Starting fires since 2002.
May 17 Jennifer Brown is tearing up. She’s converting early-2000s camcorder footage into digital files, watching as a woman’s colleagues celebrate her promotion until the woman’s boyfriend appears out of nowhere, gets down on one knee, and proposes. When a group of passersby interrupts Brown quietly weeping at her computer screen, she gestures at the proposal by [...]
May 17 There’s a popular myth that Apple’s iPad and other tablets are simply media-consumption devices, unsuitable for productivity applications. That’s just not so, and this week I tested a variety of office suites for the iPad for mini-reviews of their capabilities. In fact, I wrote and edited this entire column on an iPad using the most popular paid [...]
April 30 An app called Tempo, a free app to download on your smart phone and it aggregates your calendars with drecks. what happens if you go to five weddings or one, there’s a rehearsal dinner, a bridal shower, an after barbecue, what’s the card? what do i do? just put everything in your calendar, comes straight [...]
April 30 Advertisers already know what people are up to on their personal computers. But understanding their online whereabouts on smartphones or tablets has remained elusive. A number of companies are trying to better pinpoint mobile users’ online activity with new software and techniques they say could help advertisers track users across devices.
April 29 Emmy-nominated TV host, author, and lifestyle expert Robyn Moreno offers tips on helping everyone enjoy this season’s weddings in style. Kaj Goldberg and Amy Johnson report.
April 25 SoftBank Capital and Yahoo Japan said they had created an unusual $20 million fund to help U.S. startups break into the Japanese market, while also upping a presence in the U.S. The partnership between Japan’s largest Internet company — which is also a joint venture with Yahoo — and the venture arm of the giant SoftBank [...]
April 25 Consumer Reporter Lynda Baquero has details on HitBliss.com, a website that lets you earn money toward movies and tv shows.
April 22 Leading mobile messaging app Kik has announced it raised $19.5 million in Series B funding, underlining the growing interest in the market for free texting services. Kik is a free mobile messaging service with 50 million users that is transforming itself into a social platform.
April 16 Sivaramkrishnan is one of the few female CEO/engineers in Silicon Valley. Her company has developed a way for advertisers to track users as they cross from desktop machines to mobile devices, via an algorithm that makes an educated guess that the person who was on their phone has now started browsing from a laptop.
April 15 Last night I co-hosted the Big Apple Smackdown! (a.k.a. The Silicon Alley Ping-Pong Tournament) at Spin NYC with my friends Nihal of LocalResponse and Vijay of VSCPR. Congrats to Artsy’s Benoit Corda for emerging victorious! And a big thank you to everyone who came and made it such a fun, memorable night!
April 15 Banner ads can be pretty boring, but LocalResponse found a really creative and interesting way to approach them. This is appropriate given that one of Mehta’ favorite sayings is, “Ads suck. I am here to make them suck less.” LocalResponse uses consumers’ tweets and social media actions to trigger ads that appear on the user’s device.
April 15 If you find yourself in a pinch, needing to work with Microsoft Office files, the free CloudOn app might be just what you’re looking for. You’ll have access to Word, Excel and PowerPoint, along with the ability to open documents straight from popular online file-storage services.
April 11 Today marks the culmination of Kik’s two-year project to build an HTML5 platform, heralded by the arrival of push notifications into its messaging app. Many developers think HTML5’s lack of push notifications has been the only thing that separates Web apps from native apps.
April 10 From the makers of Siri comes Tempo, a smart calendar that integrates Facebook and LinkedIn as well as up to five email accounts to create a comprehensive digital schedule. You can choose to view appointments by the day, week, or month, and can scroll through daily appointments by swiping up or down.
April 10 he annual Webby Awards are always a treasure trove of fascinating sites and apps. The organization behind the awards, the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, announced thelatest, lengthy list of nominees on Tuesday.
April 2 People will do almost anything to get free digital access to movies and TV shows. One company believes people will even “work” to earn money to pay for this content. The job: watching ads. For the past week, I’ve been using HitBliss to watch new movies and episodes of television shows without paying anything.
March 31 That might sound precisely like Facebook, but hundreds of millions of tech-savvy young people have instead turned to a wave of smartphone-based messaging apps that are now sweeping across North America, Asia and Europe. The hot apps include Kik and Whatsapp, both products of North American startups, as well as Kakao Inc’s KakaoTalk, NHN Corp’s LINE and [...]
March 22 The greatest global companies like Microsoft, Apple and Oracle were all built by founders who continued to play the CEO role well past the startup stage. What can we learn from this history, and is the world today different from the past? We don’t think so. At Nexus Venture Partners, most of the founders we come across continue to [...]
March 21 Thumb is a mobile polling app that first hit the scene in July 2010 with a simple, valuable premise – for users to submit ‘yes or no’ questions and get near-instant feedback from fellow members of the startup’s active community. Not sure which sunglasses go best with that outfit? Ask Thumb –
March 15 GUEST MENTOR, Lux Narayan, CEO and co-founder of Unmetric: It’s often said that the business-to-business, or B2B, market is the hardest nut to crack on social media. I politely disagree. Unmetric is a young company that has rapidly got the attention of plenty of large clients as a direct result of our social media activities.
March 14 The end of Google Reader is just a few months away, but RSS, the protocol that makes Reader and many other news readers tick, is alive and well. With its Qrius syndication service and the web and mobile news reader Taptu, Mediafed wants to help independent publishers to increase their distribution and make subscribing to news feeds easier.
March 14 Game streaming might be a common feature of ISP packages for bundled Internet, if Agawi has anything to say about it. The cloud gaming startup has outlasted rival OnLive, which still exists in name after a nasty bankruptcy, andGaikai, which was picked up by Sony to power its upcoming PS4 cloud-based features, and now it wants to give ISPs and carrier networks [...]
March 8 Here’s the challenge: Build a rocket engine. Don’t worry, you don’t need much. At the SXSW festival in Austin on Saturday, startup companies DIYRockets and Sunglass are launching acompetition to create 3-D-printed rocket engines with open source (read: free) technology.
March 8 As more people and companies use 3-D printers, there’s a growing number of uses for the devices, which turn designs into actual things. I’ve seen printed skull implants, coffee mugs and even 3-D printed replacement parts for 3-D printers — how meta!
March 8 Last summer BetaKit reported on the increasing number of apps being used to track and manage diseases, including several apps that assist people with diabetes management. This week Silicon Valley startup Glooko, an app that lets diabetics log their glucose levels, has released a new version of its iPhone app, which allow diabetes patients to compare their average blood [...]
March 7 Following people online, with cookies, tagged pixels and even voluntarily given information, has been a big business. Now much of the same technology is moving into the physical world. A company called Euclid Analytics uses the Wi-Fi antennas inside stores to see how many people are coming into a store, how long they stay and even which aisles [...]
March 5 If you are phone-shopping and wonder about the reliability of various brands, you are in luck. FixYa, a volunteer technical assistance Web site, has analyzed more than 720,000 support requests to come up with complaint-per-phone ratios, which the company said represent reliability.
March 1 Right now you’re essentially getting paid to view our ads. OK…we’re getting paid. But by serving you ads we compensate for the fact that we give you content—articles, videos and slideshows—for free.
March 1 Two weeks ago, Hulu made its entire run of historic films from the Criterion Collection available for free, no Hulu Plus subscription required. It was wonderful, and it was terrible — mostly because Hulu supported the promotion with ads. Luis Buñuel’s magnificent dark comedy The Exterminating Angel was never meant to be broken up by commercials for Pizza Hut.
February 18 One of the best things about the web is that anyone can build a website, without much technical prowess or a huge financial investment. But mobile apps? They haven’t been like that at all. Enter New York startup Kleverbeast.
February 15 Tweet a complaint about bad AT&T cell coverage? Don’t be shocked to get an ad from Verizonwith information on how to switch carriers the next time you sit down at a PC. Soon, big brands like Coca-Cola, Verizon, Nike and L’Oreal and others will start serving ads targeted to what consumers are saying in social media.
February 15 Buzzy calendar and scheduling app Tempo, which made a splashy launch yesterday, is recovering after being overrun by new users. ”We are excited but overwhelmed by the demand,” Raj Singh, the founder and CEO of Tempo, wrote in a blog post today.
February 15 SRI International, the Silicon Valley research institute that developed Siri, is once again dipping its toe into the virtual personal assistant pool. On Wednesday it revealed it has spun off a new company called Tempo AI, which is using SRI’s artificial intelligence technology to create a smart calendar app for the iPhone that can infer relevant [...]
February 15 Tempo today launches a smart calendar app, one of the closest things I’ve seen to Google Now for the iPhone. Tempo acts as a personal assistant that makes educated guesses about what information will be relevant.
February 15 This is the year of increased productivity, particularly on mobile. Just a week ago we saw the highly-hyped launch of Mailbox. That is a really nice email replacement app that’s a lot nicer than Apple’s own email app. (I can’t use it because it doesn’t support Gmail’s labels, which I use extensively, but other than that [...]
February 14 Your iPhone’s built-in calendar app does a decent job of culling appointments, meetings and plans from the calendars you’ve synced it with. But it’s not very smart about it. Tempo, an iOS app out of Siri’s birthplace of SRI, adds an element of artificial intelligence to your calendar, creating a one-stop shop for your day’s [...]
February 14 Today, a self-described “stealth mode” startup named Tempo AI is taking the wraps off a new smart calendar app for iOS. It’s simply called Tempo, and the company is describing it as a “next-gen assistant for focusing your day.”
February 14 Looking for a creative way to say “I love you” today? Thanks to a new app, you can send your heartbeat to your honey. Re:Beat is a free app that uses your smartphone camera to record your pulse.
February 13 Western music fans have no shortage of digital music services to choose from, and that abundance is spreading around the world. Apple’s iTunes is now in 119 countries, and others are racing to plant their digital flags everywhere. This week, for example, Spotify opened in Italy, Poland and Portugal, bringing its reach to 23 countries.
February 12 SoftBank Capital, the New York-based venture arm of Japanese telecom giant SoftBank, announced a new $250 million growth-stage fund last week. During an hour-long discussion with SoftBank principal Matt Krna, we meandered into a number of different topics, many of which seemed worth sharing.
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