In what may, in a couple years, be remembered as a telltale remark of overconfidence, Samsung’s AV product manager said today in an interview “TVs are ultimately about picture quality. Ultimately. How smart they are…great, but let’s face it that’s a secondary consideration.” Pride goeth before a fall, Samsung!
It’s true in a way. But only in the dumbest possible way. Yes, TVs are about picture quality. Because that’s all Samsung and Sony and Sharp have been willing to improve for the last half a century. As soon as someone comes along and changes what TVs are “ultimately about,” it’s going to be a bloodbath. Will it be Apple? I don’t know. But it sure as hell doesn’t look like it’s going to be Samsung. → Read More
Shares of Apple (AAPL) closed above $500 today for the first time, ending the day at $502.60. Apple, the world’s most valuable company, now boasts a market capitalization of almost $470 billion. That is up 9 points from yesterday’s close, and up more than 80 from where the stock was the day Apple announced its impressive quarter on January 24th. Everybody was blown away by the numbers.
The $500 mark is a psychological milestone. But many Apple bulls have been predicting it. What you need to look at really is the market cap. → Read More
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Just hours after the European Commission announced their approval of Google’s $12.5 billion Motorola purchase, the United States Department of Justice has announced that they too have given the deal their blessing.
With this, Google is one step closer to closing the deal, although they’re still waiting on approval from China, Taiwan, and Israel before the transaction can officially be completed.
According to the DoJ’s Antitrust Division, who conducted the investigation, the purchase was “not likely to significantly change existing market dynamics” or “substantially lessen competition.” → Read More
Droid 4 reviews are popping up everywhere. We’re doing ours a little different. Instead of posting a “review” after spending just 24 hours with the phone like other sites, we’re living with it for a week, publishing several articles on it and then concluding with a full review after actually living with the phone for a while. But one thing was clear even before the phone launched: Motorola messed up forgoing a removable battery for a meaningless reduction in thickness.
The original Droid started the Android revolution. It was the anti-iPhone: an open OS, sliding QWERTY keyboard, available on Verizon and featured a removable battery and expandable memory. Now many of those advantages are moot points. Android is no longer viewed as open, most people are sold on virtual keyboards, the iPhone is available everywhere, and now, thanks to Motorola, the Droid 4 features a built-in battery. Sorry, power users. → Read More
Tools cannot judge of their own use. The hammer does not rebel at striking pavement, the brush recoil at distasteful composition. This is true of the internet and its tools as well. What is bittorrent? A way to easily transfer large files between peers. Used by many people in legitimate ways, by pirates for illicit purposes. Bittorrent can’t choose to allow one and deny the other. If it could, it would no longer be a tool.
What is Reddit? A way for millions of people to collaboratively promote links and discuss them more or less anonymously. Used by many people in legitimate ways, and by pedophiles for illicit purposes. Reddit has decided to be more proactive in their policing of the site. If Reddit ever was truly a tool, it isn’t any longer.
Not that this is a bad thing, exactly. It’s just not going to work. To paraphrase Churchill, this was the worst thing Reddit could do, except for every thing they could have done. → Read More
Following its November debut, HTML5 publishing platform (and TechCrunch Disrupt finalist) Pressly, is preparing to launch its self-serve platform for bloggers. Planned to go live this spring, the platform will allow publishers of any kind – big or small – to transform their WordPress sites, Tumblr blogs, Twitter updates and other social feeds into tablet and touch-friendly sites that work on the iPad, iPhone, Kindle Fire, BlackBerry PlayBook and Android tablets.
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Angry Birds has just launched on Facebook, and developer Rovio is trying out a different business model that flocks together with other freemium games on the social network. Rather than make you pay $1 up front for a mobile download, there’s 4 new powerups that you can buy for cheap – just $1 for 20 uses.
By expanding its in-app purchases beyond the level-beating Mighty Eagle, Rovio could earn higher a higher average lifetime revenue per user for itself and Facebook rather than squeezing a single golden egg from players upon install. → Read More
Having rolled out Timeline at the end of last year, Facebook followed up in mid January by letting third-party apps integrate with the reverse-chronological scrapbooking feature. Apps like Pinterest, Yahoo News and Fab began letting you post stories that stay as permanent reminders of news stories, designs, photos or anything else that you experience via a web or mobile app.
What difference is this making for developers? The early results are in, and according to Facebook data, Timeline is creating some new growth, particularly for non-gaming apps. → Read More
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The controversy that began last week with mobile startup Path being exposed for downloading users address books from their mobile device exploded over the weekend.
Nick Bilton at the New York Times opined on the matter and declared Path to have been let off way too lightly due to the Silicon Valley echo chamber and its lack of concern for privacy. Path investors, and my good friends, Mike Arrington and MG Siegler weighed in, to resist Nick’s points, and now Kara Swisher and others have responded.
Oh boy…. Lots of heat, but where oh where is the light? → Read More
While Google waits for the United States Department of Justice to sign off on their proposal to merge with handset maker Motorola Mobility, the European Commission has officially given the deal their approval.
The decision is a welcome one for the folks in Mountain View, as the European Commission initially showed some hesitance about the matter. When first tasked with reviewing the $12.5 billion transaction, members of the commission called to Google to provide additional information to support their cause. What’s more, a U.S. consumer advocacy group publicly called on the commission to strike the merger, citing fears of a Google-dominated mobile space. → Read More
The professional networking space has been heating up over the last few years, with a number of players vying for control of our digital resumes, job and employment searches, and career buildings. For all intents and purposes, LinkedIn controls the mindshare, but a couple of newcomers are beginning to give the leader a run for its money. The first is BranchOut, the professional networking service built on top of Facebook, which, like everything Facebook, has been growing like gangbusters since its inception in 2010.
Then there’s San Francisco-based Identified.com, a professed “data and analytics company” that development its eponymous “Identified Score” to measure how “in demand” users’ professional backgrounds are to companies — right now. Of course, both companies have a long way to go before they catch up to LinkedIn, which, going on Q4 numbers has a membership of 150 million-plus registered users. → Read More
Founded just seven and a half years ago, Glam Media is one of Silicon Valley’s few media success stories. Beginning in the women’s interest vertical and expanding to entertainment, health and wellness and now food, Glam acquired Ning last September and is rumored to be preparing an IPO for later this year. Glam’s great achievement, it claims, is to pioneer “vertical media” and thus to “transform the way consumers interact with content”. → Read More
As everyone and their dog moves to online production, podcasters have long hunted for a way to monetize their goods. Apps are available that let you sell podcasts for a set price, but what about aggregation over multiple platforms and using varying monetization models? More important, podcasters don’t want to do all the computerin’ to make these things work. That’s why Libsyn created MyLibsyn, a cross-platform (web, iOS, and Android) system for disseminating free and paid content from a central app.
Libsyn has just created something akin to the Netflix of content syndication. Podcasters who join must offer one piece of premium content per month as well as make their back catalog subscriber-only. Although they already offer standalone Android and iOS apps for certain podcasts, MyLibsyn assists in podcast discovery by putting all the popular podcasts in one place and, by ensuring only quality product appears in the app, it reduces the chance that podcast listeners will be disappointed and move on. → Read More
New data from app search firm Xyologic released this morning paints a picture of the relative success (or lack thereof) of the Google TV platform. By examining the install base for the apps exclusive to the Google TV platform, it’s clear that the Google media center product is still only attracting a niche crowd of early adopters. Of the nearly 4.8 million installed apps that are exclusive to Google TV, only 352,000 of them represent user downloads – the remaining 4,441,000 are pre-installed applications.
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Domain names are important, and some might even say that a premium, memorable domain name is priceless. Wherever you fall, tough to argue against businesses moving to scoop up short, descriptive domain names that are easy to remember. It can give your business, customers, and search engines a simple and quick way to find you, along with brand protection and an increase in traffic, not unlike prominent placement in the yellow pages or the local shopping mall for brick-and-mortars.
Today, we’ve learned that ViSalus Sciences, a direct sales “health transformation company” that distributes weight management and nutritional supplement products, has entered the shortlist of pricey domain name buyers, announcing today that it has acquired “challenge.com” and “vi.com” for $500,000 and $325,000, respectively. → Read More
Austin-based cloud apps startup Spanning, which provides a backup service for Google Apps, just launched a new version of its service (Spanning 3.0) which includes a feature I.T. admins are sure to love: a health monitor for Google Apps. The new dashboard shows the status of a company’s Google Apps system, including problems, errors, possible causes and suggested fixes. Day-by-day reports are available, too.
But Spanning’s most visible change may be the service’s updated style, courtesy of ex-Frog designer BJ Heinley.
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Matchbook was founded under the simple belief that mobile technology can make people’s lives easier — not just in the interest of early adopters and tech enthusiasts — but for moms and grandmothers, and the many non-tech-savvy people out there. Once upon a time, if you wanted to remember, say, a restaurant you loved or wanted to try, you went in and grabbed a branded matchbook from that venue. (Those were the days when smoking actually gave people use for those matchbooks.) The rise of mobile devices transferred that behavior into note-taking apps of all varieties. Matchbook then took those mobile notepads and built an app to enhance that experience, allowing users to more easily remember those must-visit places they hear about from friends, blogs, or just in passing by. → Read More
CruiseWise, a new online travel agency dedicated to booking cruises, is opening its doors today. The startup aims to simplify the online cruise booking process, bringing it up to par with what you find now when booking hotels or flights.
With site’s online search engine, customers can compare prices, routes, cabin choices and other options across multiple cruise lines and see the full amount for the cruise by total number of passengers, including tax. → Read More
As you’ll notice quite quickly from this infographic, we’re pitting the Droid 4 against its predecessor, the Droid 3, along with the iPhone 4S. For anyone who isn’t a die-hard Android fan, the iPhone 4S usually comes into the equation when it comes time to upgrade hardware. Since many of our reviews will be of Android devices (and Windows Phone) rather than iOS, we wanted to make sure to let you visualize the differences between the handset we’re reviewing and its biggest competitors. → Read More
Following the attack on Microsoft’s online store in India, in which a team of (purportedly) Chinese hackers defaced the site and stole user credentials, the company is now alerting users via email that their passwords will be automatically reset on their behalf.
According to the email, Microsoft also says the databases storing credit card details and payment information were not compromised, but customer account information, including email address, passwords, order details and shipping addresses may have been affected. → Read More
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