay and current and future competitors,” said Stracke.

Stracke is proud of his place in the horology niche and even prouder of the fact that the company is based in Germany. “We are one of the few German Internet start-ups that are global market leaders. And we are not a copy cat.”

via TechCrunch » Startups http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/techcrunch/startups/~3/Xv6u0q5HZ0M/

Newsana Combines Reddit's Community With Expert-Driven Curation To Create A Better Way To Consume The News

During their time with Journalists For Human Rights, Canada’s largest NGO, Ben Peterson and Jonathan Wong helped train local journalists in sub-saharan Africa on how best to report on human rights, governance (or lack thereof) and uphold the fourth estate. To help them teach these aspiring reporters, the friends looked for the best examples of Human Rights journalism. But all they found was a fire hose of news content, and the Herculean struggle of to find the best stories amidst all the noise.

Peterson tells us that this challenge quickly led them to ask, “wouldn’t it be great if we could get a group of Human Rights experts to find the best articles for us?” The answer to this question took shape in a platform called, Newsana, which the founders are officially launching today. Founded in early 2012 as an answer to the challenge of finding the best Human Rights news content, Peterson and Wong soon realized that their expert-driven crowdsourcing solution could be used for any topic.

The co-founders joined forces with a team of developers and social media experts and spent the next seven months building out the platform. Informed by the rise and fall of sites like Digg, Newsana looks to combine the best of community-based, social news sites (a la Reddit) with expert-driven curation. Unlike others of its ilk, the platform is looking to become an exclusive online community targeted at those who are “passionate about learning and discussing news and ideas,” Peterson says.

Those looking to help curate the news and have a particular area of expertise they’re interested can apply to become members of the platform. Newsana then screens these “experts,” and once accepted, allows them to choose the content they want to share and discuss. Members can vote on their favorite stories of the day, and Newsana uses its algorithms to post top stories across 35 categories (at launch), including Business, Arts and Entertainment, Lifestyle, Media, Politics and Technology.

Based on community activity, the top five stories in each category are then served in those verticals for anyone and everyone to consume. So, anyone can read and consume Newsana’s stop stories, but if you want to vote, pitch stories or engage others in conversation, you have to be logged in. Once accepted, members can invite 10 new people per week.

“The biggest challenge for us,” Peterson tells us, “is to keep the quality high. While we love and respect Reddit and strive for the same kind of community interaction, we don’t want to become just another social, news-sharing clone.” That’s why Newsana has opted for an invite-only system, to help it curate its community and reward constructive activity. To that end, within each vertical, the site ranks members based on their contributions, and the higher their rank, the more weight their activities are given on the site.

“We think that our ultimate value offering is to provide the most essential, quality news quicker than anywhere else,” Peterson says. While Twitter is a shotgun blast of news, as are Google news and RSS feeds, Newsana distills each category down to five critical topics, populating those categories with content chosen by experts.

At launch, the startup’s goal is to expand its member base, although the co-founders aren’t sure yet what the ideal number of contributing members will be; “we’re going to wait and see on that one,” the co-founder tells us. But, eventually, we want to have millions of experts and hundreds of thousands of topics. In the long-term, we want to become a historical guide, where you can find the most essential stories from two months ago, a year ago, or 50 years ago.

In terms of monetization, a potential stumbling block for any news aggregator, Peterson says that the company’s first priority is to build out a strong community and, once that is in place, the team “will work with them on the best way to monetize.” When pressed, the founder says that their first approach will likely center around providing native, branded content from sponsors — the same method Techmeme employs for its tech news aggregator.

To date, Newsana has raised $500K in seed financing from a group of Canadian angel investors, including Gary Slaight (President and CEO, Slaight Communications), Prem Watsa (Chairman and CEO Fairfax Financial Holdings) and Mohammad Al Zaibak (President and CEO, Canadian Development and Marketing Corp).

Going forward, in the next couple of weeks, Newsana plans to release an iOS app and begin offering an email newsletter with notifications to allow users to consume news in weekly email digests. The team will also look to take design and UX cues from popular newsreaders like Flipboard as it looks to build out Newsana’s mobile footprint.

“Over 70 percent of individuals online feel overwhelmed with the information available to them,” Peterson says. “Newsana was designed to solve this problem for our members because they don’t have to filter through all the noise and chatter to access the relevant content they want. We like to think of Newsana as the ‘News Nirvana’.”

For more, find Newsana at home here and check out the intro video below:

via TechCrunch » Startups http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/techcrunch/startups/~3/_gDEimiF9uM/

Sony Anycast Touch live-broadcasting system hands-on (video)

via Engadget RSS Feed http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/JT0XhpVOfDY/

ThermoShield protects your phone in unbearable heat and bone-rattling cold

via Engadget RSS Feed http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/Kmxo-F1UHMM/

Xiaomi Phone 2S and 2A announced with MIUI v5, the former entering Hong Kong and Taiwan

via Engadget RSS Feed http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/iebC7F72OX4/

Samsung Galaxy Note 8.0 Can't Touch the iPad Mini

via Tech http://feeds.mashable.com/~r/mashable/tech/~3/Qa1Y3FkBn_c/

Microsoft leak details plans for two-step authentication process

via Engadget RSS Feed http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/9vPWLUI0q_g/

Samsung Galaxy Note 8.0 review

via Engadget RSS Feed http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/8FqB3e4HePs/

Galaxy Note 8.0 coming to the US on April 11th for $400

via Engadget RSS Feed http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/Ih00_XdGtgM/

Pandora Surpasses 200 Million Registered Users, 140 Million Access Via Mobile

Pandora has just announced that its online streaming radio has quite a few listeners. In fact, the company has surpassed 200 million registered users in the U.S. That’s up from 100 million registered users in July of 2011, meaning that around half of Pandora’s users have come over in the past two years, despite the fact that Pandora launched all the way back in 2005.

Slow and steady wins the race, eh?

Of those 200 million registered users, over 140 million of them have tuned in to Pandora via mobile, which just goes to show how crucial it is to have a mobile presence, no matter the business. Pandora users have also given over 25 billion thumbs, to help personalize their stations, and on average Pandora streams around 200 million songs before 10am each morning.

Perhaps more interesting than user growth is Pandora’s ability to spread new music to a huge userbase. Pandora mentioned this morning that the company has played more than 100,000 unique artists and over 1 million unique songs just last month.

Here’s what Pandora founder Tim Westerngren had to say:

We started this company to help people discover and enjoy music they love, and to help artists reach and grow their audiences. Only in our wildest dreams did we imagine what it would become. It is now clear that radio is changing, and that’s great news for music fans and for the tens of thousands of working artists who now have a home on the air.

Growth in registered users is surely something to be excited about, but what’s most important to a service like Pandora is monthly active users. At the end of March, Pandora boasted 69.5 million monthly active users, which is up from 59.9 million in December of 2012.

In fact, the company has showed steady growth in MAU over the past couple years.

via TechCrunch » Startups http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/techcrunch/startups/~3/tUGCetAdX_8/

AU Optronics says it'll bring a 5-inch, 1080P OLED display to market soon

via Engadget RSS Feed http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/e9Xqq_grFhE/

Rogers leak pins BlackBerry Q10 Canadian launch date as April 30th

via Engadget RSS Feed http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/ibc484I6MoQ/

Carpooling Marketplace BlaBlaCar Reaches 3 Million Members, Rides Into Germany

Well, it looks like the carpooling race in Europe continues. BlaBlaCar, the European carpooling marketplace and competitor to Carpooling.com, has announced that it’s reached the milestone of 3 million members, almost double from this time last year. It’s also expanding to Germany, giving testimony to being a truly pan-European player.

In January last year, the Paris-headquartered company raised an additional $10 million from Accel Partners and existing investors ISAI, and Cabiedes & Partners, specifically for European expansion. Since then its carpooling communities have extended beyond the UK, France and Spain, to include Benelux (Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg), Poland, Portugal, Italy (via an acquisition), and now Germany, of course.

The launch into Germany, including opening an office in Hamburg, also puts the heat on ten year-old Carpooling.com, which is based in neighboring Munich and targets most of Europe, including 7 language-specific websites. In comparison, Carpooling.com claims 4 million members.

Founded in 2006, BlaBlaCar taps into the collaborative consumption phenomenon — long before anybody called it that — by offering a carpooling or ridesharing marketplace to connect drivers with empty seats and paying passengers, helping to offset long distance travel costs.

Drivers can charge passengers through BlaBlaCar or directly, while there are a number of security mechanisms, such as phone number authentication and user ratings of members, which form the basis for being blacklisted, if necessary, In other words, along with the network and marketplace aspects, it’s building a trust platform.

Accessible on the web and via mobile apps, BlaBlaCar says it’s currently seeing around 500,000 passengers every month.

via TechCrunch » Startups http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/techcrunch/startups/~3/7Znhnp2KrWQ/

Resume-Killing Jobs Marketplace HireArt Wants To Help You Find A Job At An Education Startup

If you’re not familiar with hiring platform, HireArt, they’re the startup that inspired this memorable headline, courtesy of my colleague Sarah Perez. Yes, the Y Combinator-incubated startup launched in March last year to provide a new solution to an age-old problem experienced by every employer during the hiring process: Resumes are bullshit.

Job candidates have a tendency to oversell themselves and fluff up their qualifications in their resumes, leaving employers to sort out the wheat from the hyperbolic chaffe. So HireArt devised a solution in which employers can ask applicants to complete a series of tasks in their purported areas of expertise to help them get a better sense of their actual skills. Using the startup’s platform, candidates can search for jobs and positions that are relevant to them, complete challenges and fill out applications, sending the finished product to employers with one click.

Today, HireArt is bringing its model to one of the hottest arenas in Startup Land: Education technology. The startup announced today that it is launching an Education Technology Challenge, which is designed to help people who want to work in EdTech with startups that are hiring, and, in turn, help education companies identify the best candidates.

HireArt co-founder Elli Sharef tells us that more than 50 companies have already signed on to participate in the challenge, including Scholastic, General Assembly, LearnSprout and Edmodo — to name a few.

But why education and why now? Sharef says, that for one, the EdTech space has been seeing enormous growth over the last few years, with investments in EdTech startups tripling over the last decade, increasing to $429 million in 2011 from $146 million in 2002, according the National Venture Capital Association. This, in part has led to a growing interest in the EdTech space among entrepreneurs, startups and the media — both at local and state levels. In 2012, for example, TechCrunch published four-times the amount of EdTech stories it published in 2011.

Of course, there’s also the fact that the price of a college diploma, coupled with soaring student debt, poor test scores and dwindling graduation rates make education as a whole ripe for technological solutions. We’ve seen a big uptick in the amount of education-focused startups over the last two years, and although there is the Series A crunch to contend with, the smart money says that this trend is going to continue.

Furthermore, looking for job in EdTech offers the potential to have a meaningful impact on the world, rather than simply helping to create a better photo-sharing app. One HireArt candidate explains: “I did Teach For America for two years, and now I want to work in tech because I think it’s the best way to make best practices in education truly scalable. It’s really going to change the game.”

For job candidates, the co-founder sees the potential appeal of the EdTech Challenge in that it offers an efficient and easy way to be considered by a wide range of educational employers at once. That, and that it’s a different (and maybe even fun) way to get into EdTech if you haven’t worked in the space before but want to dive in while the market is hot.

Sharef also says that HireArt has found that employers tend to care much less about the resume when they have candidates’ video and text responses to consider as alternatives. Just in case you think that not having a sterling resume might hurt your chances.

For those interested in applying to HireArt’s challenge, you can apply via HireArt’s website here. After filling out an initial form, candidates will be invited back to complete the challenge, which consists of five questions centered around EdTech (like “What trends are you excited about in education?” for example). Using HireArt’s platform, candidates can record their responses in video, text and/or attachments. The best candidates will be shared with the participating employers, who will then reach out to candidates for phone screens and in-person interviews.

HireArt’s Education Technology Challenge is free for both employers and candidates. Applications are rolling, with a final deadline of April 18th.

Apply here.

via TechCrunch » Startups http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/techcrunch/startups/~3/Tb8Y_aCZNQU/

AOptix Launches First Biometric Scanning Tool for iPhone

via Tech http://feeds.mashable.com/~r/mashable/tech/~3/Xe8xZT1Mxbk/

Intel looking to turbocharge its NUC with Core i5 and i7 CPUs, according to leak

via Engadget RSS Feed http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/zvMkCpit2RA/

With Firepad, Firebase Adds Real-Time Text Collaboration To Its App Platform

Y Combinator-backed Firebase is expanding the infrastructure that it offers to app developers with its first module — Firepad, a Google Docs-style text editor that allows you to collaborate with others.

To a consumer, that might not sound very exciting. After all, we’ve already got Google Docs. However, co-founder and CEO James Tamplin said that those kinds of capabilities are limited to big companies with “a ton of Google-quality engineers.” With Firepad, however, developers can add text editing and document collaboration to their own apps without too much extra work.

To build Firepad, Tamplin said his team had an advantage, because “we’ve got most of the pieces in place already.” Building on top of the existing Firebase platform made things “significantly easier,” but he added, “It still wasn’t trivial.” Firepad is a full-featured text editor, with capabilities like conflict resolution, cursor synchronization, user attribution, and user presence detection.

Firepad is an open source project, so developers can download the code and customize it as they please.

And there are apps already using the technology — initially for code editing, though you can imagine other uses as well. For example, Atlassian is launching a free Firepad plugin for Stash, its tool for Git repository management, so that different team members can edit or review code together. (You can see a screenshot of the plugin below.) Atlassian developer advocate Rich Manalang said the plugin was created during one of the company’s ShipIt employee hackathons, and that he could “see [Firepad] being useful in a wide variety” of Atlassian products.

Similarly, <a target="_blank" href=" see it being useful in a wide variety of products Action.IO is using Firepad to enable collaborating code editing in its web development environment.

“Firepad is great because we don’t have to worry about building the backend in order to support real-time synchronization of a document’s state,” CEO Andrew J. Solimine told me via email. “It enabled us to build our collaborative code editing in just a few days, where it might have taken us weeks otherwise.”

Tamplin added that he plans to expand Firebase’s capabilities by releasing more modules in the future. Firepad is included in the Firebase pricing plan — the platform is currently free, but when the public beta ends, the company will charge based on bandwidth, storage, and the number of users.

To see collaborative editing in action, you can visit the Firepad site and play around with the group document on the front page.

via TechCrunch » Startups http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/techcrunch/startups/~3/MB3RUlQWNR0/

After Rebooting, Lulu Sees Its Database Of Guys App Hit 200K Users In 8 Weeks Across U.S. Campuses

Lulu (formerly Luluvise), the controversial mobile app that lets girls anonymously review and recommend guys, is seeing some pretty decent traction since it rebooted in February to focus on launching across U.S. college campuses, early Facebook-style. The London/U.S. company, backed by Passion Capital, PROfounders and a host of prominent angels including Yuri Milner and Dave Morin, has garnered 200,000 users in 8 weeks across the five U.S. universities where it’s actively been marketed.

That’s out of a possible market of 6 million female U.S. undergraduates, while at the current trajectory Lulu reckons it could be on track to reach 1 in 4 female undergraduates in the U.S. by the end of the year, something which it then plans to use as a springboard to target the U.S. female market as a whole.

Pitched as a “girls-only app for dating intelligence” or an anonymous database of guys, created by girls — men are strictly prohibited from joining via Facebook login and other checks — Lulu has, perhaps, understandably received its fair amount of criticism, even though it initially stalled before take off. The main charge being that the same concept if applied to guys rating girls would be frowned upon, not least by investors, though in actual fact there are a number of similar startups targeting males.

The other, more legitimate, charge levied at Lulu is that the men reviewed have little right to reply due to being locked out of the app, even if there is a limited accompanying app that lets them edit their basic profile. A lawsuit waiting to happen, maybe, though the app’s ToS clearly puts the onus on the women asked to upload reviews, suggesting slightly disingenuously that they must seek the permission of the guy they are reviewing first if they choose to post information about them that may contravene any data-protection laws.

All of which hasn’t put off the startup’s backers. In February, Lulu announced it had added another $2.5 million to its coffers, bringing the total raised to $3.5m.

Of course, controversy has undoubtedly brought lots of PR, too, including a fair amount of mainstream media coverage in the UK and U.S., such as on Ryan Seacrest’s Virgin Radio show, so it’s not so surprising to see some traction happening states-side.

Interestingly, I’m told that overall Lulu’s U.S. college campus traction is coming at an acquisition cost of $0.07 per user, while in the first 5 universities where the app launched, it achieved 35-40% penetration within 2-3 weeks. It’s now scaling this approach nationwide.

Other interesting stats that have been shared with TechCrunch: 50% of new users come back weekly, visiting 8 times per week on average, spending 45 mins in the app per week. In addition, 52% of users create content. Overall, Lulu has seen 57 million profile views, 4 million user sessions, 5.2 million reviews read, and 10 million searches.

And, perhaps unsurprisingly, for every three women that join, one guy tries to — unsuccessfully — sign up.

Well, you can’t blame a guy for trying.

via TechCrunch » Startups http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/techcrunch/startups/~3/I_ihyyiaG2I/

Refurbished 27-inch iMacs hit the Apple store, thin profiles start at $1,529

via Engadget RSS Feed http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/oA2zAUXr7SU/

This Laser Tag Game Uses Everyday Objects As 'Guns'

via Tech http://feeds.mashable.com/~r/mashable/tech/~3/IShhTdk6pQk/

Un material inspirado en las lágrimas controla el fluir de los líquidos

En reposo el material permanece suave, transparente y liso; y las pequeñas gostas de agua o aceite se deslizan libremente por su superficie. Al estirar el material su superficie se hace más áspera y opaca. La superficie rugosa permite controlar el movimiento del líquido deteniendo su movimiento o permitiendo que se deslice o modificando su velocidad [...] La superficie puede modificarse como respuesta a cambios de temperatura, luz, campos eléctricos o magnéticos, señales químicas, presión u otras condiciones del entorno y puede repeler todo tipo de líquidos, aceite, agua o sangre.

Algunas de las aplicaciones citadas en Scientists design new adaptive material inspired by tears van desde una tienda de campaña que se mantiene translúcida en días de sol y se vuelve transparente y repelente al agua en día nublados y lluviosos a lentillas que se ajustan y limpian solas o tuberías que pueden variar el flujo según la cantidad de líquido o dependiendo de las condiciones externas.

# Enlace Permanente