FUNKY GREEN: 05/07/13

Tuesday, 7 May 2013

Facebook Comes to Google Glass

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The entire nation of Syria goes offline yet again

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BitTorrent launches 'Bundle' media format with Ultra Music partnership

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Trailer de El juego de Ender

Tras el teaser del trailer, ya tenemos el trailer propiamente dicho de El juego de Ender. Otra de esas películas que apetece ver pero que a la vez da miedito por la calidad de la novela que intenta llevar al cine.

El estreno será el 1 de noviembre de 2013 si vives en los Estados Unidos En el resto del mundo… Pues veremos.

(Gracias por el recordatorio, @vyllaykorte).

# Enlace Permanente

via Microsiervos http://www.microsiervos.com/archivo/peliculas-tv/trailer-de-el-juego-de-ender.html

Chromium code hints at Google Now for OS X

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Inside the Internet Archive's Real-World Home

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White House taps former Twitter lawyer as first Chief Privacy Officer

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Microsoft Windows 8.1 'Blue' public preview will be released at Build in June

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Adobe Milagro: el software definitivo

Adobe-Milagro

Ni Creative Suite 6 ni CS5 ni nada de nada: lo que necesitamos en nuestros ordenadores es Adobe Milagro™, una versión con funciones para resolver todos los problemillas cotidianos a los que se enfrentan diseñadores y artistas digitales de mal vivir.

¡Corre que se agota!

Es una utópica creación de Uops! Studio (vía Ateneu Popular.)

# Enlace Permanente

via Microsiervos http://www.microsiervos.com/archivo/humor/adobe-milagro-software-definitivo.html

First Else's Splay officially comes to Android as a thumb-friendly launcher (video)

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Nest acquires MyEnergy, inherits better analysis tools for its customers

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Robotic girl and dog pair up to judge your body odor in Japanese

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This Solid Aluminum iPhone Dock Is Your Deal of the Day

BitTorrent Bundles Turn Songs Into Stores

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Seagate Central review: media sharing for the home, plus backup too

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Julien Fourgeaud steps down as CEO of Scarlet Motors

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You Can Now Buy Stuff From Right Inside a Torrent

Grab Adobe Ideas For iOS For Free Right Here

YouEye Raises $3M For Its Webcam-Based Usability Testing Service With Emotion Recognition

YouEye, a usability testing service that uses a pool of screened candidates to help designers and developer get feedback for their sites, today announced that it has raised a $3 million funding round led by investors Bobby Yazdani, the founder and CEO of Saba Software and an investor in Dropbox, Google, Qwiki, Brian McClendon, the co-founder of Keyhole, Inc (which later became Google Earth) and Beth McClendon. A number of additional investors also participated in this round, which also includes a $400.000 raise from early 2011 led by Bobby Yazdani.

The company, which describes itself as a “UX lab in the cloud,” takes a different approach from other online usability test service. The focus for YouEye goes beyond asking users questions about a site and tracking their cursors. Instead, the service records the participants interactions with a site and tries to capture their emotions. The service is also currently alpha testing eye-tracking as another data point for its studies.

YouEye’s face recognition algorithms, the company says, can recognize over 50,000 micro-expressions and “can accurately show when a user’s facial expression aligns with several feelings, including happy, surprised, puzzled, disgusted, afraid and sad.” Companies that want to use the service can pick the exact demographics of the testers (age, gender, education level, income, etc.). Users can also annotate their videos. YouEye says some of its customers include Airbnb, Microsoft and Eventbrite. Here is a sample of what those final videos look like.

Typically, these kind of studies are pretty expensive and can take a long time to complete, but YouEye’s prices start at $39 per participant (including webcam and audio recording, as well as emotion recognition data and written answers to post-study survey questions) and most results should be available within 48 hours.

YouEye is also using today’s funding announcement to officially launch a new product: Insite. This service allows you to ask any visitor to your site to opt-in to participate in a usability study. Companies can then capture the full webcam video and audio from those visitors that opt in to these studies. For developers, adding this feature to an existing site is as easy as adding a single line of code. Users then see a little widget on the site that asks them to participate (and sites can sweeten the deal with a discount or other incentives, too.). The service is based on a freemium model.

Insite is currently only available as a limited beta, but you can get on the waitlist here.

via TechCrunch » Startups http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/techcrunch/startups/~3/9Szl997u9_Q/

Windows Phone 8's YouTube app goes from glorified bookmark to full application in latest update

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Boingo Wi-Finder for iOS update enables iTunes subscription billing

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Has Big Data Made Anonymity Impossible?

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Foursquare updates app for Windows Phone 8, brings lock screen notifications and NFC check-ins

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Valve experiments with players' sweat response, eye-tracking controls for future game design

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Bloomberg: Tesla's Elon Musk discussing self-driving car partnership with Google

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Urban Compass Debuts A Hyperlocal Social Network, And A Rental Portal To Serve As Its Magnet

Urban Compass, a New York-based startup that last year raised an $8 million seed round while still in stealth mode, is coming out of the shadows and debuting its first services in public beta: a hyperlocal social network, called the Urban Compass Network, and a housing rentals platform that brings online the whole process of finding, securing and subsequently paying for a place to live. The two services, which debut first in New York, were formally unveiled today at a press conference led by the Mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg.

Ori Allon, the co-founder and executive chairman — and also a search PhD who sold his last two (search-focused) startups respectively first to Google and then Twitter, where he became head of engineering based in New York until he left to start Urban Compass — is trying something new with his latest venture: a “data-driven company” as he describes it, but also one that, fundamentally, will be relying on a lot of human input for the wheels to turn.

In January, alongside an engineering recruitment effort, the company began to hire a cadre of “neighborhood specialists” to act as experts on specific locales in the city, with the request that they also have some kind of experience in customer services. The neighborhood specialists, it turns out, are serving a two-fold purpose. They are data collectors, reporting on the best that a neighborhood has to offer, which will be fed into Neighborhood Guides; these will in turn become the building blocks of Urban Compass Network. And, putting on another, more businesslike hat, those neighborhood specialists are agents, bringing prospective residents to look at potential homes. (And Urban Compass has equipped them with training and licenses for that purpose.) The aim is for 200 people to work for Urban Compass by the end of this year.

The rentals part of the service is already being used in private beta: a large corporate based in the city signed on and started to refer to Urban Compass all of its employees relocating to New York. Those users in turn were able to refer others to the site. With UC taking a percentage of every lease completed through the site, the rentals business has already started to bring in some impressive revenues — Allon says numbers will be made public soon, but he notes that those sales are strong enough that he and the other three co-founders — CEO Robert Reffkin, an ex-banker and non-profit fundraiser extraordinaire; head of product Mike Weiss; and lead engineer Ugo Di Girolamo — will not need to be raising more funding any time in the near future.

(Backers in the seed round included Founders Fund, Goldman Sachs, Thrive Capital, the CEO of American Express Kenneth Chenault, and ZocDoc’s CEO Cyrus Massoumi, among others.)

The rentals part of the site is a fairly disruptive operation in itself: not only does it cut out brokers who have acted as the costly middle man for each rental in the city; but by going directly to those leasing out properties, it’s offering one more way for them to bypass sites like Craiglist.org, creating a simple, one-stop shop for the lifetime of a rental deal. It’s also a direct link to one of Urban Compass’s first big hires, Gordon Golub, a long-standing real estate executive in the city.

Still, combining a hyperlocal social network and an e-commerce focused rentals site may sound like an incongruous pairing: a social network seems to work best when it feels as organic and uncommercial as possible, while a housing rentals site seems like the most overtly of commercial enterprises. But at Urban Compass, not only do the two have the same people working for them, but the they are built on the same platform.

“I like big challenges,” Allon says of decision to introduce the two services together. He maintains that both get equal weight in the companies’ current system, and they will do in the future as Urban Compass adds more features.

Allon describes the social network as “an essential part of both our system and future growth plans,” while the rentals service, which will soon also include homes to buy, addresses a fundamental need, one that goes hand-in-hand with selecting a neighborhood to live in: “We want to help people find a place to live, both as a neighborhood and a home.” The idea, he says, is for rentals to complement other neighborhood-focused services going forward. “It’s true that we’re starting with rentals, but this is the just the first step. We’ve designed the system with large scale in mind.”

In the beta phase of the service, only those who sign up for rentals services will have access to the Urban Compass Network. The plan is for that to open up as Urban Compass’s own services grow to cover other areas.

via TechCrunch » Startups http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/techcrunch/startups/~3/s4NyDO3v7x8/

The Best Travel Companion Since Sleeping Pills

Engadget Giveaway: win one of four gaming prizes, courtesy of Diamond Multimedia!

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Nokia Lumia 928 Outed in Magazine Ad

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Pebble Smart Watch Gets RunKeeper

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Adobe Moves to the Cloud and Other News You Need to Know

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Rovio launches sync-able account for Angry Birds Classic and others, stores your progress and scores across devices

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Atlas Mobile Calendar Brings Real-Time Scheduling

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Hidden sensors in Google Glass could enable AR apps

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TenFarms Raises $2.7M To Launch Adtile, A New Approach To Mobile Ads

TenFarms, a startup working on couple of interesting mobile product ideas, just announced that it has raised $2.7 million in funding from undisclosed angel investors.

The company has already released its first product, Photopoll, which allows users to share photos (you can pull them from your camera roll, Amazon.com, or Instagram), tell stories around those photos, and ask their friends for opinions. There are lots of other polling apps, but when founder and CEO Nils Forsblom showed me Photopoll, he emphasized the ease with which users can share multiple photos. The app has attracted a largely female audience, he said, and it will be tailoring the experience to that audience with future releases.

More interesting to me is what TenFarms is working on next — Adtile, which delivers mobile ads that don’t interrupt the user experience until someone chooses to view them. If you’re browsing an app with a stream of content, some of that content might have an Adtile icon, and if you tap on, say, that photo, it will flip over and show a related ad.

Will anyone actually tap on the ads? Forsblom said that he’s been happy with the results from the early tests, though he declined to offer any specific numbers.

Forsblom said this approach has some big advantages over other types of mobile advertising. For one thing, he said the ads themselves offer a good user experience. For example, one ad he showed me not only highlights a relevant product, but also maps out the location of nearby stores and allows users to call those stores. He said the experience is designed natively for iOS, and he argued that it’s almost wrong to call it an ad — it’s more of “an app within an app.”

The other advantage is targeting. Adtile will allow advertisers to advertise in apps in a specific topic or vertical, and they can also target by geography. Even better, Forsblom said, “We understand what’s the product or thing that it’s showing — when you flip [the content] around, there should a very, very close relationship with with the ad itself.” At the same time, he cautioned, “None of these things are ever perfect.”

Forsblom said he won’t be selling Adtile units directly, but instead working with ad networks. He also said that he wants to experiment with different pricing models, so that it’s “more democratic” and the ad that gets served isn’t always the one that comes from the advertiser with the biggest budget.

Before TenFarms, Forsblom founded Fruugo, a shopping startup that seems to have flamed out despite raising $48 million in funding. In a recent interview, Forsblom said that after taking on investors at Fruugo, he was “basically powerless”: “That was my biggest mistake, giving those voting powers to the investors and basically just being an employee of the company.” That’s why he said he’s being careful and retaining control this time around.

via TechCrunch » Startups http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/techcrunch/startups/~3/mZ_EALuu9BM/

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Tuesday, 7 May 2013

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