About two weeks ago, I couldn’t update my status on Facebook, like it just wouldn’t let me, showing me “Invalid Request” error messages even though my requests are totally valid DAMMIT.
And then just like that the fail stopped and I could update, inexplicably. In my humble experience, I’ve come across so many Facebook bugs I’ve given up on getting frustrated and now just hope they’ll eventually go away. I regularly just straight up don’t receive Messages and can we just talk about how the Like button just doesn’t work. Can we?
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Some interesting news from The Netherlands: online food ordering and delivery service Takeaway.com has been delivered 13 million euros – roughly $16.6 million – by Dutch VC Prime Ventures.
With the additional capital, the Dutch company behind the food ordering service aims to continue its international expansion, after starting local websites in a number of European countries (including Belgium, Austria, the UK and Germany). → Read More
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As Sarah wrote in November, social Q&A service Formspring has been making an effort to slowly build out the connections between its users by offering “who made you smile” and “who you responded to” categories to user profiles, but it is also going up against Facebook by becoming a “network built around users’ interests.” Of course, the site has to contend with the billions of “Likes” accumulated on Facebook, which compose its own interest graph, and it has done so with “Smiles,” Formspring’s equivalent of “Likes.”
Today, the service is adding another feature to its functionality, a tool called “Smile Sort” that aims to transform the service into a content curator. → Read More
After a day full of press conferences and jamming around Vegas like we were running for our lives, we’re streaming live from the last pre-CES press gathering of the year: Pepcom.
I’m not sure how much longer we’ll be on the air (we’ve already been roaming for quite a while), but tune in for a quick sneak peek of everything new and noteworthy that all of the big guns brought out to the show.
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Home phones are dumb phones defined. At best they feature a backlit four-line display. At worst they suck.
Well, Ooma just introduced the HD2, which not only pairs pefectly with the company’s VoIP service but offers a bunch of functions standard to feature phones. A 2-inch color LCD features picture caller-ID with the images garnered from the owner’s Facebook, Google and Yahoo friends. This can be managed either from on the handset or through the My Ooma web portal. But wait! There is more. → Read More
Collaborative consumption startup TaskRabbit has acquired SkillSlate, according to this press release I just received. This will be TaskRabbit’s, which has a total of $24.7 million in financing, first acquisition.
Even a cursory glance will tell you that the services are a good fit. TaskRabbit is a platform that allows people to pay other people to complete tasks. SkillSlate allows people to search for local businesses that provide the services they want. → Read More
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Microsoft must have feared that the annual “airing of the modest success” they bring to CES every year might not be exciting enough to satisfy the many CES attendees who were expecting something major for what may very well be their last keynote (at least for a while). So they brought out the Tweet Chorus.
What is the Tweet Chorus? It’s exactly what you think. Unless you think it’s a bunch of birds. → Read More
Remember that feeling you got back when Steve Jobs was unveiling the iPhone, and he did the “slide to unlock” gesture for the first time? I remember the way he said it – “You like that? Want to see it again?”
Since then I haven’t seen a lock screen interface that has made me feel that same “how obvious, how elegant!” feeling – until today at the NVIDIA press conference, and later at the Microsoft keynote here at CES. It sounds a little silly, sure, making such a big deal of such a small feature, but it’s just nice to see a genuinely natural and new way of doing something we’ve all done thousands upon thousands of times over the last few years. → Read More
Intuit is announcing major news this evening around its mobile credit card swiping device and Square-competitor GoPayment reader. Intuit is one of the first major U.S. mobile payments readers to go international, with a launch in Canada. And Intuit is debuting a newly, redesigned sleek version of its reader.
Launched two years ago, GoPayment offers a complimentary app and credit card reader to allow small businesses to conduct charges via their smartphones. GoPayment is available for iOS, Android and Blackberry phones and similar to Square’s device, the card reader simply plugs into the audio jack of a phone or tablet. The credit card data is also encrypted, (and never stored on the phone).
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Music streaming service MOG is today announcing partnerships with mobile, audio and video equipment manufacturer JVC as well as with Aha by HARMAN, an interactive platform that brings web content to the automobile. The companies will begin using MOG’s APIs to integrate the music service into their platforms and products. The first result of the new partnerships is MOG’s launch on Subaru vehicles.
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Artificial intelligence touches our lives in the form of chess computers that are better than most humans, computers beating the best humans at Jeopardy, intelligent ad targeting, Microsoft Kinect recognizing human motion and even amazingly, Google’s self-driving car that drove itself from San Francisco to Los Angeles. Intelligent systems can even do transactions involving judgment like investing on Wall Street (a former MIT mathematician is now a hero on Wall Street with one of the best performing investment funds for many years in this judgment-based domain) and of course Siri’s conversational interface that does what you ask (mostly—think of Gen 1.0 as a high-IQ three-year old getting better with each passing year). Computer Jeopardy champions, self-driving cars and Siri-like conversational interfaces would have seemed very hard a few years ago.
Rather than the brute force logic-based development that was envisioned with Commander Data, successful systems have been built from examples rather than logical rules. We essentially let the computer “figure it out” using lots of past problems and solutions that include probability assessment systems beyond any hard-coded rules. Reasoning under uncertain conditions underlies a major area of recent progress. → Read More
Today at Sony’s CES 2012 press conference, the company unveiled several PC concepts that are, well, just concepts. Kazuo Hirai took to the massive Sony stage deep within the Las Vegas Convention center and talked about the convergence of TV and computers. But no one cares about that marketing nonsense. It was the concepts they flashed on the screen that got everyone excited.
But don’t expect these products to hit the market. Companies are not supposed to sell concepts. They’re concepts, not products. → Read More
As companies move their data out from behind firewalls into the cloud and employees use self-provisioned mobile devices, infosecurity must change. That’s why cybercrime prevention provider ThreatMetrix will announce tomorrow its acquisition of TrustDefender, which detects malware-based attacks. ThreatMetrix can now offer an integrated fraud protection solution that verifies the identity and integrity of any device trying to access secure data. If an endpoint has been compromised through malware or identity theft: access denied. → Read More
Aurasma, a startup with a new kind of augmented reality visual browser, is part of the mobile apps showdown at CES, and I got a taste of their technology in the somewhat unlikely setting of the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas, courtesy of the company’s Matt Mills. Luckily this proves no object as, presented with an image that’s been tagged with content, it can bring that image to life with a video or animation, as you’ll see.
At CES the company has launched its new 3D engine, which enables, for instance, a children’s pop-up book to come to life with animated 3D dinosaurs which move around and roar. While there are other apps doing a similar thing, such as Blippar, Aurasma is banking on its user-generated content features to allow it to proliferate more virally.
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Sony released the first Google TV product back in the fun days of 2010. Since then, the smart TV platform has survived more than a year of criticism and a major overhaul. It’s still far from a industry leader, that title is head by Samsung’s SmartHub, but Google is sticking with it. And so it Sony. → Read More
HP has upped the ultrabook ante with a glass-backed HP laptop that looks a bit like a MacBook and a lot like the future of HP trade dress. The HD screen displays 1600×900 pixels and includes HDMI out, Ethernet, USB 3.0, and mini Displayport ports.
The glass on the back of the laptop is Gorilla Glass, which means it probably won’t break if you drop it. It includes a fat 128GB SSD drive for $1,400 and an optional 256GB upgrade. It runs a Core i5 or i7 processor and ships in February.
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Now that most of our smartphones can take crisp images and stunning video, the digital imaging sector is having a tough time holding on to its market share. Still, a few players are up for the challenge, including Sony which has today announced the latest in its line of Bloggie pocket cams: Bloggie Live and Bloggie Sport. → Read More
Sony’s really looking to give their Walkman line of mp3 players a shot in the arm with their newest addition to the lineup. Dubbed the Walkman Z1000, it’s Sony’s first Android-powered music player and it’s gunning to give Apple and Samsung a run for their money. → Read More
At NVIDIA’s press conference today, NVIDIA had a couple little surprises. Little being the word, there — they announced a diminutive 7″ tablet to compete with the likes of the Nook Tablet and Kindle Fire. The price, $249, is certainly competitive. But the tablet itself, the hardware anyway, blows them out of the water.
Jen-Hsun Huang, NVIDIA’s CEO, described it as being very nearly as powerful as the Transformer Prime, which despite some marketing and naming mishaps, is still a hell of a tablet. To put that amount of power in a smaller package and reduce the price to that level is a nice little achievement. → Read More
You wish you were here.
You pretend that you don’t want to be here because, granted, we’ve been on our feet since the crack of dawn, have been fighting MiFi and WiFi connections like we’re getting paid for it, and haven’t eaten the best food thus far. But none of those tedious little annoyances matter in a moment like this: Sony’s press conference is just seconds away. It kicks off at 5:00pm PST and should last an hour. Tune in. Sony knows how to put on a show. → Read More
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