FUNKY GREEN: 04/26/13

Friday, 26 April 2013

Engadget Podcast 341 - 04.26.13

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Nokia Lumia 520 review: does Nokia need another budget Windows Phone?

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Wii U Virtual Console now live on the eShop

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HTC One vs. Samsung Galaxy S4: Which Android Phone Wins?

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Facebook Home (para Android) es sólo para los muy fanáticos de Facebook

En RTVE.es, mis impresiones sobre Facebook Home tras haberlo probado en un Samsung Galaxy Note II, uno de los pocos teléfonos Android en los que de momento se puede instalar.

Facebook Home hace lo que promete y lo hace razonablemente bien, pero destruye cualquier noción de privacidad y además se lleva por delante funciones básicas de Android (y de la versión de Android del fabricante del teléfono), además del plan de datos y la batería del móvil.

# Enlace Permanente

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Galaxy S4 teardown reveals the silicon beauty within the plastic beast

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LG Cloud rolling out in over 40 more countries by late May

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Phone Condoms Protect Devices From the Rain

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Travel Startup AnyRoad Tries To Provide Anything But Your Typical Travel Tour

Two years ago, I had a terrible experience at the Great Wall when I visited its most popular corridor in Badaling. Trapped between tens of thousands of local tourists for miles upon miles one scorchingly humid August day, I eventually managed to get off by riding a roller coaster down the Great Wall that ended up in a bear park. Really!

I’m not alone. AnyRoad co-founders Daniel and Jonathan Yaffe almost ended up doing the same thing, but they were smarter. They asked around and found out about remote parts of the wall where you could walk for miles without seeing another soul. It took hours to get there, but they got lucky and met a courteous taxi driver who showed them exactly what they wanted — that endless, breathtaking view of the crumbling Wall stretching for hundreds of miles into the distance.

With that as inspiration, they decided to do a startup together that would offer custom tours to people in cities like Tokyo, Rio de Janeiro, Jerusalem, San Francisco and more.

The Yaffe brothers have a colorful background. The older one, Jonathan, founded and was a principal of a charter school named KAIS International in Tokyo for several years, while the younger one, Daniel, ran and sold a drinking magazine called Drink Me and is releasing a book on whiskey later this year. Their technical co-founder Michalis Polakis is a former Soundcloud engineer.

They say they’re not quite like YC-backed Vayable, or other marketplaces for experiences, because they’re partnering with established tour guides and small companies instead of regular, everyday locals that want to give people experiences in their spare time.

AnyRoad has 200 tours available through 150 guides so far in five countries. The average ticket price being about $180. These include experiences like a Candomble tour in Rio de Janeiro, which teaches people about the history of the dance and music or a visit to a whiskey distillery in Brooklyn. About 80 percent of the company’s booking are from outside the U.S.

In their two month beta, they said that bookings are tripling each month and more than 1 percent of visitors to the site book a tour. AnyRoad takes a 14 percent commission off each one.

They had to meet with more than 3,000 tour guides throughout different countries over 18 months to figure out different pain points in the booking process.

The challenges are, of course, about scaling. The strong existing online travel startups have really strong SEO strategies, and are easy to find atop any search for hotels or tours in different cities. The company said it’s focusing on unique distribution channels and other partnerships, without offering too many specifics.

On the supply side, AnyRoad is basically a very customized CMS for tour guides. It’s a self-serve model although AnyRoad curates the marketplace and doesn’t let every potential tour onto the platform. They also verify the guides’ credentials for safety and trust. The startup is bootstrapped so far.

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Engadget's laptop buyer's guide: spring 2013 edition

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Tesla announces new service details, unconditional warranty for Model S battery

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Samsung Reportedly Working on 'Rugged' Galaxy S4

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Oculus' Palmer Luckey on the Motorola StarTAC and living in the meatspace

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HP's Slate 7 tablet goes on sale, brings on the Beats for $170

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Living with Google Glass, Day Two: Around the House

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Make your PlayStation 3 look that much more like a Terminator robot with a 'Metallic Gray' DualShock 3

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Pinterest revives classic features, revamps notifications and search

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Meet The Top Five Startups From ERA's Latest New York Demo Day

Another year has come and gone, and with it a brand new class of Entrepreneur Roundtable Accelerator graduates. At demo day today, we saw ten companies launch out of development and into the public eye. Yes, all of them are interesting, disrupting industries from real estate to big data to financial services. But a handful of companies truly stand out as potential game-changers in the tech world.

So without any further ado, these are TechCrunch’s picks for the ERA Accelerator spring class:

Acquaintable

Online dating is more than a trend these days; it’s how young people make connections. Acquaintable focuses on some sort of common thread, connecting people who have mutual friends. According to the company, Acquaintable has a much lower cost for user acquisition because the friend-of-friends model offers natural virality. Plus, it has a better shot at actually creating relationships that last, as the company says that 70 percent of couples have met through friends

Using Acquaintable is easy. You hit up the website, give the service Facebook access, and then see pictures of those you might be interested in. It has a similar set up to HotOrNot.com or FaceMash, letting you approve or disapprove of someone’s picture and basic info before moving on to another suitor.

All your “likes” and “passes” are completely anonymous. Only after you and your suitor show a mutual interest can you begin communicating via messaging. Acquantainable has had an Alpha out for a while now, with 15 percent of users returning daily, and 35 percent of users sharing and inviting an average of four people. Plus, since Acquaintable focuses on friends-of-friends, it’s less of a sausage fest than online dating services that don’t ensure that this is a real, normal human being and not a creepy stranger.

Acquaintable is available now here.

Consignd

Consignd is trying to give power back to the social influencers who determine shopping habits, while still providing perks to big brand retailers and businesses. Anyone with a web presence, like bloggers, pinners, and website owners can open up a store on their site. Founder Neil Parikh explained that you can do this without ever having to source or ship inventory. Sounds weird, right? But wait.

Consignd believes that inspiration and discovery play integral roles in shopping. In fact, 48 percent of products that were bought last year were discovered socially. The breakdown between big brand retailers, affiliates, and independent retailers causes problems for all of them. Retailers lose track of where their product is sold, whereas independent retailers can’t focus on their product because of the stresses of SEO and discovery.

The idea behind Consignd is that the responsibility of bringing an audience to a retailer no longer falls on the shoulders of the retailer, thanks to sites like Pinterest and Tumblr. So as pinners and bloggers have more and more influence over shopping habits, Consignd wants to give them the credit, and the cash, by letting them open up their own store front.

Easy Pairings

When you think of NYC, it’s hard not to imagine the thousands of wannabe actresses, singer/songwriters and models who are moonlighting as waitresses until their career takes off. The problem, however, is that their careers do take off, and they leave the restaurant. In fact, most restaurants have an annual turnover rate greater than 50 percent.

Easy Pairings, one of our favorites out of ERA, is changing the way restaurants find their staff. The Easy Pairings service is available as an app, so you don’t have to run to your desktop the second you need to make a hire. Once you download the app, you can choose from the type of worker you need (server, bartender, hostess) and see who’s available for an interview.

So far, Easy Pairings has scheduled 200 interviews, and led to the hire of over 50 workers at restaurants. According to the founders Darren Wan and Peter Lada, restaurants are just the beginning, as the service can work in any industry that experiences high turnover. The company is looking to raise $500k with over $190k committed.

Startist

Startist is a platform that lets professional creatives connect and collaborate on projects with a rich-media experience. Yet, unlike most creative collaboration platforms that focus on a certain genre of artistry, Startist doesn’t discriminate. Projects can range from film and music to games and technology.

The big idea behind Startist isn’t just that creative professionals can work on projects together, but that creative professionals can form meaningful connections. Looking for bandmates or directors for your film project or models for your photography is a tough task. It isn’t just a job, it’s a relationship, and an important one at that.

Classified ads are the alternative. There are 20,000 classified ads posted by musicians every day, yet creatives aren’t able to truly express themselves in this format. Startist lets you showcase your work and search for other interesting creatives with all the originality and creativity you can muster.

Startist is opening up their private beta today, which you can check out here

The Square Foot

The Square Foot is a real estate platform that focuses on the commercial space. It lets prospective tenants, brokers, and landlords connect quickly and easily. Searching for commercial real estate isn’t easy, especially without a lot of cash to put behind a broker.

But The Square Foot helps small businesses find the right space by aggregating available office spaces. But the Square Foot goes even further than that. For one, the service doesn’t hand you off at the browser. The Square Foot follows the transaction all the way through to completion to make sure you have everything you need to get to business.

Plus, the service connects users with service and product providers to help set up the space for work, buy furniture, move, etc. As of now, the Houston-based company has over 75 percent of the Houston area searchable on the site. The team is now working on expanding this service to the wild world of New York City.

So far, the company has raised $400k, but they’re still looking for strategic angel investors.

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Toshiba to release 4K-ready, 160MB/s CompactFlash memory cards

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Primeras imágenes del Atlantis en su nueva casa

Atlantis en su lugar definitivo

Aunque la inauguración del nuevo edificio que lo aloja en el Complejo de Visitantes del Centro Espacial Kennedy no se inaugurará hasta el próximo 29 de junio ya circula por ahí esta foto del Atlantis instalado en él, justo cuando los operarios comenzaron a retirar las lonas que lo cubren.

Ilustración del transbordador expuesto

Esta es la forma en la que está previsto que sea mostrado el Atlantis en el Complejo de Visitantes del KSC

Esta será una de las paradas obligatorias de una futura gira espaciotrastornada para ver las reliquias del programa de los transbordadores espaciales, gira que además debe incluir una visita al Discovery en el Centro Steven F. Udvar-Hazy, el anexo del Museo Nacional del Aire y el Espacio que está en el aeropuerto internacional Dulles de Washington, al Endeavour en el Centro de Ciencias de California, y al Enterprise, el transbordador que se usó para pruebas aerodinámicas pero que nunca llegó a salir al espacio, que está en Museo Mar-Aire-Espacio del Intrepid en Nueva York.

Claro que puestos a ser completos también habría que visitar el Full Fuselage Trainer en el Museo del Vuelo de Seattle y el Pathfinder en Huntsville y el Explorer en Houston.

(Vía @NASAKennedy).

# Enlace Permanente

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En el primer trimestre de 2013 se distribuyeron en todo el mundo 216.200.000 teléfonos inteligentes, lo que supone el 51,6 por ciento de todos los teléfonos distribuidos en ese trimestre. Por primera vez la mayoría de los teléfonos distribuidos son smartphones, según IDC.

Humanidad aumentada = inutilidad creciente.

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