MiniatureMoments: 3D Printed Pictures Of Your Wee Bairns
A UK startup called MiniatureMoments has created a fairly unique keepsake for you and yours. These things are 3D-printed negatives that appear when you hold them up to the light. They are translucent and are about as big as a passport photo and custom-designed with your own portrait. → Read More
Square Updates Mobile Payments App For Merchants With Loyalty Features, Printed Receipts And More
After hitting $11 million in mobile payments volume per day, Square is announcing more news—an update to the startup’s flagship iOS payments app. As you may know, Square Card Reader and companion app transforms any iPad, iPhone or Android phone into a full point of sale system.
One of the major additions to version 2.2 of the app relates to customer loyalty. Now merchants can reward their regular customers with a new in-app loyalty feature that allows merchants to recognize their most frequent customers when they enter their store. The new feature also allows merchants to offer repeat customers discounts, which the customer will see reflected in their Square Card Case. → Read More
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Through Buddy Media, HootSuite & More, Google+ Pages Get Third-Party Management Tools
Last week, Google+ launched “Pages” to enable brands, products, companies, businesses, and everyone else under the sun, to build their very own tailored Google+ presence.
As G+ Pages roll out to all users, Google is looking to give businesses looking to managing their Pages a set of integrations that will enhance their experience on the platform and give them more flexibility. Today, Google+ announced that it is launching a pilot program that will essentially allow businesses and brands to manage their Google+ Pages using a number of third-party applications, like Hootsuite and Buddy Media, to name a few. → Read More
What’s In A Domain Name? Twitter Wants Twittter.com, Twittr.com
Twitter was recently successful in obtaining the domain name Twiter.com after filing a dispute with the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), and has apparently grown an appetite for more.
Last week, the company filed a complaint for the transfer of Twittter.com (with a extra ‘t’) and now we’ve noticed that they’re also gunning for Twittr.com.
You may remember Twitter was originally called Twttr, so it’s surprising to me that they didn’t already own the latter domain name, nor filed a complaint to obtain it in the past. → Read More
Sean Parker: “Little Startups Are Ridiculously OverFunded”
Speaking at the Techonomy conference today, Sean Parker warns about the downside of the explosion of seed-stage startups.”Little startups are ridiculously overfunded,” he say. “The market is ridiculously overcrowded with early stage investors. This results in a talent drain, where the best talent gets diffused and work for their own startups.”
The problem in his view is that many of the talented engineers and product designers who are now starting their own companies could have a bigger impact at places like Facebook, and they in turn will have a hard time attracting the best talent because those people can get funded to start their own projects as well. → Read More
Google: Less Than .17% Of Searches Used ‘+’ Correctly, But Here’s Verbatim
Know exactly what you’re searching for on Google? It’s now a bit easier to find it.
Google is constantly doing things to automatically tweak your queries — it’ll swap in common synonyms, correct spelling, omitting certain terms that might not be necessary, and so on. Most of the time these tweaks are helpful, but occasionally they can get in the way. It’s long been possible to search with just what you entered with some advanced search operators, and now there’s a streamlined way to do it.
Today, Google is announcing a simpler way to do this: a ‘Verbatim’ option under its search tools in the left sidebar. It does what you’d expect: run a query with Verbatim on, and you’ll get results for whatever you had in the search box.
→ Read More
Fotopedia Brings Brand Advertising To The iPad In Magazine Form (First Stop: Japan)
As Erick wrote in September, over the course of the last year, Fotopedia has been hard at work at trying to reinvent the photo book for the iPad. To date, the so-called “Wikipedia for photos” has launched seven apps, two of which have been in partnership with National Geographic, and has racked up 5.2 million downloads since August of last year.
In September, as part of turning its attention to creating more magazine-like experiences, it launched the Fotopedia Magazine on Flipboard, which highlights five photo essays each day of the week from the company’s impressive bullpen of high-end photographers. And, today, Fotopedia is launching its eighth app and, in turn, is embarking on a new initiative that aims to leverage its photographic talent to begin creating branded experiences in magazine form, combining advertising with “premium content”. → Read More
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#OccupySocialMedia: GO Launches A Mobile App For Anonymous Photo & Video Sharing
GO is new mobile application for the iPhone that allows users to broadcast and share photos, videos and commentary with others and post them to a live streaming portal. The app offers real-time access to geo-located, tagged media presented in both a stream and map view. But does the world need another mobile/social/photo-sharing experience? Well, maybe it does.
You see, there’s something different about GO that separates it from the rest: it supports complete anonymity. To be clear, it doesn’t just offer the option to use some clever Web handle instead of an authenticated user account – it actually offers the option to post as “anonymous.” #OccupySocialMedia? Oh yes. → Read More
Americans Trust Tech Companies Most, But Hate Their Exec Bonuses
Technology is the most trusted business sector by a large margin, with just 10% ranking tech less trustworthy than other sectors, according to a new Public Affairs Council study conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates International. Health insurance and pharmaceutical companies are the least trusted. Surprisingly, banks and financial institutions currently under fire from the Occupy movement weren’t at the bottom, though 41% of Americans still say they’re less trustworthy than other business types. Despite trust in tech, half of Americans felt unfavorable about successful companies giving large bonuses to top executives, and that disapproval rating jumps to 89% for companies that aren’t doing well. → Read More
Silverton, Automattic Put $1.2M Into WordPress Hosting And Security Service WP Engine
WP Engine, a powerful hosted WordPress platform for existing WordPress.org users, has raised $1.2 million in new funding led by Silverton Partners with angels Eric Ries, Loic Le Meur, Dharmesh Shah, Jeremy Benken, Bill Boebel, Rob Walling participating. Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, also made a strategic investment in WP Engine.
WP Engine, which launched in July of 2010, provides a enterprise-level hosting service for WordPress.org users who are tired of managing servers and doing IT work themselves. WP Engine makes sure blogs have super fast page load times, and scale when hit with a ton of traffic. → Read More
Gillmor Gang 11.15.11 (TCTV)
The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — took advantage of the early rays of the new rising sun to record. It must have been fun to watch the caffeine kick in, but the show was half over before I arrived. I’d been up late mourning the death of Flash, which finally received an auto-update from reality it couldn’t refuse.
Next for a wake-up call is Google+, which @scobleizer ripped a new one while continuing to insist it was just a matter of some filtering and expanded fan pages. Meanwhile it’s time to play with Amazon Fire, which the rest of the Gang has on order, and salesforce.com’s new Do.com service, for which I’ve obtained an invite code good for 500 uses. This show is rated G+. → Read More
TC Cribs: Hunting “Evil” at Baidu (TCTV)
Baidu is one of the most known of the Chinese Internet giants. Some of the buzz is admiration for Robin Li, one of the pioneers of the Chinese Web scene who built a global giant that succeeded in a political environment where Google cried “uncle.” Others have painted Baidu as the mirror image of Google’s lofty “do no evil” credo.
So on our recent trip to Beijing, we decided to take our cameras to the search giant’s massive headquarters– which spans more than one million square feet– to see if we could find any torture chambers. Big thanks to our gracious host and good sport, Baidu spokesperson Kaiser Kuo. → Read More
LivingSocial Now Testing Food Delivery & “Room Service”
LivingSocial is now testing a new food ordering and delivery service as a part of LivingSocial Instant, the company announced this morning. At launch, members in the Washington D.C. area can order food from select area restaurants and have the meals delivered to their home or workplace.
In conjunction with the restaurant delivery service, the company is also launching something called “LivingSocial Room Service,” which will offer “white glove delivery” from top restaurants, with special amenities and personal touches, like those you would find at a nice hotel. → Read More
Keen On… Tyler Cowen: Why The Internet Isn’t As Innovative As a Flushing Toilet (TCTV)
We are not nearly as innovative as we think we are. That, at least, is the view of Tyler Cowen, a professor of economics at George Mason university and the author of The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All The Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History,Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better, a book which argues that we are failing to invent technology (like flushing toilets) that radically changes the world. → Read More
OnSwipe Competitor Pressly Launches, Aims For 1 Billion Flips Per Month
OnSwipe competitor and TechCrunch Disrupt finalist Pressly is launching today with its first major publisher, Canada’s largest newspaper The Toronto Star. Like OnSwipe or even iPad mag Flipboard, Pressly’s service is designed to give traditional Web content a makeover by making it more tablet-friendly. But in Pressly’s case, it’s not about re-packaging content as a native app – instead, it uses a combination of HTML5 and customizable templates to allow publishers more control over the tablet browsing experience. → Read More
Steve Case: It’s Crazy You Have To Be An Accredited Investor, But Don’t Have To Be An “Accredited Gambler”
AOL founder Steve Case has a three-point plan to get job growth back on track in America, and it all revolves around ways the government can spur more entrepreneurship. Over the past three decades, high-growth companies created 40 million jobs. “It accounts for all the net job creation,” Case tells me in the video interview above.
“It seemed crazy to me that you have to be an accredited investor to invest in a company,” says Case, “but you can go to Las Vegas and lose $10,000 at the table in an hour but you don’t have to be an accredited gambler to do that.” → Read More
Surprise: HP Is Squeezing Every Possible Penny From The Canceled TouchPad
The $99 TouchPad fire sale was the best way to close the book on webOS and the TouchPad itself. It got the TouchPad into the hands of the fans. Only those that cared about the product lined up outside of Best Buy to grab one of the cheap notebooks. It’s also probably safe to say that most of these people do not have any interest in HP’s crapware notebooks. These people just wanted a solid tablet for a great price.
HP, you should have taken your win and walked home. But you didn’t. You’ve screwed up. Again. → Read More
Aerial 3D: Amazing System Shows 3D Objects In Mid-Air, With No Screen (Video)
Since 2006, Tokyo-based Burton has been working on Aerial 3D, a technology that makes it possible to produce pictures in 3D in mid-air or underwater – without using a screen (that’s what I call “True 3D Technology” indeed). Burton says their laser-based system is the only one of its kind.
The current system projects objects at 50,000 dots per second and with a frame rate of 10-15. The Aerial 3D works by focusing laser light, producing “plasma excitation from the oxygen and nitrogen in the air”. → Read More
Better Late Than Never: Wine.com Gets A Mobile Website
Today, the online retailer for wine enthusiasts (with the killer domain name) Wine.com is finally launching a mobile site at m.wine.com. Like its desktop-sized counterpart, the new site allows customers full access to Wine.com’s inventory of wine, gifts and accessories, site search with filtering, product details, account management, and of course, the ability to make purchases from your mobile device.
→ Read More
Mobile Games Publisher Animoca Raises Funding From Intel, IDG-Accel
Smartphone games developer and publisher Outblaze Ventures, better known as Animoca, has raised an undisclosed amount of funding in a Series A round led by Intel Capital and IDG-Accel (which tapped its China Growth Fund III).
Since its debut in January 2011, Animoca says it has released more than 150 games and education apps for iOS and Android smartphones and tablets. → Read More
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